Joe Diffie had a song called "Third Rock from the Sun" about an unbelievable chain of events. A traffic accident in New Zealand is almost as strange. A motorist was traveling near the town of Kaponga Friday night when he hit a cow, killing it.
The animal was thrown over the top of the car, peeling back the bonnet and shattering the windscreen. The car smashed into a pole which caused a power surge to race along the wires into the farmer's house.
The same surge blew up the cowshed meter board and set it on fire. However, it melted a water line directly above which extinguished the blaze.
The driver was not seriously injured. Link -via Fark
A Tweet by @MikeLeffingwell reveals a sad family secret we were all just vaguely aware of. After all, if it were only a matter of softness or firmness, they could get one of those dual adjustable beds! The illustration at Twaggies is by artist Donovan Santiago. Link
This cute little double hamburger is not a Big Mac -or even a burger! It's a cheeseburger macaron, made with cookies and fondant. Ladybird x, who made it, calls them "Little Macs." See the process of making them at Diary of a Ladybird. Link -via The Daily What
CAPTCHArt is a popular website that published user-submitted art inspired by "captchas," those little tests in which you prove you're a real person before you leave a comment at a website. Oddee sifted through and found twenty of the funniest illustrations for your amusement. Link
Sticking your face into someone else's picture isn't exactly a new phenomenon. Photobombing is apparently as old as photography itself -or at least the Civil War. Link
Sam Klemke videotaped himself every year for 35 years, clips of which are presented backwards, so you can watch him watch him grow (or shrink, rather) into a 20-year-old wearing bell bottoms and platform shoes. The sound quality does fade in the earlier clips. I found this fascinating, since he is close to my age. -via reddit
Here's a little-known slice of Americana: the story of how freed slaves changed the face of the American West.
LAND OF OPPORTUNITY
In 1865 the American Civil War came to an end and four million black slaves were free. But to what future? The South lay in ruins, its plantation economy shattered. Most slaves had been field workers or tenant farmers, and working the land was the only job they knew. Although they were now free to buy land to farm, few had the money. Even worse, a new terror was rising across the South as hostile white, bitter in defeat, donned the white hoods of the Ku Klux Klan and began to terrorize the black community. But there was a way out ...and it lay to the west.
The Homestead Act of 1862 offered grants of 160 acres of public lands on the Great Plains to anyone who would farm the land for five years. Thousands of Southern blacks joined the flood of settlers heading west to what they called "Beulah Land" -the Promised Land- only their mission was slightly different. Yes, the promise of owning their own land was sweet. But sweeter still was the possibility of living independent lives untouched by fear and racism. So they banded together and developed all-black communities, with their own banks, their own newspapers, their own businesses, and their own schools and colleges.
OKLAHOMA, THE ALL-BLACK STATE?
Although blacks migrated to every state and territory in the West, the territory of Oklahoma became the preferred place to settle: A sizable number of African-Americans already lived there, having come as slaves with the Cherokee and other tribes during the Trail of Tears in 1838. After emancipation they bought land in Indian territory (often with the help of the Indians, who, under fierce pressure to give up their land to new settlers, preferred to sell it to black Americans). A number of black leaders, such as Edward P. McCabe and Hannibal C. Carter, led the push.
Sammi Jo Stohler had a problem: her zebra Zach kept jumping out of his field, so much that she had an eight-foot fence built. So she turned his habit into an asset by training Zach to show off his jumps! Stohler took Zach in after his former owner had trouble with him.
“As I was training horses, I kept hearing, ‘You can’t train zebras, they’re untrainable.’ I said, ‘Why?’ To say something is untrainable implies that it can’t learn, and we all know that if they couldn’t learn, they’d all be extinct. They have to be able to learn and adapt. Obviously, the burden lies on the trainer to be able to train them,” Stohler said.
She got her first zebra about 10 years ago. “He was a dream to work with, and I’ve been hooked ever since. They’re very intelligent. When you teach them something, you don’t have to do a lot of review,” she said. “You train them something, put them away for a few months, then bring them back out, and it’s exactly as if you didn’t stop. A lot of horses need review over and over again before they’re consistent.”
Stohler has two zebras, Zack and Charlie, on her farm in Willis, Texas, as well as a zorse (a zebra-horse cross) and a zonkey (a zebra-donkey cross). She rides Zack frequently, especially on trail rides, and drives Charlie. Her exotic animal rehabilitation skills have led her to work with birds of prey, antelope, deer, elk, camels and badgers.
Stohler intends for Zach to jump in demonstrations, but not in competition. Link -via Arbroath
It's not a romantic comedy until a beautiful woman takes a headlong plunge, which is not only a hint at comedy, but is often a way to set her up to meet someone who will turn out to be the man of her dreams. This goes so fast- is Romancing the Stone in there? That was the greatest fall of all. From Nerve. Link -via The High Definite
When Hollywood movies are renamed for overseas audiences, the results can be literal or inexplicable, and sometimes remarkably apt. For example, Knocked Up was released in China as One Night Big Belly, which makes perfect sense. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me became Austin Powers: The Spy Who Behaved Very Nicely Around Me in Malaysia, which sounds like a scheme to get past censors. But what do you make of Dragnet, which was shown in Germany as Floppy Coppers Don't Bite? Link -via Gorilla Mask
Warning: this is nothing like what you'd expect from the title. Performance artist Jillian Mayer is determined to scar her own descendants for life. -via The Daily What
Fate threw them together. He was 2%, she was whole. This video was commissioned by Friends of the Earth, a UK organization pushing for more recycling. Link -via Laughing Squid
