The premise is right in the title. This is an elaborate cat trap, situated so that the feline stars will be facing the camera. The first cat gets his choice of box, and the rest can select from the leftovers. I like the little glance the sixth cat gave to the camera as he was deciding to double up on the lower tier instead of jumping to the higher tier. The seventh cat, who should be named Groucho, will learn that snoozing means losing.
Jordan Watson of the How To Dad series usually brings us instructional videos on how he interacts with his adorable daughters. But since he became well-known on the internet, he's come across a lot of folks who assume he is Australian. He is not. He is from New Zealand. In this video, Watson explains the differences.
Mainly, it's a different country. They don't even share a border. Yet the differences between the US and Canada are still more pronounced from our perspective. You gotta hand it to him, he's doing his best, and he's proud to be a Kiwi. -via reddit
Brooke Swanson was always color blind, but of course she didn't know that as a child, because you don't miss what you've never had. Still, it was difficult for her to use crayons if the labels were torn off. When she was diagnosed, she didn't understand. And as she grew up, she encountered new problems.
Aside from the whole crayon wrapper thing, color blindness didn’t start to really impact my daily life until high school. That’s when you start going shopping with friends, makeup becomes important, your mom isn’t dressing you anymore and you need to wear clothes that match. It wasn’t until I started making mistakes with that stuff that I realized this is kind of a big deal.
We moved when I was a junior in high school. Here I am, 16 years old, at a brand new school, and I just want what every other 16-year-old wants: to fit in. I was leaving English class when this boy Thomas came up to me and said, “I think your eyes are bleeding.” I thought it was a prank, or a weird joke, and I just kind of laughed and shrugged it off.
When I got home later the makeup I’d put on that morning was still out on the dresser. My red lip liner and my brown eyeliner were both Clinique brand, and I’d mixed them up. Thomas thought my eyes were bleeding because I’d been wearing bright red lip liner on my eyes all day. I was mortified, and I never wanted to make that mistake again. To this day, I make sure my lip and eyeliner are always different brands.
Swanson writes eloquently about the struggles of colorblindness, but her story takes an amazing turn when her boyfriend bought her a pair of Enchroma glasses. She describes discovering an entirely new world as an adult, down to seeing her son through new eyes. You'll see color differently after reading her story at The Cut. -via Digg
Police in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, were on the lookout for a suspect in the robbery of a farmer's market. A witness provided a sketch of the perpetrator, which was shown on the local TV station. Let's watch that report.
The response by newscaster Ethan Forhetz is priceless. Considering he was winging the news as it came in, he kept his cool pretty well. Now, lest you think this is a police sketch, it's not. It was drawn by a witness. Yet it was enough to lead police to identify 44-year-old Hung Phuoc Nguyen, who was still on the loose at the time of the report. It turns out that police were familiar with Nguyen already, and honestly recognized him from the sketch. -via reddit
Moko Jumbies are stilt walkers who dance and perform amazing feats on stilts that are a highlight of the Carnival season in Trinidad and Tobago, although they can be seen on other occasions. Jonadiah Gonzales, Adrian Young, and Stephanie Kanhai are moko jumbies who perform with their crew Touch D Sky, and also teach the art to a younger generation. Their skill, balance, and artistic sense are breathtaking as they perform atop 9-foot stilts.
Rob Bliss (previously at Neatorama) lives in New York City, where "same day delivery" means someone will bring what you buy fairly quickly. What would be the greatest good he could use that for? He approached homeless people and asked them what they needed the most. Click, click, click, and someone was on the way to deliver what they told him.
Note: this video is NOT SPONSORED OR AFFILIATED WITH AMAZON. I'm sure this technique could be used with Postmates or whoever else too. I simply wanted to demonstrate how easy and convenient it can be to bring a person in need, what they need, and to encourage that behavior.
That said, Bliss was impressed at how the Amazon delivery guys (who are part of the gig economy, after all) were cheerful and respectful when they delivered the goods. It had to leave them with a good feeling, as well as Bliss and the people who received the warm clothing and other supplies. -via Laughing Squid
Max is not allowed in the library. But everyone wants Max to go where he wants. Max has an Instagram gallery that he shares with his sister Gracie, and fan art has been filtering in about Max and his quest to visit the Macalester College campus library.
This comic is from Macalester art student Mariah Jo.
A wrestling match between two puppets on a Chinese TV show is not as it appears. It's an old Manchurian folk dance called Er Gui Shuai Jiao (二贵摔跤), which translates to "Too Expensive Wrestling." This type of performance goes back to at least the 17th century.
Dr. Kevin Menes is an attending physician in charge of the Emergency Department at Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas. He works the night shift. On the evening of October first, he had three other emergency doctors, one trauma surgeon, and a trauma resident on duty when the hospital was notified of a Mass Casualty Incident (MCI)- someone was shooting people at an outdoor concert. Dr. Menes went into action, calling up extra staff and preparing operating rooms.
I was out in the ambulance bay when the first police cars arrived with patients. There were three to four people inside each cruiser. Two people on the floorboards and two in the back seat, and they were in bad shape. These patients were “scoop and run”—minimal to no prior medical care but brought in a timely manner. They had thready pulses, so they went directly to Station 1, our red tag area. By textbook standards, some of these first arrivals should have been black tags, but I sent them to the red tag area anyway. I didn’t black tag a single one. We took everybody that came in—I pulled at least 10 people from cars that I knew were dead—and sent them straight back to Station 1 so that another doc could see them. If the two of us ended up thinking that this person was dead, then I knew that it was a legitimate black tag.
Before the night was over, Sunrise would treat 215 gunshot victims, not counting a few dozen who saw the trauma cases and decided their wounds could wait until later. Dr. Menes tells the story of how he and his staff handled that night at Emergency Physicians Monthly. Beneath the medical jargon, the account is intense and gripping. -via Metafilter
Plumbers are often stereotyped as being greedy and lazy, charging a fortune for a half-assed fixit job they know they'll have to come back to actually finish repairing.
But while there are a few bad apples out there underworking and overcharging most plumbers I've met take pride in their work and want to get the job done right the first time- no matter how hard they have to work.
When Acton Municipal Utility District worker Jimmie Cox showed up at the home of Andrea Adams and found her front lawn turning into a swamp thanks to a burst water line he decided it was time to take drastic action to stop the leak.
So he dived headfirst into the mudhole, proving some plumbers are willing to go above and beyond the call of duty to help out a homeowner in need.
“The hole was about five-and-a-half foot deep. There was a lady running around,” Cox told local news station WFAA.
A man is out walking with his German shepherd. The dog looks back at his human regularly. But then the man disappears! On no, what has happened to him?
Luckily, the story has a happy ending. This very short drama is a tribute to a dog's love, plus a lesson in how music enhances a plot, even in a home video of less than a minute. By the way, in the comments, someone asked if German shepherds were just "shepherds" in Germany. The German name is Deutscher schäferhund, named by a German breeder. A German commenter says they indeed just say schäferhund unless they need to distinguish it from another schäferhund, like the Belgischer schäferhund. -via Boing Boing
The three figures you see here are on display at Toronto Pearson International Airport. They are examples of inuksuit, stacked stone markers that are a traditional part of the Inuit culture. When one represents a human figure, it's called inunnguaq. The shape of each inuksuk has a specific meaning, and were often used to give information to travelers. These inunnguaq were commissioned for the Toronto airport to welcome travelers to Canada with native art.
As the CBC reports, the federal government commissioned these particular artworks back in 1963, from an Inuk artist named Kiakshuk. Save for a brief stint in storage, they’ve been standing near Terminal One since then, in these same positions. The concern about them is new, and was spurred when CBC Nunavut posted photos of the statues on Facebook, prompting a near-immediate response from Inuk readers. (“That kind of inukkuk/inuksuk signifies a bad [omen], a place of horrible death,” one, Jessie Kaludjak, wrote.)
That's the last thing you want to signal at an airport! How did it happen? Atlas Obscura has updates on the story with an explanation. It's cautionary tale that reminds us how easy it can be to misinterpret traditions from cultures we don't know enough about. In another example, the article has many links to the CBC. In an early CBC report, the works are called inukshuks, while a later story uses inuksuit, the proper plural of the Inuit word inuksuk.
DoodleChaos spent a month creating a music video for Edvard Grieg's "Hall of the Mountain King" using the app Line Rider. Yes, it was all drawn by hand. You know the song, so you can anticipate how it builds to a chaotic frenzy and goes completely off the rails -literally, in this version.
Synchronizing the drawings to the music was a painstaking job, and DoodleChaos says he/she never wants to hear the song again. I understand, but it's worth it for the many folks who are enjoying it now. -via reddit
Unless you were in the Navy, worked as a merchant marine or stowed away on a cargo ship for a trip across the ocean you probably don't know what a 30 day trip aboard a cargo ship looks like.
Maybe you've seen some of the photos and short videos posted by people like TheTravelingClatt who've chosen to travel by cargo ship for a different kind of cruise.
These posts are great and all, but to truly appreciate the beauty and splendor seen while at sea for a month you have to watch a timelapse video, like this one posted by JeffHK with this caption:
30 Days of Timelapse, about 80,000 photos combined. 1500GB of Project files. Sailing in the open ocean is a unique feeling and experience.I hope to capture and share it for everyone to see.
We're taught in school that the most important inventions created by Black people are peanut butter, blood banks and the sidewalk mailbox, but the history books continue to overlook a more recent yet equally important contributor- Jerry Lawson.
Jerry was a self-taught engineer who gave us one of the greatest, and most fun, technological leaps forward in human history- the video game console.
While working as head of engineering and marketing at Fairchild Semiconductor in the mid-70s Jerry created the Fairchild Channel F gaming console, the first cartridge-based console, which was released in 1976.
The Channel F had interchangeable cartridges so players could expand their library with new games, before that gaming "consoles" were stuck playing the one game programmed directly into the hardware.
Jerry Lawson's legacy was overshadowed by big names like Atari and Coleco, but Jerry truly deserves to be seen as one of the most important Black inventors of all time for his contribution to our entertainment lovin' lives.
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