It happens in just an instant. Dogs are very good at catching tasty snacks thrown in their direction, but if you blink, you'll miss seeing it. German photographer Christian Vieler is very good at catching those exact moments with a high-speed camera. The dogs are already in a portrait setting, so their derpy faces in action are both hilarious and adorable. Click to the right on the galleries above and below to see more dogs at their best.



Vieler loves dogs, and they love him, too. It's a lot of fun posing for a photographer who throws treats at your face! See more of Vieler's awesome dog photos (with a cat or two as well) at Instagram. -via Nag on the Lake

When both of your parents are news anchors @Robert7News pic.twitter.com/E1z2J0kyQb

— Jeannette Reyes (@Fox5DCJeannette) August 14, 2022

Have you ever wondered about that peculiar delivery and cadence people use on TV newscasts? They speak that way so that every word is understandable to the viewers and so that their natural accents don't get in the way. But do they speak like that all the time? Jeannette Reyes is a morning news anchor at Fox5 in Washington, DC. Her husband Robert Burton is a morning news anchor at WJLA ABC-7. They welcomed a new baby girl on June 30, and now give us a news update on what life is now like at their home. Jeannette does break character at one point, which only highlights how odd the whole idea is. -via reddit

Most of what we know about classic organized crime, as in the Mafia, comes from movies and TV. If you've watched The Sopranos and you've seen Goodfellas and The Godfather, you know about the traditions and stereotypes that surround la Cosa Nostra. Except Hollywood always manages to throw extra mustard on their stories to get butts in the seats, whether at a theater or at home. Real life doesn't follow a script, and stereotypes aren't universal in the real world. While some mob movies are based on real-life people, these are the cases that came to light and made national headlines- and many of them were from quite a long time ago.

For example, we tend to think that cooperating with law enforcement and informing on your colleagues is a death sentence. If that were so, how do we have so many former mobsters making bank with their tell-all books? Cracked takes a deep dive into four things you'll see in a gangster movie that aren't quite true, and why. Yes, there are video examples.

Bored Panda has a list gleaned from an AskReddit post in which the question was, "What is the most extreme example of helicopter parenting that you have ever witnessed?" You can imagine the stories that came out of the almost-10K comments. There are plenty of parents who want to do everything for their child and put them at risk of never learning to do things for themselves. But one account stuck out from the others because of the term "helicopter parent." It doesn't always mean what you think it means.  

My brother was injured pretty badly while training in Lebanon. (Israeli army). The base commander (equivalent to a captain in the us army) refused to send him to a hospital because he was partially to blame for the accident and asked the camp nurse to take care of him.

The nurse, after pumping my brother up on morphine, contacted my mom. Mom, who was a military police colonel at the time, proceeded to commandeer a chopper, fly up to the base, tear the commander a new a*****e and evac my brother out.

I mean, she literally took a helicopter. I don't think it gets more helicopter parent than that.

To be fair, she's a good mom and never really tried to control us too much. If s**t gets serious though, she'll happily murder anyone who threatens her family.

That was cool, wasn't it? We can call her a helicopter mom because of the mode of transportation, but a better term would be Mama Bear. You can see more of the best of those stories at Bored Panda.

(Image credit: Israel Defense Forces)

is it possible to get my dehumidifier to water my houseplants

I do not have a firm grasp on physics but have sketched what I have in my mind, with it strapped to a ceiling fan pic.twitter.com/VYxP4ghQr0

— Nathan W. Pyle (@nathanwpyle) August 26, 2021

Nathan W. Pyle (previously at Neatorama) is responsible for bringing us the aliens in his Strange Planet series. But his comics are about anything and everything. Recently, no doubt while emptying his humidifier, he thought about how this water might somehow be used for something, like watering the houseplants. How could this be accomplished? Using the ceiling fan sounds like a genius idea! But then he started troubleshooting.

several have asked about the dehumidifier power cord - I can solve this with a power strip attached to a model train whose speed perfectly matches the ceiling fan pic.twitter.com/DApdmi89e2

— Nathan W. Pyle (@nathanwpyle) August 26, 2021

Every time he solved a problem, that only brought up another problem.

model trains still occasionally get stuck and need to be jostled, so I have added a caboose upon which my phone can be docked under a cute umbrella and it will vibrate the train every time someone responds to this thread saying my plan is needlessly elaborate (which is frequent) pic.twitter.com/v1QWlbboIO

— Nathan W. Pyle (@nathanwpyle) August 26, 2021

So maybe this is not such a practical idea after all.

Fanny McFanFace, which is doubly funny for British people

— Benjamin Tomjack (@BenDanTomJack) August 26, 2021

 
But it was all worth it for the laughs. It won't be long before someone tries this in the real world. Look for a video coming soon. Or maybe not. See more of Pyle's comics at Instagram.

Britain’s worst inland waterway disaster was the sinking of the SS Princess Alice in the river Thames. This happened in 1878, when the ship collided with the larger Bywell Castle. The Princess Alice was broken in two, and sank quickly. More than 600 people drowned. The crew of the Bywell Castle rushed to save as many people from the river as possible, and local boatmen from both shores joined in the effort. They managed to pull 130 survivors from the water. Curiously, dozens of the survivors became ill afterward, and 16 more people died within two weeks of the wreck.

The collision happened near two of London's sewage pumping stations, only an hour after they had pumped 75 million gallons of sewage into the river. The water was also polluted by factories up and down the river. The accounts of survivors of the Princess Alice described the horrible condition of the water from which they were pulled. Descriptions of those who drowned were pretty grim, too. The wreck itself led to inquiries and lawsuits in which it was determined that both ships were at fault. It also led to discussions in Parliament over sewage treatment practices and changes in the way London's wastewater was handled. Read the story of the SS Princess Alice at Amusing Planet. 

Update: Read all the comments and replies under this post to learn more about the history of sewage than you ever knew you could learn. Thanks, WTM! 

Snake lover and mad engineer Allen Pan has a ridiculous idea: a mechanical way to give snakes legs. He has to figure out how snakes should walk if they were to do so, how to build a prosthetic, and most importantly, to find a snake that will try it. Or more to the point, find a snake owner who will let Pan anywhere near their snakes. But he manages to do all that, and ended up taking a snake for a walk on a leash. It's a silly idea, but somehow he makes it work. The sight of a snake with prosthetic lizard legs is amazing. This video contain NSFW language, and a one-minute skippable ad at about 2:40. -via reddit

Of course, the comments are all about the misuse of the word "there" in the video title, which just proves that an error can be really useful in promoting one's work.

In 1950, Adele Larson Stoneberg found a lovely wedding dress at Marshall Fields in Chicago and got married in it. Her granddaughter Serena Stoneberg wore the same dress when she got married on August 5th. In between, six other women in the family wore the same dress at their own weddings! In the third picture of the gallery above, you see Serena Stoneberg photographed with the six surviving women who also wore the dress: her great aunts, aunts, and cousin. Seven of the eight weddings took place in the Chicago area, and four at the same church.

The family considers it a "lucky dress," but didn't set out to make it a tradition. As the dress was re-used by Adele's sisters, it just sort of happened. But now it is definitely a tradition. The dress has been altered by each bride, but is still recognizable from pictures taken 72 years ago. How lucky is the dress? None of the brides who wore it have gotten a divorce. Read the full story at the Chicago Tribune.

You can study the causes of World War I for years, because there are a lot of them. The effect of quinine is not that direct; it's more like a butterfly effect. However, quinine enabled the Scramble for Africa,  when European nations competed to colonize the continent. I hope that didn't give too much away, as it's a really interesting story, told in the first half of this video. The second half is chemistry, because there have been some new discoveries about how quinine works to fight malaria. Then the story picks back up at the ten-minute mark. I have to admit I learned a few things today, mostly from this video. -via Geeks Are Sexy

In World War II, the Indian battalion known as the Fifth Gorkha Rifles fought for the British in Burma. One of the brave riflemen who went missing in Burma was named Chinta Bahadur. The battalion searched for him for days, and never found a trace of him. But a sheep found the Gorkha Rifles and followed them. The soldiers got used to the sheep and adopted him, naming him Chinta Bahadur, as if he were an incarnation of their lost colleague. They even made him a member of the battalion!

And the sheep Chinta Bahadur (Chintey for short) serves with the Fifth Gorkha Rifles to this day. Chintey wears a "uniform" of horns painted in the unit's colors, and his attendance is marked at all activities, although he is not judged by his performance. He gets promotions, too, and often outranks the soldiers that accompany him. A sheep will live around eight to ten years, and when Chinta Bahadur dies, he will be replaced by a lamb with the same name, but he must work his way up the ranks again. All the members of the unit have the utmost respect for Chintey, a living memorial to a fallen soldier. Read about Chinta Bahadur at Indian Express. -via Strange Company

How to make a great mashup: write down as many pop culture names as you can think of, separate them into piles labeled action, horror, comedy, science fiction, etc. Pull one each from two different piles. The more disparate they are from each other, the more intriguing the combination will be. Bonus points if the source materials are from vastly different decades. And so we have the Three Stooges and The Incredible Hulk! As Dr. David Banner testifies as a witness in court, Moe, Larry, and Curly's usual shenanigans anger him enough to cause his transformation into the enraged Hulk. Talk about disorder in the court! This mashup from Tvcrazyman in the spirit of Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein will brighten your day. -via Boing Boing

The earliest written documentation on "portable soup" goes back to the late 1500s. It's described as somewhat akin to a bouillon cube, with more gelatin. In a 12-hour process, meat and bones were boiled, the solids picked out, and the liquid was boiled further to reduce it to the smallest size possible and the texture of a dried gummi. The result is mostly protein and flavor, perfect for travelers. Ships that explored new continents took portable soup with them. It could be reconstituted with boiling water as a soup base, or added to oats or other available grains. It could also be chewed by itself. Lewis and Clark took 193 pounds of portable soup with them on their exploration of the American West, and instructions for making it appeared in cookbooks up until the 19th century. Other methods of preserving food eventually made portable soup unnecessary, but Britain’s National Maritime Museum has a cake of portable soup from the 1700s. It doesn't look much different than it would have back then, but no one has tried eating it. Read about portable soup at Atlas Obscura.

Naver Labs has developed a robot named Ambidex that is learning to assemble IKEA furniture. In a video at Mashable, you can see how Ambidex is connected by a haptic device to a human so it can learn to use tools like a human, and apply the proper amount of force and torque to put the pieces together. This is a pretty neat way to teach a robot, but I have questions.

First, this robot is being taught by an engineer who works in a robotics laboratory. He's probably assembled IKEA furniture before. I doubt he will be able to recreate the experience of real-world assemblers, who can't make heads or tails out of the illustrated instructions, can't find the included Allen wrench, and end up arguing about why they ever thought this was a good idea.

Second, what is the purpose of a robot putting furniture together? We have hi-tech furniture factories that do that already. The reason IKEA sells their furniture in flat packs for home assembly is to make getting it home easier and to reduce the labor cost. Does Naver Labs think that IKEA customers will arrange for a robot to come to their homes and put their furniture together?

My guess is that this is a proof of concept project, testing how well a robot learns from a human teacher with a haptic device. Teaching a robot to assemble furniture on its own doesn't have much of a real-world market. Oh yeah, Ambidex can play table tennis, too. That's more in line with what robotics engineers really want to do. 

Drive up, place your order, drive further and pay, then drive some more and get a bag of dinner. Fast food has come a long way in the past 70 years or so, since the time you'd walk into a McDonald's and they slipped however many hamburgers you wanted into a bag from their pile of ready-made burgers. As you can see from this charted data from the top ten fast food chains, Taco Bell is the overall fastest, with KFC not far behind. That makes sense when you think about it.

Have you ever walked into a Taco Bell and had to wait for them to notice you while they concentrate on drive-through orders? There's your chance to watch what they do. They have an extensive menu, but those items are made from the same ten ingredients, just combined in different ways. There are small ovens designed to quickly heat food and melt cheese for specific food items, and each dish has a simple process for quick assembly. KFC is fast because they only serve one kind of main dish, and they make plenty of it in huge batches. I'm sure there are other factors involved in each chain's speed, too.

The chart above is from rosetechnology at the subreddit Data is Beautiful, using 2020 data from Seelevel and 2021 data from QSR. -via Digg

The one thing that sets Star Wars fans apart from any other fandom is how much they hate Star Wars. It started when George Lucas made this perfect little space opera in 1977, and then a second good movie, and after that nothing else in the entire canon has ever been able to live up to expectations. As the Star Wars universe expanded, everyone found something to hang their frustrations on. Lucas even went back and changed the good movies, which made fans hate them, too. Now that there are a dozen or so feature films followed by a full schedule of TV shows on Disney+ (not to mention books, comics, and video games, and oh yeah a theme park), there's plenty for Star Wars fans to hate. It's as good a time as any for Comedy Cheat Codes to give us a fictional app to give those fans a way to vent. -via Geeks Are Sexy