Nightcrawler is one of the X-Men, who has the ability to teleport himself just about anywhere. He's also a cat, who likes teleporting of the fun of it, in this video from Kaipotainment (previously at Neatorama).
The moral of the story is: lets hope cats never acquire the mutant powers of the X-Men. They'll just use them for their own selfish purposes. -Thanks, Kaipo!
Taylor Hirstein (HumorBagel) has perfected the art of the public fart video. Here, he lets passers-by know that something's coming before they know what it is.
Farts are always funny, even better when you don't have to smell them, and perfect when the perpetrator is not at all embarrassed. Almost everyone in this video finds it as funny as we do, even when he's cropdusting in a grocery store. -via reddit
The tongue wants what it wants, and rarely consults the brain first. There are workarounds, like training yourself to taste first, then salt. It's not so easy when you are cooking for a group. I had two children who would automatically salt everything before tasting it, one who decided to give up salt completely, and a husband who complained my cooking was too salty. I just gave up and started preparing everything without salt. I knew what was in the recipe so I began salting my portion before I ate it, and the youngest kids began thinking that was the normal way to do it. Even in restaurants. Strangely, they never picked up my husband's habit of peppering everything before tasting it. I think he did that to keep other people away from his food. This is the latest comic from The Awkward Yeti.
AsapSCIENCE has a whole lot of statistics to show you know how normal you are. That seems a little weird, because what they are really showing us is how average we are. You can be way different from average and still be perfectly "normal," but that's a sementics argument, and these guys are science nerds.
That said, I seem to be the most boringly average person there is, going by these parameters. -via Digg
Domino master Hevesh5 (Lily Hevesh) and friends Berlagawesome and ShanesDominoez
set up 15,524 dominos to fall in a single line. It took two days to set them up, and when they successfully fell, it became a new world record.
I am impressed with how they planned this pattern -or lack of pattern- and set it up. There's no way to do the setup in sequence, since there's not room to stand among the loops and whirls. And they all managed to fall without tripping up dominos out of sequence. Groovy. -via Tastefully Offensive
The following article is from the book Uncle John's True Crime: A Classic Collection of Crooks, Cops, and Capers.
From small-time crook to family man to the world’s most famous punk-rocking, beach-basking fugitive, this brash Brit captured the heart of a nation...and drew the ire of Scotland Yard.
ANARCHY IN THE U.K.
The greatest train robbery in British history was not orchestrated by Ronnie Biggs, nor did he have a big part in the heist. In fact, shortly before it took place—coincidentally on the night of Biggs’s 34th birthday in August 1963—he had all but given up a life of crime.
Born in 1929 to a poor family living in a poor section of South London, Ronald Arthur Biggs had been in trouble with the law since he was a teenager. Prone to stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down —pencils, pills, cars— he was caught as often as he was not, and spent much of his early adulthood behind bars. It was there that Biggs learned a trade, house-painting, and by his 30s, he had decided to go legit. Biggs married, had two sons, and tried to make an honest living as a painter. It turned out that he wasn’t a very good painter, either, and he was having trouble paying the bills. So he phoned a friend.
AN OFFER HE COULDN’T REFUSE
When Biggs called Bruce Reynolds, an old prison buddy, in 1963 to ask for a loan of £500 to “tide him over,” Reynolds offered Biggs something better—a job. And not just any job, but a role in a train robbery the likes of which had never been seen in the U.K. Biggs’s answer: No. He couldn’t risk losing his family to more prison time. But Reynolds pressed on, promising Biggs a payday of at least £40,000 for one night’s work. And Biggs wouldn’t even have to do the actual thieving. All he had to do was recruit a friend of his who could operate a train and then keep the actual train driver quiet while more experienced criminals did the hard stuff. Reluctantly, Biggs signed on. He told his wife he had an out-of-town painting job that would take a few weeks. Then he and Reynolds headed for the English countryside to meet up with the rest of the gang.
You are familiar with the rotating snake illusion. As your eyes move over the image, they appear to move. But if you hold your gaze still in one spot, the movement stops. Now try explaining that to your cat!
Ryan Kotzin printed the illusion out and gave it to his cat Peter. The cat saw the movement and was as mesmerized as any human. After not getting anywhere with the moving snakes, he ate them. -via reddit
Britain's rarest butterfly is the simply-named large blue, once coveted by collectors and almost driven to extinction. Now it is legally protected because they cannot be bred in captivity. Why not? That's the really weird part.
The remarkable life cycle of the large blue means it can only thrive in very particular habitats. Eggs are laid on the flower buds of wild thyme or marjoram. The larvae burrow into the flower heads and when they are about 4mm long drop to the ground and wait to be found by foraging red ants, attracting them with sweet secretions from a “honey” gland. The ants place them in their brood chamber and the larvae feed on ant grubs. They turn into butterflies, crawl above ground, and fly in midsummer.
An article at The Guardian about a case of butterfly poaching tells us how the large blue was re-introduced to Britain after it was declared extinct there in the '70s. -via TYWKIWDBI
(Image credit: PJC&Co)
Some human teeth have been found in Italy that show evidence of dentistry around 13,000 years ago, even earlier than the development of grain cereals, which are blamed for a lot of tooth decay. Earlier teeth had been found with evidence of drilling, but the two teeth from near Lucca in northern Italy appear to have deliberate fillings! Archaeologist Stephano Benazzi explains.
The holes contain traces of bitumen, with plant fibres and hairs embedded in it, which Benazzi thinks are evidence of prehistoric fillings.
While the purpose of the plants and hairs is unknown, it appears that they were added to the cavity at the same time as the drilling, so are not simply the remains of food eaten later.
The Paleolithic dentist would have drilled out the cavities and filled the holes with bitumen to reduce pain and to keep food out of the pulp chamber, just like in modern dentistry, says Benazzi.
It couldn't have been pleasant. Read more about these early fillings at New Scientist. -via Gizmodo
(Image credit: Stefano Benazzi)
Girl Scout Cookies were first sold in 1917, when one troop baked cookies to raise money. The idea caught on, and a standard cookie recipe was distributed to Girl Scout troops in 1922 for fundraisers. The idea really took off, but then World War II rationing began. Sugar and other staples were diverted for the war effort.
In the early spring of 1943, Girl Scout Cookie chairwoman A.A. Rabe had some devastating news for residents of St. Petersburg, Florida, who were looking forward to getting their boxes of Girl Scout Cookies: There weren’t going to be enough.
In a crisis the likes of which American pantries had never seen, Rabe solemnly informed supporters of the venerable female troop that a war shortage of key ingredients had led to a dramatic supply issue with thousands of boxes of cookies. If a customer had ordered two, they would be lucky to get one. If they ordered one, it was anyone’s guess as to what would happen.
“Whereas before we have always worried about how we are going to sell all of the cookies and candy that we have to sell, this year we wonder how we can supply Girl Scouts with as many boxes as they have taken orders for,” Mrs. Sidney B. Miner, Commissioner of the Scouts, explained.
Not only were customers deprived of their cookies, but the Girl Scouts then had a funding problem. So they got creative. Read the tale of the cookie shortage, and how it changed the way the Girl Scout cookie sale is done, at mental_floss.
It's an old trick, but watching this cute elderly couple do it is priceless. We would all be doing good to have a relationship with such a compatible sense of humor. He'll find some way to get her back, and they'll both laugh about that, too. -via Viral Viral Videos
Mormon founder Joseph Smith was killed in 1844, and in 1847, his followers settled in the far west wilderness that would eventually be Utah, under the leadership of Brigham Young. They just wanted to be left alone without government interference in their religion. But the United States government eventually showed up in Utah. The U.S. had seized the Utah territory in the Mexican-American War, and sent David Burr out to survey it.
When David H. Burr, the first Surveyor General of Utah Territory, showed up in Salt Lake City in July 1855, Brigham Young, then territorial governor, was almost certain he was a spy for the federal government. “Burr has been watching for evil ever since he has been here,” Brigham Young wrote to Utah’s representative in Congress.
Young, also the spiritual leader of Utah’s Mormon settlers, did not have a high opinion of federal officers in general. He called them “dog and skunks … sent here by the authority of Government to rule over men as far above them as they are above the low and vicious animals they so faithfully represent.” But Burr posed a particular threat. He had made his name mapping states further east, but his task in Utah was a very different kind of job. He and his men were meant to parcel out the land of the territory into plots that could be sold or settled, and to the Mormon communities who already lived on some of the land, that work was a threat. Once the federal government had measured the ground beneath their feet, there was no guarantee they’d be allowed to stay.
The Mormons made Burr's task impossible. They read his mail. They stole livestock, beat one of his surveyors severely, and incited the Native Americans against the surveyors. The tension between the Mormons and the survey team eventually led to the two-year Utah War. Read how it came about at Atlas Obscura.
I ain't afraid of no goats! TheRiverMonkey spotted this product at a Waitrose supermarket in Sussex, UK. He couldn't resist printing out a label for it, then he left the label in his car for several months before he remembered to take it into the store. Yes, he left it there after he took the picture. Now to figure out who drew eyes on that innocent pineapple.
This guy has an impulse to write an email to his 7th grade teacher, but what would he say? Would the teacher even remember him after all those years, considering how many kids he's taught? This video from Cracked contains NSFW language.
The moral of the story is, don't pass up an opportunity to make someone's day. Most teachers put their heart and soul into their profession in order to make a difference in a child's life. How would they ever know if they were successful if you don't tell them? -via Digg
Where do comic artists get their ideas? Some adapt real life incidents from their family or work life, some do intense research, some just go with the flow, and some have a system. In his latest comic, Chris Hallbeck of Maximumble steps out of his regular cartoon world to answer the most common question he hears. It must be a common question, because he gave almost the same answer when he gave Neatorama an interview a couple of years ago, except for the part about the worm. He wasn't yet ready to give credit to his collaborator back then.
