In 1955, the Atomic Energy Commission started getting complaints from Nevada citizens about nuclear testing. After all, who wants a nuclear test in their backyard? The government responded by publishing a booklet aimed at placating local civilians. The accompanying cartoons make a nuclear blast seem like any other day, with just a few fireworks added. See more at The Atlantic. Link -via Gorilla Mask
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In 1955, the Atomic Energy Commission started getting complaints from Nevada citizens about nuclear testing. After all, who wants a nuclear test in their backyard? The government responded by publishing a booklet aimed at placating local civilians. The accompanying cartoons make a nuclear blast seem like any other day, with just a few fireworks added. See more at The Atlantic. Link -via Gorilla Mask
A farmer in China noticed something really strange about his cat. She doesn't eat chicken. Instead, Niu Niu has taken 30 young chicks under her wing (so to speak), and even licks them clean.
The chicks have bonded with the cat, and follow her everywhere. Link -via The Daily What
"I came back home and found Niu Niu had got into the chicks' box and I thought she was going to eat them," he said.
"I shouted at her and she froze. But then I realised that the chicks were climbing all over her and she was just playing with them."
Lao, of Suibing County, Heilongjiang Province, said he now leaves Niu Niu to look after the baby chicks while he goes out to work.
The chicks have bonded with the cat, and follow her everywhere. Link -via The Daily What
(YouTube link)
This guy set out to build the biggest domino pyramid ever, with 13,482 dominoes. He spent five weeks, or 30 hours of work, and stacked 13,043 of the dominoes when the unthinkable happened. -via the Presurfer
Follow these five surefire steps and you'll be stuck to the corner of envelopes in no time!
Step #1: KICK THE BUCKET
This is the hard part. According to the U.S. Postal Service, no living person can appear on an official stamp. No exceptions! (Clearly, the Postal Service is in the Elvis-is-dead camp).
Step #2: BE PATIENT
Don't expect your stamps to arrive in time for your wake. The Postal Service has a rule that people can't be honored in stamp form until five years after their death. But they do make an exception for recently deceased U.S. presidents. The USPS is willing to honor a former commander-in-chief on the first anniversary of the birthday following his death.
Step #3: CELEBRATE YOUR BIRTHDAY!
Even after you've been dead and buried for five years, the USPS will only issue stamps on significant anniversaries. For most personalities, that means waiting until what would have been their 100th birthday before landing the honor. Of course, what constitutes a "significant" anniversary is up for grabs. In 1993, the USPS issued an Elvis Presley stamp on what would have been the King's 58th birthday. No one complained; more than 500 million Elvis Presley stamps were sold.
Step #4: DON'T BECOME A RABBI
Because of the whole separation-of-church-and-state thing, the USPS won't issue stamps that commemorate "individuals whose principle achievements are associated with religious undertakings." But the government bends this rule from time to time. When the Postal Service announced its slate of commemorative stamps for 2010, one of them featured Mother Teresa. Atheist groups blasted the stamp for its religious underpinnings, but the USPS responded that the stamp was intended to honor the nun's humanitarian work more than her religious beliefs. Despite the controversy, the Mother Teresa stamp was officially released on September 5, 2010 -when she would have been 100 years old.
Step #5: DON'T SUCK UP TO THE COMMITTEE
Since 1957, the Postmaster General has appointed and maintained the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee, which consists of 15 leaders from diverse fields. They meet four times a year to discuss stamp proposals, and the committee's roster often reads like a random assemblage of folks you'd never see at the same dinner party. Past members include Academy Award winner Karl Malden, author James Michener, and Notre Dame basketball coach Digger Phelps (who served not one, but two terms on the committee, from 1983 to 2006). Phelps wrote extensively about the behind-the-scenes machinations of the group in his 2007 memoir, Undertaker's Son: Life Lessons from a Coach. During his tenure, the committee received a deluge of 50,000 proposals a year and often felt pressure from members of Congress to approve certain stamps. Phelps wrote, "The pressure doesn't work; if anything it turns off the committee."
Current members of the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Board include Jean Picker Firstenberg, former head of the American Film Institute; Joan Mondale, wife of former Vice President Walter Mondale; and Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor who ended up having a "beer summit" at the White House in 2009. If you wind up having a drink with Gates, don't bring up the stamp thing.
International Diplomacy & the Postal Service
Believe it or not, the U.S. Postal Service has been issuing commemorative stamps since 1893. (The first series celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus' voyage to the New World!) But the real reasons the USPS issues these stamps isn't so much to celebrate patriotism; it's to make money. When people collect stamps instead of using them for postage, the federal government turns a healthy profit. In 2006, the USPS estimated that 120 million Elvis stamps were never mailed, delivering more than $30 million to the Postal System's coffers.
But not every commemorative stamp is a good idea. In 1994, the Postal Service planned to issue a stamp recognizing the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The government was trying to portray the historical event without offering a judgement on the bombing itself, but lots of people questioned its tastefulness. Japan's foreign minister protested, as did the mayor of Nagasaki, who called the stamp "heartless." The Japanese embassy in Washington took its case to the State Department in hopes of canceling the stamp before it was released. Eventually, protests grew so loud that the Clinton White House leaned on the USPS to ditch the stamp, and the Postal Service caved. But it held onto the theme. In 1995, the USPS replaced the mushroom cloud stamp with one depicting Harry Truman announcing the end of the war.
Be sure to visit mental_floss' website and blog for more fun stuff!
Step #1: KICK THE BUCKET
This is the hard part. According to the U.S. Postal Service, no living person can appear on an official stamp. No exceptions! (Clearly, the Postal Service is in the Elvis-is-dead camp).
Step #2: BE PATIENT
Don't expect your stamps to arrive in time for your wake. The Postal Service has a rule that people can't be honored in stamp form until five years after their death. But they do make an exception for recently deceased U.S. presidents. The USPS is willing to honor a former commander-in-chief on the first anniversary of the birthday following his death.
Step #3: CELEBRATE YOUR BIRTHDAY!
Even after you've been dead and buried for five years, the USPS will only issue stamps on significant anniversaries. For most personalities, that means waiting until what would have been their 100th birthday before landing the honor. Of course, what constitutes a "significant" anniversary is up for grabs. In 1993, the USPS issued an Elvis Presley stamp on what would have been the King's 58th birthday. No one complained; more than 500 million Elvis Presley stamps were sold.
Step #4: DON'T BECOME A RABBI
Because of the whole separation-of-church-and-state thing, the USPS won't issue stamps that commemorate "individuals whose principle achievements are associated with religious undertakings." But the government bends this rule from time to time. When the Postal Service announced its slate of commemorative stamps for 2010, one of them featured Mother Teresa. Atheist groups blasted the stamp for its religious underpinnings, but the USPS responded that the stamp was intended to honor the nun's humanitarian work more than her religious beliefs. Despite the controversy, the Mother Teresa stamp was officially released on September 5, 2010 -when she would have been 100 years old.
Step #5: DON'T SUCK UP TO THE COMMITTEE
Since 1957, the Postmaster General has appointed and maintained the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee, which consists of 15 leaders from diverse fields. They meet four times a year to discuss stamp proposals, and the committee's roster often reads like a random assemblage of folks you'd never see at the same dinner party. Past members include Academy Award winner Karl Malden, author James Michener, and Notre Dame basketball coach Digger Phelps (who served not one, but two terms on the committee, from 1983 to 2006). Phelps wrote extensively about the behind-the-scenes machinations of the group in his 2007 memoir, Undertaker's Son: Life Lessons from a Coach. During his tenure, the committee received a deluge of 50,000 proposals a year and often felt pressure from members of Congress to approve certain stamps. Phelps wrote, "The pressure doesn't work; if anything it turns off the committee."
Current members of the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Board include Jean Picker Firstenberg, former head of the American Film Institute; Joan Mondale, wife of former Vice President Walter Mondale; and Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor who ended up having a "beer summit" at the White House in 2009. If you wind up having a drink with Gates, don't bring up the stamp thing.
International Diplomacy & the Postal Service
Believe it or not, the U.S. Postal Service has been issuing commemorative stamps since 1893. (The first series celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus' voyage to the New World!) But the real reasons the USPS issues these stamps isn't so much to celebrate patriotism; it's to make money. When people collect stamps instead of using them for postage, the federal government turns a healthy profit. In 2006, the USPS estimated that 120 million Elvis stamps were never mailed, delivering more than $30 million to the Postal System's coffers.
But not every commemorative stamp is a good idea. In 1994, the Postal Service planned to issue a stamp recognizing the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The government was trying to portray the historical event without offering a judgement on the bombing itself, but lots of people questioned its tastefulness. Japan's foreign minister protested, as did the mayor of Nagasaki, who called the stamp "heartless." The Japanese embassy in Washington took its case to the State Department in hopes of canceling the stamp before it was released. Eventually, protests grew so loud that the Clinton White House leaned on the USPS to ditch the stamp, and the Postal Service caved. But it held onto the theme. In 1995, the USPS replaced the mushroom cloud stamp with one depicting Harry Truman announcing the end of the war.
_______________________
The article above, written by Ethan Trex, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the March-April 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!Be sure to visit mental_floss' website and blog for more fun stuff!
In the days before the internet (actually 1912-1963), Bostonians could get news headlines at a glance by dropping by the storefront office of The Boston Globe. Handwritten signs and blackboards had the top stories, breaking news, and even sports stats in big print as fast as they were available. And of course, if you wanted to read more, you could buy a paper. Shown here is the big map of Europe installed for the D-Day invasion in 1944. See more pictures of the hand-lettered "homepage" at The Boston Globe. Link -via Metafilter
May 25th is Towel Day {wiki} in tribute to Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He wrote that a towel is "the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have."
Movie, comic, and science fiction fans will surely find something to argue over in this list at The Mary Sue. Link -Thanks, Susana Polo!
On Towel Day, all of Adams’ fans are encouraged to carry a towel around with them, or to at least know where their towel is, following the great tradition of hitchhiking, traveling, managing, and adventuring laid out in his work. Naturally, this got us to thinking about all the hoopy (really together guy) froods (really amazingly together guys) that we know in fiction that really know where their towels are. You know, the characters who you could drop off anywhere and anywhere in the space time continuum, and come back in an hour and they’d already be lounging in perfect confidence and opulence, nocking back something highly alcoholic. Any one who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Movie, comic, and science fiction fans will surely find something to argue over in this list at The Mary Sue. Link -Thanks, Susana Polo!
(YouTube link)
Maru was born on May 24, 2007, which makes the Japanese cat four years old today. In honor of the occasion, here is a compilation video from the past year in which Maru hides, jumps, wears funny hats, gets in boxes, and generally does the things we love him for. Link -via The Daily What
(YouTube link)
Chewbacca and an Ewok do Guns 'N' Roses to get the crowd fired up for Star Wars Weekend 2011 at Walt Disney World. Continue on to see the full 24-minute dance-off show. -via Geeks Are Sexy
(YouTube link)
Storytellers drew inspiration from the people passing through Aotea Square in Auckland, New Zealand. The stories were projected on a large screen, where folks could see themselves woven into the stories. The stunt was a promotion for the BNZ Literary Awards. Link -Thanks, Jono Aidney!
(YouTube link)
An otter at Sea World in San Diego has fun with an energetic toddler. Which is what otters really are underneath that fur! -via Buzzfeed
It's once again time for our collaboration with the ever-amusing What Is It? Blog. Do you know what this thing is?
Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirts, Funny T-Shirts and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?
There's more objects to guess posted at the What Is It? Blog. Do your best, and good luck!
Update: Berhard was the first of many with the correct answer; this is a trowel bayonet. Fafa had the funniest answer: a combination pizza server and zombie defense knife! Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop.
Mental_floss continues to have fun with the latest US Census data in today's Lunchtime Quiz.
Of the 150 most populous cities in the United States, 11 have names that are only four or five letters long. How many can you name in five minutes?
Let's see... two. And then of course I felt stupid when the answers came up. Surely you will do better! Link
Scientific Illustration is a Tumbler blog with 66 pages of scientific drawings and paintings from many linked sources. Find what you're particularly interested in seeing by scrolling through the archives -keep scrolling and watch yet more pictures load. Shown is a 1904 illustration by German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Link -via Nag on the Lake
(Image credit: Flickr user Eric Gjerde)
The Retroist reprinted some letters from the 1983 book Letters to E.T. Most of the letters are from children to the alien character, but this one is to Steven Spielberg himself. Link -via @LettersOfNote
Old-fashioned sports trading cards came with a piece of gum (they actually were a bonus for buying the gum). The next generation of trading cards comes with a LCD screen and 20 minutes of video about the player! Oh, they are still made mostly of cardboard, but will hold 2GB of storage. How do you get them?
Read more at SlashGear. Link
The special video cards will be limited edition inserts in Panini’s Totally Certified Basketball card line. The packs will include normal cards as well. Apparently, you will never know if you are getting a video card or not. A pack of five cards is about $20.
Read more at SlashGear. Link
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