Neatorama

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• The Campaign That Sold the Klan
• Actual Breath Of The Wild
• Cocktail Generator
• An Invisible Crown: How to Be an Heiress
• An Honest Trailer for <i>Shrek 2</i>
• The Ultimate Hummingbird Helmet Has 7 Feeders Attached
• Rainbow Lightning Strikes the UK
• These Guys Made Leather Out Of Cactus
• The Photo That Broke Android Phones
• The Bright Blue Graves of Safed Cemetery
• Bizarre Brand Name Blunders

The Campaign That Sold the Klan Posted: 17 Jun 2020 04:31 AM PDT The Ku Klux Klan was born during Reconstruction, but by 1915, there was only one member left- William Joseph Simmons. He had trouble recruiting new members, so he hired professional fundraisers Mary Tyler and Edward Clarke. They managed to draw five million new members between 1920 and 1925 by expanding the organization's mission, because racism against black Americans wasn't enough. So Clarke and Tyler divided the country in eight regions and sent out 1,000 agents to identify the focus of bigotry and fear in their assigned areas: labor-union organizers and communists in the industrial north, Asians on the west coast, Jews and Catholics almost anywhere. They began to expand the Klan's mission, stirring hatred against these groups. The two also tapped into Americans' anger at accelerated social change. They wanted to channel the disapproval of the media that mocked tradition, the rebellious attitude of young people, the immodest behavior of women, and, of course, jazz. Having relatively few adherents in cities, the Klan adopted several attitudes popular in rural areas. They helped enforce Prohibition and they denounced motion pictures. Almost everywhere they found a public yearning for a golden past, where they remembered an America free of foreign influences. Millions were drawn to the Klan's policy of "America for Americans" as well as its sometimes violent enforcement of fundamentalist Protestant values. But it didn't last. While the Klan is still with us, membership fell rapidly after 1925. Read about the campaign to build the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s at the Saturday Evening Post. -via Damn Interesting

Actual Breath Of The Wild Posted: 17 Jun 2020 02:39 AM PDT PointCrow isn't Link, the main character of Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, but he can most definitely emulate Link's experience in the game. The Zelda gamer recreates Breath Of The Wild in his backyard, playing and interacting as if his backyard is actually Hyrule.

Cocktail Generator Posted: 17 Jun 2020 02:39 AM PDT Sometimes we need a drink. Honestly, I've gone through this quarantine period needing something stronger than the red wine available at home. If you're looking for a different concoction to help you drown your worries away, Elle has found an online mixology resource that generates the cocktails for you based on what ingredients you have. Check out makemeacocktail.com and have a blast!  image via wikimedia commons

An Invisible Crown: How to Be an Heiress Posted: 17 Jun 2020 02:39 AM PDT People are drawn to the rich, and many folks will bend over backwards to please them. If one is perceived as very wealthy, they will be offered free things, loans, and even forgiveness for crimes. Quite a few women have leveraged this perception to their advantage as they posed as heiresses, always waiting for their inheritance to come through, while living a glamorous life at others' expense. And often all it takes is a good story that people want to believe. Violet Charlesworth made her money gambling a stolen fortune on the stock market. She grew up in Stafford, a town in the West Midlands, where her father worked as a mechanic. On a trip to nearby Derby, a city of silk mills, Violet Charlesworth launched herself as Miss Violet Gordon. It was 1905 and she was 21 years old. To a shopkeeper in the city, Violet explained that she was the goddaughter of the famed war hero General Charles George Gordon. Almost to her surprise, she managed to elicit a number of silk dresses on credit, including a cherry-red motor cloak, designed to be worn in open-top luxury cars. She made the trip to Derby more often. After several afternoon teas with a patriotic widow, the story solidified: on her 25th birthday, Miss Gordon would inherit £100,000 from the general, who, after amassing a great fortune, had died rather grandly during the 1888 siege of Khartoum. Violet spoke with confidence, holding her teacup with a pinch. By the end, she convinced the widow to lend the dear general's goddaughter her entire savings. An article at affidavit tells the tales of several fake heiresses from the 19th century to 2019. -via Digg

An Honest Trailer for <i>Shrek 2</i> Posted: 17 Jun 2020 12:03 AM PDT Shrek 2 was a sequel that actually deserved to follow in the footsteps of the original. The 2004 movie was deeper than many viewers realized at the time, and still had plenty of fart jokes. What do Screen Junkies think of Shrek 2? Find out in this Honest Trailer made as part of their Summer Blockbuster series, where they look back at the biggest summer movies of past years. There won't be one for 2020, so we may as well wallow in nostalgia, if you can call 2004 nostalgic.

The Ultimate Hummingbird Helmet Has 7 Feeders Attached Posted: 17 Jun 2020 12:03 AM PDT A hummingbird helmet is a helmet with a hummingbird feeder attached to attract hummingbirds to your face. Think of it as similar to a Bear Vest, which is a vest made of beefsteaks to attract bears. Spencer Staley goes all-out with a total of seven feeders hanging from rods extending from a helmet. I really don't see why, with proper supports, it wouldn't be possible to build a helmet with ten times as many supports. I mean, humans went to the Moon and invented Twitter. A hummingbird helmet with seventy feeders is within our potential. -via Born in Space

Rainbow Lightning Strikes the UK Posted: 16 Jun 2020 09:20 PM PDT Rainbow lightning, which is the name of my next Queensrÿche cover band, was spotted by the BBC's Weather Watchers over the past weekend. Why did these two meteorological phenomena appear together? The BBC explains: Firstly, there was a lot of energy within the atmosphere so when the thunderstorms developed there was plenty of electrical charge which produced a lot of lightning. The storms were also quite localised so there were sunny spells between the showers. And lastly, the timing was spot on. As the sun was setting, the angle of the sun was just right with the thunderstorm to form rainbows. So: sorcery. -via Aaron Starmer | Photo: CREEZ1993

These Guys Made Leather Out Of Cactus Posted: 16 Jun 2020 04:55 PM PDT Entrepreneurs from Mexico developed a method of making cacti into vegan leather- and you won't even notice it isn't real leather! When Adrián López Velarde and Marte Cázarez realized that environmental pollution is a serious problem, they were inspired to create vegan leather. The faux-leather is called "Desserto" and is made from cactus, as BoredPanda detailed:  Why cactus, you ask? The answer is simple—this plant doesn't need much water to grow, it's super resilient and strong and it can handle low temperatures without dying. Besides, it's México so there's plenty of cacti there. The vegan leather these guys create is called "Desserto" and it's the world's first environmentally friendly organic material made out of Nopal cactus. image via BoredPanda

The Photo That Broke Android Phones Posted: 16 Jun 2020 04:27 PM PDT Photographers post wallpaper-worthy photos all the time. We save them because we can't take photos as beautiful as theirs, and there's no harm in admitting that. I do it all the time. However, this particular photo of a sunset from landscape photographer Gaurav Agrawal did the unexpected. The photo often made android phones crash when set as wallpaper, PetaPixel details:  Unfortunately, when it came time to export and share the photo after a few edits in Adobe Lightroom, he picked the ProPhoto RGB color space; that, it seems, was the root of the problem. The color space attached to the photo is unreadable by a large number of Android phones, mostly those by Google and Samsung. When set as the wallpaper on the standard version of Android 10, sRGB is required, and the disparity sent these phones into an infinite re-boot loop. The issue is referred to as a "soft-brick," because it was often only fixable by performing a factory reset and losing any data that wasn't backed up. This fact was discovered and shared widely on Twitter, causing the photo to go viral and inadvertently leading to thousands of phones being bricked as some Android users couldn't resist the temptation to try using the photo themselves. Agrawal tells the BBC that he's sad about what happened. Since he's an iPhone user (and always uses a photo of his wife as his phone background) he had no idea that choosing the wrong color space could cause such a kerfuffle. "I didn't do anything intentionally. I'm sad that people ended up having issues." says Agrawal. "I hoped my photograph would have gone 'viral' for a good reason, but maybe that's for another time… I'm going to use another format from now on." image via PetaPixel

The Bright Blue Graves of Safed Cemetery Posted: 16 Jun 2020 04:27 PM PDT Embed from Getty Images In the Israeli town of Safed lies a historical cemetery containing the graves of Jewish holy men among the 40,000 burials. Safed became the center of Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism, several hundred years ago. The cemetery is undergoing some work: an effort to GPS-map the Hebrew epitaphs of Kaballah leaders from the 15th-17th centuries.    With no money available to renovate it, the cemetery has been neglected for years. No one knew the number of the graves, and the records went missing decades ago. In the early 1990s the Safed municipality decided to renovate it by cleaning old graves and roads, building a staircase, and painting selected gravestones blue. When the excavations began, they were in for a shock: Under the paths leading to the famous graves were thousands of other graves, buried under the dirt because of the rains and the sediment flowing down the mountainside. The renovation efforts expose a conundrum. Some believe the buried tombstones must be unearthed and documented for posterity. Since the inscribed markers are mostly limestone, that act in itself exposes them to weathering and destruction. The paint used in the 1990s identifies some graves, but also may have damaged them. Therefore, others believe this sacred burial site should be left as is so the dead can rest in peace. Read about Safed cemetery at Atlas Obscura.

Bizarre Brand Name Blunders Posted: 16 Jun 2020 04:26 PM PDT International marketing can be spectacularly profitable if done right. However, language and cultural differences must be smoothed out before a product is rolled out in a different country. This doesn't always happen, and sometimes there's a magnificently embarrassing screwup that people will talk about for years. Auto companies have been particularly egregious about this. But it's not always a matter of translating English to other languages. Sometimes it goes the other way. To be fair, a lot of these mistranslation events are fairly old, but they continue to happen in the 21st century. How hard would it be to vet these things with a few native speakers before releasing an entire marketing campaign? See all 15 stories in a pictofacts post at Cracked.

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Neatorama

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• Jurassic Park Low-budget Remake
• Work Out Like This Medieval Knight
• How To Encourage Honest Feedback From Your Colleagues If You’re The Boss
• A New Trick Up Adobe’s Sleeve
• What It’s Like To Be A Parent
• History Teacher Reacts To Bill Wurtz’s “History of the Entire World, I Guess”
• Katherin Marchenko's Floating Embroidery
• Kiwi Porn PSA
• Human Chair

Jurassic Park Low-budget Remake Posted: 11 Jun 2020 05:14 PM PDT A homemade version of Jurassic Park complete with cardboard dinosaurs!

Work Out Like This Medieval Knight Posted: 11 Jun 2020 01:16 PM PDT Jean II Le Maingre, who was also known as Boucicaut, was a French knight and military leader in 15th-century France. He is well-known for his outstanding military skill and he was considered back then as the "embodiment of chivalry." He was a man who always prepared his body (and probably his mind, too) for war. Boucicaut traveled from Prussia to the Ottoman Empire, fighting in conflicts that helped define the map of medieval Europe. And he couldn't have done so without a stringent, self-imposed exercise circuit, ideal for someone traipsing around in a clattering metal outfit. And because he always made his body ready for battle, it wouldn't be surprising if he did fitness feats that cannot be achieved by an average human being. Boucicaut's most astonishing fitness feat, though, was scaling a ladder while clad in his 60-pound suit of armor, taking each rung with both hands at the same time, without his feet to support him. What was his workout like? Find out over at Atlas Obscura. (Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

How To Encourage Honest Feedback From Your Colleagues If You’re The Boss Posted: 11 Jun 2020 12:55 PM PDT People see us differently than how we see ourselves. While you might see yourself in a positive light, other people don't, and more often than not, they would point out what's wrong with you, and sometimes with brutal honesty. If you're the boss, however, getting negative feedback might be something very rare for you, because one does not simply give his boss honest feedback, in fear of getting fired. As a leader, you may believe that you're approachable to your employees, but research shows that you're scarier than you think. I once received this exact feedback during a team member's exit interview: "You're scary." [...] The good news is that there are things you can do to solicit honest, useful, and timely feedback from your team. Here are four strategies to help you collect important impressions on your performance. The strategies are as follows: Call yourself out first Ask for ideas, not judgments Cultivate an air of calm Incentivize future feedback Head over at Fast Company to know more about these things. (Image Credit: Pixabay)

A New Trick Up Adobe’s Sleeve Posted: 11 Jun 2020 12:55 PM PDT Instagram is a social media platform where people dump their best photos. The app has a built-in filter feature which users can use to make their already fabulous photos even more fabulous. Now, the king of design editing softwares, Adobe, has released a new camera app with the powers of Adobe Photoshop, which makes Instagram's filters look obsolete. The app is called Photoshop Camera. Adobe has put some of the powerful photo-editing capabilities of its Photoshop software into a new camera app that uses AI to do all the hard work for you. But the app doesn't just apply filters you can preview before you snap a pic—Photoshop Camera can even replace unwanted parts of a shot while you're still framing it. The new app, available for free on Android and iOS (a paid Adobe Creative Cloud subscription isn't needed) is part of the company's recent efforts to make its powerful image-editing and creative tools available and accessible to a wider user base. It's an approach that, for the most part, hasn't compromised the advanced capabilities of Adobe's image-editing tools. That's thanks to the company's artificial intelligence system, called Sensei, which automates the editing process for novice users who don't have hours to spend on a photo, or years to learn and master a piece of software as complex as Photoshop. Amazing! Learn more about the capabilities of the app over at Gizmodo. (Image Credit: Andrew Liszewski/ Gizmodo)

What It’s Like To Be A Parent Posted: 11 Jun 2020 12:55 PM PDT Taking care of children is a thrilling and challenging task, one full of ups, downs, twists, turns, and mishaps — colorful experiences which you could write or draw about. "Professional comedy writer and amateur father" James Breakwell does just that in his webcomic series. Where the Unbelievably Bad Webcomic series excels is character development and storytelling. It unravels Breakwell's everyday life with his wife and their four daughters, providing insightful and humorous insights into the chaotic reality of the modern family. Breakwell's kids are the starting point for almost all of his jokes but his comics are an homage to parenting in general. "Everybody's kids are weird and my comics celebrate that," Breakwell said, "anyone who says they have normal children is lying." Check out many of his stories over at BoredPanda. What was your most memorable experience being a parent? (Image Credit: James Breakwell/ BoredPanda)

History Teacher Reacts To Bill Wurtz’s “History of the Entire World, I Guess” Posted: 11 Jun 2020 12:55 PM PDT Bill Wurtz's "History of the Entire World, I Guess" may just be considered as the greatest of the many history videos that can be found in YouTube for two reasons. The first reason was it was able to tell the whole history of the world in just a short amount of time. The second was it was able to teach in an engaging and interesting way. Unfortunately, because the video constantly bombards you with historical facts, you won't find time to process the information in your brain, and you might have to watch it in segments, or watch it for several times. Mr. Terry helps us break down the many historical events that Bill Wurtz covers in his video, and he explains why these moments in history are important. While the video may be a bit long (lasting about 51 minutes), it's not boring. (Video Credit: Mr. Terry History/ YouTube)

Katherin Marchenko's Floating Embroidery Posted: 11 Jun 2020 12:54 PM PDT   View this post on Instagram My typical Sunday morning rituals - wake up and embroider in my pyjamas 🦄 A post shared by Embroidery on tulle ♡ Мoscow (@kathrin_marchenko) on Nov 24, 2019 at 1:19am PST That's the adjective that I will use. Marchenko embroiders images on translucent tulle, which gives them the appearance of suspending in midair or, in the case of this mermaid, mid-water. She explains to Bored Panda that the effect of tulle is that "it makes embroidery visually more voluminous."   View this post on Instagram ♥ A post shared by Embroidery on tulle ♡ Мoscow (@kathrin_marchenko) on May 23, 2020 at 10:47am PDT   View this post on Instagram New Study "Cupid and Psyche" 🕊 SOLD .............................................................................................. Available now in my shop on Etsy ♡ Link in bio and stories ♥ #creativityxgigi A post shared by Embroidery on tulle ♡ Мoscow (@kathrin_marchenko) on May 6, 2020 at 11:08am PDT   View this post on Instagram Third piece of the set "Touche Amore" ♡ ——————————————————————————— Available now 🤎 for art inquiries email • marchenko.marc.k@mail.ru • 🕊 #creativityxgigi A post shared by Embroidery on tulle ♡ Мoscow (@kathrin_marchenko) on Apr 28, 2020 at 9:44am PDT

Kiwi Porn PSA Posted: 11 Jun 2020 12:53 PM PDT This public service announcement from New Zealand aims to get parents to drive home the fact that pornography doesn't depict sex, or anything at all, realistically. It's part of their Keep It Real Online campaign, and it's truly funny. -via Boing Boing

Human Chair Posted: 11 Jun 2020 06:44 AM PDT View this post on Instagram This is my body. A post shared by Ellen Sheidlin (@sheidlina) on Jun 14, 2019 at 4:09am PDT The enigmatic artist Ellen Sheidlin offers no clue as to the meaning of her sculpture aside from the words "This is my body." It immediately reminded me of the liturgy of the Eucharist, but an Instagram commenter suggests that it is an allusion to a famous horror manga about a person who lives inside a chair.

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Neatorama

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• Complete Strangers Recreate the Pasta Scene From Lady & The Tramp
• Rebel Since 1977 - The Rebel Spirit Grows Stronger With Age
• Sandra Day O'Connor: A Case for Justice
• Why You Should Never Play Hide-And-Seek With A Cat
• Inspired by a Pizza
• Have You Had Your Stress Dream Today?
• Revenge of the Lunch Lady
• Photos Of Winter Weather Turning Cars Into Works Of Art
• What Would Happen If You Just Left Your Stove Burner On?
• Comic Characters Who Started Out As A Joke
• The Lost Version of <i>Dracula</i>
• Kick-Ass Movie Poster Art By Frank McCarthy
• Too Old To Die Young - Running Up That Hill
• Bird Dubstep
• Amazing Pictures of America's National Parks
• Calvin and Hobbes Nursery

Complete Strangers Recreate the Pasta Scene From Lady & The Tramp Posted: 10 Feb 2017 03:59 AM PST (Video Link) Lady and the Tramp's pasta scene is one of the most classic scenes in animation history. But while it's cute to see dogs roll meatballs with their noses and suck on a string of pasta, it's kind of weird (and hilarious) to see humans do the exact same thing. It's even funnier when those humans are total strangers who are trying to be polite and not creep each other out while still trying to slurp a noodle together. It's surprising how hard it is to find a shared noodle without breaking it, but then that's exactly what makes this video so fun.

Rebel Since 1977 - The Rebel Spirit Grows Stronger With Age Posted: 10 Feb 2017 02:00 AM PST Rebel Since 1977 by Olipop The forces of darkness don't stay in the shadows for long, but every time a new dark lord tries to take control over people's lives those who can't sit by and do nothing rise up and rebel. It happened in the 60s, it happened again in 1977, and it appears the rebellion is rising up once again, ready to take down a new force of evil threatening to take away our freedom. And if you think Rebels become weaker with age think again, because we've spent the last four decades training, honing our skills so we can cut down whoever stands in the way of our freedom... Show the world you're an old school fan with this Rebel Since 1977 t-shirt by Olipop, it's a classic way to keep on rebellin' well into your golden years! Visit Olipop's Facebook fan page, official website, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more mighty geeky designs: Negan Chooses You Viva la Rebelion Mouth Breather I Walked 10 km for Nothing View more designs by Olipop | More Movie T-shirts | New T-Shirts Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!

Sandra Day O'Connor: A Case for Justice Posted: 10 Feb 2017 02:00 AM PST For 191 years, the United States Supreme Court was an all-boys' club -until an Arizona cowgirl stepped in and became themost powerful woman in the country. Sandra Day O’Connor’s desk was a mess. The day before, on September 25, 1981, she had been sworn in as the first woman on the Supreme Court. Her new office was already littered with briefs and cert requests. Not to mention nearly 10,000 missives from citizens across the nation—packages of hand-knit socks, family pictures, homemade fudge. Then there was the hate mail. “Back to your kitchen and home female!” read one letter. “This is a job for a man and only he can make rough decisions.” The insults didn’t faze her. Neither did more pragmatic concerns, including the fact that nobody had ever thought to place a women’s restroom near the courtroom—because for 191 years, only men had sat on the Supreme Court. The closest ladies’ room required O’Connor to walk down an endless hallway. So she commandeered a nearby restroom instead. O’Connor also took ownership of another boys’ room: the basketball court above the courtroom, jokingly called “the highest court in the land.” She wanted to exercise, and after she heard that other women in the building—secretaries and a few lone female clerks—did too, she reserved the gym and asked the local YWCA to send an aerobics teacher. She even ordered custom T-shirts that read Women Work Out at the Supreme Court. The class became a daily ritual.   By the end of her first month, Sandra Day O’Connor had done more than break the Supreme Court’s glass ceiling—she’d stolen its spotlight. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, she wrote opinions that shaped major social and political issues, making decisions that led Tom Goldstein, a Supreme Court expert and founder of SCOTUSblog, to call her “one of the five most influential justices of the century.” The fact that this Arizona cowgirl was the first woman on the court, he says, is “more of an asterisk.” How she got there, however, is another story. It was a hot day on the Lazy B ranch when 15-year-old Sandra Day learned how to change a tire. Her father, H.A. Day, and his ranch hands were tending to cattle far from home, where Sandra was loading a pickup truck with the crew’s supplies and lunch. She left at 7 in the morning—plenty of time to reach the cowboys by mealtime—and drove into the desert alone. The sun was rising. Sandra’s grandfather had bought this 250-square-mile stretch of windswept desert straddling the Arizona–New Mexico border in 1880. Fifty years later, when Sandra was born, the family lived in a one-bedroom house with no running water, eking out a living repairing wells and raising cattle. Their closest neighbor was 25 miles away. (Image credit: Flickr user Fairfax Library Foundation) Driving over dirt and sand, the Chevy was more rickety than usual. Sandra stopped, hopped out, and noticed that a rear tire had pancaked. She figured out how to jack up the car, grabbed a lug wrench, and twisted the lug nuts as hard as she could. They wouldn’t budge. Rusted. Watching the sun rise higher in the sky, she propped her foot on the wrench and began jumping until the rust cracked. Sandra reached the roundup well past lunchtime, and the men were branding cattle. She explained that she had woken up early, that she’d had a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, that the lug nuts were rusted tight, that she was lucky to be there at all. It sounds like a triumph, but her father was unimpressed. “You should have started a lot earlier,” he said. That was the end of their conversation. No excuses. Living alone with a bunch of cowboys in the middle of the desert breeds a certain type of pragmatism. For Sandra, days on the ranch could begin lying on her back reading Nancy Drew and end with the mercy killing of a calf. She rode horses, drove tractors, branded cattle, shot .22-caliber rifles, and tamed a pet bobcat (named Bob). When she lay in bed at night, she listened to coyotes. “We were ranchers,” O’Connor recalled in a 2008 speech at Stanford. “We didn’t know lawyers or judges.” Sandra joined her father and his ranch hands on roundups, steering cattle and spending nights without a pillow or bathroom in sight. In her memoir, Lazy B, she wrote, “It had been an all-male domain. Changing it to accommodate a female was probably my first initiation into joining an all-men’s club.” Soon, her younger sister and niece rode along without objection. The ranch, however, was no formal education, so Sandra’s parents sent her to an all-girls’ private school in El Paso, Texas, where she lived a double life with her maternal grandmother. There, she rubbed shoulders with society girls and their families, learning about the right clothes, ice cream socials, and graceful houses. Knowing how to don a lavender suit with a perfect bob gave the Western gal a polished finish that made her, in the words of Eric Citron, a future clerk, “One of the most enchanting people you will ever meet in your entire life.” At 16, after skipping two grades, Sandra entered Stanford University. She majored in economics, but a law professor, Harry Rathbun, changed her life. Each Sunday, Rathbun invited students into his home to discuss the meaning of life, making passionate arguments that each individual had a civic duty to serve his or her community. Sandra was struck. She’d spent her life as a self-reliant cowgirl, miles from the closest town. Now, she felt an obligation to serve. “He was the most inspiring teacher I ever had,” she said. After graduating, the 20-year-old applied to Stanford Law School. She was admitted, just one of four women in her class. “I had no understanding then about the almost total lack of opportunities for women in the legal profession,” she’d say. “Had I realized how hard it would be to get a job as a woman lawyer, I would have chosen another path.” Women have been symbols of justice since the Egyptian goddess Ma’at, but men have kept the scales of justice from them for just as long. By O’Connor’s time, a statue of Lady Justice adorned most courthouses, but actual lady justices—or even lady lawyers—were still very much unwelcome. It started in 1869, when Myra Bradwell attempted to become America’s first female lawyer. She passed the Illinois bar exam, but the state supreme court refused to give her a law license. When Bradwell brought the case to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1872, she lost. The justices deemed that “the natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life,” and described a woman seeking such a career as “repugnant.” For the next seven decades, states could legally deny women the opportunity to practice law—and did. (Charlotte E. Ray, the first black female lawyer, was admitted to the Washington, D.C., bar in 1872 because she went by her initials and the committee assumed she was a man.) At the turn of the century, famed lawyer Clarence Darrow told a group of woman attorneys, “You have not a high grade of intellect ... I doubt if you [can] ever make a living.” (Image credit: Flickr user The Aspen Institute) Things began to change by World War II, when a shortage of men prompted qualified women—many of whom had settled for jobs as legal librarians, stenographers, and secretaries—to obtain jobs at law firms. Some law schools saw this as a problem. When Harvard president James B. Conant was asked how the law school was handling the shortage, he crowed, “We have 75 students, and we haven’t had to admit any women.” By 1950, only three percent of lawyers were women. Sandra Day paid no attention. She was too busy excelling in law school, where she edited the Law Reviewand ranked third in her class. After graduating in 1952, she realized history was stacked against her: Firms refused to interview a woman. When she finally snagged an interview with California’s Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, one partner asked her, “Miss Day, how do you type?” He was offering her a secretarial job, which she declined. When Sandra heard that the district attorney of San Mateo County had hired a woman in the past, she visited the office and asked for a job. The county attorney waved her off, saying there were no vacancies. Sandra insisted she’d work for free. They didn’t have enough desks, he protested. She later got the job—with no pay—because she convinced the secretary to share desk space with her. After marrying John O’Connor, whom she met at Stanford, Sandra briefly worked in Germany, then moved to Phoenix to open a small walk-in law practice in a suburban strip mall, the kind of place where customers came in unannounced to complain about grocery bills and shifty landlords. It wasn’t prestigious, but it kept her in the game. Then her babysitter quit. In those days, having children was career suicide. But in O’Connor’s case, it was the best move she ever made. “Small children need supervision day and night,” she wrote mental_floss in an email. “With two little children I needed to be ‘at home’ with them.” She stayed “at home” for about six years—while volunteering for enough civic and community groups to fill a couple of lifetimes. Embed from Getty Images   O’Connor served on the Maricopa County Board of Adjustment and Appeals and the Governor’s Committee on Marriage and the Family, chaired the Maricopa County Juvenile Detention Home Visiting Board, and was an administrative assistant at the Arizona State Hospital. She wrote questions for the Arizona bar exam, volunteered at a school for minorities, worked as an adviser to the Salvation Army, and acted as district chair for the local chapter of the Republican party. All that (and more) while practicing a little law on the side. And raising three boys.   Politicians noticed. Those connections helped O’Connor—who still could not get hired at a private firm—earn a part-time job at the attorney general’s office, where she climbed her way up to assistant attorney general. Her work impressed Arizona’s governor so much that he selected her to fill a vacant seat in the state senate. Within months, her Republican colleagues voted her majority leader, making O’Connor America’s first female majority leader of a state legislature. O’Connor knew what she wanted: to remove sexism from the books. She searched for laws biased against women and quietly worked to change them. The Republicans had a razor-thin majority—negotiations were essential. She regularly hosted parties at her adobe house, inviting leaders from all sides to eat homemade burritos, not to broker deals, but to get to know one another. Her cooking was legendary, but at work she was all business. “With Sandra O’Connor, there ain’t no Miller Time,” one colleague quipped. She was just as fastidious, if not nitpicky, as a stateswoman. (One time she introduced an amendment to remove a single misplaced comma from a bill.) She hit the second shift of motherhood hard. Once, when a budget deadline loomed, a fellow legislator moaned that it would be impossible to reach a compromise before midnight. O’Connor insisted they would finish by 6 p.m.: Her son was leaving for summer camp, and she wanted to be home in time to bake cookies before he left. It worked. In 1975, O’Connor won a judgeship in Maricopa County, where she built a reputation as a no-nonsense taskmaster who followed the law to the letter, even when it conflicted with her beliefs. In one case, she sentenced a woman to five to 10 years in prison for passing $3,500 in bad checks. The woman’s husband had abandoned her, and the jail sentence meant the state would take her children. After ruling, O’Connor cried in her chambers. In the spring of 1981, President Ronald Reagan learned that Justice Potter Stewart was resigning. Months earlier, as he campaigned for the presidency, Reagan had courted women voters by promising to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court. When his advisers tried to talk him out of it, pointing to the dozens of available men for the job, Reagan insisted. A promise was a promise. In April 1981, two Reagan staffers flew to Phoenix to meet with the candidate, who presented them with a salmon mousse and a stunning knowledge of constitutional jurisprudence. Dazzled, they invited her back to Washington to meet with the president. Reagan’s earliest ranches may have been Hollywood sets with plywood saguaros and stunt horses, but he was a sensible westerner at heart. O’Connor told Reagan’s staff she’d meet them in front of a drugstore, wearing a lavender suit. Once they met, they talked about horse riding and life on ranches. Afterward, he refused to meet with anyone else. Ruth McGregor, who became O’Connor’s first clerk, remembers hearing about the nomination on the radio: “I was, like most women in law, literally overcome. I was driving my car and had to pull over to the side because I just burst into tears.” Though religious conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Jesse Helms tried to sink the nomination on the grounds that O’Connor would uphold Roe v. Wade, the Senate confirmed her with a record-setting 99-0. The Supreme Court, 191 years old, had gone coed. The fame was suffocating. “I had never expected or aspired to be a Supreme Court justice,” O’Connor said in the Deseret News in 1988. “My first year on the court made me long at times for obscurity.” She tried to answer every letter she received, even the countless invitations from Washington socialites. She and her husband were happy to dance the night away, but the learning curve was so steep that she had to ditch the dance floor (and sleep) to read briefs and edit opinions. O’Connor knew she needed to establish herself as a jurist. “Eternally a ranch girl, she wanted solutions that really worked and had little patience for esoteric theory that had no grounding in reality,” recalls O’Connor clerk RonNell Andersen Jones in a SCOTUSblog retrospective. Advocates before the court were guaranteed that O’Connor would ask the first question, and it “would be overwhelmingly practical,” Goldstein said. Her fellow justices ritually asked how an argument squared with legal precedents, but O’Connor wanted to know how it affected people. “A wise old woman and a wise old man will reach the same conclusion,” O’Connor says, but she acknowledges she brought experiences that her brothers on the court didn’t have. She was a key vote on cases about gender equality. In Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, for example, she decided that a women’s state nursing college couldn’t exclude men, knowing that letting men into a traditionally female profession would probably bring about higher salaries. She became famous for her narrow opinions, which avoided creating broad, sweeping rules of law that might lead to new injustices. Even when voting for the majority, she often wrote concurring opinions that made the majority’s decision less broad. (In one voting rights case, she wrote a concurring opinion to her own opinion.) The philosophy distinguished O’Connor as unpredictable. Unless she had encountered a similar case before, it was hard to know what she’d decide. By the 1990s, with consistent blocs to her left and right, she was the deciding vote. “She wouldn’t have felt her vote was any different than anyone else’s vote,” Citron says. Indeed, O’Connor was the glue of the court. “She knew you have to talk—it’s not a question of talking about the court stuff, you have to know people,” recalls NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg. She set up regular lunches with the justices and took her clerks and staff out hiking, fly-fishing, and white-water rafting. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1999, O’Connor was the first person to call her in the hospital. She reached out to the community, too: In 2001, she made a guest appearance at Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre to bring King Lear to trial. (The verdict? “Not mad.”) Retired since 2006, O’Connor sees the current trio of lady justices as her legacy, but her footprint is vastly larger. “We really can’t exaggerate how much it affected things,” McGregor says. “This was still a time in the legal profession where women were regarded as not capable … Once someone is a member of the Supreme Court and is doing the job well, it’s really hard to argue that women aren’t qualified.” The statistics don’t lie. Today, the ratio of women to men studying law tickles 50 percent. Women make up about 33 percent of lawyers and 27 percent of state judges. While the numbers aren’t equal, O’Connor kicked the door wide open so that one day, they may be.  ________________________________ The article above by Lizzie Jacobs appeared in the March-April 2016 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission. Feed your brain by visiting mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog today for more!

Why You Should Never Play Hide-And-Seek With A Cat Posted: 09 Feb 2017 11:59 PM PST (Image Link) Most dogs don't get the hiding part of hide and seek, although they are really good at seeking thanks to their keen senses, but if cats want to hide and stay hidden, even in plain sight, they have the power to do so. (Image Link) Cats have mastered the arts of camouflage, burrowing and diversion, and if all else fails they will just use their ninja like climbing abilities to head to higher ground, so they can ambush the seeker if need be. (Image Link) So if your cat invites you to play hide-and-seek you may want to politely decline and distract them with some catnip, or else you're playing right into their paws. (Image Link) See Photographic Proof That Cats Are The Greatest Hide And Seek Champions Ever here

Inspired by a Pizza Posted: 09 Feb 2017 09:59 PM PST Video game designer Toru Iwatani wanted to get away from the shooter games that dominated arcades in the 1970s. This video tells how he came up with the idea for Pac-Man. (YouTube link) At the time, Pac-Man was simpler than it needed to be, but its very simplicity was a genius idea that made the game stand out among the crowd. Video Game Story Time explains Iwatani's reasoning for what became the video game icon of the 20th century. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Have You Had Your Stress Dream Today? Posted: 09 Feb 2017 07:59 PM PST Our dreams transport us to a magical kingdom full of fun and imagination when we're young, but then our pragmatic adult minds come in and take a wrecking ball to the kingdom, killing our imaginary friends in the process. This transition is sadly unavoidable because, as this comic by Dami Lee shows, we can't maintain a carefree state of mind when stress dreams keep reminding us magic kingdoms are expensive and really far away. -Via Geeks Are Sexy

Revenge of the Lunch Lady Posted: 09 Feb 2017 05:59 PM PST In 2009, British chef Jamie Oliver visited Huntington, West Virginia, and was appalled at the processed food the schools were serving. He brought in a test kitchen and developed recipes that used fresh produce and a variety of ingredients (for the TV show Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution), but got little in the way of thanks. For one thing, the kids did not like the food. Another problem was that his dishes did not meet federal nutritional standards for the school lunch program. Besides, there was a set budget for meals that schools could not afford to step over. What to do? Cabell County food service director Rhonda McCoy went to work, and made it happen. But to understand the difficulties in serving good food, that kids like, that meets federal nutrition standards, within a budget, in a school kitchen, you have to know a little about the changes the U.S. school lunch program has undergone in its 70 year existence. It's a story of differing goals, conflicts of interest, lobbying, budget cutbacks, subsidies, and grants. You'll get a good overview of McCoy's work and why it will be hard to replicate everywhere, at Highline. (Image credit: Sam Kaplan)

Photos Of Winter Weather Turning Cars Into Works Of Art Posted: 09 Feb 2017 03:59 PM PST (Image Link) Jack Frost is one amazing artist, but the cool, muted palette of winter is a bit limiting, so Jack has to go looking for places to put up his art other than a canvas or a city wall- so he slaps coats of cold on our cars. (Image Link) His icy art comes in many forms, from simple sheets to dangerously avant garde icicles, but my favorite car-based works by Frost involve feathers. (Image Link) But Jack refuses to restrict himself to any one style of art, and for every pretty and pleasant work he creates Jack counters with an edgier piece that really challenges the viewer. This work challenges the car owner to open their door without shattering the window! (Image Link) See 10+ Times Winter Turned Cars Into Art here

What Would Happen If You Just Left Your Stove Burner On? Posted: 09 Feb 2017 01:59 PM PST My mother used to worry about leaving the iron on when she went somewhere. That doesn't happen much anymore, as fewer people even have electric irons. But the common trope is worrying about having left the stove on when you go out of the house. What's the worst that could happen? John Drengenberg of Underwriters Laboratories explains why you shouldn't worry about the stove itself. "A stove is designed to run indefinitely," says Drengenberg. "Do we recommend that? Absolutely not." While it's not the best idea to leave an open flame unattended, If you leave your stove burner on, your house will, in all likelihood, not burn down. UL tests just about every stove that hits the market. Part of that testing involves ensuring they hit thermal stability. In other words, they turn the stove on, and check the temperature of the burner, and keep checking the temperature until it stops increasing — just to make sure the burner doesn't ultimately set the entire stove on fire. So the burner is not going to cause a problem itself. The problem is when you leave something on top of that burner, which I have learned from the experience of several ruined cooking pans. Read more about the danger of leaving the stove on at Digg. (Image credit: Christian Smith)

Comic Characters Who Started Out As A Joke Posted: 09 Feb 2017 11:59 AM PST Rocket Raccoon became a big hit with fans after appearing in Guardians of the Galaxy, The Tick is about to have his third TV show, and Howard the Duck got his own (albeit crappy) movie decades before Spider-Man. Know what else these characters all have in common? They all started out as joke characters that became seriously popular. Rocket Raccoon was initially named Rocky, created as an homage to the Beatles song, but after his first few guest appearances he became popular enough to get his own mini-series. Then we didn't see him again for like 25 years...but now Rocket's one of the most popular Marvel Comics characters of all time! The Tick started out as an absurdist parody of superheroes Ben Edlund created for the New England Comics newsletter, and folks liked The Tick so much he became the comic chain's mascot. Ben began drawing Tick strips for the NEC newsletter, and then the company got into the business of making their own comics and started releasing The Tick as a series. Lastly there's my favorite cigar chompin' duck Howard, who was created by Steve Gerber as a gag but became a pluckin' hero. Howard came from an alternate Earth full of funny animals instead of humans, so he was the perfect everyduck to star in a comic series that satirizes American culture and genre fiction. The original Howard The Duck series dealt with existentialist themes and life in a multiverse, and this is the series' main joke, according to Gerber- "that life's most serious moments and most incredibly dumb moments are often distinguishable only by a momentary point of view." See 15 Popular Comic Book Characters That Started As Jokes here

The Lost Version of <i>Dracula</i> Posted: 09 Feb 2017 09:59 AM PST Author Valdimar Ásmundsson translated Bram Stoker's novel Dracula into Icelandic in 1900, when the novel was only three years old. He called it Makt Myrkranna, which means Powers of Darkness. It was little-known outside of Iceland, but has been re-translated into English and is now available as Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula. It is very different from the novel we know. For context, Powers of Darkness, which has been published in English by the Overlook Press, spends over 75 percent of its length detailing Thomas Harker’s (not Jonathan) stay in Castle Dracula, which is devoid of two of the Count’s famed brides. Luckily, it is occasionally filled with secret half-ape vampire relatives who seem to worship demons while sacrificing half-nude young girls in the basement with “lascivious” glee. If only Francis Ford Coppola had known about this 25 years ago, no? In Powers, Dracula is a Darwinian strongman who admires socialists and anarchists, yet simultaneously wishes to rule them while ushering in a new world order through a secret international conspiracy teeming with Napoleonic undertones. Ásmundsson even unintentionally anticipated the elements that cinematic storytellers would gravitate to in the ensuing century: the suave continental villain who makes parlor room visits, and the erotic ecstasy he and his ilk tempt all in their path with. The shadowy unkempt cadaver of Stoker’s novel takes on a militaristic authoritarian sheen here that is both undercooked and fascinating. So how did that happen? Was it embellished, a work of fan fiction, or did Ásmundsson use an earlier draft of Bram Stoker's Dracula? Read about the mysterious new publication and its history at Den of Geek.

Kick-Ass Movie Poster Art By Frank McCarthy Posted: 09 Feb 2017 08:59 AM PST Movie poster artwork is supposed to capture the feel of the film, but over the years creativity has been replaced with generic mass appeal, leaving movie posters looking dull and lifeless. But it's hard to tell just how boring they've become until you check out these action packed movie posters by Frank McCarthy. Frank's posters were made for people who like to watch movies full of action, and his posters are so dynamic they're often more exciting to view than the movies they're advertising! Frank created amazing poster artwork for movies like Where Eagles Dare, The Dirty Dozen, The Dark of the Sun (aka The Mercenaries) and Thunderball, and his art style influenced generations of comic artists looking to put the "pop" back in pop culture. See The Kick-Ass Movie Poster Art Of Frank McCarthy here

Too Old To Die Young - Running Up That Hill Posted: 09 Feb 2017 07:59 AM PST Too Old to Die Young by Mitxel Remember how much people used to talk about living fast and dying young, man, that mentality seems so far from cool nowadays- because there's so much livin' to do. It's easy to feel like the walls are about to come crashing in, and with the state of the world today it's hard to remain hopeful for the future, but we still have so much enjoyment ahead of us and so many reasons to want to grow old and die whenever. And despite what we might think during these dark times there is still good in the world, and there are many good sides to mellowing out and leaving that fast living behind you, so settle in and enjoy the ride until you're the last one riding... Show the world you survived your YA years with this Too Old to Die Young t-shirt by Mitxel, it's a refreshing take on growing gray gracefully. Visit Mitxel's Facebook fan page, official website and Twitter, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more brick-tastically geeky designs: SkaTee-Rex Audrey Stardust Caffeine Please Red Rum View more designs by Mitxel | More Funny T-shirts | New T-Shirts Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!

Bird Dubstep Posted: 09 Feb 2017 07:59 AM PST Joe Penna, who we've seen before as Mystery Guitar Man, created a new dubstep song completely made of bird sounds and drums. Oh yeah, and a little bit of Sir David Attenborough. Don't let the word "dubstep" turn you off; the song is less than a minute long. (YouTube link) Granted, it helps when you use birds that imitate other sounds, such as the lyrebird and parrots. But the result is still impressive. -via Laughing Squid

Amazing Pictures of America's National Parks Posted: 09 Feb 2017 06:59 AM PST We previously wrote about the most beautiful National Parks in every state, but that only allowed for one picture from each park. For those aching for more beauty in their life, this Distractify article features 24 more pictures that remind us just how incredible the Park System is.  While every state may not be represented and some parks are even photographed more than once, each image is simply stunning. So don't miss the full list over on Distractify.

Calvin and Hobbes Nursery Posted: 09 Feb 2017 05:59 AM PST Imgur user overflight wanted a Calvin and Hobbes-themed nursery. Inspired by other such projects, she painted a large mural on one wall, showing Calvin and his tiger chilling in a tree. She added some framed artwork, and friends filled in the rest with gifts. You can see pictures of the work in progress and the whole finished nursery at TVOM.

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