This morning, the 2017 Race to Alaska begins. Dozens of boats will take off from Port Townsend, Washington, headed for Ketchikan, Alaska, a distance of about 750 miles. Boats can be wind-powered or human-powered, but no engines are allowed. The website explains,

It’s like the Iditarod, on a boat, with a chance of drowning, being run down by a freighter, or eaten by a grizzly bear. There are squalls, killer whales, tidal currents that run upwards of 20 miles an hour, and some of the most beautiful scenery on earth.

The winning team will receive $10,000, and the second-place finishers will receive a set of steak knives.The FAQs are fairly entertaining, as are the names of the participating teams and boats. Since the party was last night, some of the crew members will be hungover and/or sporting new tattoos. You can follow the race as it happens with this tracker. Watch an explainer from CBS Sunday Morning. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Race To Alaska by Northwest Maritime Center)

I scream, you scream, I scream again because you ate all my ice cream! People can be pretty awful about food: protect your own supply while making an effort to get the next guy's share. This is like a child who sticks a dirty finger into the last jelly doughnut. Or the family member who serves himself more food than he'll eat and puts pepper all over it so no one else will want it. I'm sure there is someone in your family who has a technique for consuming more than his share, with a perfectly logical explanation. This is the latest comic from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble.  

1. SEVERUS SNAPE

Harry Potter’s antagonistic, unkempt, and ultimately loyal potions master was inspired by J.K. Rowling’s severe high school chemistry teacher, John Nettleship. “I knew I was a strict teacher,” he told a reporter, “but I didn’t think I was that bad.”

2. WONDER WOMAN

Psychologist William Moulton Marston was a man of many talents: He invented an early lie detector test. He also debuted Wonder Woman in 1941 to teach children about women’s equality in an easy-to-digest format. His inspiration was a member of his family, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.

3. UNCLE BEN

Betty Crocker and Aunt Jemima are fictitious, but Uncle Ben was a real Houston rice farmer renowned for his quality grains. However, that’s not his rice in the box—nor is that his visage. The bow-tied man is said to be a Chicago maitre d’hotel named Frank Brown.

This is the Skyladder Parkour Course at Tianman Mountain in China. It consists of 999 steps and has an average incline of 45 degrees. Calen Chan, a 19-year-old freerunner fromUtah, got to run all the way down. With a GoPro camera held in his mouth!

(YouTube link)

Oh yeah, the video might make you a little dizzy. -via Laughing Squid

(Image edit: Calen Chan)

One band, 213 songs, a ranked list, and thousands of internet commenters with opinions. This is more than a list, as Vulture's Bill Wyman (not that Bill Wyman) gives a rationale for the ranking of each Beatles song. Yes, he knew it would enrage people to see their personal favorites ranked lower than they expected.

No stupid list has ever made me as angry as this one! https://t.co/uDd88taFaT

— Patrick Callaghan (@PatJC83) June 7, 2017

My work here is done! https://t.co/pfo7YAy5no

— Bill Wyman (@hitsville) June 7, 2017

See how your favorites fared in the list at Vulture. Each song is linked to its Spotify recording or YouTube video, and if you don't have a Spotify account, most of them can be found at YouTube. -via Metafilter

At a time when home ownership in the U.S. is at an all-time low, HGTV real estate shows are hot. They are an escapist fantasy, like most TV is. People watch while dreaming of being in the position of the people who are buying and renovating their dream home on TV. We already know that the homes people "select" are often houses they've already purchased, but you might not know that getting a real estate bargain, whether to live in, to rent out, or to flip, often comes at a cost for the neighborhood: gentrification, and the eviction of the people who can no longer afford to live there. Some of them still live in those homes as they are being sold.

Tarek and Christina El Moussa, the now-divorced hosts of Flip or Flop, discovered as much in 2015 when they attempted to host a house flipping seminar in Portland, Oregon, a city buckling under the consequences of its lack of affordable housing. The pair was forced to postpone the event and others in the Pacific Northwest indefinitely after a wave of backlash online. The couple told the Orange County Register in 2013 that evicting people, including families, is a regular part of the home flipping process. “I’ll buy any house, any condition (and) any location as long as I can get it at the right price,” Tarek told the paper. That potentially troubling aspect of home renovation never makes in onto Flip or Flop, however. If it did, the show might not be in the position to be renewed for its seventh season on the network and have its hosts profiled in the New York Times.

The Outline looks at several cases where the story you don't see on TV is more interesting than the sale or renovation. -via Digg

(Image credit: Brendel)

(YouTube link)

Even if you're not into poetry, you have to admit that the folks who became famous by writing it are tres interesting. From William Shakespeare to Maya Angelou, John Green knows a weird fact when he sees it. You'll learn some really weird trivia about many different poets in this , the latest episode of the Mental Floss List Show.  

The reviews of the choral can-tata were mixed. Some said they sounded tinny and flat, and sang recycled songs with canned background music. One actually called it "soda depressing." Others thought they crushed it, especially with the metal covers.

This display was spotted in the Netherlands. -via reddit

Quite a few years ago, paleontologists discovered that dinosaurs were the ancient ancestors of birds, and since then, a few dinosaur fossils have been found with evidence of feathers, including two tyrannosauroids that predated T. rex. That led us to picture Tyrannosaurus rex and other dinos as feathered reptiles. Now, a new study by Phil R. Bell of Australia's University of New England says that T. rex had scales.

Bell and his colleagues examined skin from T. rex and four relatives from fairly late in tyrannosaur history: Albertosaurus, Daspletosaurus, Gorgosaurus and Tarbosaurus. Tyrannosaur skin is rare, Bell said, in part because paleontologists historically favored smashing through skin to get to bones.

From these skin patches, representing the tyrannosaur abdomen, chest, pelvis, neck and tail, the researchers found nothing but scales. If feathers existed, they did so only along the animals' back or spines.

“This doesn't rule out feathers on even the biggest tyrannosaurs,” said University of London paleontologist David Hone, who was not involved in the research, “but does suggest they lacked a full coat of feathers.”

That's good news for the producers of Jurassic Park. Read more about the study at The Washington Post.

Mohan is one of the red panda triplets at Symbio Wildlife Park in New South Wales, Australia. The others are Raja and Phingu. In this video, Mohan busy being cute for zoo visitors, and enjoys getting his belly rubbed.

(YouTube link)

There, that should make your whole work day go better. -via Tastefully Offensive

The West Wing broke new ground for television, as TV networks avoided politics like the plague beforehand. Producers figured that whatever they did, they were going to lose a chunk of the audience over accusations of partisanship. But with today's highly-fragmented audience, thanks to hundreds of cable channels, a series does not have to appeal to everyone to be successful. Quite a few fictional political shows followed The West Wing in portraying fictional politicians. Right now they are all scrambling to compete with real political news for entertainment value. You might want to check out the profiles of the politicians that can't affect your lives, but will appear every week on your TV anyway, at TVOM.

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

 In the minds of countless millions of moviegoers the world over, certain celluloid images are indelible. There's Clark Gable looking dashing in his Rhett Butler garb, telling Scarlett (Vivien Leigh) "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." There's Judy Garland dancing down the yellow brick road with her three companions, Humphrey Bogart in his Casablanca trench coat, Charlie Chaplin waddling down the road with cane in hand, and Harold Lloyd hanging from that big clock on that tall building.

Which brings us to the movie with the world's most beloved comic duo trying to push a piano up a seemingly insurmountable flight of stairs.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy filmed The Music Box during an 11-day span, from December 7th through December 17th, in 1931. Although they may not have realized it during those 11 days, they were filming not only their most enduring cinematic image and their single most beloved short, but their only film in the over 100 they worked on together to be awarded an Academy Award.

Some original titles for the The Music Box were Top Heavy, Words and Music and The Up and Up. One has to wonder if they hadn't ultimately decided on the much catchier The Music Box, would this short have achieved it's "classic" status and immortality.

The plot is simple enough: two dimwits (Stan and Ollie) are assigned to deliver a piano to a home on top of a huge flight of stairs. Various perils, mistakes, confusions mess-ups and angry encounters occur along the way (as if you didn't suspect). As in any Laurel and Hardy film, the boys are inept and incompetent due to three major factors: other's interference, the laws of nature, but most of all their own stupidity.

At the turn of the 20th century, Vietnam was a French colony. The administrators built their own French neighborhood in Hanoi to house their families, complete with a modern sewer system underneath. That particular amenity of Western life was not compatible with the existing ecosystem of Vietnam.

It turns out that when Doumer’s colonial government laid more than nine miles of sewage pipe beneath Hanoi, it inadvertently created nine miles of cool, dark rodent paradise, where the pests could breed without fear of predators. And when they got hungry, the rats had direct access to the city’s ritziest real estate via a subterranean superhighway. Under the streets of French Hanoi, rats multiplied exponentially—and then skittered to the surface.

As if it wasn’t enough that these furry invaders disrupted the colonists’ illusion of European tranquility in Asia, cases of the bubonic plague started popping up, and rats were suspected of carrying the disease. Something had to be done.

The colonial government waged a war on rats that began with professional rat hunters, but soon expanded to offering a bounty to the public: a penny for each rat killed. You might be able to see where this is going, and you'd be right. No matter how many bounties were paid, the rats only multiplied. Read the story of the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre at Atlas Obscura.

If you've never owned a house, you might be under the impression that the huge mortgage is the scariest thing about home ownership. Or maybe the fact that you can't easily up and move to a new town when a great job opportunity arises. No, what's really scary is that there's no landlord to take care of all the things that can go wrong. It's your house, and your responsibility. And there are plenty of things that can go wrong. Oh, like the heater not working? Ha! That's elementary. Call a heating and air company; they'll fix it. There are much worse things to scare you about home ownership, listed at the Concourse.

Normally, I'm completely against trolling someone just to provoke a reaction, but in this case, it's so extreme and so fictional that I'll let it pass, maybe as an example of what not to do. This isn't even nice. Oh, sure, if the target geek were in on the joke, it would be completely different. It's the latest comic from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.