Fox 9 News reports that last week, a car crashed through a guardrail on I-94 in St. Paul, Minnesota and caught on fire. The driver was conscious, but also injured and trapped inside. Several motorists stopped and rushed in to save him.
As this dramatic video shows, they bravely struggled with the doors, which could not open because of the guardrail. Eventually, a highway worker used a tool to smash the window. The heroic rescuers then pulled the victim out of the burning car just before the flames reached the front of the cabin.
The driver escaped serious injuries but was taken to a hospital for evaluation.
If you've been holding your breath, anxiously awaiting the results of the world seagull screeching championships, you can now relax and collect your winnings with the bookie. The Guardian reports that the winner of the under-16 category is a 9-year old British boy named Cooper Wallace.
As I noted last year, thoughtful people admire this most noble beast of the sea. Admirers of the majestic seagull gathered in De Panne, Belgium for the fourth year to imitate the seagull's melodious screech. In this video, you can watch some of the top performances.
Notice that, in this video, the performances take place under a banana. Why? I'm fully capable of jumping to preposterous conclusions based on no evidence whatsoever. Specifically, Belgium is home the the world's largest collection of bananas and Belgium is, of course, a grotesque obscenity. Hanging a banana from the ceiling is a traditional Belgian way of summoning a blessing from the gods.
This is what happens to a guy who was probably an adolescent when he saw the movie Back to the Future and really, really wanted a DeLorean but all he could get hold of was a Tesla. So Supercar Blondie had his favorite mechanic shop convert the Tesla into his image of a badass time machine, complete with DeLorean branding and even a vanity plate. It may not be jet-powered, but it's got flamethrowers coming out of the rear! It's also got a "flux capacitor," the "garbage to energy" converter from Back to the Future 2, all the dashboard controls from the movies, and even a hoverboard stashed inside. They went to a lot of trouble to make the electric car sound like a gas-powered machine, because the noise is important.
The Tesla part is in the first eight minutes. Keep watching to see a conversion car from Resident Evil. It has a gun rack, a rocket launcher, an armor cage, and more apocalyptic details. -via Geeks Are Sexy
While the Brothers Grimm were real people, Mother Goose is a catch-all name for the author of nursery rhymes that have been handed down, generation by generation, for hundreds of years. Charles Perrault used the term for a collection of stories published in 1695 that included both fairy tales and nursery rhymes, although at least one individual poem had been attributed to Mother Goose before then. Tracking down the inspiration for a fictional author of folk poems so far back is difficult, but extrapolating from both history and rumors of history, Mental Floss has come up with two good candidates. They were both queens, both named Bertha, and both were notorious for having large or webbed feet! There is no evidence that either actually wrote the nursery rhymes that we know and love, but they may have inspired the name and mental image of the old woman who always had a rhyme ready for every occasion.
Tippy is the digital mascot of modern tipping culture. He's here to shake you down for extra cash with his weapons of surprise and guilt. Yes, you will be asked to tip for the most absurd reasons by businesses that have no justification to ask for a tip, such as utility companies and library reference desks.
Kurtis Scott created this cartoon showing Tippy interacting with a meat-based lifeform in an effort to extract valuable resources. He's not really persuasive. But like a lot of hustlers, he profits from people being unwilling to stand up for themselves in the face of emotional bullying.
Honeybees are incredibly talented for insects. They manufacture honey, wax, and other bees. They pollinate our crops, they communicate by dancing, and they remember where the flowers are blooming. And they can deliver a pretty good sting when they need to. But bees can also be trained to do things that bees won't normally do by instinct, like solve puzzles or play ball games. The research on bees' dances have led scientists to focus on how they can judge and communicate distances. Experiments that test a bee's geolocation ability is how we found out that bees have some understanding of numbers, which is rather mind-blowing. I'm also very impressed by the scientists who managed to figure out what the bees are saying when they dance. This episode of Ze Frank's True Facts series is unusually wholesome, almost devoid of salacious jokes. Honeybees are probably smart enough to appreciate that. There's a one-minute skippable ad at the 5:15 mark.
It's the end of an era. Many years ago, no one knows exactly when, a new sidewalk on West Roscoe Street in Chicago was laid, and a rodent left an imprint of its body in the wet cement. In January, the rat-shaped hole went viral. Since then, people have been coming from all over to make a pilgrimage to the site of the Chicago rat hole. They leave coins in the hole, and have left flowers, photographs, signs, and other trinkets. A plaque was made. At least one wedding was staged at the site. Someone filled the hole with plaster, and others dug it out.
This left some of the neighbors in Roscoe Village annoyed with the crowds and the garbage they left behind. The Chicago Department of Transportation had a dilemma: replace that portion of the sidewalk to please the locals, or let tourists and fans have their fun? Some of the neighbors wanted the rat hole to stay. The city finally decided to replace the sidewalk section, which happened on Wednesday, but they took pains to preserve the concrete that contained the rat hole. The square slab was successfully excavated and will be saved. Will we ever see it again? The city has not yet decided on what to do with the rat hole slab, although they are listening to those who say it belongs in a museum. After all, it is now a piece of city history. Read more on the fate of the Chicago rat hole. -via Fark
When we disturb the tombs of ancient mummies, we fear a curse or worse, but we also forget that they were people of their time when they were alive. They had no concept of guns. Sure, you can't kill a mummy, because they are already dead, but it can sure hurt them, and baffle them besides. This mummy has to recalibrate and ponder the possible technological innovations that have occurred since he was buried. But he's still supernatural, otherwise he wouldn't have known the date of his death was 2,600 BC. Think about it. While we marvel at the skill with which they preserved human remains so far back, they had nothing on modern morticians, not to mention plastinationists. When our civilization has ended and another arises, will they fear a resurrection of the bodies we leave behind? Probably not- they can just use their laser weapons.
You might recognize the rotoscope technique of Joel Haver in this video. Redditor WiiFitBalanceBoard, who made this video under the name Cool Giant at YouTube, says he made this after watching Haver's animation tutorial. -via reddit
People love visiting national parks. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park in East Tennessee saw 13.29 million visitors in 2023! In fact, it's getting to the point that a park experience can be diminished by the very number of people in those parks. Like Yogi Berra once said, "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded." However, there are some US National Parks that are quite un-crowded. The least visited is Gates of the Arctic in Alaska, which is quite scenic but has no roads, trails, or campsites. And it can get pretty cold. However, the second least visited US National Park is a tropical paradise. So why do few people visit it?
The name of the park is the National Park of American Samoa. It is our only national park south of the equator, and it's not easy to get to. First, you have to get to Hawaii, then take a plane 2,600 more miles to the island of Tutuila, and flights only happen twice a week. Despite it being American territory, you'll need a passport to prove your citizenship. There are limited hotels, and no visitor center. But once you are at the park, you'll have the solitude of a desert island while you hike, swim, snorkel, or just enjoy the scenery. Read about one intrepid traveler's experience at the National Park of American Samoa at BBC Travel. -via Damn Interesting
You might or might not be familiar with the warning scale the National Weather Service uses for high temperatures, but it's pretty intuitive. Green is for no danger, yellow and orange are cautionary, and red means danger, just like other scales (blue is reserved for cold weather). But the scale has been adjusted, as 2023 was the hottest year on record. In fact, the ten hottest years since temperature recordings began to be documented have all been in the last ten years.
With temperatures getting hotter every year, the NWS and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have instituted a new category of warning, and it's purple, or officially magenta. This category warns us of "rare and/or long-duration extreme heat with little to no overnight relief." This can pose a danger to anyone who doesn't have air conditioning. The weather service will make heat risk maps available for the entire US this year, instead of just the Western US as has been the case. As we go into the summer months, you may want to make a habit of paying attention to heat risk maps, plan your outside activities accordingly, and check on your neighbors when the occasion arises.
Most ordinary distance runners prefer water, but Tom Gilbey is anything but ordinary. He's an expert on wines put his knowledge to the test during the recent London Marathon. He hid two wine glasses in his belt and, at each mile maker, he guessed the identity of each wine given to him by colleagues.
Of the 25 wines, Gilbey got 7 completely correct, 14 mostly correctly, and 4 wrong by the metrics of year, origin, and type. The 52-year old tells BBC News that he didn't do any serious training for this event and hadn't run a marathon since 1996.
By committing to this act of extreme athleticism, he raised over £10,000 for a hospice. You can watch his compilation video of each stop here.
Tom Curtis admired the drawings his six-year-old son Dom drew, and rendered them as something akin to a photograph, by adding color, contours, and backgrounds. It was so much fun he began posting these art pieces at his site Things I Have Drawn, and soon Dom's little brother Al joined in. Eventually, other people started submitting their own children's drawings to be rendered. While Dom and Al are a little old for this sort of thing now, Tom is still mining their earlier art for the site, and turning other people's submissions into colorful renders.
Click on any of the pictures at the main website to bring up an entire category of pictures, or go to Instagram to see the latest artworks submitted by children from all over. Some are presented as humorous videos. You can buy many of these drawings as posters and other gifts. -via Nag on the Lake
There are those who believe that the great architectural marvels of the past were not designed in their time, but are the remnants of a lost civilization called the Tartarian Empire. This theory is akin to that of ancient aliens, since no one in, say, ancient Egypt was smart enough to build the pyramids (fact check: they were). All the great technology that popped up in different parts of the earth were influenced by this empire, which was somewhere in Central Asia. But it was destroyed by the powers that came after it, and erased from history so that others could take the credit. In some versions of the conspiracy theory, Marco Polo was in on the suppression of the knowledge of Tartaria, and in others, Napoleon and the Russian Tsar made sure that Tartaria never made it into our history books.
The secret of the fictional Tartarian Empire is that they had harnessed the production of unlimited free energy. How they did this is lost to civilization, or was a secret kept so well no other nation knew about it, like Wakanda. While the theory arose in Russia in the 1970s, those who believe point to the 1915 World's Fair in San Francisco as proof of the existence of Tartaria. Read about this really weird conspiracy theory at Messy Nessy Chic.
B Unique Crew is an Indian dance crew with three dancers and one genuine contortionist. They achieved notoriety with this horror dance on the Indian competition TV show Hunarbaaz: Desh ki shaan (Pride of the Country) a few years ago. They are using modified traditional dance moves to illustrate a classic story that was retold in the horror comedy movie Bhool Bhulaiyaa, just in case you want to check out the plot. The dance is replete with scary moves from the one guy who can turn his head completely backwards, so be warned.
The judges were properly horrified, but the act didn't win. Since then, B Unique Crew has appeared on various version of the Got Talent franchise in different countries. See more of their dance routines at YouTube. If you dare. -via Digg
As I have said before, I love books, especially the physical copies of books. There are many factors that make a physical book different from a digital copy. There are the sensations: the smell of the pages, the texture of the paper, the art on the cover of the book. All of these contribute to why I prefer physical books over ebooks. But the publishing industry might not be long for this world.
Recently, the merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster was denied by the federal courts, otherwise the Big Five publishing houses would have become the Big Four. And there are several reasons why the publishing industry is struggling. But the major one is that nobody is buying books.
To be more specific, publishing houses aren't making much profit. Out of all the books that they publish each year, only a handful of books actually make a return on the investment. And only a select number of titles can be considered cash cows for these businesses. Not only that, but the growth of ebooks and digital distribution have made it even more difficult for traditional publishing houses to stay afloat.
It's a harsh reality to swallow, but for any aspiring writer, really the best option that they have is to build their own base of followers, and become independent. But that takes years of grueling hard work, and the payoff is uncertain. Since the whole publishing industry is dependent on whether titles will have demand in the market, it's oftentimes a complete gamble to even buy the rights to publishing a certain book.
And even titles that are expected to become bestsellers aren't always guaranteed that they're going to sell. It's a hit or miss, and according to many industry veterans, the hits often are just once every five years or so. Much of their profits come from franchise authors or celebrity books.
With the advent of Amazon, the whole ballgame has shifted. Publishing houses pay tons of money to Amazon to help improve their search results. But if Amazon were to start publishing books, or if authors with large fanbases decide to go independent, then that will be the end of publishing houses.
In fact, if a "Netflix" or "Spotify" for books is launched, then that will be the last nail in the coffin. It will truly be the death of the traditional publishing industry as we know it. - via Metafilter
