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Which Harry Potter House Does Your Cat Belong In?

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Time to break out the old Sorting Hat and figure out exactly what kind of cats we have.

drodd.com / Via Warner Bros.


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Are you the ~breast~ lover you can be?

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Do you really have what it takes to be a Pokémon Master?

Do These Dresses Cost More Or Less Than $50?

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Give it your best guess!

Can You Guess The Emo Music Video From An Obscure Description?

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She says she’s no good with words, but we’re worse!


Which Is The Superior Grape: Green Or Red?

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Let’s settle this once and for all

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The Trouble With Sulcata Tortoises, America's Ill-Advised Pet Fad

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Tank the tortoise was on a mission to destroy.

Within minutes of meeting me, the beer keg–sized animal tried to tear down a banner for American Tortoise Rescue, the ranch in Malibu, California where he lives, and shoved a giant garbage can 6 feet across his pen. Then he headed back to his pile of carrots for a restorative snack.

With their animatronic, pigeon-toed walks and dinosaur snouts, sulcata tortoises — also known as African spurred tortoises — have a dedicated fanbase and are surprisingly popular pets. Leonardo DiCaprio has one; so does 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

To understand why, you just have to look at a baby sulcata. It’s tough to overstate how cute they are. They fit right in the palm of your hand, their pinkie nail–sized heads swiveling around on a constant search for food. When you approach a tank full of babies, they bumble over on toothpick claws to crowd around your hand, eager for a bite of lettuce or a fruit treat.

Baby sulcata tortoises for sale at the East Bay Vivarium.

Rob Williamson for BuzzFeed News

Wherever you live in the United States, and whatever the climate, you can buy your very own sulcata in a pet store for between $50 and $200. Stick it in a fish tank with a UV light and some lettuce, and you’re good to go. According to the 9,250-person-strong Facebook group Sulcata Tortoises, the animals are “no trouble at all.”

But they don’t stay small for long. Properly cared for, males can grow to over 200 pounds, females around half that. Like “teacup” pig buyers, perspective sulcata owners are often burdened with significant misinformation. Pet stores sometimes tell customers that the animals stay small if kept in a small tank (they don’t), that they can eat anything vegetarian (they can’t), and that if they get too big, a zoo will take them (a myth that zookeepers are sick of debunking). Even kept with the best intentions, sulcatas might develop deformed shells, or tear up drywall and backyards.

“They’re just pretty destructive. Any place you see a wall, there’s some reason with a sulcata,” Susan Tellem, American Tortoise Rescue’s co-founder, explained as she showed me a deep hole Tank had dug recently. Even sliding doors can be a problem: Tellem had to put up a wall between Tank and the house when he figured out how to slide the glass and screen doors open with his legs to get inside.

Which is not to say that the sweet and friendly animals never make good pets. Tellem calls them “hard dogs,” and Tank comes when he’s called. “They’re personable, they’re entertaining, they know their names,” Tellem said. “People don’t realize how smart they are.”

But you’re bound to run into problems when you combine breeders who produce thousands of cartoonishly cute hatchlings a year; buyers who get the third-largest tortoise species on a whim without educating themselves; pet stores that sell the animals without warning buyers how big they’ll get or how to care for them; and wonderful, knowledgeable owners who nevertheless age out of being able to care for a heavy and long-lived pet. Sulcatas are nearly guaranteed to outlive their owners. Experts aren’t sure exactly how long they live in captivity, since the pet trade started only around half their lifespans ago, but educated guesses peg it at over 100 years.

All told, this adds up to hundreds or even thousands of tortoises across the country who need new homes — mostly males, who fight one another when kept together and aren’t particularly useful to breeders. And because adult sulcatas need so much space and can be difficult to adopt out, many reptile rescues can’t take them in anymore.

While some conservationists have been able to give unwanted pet sulcatas jobs — such as a project that uses them for natural weed control in a Hawaiian nature preserve — most abandoned tortoises are just looking for a place to call home. Do you have a walled yard, a strong back, and a desire to put a possibly centenarian tortoise in your last will and testament?

A tortoise at American Tortoise Rescue in Malibu.

Bryan Dale for BuzzFeed News

Paul Bulley has been breeding sulcatas for 15 years at his two Orange County homes, which together he calls “Tortuga Villa.” He met me in front of one of them in April, wearing gray camo shorts and a hat with a picture of a machine gun that read “Come and take it.” (The first time we chatted on the phone, he asked me if I was law enforcement.)

All kinds of tortoises live at Tortuga Villa — radiated tortoises, Indian star tortoises, and even Aldabras, a rare species that, in extreme cases, can tip the scales at 800 pounds and live over 200 years. But I was there to see the sulcatas; Bulley has around 20 of the typical brownish-gray ones grazing in a field and a couple of albinos in a smaller pen with burlap covering it for shade.

Bulley says he sells mostly baby sulcatas — up to a thousand in a good year, for $50 to $75 each — to pet stores, wholesalers, and private parties as a way to support his hobby. Between electricity and food, he spends about $2,500 a month keeping his 10 species of tortoises healthy and happy. Since sulcatas don’t hibernate like other tortoises, they also need access to a warm hidey-hole year-round. All that heat uses so much power that Bulley once got a visit from the police, who thought he was growing weed. “They came and visited me and were like, ‘Can we look at your tortoises?’”

Paul Bulley at his sanctuary for tortoises in Orange County.

Bryan Dale for BuzzFeed News

Bulley, like any tortoise enthusiast, doesn’t need a license to breed sulcatas, though permit regulations for ownership and sales vary from state to state. That makes pinning down how many live in the US next to impossible.

“Unfortunately I cannot begin to answer that accurately,” Abigail DeSesa, executive board chair of the California Turtle and Tortoise Club — a society for aficionados and rescuers — told me by email when I asked if she could estimate the sulcata population in the United States. “What I can clearly state without a single doubt is there are too many. There is a serious breeding problem in the United States.”

Sulcatas are believed to have first arrived in the US in the 1960s, when a few were imported from the southern edge of the Sahara by wealthy obsessives, including big-game hunter Paquita Machris, whose kills live on in dioramas at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. The first US babies were born in the 1970s, but they stayed a rarity until breeders figured out the best incubation strategies. By the early 2000s, an “exponential cascade” of the animals had flooded the US pet trade.

Sulcatas are prodigious egg layers — several times a year, between 15 and 50 in a clutch — so breeders can produce thousands of babies with relatively little effort. Over the years, overbreeding has pushed the prices of the tiny tortoises down to a fraction of their cost when breeding first took off. A $70 tortoise is a much more palatable impulse buy than one with a steeper up-front cost — but impulse buys that become inconvenient are easily discarded.

Many sulcatas get dumped in garages or basements, far from the sunlight they need to synthesize vitamin D and keep their shells and bones healthy. Without it — or with too much or too little protein, or too little humidity, or too little calcium — sulcatas will develop metabolic bone disease, a catchall term for skeletal disorders resulting from malnutrition. A healthy sulcata’s shell is smooth and round, but many of those raised in captivity suffer from some degree of “pyramiding,” a bone disease where they develop characteristic spikes on their carapace, the top half of the shell.

Bulley said he thoroughly vets prospective owners he doesn’t know — asking them where they will keep the babies, how they will care for the resulting adults, what kind of diet and setup they’ll provide. To keep the tortoises comfortable and prevent them from digging under house foundations, most experts, including Bulley, recommend that owners build sheds or doghouses in the yard, heated to at least 80 degrees year-round. Bulley said he’s taken at least 100 male sulcatas off owners who were in over their heads, both from his own customers and from people who find him online. “A lot of my tortoises are rescues or adopted,” he told me. “People give me tortoises all the time.”

The real blame, Bulley insisted, lies with pet stores, which he said often mislead buyers. “They’re kinda in it for the money,” he said, though pet stores are among his biggest clients. “I don’t think they give people the right information.” When asked how he vets stores and wholesalers, Bulley said, “I only deal with people I know real well, and pet stores that have a good setup.”

Bulley acknowledged that many other tortoise rescuers would argue that he is also acting irresponsibly by breeding sulcatas in the first place. “They probably don’t like me,” he said. “But I don’t worry about what people think of me, ’cause I do a lot of good, too.” He created Tortuga Villa’s website not to sell babies — he sells plenty as it is — but to provide information for those looking to be better owners. Bulley doesn’t believe in shipping tortoises, so the site doesn’t list any prices or ordering information.

“Some people get irritated with me. They go, 'Do you want to sell one or not?'” he said. “And I go, 'Well, I would...but maybe I don’t feel good about you owning one.”

Tortoises at Bulley's sanctuary, Tortuga Villa.

Bryan Dale for BuzzFeed News

In spring and summer of this year, I went to four pet stores in Los Angeles County and the Bay Area that sell sulcatas. All were openly selling babies (except for one store that had just sold out), with the caveat that the little ones were for educational or research purposes only. There is a federal law stating that tortoises and turtles under 4 inches can’t be sold as pets, since tortoises, like all reptiles, can carry salmonella — and a tiny tortoise is just the right size for a toddler to pop into their mouth. I asked the salespeople a series of questions — what kind of food sulcatas eat, how big they get, how long they live — and heard nearly every myth Bulley and others I’d spoken to complained about, though not as often as I was expecting.

At one of the stores, the salesperson told me sulcatas will stay little if you keep them in a small tank their whole lives (a myth that haunts many tank-dwelling pets). While it is true that the tortoises should be kept in tanks as babies, within two years they’ll be less susceptible to harm and need room to roam. He also referred to the species as “the easiest tortoise” to care for, saying they will eat anything vegetarian. He neglected to mention that a diet of anything besides 85% grasses, weeds, and low-protein hay is likely to result in bone disease.

At the other stores, the salespeople were honest about how large sulcatas grow, though one of them also said the Oakland Zoo would take them when they got too big. “There’s just no way I can take in every animal people want to give up,” said Margaret Rousser, a zoological manager at the Oakland Zoo. “I have to make sure I have the resources for the animals that are already here on grounds.”

Owen Maercks at the East Bay Vivarium.

Rob Williamson for BuzzFeed News

Owen Maercks, cult-famous musician and co-owner of the East Bay Vivarium in Berkeley, clearly cares deeply that his animals go to good homes. The store, which gets 20 to 30 baby sulcatas every two to three months, can sell them within a few months. But for every hundred people who come in and say “Look at the cute tortoises!” only one or so will actually take one home. That’s because when passersby stop to ogle the babies near the front of the store, Maercks and his employees direct them around the corner to Carl, an 8-year-old, 50-pound sulcata. “The first thing I say is, ‘This’” — Maercks pointed to the babies — "'plus eight years equals that'" — he pointed to Carl. "And that's still half-grown."

Maercks is one of several sulcata distributors I spoke to who insists that would-be owners take a hard look at their own mortality: When parents bring their children to look at sulcatas, he asks the kids whether they plan on having grandchildren who can take care of them.

Carl, who was sulking in the corner of his UV tank until a shop worker presented him with a bus bin full of food, is Maercks’s current “show tortoise,” a two- to three-year position for medium-sized sulcatas. The gig involves heading out with Maercks’s traveling reptile show, while spending downtime dissuading casual baby buyers.

“He’s half-grown,” Maercks told a little girl in a princess dress who was watching Carl stomp through his tray of veggies, which the Vivarium gets for free after their sell-by date from a local grocery. (Maercks recommends every owner of a large sulcata befriend a grocery store manager and indulge in “the time-honored tradition of dumpster diving.”) Carl dragged his dinner into the shavings and then started to eat with voracious lunges of his dinosaur beak. The little girl borrowed her dad’s cell phone to take pictures.

“Our store sells them conscientiously,” Maercks told me. “You’re not going to buy it and take it home and then two years later wonder why it hasn’t stopped growing. I can’t speak to other stores that don’t do their job well.”

Once the show tortoises get too big for Maercks to lift easily (he often sticks Carl on a scale to show kids), he finds them a home with someone looking for a larger pet and cycles in a new tortoise that got too big for its owners. Some go back to his partner in Southern California, to keep the babies coming.

Kids, grown-ups, and dogs wandered freely through the store, which essentially functions as a free zoo where you can take the animals home if you’re so moved. It’s packed with a dense maze of stacked glass displays filled with spiders, snakes, turtles, and tortoises. Along the back wall is a huge tank housing Elmo the Eviscerator, a 6-foot-long black-throated monitor lizard who looks like he’d eat a kid for a snack. (“I take him to preschools and birthday parties,” Maercks reassured me. “The kids love him.”)

But for all the density of animals, the only sound came from the humans. “That’s the animal I can’t stand,” Maercks said as a baby’s wail pierced the hot, pine-fragrant air.

The East Bay Vivarium.

Rob Williamson for BuzzFeed News

At Susan Tellem’s American Tortoise Rescue, Tank and another sulcata, Popcorn, ignored sweeping views of the Malibu hills as they chowed down on carrots and hay. Popcorn, or Poppy, is named after the popcorn and rice cakes he lived on before coming to the rescue, which also houses chickens, goats, and sheep. The boys have been kept separated by cinderblocks and chicken wire ever since a fight between the two landed Popcorn a bloody eye and Tellem and her husband had to cart the enormous animal off to the vet.

Tellem works hard to actively discourage breeding. She sends press releases to journalists who cover animal issues, encourages people who contact her for information to adopt instead of buying babies, and tells off others who email her looking for a female to breed. I asked her if she thinks there’s a place for ethical breeding — selling babies with the assurance that they go to good owners who are aware of the difficulties of sulcata ownership. “No, I don’t,” she responded. “With sulcatas, there’s just so many needing homes.”

Susan Tellem and her husband at their sanctuary.

Bryan Dale for BuzzFeed News

14 Olympic Movies To Get You Ready For Rio

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From triumphant tales to hilarious parodies, we’ve got you covered.

Chariots of Fire (1981)

Chariots of Fire (1981)

Winner of four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Chariots of Fire tells the story of two dedicated young athletes training for the 1924 Paris Olympics in the religiously divided United Kingdom. The inspiring film is based on the real-life stories of runners Eric Liddell, a Scottish Christian whose faith is the driving force behind his quest, and Harold Abrahams, an English Jew running to rise above anti-Semitism. Also, it's where that song that is used in pretty much every slow-motion parody sequence came from.

Twentieth Century Fox

Miracle (2004)

Miracle (2004)

Another rousing tale based on the true story of the 1980 USA Olympic men's ice hockey team and the unbelievable journey that led them to (spoiler alert) triumph over the unstoppable Soviet team in the final match, which became known as the "Miracle on Ice." Required viewing for anyone who gets even a bit choked up at hearing "The Star-Spangled Banner" every time Team USA wins a gold medal.

Walt Disney Pictures

Cool Runnings (1993)

Cool Runnings (1993)

This feel-good comedy has become a classic, and no list of Olympic-themed movies would be complete without this tale of four Jamaican athletes who dream of competing in the Winter Olympics as the first Jamaican bobsled team — despite the fact that they have never even seen snow. Believe it or not, this movie was also based on a true story, although some changes were made to enhance the comedy and drama in the storytelling.

Walt Disney Pictures

The Cutting Edge (1992)

The Cutting Edge (1992)

Hockey! Figure skating! An unlikely love story! An instant classic from the ’90s set against the backdrop of the road to the 1988 Winter Olympics — what more can you ask for?

MGM


View Entire List ›

David Bowie's Son Has Named His New Baby After His Dad

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Jim Spellman / WireImage

David Bowie's son, Duncan Jones, announced Saturday that his wife had given birth to a baby boy, and they had named him Stenton David Jones after the film director's late father.

Bowie, whose real name was David Jones, died from cancer on 10 January.

Duncan Jones tweeted that his son had been born on 10 July "exactly six months after his grandad made room for him".

The tweet was accompanied by an illustration by British cartoonist, David Shrigley.

In a separate tweet, Jones also expressed his "love and awe" for his wife, the photographer Rodene Jones, "who made a human being in her belly".

He called her: "Warrior woman and every day, my hero."

The couple announced that they were expecting a baby just one month after Bowie's death.

Jones said that he had shared the news with his father at Christmas.

The 45-year-old film director is the son of Bowie and his first wife Angie. He is best known for his 2009 film, Moon.

Angie Bowie, Duncan Jones and David Bowie.

Gijsbert Hanekroot / Redferns

As a child, Jones was known as Zowie Bowie, but has chosen to go by the more sedate name of Duncan in adulthood.

Speaking about his father's death to the Nerdist podcast in May, Jones said: "It’s bittersweet because right now my wife is very pregnant and she’s due in June."

Stenton is Duncan and Rodene's first child.

How Much Of A Grammar Snob Are You?

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Are you more prescriptivist or descriptivist?


13 Turtles Who Will Inspire You To Get Out Of Your Shell

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Because there’s a whole world out there.

This new baby turtle who is ready to leave its warm and cozy shell to finally see what the world has to offer:

This new baby turtle who is ready to leave its warm and cozy shell to finally see what the world has to offer:

Via youtube.com

And this adorable little guy who believes taking a bite out of life is the best way to enjoy it:

And this adorable little guy who believes taking a bite out of life is the best way to enjoy it:

Via imgur.com

This party animal who can't wait for you and your adorable fins to join the party:

This party animal who can't wait for you and your adorable fins to join the party:

Via imgur.com

And this groovy reptile who knows that ​the world​ can be a scary place, but it’s also where all the fun happens:

And this groovy reptile who knows that ​the world​ can be a scary place, but it’s also where all the fun happens:

Via imgur.com


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Horrifying Situation: This Woman Accidentally Got Sent Her Mom's Sexts

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Worst. Group. Chat. Ever.

Moms are cool, in general. And since we're all on this earth we know they can get down, so to speak.

Moms are cool, in general. And since we're all on this earth we know they can get down, so to speak.

Paramount Pictures / Via realitytvgifs.tumblr.com

But you def don't need to be looped into your mom's sexts, right? Like, no one deserves that.

But you def don't need to be looped into your mom's sexts, right? Like, no one deserves that.

youtube.com

But that's exactly what happened to this poor daughter who somehow got onto a group chat with her mom, and her mom's potential new ~lover~.

But that's exactly what happened to this poor daughter who somehow got onto a group chat with her mom, and her mom's potential new ~lover~.

imgur.com / Via reddit.com

"You like older women?" 👀

"You like older women?" 👀

imgur.com / Via reddit.com


View Entire List ›

25 Signs You Grew Up In Rhode Island

21 Tumblr Posts That Perfectly Describe Living With Your Parents

This Movie Could Teach Pokémon Go Players And Jason Bourne About Surveillance

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Emma Roberts in Nerve.

Niko Tavernise / Lionsgate

The original Bourne trilogy (let’s not speak of the regrettable attempt at passing the torch from Matt Damon to Jeremy Renner in The Bourne Supremacy) was made up of movies that were bruisingly, brilliantly precise in their action and less so in terms of the relevance they flirted with. Their paranoia, cynicism, and grim envisioning of murders being committed in the name of national security felt timely without offering direct correlations, and were ultimately more about setting a dark tone than making an incisive comment.

But of all the indignities Damon’s title character, dug out of retirement after nine years, has to suffer in the disappointing Jason Bourne, the worst is how out-of-touch the new conspiracy he unravels feels, particularly when compared with fellow recent release Nerve. A romantic thriller about an iPhone game from Catfish directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, Nerve is sharper and smarter about surveillance and social media than the latest installment of the spy franchise. Which might be less surprising if Jason Bourne weren’t so concerned with both topics, which are revealed to be integral to the CIA’s latest nefarious black ops program.

After years of operations with tasteful furniture-line names like Treadstone and Blackbriar, the CIA has focused its attention on something more practical and less overtly murder-y called Iron Hand, which is connected to a Google/Facebook-like company run by Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed). Despite the ominous label, Iron Hand turns out to be a lot less dramatic than the previous Bourne initiatives, in which handsome men were expertly trained, lightly brainwashed, and then positioned as sleeper agent assassins around the world.

Jason Bourne compensates for its lack of urgency by stretching for greater relevance, with Silicon Valley dealings, a Julian Assange stand-in, and anti-austerity riots. But it just comes across as naive. Its version of the CIA, dominated by a crusty member of the old guard (Tommy Lee Jones) and a steely representative of the new (Alicia Vikander), is prepared to kill to cover up the fact that it’s demanding backdoor access to a widely used social media application — inexplicable given that the FBI and Apple have been having a similar battle out in the open for a while now. The Bourne movies have always existed in a world in constant surveillance, the reach of which has grown in each installment, and yet this latest film has more optimistic ideas about expectations of privacy than the average internet denizen.

Matt Damon in Jason Bourne.

Universal Pictures

Infinitely more on point is the way shy Staten Island high school senior Vee (Emma Roberts) impulsively signs away her life when registering for the title game in Nerve. It’s a 24-hour P2P game in which participants choose to be either players or watchers, the latter paying for the privilege of following the adventures of the former, who document themselves taking on a series of user-generated dares for money. The app pulls together information from each player’s internet footprint to make the dares more personal, which is how Vee is made to go up against her more outgoing bestie Sydney (Emily Meade). Arriving in theaters less than a month after millions of people gave away full access to their Google accounts in order to sign up for Pokémon Go, Nerve’s capturing of the blitheness with which its participants surrender their personal info for a chance at internet fame feels all too accurate.

Naturally, it all goes to hell, the consequences catching up with Vee in an over-the-top finale. But before that, Nerve is a dizzyingly of-the-moment good time, a dystopian meet-cute in present-day New York. There are benefits to having the attention of anonymous all-seeing eyes, which, for Vee, means getting teamed up with dreamboat Ian (Dave Franco) for dares that lead to dashing through a department store in skivvies and attempting a risky stunt on a motorcycle. The better the two do, the more they're watched, their conversations broadcast live, their locations mapped, watchers filming them on the street as they pass by. But Nerve has a sense of the sadism online mobs are capable of as well — as more players drop out and the stakes grow higher, the dares escalate too. Soon, it’s clear that for the watchers, seeing someone get hurt or killed is just as exciting as seeing them succeed.

Dave Franco and Roberts in Nerve.

Niko Tavernise / Lionsgate

Nerve’s ending doesn’t work because it uses hacking as a deus ex machina, and also because it tries to come up with a scenario in which an anonymous internet crowd feels chastised and shamed, something the real world has yet to manage. But its fictional game is eerily plausible, as are the liberties its players allow it.

What Nerve gets that Jason Bourne doesn’t is that privacy doesn’t need to be stolen from people. We surrender degrees of it all the time, for something as silly as a social media game that gives us the attention of strangers online. And it’s not that we’re not aware of the consequences; we just don’t think they’ll ever matter to us — until they do.

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