Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, erected banners along its main street to honor local veterans. This banner salutes five brothers who all served in the armed forces: Thomas, Michael, Robert, Francis, and Jack Gergal. The youngest, Jack, is the sole remaining brother, and came in from out of town to see the banners. He's shown here saluting his brothers. Jack's grandson shared this image, and said,
Jack served 20 years in the military, 16 for the AF and 4 for the Navy. He was mostly a mechanic for various aircraft but also spent time as a "Hurricane Hunter". He was the youngest so his older brothers participated earlier than him and they served different branches of the military but they all served.
We've seen seven numbered movies in the Star Wars saga, plus Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Watching all those has taken some of us forty years. That's eight movies that your children or grandchildren have not yet seen, and they don't have forty years to catch up on them before The Last Jedi is released in December. So how do you introduce your kids to the Star Wars saga? The easiest (and laziest) method would be to show them in episode order, with Rogue One between episodes III and IV. But this causes some real problems.
Here’s why: the best part of the saga – Luke’s parentage, is rendered meaningless by the prequel trilogy, as well as the reality behind Luke and Leia’s familial bond – makes some of the sequences a little bit incestual. That said, the prequels were made with subtle nods to the original films, so there’s moments that make very little sense, unless you’ve seen Episodes IV-VI, not to mention the change in technology.
Finally, starting anyone who hasn’t seen the Saga with Episode I seriously ensures that someone won’t want to make it through the rest of them, if that’s the starting point. It’s easily the worst film out of all of them and suggesting that it gets better 3 films later, is a tough ask for a newbie.
The idea seems kind of silly, but once you start watching, it's really kind of neat. Your favorite movies have numbers in them, and ThorC1138 edited them to count down from 100 to zero. You'll recognize most of them, and if you are wondering about any of the others, there's a list at the YouTube page.
Then you start thinking about how much work it had to be to find and isolate all those numbers, and you have to respect the madness that went into this project. -via Tastefully Offensive
Happy birthday to the world's most famous cat! Maru the Japanese Scottish fold was born ten years ago this week. In this video, we see clips of his kittenhood, and his latest adventures.
Maru now has a worldwide audience and a little sister named Hana, but he still take pleasure in the simple things, like boxes. He's just as charming at ten as ever. -via Fark
When young Jack Kennedy entered Choate, the prestigious boarding school in Connecticut, he was following in the footsteps of his older brother Joe. Joe was an excellent student and a standout athlete. Jack was not, and didn't even pass the entrance exams. But he was admitted anyway, and made mediocre grades. His energies went into pulling pranks.
Aided by the sons of America’s most influential families, young Jack—then a student at Choate—had successfully snuck firecrackers onto his elite boarding school’s Wallingford, Connecticut campus, and headed straight for the bathroom. That morning, during the obligatory daily assembly, long-suffering headmaster George St. John held up the defenseless victim—a badly injured toilet seat—for all to see.
St. John railed against “the muckers,” as he labeled the culprits, which Jack took to heart, though not in the way the headmaster likely intended. Inspired, the future president named his band of first-class troublemakers “The Choate Muckers Club.”
The school administration didn't think much of John F. Kennedy, but his classmates saw leadership. Read about Kennedy's boarding school days at Town & Country. -via Digg
Formally known as the Marine Corps War Memorial, the monument is a replica of Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal's famous picture.
LAST STOP, IWO JIMA
By February 1945, U.S. troops had recovered most of the territory taken by the Japanese in 1941-42 except for the small island of Iwo Jima, 660 miles from Tokyo. Recapturing Iwo Jima would bring America's Pacific campaign to a successful conclusion.
The Marines landed on Iwo Jima on February 19 and made their way toward Mount Suribachi, the island's highest point. They reached and surrounded their destination on the 21st, but it took them until the afternoon of the 23rd to capture the summit. When five Marines and a Navy corpsman raised the American flag at the summit of Mount Suribachi, Joe Rosenthal was lucky and quick-witted enough to capture an iconic image. Rosenthal's photograph was splashed onto the front pages of newspapers everywhere. By the end of March 1945, Time magazine had called it "the most widely printed photograph of World War II," it was the centerpiece of the seventh war bond drive, and had earned Rosenthal a Pulitzer Prize.
An early pioneer of the Southern Rock movement has passed away. Gregg Allman died peacefully today at his home in Savannah, Georgia. The musician had suffered from health problems; he contracted hepatitis C in 1999 and underwent a liver transplant in 2010. No cause of death has been released.
Allman fronted his band for 45 years, first alongside Duane and then as its sole namesake, after his older brother -- regarded as one of the most influential guitarists in rock history -- was killed in a motorcycle accident in November 1971, just as their trailblazing Southern rock tracks were taking hold on the charts.
Soldiering on through grief and then the eerily similar death of bassist Berry Oakley just one year and 10 days after Duane died, Allman and the band became as well known for their stoic survival as they were for their freewheeling concerts.
The Allman Brothers Band first reached the Billboard 200 albums chart with its self-titled debut in 1970. Over the next 34 years, the group charted 24 more albums, including four top 10 sets. It topped the list once, with Brothers and Sisters, which reached No. 1 for five weeks in 1973.
As a soloist, Allman notched seven charting albums on the Billboard 200, including one top 10 set: the No. 5-peaking Low Country Blues in 2001. On the Hot 100, he claimed a pair of entries with “Midnight Rider” (No. 19 in 1974) and “I’m No Angel” (No. 49 in 1987). The latter also topped the Mainstream Rock Songs chart that same year.
He'll probably be traumatized for life. What a great prank! Thank comic artist Pedro Arizpe for the idea. Read what else she told him at Port Sherry. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Every picture tells a story, and this one is a tale of overconfidence -or maybe just cluelessness. That's the cat door around his neck. This puppy thought he was small enough to go through, just like the cat he lives with. It doesn't work that way. His head went through, but getting it back out was a different story. The uploader doesn't say whether the dog broke the door off or the human had to disconnect it, but the result is a sorry dog with a self-made collar of shame who may our may not have learned his lesson. -via reddit
Kate Marsden was a medical adventurer and advocate. While nursing wounded soldiers in the Russo-Turkish War in 1877, she first encountered the horrors of leprosy and became obsessed with finding a treatment. A doctor in Constantinople told her of an herb that grew in Siberia that was supposed to alleviate the disease, so Marsden became determined to go to Siberia. The problem was that Siberia was a wild and desolate area used for exile (which included leprosy sufferers). There was not yet a Transiberian Railway, so in 1891, she went on horseback and sled.
In many ways, Marsden fits the profile of a daring female explorer of the Victorian age. She went to Siberia to find a particular medicinal herb that she thought could cure leprosy, and to meet sufferers of the disease living in the Russian forest. Her advocacy for leprosy patients has since made her a local hero—there’s even a very large diamond named after her—but in her own time, her adventurousness, coupled with gossip about her personal life and sexual preference, brought her only infamy. After she returned from Siberia, she was vilified as a fabulist and an embezzler who had betrayed people who trusted her. Her critics questioned her motives for going to Sosnovka at all: What was she really after? Or was she just running away from something?
Mark Zuckerberg gave the commencement address at Harvard University's graduation ceremonies on Thursday -and grabbed most of the headlines. But he wasn't the only celebrity on hand. Ten honorary degrees were bestowed, including a doctor of music to composer John Williams. The Harvard Din and Tonics, an a cappella group, performed a tribute to Williams during the ceremonies.
The medley of movie themes included music from Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, Superman, Jaws, and more. -via Laughing Squid
No matter what she says, we all know the real reason that Ash doesn't want to go to the beach is because she'd rather stay inside and play video games. That doesn't make for a convincing argument, though, so the sun gets the blame. At least that way, it's not all about her. This is the latest comic from Megacynics. For the rest of us, Memorial Day weekend is the perfect time to get outside and play, but don't forget your sunscreen.
In this parody trailer, which is honestly pretty short, Mashable proves that you don't need jokes to make a comedy trailer. You don't even need laughs, although there is a giggle or two here. All you need is the music. -via Tastefully Offensive
A motorist with a dash cam pulled up to an intersection and stopped with plenty of room for pedestrians to cross. The guy crossing the street didn't not seem happy about it at all. But he got his. Then, for bonus points, he gets angry again! -via Boing Boing
Arsenic has been the go-to poison for people wanting to get rid of family members for centuries. It's odorless, tasteless, produces symptoms of illness that can be attributed to natural causes, and for most of history, hard to detect after the fact. When divorce was difficult, arsenic was easy. Tests were eventually developed to detect arsenic in a human body, but they weren't reliable enough to persuade juries in cases without additional evidence. That is, until British chemist James Marsh developed the Marsh test in 1836, which made its dramatic courtroom debut a few years later.
Perhaps the most famous use of Marsh’s test was in the trial of Marie Lafarge in 1840, in which the defendant stood accused of poisoning her husband. Young Marie had entered an arranged marriage with Charles Lafarge believing him to be a wealthy, cultured businessman, and when she found out he was in fact a boorish clod with a run-down chateau, rough sexual habits and substantial debt, she got to putting arsenic in his food. (Friends mentioned that they’d heard her asking casually about mourning fashions: How long did you have to wear black, again?) By the time Charles came to realize his wife’s devotion to home cooking was not a loving gesture, it was too late.
A back-and-forth festival of forensic testing ensued: local scientists first analyzed the dead man’s beverages, stomach tissue and vomit; and while they claimed to have found arsenic, their glassware broke during testing. Moreover, defense counsel was upset at use of outdated techniques, and called in Mateu Orfila, dean of the Paris Faculty of Medicine and the era’s premier toxicologist, who confirmed that only the Marsh test would be credible in court.
At the time, people were skeptical of forensic scientists, particularly when a defendant's life was at stake. Testimony about test results wasn't enough; they wanted to see the test performed. So what was left of the victim's body was brought into the court for the Marsh test, resulting in trial spectators buying 500 bottles of smelling salts. Read what happened at that trial, and how the results influenced forensic science, at Atlas Obscura.
