Wouldn't it be nice to speak English in a manner that was legible, pleasant, and did not peg you as a resident of ...anywhere in particular? That is called the Transatlantic accent, which sounds halfway between British and American English.

It makes you sound like you have a good education but no one can tell quite where you are from. You hear it in old Hollywood films from the 1930s and 1940s. It is the accent of Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, William F Buckley and (at least in some films) God.

There is no town in the world where people grow up speaking English that way. Instead you get the accent in one of three ways:

1. Learn the accent on purpose (actors used to do that).
2. Grow up or live on both sides of the Atlantic (but that can lead to even stranger accents, like those of Loyd Grossman and Madonna).
3. Pick it up at a top boarding school in America before the 1960s.

Abagond has some tips to help you cultivate a Transatlantic accent. Link -via Cynical-C

The Darwin Awards for 2009 have been announced. These annual awards recognize "those who improve our gene pool... by removing themselves from it." All the awards are posthumous. The winners for 2009 are a pair of bank robbers in Belgium.

The city of Dinant is the backdrop for this rare Double Darwin Award. Two bankrobbers attempting to make a sizeable withdrawal from an ATM died when they overestimated the quantity of dynamite needed for the explosion. The blast demolished the building the bank was housed in. Nobody else was in the building at the time of the attack.

Among the runners-up is the first ever female Darwin award, given to a woman who drove her moped into flood waters, and then leapt back in after she was rescued to retrieve her bike! Link

Find hundreds of ads going up to a couple hundred years back with the Vintage Ad Browser. I spent a lot of time looking around, but kept coming back to this perfume ad from 1890. The picture has nothing to do with the product, but it doesn't matter, since everyone loves babies and dogs, right? Link -via the Presurfer

A star actor's final performance should be something memorable, but that doesn't happen often. In many cases, the actor probably didn't know it would be their final performance. For others, their career was already fading, or maybe old age limited their options. Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss asks: how many of these final performances can you match with the well-known actor who played the part? I scored only about as well as you'd expect with random guesses. Link

At first you think: it's "free" and "this machine accepts all credit cards", that's not right. And then you think "Oh..." This clever recycling idea was submitted to There, I Fixed It. Link -via reddit

42-year-old Roberto Carrillo didn't want to be in jail for New Years Eve. He tried to escape the cell in Valle Hermoso, Mexico by squeezing through a gap he saw where the roof met a wall of bars, but there wasn't enough room. He became stuck hanging upside-down and had to be rescued by laughing guards.

A source at the jail told The Sun: 'If he'd had a brain, it could have been embarrassing.'

Link -via Arbroath

Jeff Kisseloff interviewed grocer Harry Dubin about an article written about him in 1947, but then found something much more interesting about Dubin.

I picked up the album and opened it, and my eyes nearly jumped out of my head. Inside were some 30 color photographs taken in and around the city in the 1940s. I had never seen such vibrant photos of the city in those years. In fact, I had never seen any color photos of the city in those years, yet here they were. It was such an interesting collection. Each of the pictures depicted a man in uniform intently doing his job, whether it was a street sweeper, gas station attendant or hansom cab driver. When I looked at them twice, I realized something, all of them were Harry!

Needless to say, while our subsequent interview was wonderful, the album left me speechless in delight. These were the most evocative photographs of old New York I had ever seen. Harry explained that all of them were taken by his son Ronald, who was then a teenager, after Harry managed to convince each worker to change clothes with him in an alley and let Harry do his job for a few minutes so the picture could be taken.

You might want to check back with The Kisseloff Collection as more pictures are added. http://thekisseloffcollection.com/wordpress/KC/?tag=harry-dubin -via Metafilter

When Alistair Hodgson was 21, he was a British paratrooper stationed in Northern Ireland. A booby trap exploded and tore him apart. His horrific injuries healed, except for the leg that was blown off and the other leg which had to be amputated. That was 17 years ago. Now Hodgson is the British National Freestyle Skydiving ­Champion. Besides training in his sport and coaching other skydivers, Hodgson works to inspire other disabled vets returning from Afghanistan.

“It’s so hard. But you have to ­rehabilitate yourself, find a focus…something to hold on to. If I can inspire just one other person to lift themselves out of that same dark place I was in – train for the Paralympics in 2012 or something, then it’s worth it.

“There was a time I thought my life was over and I still have very dark times when it’s difficult to deal with. Sometimes people poke fun at me or I catch sight of myself in a mirror and think, ‘You’re in a hell of a mess’.

"But when I’m in the air it’s like it never happened. I can ­compete at a world level – alongside people who have all their limbs – and have found a way to fly.”

Hodgson will compete against able-bodied skydivers for the world championship in August. Link -via Fark

(YouTube link)

I had to find out who sells that pacifier. You can get one at Perpetual Kid. Video via Unique Daily.

All that most of us know about a sling is that David slew Goliath with one. Maybe our fathers made one for us when we were kids (mine did). But what else do you know about the sling as a weapon?

The sling was likely mankind's first, true projectile weapon. It generally consists of two cords and a pouch. These cords are held in one hand and a projectile is placed in the pouch. The length of the sling provides greater mechanical advantage than one's arms. Projectiles can be slung over 1500 feet (450m) at speeds exceeding 250 miles per hour (400 kph). The sling is unique in that the movement of the weapon is merely an extension of the user’s body. The power and accuracy of the weapon is not by technological means, but rather user skill. The connection between slinger and sling is an intimate one, a relationship rarely found in modern weaponry.

Slinging.org has the history of the sling, information on different kinds of slings, and advice on making and using a sling. Link -via Everlasting Blort

Phillip Niemeyer created an infographic of the big subjects of each year of the past decade for the New York Times. This is just a small part of the chart, which you can enlarge at the link. Keep in mind, this is on the opinion page. Link -via Digg

January 2, 2010 is a palindrome, at least in countries that write the date in the mm/dd/yyyy form. Personally, I've been writing the date without initial zeros, like 12-3-9, but that's just me. Who notices such things? Professor Aziz Inan of the University of Portland, who teaches electrical engineering but loves math puzzles.

A native of Istanbul, Inan creates math puzzles in his spare time. So it was a big day when he looked closely at his own name and saw a pattern. His first and last names are both vowel-consonant-vowel-same consonant -- and, if you write the names in all caps, switch the vowels and turn one set of consonants 90 degrees, both names are the same.

"I jumped in my chair," he said of the day two years ago when the connection hit him. "My parents had no idea."

The next palindromic date will be November 2, 2011. Link -via J-Walk Blog

The Big Picture has photographs from all over the world illustrating the different ways people celebrate the new year. Yes, there are plenty of fireworks, but also bonfires, skits, costumes, swimming, praying, gunfire, and other customs. This picture was taken in Bhopal, India. Link -via the Presurfer

(image credit: REUTERS/Raj Patidar)

(Live Leak link)

A building demolition in Liuzhou, China went horribly wrong on Wednesday. Experts planned for the building to be split in two, but they expected both halves to fall down. Instead, one half of the 22-story apartment building was left leaning at a dangerous angle. It has since been brought down by crane. Link -via Arbroath

Teenagers need more sleep than other age groups; nine hours is recommended. But many only get seven or even fewer hours of sleep each night. A recent study found that adolescents whose parents set an early bedtime for them had fewer bouts of depression and suicidal thoughts than those whose parents set a later bedtime. Most adolescents in the study complied with set bedtimes, getting to bed an average of five minutes later.

Results show that adolescents with parental set bedtimes of midnight or later were 24 percent more likely to suffer from depression (odds ratio = 1.24) and 20 percent more likely to have suicidal ideation (OR=1.20) than adolescents with parental set bedtimes of 10 p.m. or earlier. This association was appreciably attenuated by self-reported sleep duration and the perception of getting enough sleep. Adolescents who reported that they usually sleep for five or fewer hours per night were 71 percent more likely to suffer from depression (OR=1.71) and 48 percent more likely to think about committing suicide (OR=1.48) than those who reported getting eight hours of nightly sleep. Participants who reported that they "usually get enough sleep" were significantly less likely to suffer from depression (OR=0.35) and suicidal ideation (OR=0.71).

The researchers in this study say there are several ways sleep deprivation can lead to depression. Link -via reddit

(image credit: Flickr user Carlos 57)