Hpecker

Unfortunate newspaper headlines, collected by Robert Goralski for Press Follies, 1983:

TOWN OKS ANIMAL RULE (Asheville Citizen)
TRAVIS MAN DIES AFTER ALTERATION (Sacramento Bee)
INDIAN OCEAN TALKS (The Plain Dealer)
JUVENILE COURT TO TRY SHOOTING DEFENDANT (Deseret News)
TRAIN ROLLS 0 MILES WITH NO ONE ABOARD (New York Times)
LAWMEN FROM MEXICO BARBECUE GUESTS (San Benito [Texas] News)
FLIES TO RECEIVE NOBEL PRIZE (New York Times)
CARTER TICKS OFF BLACK HELP (San Francisco Examiner)
MAULING BY BEAR LEAVES WOMAN GRATEFUL FOR LIFE (Herald-Dispatch, Huntington, W.Va.)
SILENT TEAMSTER GETS CRUEL PUNISHMENT: LAWYER (The Home News, Brunswick, N.J.)
MANCHESTER MAN BURSTS, HALTS TRAFFIC (Hartford Times)
SKELETON TIED TO MISSING DIPLOMAT (Philadelphia Evening Bulletin)
POET DOESN’T WANT AUDIENCE OF ILLERATES (Raleigh Times)
GLASS EYE IS NO HELP IN IDENTIFYING CORPSE (Deseret News)
FORMER MAN DIES IN CALIFORNIA (Freemont County [Calif.] Chronicle News)
MATH IMPROVEMENT INDICATES LEARNING IS TIED TO TEACHING (New York Times)
PAIR CHARGED WITH BATTERY (Denver Post)
TUNA RECALLED AFTER DEATH (Chicago Daily News)
TWO CONVICTS EVADE NOOSE; JURY HUNG (Oakland Tribune)
JERK INJURES NECK, WINS AWARD (Buffalo News)
TEACHERS’ HEAD GOES OFF TO JAIL (Sarasota Herald-Tribune)
SIX SENTENCED TO LIFE IN CLARKSVILLE (Nashville Banner)
POPE LAUNCHES TALKS TO END LONG DIVISION (Pomono Progress Bulletin)
A GRATEFUL NATION BURIES SAM RAYBURN (New York Herald Tribune)
SHOUTING MATCH ENDS TEACHER’S HEARING (Newsday)
DOCTOR TESTIFIES IN HORSE SUIT (Waterbury Republican)

Some are inspired: When the New York Times reported that a mansion-hunting Aristotle Onassis had visited Buster Keaton’s former estate, it chose the headline ARISTOTLE CONTEMPLATING THE HOME OF BUSTER.

The post Head Trauma appeared first on Futility Closet.

todaysdocument:

usnatarchives:

In honor of the Washington Nationals​ opening day here in Washington, DC, here’s one of our most bizarre baseball-related patents.

James E. Bennett patented the “baseball catcher” on March 22, 1904. This contraption replaced the catcher’s mitt with a wire cage on the catcher’s chest.

The “baseball catcher” was a rectangular open-wire frame body reinforced by slotted walls of wood. The impact of the ball on the catcher’s chest is protected by springs on the rear wall of the device.

After the ball has passed through the open front end, it closes automatically. At the bottom of the device is an opening where the ball passes into a pocket where it is retrieved by the catcher. The device also includes a wire mesh on the top to protect the catcher’s face.

Image: Patent for “baseball catcher” by James Bennett. Patent 755,209, records of the Patent and Trademark Office (Record Group 241).

Read about more baseball patents at The Text Message » Baseball Patents

Hovertext: Adultery for NASA! Let's start a movement!

 Nerd dreams *do* come true.

skye-yote:

stimmyabby:

Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”

and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”

and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.

Oh god this makes so much sense.

If posing in a picture with Snoop Dogg is a crime, only criminals will be extremely fresh.

TBT

#drunkjcrew #AprilFools  @drunkjcrewuguys

unregardless:

data analysis 

Artist Pierre Vivant performed a sort of typographical sleight of hand in an Oxfordshire field in 1990. In early summer oilseed rape changes from green to yellow as its flowers open. Vivant cut the words GREEN and YELLOW into the flowering field so that each word bore the color it named. Over the ensuing month, the flowers faded and the field reverted to green while the plants in the areas that Vivant had cut grew and flowered. The end result was the reverse of what you see here: a green field in which the word GREEN is yellow and the word YELLOW is green.

The post Flux appeared first on Futility Closet.

Extreme thumb wrestling

I had a potential client that asked me to stop by their office for a consultation on redesigning their current website. When she offered to show me her current site this is what she did (and I wish I was exaggerating): opened Internet Explorer which defaulted to google.com, and in the Google search field, she typed in “Yahoo.com”, clicked search, and in the results, clicked the Yahoo.com paid ad, then, in Yahoo’s search box, entered her website’s URL, clicked search, and in Yahoo’s results, clicked the third link from the top.

Me: Do you do this every time?

Client: How else do you expect me to find my website!?

The post Poltergeist. appeared first on Indexed.

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The post Setting Up & Supporting Volunteer Teams appeared first on New Organizing Institute.

Editorial guidelines from Spicy Detective magazine, 1935:

1. In describing breasts of a female character, avoid anatomical descriptions.
2. If it is necessary for the story to have the girl give herself to a man, or be taken by him, do not go too carefully into details. …
3. Whenever possible, avoid complete nudity of the female characters. You can have a girl strip to her underwear or transparent negligee or nightgown, or the thin torn shred of her garments, but while the girl is alive and in contact with a man, we do not want complete nudity.
4. A nude female corpse is allowable, of course.
5. Also a girl undressing in the privacy of her own room, but when men are in the action try to keep at least a shred of something on the girls.
6. Do not have men in underwear in scenes with women, and no nude men at all.

“The idea is to have a very strong sex element in these stories without anything that might be intrepreted as being vulgar or obscene.”

(From Nicholas Parsons, The Book of Literary Lists, 1987.)

The post The High Road appeared first on Futility Closet.

Hovertext: In Robot romantic comedies, everyone finds their perfect mate with no difficulty. The humor comes from imagining doing that without a digital brain.

 Cards Against Humanity Science Packs are funding a scholarship!

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In an 1810 satire, C.L. Pitt noted that “a novel may be made out of a romance, or a romance out of a novel with the greatest ease, by scratching out a few terms, and inserting others.” The steps below will, “like machinery in factories,” convert a Gothic romance into a sentimental novel:

Where you find:              Put:

A castle                     An house
A cavern                     A bower
A groan                      A sigh
A giant                      A father
A bloodstained dagger        A fan
Howling blasts               Zephyrs
A knight                     A gentleman without whiskers
A lady who is the heroine    Need not be changed, being versatile
Assassins                    Telling glances
A monk                       An old steward
Skeletons, skulls, etc.      Compliments, sentiments etc.
A gliding ghost              A usurer, or an attorney
A witch                      An old housekeeper
A wound                      A kiss
A midnight murder            A marriage

“The same table of course answers for transmuting a novel into a romance.”

(From a footnote in Pitt’s The Age: A Poem, Moral, Political, and Metaphysical, With Illustrative Annotations, 1810.)

The post New Tropes for Old appeared first on Futility Closet.

Client: We would like a fully interactive website for our members. We have already created a lot of the content and we have put together a couple of CDs full of images from our archives for you to choose from. However, one thing that annoys me about websites is this whole ‘scrolling’ thing. I find scrolling really annoying. Would it be possible for you to build a side that doesn’t scroll?

Me: … Um, I’m not sure I understand. Do you mean when the page is too wide and you have to scroll right to read all the text?

Client: No, I mean scrolling down the page.

I wasn’t sure how to respond. At this point, the client’s secretary interjects to point out to the client that websites have to scroll, or they don’t really work.

Client: Yes, but our brochures don’t scroll and they contain lots of information.

The secretary and I stared, speechless.

Client: Well OK, we can come back to that later.

The client finally got the new site, and even though you had to scroll, was very pleased with it.

Hovertext: From a certain perspective, all rebus puzzles are obvious.

It’s possible to sail in a straight line from Pakistan to Siberia — a carefully plotted great-circle route will thread a line between Madascar and the African mainland, between Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica, and through the Aleutian Islands to arrive at the Kamchatka Peninsula, a total distance of nearly 20,000 miles, about 80 percent of the Earth’s circumference. You can reverse course to get back to Karachi.

(Thanks, Derek.)

The post The Long Way appeared first on Futility Closet.

Cicero: Get off my dick Catiline

Cicero denounces Catiline (1882-1888), Cesare Maccari / G.O.M.D., J. Cole

Albert Szent-Györgyi, who knew a lot about maps
according to which life is on its way somewhere or other,
told us this story from the war
due to which history is on its way somewhere or other:

The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps
sent a reconnaissance unit out into the icy wasteland.
It began to snow
immediately, snowed for two days and the unit
did not return. The lieutenant suffered: he had dispatched
his own people to death.

But the third day the unit came back.
Where had they been? How had they made their way?
Yes, they said, we considered ourselves
lost and waited for the end. And then one of us
found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down.
We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm and then with the map
we discovered our bearings.
And here we are.

The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map
and had a good look at it. It was not a map of the Alps
but of the Pyrenees.

Goodbye now.

— From Miroslav Holub, Notes of a Clay Pigeon, reprinted in G.Y. Craig and E.J. Jones, A Geological Miscellany, 1982.

The post Unfolding Hopes appeared first on Futility Closet.

Client: We need a new platform for our website. This one is old.

Me: What do you mean when you say platform?

Client: I don’t know, but I’ve been told we need a new one.

flyartproductions:

La Vie Part II

La Vie (1903), Pablo Picasso / Confessions Part II, Usher

jtotheizzoe:

That “new scientific breakthrough discovery” you just read about on that news site/blog/Facebook page? It’s almost certainly wrong. This article from Vox is a seriously important thing that, if you care about science, you really need to read, like right now. 

My take: The tendency of the media to report on what is *NEW* in science is indicative of what I think is the largest perspective gap between scientists and nonscientists. 

The general public (apologies, I hate how homogenous that word is, because there is no single “general public”, but I have to use it here) seems to crave novelty and has a tendency to view every scientific finding as forwardprogress and individually meaningful, but science is a an ongoing process of self-correction and repetition. It doesn’t have an “end” and any single study is almost certainly wrong, or at the very least doesn’t tell the full story.

This is why I have tried to steer clear of reporting on “breaking” science news in my own efforts here on OKTBS. Science communicators and journalists, we need to make a commitment to covering science as a process and not as a series of breakthroughs. When science IS reported that way, we run the risk of losing people’s trust when science later must later correct or contradict itself, which is something that will absolutely happen, because that’s what science does. We must also make people comfortable with the idea uncertainty and science-as-a-process is a good thing!

I’ll shut up now. Go read this.