Just a thread for different kindsa interesting things

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Viewing 30 posts - 91 through 120 (of 156 total)
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  • #137840
    nittany ram
    Moderator

    #137860
    Zooey
    Participant

    #137971
    Zooey
    Participant

    #138367
    zn
    Moderator

    #138485
    zn
    Moderator

    #138719
    Zooey
    Participant

    #139099
    zn
    Moderator

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    #139132
    zn
    Moderator

    from quora
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    There once lived a man named Frank Cannonball Richards. This man had a very unique talent, in that his stomach was pretty much indestructible.

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    I’ve no idea how he discovered his talent, but I always like to imagine that it was when he accidentally ran face first into a lamppost, or something relatable like that. Because let’s face it. We’ve all been there. Anyway, once he discovered his ability, he made the most of it.

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    Firstly, he charged people to pummel him in the gut. He even let Jack Dempsey, an at the time heavyweight boxer, perform his knockout blow on him. 3 times in a row. With no effect!

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    Secondly, he upped his game! He began letting people whack him with giant sledgehammers! To begin with, he let them hit him one at a time, but eventually he turned to just lying on the ground and getting smashed! Quite literally.

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    Finally, he decided to test his luck. He stood directly in front of a MASSIVE CANNON, instructed his potential executioner to load the ball, and had it fired into him. Here’s an unbelievable, yet true, photo:

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    And the effect?.

    He was knocked over. To immediately get back up again.</p>
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    This became his full time job, and twice a day, he was smashed into by a massive cannonball. Health and safety would never allow that nowadays! He performed the trick twice a day, as any more, and it would get too painful.

    #139159
    zn
    Moderator
    from quora
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    Muhammad Ali. Back in 1988, I was tending bar at the airport in Cleveland. I saw him sitting alone in the lobby, in front of the restaurant I was working at. I got up the nerve to shyly approach him and hopefully, just shake his hand.
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    When I did, he offered to have me sit across from him, and then he started engaging me in conversation, asking me questions about myself. He wanted to know if I liked the job I had at the airport (I wore the unmistakable uniform of a tux shirt and bow tie… the class outfit for a bartender at a fancy restaurant), how long I worked there, etc. When I finally got a chance to ask HIM something, I just had to find out how he came up with the rope-a-dope when he fought George Foreman in Zaire. He gestured to me to lean forward towards him, almost conspiratorially, and said, “I was scared”. He then told me he was backing against the ropes to avoid getting the brunt of Foreman’s punches, because up until that point, he’d never been hit so hard in his life. He then saw that Foreman was getting worn out and frustrated with him backing against the ropes, and then Ali told me he just wanted to try to score points against him. He also said nobody was more surprised than he was when he managed to knock Foreman out. I told him he didn’t seem surprised at all when I watched the footage of the fight. He then told me, “I’m Muhammad Ali, I ain’t supposed to act surprised when I knock someone out!”
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    At that point, I realized I had a job to get back to, and I shook his hand. And then asked me my name, and when I told him, he pulled out a Muslim tract, and signed it for me. I was absolutely amazed that somebody as famous as Muhammad Ali took the time and sat to talk with me as though we were old friends. A memory with my childhood hero I will always cherish, and will never forget!
    #139302
    zn
    Moderator

    #139373
    zn
    Moderator

    #139381
    zn
    Moderator
    from quora

    These are called Mammatus clouds. They are like pouches that hang under a storm cloud. You typically see these when it is about to storm very, very hard. Pilots are often warned to avoid clouds that have these.

     

    #139518
    zn
    Moderator

    #139568
    zn
    Moderator
    from quora: Jean-Marie Valheur, political aficionado & former journalist
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    Everything you will ever read of Abraham Lincoln will tell you he was a man of great contrasts. For instance, his height of 6′4″ was impressive, but his shoulders were narrow and his body slim. His hands and arms were exceptionally strong and his voice rather shrill for a man his size. In his youth he was a wrestler, as well as a day-laborer known to easily do the work of three men. “No man could drive a nail deeper,” his old boss would admiringly say.

    In his army volunteer days he wrestled hundreds of men, never losing until a particularly tough man known as one of the finest wrestlers in the nation got the better of him. Lincoln graciously admitted defeat. All this is made more impressive if you realize that even at his heaviest, the future president never weighed more than 190 pounds and would dip well below that in later life. During the civil war, Lincoln was not in the finest health. He’d still visit hospitals to boost morale and shake hundreds of hands. A soldier asked him: “Mister president, are you not tired shaking so many hands?”
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    “Not at all,” said Lincoln, and proceeded to walk to the door near the hospitals exit where a heavy axe was located. He held the axe by the end of the handle with one hand and held it horizontally in front of him with his arm stretched for several minutes. He asked some of the people around if they could repeat the feat, and none could do so. He then walked out into the yard and cut some wood to keep the wounded men warm in the dead of winter. Hitting the trunks so vigorously splinters flew everywhere and were “collected by onlookers as trophies”.

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    After his death, doctors remarked Lincoln’s “remarkable musculature” and said he had “not an ounce of surplus flesh”. His boots, preserved, are a size fourteen in today’s measurements, largest of any president. Without a doubt Abraham Lincoln would have been quite a sight to 19th century people. A great orator and a man with a magnificent physical presence.

    #139587
    wv
    Participant

    Just a vid I watched.  Started it at the 30 min. mark.

    ==

    #139620
    zn
    Moderator

    #139643
    zn
    Moderator

    #139719
    zn
    Moderator

    The Airman Who Fell 18,000 Feet Without A Parachute & Lived

    https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/nicholas-alkemade-the-raf-airman.html?T2c=1&A1c=1

    Nicholas Alkemade was born in 1922 in Norfolk, England, and was a gardener before signing up with the Royal Air Force when WWII broke out. He was trained as an air gunner, and after completing his training he served as a tail gunner with RAF 115 Squadron.

    Alkemade was part of a crew that flew an Avro Lancaster MK II bomber, which was capable of carrying the largest bombs used by the RAF during the Second World War. These bombers often flew night missions, and, as such, the bomber that Alkemade’s crew manned was christened Werewolf.

    Alkemade flew fourteen successful missions with the crew of Werewolf, and on the night of 24 March 1944 they were part of a bombing raid targeting Berlin. They successfully delivered their payload, but on the return journey heavy winds took them off course. They ended up flying over the Ruhr region, which had a high concentration of anti-aircraft defenses.

    Werewolf was attacked from below by a German night-fighter aircraft, and the resulting damage tore up Werewolf’s wing and fuselage, and set the plane on fire. It was obvious that Werewolf was beyond salvation, and the pilot ordered the crew to grab their parachutes in preparation for an emergency exit from the burning aircraft.

    Read also: Men Were Too Scared to Fly B-29 Superfortresses – Until Two Women Did
    Alkemade, alone in his turret at the back of the plane, was already being scorched by the flames, with his rubber oxygen mask beginning to melt on his face, and his arms seared by the fire. Scrambling for his parachute in a panic, he was hit with a moment of pure dread when he finally located it – for his parachute, like everything else around him, was on fire.

    Faced with a terrible choice – that of burning to death, or falling to his death, Alkemade chose the latter option. Better to suffer the brief terror of the fall and have a swift, merciful end than suffer through the torment of fire. He jumped from the burning plane without his parachute, and, falling at almost 120mph and looking up at the starry sky and the burning airplane from which he had just jumped, he lost consciousness.

    Amazingly he woke up three hours later, lying in deep snow in a pine forest. It seemed that the flexible young pines had slowed his descent enough that the snow was able to cushion his fall. He had not broken any bones, but had managed to sprain his knee after his 18,000 foot fall from the sky. In addition, he had suffered burn wounds from the fire and had pieces of perspex from his flak-shattered screen embedded in his skin.

    While he had survived the fall, surviving the rest of the night was not a guarantee. His knee was in too much pain for him to walk, and the freezing cold was beginning to take its toll.

    He began blowing his distress whistle, which eventually attracted the attention of some German civilians. He was taken to Meschede Hospital where his wounds were treated, and when he was well enough to talk, he was interrogated by the Gestapo.

    He told them his story, but they refused to believe that he could have survived such a fall without a parachute. They insisted that he had buried his parachute somewhere and that he was a spy – but when they sent men to investigate the landing site, as well as the wreckage of Werewolf, they were amazed to find that the remains of Alkemade’s parachute were indeed still in the wreckage of the plane. Before sending him to a POW camp, they gave him an official document certifying his claim, “Because no one will believe you after the war.”

    Alkemade then became something of a celebrity, and met a number of Luftwaffe officers who wanted to hear about his miraculous jump. However, this did not earn him any special treatment, and like any other captured Allied airman he was sent to the notorious prison camp Stalag Luft III.

    Read another story from us: Revealing the Ineffectiveness of Early British Night-Bombing Raids

    Alkemade’s luck remained with him, though. When the camp’s 10,000 inmates were forced to trek hundreds of miles across northern Germany, through a blizzard, with temperatures dropping as low as -22 degrees C, he survived and was eventually liberated.

    After the war Alkemade worked in the chemical industry in the UK, and lived to the age of 64. He passed away in June 1987

    #139756
    zn
    Moderator

    #139814
    zn
    Moderator

    #139851
    wv
    Participant

    Jim Jarmusch talks about relying on instinct as opposed to intellect.   Contrasts his approach to Hitchcock.

    Thot it was interesting.   Started vid at 19 minute mark.

    ==

    #139891
    wv
    Participant

    I am enjoying this dvd: Blank City.   Its about broke, NY, film-makers in the 70s.   NY City was bankrupt so, apparently you could have your own loft in Manhattan for a hundred bucks a month…

    ==

    #139915
    zn
    Moderator
    .
    On September 25, 2000, 19-year-old Kevin Hines tried to kill himself by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. He fell more than 220 feet to the water below, slamming into it at 75 miles per hour.
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    The impact shattered three of his vertebrae and came within two millimeters of severing his spine — yet he somehow survived. And when he realized he was still alive, he was immediately overtaken by an overwhelming will to live.
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    However, the weight of his clothes kept dragging him down below the surface of San Francisco Bay. For what felt like an eternity, he barely managed to resurface for mere seconds at a time and breathe just enough air to cling to life.

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    Then, he suddenly felt a strange force from below pushing him up above the water, where he stayed until the Coast Guard eventually came to get him. Only later did he learn that eyewitnesses had seen the mysterious force that had been keeping him afloat: a sea lion that was propping up his body until the rescue boat arrived.

    #139918
    zn
    Moderator

    #140060
    zn
    Moderator

    #140115
    zn
    Moderator

    Darvio Morrow@DTheKingpin
    I have to share this with yall. I’m with my mother & I go into the gas station and I see this real old white man walk in. Walking slow and gingerly. I happen to look up at his hat and it said “World War 2 veteran”. I’m like wow. Normally when I see people with veteran hats on

    I thank them for their service. And I was going to do that here. But I got distracted, laughing and joking with another customer and I forgot. So as I get back in my car, I see the guy walk back out, slowly, to pump his gas. I pull back around to tell him thank you 4 his service

    At first I’m in the car and he can’t hear me, not even looking my way. So I pull over and get out and walk up to him and say “I just want to thank you for your service.” He looks at me, and he says “I want to tell you something. You got a minute?” I say yes sir.

    He starts telling me about this all black battalion in the war. He says “they kept them separated from us and that was wrong”. And he tells me that they were great fighters and they destroyed Nazi tanks at even a higher rate than the white guys. He says

    “The Germans wanted to know who were these guys.” He said that found out and captured them. He says “the Germans cut their eyes out, cut their hands off and killed them.” And as he’s telling me this I still see the pain and anger in his eyes. Like he’s back on the battlefield.

    He tells me “I captured Germans, I held them prisoner. I never killed anybody. I didn’t know what they did until later. Had I known what they did to those black guys, I would’ve killed every last f**king one of them.” Looking in his eyes I knew he meant every word.

    This man was 96 years old and you could tell that he was still so angry about what the Nazis did. He tells me “there’s not a lot of guys like me left from that war.” I said “God bless you.” He says “He did. I don’t know why, but He did.”

    As I shook hands with him one more time and get back in my car and I’m pulling away, trying to emotionally process all of that, it was a reminder to me: THIS is who we are. To see this old white man enraged all over again as he thinks about how the Nazis treated black soldiers

    that really had an impact on me. What mattered to him was that they were Americans. They were soldiers. They were his countrymen. That was powerful. All of this at the gas station lol. My goodness. God bless you sir. /end

    #140130
    wv
    Participant

    I have liked Curtis White’s writings.

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    https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/technology/living-world-without-stars

     

    #140141
    zn
    Moderator

    #140162
    zn
    Moderator

    #140304
    zn
    Moderator
     
    Czech climber Adam Ondra free-climbing El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Amazing!
    Adam Ondra is a Czech professional rock climber, specializing in lead climbing and bouldering. Rock & Ice magazine described Ondra in 2013 as a prodigy and the leading climber of his generation.
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