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John Shaw-Rimmington, a sculptor of stone walls, made this dry stone wall in a conservation area in Orangeville, Ontario. If I understand the story correctly, it is a memorial to a woman named Kerry Landman. Her husband, Eric Landman, helped build the wall himself.
The Lord of the Rings may quickly discuss how orcs were created, but somehow this makes much more sense. Take one pudgy-faced cat, squish it’s head good and bam! You’ve got an orc.
Artist Ming Liang Lu has a rather unique way of creating portraits for customers that visit him in various subway platforms and tunnels throughout New York City-he cuts up small sheets of paper to look like his subjects, and the results are quite incredible.
The cut paper portraits are so small and delicate it’s hard to imagine that such a clear likeness could be achieved in such a manner, but Ming has obviously been at this for a while (this video was posted in 2010), and his skills with the scissors are most impressive indeed.
Link –via Laughing Squid
Mustache Letter Opener – $9.95
Does your letter opening lack a certain panache? Add the flair back into your mundane bill paying with the dangerously sophisticated Mustache Letter Opener from the NeatoShop. This fantastic letter opener was handcrafted by seriously hip local artisans. Opening mail just got a whole lot cooler.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Mustache fun and Letter Opening merriment!
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You might think that Adele has little in common with ’80s one-hit-wonder Baltimora, but their songs “Set Fire to the Rain” and “Tarzan Boy” mix surprisingly well. How do people come up with these odd combinations? Mashup by The Reborn Identity. -via The Daily What
The food at the Space Shuttle Cafe isn’t out of this world, but it is in low Earth orbit. It was born in 1944 as a Douglas DC-3 airliner, then converted into a street legal vehicle in 1976. Now it’s like a space shuttle that can prepare fresh chili dogs. Want it? The Space Shuttle Cafe is for sale on eBay.
When you have both male and female LEGO minifigs, you are bound to see babies sooner or later. These custom minifigs are from Citizen Brick. Link -via Laughing Squid
(Image source: The Brothers Brick)
This imaginative and visually appealing animated short is by Toniko Pantoja, who is a second year student at CalArts with a promising career in animation ahead of him!
Dragons are always portrayed as ornery and bloodthirsty, so it’s nice to know that they have a cutesy, artistic side too.
Link –via Geek Tyrant
With just a push, Irene Kiss’s clever crocheted fish toy turns into a sushi roll. Best of all, there’s no cooking required. You can find larger images at the link.
Link and Crochet Pattern -via Craft
It all begins with one dot, made with a pushpin. The hole, which exposes the interior to the air, rots and turns brown. Phil Hansen keeps pricking the skin until he creates complete image. At the link, watch a time-lapse video of him recreating great works of Western art on bananas and providing instructions on how to make your own.
Photo: Hopefoote/Flickr
Which is the flower and which is the caterpillar? The camouflaged looper inchworm is a genius at camouflage (hence the name, I suppose) - it glues bits of flowers to its back in order to blend in.
See more photos at Twisted Sifter: Link
At some point in the (relative) past or future, Sylvester Stallone traveled back in time to Sixteenth Century Italy. Raphael painted him peering over the shoulder of Pope Gregory IX. Stallone has offered no comment about the purpose of his visit or how it changed the course of history.
Link -via VA Viper | Image: Everett Collection/United Artists
It's
a match made in chemical heaven ... the combination of two of the most
delicious substances in the Universe. Behold, SPAM With Bacon
Patrick Di Justo of Wired Science explains what exactly is in this magical concoction:
“The cured belly of a swine carcass,” says the USDA. “Mmmm, bacon,” says most of America. Large-scale curing is usually done by injecting a brine solution into the belly of a butchered swine. The brine contains sodium erythorbate, an antioxidant that’s chemically similar to vitamin C. But it’s not here to prevent scurvy; instead it boosts the conversion of the sodium nitrite in bacon into nitric oxide, which minimizes the production of carcinogens when the pork belly is fried up. The brining increases the meat’s weight by 12 percent, but a trip through a 128-degree smokehouse dries the bellies back to their original weight, ready to be combined with the pork and ham in this canned pigfest.
Link - via Discover's 80beats
Do we have Bacon and SPAM stuff on the NeatoShop? Of course we do!
This animatronic Terminator head looks like it came straight from Judgment Day, complete with red glowing eyes and teeth modeled after Schwarzenegger’s own mighty set of choppers.
Created by Animatronic Works Japan, it’s not for those who fear the subjugation of humanity by robotic overlords, but it definitely makes one hell of a conversation piece!
Hit the link to check out videos of the head moving about, waiting for an opportunity to lash out against the humans who dare to keep it trapped inside a glass case.
Link –via Obvious Winner
Only $1,500 separates you from what a very nearsighted and ill-informed person might mistake for an armored car. It’s a 1988 Chevrolet Caprice with 33 inch tires and a turret. The car appears to also have a snorkel. Does it work? Buy it, then drive it through three feet of water and let us know.
Waka waka waka! German Photographer Patrick Runte's project Jump 'N' Run visualizes what retro video games, like Pac-Man above, would look like in real life: Link - via Design Taxi
Sometimes a hankering for some unusual foodstuffs can result in an upset stomach, sometimes it can change your life forever.
Check out this crazy trailer for upcoming movie from director Ben West- Fugu & Tako, you’ll never look at sushi the same way again!
–via Twitch
This is wonderful: Guatemalan photographer Luis González Palma photographed a series of model ships "sailing" the rough oceans of bedsheets. Watch out for that iceberg, er pillow!
Check out his gallery of "Ara Solis" - via Laughing Squid
Miniature horse fans rejoice! Thanks to a Senate vote, miniature horses have now been approved for use as service animals in the state of Illinois.
Here’s why mini horses make awesome guides:
According to the Guide Horse Foundation, miniature horses can be useful for people with severe allergies or phobias to dogs, or people who want an animal likely to live longer than a dog. The horses are strong enough to provide support when handlers need to lean on them, and they are not easily distracted by crowds.
So, the next time you see a mini horse on a leash, sporting a fashionable vest and some oh-so-cute little shoes, don’t panic!
They’re here to help, and they’re not just in it for the free carrots.
"It's
a lion*, run!" strategy doesn't seem to work out very well for white-tailed
deer fawns.
What works, it turns out, is an escape plan:
Fawns often bypass the nearest "escape cover" to seek out better habitats for shaking off predators, new research has found.
Baby deer are more likely to survive if they use this selective technique rather than simply fleeing to the closest refuge.
The study in the journal Animal Behaviour, followed white-tailed deer fawns in the Great Plains of the US.
The fawns' behaviour was a surprise to the research team, they said.
"We expected them to look for cover as soon as possible and try to take that cover… (but) they actually went to a better cover rather than the first available," says Jonathan Jenks, distinguished professor of wildlife and fisheries sciences at South Dakota State University.
Link (Photo: ForestWander/Wikipedia)
*Okay, there's no lion in their native habitat, but gimme a literary license here. If you're a stickler for technicalities, read that sentence as "It's a coyote, run!"
Is there an ideal shape for a subway system? Statistical physicist Marc Barthelemy and Camille Roth of France's National Center for Scientific Research analyzed subways of New York, Tokyo, London and other large cities in the world - with all their different topologies and geographies - have strikingly similar subway structures:
Brandon Keim of Wired reports: LinkWith equations used to study two-dimensional spatial networks, the class of network to which subways belong, the researchers turned stations and lines to a mathematics of nodes and branches. They repeated their analyses with data from each decade of a subway system’s history, and looked for underlying trends.
Patterns emerged: The core-and-branch topology, of course, and patterns more fine-grained. Roughly half the stations in any subway will be found on its outer branches rather than the core. The distance from a city’s center to its farthest terminus station is twice the diameter of the subway system’s core. This happens again and again.“Many other shapes could be expected, such as a regular lattice,” said Barthelemy. “What we find surprising is that all these different cities, on different continents, with different histories and geographical constraints, lead finally to the same structure.”
Subway systems seem to gravitate towards these ratios organically, through a combination of planning, expedience, circumstance and socioeconomic fluctuation, say the researchers.
A quiz from 1948! How fun!
You can be a real he-man and still like to make a cheese souffle. To find out, though, how strongly masculine or feminine your interests are study these six sets of pictures, check your preferences, score yourself.
I saw the first picture, reproduced here, and said, “Neither!” Both of those fabrics are hideous, and unless it’s for a young child’s room, you should always go for solid color draperies. Other questions were just as difficult, but the apparent answer for each sex is quite obvious. Link
Americans
have been wringing their hands about the problem of obesity for decades
(for some of us, while munching on snacks), but never before has the problem
been attacked from the perspective of ... math!
In 2004, mathematician and physicist Carson Chow was tasked with figuring out why more and more Americans are getting fatter. When he started, Carson said that "[he] knew almost nothing of obesity. [He] didn't even know what a calorie was."
But he could clearly see a trend: Since 1975, the average weight of Americans jumped by about 20 pounds and the national obesity rate went from 20% to 30%. So what gives?
Claudie Dreifus interviewed the math whiz for The New York Times:
Did you ever solve the question posed to you when you were first hired — what caused the obesity epidemic?
We think so. And it’s something very simple, very obvious, something that few want to hear: The epidemic was caused by the overproduction of food in the United States.
Beginning in the 1970s, there was a change in national agricultural policy. Instead of the government paying farmers not to engage in full production, as was the practice, they were encouraged to grow as much food as they could. At the same time, technological changes and the “green revolution” made our farms much more productive. The price of food plummeted, while the number of calories available to the average American grew by about 1,000 a day.
Well, what do people do when there is extra food around? They eat it! This, of course, is a tremendously controversial idea. However, the model shows that increase in food more than explains the increase in weight.
Link (Photo: Michael Temchine/NY Times)
To
many people, pigeons are rats with wings, but to some, they're the "Ferraris
of the bird world." And they've got the price tags to prove it:
To the average observer, they look like ordinary pigeons, caged into a balcony in a high-rise Beijing apartment. But make no mistake. These cooing birds, according to breeder Yang Shibo, are like top-of-the-line sports cars.
"These are the Ferraris of the bird world," he says. "They're the most expensive, and the fastest."
The price of racing pigeons is soaring sky-high, pushed up by wealthy Chinese buyers.
It's the latest market to be inflated by the China Effect — or massive demand from China — which has pushed up commodity prices on everything from Australian iron ore to Brazilian soybeans.
And in China, pigeons can be lucrative. Yang Shibo's best bird, a German pigeon, cost more than $1,000 back in 2001. Its descendants have earned him around $150,000 in prize money.
The highest price ever paid for a racing pigeon in China? $328,000. Now that's definitely something to cluck about.
NPR's Louisa Lim has the story: Link (Photo: Louisa Lim/NPR)
A man was arrested in Shepherdsville, Kentucky on misdemeanor charges of endangering the welfare of a minor. He had gone into a bar to drink and left his son behind in the car.
According to an arrest report, 59-year-old James L. Osborne was seen walking into The Electric Cowboy, a bar on Dixie Highway, near Oak Park Drive, early Saturday morning, shortly before 2:30 a.m.
Witnesses say he left a young boy inside his vehicle.
When police arrived, they approached the boy and asked him his age. It was determined that the boy was 17.
He was 17? When I was 17, I was in college! It’s likely that the son was his designated driver. Link -via Arbroath
And you thought nothing could be sillier than Sharktopus! SyFy does it again with a man-eating fish-reptile called Piranhaconda, coming to a river, er, TV near you. -via The Daily What
This story reminds me of the joke about a customer who was upset that a waitress cut him off the buffet after two plates. “That’s ALL you can eat for ten dollars!” she said. But this is a real story out of Thiensville, Wisconsin, where a man says all-you-can-eat doesn’t mean just until the restaurant runs out of food.
At 6’6″ and 350 lbs, Bill Wisth admits he’s a big guy who can pack it away more than most. And he wants one restaurant to make all-you-can-eat, all he can eat too.
“It’s false advertising,” said Wisth to TODAY’S TMJ4.
Wisth has a beef with the all-you-can-eat fish fry at Chuck’s Place. He was there Friday when the restaurant cut him off after he ate a dozen pieces.
“Well, we asked for more fish and they refused to give us any more fish,” recalled Wisth.
The restaurant says it was running out of fish and patience; arguing Bill has been a problem customer before. They sent him on his way with another eight pieces, but that still wasn’t enough.
He was so fired up, he called the police. “I think that people have to stand up for consumers,” said Wisth.
And he wasn’t done. He came back two days later with a picket sign.
Wisth says he plans to protest at the restaurant every Sunday. A restaurant employee says Whisth still owes for food he’s already eaten. Link -via HuffPo
In a two-part article at Sociological Images, David Pickett traces the history of LEGO and the toy’s male-female dichotomy. The toys were pretty much gender-neutral before the introduction of mini-figs in 1978. Even then, the figures were generic and ambiguous -until 1989.
I discussed the introduction of LEGOs the invention of gendered minifigs, and early efforts to market separately to girls and boys in Part I of this series, covering 1932 to 1988. The segregation of LEGO into feminine and masculine sets would escalate beginning in 1989. That year the LEGO group introduced gender to the minifig in a big way with the new Pirates theme. The masculine figs sported copious facial hair and the lone feminine pirate had lipstick and a curved shirt that implied a busty chest.
This pioneering pirate was the first in a long line of token females in otherwise male-dominated action-centric themes. The imbalanced ratio of masculine to feminine minifigs persists today, though it has lessened over time. I have seen several different numbers for this ratio, so I decided to do my own count. I gave TLG the benefit of the doubt and counted as gender neutral any minifigs lacking definitely masculine (facial hair) or feminine (lipstick, eyelashes, cleveage) traits, even when LEGO marketing materials clearly delineate them as male or female.
The imbalance is huge, even when you discount people’s tendency to look at “gender-neutral” figures as male by default. Link to part one. Link to part two. -via Boing Boing
A house in Tokyo, Japan, by Sou Fujimoto Architects stands out because it’s completely transparent, made from a plastic frame, some transparent panels, and lots of open space. The idea was inspired by our distant ancestors who lived in trees and could never expect privacy. The split-level house has minimal furniture and, as far as I can tell, no bathroom. It looks pretty in daylight, but imagine all the people staring at the occupants at night! However, this concept may never have permanent residents. Completely open walls above the ground floor wouldn’t adhere to building codes for residential structures. See more pictures at Bored Panda. Link -via The Daily What
(Image credit: Iwan Baan)
Elaine Balden and Bobby Burgess demonstrated the hot dances of the 1960s when they performed “Land of 1,000 Dances” on The Lawrence Welk Show in 1981. Compare and contrast with the hit 1966 version by Wilson Pickett, if you’re not familiar with the song. -via Buzzfeed
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