Richard Scarry's classic "What Do People Do All Day?" is filled with all sorts of jobs that people do - but cartoonist Ruben Bolling of Tom the Dancing Bug noticed that they need a bit of updating to catch up with the modern day.
So he took liberty in adding in a few modern jobs that fit modern American political and socioeconomic dystopia.
View the original piece over at Topic
View the original piece over at The Nib
Villas Las Estrellas is one of the few settlements in Antarctica where people live for years and raise children. The core population is made up of scientists and workers from Chile's military, but they stay long enough to bring their families along. There's a school, a post office, a bank, and a Russian Orthodox church. But the nearest hospital is 625 miles away, so if you want to live there, you must have your appendix removed first -children included. Getting pregnant is not prohibited, but discouraged. See what life is like in Villas Las Estrellas in a gallery from BBC Future. -via Nag on the Lake
(Image credit: SnowSwan)
There's so much about the world that children are expected to just pick up from their environment. That means so many things are only half-learned because we don't realize what we are misunderstanding. Ross McClearly asked Twitter users to share the misconceptions they remember from childhood.
I thought the the Americans were fighting gorillas in the jungles of Vietnam called the Viet Kong, and their leader was King Kong. A peculiar problem of a 1960s childhood. I
— Rufus MacDufus (@RufusLongpaws) September 7, 2018
My daughter told me that when she was very young, she'd watch me do laundry. I would clean the lint filter out and put the lint in the "magic pink box" on the shelf. And after it got full, she'd look in and all the lint had disappeared! Magic!
"Honey, that's a waste basket. I emptied it."
"I know! I felt like an idiot when I got older and figured that out!"
My daughter stopped eating all ceareal as a kid. She told us years later she heard on the news a serial killer was on the loose. Thought he was in the cereal box. Didn’t want to take a chance. And she loved cereal.
— Diane Lander-Simon (@dishwithdi) September 7, 2018
Read some of the other things people completely misunderstood when they were children at Buzzfeed. There's more in the comments, too, and in the original Twitter thread.
Good Show Sir is a terrific website that collects terrible sci-fi and fantasy book covers. They've got a few simple rules:
Some of the things to look for in a cover:
1. So much going on it burns your eyes. We want covers with elves, dragons, space ships and large busty women, all on the same glorious cover!
2. Terrible art. Awful… just awful. Crazed monsters that are congenital disorders with no skeletal support, brush strokes that display a hilariously misinformed understanding of anatomical proportions, unreadable and/or multiple horrible fonts, magical light orbs that lack even the most basic digital imaging techniques. That sort of thing.
3. Epic things happening. Look for people doing crazy things, such as holding a staff to a dragons eye, firing a laser pistol with one hand whilst doing stunts on a a hover bike with the other, or summoning interdimensional beasts whilst surrounded by improbably-clad warrior priestesses who are fighting off invisible fairies on top of a mountain made of crystal and sand.
I dare say they succeed! Hours and hours of browsing over at Good Show Sir. You've been warned.
When Joe Gold was young, weightlifting wasn't much of a thing, so he and his friends made their own weights and lifted in Joe's family garage. Later, he hung out at Muscle Beach, where fitness fans worked out. In 1965, he opened Gold's Gym in Venice Beach. It became the ultimate training ground for serious bodybuilders.
Today, we take for granted that high school, collegiate and professional athletes—not to mention Hollywood stars and weekend warriors—lift weights. And yet, when Gold’s first opened that practice was frowned upon, or even considered taboo, by most every doctor, trainer, and coach. The few men (and they were pretty much all men back then) who called themselves bodybuilders were ridiculed as narcissistic freaks and taunted with not-so-subtle innuendoes of homosexuality. They were outliers, but they did not care. They lived for The Pump.
Joe Gold changed that perception. Though Gold sold his eponymous gym and the rights to his name in 1970 (a move he regretted for the rest of his life), by the time of his death in 2004, the place known as “The Mecca” by generations of bodybuilders and their fans had become a cultural touchstone in the modern fitness movement that now encompasses activities like yoga, meditation, and mountain biking.
Deadspin talked to the founders and longtime members of Gold's Gym about the facility's early days and its iconic status in the world of bodybuilding. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Flickr user Gary Paulson)
Hello everyone! I'm excited to tell you that we have a new feature on Neatorama: now you can submit your own post.
It's easy to get started: just click the "Submit" link in the navigation bar and write your first post. Drag and drop that funny LOL pic, link to an interesting find on the Internet or submit a YouTube/Vimeo link.
Submitting a post will earn you some NeatoPoints (that you can redeem for really neat stuff over at the NeatoShop). If your post garners enough votes to be frontpaged, you'll get even more points!
You can also vote for worthy submitted posts by clicking the "Upcoming" link. You can upvote posts that you like and get NeatoPoints for your upvotes as well.
This user submission and upcoming posts features are new, so there may be bugs. If you find any, please let us know in the comments.
Thank you for being a loyal Neatoramanaut!
The pavement fell into a sinkhole on Poplar Plains Road in Toronto. City workers placed cones around it, but months went by with no repairs in sight. Then someone planted tomatoes in it! The neighbors began taking care of the garden, providing tomato cages and water for the plants. The plants grew and began producing tomatoes. The city continued to ignore the hole, until pictures were posted at reddit. Then CBC got hold of the story. The publicity got the attention of city officials. Last week, one day after the story hit the news, city officials were out repairing the hole. The tomato plants will be transferred to a community garden. -via Mashable
(Image credit: I-am-doggo)
The little triangle you see above is the result of the collision of New York City's street grid with New York City's attitude. And it happened over a hundred years ago. But the story begins a lot earlier, when Manhattan Island was a new and popular place to settle, long before city planners tried to make sense of the city.
While most of New York City’s streets are laid out in a neatly ordered grid, Lower Manhattan—the oldest part of the city—is, cartographically speaking, kind of a mess. That’s because the city didn’t implement an official master plan for the layout of new streets until 1811, more than a century after the Dutch established a settlement at the southern tip of the island. The earliest-built parts of the city still maintain some of the quirks of a pre-plan settlement where property owners built their own streets with nearly no official oversight, resulting in a haphazard array of oddly shaped, variably sized blocks and narrow, crooked streets.
The bit of property now known as Hess’s triangle is located in this latter part of Manhattan, where the street grid is still a little wonky. It was even more so in the 1910s, when the city decided it needed to extend Seventh Avenue, a wide thoroughfare that was first built as part of that landmark 1811 master plan. In order to make room for traffic and for the construction of a new subway line, the city condemned an 11-block stretch of the West Village, demolishing hundreds of buildings starting in 1913. The extension was finished in 1916.
David Hess owned one of those buildings that was condemned, and he didn't like the idea one bit. Read the story of the Hess Triangle at Mental Floss, and see an explanation of the maps that led to it in this Twitter thread.
(Image credit: Chris Hamby)
Marc "Zeke" Kossover is a science teacher in California. As such, he's always looking for real-world demonstrations of science principles, and he's pretty clever.
Let's say you you were into making solar ovens. Let's say that you decided a few years ago to make the best solar oven ever. Further, let's stipulate that you saw a nearly meter-diameter Direct TV antenna on the side of the road. An idea happened. You rushed to the local plastics store and bought highly reflective Mylar and glued it to the antenna.
Your solar oven was pretty amazing. While the hot spot wasn't super small, it was hot. Really hot. It can pasteurize a liter of water in 15 minutes.
The principle is called solar convergence. The problem is that a device like this will continue working even when you are not demonstrating the scientific principle. Kossover found that out when he took his homemade parabolic mirror to work and then forgot and left it in his car. In July. In California. You can read the story and see more pictures of the damage at The Blog of Phyz. -via Metafilter
It's hot this summer in North Carolina, especially if you are a dog bred for cold climates. Mako the Husky has found a way around that, because he's found his place -inside the ice maker! He would have never been found if he'd pulled his tail in properly. Now the ice machine belongs to him.
Boing Boing has another video where they caught Mako in the act of climbing into the ice machine.
Cara Wohr's dog loves to play in the sprinkler water. How much does he love the sprinkler? Enough to drag it into the house through the doggy door! Was he thinking of sharing this wonderful water with his humans, or was it just too hot outside? We don't know, but she managed to take a picture for the insurance adjuster and her blog. See more pictures of Wohr's dog and the sprinkler at Cats, Beavers & Ducks. You can just hear the insurance guy now: "We know a thing or two because we've seen a thing or two." -via Mashable
(Image credit: Cara Wohr)
In only around 10% of mammal species do males spend quality time with their young. The species that developed paternal care have some advantages over species that don't. One of them is the bat-eared fox.
Pops in this species are so dedicated that males spend even more time than females near the dens that house their offspring. These furry fathers play a role in nearly every aspect of child-rearing: grooming cubs’ silky fur, engaging them in play and teaching them to stalk terrestrial insects with their bat-wing-shaped ears (which can grow up to five inches long—nearly 30 percent of their total height).
And this commitment pays off: The amount of time bat-eared fox fathers spend monitoring their young is an even bigger predictor of pup survival than maternal investment or food availability. Dads, at least in this species, matter.
It's not just mammals. Among the 20% of fish species that take care of their hatchlings, most of them are raised mainly by their fathers. Scientists have been studying the reasons for paternal care, the chemical mechanisms that contribute to the behavior, and the outcomes for various species. Read about that research at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Derek Keats)
Brett Yang and Eddy Chen are a two-man group called TwoSet Violin. They aren't limited to violin music, as you can see from their performance of Pachelbel's Canon in D played on rubber chickens. I'm not sure that there wasn't some electronic magic going on here, since, while you can tuna fish, you can't tune a chicken. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: eldy50)
You're flying home, and you need a ride from the airport. Your family assures you they will be there to pick you up. But you don't know what they're going to do to stand out in a crowd so you will see them.
(Image credit: rhapsodyinpoo)
I have two daughters coming in from different countries in the next couple of weeks. I may have to arrange something really embarrassing for the pickups.
(Image credit: siwangmu)
These are a few from a mega-list at Bored Panda that go beyond greetings and encompass more than 100 weird things photographed at airports.
