Children do not want to go to sleep at 8 PM, or whenever you've decided bedtime is. They're not sleepy, and they want to play. But their parents have been waiting all day for a chance to catch their breath, and they'd love to have a few minutes of calm before they fall into their own exhausted sleep. New Zealand dad Jordan Watson (previously at Neatorama) shares some of his wisdom about putting children to bed.
It's a losing battle. You cannot make a child fall asleep. You can only hope to outlast them so you can have a few minutes to yourself. Good luck. -via Tastefully Offensive
Fast Times at Ridgemont High was released 35 years ago today. It was a high school comedy full of unknown actors who went on to stardom, such as Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, and Anthony Edwards. Cameron Crowe wrote the screenplay, which was based on the book he wrote about a high school he attended and researched undercover. The movie wasn't promoted much, but it became a smash hits among teenagers and grew into a classic. Variety talked to Crowe and director Amy Heckerling about the film's origins.
Save for Ray Walston, as the acerbic history teacher and Spicoli’s nemesis, Mr. Hand, there are very few adults in “Fast Times,” including the characters’ parents.
“I hate parents,” said Heckerling. “Parents open a whole box of stuff I didn’t want to get into. I just wanted to say ‘Here’s the world of kids in their own universe. This is real. This is this particular time and place. These are real characters and what they were going through.’”
Crowe recalled being told that if you make a movie just for kids, it will fail because not enough kids will come to the movie. “That was strange to all of us,” he said. “So we banded together to make this movie where parents barely existed. It was raw in what it was showing. There was pot smoking and abortion and all of this stuff.”
Sweet treats, often including a very specific type of cake, are a near-universal part of a wedding celebration. We are used to the traditional tall wedding cake in America, and we've posted many modern interpretations. Wedding cakes and their traditions vary widely in other countries.
At weddings in France and parts of Belgium the croquembouche is served. The name croquembouche derives from the French “croque en bouche” meaning crack in mouth. This is apt as croquembouche is a tall, conical structure of cream-filled pastry buns enveloped in hard sugar. On top of the croquembouche are a set of figurines symbolizing the newlyweds. Similar to a croquembouche are the Icelandic wedding cake known as kransakaka and the Danish kransekage. These are wreath cakes consisting of multiple almond pastry rings of decreasing size placed one atop the other to form a cone of cakes. Each ring cake is decorated with white icing and the whole cake is filled with confectionary. According to Danish tradition the newlyweds should remove the top layer with the number of layers that adhere to it indicating how many children the couple will have.
GirthyBurritos spotted this vehicle filling up at an interstate exit. This cat is clearly headed for a new life in a new place. Since he had to strap his cat tree on top, you can assume that the interior is full of catnip, Fancy Feast, and hair ties. The reddit thread underneath gives a collaborative speculation as to his story.
Salty
"Sitting in James' truck at the gas station, I began to question my choice to leave. No. Karen and James had their chance, that sparrow was the last straw.
I had hunted, killed and gifted 47 prey by that point and every one had been met with disgust and rejection. After duly showing gratitude for my humans handing me ownership of themselves and their land, Karen grabbed me by the neck and rubbed my face in the delicious meal I had brought them. I was baffled and deeply offended. I didn't understand them, they didn't understand me, it was time to move on.
Without me patrolling the garden, Karen and James would most likely be eaten by dogs. So be it, I had no more use for them."
Bifferer
...so, with 2 kilos of catnip and my lookout post strapped to the roof, I topped off the tank and left town.
Snarkhive
"We were just outside of barstow when the catnip began to take hold"
xtraordinaryshitpost
I would watch this movie.
Further down in the comment thread, the plot gets much weirder. Wherever he's going, he's definitely in the driver's seat. I bet his name is Toonces. The moral of the story: Never leave your car keys out where the cat can get them.
Edward Jones was a lifelong criminal. He got started early, and made a real reputation for himself by sneaking into the royal palace during Queen Victoria's reign. At age 14, he was caught stuffing the queen's underwear down his pants. Jones had gotten into the palace by dressing as a chimney sweep. Strangely, he was acquitted of the charges, which only emboldened him to return and make somewhat of a career of sneaking into Buckingham Palace.
The boy was very good at getting into the palace. Two years after the original incident, Her Majesty had just given birth to her first child, and Jones climbed a palace wall, walked around the palace, and left undetected. He came back the following night and was discovered in the Queen’s dressing room, hiding under a sofa. He was sentenced to three months in prison, and while the first break-in caught the public’s imagination, the second caught the public’s ire, as concern for the newborn princess overrode the novelty of a kid breaking into the castle.
But almost immediately after Jones’ sentence, he was back. This time he helped himself to a snack, but the palace had increased security, and a guard caught him. Jones was sentenced to three months hard labor, and still more palace guards were added.
Burnaby, British Columbia was the locale for one of those chain reaction stories in which a small action becomes a big mess. A squirrel chewed through a wire on an (electric company) BC Hydro utility pole. The pole caught on fire as a result, and electrical power was down for more than 150 Burnaby residents …and one factory. Scardillo Cheese was able to rent generators to keep their cheese refrigerated, but not enough to refrigerate the milk waiting to be made into cheese. Power was restored after about 12 hours, but by then, 82,000 liters of milk were spoiled.
The company is estimated to lose about a week of production disposing of and cleaning up the milk. The squirrel is still at large.
The hooded grebe is a critically endangered species of bird that lives in South America. They are known for their spectacular mating dance, which is even more stylized than the human tango.
Yeah, it's funny-looking, but it works for them. If they can memorize all those moves that precisely, they can certainly raise a flock of chicks. Hey, at one time, the Hustle worked for us. This footage is from the upcoming documentary Tango in the Wind. -via reddit
Experimental musician Andrew Huang (previously at Neatorama) made a song out of the whistles, clangs, and growls that the radiant heating system in his building makes. Oh yeah, he also collected sounds from another building to round out the collection of tones he had to work with.
Cracked readers were asked to submit their best "brush with greatness" stories, and the top 19 were published. Some were delightful, some were just plain weird, and some were sadly lame. The best ones were funny. I liked this one because of the epilogue.
Before Kotex sanitary napkins came on the scene in the 1920s, women handled menstruation in private, using whatever fabric they had, and only discussing its use with the women in one's family. Then stores started stocking mysterious plain boxes, labeled with only the brand name Kotex. It was a product that would make life easier for millions of women, but how could they be helped if they didn't know what it was for?
Like a number of other products that first came to market in the 1920s, Kotex sanitary pads originated as a wartime invention. Kimberly-Clark, an American paper products company formed in the 1870s, produced bandages from a material called Cellucotton for World War I. Cellucotton, which was made of wood pulp,, was five times as absorbent as cotton bandages but much less expensive.
In 1919, with the war over, Kimberly-Clark executives were looking for ways to use Cellucotton in peacetime. The company got the idea of sanitary pads from the American Fund for the French Wounded, according to historians Thomas Heinrich and Bob Batchelor. The Fund “received letters from Army nurses claiming they used Cellucotton surgical dressings as makeshift sanitary napkins,” the pair write.
Kimberly-Clark employee Walter Luecke, who had been tasked with finding a use for Cellucotton, understood that a product designed to appeal to about half the country’s population could create enough demand to take the place of the wartime demand for bandages. He jumped on the idea.
But Luecke ran into problems almost immediately. The firms he approached to manufacture sanitary napkins from Kimberly-Clark’s Cellucotton refused to do so. “They argued that sanitary napkins were “too personal and could never be advertised,” Heinrich and Batchelor write. Similar doubts plagued Kimberly-Clark executives, but Luecke kept pushing and they agreed to try the idea, making the sanitary napkins themselves.
They found a way to advertise their product, too, although figuring out what the ads were talking about was strictly on a need-to-know basis. Once again, that was discussed only with the women in one's family, for the next 50 years or so, when other brands gave Kotex some competition. Read up on the history of Kotex and its discreet advertising campaigns at Smithsonian.
If you've ever watched a domino artist set up a run by hand, you probably decided that's too much trouble and time to even attempt. The next step? Design a machine to do it for you. Matthias Wandel (previously at Neatorama) built a strangely simple wooden device just for that. It's quite impressive.
According to this bread bag alignment chart by Aurelian Rabbit, I am a lawful neutral (my bread comes with a twist tie instead of a plastic clip), my husband was a chaotic neutral, and my children were chaotic evil through most of their time with me. Twitter followers had to inform Aurelian Rabbit that even with a bread box, you have to use the plastic bag the bread comes in. There aren't very many people who use a bread box anymore. Its utility is mainly in keeping people from stacking things on top of the bread and squishing it. -via Nag on the Lake
You might think you'd be pretty good at designing a roller coaster, especially if you've played with any of the online design games. But the people who have actually done that and had their ideas rendered in life-size steel know a thing or two that you don't. Brendan Walker is one of several roller coaster designers who shared some secrets.
There is absolutely nothing random about the length of a coaster’s track. In addition to designing a ride based on the topography of a park site, designers take into account exactly how much space they’ll need to terrorize you and not an inch more. When England’s Alton Towers park was preparing to build a ride named TH13TEEN for a 2010 opening, they asked Walker exactly how much of a drop was needed to scare someone in the dark. “It was a practical question,” Walker says. “For every extra foot of steelwork, it would have cost them £30,000 [roughly $40,000].”
This hen is having a hard time with a piece of hollowed-out bread. She somehow gets it over her head and stuck around her neck. But the bird-brain hasn't learned a thing, because she manages to get a second piece of bread stuck around her neck.
However, at the end of the day, this chicken goes back to the coop with bread she can eat later (if she figures out how), so how is that dumb? Meanwhile, all I could think of while watching this video is that the person laughing in the background sounds more and more like a chicken as the video went along. -via Tastefully Offensive
Don't gloat. You should never gloat about your successes, because you're very likely to receive some kind of comeuppance. This neural network is smart, alright, but we humans still have some tricks up our sleeves. One of them is the ability to enjoy a good paradox when we see one. This is the latest sarcastic comic from Randall Munroe at xkcd.
