Ray Harryhausen didn't invent stop-motion animation, but he advanced the technique so much that his name has become forever intertwined with the art of stop-motion. You've seen his work in films ranging from Mighty Joe Young in 1949 to Jason and the Argonauts (1963) through Clash of the Titans in 1981. Harryhausen pioneered techniques for mixing stop-motion skeletons, dinosaurs, and monsters with live-action actors. It was not any easy thing to accomplish without computers. Harryhausen had to line up all his shots by hand and time them frame-by-frame to get what he wanted. The finished product was a mind-blowing and surreal experience for the audience. The Royal Ocean Film Society shows us how he did it in this video. -via Laughing Squid

We've all encountered dunking booths at the county fair, in which you pay money for the chance to drop a local celebrity into a tank of water. Getting dunked is a volunteer position, usually to raise funds for charity. But between the mid-16th and early 19th centuries, it was a sentence used to punish women for crimes such as prostitution, adultery, making bad beer, or "scolding," which could mean insults, gossip, or just plain talking too much. They spelled it "ducking" instead of dunking back then, and it was a public spectacle meant to humiliate the woman and serve as a warning to others. However, it could be deadly.

Communities across England, and also in Scotland and colonial America, had a ducking stool, a chair with a lever or pulley that could be raised and lowered into a river or pond. The "scold" was strapped to the chair and ducked into the water as many times as local authorities deemed proper according to the severity of her crime. The message was clear: women should be silent and remember their place. Ducking continued until 1809, but the crime of being a scold was only abolished in England in 1967! Read about the crime of scolding and the practice of ducking at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: New York Public Library)

Piyo has lots of frogs, but Ruri Green Frog is special. Ruri loves Piyo very much, to the point of wanting to eat her up. When Piyo tries to take a video of another frog, Ruri is so jealous that she/he videobombs the project in a most spectacular way. Ruri makes no bones about how she/he feels about this!

Do frogs really have personalities? We often ascribe emotions or intelligence to animals in a very human manner, which is anthropomorphizing. But how else can we interpret this video sequence? Let's just say it's really cute. -via Metafilter

Since Tom Scott brought up the subject of being murdered in Yellowstone National Park, we may as well learn about how it happens. On the occasion of Yellowstone's 150th anniversary, Cowboy State Daily published a map and list of maulings, scaldings, and murders that have occurred at the park. The deaths are mostly gleaned from the book Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park. Now, before you get the idea that Yellowstone is a hotbed of unnatural deaths, keep in mind that the greatest causes of deaths in the park are auto accidents and heart attacks, just like everywhere else. And among national parks, Yellowstone is only the fifth most deadly, despite having the longest history.

But Yellowstone has dangerous attractions, namely geothermal features like geysers and boiling hot springs that tourists fall into and sometimes jump into. Others want to get close to the bison or the bears, with deadly results. You might conceivably call these natural deaths as they happen in nature, but they are usually due to human foolishness. After all, nature is metal. The list of murders in the park include several killings within a family, one case of cannibalism, and ends with Gabby Petito. You can read about some of these deaths, and download the map, here.

Since Thor: Love and Thunder is in theaters, Screen Junkies has gone back in time to revisit the Marvel superhero's first film. The name of the movie is really The Incredible Hulk Returns, a made-for-TV film released in 1988. It's just as cheesy as you might imagine. While we might enjoy looking into the seeds of what would eventually become the Marvel Cinematic Universe with its constant superhero crossovers, all we can think of when watching this is "That's so 1980s." You get the idea that the plot would have fit into a one-hour episode of The Incredible Hulk, but that TV series had ended six years before. The Hulk would go on to star in two more made-for-TV movies capitalizing on the earlier series. It would take another 24 years for the Hulk and Thor to appear in a movie together again. This Honest Trailer might make you feel better about Thor: Love and Thunder, which hasn't lived up to expectations.

We may marvel at an ostrich taller than we are, or an eagle with talons bigger than a human hand. But they have nothing on prehistoric birds, some of which we mind-bogglingly large. The picture above is a recreation of a Paraphysornis, or terror bird, that weighed around 400 pounds. But there was also Dromornis stirtoni, an Australian thunder bird, the males of which averaged 1400 pounds! A female South Island giant moa could reach ten feet tall. And a fossil named Pelagornis sandersi found in South Carolina had a wingspan of 24 feet.

Why were prehistoric birds able to grow so large? And why did they die out? As far as extinction goes, that was usually due to predators, including humans. Read about these enormous birds of the distant past at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Armin Reindl)

The Tim Traveler is looking for the oldest surviving building on earth. Now, you notice that there is no building identified in the title of this post, because such a question will have a lot of qualifiers. First, you have to define what you mean by "building," and then you have to define what you mean by "surviving." There could be any number of old buildings to top the list, depending on how you define those terms. Which is good, because that means we get to learn about several very old structures in this video. Tim has qualifiers that are different from Wikipedia's list. He makes the argument for the Cairn of Barnenez in France, because you can still go inside it and have a roof over your head. That would make me a bit nervous, because I've had bad experiences with very old man-made roofs. -via Digg

The 1930s character Indiana Jones would say "It belongs in a museum!" and a 21st century audience would add "in the country you looted it from!" If you were disturbed by the story of the Nigerian Ife Head, you need to read about the New York Antiquities Theft Task Force. The task force is led by assistant district attorney Matthew Bogdanos, who began this work by tracking down antiquities looted from the National Museum of Iraq in 2003. Since then, the task force has recovered around 4,000 items, half of which have been returned to their place of origin. The rest are awaiting repatriation in a storage facility that is considered Manhattan’s best antiquities museum.

An interview with Bogdanos gives us insight into the world of looters, smugglers, dealers, collectors, donors, and museums that end up with precious stolen artifacts, and how cases are cracked. There is some comedy, as in the awkward process of serving warrants on the very rich and privileged people involved. But the best part is Bogdanos' philosophy around the work he does, which is about righting global wrongs and restoring the legacy of victim nations.  -via Metafilter

An awful lot of obviously guilty people get away with crimes because of technicalities. There's a glaring loophole of geography and law in a small part of Yellowstone National Park that causes it to be known as the Zone of Death. No, not because people die there, but because it might happen someday, and if it was murder, the perpetrator could conceivably get away with it. The park exists in three different states, which makes jurisdiction kind of complicated, and the way the laws are worded would make any trial very complex, if not impossible. So if you want to commit the perfect crime, well, just don't. Even if the long arm of the law can't get you, karma will. Tom Scott explains what's going on in the Zone of Death, which is only on paper. In real life, no one lives there, and people rarely go there. It's just fine for bears and bison, however -they don't even bother with criminal trials.

Perlora Ciudad de Vacaciones is collection of about 150 midcentury buildings on Spain's northern coast. The resort was built under the authority of fascist dictator Francisco Franco, to provide a two-week holiday getaway for the working class. It opened in 1954. Although austere by modern standards, the hotel and cabins had electricity and plumbing, making them a luxurious upgrade for many Spaniards. Vacation City survived long past Franco's regime, and was a beloved destination for families up until it closed in 2005.

People who have fond memories of Perlora Ciudad de Vacaciones still go there. Although the remaining buildings are locked, the area is open to the public by law, and in the summer you'll find plenty of folks sitting in the yards of their old vacation homes, enjoying picnics or using the tennis courts. The resort is owned by the regional government, and they'd like to reopen it if someone with a proper plan can rehabilitate it. The proposals include everything from art workshops to retirement housing, but no project has made it to approval yet. Read about Perlora Ciudad de Vacaciones, its past, pressent, and future, at Atlas Obscura.

This is a compilation of familiar viral cat videos with a new soundtrack. Be on the lookout for the one cat who can actually form words. For some reason, I was trying to identify the movie in which Schwarzenegger made this particular noise, but I gave up on that pretty quickly. As one internet sage put it: "This is simultaneously both the stupidest and the greatest thing I've ever seen." After this video goes viral, you'll want to be on the lookout for the Werner Herzog version. Or maybe William Shatner. And this, kids, is the kind of thing that made the internet so popular in the 1990s, before we even had social media. -via Metafilter

David Bennett was 57 years old, and suffering from heart failure, among several other health problems. He was not a candidate for a heart transplant because he had a history of not following doctor's orders. In January, he had been in a hospital bed for two months when he received an experimental procedure of last resort: a transplant heart from a pig, an operation that had been in the works, but had never been performed on a human. The heart came from a pig that had been genetically modified with human genes to be more compatible. The pig heart started pumping, and Bennett survived the surgery. But he died 60 days later.

Why did Bennett die? The surgery was deemed successful, but if “cardiac xenotransplantation” is to ever be useful, post-surgical complications must be identified and addressed. Doctors still haven't pinpointed the cause of death, but they have four possibilities that are described and explored at Smithsonian. ​

(Image credit: University of Maryland School of Medicine)

For the past three years, you can barely surf the internet for a day without seeing the "Woman Yelling at Cat" meme. It's a convenient and engaging two-image combination to amusingly illustrate any statement with a comeback. We've posted the story of Smudge the cat. Now we get a chance to hear the story of the woman, Taylor Armstrong, who tells us what led to the image of her yelling on the reality TV series The Real Housewives of Beverley Hills. Warning: it involves domestic abuse. Armstrong is out of that relationship, but how does she feel about the meme?



It's good to know that even though the original experience was traumatic, you can feel okay about using the meme that it spawned. Meanwhile, Smudge is doing fine, and still sitting at the table, and occasionally doing that face. He still no like vegetals. -via Digg

and I’m here, to remind you of the grass you left when you went away… 😂 https://t.co/3ISMFESryx

— Alanis Morissette (@Alanis) July 10, 2022

Lawn care companies are out in force this summer. There are so many of them that they've come up with memorable names, like "Lawn and Order" to stand out against the crowd. But one that just has a name on their equipment trailers captured the attention of just the right people. When Alanis Morrisette saw it, the puns just wrote themselves. Everyone had a take on Morrisette's biggest songs "You Oughta Know," "Ironic," and "One Hand in My Pocket") that could be used in the lawn care business.  

It's some free mulch when you've already paid

— underscore (@the_under_score) July 10, 2022

Weird Al jumped in to protect his territory. Maybe he was already in the process of writing a parody song.

Hey! Stay in your lane! https://t.co/9wPAuWYUNy

— Al Yankovic (@alyankovic) July 11, 2022

He's not the only celebrity to jump in.

Holy shit. Wonder Woman is teaming up with @ThatKevinSmith's God on a 90's remix song @alyankovic style, and I can't think of anything better right now.

— William Ware (@jitterypillow41) July 11, 2022

All Morrisette songs are fair game for lawn care puns here.

Omggg snort laughed

— ILuv2Dance 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@ILuv2Dance) July 12, 2022

Even her name!

This is the content I'm here for
Well done

— Colleen Buck (@cjupiterr) July 11, 2022

Oh, there's plenty more in this ever-growing Twitter thread. -via a comment at Jezebel

The decommissioned Sheep Mountain Fire Lookout in Bighorn National Forest, Wyoming, is not exactly a tower, but it doesn't have to be because it's already high up on the mountain. It was constructed of rock by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1950, so you can bet it will be there for hundreds of years to come. But what makes this lookout so special is that it is available to rent overnight for camping. Yeah, it's real camping, with no plumbing or electricity, but it has a set of bunkbeds, a "single vault toilet" (outhouse), and you don't have to pitch a tent. But the biggest draw of the lookout is the spectacular view. It's so far away from city lights that you'll see stars like you've never seen before. See more pictures of the lookout facility and the view at TYWKIWDBI.