On Monday, a woman tried to text her daughter Jess and have her stop at the store for some groceries on the way home. But she dialed a wrong number and instead the message went to a 35-year-old man. That's normal enough, but when he told her she had the wrong number, she did not believe him, and kept texting pretty much all day long. So he decided to have some fun, since she was stubbornly believing he was Jess. When she finally came to the realization that he was not her daughter, she turned her anger on him, the poor guy who was just chilling' at home with his wife when a strange woman texted. These are just two screenshots of 13 that tell the story. See them all at Boing Boing.
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It's a sure sign that you're getting older when you realize your kids are cooler than you ever were. Maybe you'll be lucky and that will happen when they are just a bit older than these children. It's the latest comic from Chris at Lunarbaboon.
(Image credit: Katie Carey)
How two little wheels spun a revolution in dating, fashion, medicine, and space travel.
1. IT REVOLUTIONIZED HOW PEOPLE HOOK UP, A CENTURY BEFORE TINDER.
When bicycle prices dropped in the 1890s, people of modest means could afford their own transport for the first time. The effect on romance was profound: Long-distance courtships were possible. People could date outside their parishes, which, according to British geneticist Steve Jones, widened the gene pool, making the bicycle “the most important event in recent human evolution.”
2. IT SHOWED THE WORLD THAT AFRICAN AMERICANS BELONGED.
Wonder Woman was a breakthrough character for DC Comics in that she was a (gasp) woman! Since her debut in 1941, she's been a symbol of a woman's power, although a problematic one, having been written and drawn by men for a male audience. And even so, she got the short end of the stick in pop culture.
Nevertheless, Wonder Woman persevered. And she will finally get a theatrical movie this summer. Learn the history of Wonder Woman in this video from kaptainkristian. -via Tastefully Offensive
Amazon has introduced the new Echo Look. This is a new feature of the Echo and its personal assistant Alexa that looks at you and tells you when your fashion choices are acceptable. And it will sell you better clothing. What could possibly go wrong? For one thing, you might want to never take your clothes off in the same room with the device. And think about how much information Amazon can gather with a full-length picture of you in your home.
This might seem overly speculative or alarmist to some, but Amazon isn’t offering any reassurance that they won’t be doing more with data gathered from the Echo Look. When asked if the company would use machine learning to analyze users’ photos for any purpose other than fashion advice, a representative simply told The Verge that they “can’t speculate” on the topic. The rep did stress that users can delete videos and photos taken by the Look at any time, but until they do, it seems this content will be stored indefinitely on Amazon’s servers.
This non-denial means the Echo Look could potentially provide Amazon with the resource every AI company craves: data. And full-length photos of people taken regularly in the same location would be a particularly valuable dataset — even more so if you combine this information with everything else Amazon knows about its customers (their shopping habits, for one). But when asked whether the company would ever combine these two datasets, an Amazon rep only gave the same, canned answer: “Can’t speculate.”
Read more about the Amazon Echo Look at The Verge. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Amazon)
How do you get your money's worth at a buffet? The Food Network is here to tell us how we've been doing it wrong. See, buffet eating is a zero-sum game, and you have to have a proper strategy to win.
On the other hand, you can decide that eating out is not a competition, but an experience that you pay to enjoy. If you enjoy the food and the experience, then you've won, no matter where you are. If your local buffet restaurant is full of diners trying to "beat the house," the experience will not be great and the food is probably sub-par. Maybe you should patronize a restaurant that gives you the good experience you are paying for. -via Boing Boing
When you see a scary movie, you tell yourself, "It's only a movie, it's only a movie." but you're still frightened. There's nothing that will kill that mood like seeing the production reels with actors falling into giggles when they're supposed to be dying in some gruesome way. Production crews archive bloopers as a matter of course these days, but it may be years before the public sees them. Check out blooper reels from the horror movies The Descent, Scream, Scream 4, House of Wax, Halloween, Jennifer's Body, The Witch, Shaun of the Dead, and Silence of the Lambs at TVOM. You can assume that all blooper reels will contains some NSFW language.
Redditor shanekeith_ shared a letter his workplace received from a student somewhere far from Missouri. Even though he or she struggled to get three paragraphs, you can tell this kid is going places (although probably not Missouri, because he is only eleven). Honestly, if you were to received a letter from a stranger, wouldn't you rather see some humor and personality than a perfectly-composed business letter? Anyway, shanekeith_ works at Breakout KC, an escape room experience in Kansas City. He says they have plenty of cool stuff laying around, and will send the kid something that will blow his mind. If you can't read the letter, you can enlarge the image here.
When George Lucas was working on the early drafts of what would become Star Wars, he was going to have the story narrated by a character who was explaining it to a a more advanced species long after the fact. The "Journal of the Whills" was the written, or otherwise recorded, account of the Skywalker saga. The idea was scrapped long before the script was finished, but Lucas' early idea managed to hang around long enough to find its way into the Expanded Universe, and then into the official novelization of The Force Awakens. Read the story of the Journal of the Whills at Den of Geek.
Minoule is an urban cat who discovers that there's a canary living in the building across the street. He takes grave risks to get that bird, and along the way, a lot of other things are going on in the city.
The canary and a guitar-playing cat on the roof provide a fine soundtrack to this wordless French production by Nicolas Bianco-Levrin. -via The Kid Should See This
Volcanoes are cool, except when you're in danger of being killed by one. Well, maybe cool isn't the right word, because they're hot. John Green tells us all kinds of neat things about volcanoes in the latest episode of the mental_floss List Show.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were introduced on a New York street in March of 1945. Dean was born Dino Paul Crocetti in Steubenville, Ohio, on June 7, 1917. Jerry was born Jerome Levitch in Newark, New Jersey, on March 16, 1926.
They were introduced that fateful day by a mutual friend, an Italian singer named Sonny King. At the time, Dean was a semi-successful singer, performing around the East Coast in nightclubs and on his own radio show. Jerry was eking out a living doing a "record act," where he would mime to records by famous singers, all the while mugging outrageously.
According to one later interview, their initial reactions to each other reflected the fact that neither was very impressed. Jerry thought Dean was "conceited, snooty and stand-offish," Dean thought Jerry was "a young wise guy." Despite these initial opinions, the two soon became friends.
Staying in the same hotel, as well as being chronically out of work, Jerry would babysit Dean's kids for him. Soon, by pure coincidence, the two would sometimes be booked at the same clubs. Jerry and Dean would sometimes goof around onstage together, heckling each other, doing imitations and cracking jokes. The audiences ate it up, the boys had fun, but nothing more came of it.
J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were friends and carried on epic literary and religious discussions. They also went to see Disney's first animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, together in 1938 or '39. They hated it. Tolkien was particularly repulsed by how Disney portrayed dwarves.
Years later, in a 1964 letter to a Miss J.L. Curry at Stanford University, likely spurred on by the controversy surrounding Disney’s treatment of Mary Poppins, Tolkien further laid bare his true feelings on Disney’s work. He described Disney’s talent as “hopelessly corrupted,” writing, “Though in most of the ‘pictures’ proceeding from his studios there are admirable or charming passages, the effect of all of them is to me disgusting. Some have given me nausea…” He goes on to call Disney a “cheat,” noting that while he too had a profit motive behind his work, he wouldn’t stoop to working with Disney.
Read the particulars of Tolkien's and Lewis' criticism of Disney at Atlas Obscura.
If a Unicorn Frappuccino doesn't turn you on, maybe you'd prefer some Goth ice cream from Little Damage Ice Cream Shop in Los Angeles. It's charcoal-almond flavored soft serve ice cream with the black provided by activated charcoal. The cone is black, too. People at Instagram seem to love it, but whether that's because of the flavor or the look isn't quite clear. Go to SomeEcards to see more pictures of the ice cream and what it does to your teeth. -via Boing Boing
@SssnakeySci is a snake biologist. A friend sent her this picture and swears there's a copperhead in it. Can you find it? I looked for a while and then gave up. Snakes are sneaky; he's probably underneath the leaves. But no. Once you give up, see the answer outlined here. Now, I looked at the answer, and then still had trouble finding it in the original photo! Like my mother used to tell me when I didn't see something in plain sight, "If it were a snake, it would have bit you." -via Geeks Are Sexy
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