Page 51 - Best of the Month

Mickey Mouse's trademark white gloves have racist origins!

Mickey's Mellerdrammer is a short film released by Disney in 1933. The premise is that of Mickey and friends putting on a stage production of Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

In the production, Mickey plays Uncle Tom. Mickey was dressed in blackface: Exaggerated orange lips, bushy sidewhiskers made out of cotton, and his now-famous white gloves.

This film, along with other films released by Disney, led to the belief that Walt Disney himself was racist. However, most Disney scholars agree that Disney was not racist, but rather racially insensitive, as many people from his time were.

In either case, now you know where Mickey got his white gloves. The cartoon was probably not controversial at the time, but the perception changed as time passed and people's attitudes towards racial insensitivity changed.

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YouTube intentionally freezes view counts of popular new videos at 301 views!

If you're ever one of the first people to see a YouTube video that's gonna get a lot of views, you might have noticed that the video can have thousands of likes, yet only about 301 views. People always comment on how stupid it is, or how little sense it makes. In reality, it's an anti-fraud tactic that YouTube has enacted to prevent cheaters.

When a video becomes really popular, YouTube tries to verify that every view is a real view. This is to prevent illegitimate views. What is an illegitimate view? Views from bots are not counted. They also want to prevent people who are baited into a video and leave after a few seconds.

Why is this a big deal? Views are viewed as currency on YouTube. It helps YouTube stars get sponsors, and actually make a living off of a YouTube channel. This is why YouTube wants to keep the views as legitimate as possible so that only people with real talent rise of the top of the YouTube ranks.

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An orangutan learned how to spear fish by watching humans do it!

The first time an orangutan was documented using a tool was in 1994, when Carel van Schaik observed orangutans developing tools to help themselves eat. They were using sticks to pry open fruit that had some needles that were in the way of the actual food part of the fruit.

In the jungles of Borneo, scientists observed an orangutan spear fishing (look at the picture on the right). Apparently this orangutan had seen (human) locals spear fishing on the river and attempted to do the same.

Apparently, the method required too much skill for him to master, but he was later able to improvise by using the pole to catch fish that were already trapped in the locals' fishing lines.

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The Smithsonian has just recently extracted Alexander Graham Bell's voice from a 130 year old record!

The inventor of the original telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, recorded his voice onto a wax disc sometime between 1881 and 1886. For the first time, researchers in partnership with the Smithsonian museum have isolated Bell's voice from a collection of 200 other recordings.

Due to the disc's wax composition, researchers couldn't simply stick it on a record player. Instead, they created a digital reconstruction of it and extrapolated the sound waves from that, which is a considerable achievement given it's extreme age and condition. Check out the clip at the link below!

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Fight Clubs has a Starbucks cup in every single scene!

If you haven't seen Fight Club, it's one of those movies that is so incredibly mind bending that you have to see it at some point in your life. Not only is the film an incredible roller coaster ride of emotion and plot twists, there are hundreds of fun facts within the film.

For example, there is a cup of Starbucks in every scene of the movie. This isn't an exaggeration either, the director, David Fincher, confirmed this fact. In fact, Starbucks had no problem with their name and products being used constantly throughout the film. However, Starbucks drew the line when a coffee shop is destroyed - their logo doesn't appear on the building.

If you've seen the film, you better click the source to read more facts like this one! Careful though, there are a few spoilers.

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