Have you ever tuned in to catch a TV show's introductory theme song, even if you didn't stick around to watch the entire episode? You might start doing that after you are introduced to some new shows that have awesome theme music. You'll also learn a bit about what goes into designing those themes.Who knows? You might even want to stick around and watch the whole show once you get hooked by the music. Hear the best of them at TVOM.
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They're saying their sacred wedding vows in front of family, friends, and a videographer. Then the groom reaches out and slaps the bride! He wasn't thinking of how it looked -she had a bee on her face. He was just thinking of her safety.
The poor groom then realized what it looked like, and knows he'll never live it down. Luckily, the officiant saw it, and let everyone know what happened. A good time was had by all. -via reddit
The following article is from the book Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into California.
(Image credit: Zarathustra~commonswiki)
Ancient occult societies, alchemy, and magical chanting—how much do you really know about your nice neighbors in San Jose?
MUMMY DEAREST
Tucked away in an area of San Jose best known for its green lawns and high-end homes are ancient mummies of everything from cats to catfish, including a few mummified people. These mummies rest in San Jose’s Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum with more than 4,000 other artifacts (originals and replicas), the largest collection of Egyptian artifacts on exhibit in the western United States.
The museum building, designed to resemble the ancient Amon temple that once stood in Karnak, Egypt, is part of a beautiful, but somewhat baffling, complex built by the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC). The what? They’re a group devoted to self-improvement and the study of mysticism. Rosicrucian Park takes up an entire city block in San Jose and features a planetarium, a research library, a temple, a shrine, and a peace garden replete with Egyptian plants, a pond, and fountains. All the buildings —except the Moorish-style planetarium— have exteriors inspired by Egyptian structures.
How this blend of ancient Egypt and New Age mysticism came to be located in a San Jose suburb is a strange story. For some, it begins in 1915 when Harvey Spencer Lewis, a former advertising illustrator from New Jersey, founded the AMORC to “study the elusive mysteries of life and the universe.” For others, though, the story really begins in 1500 BC, when some of those mummies in the museum were still alive.
EGYPT, BY WAY OF GERMANY?
This is a nice necklace, made of gold and rubies and once belonged to movie star Elizabeth Taylor. But is it worth $8 million? Taylor had an extensive collection of fabulous jewels, many with precious gems much larger than these rubies, but this one, given to her by Richard Burton, was supposed to have also belonged to Shah Jahan, the Mughal Emperor who built the Taj Mahal. Christie's was charged with finding a buyer for the necklace, and they did, but it was returned. And the Taylor estate refused to refund the money to Christie's. The kerfuffle has Christie's in a bind, and they are holding more of Taylor's jewelry collection until the deal is worked out. You can read the details of the necklace and its status, plus see a gallery of Elizabeth Taylor's other fabulous jewels that may be auctioned off at Vanity Fair. -via Digg
(Image credit: Christie's Auctions)
This is not about Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which we've covered a few times before. Los Alamos, New Mexico, was where Robert Oppenheimer and his team of physicists worked at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory to design the world's first nuclear bomb. Before the laboratory, there was little to be found in the area, but when employees moved in, it became a community. After the war, the development of nuclear weapons continued at Los Alamos, but the government didn't want that to be widely known. A 1954 public relations campaign made it seem like just another town.
It had multiple barber shops, movie theatres, and jewelers, a photography store, pastry shop and even a florist. There was a police force and fire department, albeit one directly subsidized by the federal Atomic Energy Council that also had to be trained in special firefighting techniques involving radioactive materials. There was a daily flight from Los Alamos to Albuquerque, a library stocked with over 18,000 titles, and living space aplenty, with the smallest one-bedroom apartments going for $22 a month and rents for the largest units capped at $135. Residents of Los Alamos could even listen to the radio, a luxury that wasn't afforded them during wartime. Their local station, KRSN was presided over by a certain Robert Porton, whose "large record collection is the envy of many a disc jockey."
Sure, most of 12,000 citizens were working on developing weapons of mass destruction or the family members of someone who was, but other than that, Los Alamos was a paragon of idyllic 50s American life.
Read about how Los Alamos went from a brand new wartime facility to a "normal" town at Motherboard.
This is a spectacularly clever costume mashup: X-Men's Beast and Jubilee as Disney's Beauty and the Beast! They were spotted at Ottawa Comic Con this past weekend. This is Ottawa's sixth year hosting a Comic Con, and our friends from Geeks Are Sexy took photographer Patrick-Michel Dagenais to the con to capture the best of the best cosplayers. The first gallery featuring dozens of cosplayers is up now for your viewing pleasure. Check back for more in the next couple of days.
As they should be, Moms are full of advice, some good, some not-so-good. In most cases, she was just doing her best with what she had. And some mothers who usually have great advice on everything have their off days. In other cases, you wonder what was going on in her mind.
Keep in mind that mothers are just people, struggling to do the right thing even when they're very much wrong. In a list of image macros, Cracked readers contribute 22 of the worst pieces of advice their mothers gave them. After reading its, you will probably appreciate your mother more than ever.
When train travel was fairly new, somehow the idea took hold that rising on one could cause a man to go insane. There were tales of socially unacceptable behavior, particularly fights and attacks on women. And these made the news, which made the incidents seems more prevalent than they were.
As the railway grew more popular in the 1850s and 1860s, trains allowed travelers to move about with unprecedented speed and efficiency, cutting the length of travel time drastically. But according to the more fearful Victorians, these technological achievements came at the considerable cost of mental health. As Edwin Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller wrote in The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present, trains were believed to “injure the brain.” In particular, the jarring motion of the train was alleged to unhinge the mind and either drive sane people mad or trigger violent outbursts from a latent “lunatic.” Mixed with the noise of the train car, it could, it was believed, shatter nerves.
The novel experience made people nervous, which probably sparked some incidents. Train travel also caused people of different classes to be inclose proximity, which may have exacerbated anxiety. But over time, people got used to travel, mad "railway madness" seemed to disappear. Although modern-day riders know that if you ride a commuter train every day, you're going to see some strange behavior even today. Read about railway madness and the trouble it caused at Atlas Obscura.
Simon Tofield and Nicky Trevorrow have some basic information for people thinking about adopting a kitten. It's a real commitment that shouldn't be taken lightly, but if you're prepared, you'll have a wonderful companion.
But that's just a couple minutes of this video. The back end is a Simon's cat cartoon from when the kitten was new! -via Tastefully Offensive
In March of 2011, miners using heavy equipment in Alberta found a dinosaur. But this was not just any fossil. A nodosaur had been swept out to sea millions years ago and was preserved better than any other nodosaur before. The front half of the animal was recovered in a state that doesn't even have to be reconstructed. Its soft tissue, armor, and even individual scales of its skin were fossilized as well as its bones.
The remarkable fossil is a newfound species (and genus) of nodosaur, a type of ankylosaur often overshadowed by its cereal box–famous cousins in the subgroup Ankylosauridae. Unlike ankylosaurs, nodosaurs had no shin-splitting tail clubs, but they too wielded thorny armor to deter predators. As it lumbered across the landscape between 110 million and 112 million years ago, almost midway through the Cretaceous period, the 18-foot-long, nearly 3,000-pound behemoth was the rhinoceros of its day, a grumpy herbivore that largely kept to itself. And if something did come calling—perhaps the fearsome Acrocanthosaurus—the nodosaur had just the trick: two 20-inch-long spikes jutting out of its shoulders like a misplaced pair of bull’s horns.
Removing such a large intact specimen was no easy task, and the fossil broke in half as it was removed from the rock around it. But six years later, we are able to see the nodosaur, and further research may reveal what color it was and even what it ate for its last meal. Read the story, and see lots of pictures at National Geographic. -via Digg
(Image credit: Robert Clark/National Geographic)
The Social Security Administration lists the most popular baby names of 2016. The names at the top of the list for both boys and girls are pretty much the same as in 2015. But the real news is further down the list, there are some real changes brewing. Mental Floss found what names are zooming in popularity, like the pop culture influences of Kehlani, Kylo, and Zayn, and what names are plummeting like they are Kryptonite (which is not in the top thousand names for either sex, but will eventually sound nice to someone). Check out the latest name trends here.
(Image credit: Flickr user Dave Herholz)
Mother's Day is for celebrating mothers of all kinds. Mom dedicate all their time to teaching their young ones what they need to get through life. Even if that entails jumping off a dock.
Yes, you can do it! These dozen or so ducklings trust Mama to know what they are capable of. -via Metafilter
Watch a 3-year-old girl change out a sink tap to stop a leak. She needs a chair to reach the sink, but she gets the job done! And she didn't leave out the part about going to Home Depot …which in most cases turns out to be three trips to get the right part.
There are already eight episodes of the Little "How To" Girl series, in which she does things like cut a man's hair, vacuums the floor, fixes a headlight, and replaces a lawn mower battery. -via Nag on the Lake
The Slow Mo Guys are back, after a brainstorm session to figure out some really weird stunts to show us through their ultra-high-speed cameras. It took four hours to set up a thousand mousetraps on a trampoline. And just seconds to set them off!
Were the results worth the effort? Five millions views says yes. -via Pleated-Jeans
For hundreds of years, women in several countries would leave "toad votives," candles shaped like toads, at Christian sites and shrines. The symbolism of the toad has to do with childbirth. And the reasons for that association are both numerous and weird.
In the medieval world, toads were charter members of the cabal of slimy, devilish creatures imbued with powers and beloved of witches—tormentors of the sinful mind. In one medieval church sculpture motif, the femme aux serpents, the embodiment of sinful lust, toads sometimes sub in for the snakes that writhe around a woman’s body and occasionally bite her breasts. But toads weren’t as purely evil as snakes; they could be humorous, too. In one German story, a woman loses her vagina and it “is mistaken for a toad as it roams the streets,” writes Blumenfeld-Kosinski. (Eventually, the woman gets her detachable vagina back.) Toads were also thought to have the power of spontaneous generation and resurrection.
Even weirder is the association of the toad votives with toad votive, who is more of a legend than a saint. Read how a miracle saved Wilgefortis from an unwanted marriage at Atlas Obscura. That she became a patron saint of the marital bed is just more weirdness.
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