(YouTube link)
AT&T produced this documentary about what happens when overconfident drivers think they can multitask -sending text messages while driving. It's not worth it. -via Metafilter
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
What happens in war when an enemy rescues endangered civilians? In 1942, a German U-boat sunk a ship carrying 400 Allied troops, dozens of civilians, and (unknown to the Germans) 1800 Italian POWs. The attack left a couple of thousand survivors floating in lifeboats or treading water in the ocean.
A U-boat cannot accommodate so many people. What happened to the survivors of the RMS Laconia is the subject of discussion even today. Read the whole story at Kuriositas. Link -via the Presurfer
The survivors faced a certain and protracted watery death.
Then, the U-Boat commander Werner Hartenstein (left), made an extraordinary decision that went beyond all protocol.
He ordered the U-boat to surface he ordered his submariners to save as many of the marooned survivors as possible.
This act of humanity would save the lives of many hundreds of people. Yet the tragedy of the Laconia was not over yet.
A U-boat cannot accommodate so many people. What happened to the survivors of the RMS Laconia is the subject of discussion even today. Read the whole story at Kuriositas. Link -via the Presurfer
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The only safe way to film polar bears is by remote control cameras, but curious bears are onto the trick! The BBC aired footage of the mayhem last night. Link -via reddit
The author of Catsparella sifted through a year of Maru's blog and excerpted some of the best photographs and videos of 2010. Each entry has a link to the original blog post. I particularly liked Maru's response to YouTube in gratitude for another trophy. But of course, nothing beats Maru's love of boxes! Link -via Buzzfeed
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Man in a Blizzard, also possibly at one time called Idiot with a Tripod, is Jamie Stuart's observations during the blizzard that hit New York City. It was filmed on Saturday, edited in almost no time, uploaded to YouTube Sunday, and earned a great review from Roger Ebert.
This film deserves to win the Academy Award for best live-action short subject.
(1) Because of its wonderful quality. (2) Because of its role as homage. It is directly inspired by Dziga Vertov's 1929 silent classic "Man With a Movie Camera." (3) Because it represents an almost unbelievable technical proficiency.
-via The Daily What
One of our New Year traditions is to kiss someone at midnight. No pressure there, right? A kiss is a great way to start out a new year on a high note, and there is a biological basis for the urge. A kiss works toward three things: sex, romantic love, and bonding.
Sheril Kirshenbaum, who wrote the book The Science of Kissing, tells us how great kisses kick start our chemicals and hormones, and how a kiss' effects on our brains and bodies promote relationships. Link -via The Intersection
Humans have evolved to use a number of signals - including taste, smell and possibly silent chemical messengers called pheromones - to help us figure out whether someone is a suitable partner and a good person to reproduce with. A kiss means getting close to someone - close enough to suss out important clues about chemistry and genetics. At this range, our noses can detect valuable information about another person's health and perhaps even his or her DNA. Biologist Claus Wedekind has found, for instance, that women are most attracted to the scents of men with a different set of genetic coding for immunity than their own. This is probably because when there is greater genetic diversity between parents in this area, their children will have more versatile immune systems.
Sheril Kirshenbaum, who wrote the book The Science of Kissing, tells us how great kisses kick start our chemicals and hormones, and how a kiss' effects on our brains and bodies promote relationships. Link -via The Intersection
If you're like most Americans, you probably picture one of two things when you hear the banjo -Kermit the Frog strumming away in the swamp or the inbred boy from Deliverance. How can one instrument conjure up images both so sweet and so repugnant? The answer lies in the history of the banjo, which stretches from Africa to Hollywood, with an extended stop in Appalachia.
Centuries ago, somewhere in West Africa, the banjo was born on the knee of griots -storytellers who improvised their lyrics as they performed. Almost like forerunners to today's hip-hop artists, griots interacted with their audiences using call-and-response patterns to liven up the crowd. Their instruments -strings and animal skins tacked across hollowed-out gourds- are considered the first banjos.
The earliest versions were easy to make and easily portable, so when Africans were forced aboard slave ships, they brought their banjos with them. Once in America, slaves had no trouble recreating the instruments wherever they went. The banjo spread across Appalachia, but it was quickly pigeonholed as a black instrument.
THE JIM CROW SHOW
Big changes were in store for the banjo, though. In the mid-19th century, the newest and most popular form of entertainment was the minstrel show. White men and women toured the nation dressed in blackface while singing and dancing in a manner that mocked black people. And because they were lampooning all aspects of African-American culture -particularly African dance and music- the banjo was at center stage.
Minstrel shows also meant change for the instrument itself. The early "minstrel banjo" was a fretless, four-string instrument with strings crafted from animal intestines. But metal strings soon replaced those, and then a minstrel named Joel Walker Sweeney (aka the Banjo King) popularized the fifth string, which became the defining characteristic of the modern instrument.
During the next 50 years or so, a strange thing happened to the banjo. Although minstrel shows poked fun at black people, they made the banjo immensely popular among white people in the process. In turn, African-Americans increasingly wanted to distance themselves from an instrument that had come to represent oppression and bigotry. In the early 1900s, the banjo only played a small part in new forms of African-American music, such as blues, gospel, and jazz. Meanwhile, it was becoming all the rage in white communities, especially in Appalachia.
HILLBILLY HILARITY
The 1930s saw the rise of the banjo in Appalachian country music, thanks to the Grand Ole Opry. A Saturday night variety show performed in Nashville and broadcast live on the radio, the Opry spread "hillbilly" culture over the airwaves. The banjo played a central role in this, accompanying the antics of comedians such as David "Stringbean" Akeman and Louis Marshall "Grandpa" Jones, both of whom became even more famous later on the TV hit Hee-Haw.
The banjo might have remained an instrument of redneck comedy forever if it hadn't been for one man -Earl Scruggs. Born in 1924 in rural North Carolina, Scruggs grew up listening to the Opry and became convinced that the instrument could do more than accompany stage acts. By inventing the jangly, three-finger technique of banjo-picking -the trademark of today's bluegrass music- Scruggs used his fast-paced twangy style to prove beyond a doubt that banjo pickers could be virtuoso musicians. Of course, the trend has lived on. Modern-day banjo masters like Bela Fleck, Tony Trischka, and Bill Keith all play with as much technical precision as concert violinists.
Ironically, Scruggs also recorded the soundtracks for Bonnie and Clyde (ever wonder why high-speed getaway music is always played on the banjo?) and TV's The Beverly Hillbillies. Both projects probably maligned the banjo's image as much as Scruggs earlier work had innovated it, though not everyone in the music industry agrees. In fact, Julliard-trained banjo legend Eric Weissberg thinks the soundtracks brought bluegrass into the lives of many people who would have otherwise never heard it.
Until the 1960s, bluegrass wasn't really played outside of Appalachia. And because it was considered regional music, record companies didn't distribute it nationally. But in 1963, Weissberg recorded an album with his friend Marshall Brickman called New Dimensions in Banjo & Bluegrass. The record didn't generate much attention at first, but five years later, the hills came alive with the sound of banjos when director John Borman wanted the song "Dueling Banjos" for his new movie Deliverance. Weissberg happily recorded a new version with musician Steve Mandell, and it turns out the song shouldn't have been called "Dueling Banjos" at all. It's actually a duet between a banjo and a guitar, but listeners didn't seem to care. The new cut was played as the background music in the movie's radio ad, and all of the sudden, all over the country, disc jockeys were answering phone calls from people who wanted to know where they cold get their hands on the song. In lieu of a soundtrack album, Warner Brothers added two Deliverance songs to the material from New Dimensions and released it in 1973 as Dueling Banjos. Weissberg, Brickman, and Mandell became rich overnight, and Deliverance's depiction of rural Appalachian life -with that foreboding, nine-note banjo melody -was burned forever into the American psyche.
SIX DEGREES OF MARSHALL BRICKMAN
By the time Marshall Brickman received his $160,000 royalty check for Dueling Banjos, he'd already left the musician life to write scripts for The Tonight Show and Candid Camera. He began working alongside up-and-coming filmmaker Woody Allen, and together they wrote he Academy Award winning screenplay for Annie Hall in 1977. In Hollywood, Brickman became the missing link in the "Dueling Banjos"-to-Kermit-the-Frog axis of American pop culture. With his buddy Jim Henson, he wrote the script to a TV special that was later fine-tuned into The Muppet Show. In Brickman's opinion, Kermit just wouldn't have been Kermit without the banjo. "I try to picture it quickly -Kermit with another instrument- and I can't," Brickman says. "Not only figuratively, but literally, that banjo is nailed to his hand."
Be sure to visit mental_floss' entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
Centuries ago, somewhere in West Africa, the banjo was born on the knee of griots -storytellers who improvised their lyrics as they performed. Almost like forerunners to today's hip-hop artists, griots interacted with their audiences using call-and-response patterns to liven up the crowd. Their instruments -strings and animal skins tacked across hollowed-out gourds- are considered the first banjos.
The earliest versions were easy to make and easily portable, so when Africans were forced aboard slave ships, they brought their banjos with them. Once in America, slaves had no trouble recreating the instruments wherever they went. The banjo spread across Appalachia, but it was quickly pigeonholed as a black instrument.
THE JIM CROW SHOW
Big changes were in store for the banjo, though. In the mid-19th century, the newest and most popular form of entertainment was the minstrel show. White men and women toured the nation dressed in blackface while singing and dancing in a manner that mocked black people. And because they were lampooning all aspects of African-American culture -particularly African dance and music- the banjo was at center stage.
Minstrel shows also meant change for the instrument itself. The early "minstrel banjo" was a fretless, four-string instrument with strings crafted from animal intestines. But metal strings soon replaced those, and then a minstrel named Joel Walker Sweeney (aka the Banjo King) popularized the fifth string, which became the defining characteristic of the modern instrument.
During the next 50 years or so, a strange thing happened to the banjo. Although minstrel shows poked fun at black people, they made the banjo immensely popular among white people in the process. In turn, African-Americans increasingly wanted to distance themselves from an instrument that had come to represent oppression and bigotry. In the early 1900s, the banjo only played a small part in new forms of African-American music, such as blues, gospel, and jazz. Meanwhile, it was becoming all the rage in white communities, especially in Appalachia.
HILLBILLY HILARITY
The 1930s saw the rise of the banjo in Appalachian country music, thanks to the Grand Ole Opry. A Saturday night variety show performed in Nashville and broadcast live on the radio, the Opry spread "hillbilly" culture over the airwaves. The banjo played a central role in this, accompanying the antics of comedians such as David "Stringbean" Akeman and Louis Marshall "Grandpa" Jones, both of whom became even more famous later on the TV hit Hee-Haw.
The banjo might have remained an instrument of redneck comedy forever if it hadn't been for one man -Earl Scruggs. Born in 1924 in rural North Carolina, Scruggs grew up listening to the Opry and became convinced that the instrument could do more than accompany stage acts. By inventing the jangly, three-finger technique of banjo-picking -the trademark of today's bluegrass music- Scruggs used his fast-paced twangy style to prove beyond a doubt that banjo pickers could be virtuoso musicians. Of course, the trend has lived on. Modern-day banjo masters like Bela Fleck, Tony Trischka, and Bill Keith all play with as much technical precision as concert violinists.
Ironically, Scruggs also recorded the soundtracks for Bonnie and Clyde (ever wonder why high-speed getaway music is always played on the banjo?) and TV's The Beverly Hillbillies. Both projects probably maligned the banjo's image as much as Scruggs earlier work had innovated it, though not everyone in the music industry agrees. In fact, Julliard-trained banjo legend Eric Weissberg thinks the soundtracks brought bluegrass into the lives of many people who would have otherwise never heard it.
Until the 1960s, bluegrass wasn't really played outside of Appalachia. And because it was considered regional music, record companies didn't distribute it nationally. But in 1963, Weissberg recorded an album with his friend Marshall Brickman called New Dimensions in Banjo & Bluegrass. The record didn't generate much attention at first, but five years later, the hills came alive with the sound of banjos when director John Borman wanted the song "Dueling Banjos" for his new movie Deliverance. Weissberg happily recorded a new version with musician Steve Mandell, and it turns out the song shouldn't have been called "Dueling Banjos" at all. It's actually a duet between a banjo and a guitar, but listeners didn't seem to care. The new cut was played as the background music in the movie's radio ad, and all of the sudden, all over the country, disc jockeys were answering phone calls from people who wanted to know where they cold get their hands on the song. In lieu of a soundtrack album, Warner Brothers added two Deliverance songs to the material from New Dimensions and released it in 1973 as Dueling Banjos. Weissberg, Brickman, and Mandell became rich overnight, and Deliverance's depiction of rural Appalachian life -with that foreboding, nine-note banjo melody -was burned forever into the American psyche.
SIX DEGREES OF MARSHALL BRICKMAN
By the time Marshall Brickman received his $160,000 royalty check for Dueling Banjos, he'd already left the musician life to write scripts for The Tonight Show and Candid Camera. He began working alongside up-and-coming filmmaker Woody Allen, and together they wrote he Academy Award winning screenplay for Annie Hall in 1977. In Hollywood, Brickman became the missing link in the "Dueling Banjos"-to-Kermit-the-Frog axis of American pop culture. With his buddy Jim Henson, he wrote the script to a TV special that was later fine-tuned into The Muppet Show. In Brickman's opinion, Kermit just wouldn't have been Kermit without the banjo. "I try to picture it quickly -Kermit with another instrument- and I can't," Brickman says. "Not only figuratively, but literally, that banjo is nailed to his hand."
__________________________
The above article was written by Robbie Whelan. It is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the November-December 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine.Be sure to visit mental_floss' entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
(YouTube link)
Two guys with a conflict turn into street art and behave like video game characters. This really neat animation was produced by CorridorDigital. -via Laughing Squid
Funeral homes strive to do their job with sympathy and dignity. However, a lot of older hearses are sold to the public and quite a few private owners like to show off their ride, which can mean getting an "appropriate" vanity plate. Shiny Plates has a collection of these morbid but imaginative hearse license plates. Link -via Bits and Pieces (Image credit: Flickr user Molly Holzschlag)
Spanish police have arrested an unnamed woman who faked her own kidnapping. She sent a photograph of herself with her hands and feet tied, along with a ransom demand of 20,000 euros.
There's no word on whether the perpetrator found her husband's response acceptable. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gkRh_QkF1ekXcL8g-l9JUKpzXX-A?docId=CNG.0d309dcf9ee2b6ffbe5ce91469eb53b2.281-via Arbroath
(Image created with Ransom Note Generator)
The ransom request was repeated in later text messages as well as warnings that the man not go to police, which he ignored.
Police launched a search and spotted her car, which they followed to a shopping mall in the town of Gandia on the Mediterranean coast.
"The woman, who was travelling alone and was in perfect health, was the supposed victim of the kidnapping," the police statement said.
At first she told police that she had been released that morning but later confessed to faking her abduction "to find out what her husband would be willing to do for her".
There's no word on whether the perpetrator found her husband's response acceptable. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gkRh_QkF1ekXcL8g-l9JUKpzXX-A?docId=CNG.0d309dcf9ee2b6ffbe5ce91469eb53b2.281-via Arbroath
(Image created with Ransom Note Generator)
Nhow Berlin (in Berlin, of course) calls itself "Europe's first music hotel." It has a state-of-the-art recording studio and amenities that cater to musicians. But the real attraction is the weird architecture! The inside is artfully designed as well. See more pictures at Jetsetta. Link
In Papua New Guinea, natives describe huge flying animals with long beaks, bat-like wings, and razor-sharp teeth and claws. Evidence of gigantic nesting sites have been found in the mountains. Remember, this is the area where previously-unknown species of animals are found almost constantly. Could these creatures be living pterosaurs?
Link
(Image credit: Wikipedia user DinoGuy2)
The Ropen or ‘demon flyer' is a monstrous animal that is said to have terrified the natives of Papua New Guinea for thousands of years. Another smaller animal, known as the Duah, is possibly related to the Ropen, a cryptid creature said to haunts some of the far-flung outlying islands.
The flying animals described are said to "glow" in the dark, as reported both by locals and researchers. It has been hypothesized that the bio-luminescent glow assists the animals' effort to hunt and catch food in the deep darkness of the tropical night. One of the researchers, David Woetzel, has said that he recorded images of the animals while studying them.
Link
(Image credit: Wikipedia user DinoGuy2)
DJ Earworm has released his annual mashup of the top 25 songs of the year. The songs used in this video are listed at the YouTube page. -via The Daily What
The story of the Romanov family seems tailor-made for Hollywood (and Hollywood has embraced it, many times) with fabulous wealth and power, war and revolution, personal heartaches, conflicts, romance, deception, and action -including chase scenes. Parts of their history would be considered too unbelievable if it were presented as fiction. For example, the Russian royal family's advisor Rasputin was a strange character in life and even more so in death.
But there must be more to the song, because Rasputin wasn't quite dead even after he was shot! Read what really happened to Rasputin, and to the Romanovs at Atlas Obscura. Link
Ra ra Rasputin/Lover of the Russian queen/They put some poison into his wine/Ra ra Rasputin/Russia's greatest love machine/He drank it all and said "I feel fine"
Ra ra Rasputin/Lover of the Russian Queen/They didn't quit, they wanted his head/Ra ra Rasputin/Russia's greatest love machine/And so they shot him till he was dead
But there must be more to the song, because Rasputin wasn't quite dead even after he was shot! Read what really happened to Rasputin, and to the Romanovs at Atlas Obscura. Link
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