An Italian Mother
Mrs. Ravioli comes to visit her son Anthony for dinner. He lives with a female roommate, Maria.During the course of the meal, his mother couldn't help but notice how pretty Anthony's roommate was. She had long been suspicious of a relationship between the two, and this had only made her more curious.
Over the course of the evening, while watching the two interact, she started to wonder if there was more between Anthony and his roommate than met the eye.
Reading his mom's thoughts, Anthony volunteered, 'I know what you must be thinking, but I assure you, Maria and I are just roommates.'
About a week later, Maria came to Anthony saying, 'Ever since your mother came to dinner, I've been unable to find the silver sugar bowl. You don't suppose she took it, do you?'
Well, I doubt it, but I'll email her, just to be sure.' So he sat down and wrote an email:
Dear Mama,
But the fact remains that it has been missing ever since you were here for dinner.
Love, Anthony
Several days later, Anthony received a response email from his Mama which read:
Dear Son,
I'm not saying that you 'do' sleep with Maria, and I'm not saying that you 'do not' sleep with her.
But the fact remains that if she was sleeping in her “OWN bed”, she would have found the sugar bowl by now.
Love, Mama
Moral: Never lie to your Mama .
Dmitriy Badin colorized 124-year-old footage of a snowball fight in Lyon, France.
As winter approaches, it’s easy to feel all doom and gloom. However, the cold weather brings the potential of snow, and those of us who are kids at heart know that only means one thing: snowball fights! People have been enjoying friendly winter warfare for centuries, and thanks to YouTuber Dmitriy Badin, you can now watch an epic battle from 124 years ago in color.
The original footage was taken by Louis Lumière of the Lumière Brothers, who captured the good old-fashioned snowball fight in 1896 on the streets of Lyon, France. The Lumière Brothers were filmmaking pioneers, and captured some of the first motion pictures ever made. In this particular silent film, titled Bataille de boules de neige (Snowball Fight), you can just about make out the figures going head to head, but it’s difficult to see any details due to the video’s grainy quality. However, the historical footage was recently colorized by Badin, revealing the subjects' facial features and even some clothing details.
The First Licensed Female Doctors
The three women pictured in this incredible photograph taken on this day in 1885 -- Anandibai Joshi of India,
Keiko Okami of Japan, and Sabat Islambouli of Syria -- each became the first licensed female doctors in their respective countries. The three were students at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania; one of the only places in the world at the time where women could study medicine.
As Mallika Rao writes in HuffPost, "If the timing doesn't seem quite right, that's understandable. In 1885, women in the U.S. still couldn't vote, nor were they encouraged to learn very much. Popular wisdom decreed that studying was a threat to motherhood." Given this, how did three women from around the world end up studying there to become doctors? The credit, according to Christopher Woolf of PRI's The World, goes to the Quakers who "believed in women’s rights enough to set up the WMCP way back in 1850 in Germantown.”
Woolf added, "It was the first women’s medical college in the world, and immediately began attracting foreign students unable to study medicine in their home countries. First they came from elsewhere in North America and Europe, and then from further afield. Women, like Joshi in India and Keiko Okami in Japan, heard about WMCP, and defied expectations of society and family to travel independently to America to apply, then figure out how to pay for their tuition and board... . Besides the international students, it also produced the nation’s first Native American woman doctor, Susan La Flesche, while African Americans were often students as well. Some of whom, like Eliza Grier, were former slaves."
How Animals and Plants Are Evolving in Cities
In cities, evolution occurs constantly, as countless plants, animals and insects adapt to human-made habitats in spectacular ways. Evolutionary biologist Menno Schilthuizen calls on peculiar beings such as fast food-loving mice and self-cooling snails to illustrate the ever-transforming wonders of urban wildlife -- and explains how you can observe this phenomenon in real-time, thanks to a global network of enthusiastic citizen scientists.