Going to a wedding today. Instead of holding flowers, the bridesmaids have hatchets. They are not pagan as far as I know, but some of you might like it regardless. pic.twitter.com/MXKbV9QPDX
Twitter user sugar&ice Crystals shares this story from a wedding. I like the idea of axes for bridesmaids.
It might also be an appropriate choice for the bride instead of a bouquet. Consider the tradition of the bride tossing the bouquet over her back to identify the next person to get married. Would axes be an improvement over flowers? Would the goal be to catch the axe or dodge it?
The best descriptions always come from the YouTube comments. One said that Trombone Nonsense was his favorite genre of music. Another said the trombone is perfect balance of beauty and comedy. But most lauded this video as a throwback to years ago when videos were clever and silly and original and didn't rely on effects.
Charis Dwire wrote this song, "Tug of War Duet", after her brother Nathan Dwire thought up the idea of trombones having a musical tug-of-war as if their slides has become entangled at the ends. It is performed here by Joseph Greene and Sam Robertson. You can download the sheet music here.
The Hugo Awards for great science fiction were named for Hugo Gernsback. He founded the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926 and went on to publish and edit several other magazines. Gernsback wrote extensively on technology, imagining the gadgets of the future, many that came to be in one way or another, and many that were possible, but that no one really wanted.
In the above image, Gernsback illustrated long distance medical care, in which the doctor can see and even feel a patient without making a house call. This was in 1925, before we even had television! Today we have telemedicine, in which a patient consults a doctor by internet, and also long-distance surgery in which a surgeon manipulates robotic instruments on a patient in another country. However, Gernsback also imagined devices to get more work out of employees, like a helmet that kept distractions away and an electric cage that would wake an office worker who started to doze off. You have to worry about the poor folks who worked on his magazines. Read about seven of Gernsback's weirdest visions of a technological future at Gizmodo.
Odin is a good boy. He's a Swiss shepherd who has learned to carry a camera as he zooms around and explores. This is an Insta360 camera, which gives the effect that Odin is a giant floating dog traipsing around the tiny globe wherever he is. And he's so happy doing it!
If you enjoyed that, there are plenty of videos of Odin and his 360 camera at TikTok. Odin has been to a lot of exotic places -and worn a lot of costumes- for his art. @odinswissshepherd -via Laughing Squid
The legendary Paris cafés where intellectuals met and tourists now flock haven't been there all that long in the grand scheme of things. There weren't many restaurants at all in Paris 150 years ago. But there were migrants from rural France who came to the city to make a living during the industrial revolution. When a railway was built, many of these migrants moved in from the Auvergne region. They settled in a small area of Paris together and were called Auvergnats. They got jobs doing the hard labor Parisians didn't want to do, but eventually settled on the coal and charcoal business. Auvergnats imported coal by rivers and canals and delivered it to city dwellers who increasingly lived in buildings that were heated.
To store the coal before it was sold to individuals, they had to have space, and they put up warehouses for that purpose. But the coal business was slow in summer, so the Auvergnats began to sell refreshments out of their warehouses during warm weather, which customers could enjoy at tables outside. In this roundabout way, the Paris café was invented. But there's a lot more to the story, which you can read at Messy Nessy Chic.
An airline for dogs? It sounds like an April Fool joke, and the video makes the whole idea seem like a parody, but Bark Air is real. It was launched by the folks who bring us Bark Toys in Bark Boxes. For those who need to travel with their beloved dog, this is the ultimate in customer service. The dogs are treated better than any economy class passenger on a major airline.
But there are caveats. Bark Air does not operate its own planes. They use planes and pilots from other carriers, and take off from private airports. So far, there are only two routes, New York to London, and New York to Los Angeles. The London route costs $8,000 one way for one person and one dog. The LA route is $6,000. Still, it's a start, and Bark Air hopes to expand service and bring the cost down as they grow. That is, if there's enough demand for them to stay in business long enough to grow. -via Nag on the Lake
Believe it or not, Cabbage Patch Kids, the dolls that took the world by storm when they became the Christmas gift of 1983, are still a thing. One of their draws is that these dolls have a magical backstory. Each one is "born" at Babyland General Hospital, and the owner "adopts" the doll, with certificates and everything. Furthermore, Babyland General Hospital is a real place, and you can visit it in Cleveland, Georgia. Take a tour, visit the gift shop, and if you have the bucks, you can buy a doll that you can witness being born. If you don't have the bucks, you can watch someone else's doll being born.
The dolls are born from Mother Cabbage with the help of a costumed nurse who engages the crowd to help her through her labor pains. It's not clear whether Mother cabbage is a tree, a mound, or something hidden behind those things, but the ritual is the ultimate in kitsch, meant to engage a five-year-old but still a little beyond their understanding. Joshua Rigsby took his family to Babyland General Hospital and got to witness the birth of a Cabbage Patch Kid. His description of the bizarre ritual at Thrillist will make you want to visit just for the giggles. -via Damn Interesting
Every detail of Boba Fett's getup is perfect as he sets out on his adventure. Everyone knows who he is supposed to be, but once he makes it to a galaxy far, far away, he kind of blends in a little too well. There are Wookiees and Cereans and Biths and Jawas everywhere. Where are all his Mandalorian friends?
This is an ad for Apple's new app called Precision Finding, available for iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro. I don't know anyone who has a 15, or can afford one, but the skit is pretty cool. The music will be stuck in my head for a while. May the fourth be with you. -via Boing Boing
The monument you see above is in the Kensal Green cemetery in London. This is the grave of George Hill, who died in 1864. It has a lot of text carved into it, which was all about his job with the Colonial Civil Service in India. Apparently he was a highly-regarded employee, but rarely do you see much about one's occupation on a tombstone. Was this a case of a man who had no family? They are not mentioned on the monument, but he had plenty of family. George Hill had two wives and had sired 13 children, eight of whom survived to adulthood.
The tale of his first wife was tragic, and after her death, Hill married a woman half his age who had a child, although the circumstances of her first marriage were suspicious. The second marriage was salaciously eventful, and may be the reason all the room on his gravestone was taken up with the boasting of a successful career. Every life has a story, even if that person doesn't want it to be remembered. Read the real story behind the much-admired civil servant George Hill at The London Dead. -via Strange Company
Today I learned that the US Navy traditionally allows the infant children of crew members to be baptized in the upturned ship's bell. A 2021 Navy press release about such a baptism onboard the USS Kearsarge says that this tradition was borrowed from the Royal Navy which permitted the such rites in foreign ports either in or under the bell.
A webpage created the National Bell Festival, a non-profit organization that supports the restoration of historic bells, says that the practice is also followed by the US Coast Guard, the Royal Australian Navy, and the Royal Canadian Navy.
This video from 2017 shows a baptism performed in the bell of the USS Gerald R. Ford.
Neatoramanauts are a particularly well-read bunch, so it stands to reason that you've read a lot of banned books. That means books that were banned or challenged by someone, somewhere, at some time, for some reason. The reasons for challenging a book vary widely, and whether you agree that the books should be restricted or not, some justifications are rather weird. Heaven forbid that adolescents should be exposed to the concept of menstruation! My parents never objected to any book I could get my hands on, and it turned out that the only ones that disturbed me were history books.
Any type of book ban can entice readers and make a book a bestseller. But books that may be unavailable to some readers are catnip to movie producers, because the cinematic version will draw readers and non-readers alike. Weird History goes through the stories of 13 challenged books that ended up as movies. The vast majority of those movies were critically acclaimed or blockbusters or both.
A group of scientists studying orangutans in Indonesia have observed an orangutan treating his own facial wound with a the leaves of an Akar Palo vine (Fibraurea tinctoria), which is known to have "antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, antioxidant, pain-killing and anticarcinogenic properties," and is used in traditional medicine. The Sumatran orangutan named Rakus was observed with a fresh facial wound below his eye, possibly from an encounter with another orangutan. Later, he was seen chewing the leaves of the vine and dabbing the juice on his wound. He finished up by sticking the chewed leaves on the wound. Five days later, the researchers saw that the wound had closed up.
This is the first time a wild animal has been seen using a known medicinal plant to treat a wound. Read about Rakus and his feat and what it could mean to the history of medicine at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting
The Duke of Richmond would be the first to die trying to build the Rideau Canal, but he would be far from the last.
Canadians used the St. Lawrence River for shipping and traveling, but that river is also their border with the USA. After the War of 1812, our neighbors to the north decided they needed a safer, internal waterway that steered clear of the US. The Rideau Canal was an engineering marvel, 200 kilometers long, built by hand in less than six years, but the cost was high. The Duke of Richmond died of rabies, and a thousand of the workers who built the canal were killed by accidents and disease. The canal as a shipping lane was replaced by rail and road, but is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It also left a living legacy in the form of a rather important city.
This video ends at 8:30, followed by promotional material, then at 10:06 there's a bonus story told over the credits that is well worth the time. -via Digg
Twitter* user @Tastemade_japan shows this clever omurice dish that begins with rice balls decorated to resemble chicks, then fried into a gentle nest made of the flesh of their lost siblings. Next, it is devoured whole by feckless gods who laugh at the terror of the birds. The rice birds realize all too late that the only purpose of their existence was to be consumed.
In the 1940s, Lali Sokolov met Gita Furman when he tattooed her arm at Auschwitz. The two fell in love, and after liberation, they moved to Australia where they spent the rest of their lives together. Furman didn't want to talk about the Holocaust, so Sokolov didn't, either. After Gita's death in 2003, he told his story to Heather Morris, a non-Jew from New Zealand who didn't know much about the Holocaust. Morris spent three years hearing Sokolov's recollections, and then another ten years trying to option the story as a play. Then she made it into a novel instead. The Tattooist of Auschwitz became a worldwide best seller in 2018.
Although classified as fiction, the book was based on Sokolov's story. Historians from the Shoah Foundation and the the Auschwitz Memorial Research Center, among others, found numerous historical inconsistencies and errors in the account of the tattooist. The story was like a game of telephone, passed from the subject 50 years after the fact, to a young writer with little historical background and no corroboration from Furman. Sokolov died years before the book was published. However, The Tattooist of Auschwitz is far from the only story fictionalized from the Holocaust, and as the generation of survivors disappears, there will only be more.
