If a school suddenly imposes a ridiculous rule that no one understands, you can assume that someone caused a problem, and they can't figure out a better way to deal with it. When I was in high school, they cut our lunch break from a half hour to 20 minutes. Then the next year it was cut to 15 minutes. That was serious for a school that didn't have a cafeteria. Both cuts came after someone was busted for drugs, and all of us suffered.
I'm sure that's happened throughout the history of public schools, but in the age of the internet, such incidents can make the local news and then go viral globally. You probably didn't hear about each of these instances, but Chill Dude Explains did the research. Here are ten times that one prankster, or one group of pranksters, left their legacy for the classes that followed them by sparking odd school rules. Sometimes these new rules spread to schools statewide or even nationwide.
Dries Depoorter is a Belgian artist, public speaker, and "concept provider." I would be skeptical about the last position as a real job, but my introduction to him is this clever candle that burns down at the rate of its cost. The candle costs €30 (that's $34 or 16 quatloos) and has 30 lines on it. As you use it, the money that you've spent on it burns away.
-via Flowing Data
Imagine what it would have been like if George Lucas had to produce Episode IV of Star Wars with only pocket change?
Secondhand Movie Company has recreated iconic scenes from Star Wars (and Jurassic Park) with props made of cardboard, duct tape, and spraypaint. Here's the introduction of Luke Skywalker and a drunk Uncle Owen buying droids on Tatooine.
It's not a shot-for-short remake of Star Wars. The scriptwriters have fun with the scenes by adding animosity and implied sexual tension between our two favorite droids. They also turn the iconic blue milk into paint and give Aunt Beru a beard.
-via Nag on the Lake
We learn about the American Revolution from the accounts of those who lived through it, but they only wrote about the most important events. What their everyday lives were like got short shrift because it was normal to them. Everyone had aches and pains, itchy skin, and deteriorating food, so there was no use in making a big deal about it.
With few doctors and no germ theory, about a third of colonial children died before their second birthday. However, they knew to stay away from people with diseases like smallpox or diphtheria. Low level malnutrition was rampant. A toothache usually meant pulling the tooth. There were treatments like bloodletting, but most colonists just dulled the senses with alcohol. And they still managed to defeat the British. Some people, like Benjamin Franklin, would refer to the constantly suffering health concerns of colonists in their letters. Get a glimpse of what colonial life was like from a medical historian at the Conversation.
American musicians have always been drawn to traveling the open roads, or at least singing about some wonderful place they've been before. Or maybe some notorious place full of memories they can't get out of their minds. City names pop up in songs of every genre throughout the history of recorded music. It's a surefire way to get airplay in at least one town!
This geographic compilation by Dustin Ballard of There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama) takes us on a musical trip through the cities of the United States, as sung by artists you know and love, from Dolly Parton to Eminem to Frank Sinatra. Of course, this could have been much longer, but we're getting near a holiday weekend, so he didn't want to put too much work into it. The signature slide whistle is there, and the end is not the end, because a special guest comes in to wrap things up in a coda.
Americans traditionally celebrate the Fourth of July with cookouts and fireworks, and sometimes a parade. Some towns tried something strange and different at one time or another, and the event was so popular it became a holiday tradition. In Hannibal, Missouri, they're celebrating Tom Sawyer Days in honor of Mark Twain. On the fourth you can see the National Fence Painting Contest, in which participants race to paint a section of a wooden fence faster than anyone else, just as Tom Sawyer tricked his friends into doing the chore for him. In Gatlinburg, Tennessee, you can catch the first Fourth of July parade of the year because it starts at midnight. In Bristol, Vermont, the holiday isn't complete until the Great Bristol Outhouse Race is run. And in Key West, Florida, they have the annual Key Lime Pie-eating Contest, a race to eat a whole pie the fastest without using your hands.
Read about these oddball Independence Day traditions and more, ten of them in all, at Smithsonian.
In 1975, a criminal court in Georgia convicted Terry Brown and sentenced him to seven years in prison at hard labor. There was apparently a personality conflict between the presiding judge and members of the appellate court because the judge "demanded that if Judge Randall Evans, Jr. ever again was so presumptious as to reverse one of his decisions, that the opinion be written in poetry."
The appellate court did precisely that. Judge Dunbar Harrison composed the reversal of Brown's conviction in proper rhyme. You can read the full poem/decision at Justia and an article about it and other instances of judical humor in the University of California Law Journal.
-via Jarvis Best
When John Adams wrote about American celebrating Independence day with bonfires and illuminations, he never dreamt it would be like this. CodyBPyrotechnics shows us the latest innovations in Roman candles. The ones available for consumer use are bigger than ever before. There's also a model of launcher that resemble a Gatling gun. Why would you need a rotating gun for fireworks? I guess because it just seems cool. The real innovation is that you can aim your massive fireworks somewhere other than straight up, which doesn't seem all that safe to me. He compares several of these guns in this video.
The fireworks are pretty, but watching a video is as risky as I want to get with this. Not to mention I don't want to pay for such a single-use gun- although someone in the comments mentioned you can reload them. These should not be used near people, or forests, or homes, or after holiday drinking. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Anytime someone posts a list of the greatest songs or artists, it's an invitation for everyone to critique their taste, no matter what kind of criteria they use. Now we have a list of the best music, meaning the best 500 musical artists, the best 500 songs, and the best 500 albums, called The Greatest Music.
This ranking was compiled by using other lists, with a weighed criteria that's explained here. Yes, you can argue that it's too 20th century, because songs that stand the test of time do well, and too English language, because, well it is. But, while you can kvetch about the rankings all day, you won't find any bad artists or songs here. Click on any of the titles to get a "resume" of the song's source lists. You can also sort the lists by decade.
In the arguments at Metafilter, there's a list of the top songs in alphabetical order by artist to make it easy for you to check your favorites.
Sora News 24 tells us about the opening of a new hotel outside of Osaka. The Hoshinoya Nara Prison is a beautiful historic penitentiary that now serves more voluntary guests and provides conditions that previous residents would envy.
The live action version of Moana will be released this weekend. It's a remake of the 2016 animated movie. But the first Moana that Disney produced was 100 years ago, in 1926! The full-length silent film was directed by directed by Robert J. Flaherty, who did Nanook of the North in 1922. Flaherty spent a year in Samoa recording footage. He had envisioned an exciting tale of a sea monster, but instead found happy people living peacefully with no dangerous sea creatures that could pass for an antagonist. But the film was completed anyway.
Without a plot, Moana was not a hit. A critic coined the word "documentary" to describe the film in a review. However, the movie was not a documentary in the way we use the word today. Rather, it was a fictional collaboration between Flaherty and the Samoans to illustrate their world in a traditional and flattering way. Read about the first Moana at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Paramount Pictures)
If you enjoy those old Looney Tunes cartoons in which all rules of logic were suspended to build chaos, action, and suspense, then you'll love o28. A German couple on vacation take a ride on the well known Tram 28 (Eléctrico 28E) to see the historic sections of Lisbon, Portugal. Except he is more interested in a magazine than the sights, and she is occupied by taking pictures for Instagram. But once the streetcar goes completely out of control, their attention is focused. The driver is gone, the brakes are broken, and the track is jumped. On top of it all, there's a baby on board with a pronounced unibrow.
The film o28 was made by a group of students at Rubika, an animation school based in Valenciennes, France. There are cultural references and easter eggs throughout the video that you might miss the first time around, and are pointed out at Kuriositas.
The Blind Pelican is a seafood restaurant in Holly Springs, North Carolina. On the southwestern edge of Raleigh, it's quite far from the Atlantic Ocean. But guests can still enjoy massive quantities of seafood.
The eatery is locally famous for its cocktails. Each one is a meal--probably for four people. The margaritas come with food items on skewers, often more than just appetizers. Why not stick a whole lobster in the drink? And why not then add a Alaska King Crab? Put in some onion rings and a steak so that it's a balanced meal. Make the drink so large that it takes two people just to bring it to the table.
Sometimes school yearbooks request baby photos from graduating students. It appears that one prankster decided to submit a photo of Adolf Hitler as a baby instead of him/herself.
The New York Post reports that East Brook Middle School in Paramus, New Jersey has recalled all copies of the yearbook and apologized for the oversight in a letter sent to parents of all the students. The principal then condemned both the prank and Adolf Hitler.
-via Wade Stotts, who quips, "The school apologized saying, 'If we could go back in time to prevent this from happening, we would.'"
Photos: Josef Franz Klinger/Google Street view
We've featured Ghanian movie posters a few times here at Neatorama. They are hand painted, have little to do with the movie, and are often quite lurid. There were born from a homegrown business of showing films in villages that had no electricity and hiring local artists to produce promotional posters. The posters became quite popular in the US for their imaginative depictions of films the artists had not seen. They commonly include guns and severed heads for dramatic purposes, no matter the movie's actual subject matter.
Americans can buy prints of these posters, and even painted originals, through Deadly Prey Gallery, a Chicago-based business that works with ten artists in or near Accra, Ghana. All profits go to the artists. The gallery stages pop-up exhibitions in cities around the US; check Instagram for their current schedule. Oh yeah, they accept commissions, too, in case you've ever wanted your own face enshrined in a Ghanian movie poster. -via Everlasting Blort
