We all feel like this sometimes. Some of us feel like this all the time. It's Impostor Syndrome rearing its ugly head again. But don't worry about it- the people who are judging your performance don't know what they're doing, either. As if that's any comfort. This comic is from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble.
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When my sister was a kid she used to have a hard time finding real life friends to come to her tea party so she would sit down with her stuffed animals and the cat, which was a good enough guest list for her most of the time.
My dad and I were available if she insisted on having a human at her tea party so she never had to use the Dark Arts to summon guests, which was lucky for us because brimstone stains are really hard to get out of the carpet! (Comic by War And Peas)
-Via Geeks Are Sexy
Miracle on 34th Street has a lot going for it: it's a Christmas movie, a romance, a courtroom drama, and it has the adorable 8-year-old Natalie Wood. The 1947 film starts out with a boatload of cynicism and gradually fills each character with the spirit of Christmas before it's over. If Miracle on 34th Street is one of your favorite Christmas memories, you'll want to learn more about its production.
2. VALENTINE DAVIES WAS INSPIRED TO WRITE THE STORY WHILE STANDING IN A LONG LINE AT A DEPARTMENT STORE.
According to TCM, Davies got the idea for the film during the hustle and bustle of the holiday season. The long lines and chaos left him to wonder what Santa would’ve thought about such commercialization. After writing the story, he gave the idea to [director George] Seaton to turn into a script. In 1947, when the film was released in theaters, Davies also released his novella version of the story.
3. THE STUDIO DIDN’T GET THE CONSENT OF MACY’S AND GIMBELS UNTIL AFTER FILMING HAD CONCLUDED.
Despite the fact that both Macy’s and Gimbels figure prominently in the story, the studio took a gamble by not getting the companies to sign off before using their names. According to TCM, the studio made the companies aware they were going into production, but refused to share footage until filming was completed. Luckily, both department stores were satisfied with the final product.
Learn more about Miracle on 34th Street, some of it straight from the memories of its starring cast, at Mental Floss.
A video from New Zealand aims to recruit new people for its police force and ends up entertaining us all. The video features 70 volunteer police officers, Police Commissioner Mike Bush, a police pipe band, dogs and cats, and Kiwi celebrity William Waiirua. They illustrate the many different things police work can involve. And they're funny, too.
The outtakes at the end and the beginning of the credits are pretty good, too. If this has inspired you to apply for the job, be warned that you must be a New Zealand or Australian citizen or NZ permanent resident. -via reddit
I don't get why employers still ask applicants what their weaknesses are, since applicants always lie when asked this question.
Employers claim it gives them insight into how an employee's mind works, but asking about a their weaknesses just makes you sound like a cheesy supervillain out to defeat the heroic applicant who lacks the "plenty of money" super power.
If you need a job then keep telling interviewers your weaknesses are you can't bring yourself to take vacations and you're a perfectionist, but as this Mr. Lovenstein comic shows only say you have no weaknesses if you're bulletproof.
-Via Geeks Are Sexy
If you are passing through, you can always get pie in Pie Town. Pie Town, New Mexico, was settled like many other towns in the western US when a would-be prospector found no gold and ended up doing something completely different. In this case, it was selling fruit pies to cowboys. The adventurous settlers who established Pie Town were protective of the name.
At this early point in its history, Pie Town displayed the attitude that still defines the town. In the old days, resident Nita Larronde says, Pie Town was barely on road maps. The town had to petition just to get a post office. To secure one, Pie Town residents were asked, in 1927, to suggest three other names for their settlement. “The name was beneath the dignity of the post office,” Larronde says. “But the people of Pie Town decided, ‘No, we’re Pie Town. You can take your post office and go to hell.’”
Pie Town has a population of 67 and three pie shops, all launched in the last 27 years. Oh yeah, you betcha they have a pie festival. Read about this small but quirky town (and its pies) at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Sophie Putka)
Tattooing a lover's name on your body is always a bad decision, because relationships far too often end badly, and yet people continue to voluntarily go under the gun to get this most regrettable of all tattoos.
Luckily all kinds of medical centers offer laser tattoo removal services these days, but these services can cost thousands of dollars so most people just have a tattoo artist cover up love's bad name with some new ink.
Some choose to use clever jokes or cartoon characters, while others are happy to simply scribble out the name to emphasize what a mistake they made by hooking up with their ex in the first place.
See 10 Hilarious Tattoo Coverups From Exes Moving On here (NSFW language)
Comic artist Abby Howard has a door in her kitchen. It's behind the refrigerator, and there's no other place to put the refrigerator, so she doesn't know what's behind the door. To be honest, Howard might know what's behind the door, or it might belong to someone she knows. She didn't say. But the door is real, and it served as an inspiration. She wrote an entire story around it, and it's rather creepy.
Taras Kulakov, or the Crazy Russian Hacker, got a hold of some newfangled alarm clocks that make getting out of bed an ordeal. You know, the kind that require you to actually wake up in order to turn them off. They come in a lot of clever designs now.
Some these would scare the living daylights out of you, but they do the job. However, if you are sleepy and frustrated enough, you could always chuck them out the window. Keep this video handy in case you need to buy a Christmas gift for someone you hate. If you snooze, you lose! And remember, safety is numbern prerty. -via Tastefully Offensive
Boromir is a brave warrior, and dedicated to the cause. But there's one omen that seals his fate, as illustrated by this comic from Is It Canon. The tagline is,
You either have to pronounce it "Seen Been" or "Shawn Bawn." YOU CAN'T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS.
I intend to keep having it both ways, because both those pronunciations are ridiculous. Just don't cast Sean Bean in my biopic. -via Geeks Are Sexy
A party boat pulls over to unload people in Utrecht, Netherlands. Taken from the full video here, this gif focuses on the important ten seconds or so. You may have to watch it a few times to catch all the details.
The guy who steps off the boat should have waited until someone secured the craft to the shore. The force he exerts causes the boat to move back, dooming both women.
The woman in white gets helped out of the water, but then falls back in all by herself. Alcohol might have been involved.
Two beers make it to the dock, the woman's beer falling over immediately. The guy puts his down to help them, but it falls over, too.
When the guy pulls on the woman in purple, he injures her shoulder. She has trouble convincing him that she's hurt.
So it was a disaster all around. Did I miss anything? -via reddit
You thought the Joker was disguised as a nurse, but for Halloween, he was an obstetrician! Brittany Selph and her husband Justin went to the hospital in Paris, Tennessee, on Halloween because Brittany was in labor. Her doctor, Paul Locus, was dressed as the Joker and left for a while to hand out Halloween candy. He was still in costume when he returned to the hospital in time to deliver their little girl Oaklyn at 8:20 that evening.
"When [Locus] came in our room the following morning, in normal doctor attire, he said, 'Sorry I couldn't make it in last night, glad to see the delivery went well'," said Justin. "He was a great sport about it all."
I saw this picture yesterday at reddit, and at that time almost everyone said it was staged. So many redditors assumed that childbirth in a hospital is a sterile procedure, with mandatory scrubbing and masks. That's only necessary for surgery. See more pictures of Oaklyn's first Halloween at Buzzfeed.
As they have in previous years, Salt & Straw in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland is offering special limited edition ice cream flavors in the month of November that mimic the taste of a classic Thanksgiving dinner. Specifically, this year's Thanksgiving ice creams are 1. Sweet Potato Casserole with Maple Pecans, 2. Buttered Mashed Potatoes & Gravy, 3. Apple Cranberry Stuffing, 4. Salted Caramel Thanksgiving Turkey, and 5. Spiced Goat Cheese & Pumpkin Pie. Honestly, those might be good if you take out the words potato, gravy, and turkey. Los Angeles magazine offers a description of each flavor, although the stuffing flavor is different from the company's menu. They do note that
(they skipped that green bean-mushroom soup thing, which was wise)
You can order a pint of each, packed in dry ice, for $65 plus shipping costs. -via Boing Boing
Grandpas used to be seen as grumpy old curmudgeons who love nothing more than sitting in front of the television shaking their fists at the screen while yelling "damn kids these days!".
But these days we know better than to prejudge someone just because they're a grandparent, and as the populace gets older the grandparents of the world keep getting younger in both attitude and appearance.
Which is why you young whippersnappers out there shouldn't challenge a grandpa to a break dancing battle unless you want to get your electric boogaloo-happy butt handed to you in front of a crowd.
-Via InspireMore
The flu pandemic of 1918 killed between 50 million and 100 million people across the globe -more than died in World War I combat. But no one took it seriously at the beginning, because it was just flu, and few of the people who contracted it died. That's why it was able to spread so fast and so far. It was called Spanish flu, but it probably originated in the United States. After the fact, the outbreak was traced to Haskell County, Kansas, where many people became sick in January of 1918. The local doctor reported the outbreak, which meant it particularly worried him, since influenza was not a reportable disease.
Several Haskell men who had been exposed to influenza went to Camp Funston, in central Kansas. Days later, on March 4, the first soldier known to have influenza reported ill. The huge Army base was training men for combat in World War I, and within two weeks 1,100 soldiers were admitted to the hospital, with thousands more sick in barracks. Thirty-eight died. Then, infected soldiers likely carried influenza from Funston to other Army camps in the States—24 of 36 large camps had outbreaks—sickening tens of thousands, before carrying the disease overseas. Meanwhile, the disease spread into U.S. civilian communities.
The influenza virus mutates rapidly, changing enough that the human immune system has difficulty recognizing and attacking it even from one season to the next. A pandemic occurs when an entirely new and virulent influenza virus, which the immune system has not previously seen, enters the population and spreads worldwide. Ordinary seasonal influenza viruses normally bind only to cells in the upper respiratory tract—the nose and throat—which is why they transmit easily. The 1918 pandemic virus infected cells in the upper respiratory tract, transmitting easily, but also deep in the lungs, damaging tissue and often leading to viral as well as bacterial pneumonias.
The flu ravaged Europe, then abated in July, leading to a false sense that it was over. When it roared back, it was deadlier than ever. The disease was exacerbated in the US, where government officials refused to acknowledge it, fearing it would hinder the war effort. The lack of information only fueled panic. Smithsonian magazine tells us about the spread of the 1918 flu pandemic.
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