The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!
by Stephen Drew, Improbable Research staff
Italian hand gestures fascinate scholars, who labor to classify the gestures and grasp their meanings.
Andrea de Jorio's Handy Classic
Detail from de Jorio's book. A typical scene of a boy and an adult woman communicating partially with hand gestures.
A book published in 1832 is in some sense a bible of Italian--- especially southern Italian---hand gestures:
La Mimica Degli Antichi Investigata nel Gestire Napoletano [The Body Language of the Ancients as Interpreted in Neapolitan Gesture], Andrea de Jorio, Naples, 1832.
Eventually, someone translated de Jorio's work into English:
Here's an idea that probably deserves some study. Tips are taxable income, but cash gifts are not (unless the gift is over $13,000 in one year). Does this money add to the waiter's taxable income? Does it contribute to her total for the week in making up the difference between her pay from the restaurant and minimum wage? Does it go into the pot to share with the cooks and bussers? Don't bother asking the IRS.
An Internal Revenue Service (IRS) spokesperson conceded that he'd never heard of such a situation and declined to speculate about possible legal implications. He directed ATTN: to the agency's "Tips on Tips" guide, which emphasizes that "income received in the form of tips is taxable."
Since this image has gone viral, we might expect a statement from the agency sometime soon.
Ian Pfaff, of Glendale, California, has a two-year-old daughter named Junior and an infant son named Benji. Pfaff is a Mad Max fan, but he didn't get to see Mad Max: Fury Road on its opening day because Junior had just been born the day before. But the kids are getting the Mad Max bug anyway, because of what their father has created. He took two Cozy Coupes and modded them Fury Road style!
The Alberta Aurora Chasers Facebook group shares pictures its members take of the Northern Lights. Last year, they noticed a phenomenon showing up in some pictures: a purplish ribbon in the sky.
Giving off a glow in mostly purple and green colors, the phenomenon was observed by members of a Facebook group called the “Alberta Aurora Chasers” who named the display “Steve.” Why Steve? Well, this is a reference to the popular children’s movie Over the Hedge where one of the characters isn’t sure what he is looking at and randomly names it Steve. Steve was formerly called by aurora chasers and photographers a “proton arc” (also known as a proton aurora). Proton aurora, or aurora caused by the raining down of protons from the magnetosphere is broad, diffuse, and dim visually unlike the structure of Steve that is narrow and has motion. So we know it is not a proton arc although we do not yet fully know what it is.
In 1938, the hotel St. Francis in San Francisco began washing all its coins as a courtesy to guests -particularly women who wore white gloves. Back then, it was a full-time job, since coins could pay for about anything. Now Rob Holsen continues the custom, but almost 80 years later, it only takes about ten hours a week, because people don't use coins as much. Still, the hotel has the cleanest coins anywhere.
The process begins when the general cashier sends racks of rolled coins to Holsen, who empties the change into a repurposed silver burnisher.
Along with the coins, the burnisher is filled with water, bird shot to knock the dirt off, and a healthy pour of 20 Mule Team Borax soap. After three hours of swishing the coins around, Holsen uses a metal ice scoop to pour the loot into a perforated roast pan that sifts out the bird shot.
The wet coins are then spread out on a table beneath heat lamps.
This is where once-rusted copper pennies turn into shimmering bronze coins.
Edward Gorey was a masterful storyteller and artist, and he was also a collector. Not of anything in particular that he could become an expert on, but everything. The extent of his collecting didn't become well known until after his death in 2000, when his possessions -artworks, books, personal items, and everything else, were sorted and catalogued for the museum that his home became.
When he wasn’t writing, drawing, illustrating, and designing—and even when he was—Edward Gorey was collecting. Over the course of his life, the artist gathered, and kept, everything from tarot cards to trilobites to particularly interesting cheese graters. “We ask the docents not to use the word ‘hoarder,’” says Hischak, grinning as he surveys the House’s newest exhibit, which focuses on Gorey’s pack rat tendencies. “But he really did hoard interesting things.”
Poor Aquaman. When DC tried to give their lineup a little diversity in super powers and setting, he got the short end of the stick and has been stuck with them for decades. The only thing they could have possibly done to help the character is have Jason Momoa play him in the movies. But in the comics, he was the epitome of lame.
Aristocrats of the 18th century were always on the lookout for something new and impressive to spend money on. For some, that meant hiring their own hermit, to entertain guests and to, let's say, outsource their interest in philosophy. Finding and keeping your own personal estate hermit could be accomplished in several different ways. Maki Naro created a graphic story explaining the custom, which you'll find exceedingly weird. Read the rest of it at The Nib. -via Metafilter
Think about the most popular cartoon characters you know. Right, The Simpsons. Or Pikachu, or Spongebob, or Jake. A strangely large percentage of the top animated characters are yellow. They each have their own reasons, but even so, they ended up in the same place. Even LEGO minifigs.
But why did so many successful cartoon end up yellow? To determine the answer, first we learn about color theory, then some animation history. So this video ended up being about a lot more than yellow cartoon colors, but it's all fascinating. Turns out that yellow is an altogether good color. -via Digg
"It was fun to do. I honestly wasn't expecting to do it," said Ketola, a 225-average bowler who works and bowls at 281 Bowl. "I just wanted to see how quickly I could get across the house and get strikes."
While there is no official speed category in the official United States Bowling Congress' record books, Ketola wanted to attempt the unusual feat after watching a 2015 YouTube video posted by pro bowler Tom Dougherty. In the video, Dougherty fired 12 strikes over 12 lanes for what was billed at the time the world's fastest 300 game in 1 minute, 50.99 seconds.
In case you're wondering, he used eight of his own balls and two alley balls. -via SB Nation
While other innovative transportation companies are working on private space travel or self-driving vehicles, AeroMobil is focused on bringing us the flying car- finally! The Jetsons must have really had a profound effect on the founders, who've been working on a flying car since 1990. But it's not cheap.
The AeroMobile flying car unveiled its first version for pre-sale in Monaco over the weekend. By unfolding the wings, you can go from road to air and all you need is a pilot’s license and around $1.6 million to spend. The Slavakian company hopes to pre-sell about 500 units that will not be delivered until 2020.
When people got together on the internet, they shared enough cat pictures that LOLcat, the language, was born. It took a while longer, but there's also a language for dogs: DoggoLingo. Even if you've never heard of the language, you recognize it when you read it. Maybe you already speak this language!
DoggoLingo, sometimes referred to as doggo-speak, "seems to be quite lexical, there are a lot of distinctive words that are used," says Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch. "It's cutesier than others, too. Doggo, woofer, pupper, pupperino, fluffer — those have all got an extra suffix on the end to make them cuter."
McCulloch also notes DoggoLingo is uniquely heavy on onomatopoeias like bork, blep, mlem and blop.
Many of the terms come from popular places like the Facebook group Dogspotting and the Twitter feed WeRateDogs.
Here's a pupper before and after being asked "who's a good girl?" Unsure as h*ck. 12/10 hint hint it's you pic.twitter.com/ORiK6jlgdH
You can say anything you want to in icing on a cake, so it's a great way to say you're sorry and give a gift at the same time. However, there's always the danger that the message will be photographed and go viral on the 'net, without context. Especially if you are apologizing for something truly weird.
What do you even do about this one? A clothes dryer is an electrical appliance full of air vents and things. Maybe the perpetrator should have sent a Home Depot gift card instead. See more such cakes in a list called 23 Apology Cakes That Are Almost Too Hilarious To Eat at Buzzfeed.
Better not think about it too deeply. If there is a multiverse, there is probably an alternate you who is much better than the you that you turned out to be. If that's too depressing, remember that there may be worse versions of you. Of course, that's pretty depressing, too. This is the latest comic from Stephen Beals at StBeals. Check out more of his work; I think this one may be my favorite so far. -via reddit
Rob Reiner, Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer began working on an idea in 1978 that would eventually become the movie This Is Spinal Tap in 1984. They performed music gigs and made a 20-minute demo, but were rejected by studio after studio until the movie was finally made on a budget of $2 million, and released in 1984. This Is Spinal Tap performed modestly in theaters, but found success on home video, and is now a classic. As the 30th anniversary of the movie approached, Harry Shearer realized that neither he nor the other three principles had been paid any residuals, despite conceiving, writing, performing music, and acting in the film.
Sometimes it takes a malcontent to disturb something as intractable as Hollywood accounting practices. By the terms of the contract they signed in 1982 with Embassy Pictures, the four creators of Spinal Tap are entitled to a portion of income from the film, including merchandise and music, provided certain benchmarks are hit. Given the wild afterlife of This Is Spinal Tap, it seems impossible that anyone with a piece of the movie hasn’t made money. And yet this is Hollywood, where studios have claimed that some of the highest-grossing films—hits such as Return of the Jedi, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy—somehow haven’t turned a profit. As David Zucker, one of the creators of Airplane!, once said of his own sleeper hit, “It made so much money that the studio couldn’t hide it fast enough.”
With Embassy out of business, the theatrical rights to Spinal Tap bounced around from Coca-Cola to De Laurentiis Entertainment Group to a L’Oréal property named Parafrance to, around 1990, Studiocanal, a subsidiary of the French company Vivendi SA. The home-video rights followed a separate path and landed with Sony Music Entertainment. None of those companies paid the four creators, and no one did anything about it until Shearer finally lost his patience. “We were approaching the 30th anniversary,” he says, “and this low-burning lightbulb begins to go off—‘Hey, wait a minute, what’s going on here?’ ”
An investigation into the film's accounting showed that the four were owed $81 in merchandizing income and $98 in album income. Smelling a rat, Shearer filed a $125 million lawsuit last year. In 2017, Reiner, McKean, and Guest joined the lawsuit and raised the amount to $400 million, plus reversion of the copyright to the name Spinal Tap.
Vivendi, in its response to the lawsuit, argued that the creators made the film as a work for hire, and were hence not entitled to the copyright. It seems crazy, given that there’s plenty of evidence the four of them invented the band years before making their deal with Embassy, but calling a contribution work-for-hire is fairly common in copyright cases. In Shearer’s latest filing, he calls Vivendi’s position on the copyright a threat to scare him away from pressing his profit case. He also says it’s hypocritical for the company to cling to a film’s copyright while suggesting, based on what it claims is the film’s poor performance, there’s no money to be made with it.
