No doubt, the best of TomSka's asdf movie #10 are the parts with the sheep. And the cow. So here's the entire song, sung by BlackGryph0n (Gabriel Brown) and TomSka (Thomas Ridgewell).
Meow meow, I'm a cow. There have already been covers, remixes, and other weird fun with this song, if you want to see them.
What can a camel do to make itself stand out against the rest of the herd? Topsy did it all. The Bactrian (two-humped) camel came to the United States in the 1850s with one of the shipments of camels that became U.S. Army’s Camel Corps, formed to haul supplies for road-building. The camels scared horses, and settlers, too.
Their human companions, though, were charmed by their personalities and hauling skills. “As individual units became familiar with the animals, they were really quite fond of them,” says Johnson. As the expedition moved along, Topsy and her fellow camels lugged supplies and tools, and the humans cleared rocks and brush out of a continuous ten-foot swath, laying out what was then known as the “military wagon road.” This track would eventually become the westernmost part of America’s most famous highway: Route 66. “You can attribute Route 66 to the camels in this way,” says Johnson.
The Army, impressed with their new recruits’ performance, retained hope that they would be an asset in military situations as well. The camels’ endurance and speed—especially compared to that of the horses and mules that had accompanied them on the road-building journey—convinced the army that they’d found “a new superior weapon,” says Johnson. But before the camels could prove their worth in this way, a more pressing conflict boiled over: the Civil War. The resources that the Army had dedicated to the camels were needed elsewhere, and the project was disbanded.
Topsy the world traveler and road-builder, along with her Syrian handler Hi Jolly, was then put to work in the mining industry, then in a circus, then in a zoo. She lived to be an estimated 81 years old when she died in 1934. Read the saga of Topsy the camel at Atlas Obscura.
As you might have suspected, the most famous father figure in the galaxy is full of Dad jokes. In this video from Nerdist, Darth Vader delivers all the one-liners he wish he could've done in the original movies.
And the bad puns just keep coming, one right after another. Stop groaning, or you'll miss one! -via Geeks Are Sexy
Einstein the African grey parrot at Zoo Knoxville is 30 years old today. (They call it his "hatch day.") In honor of the occasion, the zoo released a video of Einstein showing off his impressions, sound effects, and singing. He has quite a repertoire!
Einstein was purchased for the zoo from a breeder in California at the age of 5. The talented parrot is an ambassador for the zoo, has appeared on TV, and even gave a TED talk in 2006. -via Laughing Squid
[Edit 4/6/17 by Alex with information from the zoo - Thanks Amy!]
If you've been around the internet for a while, you surely remember QWOP, the video game in which you control a runner's muscles. The coordination required to make it work correctly was impossible, which is what made it so funny. It also gave us a new appreciation for our brains that do it without thinking.
There have been cosplay and simulations using real people. Well now, the Hacksmith takes that a step further and uses electricity to stimulate a real person's muscles, to see how well the game emulates the real-life scenario in the game. He is the guinea pig, controlled by another guy. If you want to skip the tech, the experiment begins at about three minutes into the video. Luckily, he still has control over his arms for balance, or else this would just be constant falling. If it weren't for the laughing, and the fact that it was his idea in the first place, I'd feel sorry for him. -via Digg
The seven movies in the Harry Potter franchise had to be very detailed, because the books were, and you can't disappoint the millions of children who learned to love reading from the Harry Potter books. Also, the producers were pretty sure that more than one movie would be made, so sets and props could be re-used. Might as well make them to last, and not skimp on the quality.
What came from those basic ideas was a sumptuous, detail-oriented set of films that we are always learning more about. You'll learn a lot from an illustrated list of 70 Intricate Details About the Harry Potter Movies at TVOM.
We send our kids to school because we don't have time to teach them all the things they need to know: how to read, write, and all that basic science and history stuff we learned. But you may be surprised to learn the economics behind the texts they are using, in both high school and college.
This Honest Ad from Cracked has the short version of how the textbook business became so profitable and uncompetitive.
Vanilla beans are a lot harder to grow than you'd think. Did you know that the vanilla vine only blooms one day a year? If a vanilla farmer isn't there on the spot to pollinate them by hand (a tricky process), he won't see any vanilla beans. And even if he does, there's a lot of processing to go through before the flavoring is usable. But vanilla is one of the most popular spices in the world, found in at least 18,000 different products. You might be surprised to learn that the majority of the vanilla we consume today doesn't even come from vanilla beans.
In the late 19th century, scientists figured out how to derive vanillin—the dominant compound that gives vanilla its signature aroma—from less expensive sources. These included eugenol (a chemical compound found in clove oil) and lignin, which is found in plants, wood pulp and even cow feces. Today, about 85 percent of vanillin comes from guaiacol that’s synthesized from petrochemicals. This isn’t something many of us realize, because labeling can be confusing.
In short, vanilla is the plant. Vanillin is one of up to 250 chemical compounds that make up the flavor we know as vanilla. The Food and Drug Administration broadly defines “natural flavors” as those derived from “a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material … whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional.” Artificial flavoring, on the other hand, is defined as being derived from substances outside of those parameters—even if the chemical composition of the two products are similar.
So a product containing "natural" vanilla might come from something other than vanilla beans. However, producing vanilla beans is still a lucrative business. Read about the history and the process of producing vanilla at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: tirados joselito)
Almost twenty years after it ceased production, Seinfeld is still on a lot of fans "must see" TV list in syndication and home video. For nine years, Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer were NBC's John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Which was a pretty, pretty big deal for a show about nothing.
If Seinfeld is one of your best TV memories, you probably know a lot of trivia behind it, but you'll still find something new in this list of illustrated Seinfeld trivia at TVOM. If you've never seen the show, it might just to pique your interest.
No, this isn't about genocide or other war crimes, although history's worst dictators did plenty of that. Instead, Cracked lets us in on the weird peccadilloes indulged in by guys who could get away with them. There's Stalin putting humorous captions on nude pictures, Muammar Gaddafi's crush on Condoleeza Rice, Castro's ice cream obsession, and former Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu, who took extreme measures because he knew how hated he was. Normally, paranoid autocrats have their food tasted in case of poison, but Ceausescu went a step further.
Concerned that he might be poisoned by osmosis via substances put into the fabric of his clothes, Ceausescu began wearing a different suit every day and burning his clothes and shoes after a single wearing. Prior to being worn, each article of clothing was stored in a clear plastic bag and "sealed with high frequency electrical equipment." Once removed, clothing was stamped with colored ink and sent to the incinerator, leaving Ceausescu in a perpetual state of breaking in new shoes. His staff kept a 365-day supply of suits and shoes on hand, each article hermetically sealed and stored inside a climate-controlled warehouse.
Read these stories and others, in the NSFW language you'd expect from Cracked.
Here's a video in which we learn the utility of finding new uses for existing products, particularly if the original use didn't work out. And honestly, some of these accidental discoveries came from pure research, which is more useful than it gets credit for.
Yes, we've posted about a few of these before, but you still will encounter something you didn't know. -via Geeks Are Sexy
We've read about excavations in Ireland and other places where precautions were taken to ensure the corpse didn't reanimate as a vampire or zombie. It turns out that England may have been afraid of the same thing. An archaeological dig at the abandoned medieval village of Wharram Percy in North Yorkshire had led a group of researchers to pose that theory.
In the 1960s, when archaeologists worked to excavate the village, they found a strange group of human bones. These bones were buried outside the churchyard, near the end of one row of buildings. There were 137 bones in the excavated pit, belonging to at least 10 people, ranging in age from 2 or 3 to 50.
For many years, no one knew exactly what to make of these bones, but now a team of archaeologists from Historic England and the University of Southampton have published a new theory about them: these bodies were burned and mutilated after death to keep them from becoming reanimated corpses.
What led them to this idea? Read about the research at Atlas Obscura.
Come to think of it, we've also posted a lot of stories about people being buried alive. No wonder people thought residents of graveyards might come back. It reminds one of an old joke.
(Image credit: Paul Allison)
You can credit McMansion Hell for making us more aware of the architecture around us. The website caused Grant Snider to recognize a house that inspired this comic he posted at Incidental Comics. Snider says there's a house in his neighborhood that looks just like the one in the final panel. Minus his artistic interpretation, I assume. That is, I hope.
In Michigan, 500 sugar maple trees are harvested for a special project. Ten miles of boards are cuts from the trees, dried, and made into floor panels that fit together. They are assembled, sanded, stained, painted, measured, finished, and disassembled. Almost 40 tons of flooring travel 2,300 miles to be installed at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Arizona for the NCAA basketball tournament Final Four games. ESPN has a photo essay that follows the preparation of the floor from trees to tipoff (with some video, too). It does not explain what happens to the floor after tonight's championship game.
(Image credit: Ross Dettman)
Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Columbia House could do no wrong—as a way to get music, the mail-order service was cheap and easy at first. Then, the bills came.
A while back, a coworker and good friend of mine revealed to me a fact that made me feel very old. We were talking about Spotify—and his desire not to pay $10 per month for the service—and I referenced Columbia House. He did not know what I was talking about. I was taken aback by this news—I thought everyone knew what Columbia House was! The mail-order CD service (along with its competitor BMG) had a bright moment in the early ’90s, only to see its business model fall apart thanks to iTunes, and later, Spotify. Today in Tedium, we’re going to explain what it was, its effect on the music industry, and the shady business practice that made a penny stretch into a dozen CDs.
AOL may have had the most prevalent mail-and-magazine-based marketing campaign of the ’90s, but a close second goes to both Columbia House, which was owned by Sony, and BMG, which was owned by RCA.
It was a common sight in magazines of all shapes and sizes to see ads like the one above, which promoted extremely cheap collections of music in exchange for signing up for a membership. It even singlehandedly helped some CDs become hits—Hootie and the Blowfish, for example, is said to have sold 3 million copies of Cracked Rear View through the service.
