Thirty three-year-old Judy Viger faced up to a year in jail for child
endangerment after she hired strippers to perform lap dances t her 16-year-old
son's birthday party:
A New York mother has been charged with five counts of endangering
the welfare of a child after she allegedly hired two strippers to perform
lap dances on the guests at her son’s 16th birthday party.
Judy Viger, 33, hired the women from a company called Tops in Bottoms
and arranged for them to perform in a private room at the Spare Time
Bowling Center in South Glens Falls on Nov. 3.
At the party, the women performed what police describe as “personal
and intimate” dances with the party guests, some of whom were
as young as 13.
David Knowles of the New York Daily News has the story: Link
(yes, with photo of the, um, performance, party. Don't worry, no nudity.)
This lovely picture of a pair of raccoons may startle you at first. No, the rock is not about to hit the smaller raccoon. The stone is jutting out of the water, which is perfectly reflecting the sky! Now look closer. The raccoon on the left has apparently taken off his mask, not thinking that anyone would take his picture. Have you ever seen a maskless raccoon before? Link -via reddit
The
Cosby Sweater, the wonderfully garish "knit woolen thing that look
like the sheep were different colors or fell in some paint" (as Cosby
himself once said), is a cultural icon (it even has its
own Tumblr blog).
But ever wonder why Cosby wore Cosby Sweaters in his TV series? Cosby
show costumer Sarah Lemire told us:
Lemire says that Cosby often strayed from the script, following his
gut if he thought it might get a better laugh. “It was incredible
and it came out of nowhere, and the director knew to grab that.”
As a result, the show often relied on close-up shots of Cosby to capture
such moments of improvised humor. However, tight shots like these caused
problems when matching the scenes from two different takes, as a slight
difference in costume positioning would become a glaring mistake.
“Usually you don’t do close-ups on TV, and that’s
why we started using sweaters,” says Lemire. “As our bodies
move around, the clothes are going to shift between the first and second
take. If you have a jacket on, and the shirt collar’s in one spot,
it’s going to slide off a little on one side or the other, or
it might do something else that didn’t match. [Director Jay Sandrich]
was a real stickler for things matching, so we just did the sweater
thing. I actually sewed his shirts to the sweaters so that nothing moved.”
Well, at least they don't have to change the first part of their names!
The Wall Street Journal reported that OfficeMax and Office Depot are merging:
OfficeMax Inc. and Office Depot Inc. are in advanced talks to merge,
people familiar with the matter said, as the retailers of pens, paper
and desks try to fight off tougher competition from rivals like Staples
Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.
A deal would combine two companies that have been hammered in recent
years by weak economic conditions, falling sales and rising online competition.
Office Depot's market value is just $1.3 billion, and OfficeMax's is
about $933 million.
Still, the two chains have a substantial retail presence. Office Depot,
based in Boca Raton, Fla., has 1,675 stores world-wide, annual sales
of some $11.5 billion and about 39,000 employees. OfficeMax, based in
Naperville, Ill., has about 900 stores in the U.S. and Mexico, roughly
$7 billion in annual sales and approximately 29,000 employees. OfficeMax
is scheduled to post its quarterly and annual results Thursday.
You Had One Job is a photo repository for the meme, which contains hundreds of photos already, with more coming in constantly. You can eat up quite a bit of time looking through them! Continue reading to see some of the best.
A Polish truck driver needed to move four vehicles to Belgium. As you can see, he devised an ingenious solution. He almost made it, but spoilsport police in the town of Krefeld, Germany stopped him.
A car chase in Cleveland, Ohio, ended up in a deadly firefight where
more than a dozen of Cleveland police officers exchanged fire. In total,
they fired nearly 140 bullets in less than 30 seconds. But after the gunsmoke
dissipated, it was clear they had a problem. A big problem:
A November car chase ended in a "full blown-out" firefight,
with glass and bullets flying, according to Cleveland police officers
who described for investigators the chaotic scene at the end of the
deadly 25-minute pursuit.
But when the smoky haze -- caused by rapid fire of nearly 140 bullets
in less than 30 seconds -- dissipated, it soon became clear that more
than a dozen officers had been firing at one another across a middle
school parking lot in East Cleveland.
CNN affiliate KIRO tested drivers before and after they smoked marijuana to see how it affects their abilities. Something that had never occurred to me is how states with varying levels of legal marijuana use have to establish limits on how much would make you legally ineligible to drive a vehicle. They have, and if these test subjects are any indication, one would probably need to consume several times the legal limit before police will observe you driving erratically. That said, you should never operate a vehicle, or any heavy machinery, while impaired, legally or not. -via reddit
Artist Olly Moss created his own version of the classic Blue Willow china pattern by incorporating video game imagery into the design. These would blend into my own china collection seamlessly, but would also get my grandson to eat all his vegetables just to see what was underneath! Link -via Laughing Squid
Veronica's bookcase elegantly displays the beauty of the written word and the reading life. She writes:
My apartment is quite small and I am lawyer so I have to read a lot. I really enjoy it,and didn't want to have the typical 50 inch tv on my living room wall...
I needed a library but it had to be different, so I made one inspired by a mandala. I think the carpenter did a great job, exactly what I designed!
I've watched dozens of Harlem Shake videos in the last few days, from TV show casts, military units, and even one done underwater. I keep rejecting them because the meme is burning up faster than Gangnam Style, and it would be easy to overdo it. However, this video from SeaWorld in San Antonio, Texas, has something special the rest of them don't. -via reddit
Camera resolution charts are like eye charts for cameras. They are used to calibrate and focus the instruments. Cameras on airplanes need to be calibrated, too -and the charts for them are there, larger than life, to be used by spy planes and drones, and even by satellites.
The largest concentration of calibration targets in one place is on the grounds of Edwards Air Force Base, in an area referred to as the photo resolution range, where 15 calibration targets run for 20 miles across the southeast side of the base in a line, so multiple targets can be photographed in one pass. There is some variation in the size and shape of the targets at Edwards, suggesting updates and modifications for specific programs. A number of the targets there also have aircraft hulks next to them, added to provide additional, realistic subjects for testing cameras. Some of these planes are themselves unusual and rare military jets, officially in the collection of the base museum, despite being left out on the range.
There are an unknown number of other isolated photo calibration targets across the country, mostly inside restricted groundspace at military areas, such as at Eglin AFB, Florida; the Nevada Test Site; around Walker Field, a Navy drone airport in Maryland; and an especially exotic one at Fort Huachuca, in Arizona. Several others are painted on existing taxiways and runways, such as at Wright Patterson AFB, Ohio; Travis AFB, California; Beaufort Marine Corps Base and Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina.
Google Earth gives us a view of some of these charts, which you can see at the Center for Land Use Interpretation. They strangely remind one of crop circles, even though they involve neither crops not circles. Link -via PetaPixel
Celebrate your survival from the latest cosmic-based apocalypse (take
that, space pebble!) with this clever T-shirt design by Chris
Murphy. Remember: In Russia, Space Explores YOU!
…the beauty of a sunset, in all of its varieties and variations, is only enhanced the more you know about it.
Sunsets grab our eyes and our interest. They change colors, dominate the horizon, and sometimes we even see a flash of green or blue, if we're lucky. Sunsets even come with their own optical illusions. Cosmologist Ethan Siegel explains why sunsets are so magical.
You may not even realize it, but by time you’d see a sunset like the picture above, the Sun has already technically set, it’s only due to the fact that the atmosphere bends light that we’re still seeing it like this.
This is why, if you time a sunset, it will take longer than the expected 120 seconds to go from the moment it touches the horizon to the moment it dips below, even during the equinox at the equator, where it rises and sets as close to completely vertical to the horizon as possible. The Sun appears to linger due to the refraction of our atmosphere.
The explanation of this and other sunset phenomena comes with some awesome pictures at Starts With A Bang. Link
Cornell graduate student Jesse Silverberg observed mosh pit activity at a heavy metal concert, and was inspired to study the movements of the dancers. Those movements turned out to be a lot like how gas particles move.
To investigate, the team simulated a mosh pit with a few basic rules: the virtual moshers bounce off each other when they collide (instead of sticking or sliding through each other); they can move independently; and they can flock, or follow each other, to varying degrees. Finally, the team added a certain amount of statistical noise to the simulated moshers' movements – "to mimic the effects of the inebriants that the participants typically use", says co-author Matthew Bierbaum.
They found that by tweaking their model parameters – decreasing noise or increasing the tendency to flock, for instance – they could make the pit shift between the random-gas-like moshing and a circular vortex called a circle pit, which is exactly what they saw in the YouTube videos of real mosh pits. Their simulation is available online.
"These are collective behaviours that you wouldn't have predicted based on the previous literature on collective motion in humans," Silverberg says. "That work was geared at pedestrians, but what we're seeing is fundamentally different."
"The fact that human beings are very complex creatures, and yet we can develop a lifeless computer simulation that mimics their behaviour, really tells us that we're understanding something new about the behaviour of crowds that we didn't understand before," says co-author James Sethna.
Read more about the research at New Scientist. Link -via Dangerous Minds, where you can see a video of mosh pit dancers acting like gas.
