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Archive for July 6th, 2008

The Simpsons Cutouts Congratulate High School Grad

Photo: brantastic [Flickr]

Somewhere in Nova Scotia, in the front lawn of a nondescript house are these cutouts of characters from The Simpsons congratulating a family member’s graduation. Flickr user brantastic has the story:

It turns out she’d made all of these wooden simpsons cutouts herself, from scratch, as a surprise for her son who was graduating from high school. she told us that he’d worked really hard and only took breaks to watch The Simpsons.

Link – Thanks lara!

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Baby vs. Cobra

Ah, India … the land that brought us Bollywood also brought us this strange and disturbing video clip. Watch as a baby wrestles with a cobra (a cobra!) that either has been defanged or whose mouthseem to have been sewn shut – while adults chatter on in the background (anyone here know what they’re saying?)

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

Polls Boutique is running a poll to see whether you think "poor baby" or "poor snake" (maybe a little of both!) – Thanks Eran!

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Techno Chicken

(YouTube link)
This is just silly, but it made me smile. -via Arbroath

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Send Your Name to the Moon

Psst! Wanna send your name to the moon? NASA is setting up a website where you can enter your name, which will then be entered in a database on a microchip that will be integrated onto the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The deadline for submitting your name is July 25, 2008 – and the LRO is scheduled to launch in late 2008: Link – Thanks Kays Kadar!

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Reflexology World Record

Photo: huaxia.com

My, that’s a lot of foot massages! Taiwan has set a new Guinness World Record for having the "most people receiving foot massage (reflexology) simultaneously": 1008 reflexologists and 1008 tourists joined in the fun.

Link – Thanks Jee!

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Recreation of the Film Set of Stanley Kubric's The Shining

This is quite neat: Channel 4 in the UK has recreated the set of Stanley Kubrick’s horror film The Shining – complete with crew and cast-member look-a-likes – for a TV ad:

Viewers get Kubrick’s point of view as he walks through the set, ending up in his director’s chair as the crew prepare to shoot the famous scene of Danny Torrance, the son of Duvall and Jack Nicholson’s characters, riding round and round the deserted corridors of the Overlook Hotel.

The promo, filmed as a single tracking shot with a cast of 55 actors, was meticulously researched to "remain as faithful as possible to the period in which it was shot and the culture of the British studio in the late 1970s".

Link | If the video didn’t work for you, check out the clip at The Fire Wire – Thanks Larry!

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Mona Lisa Graffiti

Photo: 2cauldrons [Flickr]

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is so iconic that her smiling face has even shown up on graffiti. WebUrbanist has a neat post about 8 such unauthorized appearances by La Gioconda in the streets all over the world.

This one above is the RPG Mona Lisa, by the British street artist Banksy in Soho London.

Link – Thanks Jon Jason!

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Jack White's poem about his beloved Detroit

[Creative Commons licensed photo of Michigan Central Station (abandoned) in Detroit by Flickr user Matt Callow.]
Jack White of the White Stripes hurt some feelings back home when he moved from Detroit to Nashville in 2006. Egos were further bruised when he described the Detroit music scene as “super negative” in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in June.

In order to set things straight, he wrote a poem about his beloved Detroit called ‘Courageous Dream’s Concern.’ Click through to the Detroit Free Press for the poem.

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The Nietzsche Family Circus

He who is punished is never he who performed the deed. He is always the scapegoat.

The Nietzsche Family Circus is a randomized combination of Friedrich Nietzsche quotations and Family Circus cartoons — usually with appropriate results. Link

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Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey's Grassy Photograph

UK artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey took advantage of the natural photosensitive nature of grass to use them as pixels in what we can only call a "photograss."

CR Blog has more on this particular set of photos, commissioned by HSBC in partnership with the 2008 Wimbledon Tennis Championships:

“When grass gets plenty of sunlight, it produces chlorophyll and therefore turns green – but the less light it receives, the more yellow the colour is,” explains JWT art director Mark Norcutt of the process used to make the work. “Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey discovered that by projecting a bright black-and-white negative image onto a patch of grass as it grows (in an otherwise dark room), they can use the natural photosensitive properties of the grass to reproduce photographs. From a distance it looks like any other monochrome photograph (albeit with a slightly unusual tint); up close, it looks like perfectly ordinary grass. But even individual blades sometimes have a range of hues, as any given cell can respond to the amount of light it receives.”

Link – Thanks sadtomato!

Previously on Neatorama: Photosynthetic Photography: Pixels are Blades of Grass, also by the two artists.

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Couch Went Lawn Chair Ballooning

Just because earlier attempts of lawnchair ballooning went so well (the first one by Larry Walters, ended up with an arrest, fame, lost of fame, and then suicide; the second one by Brazilian priest Adelir Antonio de Carli ended up with him missing and presumed dead), Kent Couch decided to try it himself.

Couch (I know, I know) rode a green lawnchair with 150 helium-filled party balloons from central Oregon all the way to Idaho:

Couch kissed his wife and kids goodbye, and patted their shivering Chihuahua, Isabella, before his ground crew gave him a push so he could clear surrounding light poles and a coffee cart.

Then, clutching a big mug of coffee, Couch rose out of the parking lot of his gas station into the bright blue morning sky, cheered by a crowd of spectators. [...]

Said his wife, Susan: "He’s crazy. It’s never been a dull moment since I married him."

Link – Thanks Geekazoid!

Photo: Jeff Barnard/AP

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Found: Video of Conan O'Brien's Harvard Class of 2000 Commencement Speech

We’ve posted about Harry Potter’s author J.K. Rowling’s commencement speech to Harvard grads before on Neatorama – this time it’s Conan O’Brien’s turn.

Here’s a clip and transcript to Conan’s commencement address for Harvard’s Class of 2000:

I’ve dwelled on my failures today because, as graduates of Harvard, your biggest liability is your need to succeed. Your need to always find yourself on the sweet side of the bell curve.

Because success is a lot like a bright, white tuxedo. You feel terrific when you get it, but then you’re desperately afraid of getting it dirty, of spoiling it in any way.

I left the cocoon of Harvard, I left the cocoon of Saturday Night Live, I left the cocoon of The Simpsons. And each time it was bruising and tumultuous. And yet, every failure was freeing, and today I’m as nostalgic for the bad as I am for the good.

So, that’s what I wish for all of you: the bad as well as the good. Fall down, make a mess, break something occasionally. And remember that the story is never over.

Link – Thanks Will!

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Chronotopic Anamorphosis

André Mintz of the Marginalia Project explains what “Chronotopic Anamorphosis” is all about:

The image is digitally manipulated by fragmenting it into horizontal lines and then combining lines from different frames in the display. The result is a distorsion of the figures caused by their motion in time, or, as Brazilian researcher Arlindo Machado calls it: chronotopic anamorphosis.

The last segment of the video is the coolest one, hit play or follow the link to the Vimeo video.

Link – via Furl

Author of Chronotopic Anamorphosis video and software: André Mintz
Marginalia Project group: André Mintz and Pedro Veneroso
Location: Belo Horizonte, Brazil – Thanks for the info, André!

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