One thing you can say about the movie It, it readily lends itself to puns. We've seen that once already, and now the IT department is involved. In this skit from The Late Late Show with James Corden, Corden is Pennywise, or in this case, It.
Sure, that one joke plays out pretty quickly, but goes in a different direction as Corden takes it upon himself to be helpful. The poor sap that called for IT help doesn't need that kind of freakout. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The latest comic from Grant Snider at Incidental Comics reminds us to look for the common things that have a hint of the extraordinary. Beauty is found where you look for it, when you look without preconceived notions of what you will find.
Snider's new book is called The Shape of Things, available as a 2018 calendar, too!
Norm Krumpe had the digital personal assistant Alexa pick a number between one and a million. He only needed two guesses to get it right. Artificial intelligence has a way to go before it takes over the world. Someone remarked that it was like playing hide and seek with a giggling toddler. -via reddit
Peacock spiders perform their mating dance to a disco beat with the Bee Gees' tune "Staying Alive" from the movie Saturday Night Fever. If this doesn't impress those lady spiders, I don't know what will! They not only dance well, but they display an astonishing variety of colors and patterns on their butts.
Jürgen Otto, also known as Peacockspiderman, dipped into his extensive archives of spider videos and put this awesome music video together. There are 51 different spiders spiders here. -via Tastefully Offensive
See more of Otto's peacock spiders.
Have you ever wondered what orange juice companies do with all the peels from the fruit they juice?
The tons of leftover pulp and peels are typically burned or tossed in a landfill, but in 1997 ecologists Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs came up with a better way to dispose of peels- dump them on deforested land:
In 1997, the pair approached the orange juice company and had a proposition for them. If they donated a piece of completely unspoiled, forested land to the Área de Conservación Guanacaste, then they could dump their discarded peels and pulp free of charge.
The place where they would dump the orange juice waste was a heavily grazed and deforested piece of land. The orange juice company agreed to the bargain. A year later, a thousand trucks came in and dumped over 12,000 metric tons of messy, sticky, orange-compost onto the land.
The agri-waste was supposed to act as compost and renew the stripped soil, but Daniel and Winnie wouldn't know how spot on their peel disposal proposal had been until decades later:
After 16 years, Janzen had a graduate student named Timothy Treuer take a look at the spot and report back with his findings. He gave him directions to the sign they created; there shouldn’t be any issues locating the plot.
He wandered around for half an hour, and without any luck, couldn’t find the sign that Janzen had him set out to locate. Treuer called Janzen for some more details about the sign’s location. He returned a week later to the exact spot that Janzen elaborated on — but still, there was no sign in sight. They knew, though, that this was the plot of land they had the company dump on so many years ago.
When they realized they were looking at the correct plot of land, they were shocked. It looked nothing like the surrounding area anymore.
Compared to the adjacent land, Treuer said the side-by-side comparison was like “night and day.”
“It was just hard to believe that the only difference between the two areas was a bunch of orange peels. They look like completely different ecosystems,” he says. The vegetation was so incredibly thick; they could still not locate the sign.
Read Orange Is The New Green: How Orange Peels Revived A Costa Rican Forest here
-Via Shareably
A young cat is down in a hole, and this guy is going to do the right thing and give him a way out. The cat doesn't climb the ladder, so the guy goes down to execute a rescue. Surprise! The cat was apparently doing his own thing, and did not feel the need for your assistance. You'll want to let the rest of the video play out, because laughter is infectious no matter what language you speak. -via Digg
This cat rarely lets a bottle cap get by! He was only seven months old when this video was recorded, but he's skilled at stopping them high or low. This kitty is laser-focused on his goal tending duties when the bottle caps start flying in a game a "Nyan hockey." You can see more of his games here. -via Laughing Squid
The Vienna Chamber Orchestra was performing Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony No. 4 in Izmir, Turkey, when a wandering music fan decided to join them onstage at the amphitheater.
He's a good boy, and so deserves first chair in the violin section, although he'd rather listen than play. He knows his limitations. The conductor was amused. You can imagine what the musicians who couldn't see what was happening thought when the audience started laughing and applauding at an inappropriate time in the music. -via reddit
Condors don't strike me as being the most affectionate animals, but maybe that's just me judging them by their somewhat vulture-y look and those beady little eyes.
For all I know they're the cuddliest critters on Earth, and this video shot by Nestor David seems to indicate condors are quite loveable after all. In it we see Nestor's friend Edgardo Della getting lotsa love from the condor he nursed back to health:
One day in March he appeared here alone and with a broken leg. We were healing him from an injury that did not seem to be serious and from that day he approaches me every time I call him.
-Via Laughing Squid
The residents of the charming alpine village of Bergün, Switzerland, held a meeting Monday and passed a new law -against tourist photography! Any tourist caught taking a picture would be fined five francs ($5.19).The reasoning behind the law was concern over others on social media.
“It is scientifically proven that beautiful holiday photos on social media make the viewer unhappy because they cannot be there themselves,” said the village tourist office in a statement.
Bergün/Bravuogn has a particularly picturesque landscape to offer, so it risks making people particularly unhappy, it feels.
“Bergün/Bravuogn is beautiful. We don’t want to make people outside the community unhappy by sharing social media photos of our picturesque landscape, and we cordially invite you to visit Bergün to experience it for yourself,” said mayor Peter Nicolay.
The village removed photographs from its own Facebook account, and people started talking. Of course, that was the whole point, and the publicity stunt worked exactly as it was intended. Bergün's move and the backlash was covered in papers all over. By Thursday, the village announced it was granting "special permission" for visitors to take pictures, and the ban will be rescinded completely at the next village meeting. -via Atlas Obscura
(Image credit: Adrian Michael)
Jerich Alcantara left early for his graduation from Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing in New York City. He got on the subway wearing his cap and gown. But wouldn't you know it, the train was delayed and Alcantara, along with a trainload of other passengers, was stuck underground for several hours. So the other passengers held him an impromptu graduation right where they were.
"I was wearing the cap and gown the whole time, and honestly when we were on the train at some point it looked like everyone was kinda upset, tired of everything so I decided I'd just thank everyone for being there for my graduation that it meant a whole lot to me and then they just all started cheering," Alcantara said.
In the video, you see Alcantara being handed his diploma by a friend -which was an image on a phone. He missed the school commencement ceremony, but his family and friends threw their own celebration when Alcantara finally arrived. -via Atlas Obscura
It's good for expectant parents to be excited about the new addition coming to their family, but actress Gemma Marin was so excited to be pregnant the feeling made her dance with joy.
So Gemma and her partner Israel Duffus filmed their joyful dancing and posted the video to Instagram, which promptly went viral because watching it made people happy.
At forty weeks pregnant Gemma and Israel's dancing was just as joyful only with a slightly different tone- because she was now dancing in hopes of inducing labor.
People loved their videos so much Gemma decided to post another one after baby Alexandra was born, and she promises to post more videos of her happy little family soon!
-Via Shareably
America's Got Talent returned for season 12 last night with a lineup of first round acts that delighted the audience. One was 12-year-old Darci Lynne Farmer, who managed to sing a song without moving her lips and operated a puppet at the same time. In the old days, we called this ventriloquism.
She got a golden buzzer for that one! There were also some other acts you may be familiar with (since we've posted them here) include Puddles the Clown and Jokgu the piano-playing chicken. -via Tastefully Offensive
A giant Pacific octopus has learned where to get an easy crab meal -from a crab fisherman's trap! An octopus is about the smartest creature living underwater, so a trap designed for dumb crabs is easy to break into -and then break out of.
In this video from BBC Earth, we see how the octopus takes advantage of the trapped seafood feast presented to him. Not only does he figure out the trap, but his ability to fit through the smallest of holes serves him well. -via Digg
He'll probably be traumatized for life. What a great prank! Thank comic artist Pedro Arizpe for the idea. Read what else she told him at Port Sherry. -via Geeks Are Sexy
