The Great Wall of China has been standing proudly for thousands of years—but now, it needs your help. CNN reports that the wall has fallen into disrepair and the China Foundation for Cultural Heritage Conservation has launched an online crowdfunding campaign to raise money for restorations.
Stretching 13,000 miles across northern China, the Great Wall was built in stages starting from the third century BCE and reaching completion in the 16th century. To some degree, though, it’s always been under construction. For centuries, individuals and organizations have periodically repaired and rebuilt damaged sections. However, the crowdfunding campaign marks the first time the internet has gotten involved in the preservation of the ancient icon. The China Foundation for Cultural Heritage Conservation is trying to raise $1.6 million (11 million yuan) to restore the wall, and has so far raised $45,000 (or 300,000 yuan).
Fundraising coordinator Dong Yaohui tells the BBC that, although the Chinese government provides some funds for wall repairs, it’s not enough to fix all of the damage: “By pooling the contribution of every single individual, however small it is, we will be able to form a great wall to protect the Great Wall,” he said.
Believe it or not, being a couch potato can be a real struggle. Noisy chip chewing can muffle the sound of the television, the remote can slip just out of reach, and the top of your mug can even obscure your view. Now an invention from Perpetual Kid promises that you’ll never have to deal with the latter problem again.
The TV Beer Mug might not look like much, but it claims to save countless viewers valuable seconds of television. The offending section of the mug that normally blocks the drinker’s view as you take a swig has been removed, leaving the line of sight free and ready to consume more media. If you have big plans of sitting on your couch and drinking beer coming up, you might want to grab one of these $11 mugs while you can.
It’s a common refrain: “I’d rather watch paint dry” than sit through some boring event. Good news, everyone! YouTube is here to fulfill your watching-paint-dry needs, in any form you can imagine. Let’s take a tour.
PAINT DRYING SLOWLY
In this epic video, Glen Wilson brushes paint onto a wall, and we watch it dry. There’s really not much more to it than that. It’s impressive that the video is, for some reason, presented at 60 frames per second—presumably so you can really get a hyper-real sense of the drying as it happens—but the real action here involves zipping ahead. If you jump forward in the video, you can perceive the paint drying in a way that just isn’t obvious in real time.
If you’ve ever wanted to watch paint dry, you can now do it in half the time through the wonders of time lapse. I stumbled upon Space Squid contributor David Johnston as he was in the middle of an experiment in layering of patina. Because of the 94-degree Texas sun, it didn’t take all that long for the transformation to occur. Paint dries quick in Austin.
PAINT DRYING UNDER A MICROSCOPE
In this video, Sixty Symbols shows us paint drying under a microscope, explaining what’s happening as the paint dries. This one is both beautiful and educational!
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and in Longville, Minnesota, dogs gotta walk. At least one dog, anyway.
For the past 12 years, a Chesapeake-Lab mix named Bruno has been regularly walking four miles (eight miles round trip) to downtown Longville from his country home to socialize, collect treats, and hang around. His almost daily commute has made Bruno a beloved town legend.
“Everybody knows Bruno,” resident Sharon Rouse told KARE11 News. “[You] may not know the people, but you’ll know Bruno.”
The pup belongs to Larry and Debbie LaVallee, who took Bruno in after he appeared in a box on their driveway over a decade ago. They tried to keep him tied up, but the dog’s desire to roam was too great, and he started making his way to town every day.
Now, he’s somewhat of a celebrity, with regular stops at city hall, the ice cream shop, and the back door of a local grocery store, where employees help Bruno fuel up with deli counter scraps. People know and greet Bruno, sometimes to the surprise of the LaVallees, who only know a fraction of their dog’s many admirers. His wandering has even earned him the title of “Town Dog and Ambassador,” which is set in literal stone in a Longville statue.
As he’s gotten older, Bruno’s trips down Highway 84 have slowed a bit. According to The Kansas City Star, the canine sometimes even takes a break, settling down right in the middle of the road. It’s no problem though—the town that opens its doors to the rambling pup is also more than willing to drive around him.
To see Bruno in action, check out the report from KARE11 below, and to see updated photos, head on over to the dog’s Facebook page.
Since its debut in the spring of 2015, Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has become a bona fide pop culture obsession. The brainchild of Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, who worked together on Saturday Night Liveand 30 Rock, the comedy series has also scored major accolades from critics, as evidenced by the four Emmy nominations it received for its second season, including a nod for Outstanding Comedy Series. Here are 15 things you might not know about the streaming series.
1. IT WAS ORIGINALLY TITLED TOOKEN.
Inspired by her two daughters—ages four and 10—Tina Fey originally intended for the series to be called Tooken. NBC, the original network behind the show, however, rejected the title.
2. HAD THE TITLE STUCK, THE THEME SONG WOULD HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT.
While fans of the series will undoubtedly recognize “Unbreakable! They alive, damnit! It’s a miracle!”as the catchy chorus behind Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s theme song, Tooken would have had a slightly different tune. As gathered from an October 22, 2013 draft of the Tooken pilot script, Mr. Bankston would have sung something to the auto-tuned likes of:
Them girls got tooken / I was cutting up bike tires with my grandson when outta nowhere/ forty hundred police vehicles came bookin’ / they went busting in that weird old white dude’s house / we call him “Spiral Eyes” / my wife says he’s just a nerd / I say cult! / I knew somethin’ was up ‘cuz I seen him in town at Publix buying feminine napkins. Who that for?!
3. WHEN THE TITLE CHANGED, SO DID THE SHOW’S DIRECTION.
Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images
Veering away from the darker side of Kimmy’s past, Fey and Carlock decided to focus on Kimmy moving forward with her life. “Once we agreed upon this [title], it ended up informing the episodes. They did end up leaning more towards the positive and the future as opposed to what had happened in the past,” Fey told BuzzFeed. Because of this, the darker humor was toned down, as demonstrated by the removal of a scene in the early draft in which Kimmy, after discovering a rat in the bunker, is locked inside a metal box by the Reverend.
4. THERE WAS A FIFTH MOLE WOMAN.
Another element removed from Tooken was the story of a fifth mole woman. In the early draft, an FBI agent named Clarisse finds herself as the fifth member of the bunker. She explains her capture to Matt Lauer in the beginning of the episode: While following a tip, she finds the Reverend at his farmhouse in Indiana. He, however, quickly disarms her and throws her in an old refrigerator, keeping her there until she is willing to join the others in the bunker.
5. KIMMY WAS WRITTEN WITH ELLIE KEMPER IN MIND.
“I still am not sure what in my face screams ‘bunker-cult victim’ to [show creators Robert Carlock and Tina Fey], but something did, so they went with that,” star Ellie Kemper told NPR about the title role being written specifically for her.
6. AUDIENCES ALMOST MISSED OUT ON MEETING KIMMY ALTOGETHER.
Netflix
Even with its new title and more positive spin, NBC feared that Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt wouldn’t be a good fit with their drama-heavy spring TV lineup. If it failed to generate positive ratings, the network would have no choice but to cancel the show in which they had already invested 13 episodes. Because of this, in November of 2014, NBC happily agreed to sell the series to Netflix, who made a two-season commitment.
7. THE MOVE TO NETFLIX GAVE THE CREATORS MORE FREEDOM.
While the first six episodes of the series were originally edited with the thinking that they would air on NBC, the creators were allowed to reedit the episodes once Netflix purchased the series. Jokes that were deemed unfit for broadcast were allowed to be edited back in, breaks in the story for commercials were removed, and the episodes were no longer constrained to fit the network’s 22-minute time slot.
8. EVEN THOUGH TITUS ANDROMEDON WAS NAMED AFTER ACTOR TITUSS BURGESS, HE STILL HAD TO AUDITION FOR THE PART.
Impressed with his appearances on 30 Rock, Carlock and Fey found themselves developing the character of Titus for Burgess. But they weren’t sure whether Burgess had the singing prowess the character needed. “We thought, okay, he can hit one-liners, and he has presence and style, but we started to mold the character without really knowing how deep the chest was,” Carlock told Entertainment Weekly. “I mean, he had to audition for a part named after him!”
9. “PEENO NOIR” WAS A LAST-MINUTE ADDITION.
Jeff Richmond, Fey’s husband and composer/executive producer for both Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and 30 Rock, admitted that Titus’s tune, “Peeno Noir,” was thought up on the spot. Behind schedule on that particular day of shooting, Richmond played the ringtone beat while the writers shouted out rhymes for Burgess to perform. It wasn’t until after the footage was shot that Richmond began layering in the different elements of the song, turning it into the viral hit we know today.
And as for the beat? Richmond confessed that the beat behind “Peeno Noir” comes from the 30 Rock segment “La Piscine,” in which Denise Richards sings about her love for the pool. “We needed something,” Richmond told The Hollywood Reporter. “We were shooting in 10 minutes, so Giancarlo [Vulcano, Richmond’s music associate] said, ‘What about ‘La Piscine’?” and we said, ‘OK, perfect.’”
10. BURGESS NOW HAS HIS OWN BRAND OF PINOT NOIR.
Thanks to the immense popularity of “Peeno Noir,” Burgess decided to create his own brand of Pinot Noir. Pinot By Tituss was first announced via Burgess’s Instagram and became available to consumers on March 14, 2016. A 2014 Santa Barbara County Pinot Noir, Pinot by Tituss is described as possessing “aromas of dried fruits, slate, subtle rosemary, coriander and roses lead to flavors of plum and black cherry cola.” Selling for $24.99 a bottle, Pinot by Tituss is available at select retailers in New York and New Jersey and for order online.
11. FEY AND CARLOCK HAD ALWAYS INTENDED FOR JANE KRAKOWSKI TO PLAY JACQUELINE VOORHEES.
Netflix
However, when it came time to film the pilot, Krakowski was unavailable as she was committed to Fox’s comedy Dead Boss. So actress Megan Dodds was cast in the role. After it was announced that Krakowski’s Dead Boss had been canceled, she was quickly brought in to replace Dodds as Jacqueline Voorhees. Trusting Fey and Carlock from their 30 Rock days together, Krakowski agreed to the part without having read the scripts.
With Dodds out, Krakowski reshot the few scenes in which Jacqueline appears in the pilot. “There were no actors there, but I read the scene with a stand in and script supervisor,” Krakowski told The Hollywood Reporter. “They just pasted me in, and I started filming a few weeks later. I really didn’t even know who I was playing. It was that quick. We filmed it properly again once I knew where everything was going.”
12. SEASON TWO WAS JAM-PACKED WITH CAMEOS.
As the adventures of Kimmy Schmidt continued, season two brought a slew of new characters to the table. Adding to the mix of talent were cameos by Anna Camp, Jeff Goldblum, Fred Armisen, Zosia Mamet, and David Cross.
13. THE CREATORS FOUND EVEN GREATER FREEDOM WITH SEASON TWO.
Cindy Ord/Getty Images
Unlike the first season, season two’s writing began with the knowledge that all 13 episodes would stream directly on Netflix. Because of this, a whole new world opened up for the show, one full of jokes, themes, and storylines that would otherwise be unimaginable for network television. But Fey and Carlock had to fight the many temptations of this newfound freedom, and instead they focused on what had brought them success in season one. “We definitely have the freedom to kind of explore these ideas, but we also became aware just anecdotally after season one premiered that we have, in a lot of ways, a very young audience,” Fey said.
14. EVEN MORE KIMMY SCHMIDT IS ON THE WAY.
On January 17, 2016, almost three months ahead of season two’s debut, Netflix demonstrated its faith in the newest episodes of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt by renewing the show for a third season.
15. IT COULD TAKE A LITTLE WHILE FOR THE NEXT SEASON TO BEGIN FILMING.
While a third season is confirmed, it could take a little to reach audiences. In order to debut its second season in the spring, season two filmed throughout last summer. But filming of season three had to be delayed due to a couple of timing issues—both of them happy ones: Tina Fey is working on adapting Mean Girls into a musical and Ellie Kemper is pregnant with her first child.
Lifting weights is part of Kris Boesen’s regular program of physical therapy.
On March 6, 2016, just before Kris Boesen’s 21st birthday, his car skidded across a wet road in Bakersfield, California and slammed into a telephone pole. He broke bones in his neck and suffered a traumatic injury to his cervical spine that left him paralyzed from the neck down. However, thanks to a bit of luck and timing, he qualified for a current clinical trial conducted as a partnership between Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center and Keck Medicine at the University of Southern California (USC), headed up by Charles Liu, director of the USC Neurorestoration Center. Today, Kris can move his arms and hands, operate his motorized wheelchair, breathe on his own—and even feel some sensation below the waist.
In April, just five weeks after his accident, researchers injected an experimental dose of 10 million AST-OPC1 cells into Kris’s cervical spinal cord. These AST-OPC1 cells were developed by Asterias Biotherapeutics, in Fremont, California from embryonic stem cells, which they converted into oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) normally found in the brain and spinal cord of healthy bodies.
When a spinal cord injury occurs, Liu tells mental_floss, “The neurons can die, the axons can be severed, or the myelin can be damaged.” These AST-OPC1 cells have been designed to address the myelination and are neuroregenerative—that is, they can restore connections and tissue within the spinal cord, thus potentially restore feeling and movement to the limbs.
“Quite frankly, my expectations were not very high,” Liu says. “People have been talking about regenerative medicine for a while now, but in the nervous system we haven’t had a whole lot of success.”
Charles Liu, director of the Neurorestoration Center at the University of California
Kris has what is known as a grade A injury on the ASIA scale (American Spinal Injury Association). This means he couldn’t move anything more than the smallest shrug of the shoulders at the neck line, and nothing from the neck down. Rodney Boesen, Kris’s father, tells mental_floss that he recalls Liu saying he hoped that at most Kris might be able to move from a grade A injury to a grade B, which means he’d regain some feeling below the neck. “The real key word there was hope,” says Rodney.
Six weeks after the stem cell therapy, Kris left the hospital. And now, just five months after the treatment, hope has become a reality: Kris has surpassed everyone’s expectations and “moved up two additional motor levels,” says Liu, which he calls “extremely significant,” adding, “Think of all these patients that are quadriplegic: they’re basically not able to move their arms or legs. Now you can turn them into patients who can actually brush their teeth and do stuff for themselves.”
Indeed, Kris can now do most everything with his hands and arms that someone without a spinal cord injury can do: brush his teeth, feed himself, write his name, text his girlfriend, and even lift weights, which is an important part of his physical therapy.
Liu says Kris’s improvement “is very atypical in natural improvement or just rehabilitation alone. He had no improvement at all until he got the cells,” he says. He expects Kris will continue to improve.
Kris Boesen and his father, Rodney
Even more encouraging, says Kris’s father, “There’s sensation going on below his waist.” This is how his doctors realized recently that he had a bladder infection; Kris could feel it. Most people with spinal cord injuries of his kind wouldn’t be able to. Moreover, Rodney says, “The stem cells have given him back a lot of functions,” including breathing without a ventilator, coughing, and even sweating. Sweating, which most people take for granted (and don’t especially enjoy), is a process that most para- and quadriplegics can no longer do, as it requires the spinal cord to send signals to the sweat glands. This is another promising sign that Kris’s treatment has had a regenerative effect.
He has also had involuntary movement in his feet and some sensation returning in his knees and thighs. “The nurses noticed when you touch his legs that they’re warm,” Rodney says. “They told me that it’s unusual for people with his injury to have warm legs because they have such a problem regulating their body temperature.”
Rodney credits Liu for “moving heaven and Earth” to get Kris into the trial.
Liu is encouraged by Kris’s results and feels that the new “biological engineering” technologies emerging to treat spinal cord injuries— such as cell transplantation, new prosthetics, and brain wave interface processing—will come together to make huge strides “toward restoring function in either a conventional or unconventional way,” Liu says. “It’s really exciting.”
Kris was not up for an interview at this time, but in a statement provided by Keck Medicine, he said, “Just because you went through something bad doesn’t mean you have to suffer the rest of your life … now, thankfully with technology, we have some stuff that’s working, and it’s obviously worked for me so far.”
The initial results of this ongoing trial, which includes six patients at six sites across the United States, will be published sometime in September.
By Shawn from Airdrie, Canada – Gander, Newfoundland, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
In the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks, our Canadian neighbors sprang into action to help clear American airspace of any other potentially dangerous flights. The action was known as Operation Yellow Ribbon, and in those uncertain first hours after the attacks, it was hugely helpful. The mission also made a tiny town in Newfoundland world famous for its hospitality.
Canadian authorities began diverting flights heading into the U.S. to various locations around Canada to help neutralize any lingering threats, but the task was a tricky one. It wouldn’t have made much sense to pull flights away from American airspace only to route them to Canada’s major centers, so the ideal landing spots for these planes had to be relatively remote, while also having a large enough airport to accommodate all the traffic.
As luck would have it, Canada had just such an airport in Gander, Newfoundland.
The tiny town only boasted 10,000 residents, but what it lacked in population size, it more than made up for in airport capacity. Gander International Airport had previously served as a refueling stop for transatlantic flights and had served as a staging point for U-boat hunting flights during World War II. Gander ended up receiving 38 flights in the wake of the September 11th attacks, second only to Halifax’s 47 diverted flights.
Landing all the planes in Gander was easy. Figuring out what to do with the 6500-plus passengers and crew members who were stuck on the ground until flights resumed was quite a bit tougher. Towns of 10,000 people aren’t exactly built to accommodate sudden 66 percent population surges, so there wasn’t hotel and restaurant capacity to take in all these stranded flyers.
Gander’s population may have been small, but the town was also ridiculously hospitable. To say the locals bent over backwards to accommodate their unexpected guests would be a gross understatement. When flyers stepped off of their planes, Gander’s citizens met them with homemade bagged lunches. The town converted its schools and large buildings into temporary shelters, and when those lodgings filled up, citizens took strangers into their homes. Medical personnel saw patients and filled prescriptions free of charge.
When the stranded passengers finally got to fly home a few days later, they couldn’t believe how wonderful their Canadian hosts had been.
On Sunday, the town will commemorate the 15th anniversary with a Wounded Warriors Canada event. “We expect to have a full house,” Gander and Area Chamber of Commerce chair Debby Yannikidis said.To thank the town for its role in helping thousands of temporary transients in the wake of the attacks, New Yorkers gifted Gander with a piece of steel from the World Trade Center’s south tower, courtesy of the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation. “The people of Gander … stepped up and performed their own acts of courage and heroism on 9/11 and soon thereafter for the thousands of people who descended upon them or were stranded with no advance notice whatsoever,” Catherine Christman, a spokesperson for the foundation, said.
The story of Gander and its people will also be making its way to Broadway this winter via the musical Come From Away, which is currently playing at Washington, D.C.’s Ford’s Theatre.
As former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien told Gander’s citizens in a memorial on the first anniversary of the attacks, “You did yourselves proud, ladies and gentlemen, and you did Canada proud.”
Since the time you were a kid, adults have been telling you that when it comes to choosing a career, you should “love what you do.” And if what you love to do is lie on the couch and relive The Magic School Bus, well, you’re in luck. Because, according to Thrillist, Netflix is currently in the market for a Kids Content Tagger.
Just what does being a Kids Content Tagger for Netflix entail? Fair question. According to the job listing, the tagger’s three main duties are as follows:
Tag Kids Content. You will help categorize kids content for different ages and for hundreds of themes, including tone, storyline, character attributes, positive messages, cautionary material, etc. You will participate in weekly Kids Tagging Meetings and monthly Tagging Workshops designed to ensure consistency across tagging.
Complete Backtagging Projects. When new tags are added or removed, we will ask you to do broad back-tagging projects that look across hundreds of titles to ensure that tags are applied appropriately.
Contribute to Kids Innovation Projects. On occasion, the Kids Content Tagger will be asked to assist with special projects. This includes, but is not limited to 1) vetting titles to determine how or if they are suitable for kids, and 2) testing and providing feedback on experimental tagging processes.
The requirements are pretty simple, too. The ideal candidate should have a pretty extensive knowledge of (plus the requisite “passion for”) kids’ movies and television shows, be comfortable mastering Netflix’s categorization system, and be able to play well with others. Applicants who have a background in kids’ entertainment are even more welcome.
The job, which is a remote position (read: can be done in your sweatpants), will fill up about 15 hours of your time per week. While there’s no indication of how much the gig pays, if you’re going to spend all day watching Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, you may as well get paid for it. (But, for the love of Twitter, just make sure you know the difference between a kids’ movie and a slasher flick.)
This month, there’s more than one moon on view in Seoul. A 60-foot-tall work of public art called Super Moon has been erected—or rather, inflated—within the waters of Seokchon Lake, located in a park near the Han River.
The opaque, glowing space art is the work of FriendsWithYou, a Los Angeles-based art collective that specializes in cutesy, toy-like experimental installations that are often inflatable, rainbow-colored, and illluminated. It’s like Jeff Koons meets Sanrio.
Super Moon was commissioned by a massive Seoul shopping complex opening this winter, the nearby Lotte World Tower and Mall, but this particular lake is no stranger to odd art, having hosted Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman’s huge rubber duck in 2014.
During the day, the artists have set up a cloud-shaped bounce house and cosmos-themed mascots to interact with visitors. In addition to the moon, there are eight other planetary sculptures. At night, each of the sculptures glows, and programmable LEDs shift the colors of the moon sculpture.
“Super Moon is a symbolic manifestation of the immense power and serenity of our cosmos,” the artists say in a press release. “When we gather around the moon as a community, we all orbit together,” they explain, adding that they hope Super Moon viewers “can experience this sense of unity and peace.”
It’s on view until October 3, timed to coincide with the Korean harvest festival Chuseok (often likened to a Korean version of Thanksgiving), which happens around the fall equinox each year on the full moon. This year, the three-day festival takes place September 14 through 16.
