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I got a chuckle last night when I saw, in NME’s Facebook feed, a breezy listicle called “Ten Geeky Facts about ‘Creep,’” trumpeting the 23rd anniversary of

Joinyouinthesun posted 80 classic movie posters, in hi-resolution, with the text removed.

80 hi-res, textless posters (some of my favorites)

via Popular Science:

This year marks the centennial of the start of World War I. To honor it, Popular Science is combing through our archives to bring you the best of our original war coverage–from the emergence of tanks, airplanes, and other military tech, to essays examining the relationship between war and eugenics. 

Just as the First World War was winding down, another disaster struck: The so-called “Spanish flu,” an influenza virus with unique mutations that made it unusually virulent and deadly. Anywhere between 20 percent and 40 percent of the world’s population contracted it. An estimated 50 million people died, including about one person out of every 160 in the U.S. War conditions hastened the disease’s spread, as troops moved around the world and the war effort left few healthcare workers to administer to civilians.

The pandemic left a lasting mark on societies and science, so we thought contemporary issues of Popular Science might have some interesting reporting on the phenomenon. They did. But, we discovered, some of it was peculiar.

Our earliest Spanish flu story took an unusual, but serious angle on the story. It looked at how the outbreak prompted the city of Chicago to give its street-cleaners simple masks to wear at work. The masks were akin to early gas masks developed for the war. “Germs May Be Just as Deadly as German Gas,” was the somber headline. That was in December 1918.

Chicago was not the only worried workplace. An unnamed factory put wire cages around its drinking fountains to ensure workers kept their mouths at a sanitary distance from the pipe opening, the magazine reported in April 1919. (But what kept their mouths off of the wires, we wonder.)

A Wire Cage for a Lightbulb, Repurposed for a Drinking Fountain Popular Science, April 1919

Continue reading.

The post Popular Science’s Strange Reporting Of The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic appeared first on disinformation.

Archivists at the Library of Congress recently discovered a "Nazi Driver Education Film." It shows German society just a few years before the war, along with the rather bizarre — and frightening — driving culture of the times.

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What happens when you ask hundreds of Star Wars fans to remake short segments of Episode V—with toys, animation, and amateur actors—and cut them together into a single film? You get The Empire Strikes Back Uncut, a sometimes silly, sometimes remarkable feature-length tribute to the film.

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There have been 5,000 Ebola false alarms since the first case in the U.S. was confirmed on September 30. And if past outbreaks are any guide, expect a growing number of Americans to be making unnecessary visits to hospitals, placing stress on the resources of emergency care facilities.

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The alpha-anteater pose was overkill as the baby roo was already running away and didn't see it.

If you like posts about delightful creatures like this, take a look at Boing Boing's Delightful Creatures tag!

"The man allegedly slung the life-size likeness of the Dagobah resident across the handlebars and rode off doing what police described as an uncanny impression of Elliott and ET..."(via)

Futility Closet reports on Silbo, a language whistled on La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands. Read the rest

Jason Torchinsky does some good armchair sleuthing to present his case that this is probably the first color photo of a car. He also talks about how early color photography was achieved. The secret ingredient: potatoes!

(Photo: freedomfighter1982)

He's an incredible scientist when he's drunk. Otherwise he's a simpleton.

You just might be able to convince a friend/prank victim of this if you repeat the process a few times. 

(Headline credit goes to redditor Mayson023)

I'm very fond of telling the story about the time my World Cultures teacher, Mr. Achenbach, tricked my class into eating vegemite, Australia's favorite spread. He put a generous helping on a cracker, shoved it in his mouth, and proclaimed loudly, "I love it! It's so delicious!" as we passed the jar around the room, slathering vegemite on our own crackers. When we each had one, we ate it at the same time ... and reacted with horror. That stuff was disgusting. Mr. Achenbach spit out his own cracker, now yelling "Isn't it gross? I actually hate this stuff!" over the noises of my class coughing, groaning, and otherwise freaking out. 

So I can totally relate to the kids trying vegemite in the Fine Brothers latest React video. They are very wary of the stuff from the get-go, assuming it's smelly chocolate pudding or "nutella that's weird." One girl even guesses it's poop (then says, "it's poop?!" when no one corrects her). They say it smells like bread—not a bad guess; vegemite is made from brewer's yeast—or teriyaki sauce.

But their reactions, as you'll see, are absolutely the best.

Oh, kids, I have been there. 

No, you’re overreacting.

So, a few years ago Steven Moffat introduced a monster to Doctor Who called the Vashta Nerada who were basically a cloud of microscopic carnivores and who you could only tell were around because suddenly you had an extra shadow and oh crap they’re going to eat you they ARE eating you and there’s nothing you can do.

We find out that these critters actually live in books because their natural habitat is trees and book paper and oh look, this guy over at Scientific American is pointing out that there are REAL animals on Earth who are basically this annnnd they’re scorpions. Book scorpions.

[BOOK SCORPIONS, PEOPLE]

Read the full article

Summer of Sleaze is 2014’s turbo-charged trash safari where Will Errickson of Too Much Horror Fiction and Grady Hendrix of The Great Stephen King Reread plunge into the bowels of vintage paperback horror fiction, unearthing treasures and trauma in equal measure.

“Last night I cast my first spell…this is real power!” Debbie gloats.

“Which spell did you cast, Debbie?” Ms. Frost asks.

“I used the mind bondage spell on my father. He was trying to stop me from playing D&D…He just bought me $200 worth of new D&D figures and manuals. It was great!”

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to 1984, the year Jack Chick published his famous anti-RPG tract, Dark Dungeons, revealing the shocking truth behind D&D: it is a gateway to Satanism and suicide! If you have rolled the polyhedral die, the only way to save your immortal soul is to burn all your monster manuals and player handbooks for Jesus. Underneath all its bluster, the moral lather B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons) worked itself into over RPGs had a very real nougaty center: the very sad suicide of a child prodigy named James Dallas Egbert III.

[Read More]

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It’s a bit ironic that @ZooHannibal, the bizarre and weirdly funny Twitter account collecting Hannibal Lecter’s existential musings from a day at the zoo, is so pro-animal. You know, considering that the good doctor has such a predilection for feasting on human parts—the rawer, the better.

At any rate, the account (which was started in May) reads like an especially bizarre piece of fanfiction. @ZooHannibal’s random tour through the butterfly garden and marmoset enclosure brings us tweets on captivity, power, and feeding time, and even a message for his patient Will Graham.

[Check out our favorites]

Read the full article

(YouTube link)

Patrick Wilson keeps the beat while catching a Frisbee thrown from the audience during a Weezer concert in St. Augustine, Florida, Friday night. If he had not seen it coming, and reached out at the right time, we may be looking at a picture of a disaster instead of a cool catch. Instagram member _lindsayhxo_  was right there with her camera focused on the right place to catch it. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

The Mothership made famous in George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic golden years will soon be available for viewing at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. Read the rest

A moving truck is struck by lightning in Alberta, Canada. The couple inside were rescued by police, according to ABC News.

A San Francisco woman with the moniker "Rat Girl" engages in an unusual pastime: "breeding hundreds of rats in her home and then releasing them into public parks." Authorities say they are powerless to stop her.

It could be worse. She could be breeding politicians.

Hatton Country Word animal park in Warwickshire, England is about to face something of a population boom, after a male guinea pig escaped the male-only enclosure, found his way to the female pen, and made The Rounds.

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A 16th century German artillery manual by Conrad Haas contains an illustration of a cat with some kind of incendiary device attached to its back. And a bird. The Associated Press called them “jet-propelled cats and birds.” They interviewed a historian who responded, “I really doubt this was ever put into practice, it seems like a really terrible idea.” Zak Smith was astounded that a historian would answer in such a way. Of all the weird things medieval people did in the name of war, this picture seems altogether tame.

European History People sent burning pigs stampeding toward their neighbors regularly and would put a rooster on trial for real actually with a lawyer and everything if someone said it laid an egg without a yolk. If someone like that was soberly strapping a rocket to a cat and you interrupted them in their cat-to-rocket-strapping-room they’d look up like “Yeah?” and they would have this big pinky white person expression on their face like it wasn’t even a little bit weird.

It turns out that the device is less of a rocket and more of an arson method. But getting from “rocket cat” to “of course they did that!” takes us on a ride through some of the awful things people have done in the name of war and progress, in a hilarious essay at The Toast. -via Metafilter

(Image Via Medicingid)

(Image Via Bestourism)

Public art is meant to be eye catching and pleasant to look at, and not something that will make little kids cry or make people feel uncomfortable being around it, so when public art frightens rather than amuses it becomes the talk of the town.

Putting up a statue of Marilyn Monroe’s iconic pose from The Seven-Year Itch is one thing, but putting a statue of a half dissected pregnant warrior woman in the town square for all to see is bound to give the kiddies nightmares!

The artists clearly didn’t intend their statues to be terrifying (although a few are definitely testing the boundaries), but sometimes what looks good on paper, and in the studio, looks rather scary when exposed to the light of day.

Feast your eyes on The 10 Most Unintentionally Terrifying Statues In The World

(NSFW due to language, like nearly every post on Cracked)

A replica of the 1970s Mothership will be displayed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. It'll be located at museum's Musical Crossroads gallery and displayed with music and concert footage of the Mothership on stage. As if we needed more of a reason to to D.C.'s museums.

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RoboCop threw out the ceremonial first pitch in Detroit today, and it was only marginally better than his latest movie. His appearance was supposed to coincide with an unveiling of the long-dreamt-of statue everyone wants to see planted in old Detroit, but alas, that didn't really come off, either.

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Just look at them.

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Pink Floyd misrepresented Soviet foreign policy? Donna Summer evinced an unacceptable level of eroticism? Pffft. But I think we can all agree on the inherent Nazi tendencies of To All the Girls I've Loved Before.

(Photo: David Good)

On the right is David Good, a man from Philadelphia. One the left is his mother, Yarima of the Yanomami people of Venezuela.

How this relation came to pass is a long story told in detail at the New York Post. David's father, Kenneth Good, was an anthropology student at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s. In 1975, Kenneth went on an expedition to a remote jungle area on the border of Venezuela and Brazil. Arrogant and stubborn, he separated from the group he was travelling with and set out on his own into the unknown.

There Kenneth found the Yanomami tribe. He befriended them and made further visits. On one visit in 1978, the tribe gave Kenneth a young girl as a wife. Her name was Yarima.

Kenneth went in and out of the jungle and did not provide the protection that a husband owes his wife in the Yanomami culture. By 1986, she was pregnant with his child, so he brought her back to the United States. It was impossible for her to adjust:

In November 1986, within a week of arriving in Bryn Mawr, Pa., Yarima went into labor and was panicked by the American hospital: the gurneys, the monitors, the machines, the needles. Once admitted, she sprung herself out of bed and attempted to give birth by squatting in the corner of the hospital room.

“It was so unnatural to her,” Kenneth says. “It went against ­everything she ever learned.” […]

Meanwhile, his wife was becoming ever more isolated and desperate. While Kenneth was teaching, Yarima would take the $20 he left every morning and go to Dunkin’ Donuts, then the $10 store, where she never knew how much she could buy. She had to adapt to wearing clothes every day and thought that running cars were animals on the attack. She had no friends.

“I miss my family,” Yarima told People magazine. “I want to go home.” Kenneth was her translator.

In 1991, Yarima went back to her people, leaving her young son, David, with his father. Two decades later, David journeyed into the jungle to find her:

He arrived in August 2011, the tribe expecting him. When his mother emerged, he recognized her immediately. She wore wooden shoots through her face and little clothing, and he felt immediately that he was her son in every way.

He’d thought a lot about whether to hug her — he wanted to, but he was too nervous, and the Yanomami don’t hug — so he put his hand on her shoulder and told her what he’d wanted to for years.

“I said, ‘Mama, I made it, I’m home. It took so long, but I made it.’ ” Yarima wept.

(Video Link)

Credit for the headline goes to David Burge, from whom I first encountered this video.

It wasn't until after I had watched the entire video and did some research that I discovered that the man in it is a real person, not an actor performing in a satire. To my surprise, there actually is a man named Cameron Carpenter noted for his high degree of skill as an organist. The man in the video is Carpenter himself, not a comedian lampooning him.

Yes, really!

Thanks to him, we are facing an impending revolutionary moment in music. Carpenter says so at 3:19:

It's frightening. It's monumental. It's just going to be beyond anything that I could have told you about.

Which Carpenter then immediately follows at 3:26 with this profound expression:

You've got to see it to believe it.