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Any Lost fans out there? (Maybe we should start a Lost thread in the forums.) This picture reminds me of Eko’s brother’s plane. Anyway, this gallery is full of cool pictures of Mother Nature taking (back) over. Most are jungle pictures, but there are a couple of others as well – the one of kudzu completely devouring a house in Georgia is interesting.
See all 20 of them at Environmental Graffiti.
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I can’t juggle in real life, so I’m not sure why I thought I would do well at virtual juggling. I couldn’t even get past the first level… but maybe you can. Let us know how you do!
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Designing those little icons is tougher than you might think. Check out how designer Felix Sockwell went through the creative process (and the review process, of course) to come up with the icons for the New York Times app.
Link via Boing Boing
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In high school and college, I spent hours writing overwrought, angst-filled, free verse poetry. Now today’s spoiled and over-emotional teenagers can do the same thing, but with only a single mouseclick, thanks to the Adolescent Poetry Generator.
Here’s a sample:
i am over adam he is my
night he’s my world
and that made me cry, when i
take a drug u will surely stay
alive i log into my inbox, i’ve got
mail!! that’s
faster than any
other mail,including the snail.
gotta write bak to bak.. hi
bak,what’s up?
Link via The Corner
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Casu marzu is a Sardinian cheese with the singularity to be pre-digested by cheese flies’ maggots.
Wait! it gets better : "Casu marzu is considered toxic when the maggots in the cheese have died. Because of this, only cheese in which the maggots are still alive is eaten" (from Wikipedia)
This documentary in German brings us closer to this old and tasty tradition.
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Artist and Graphic designer Kasey McMahon used 16th century illustrations to create a silly fashion guide on pants and how to wear or NOT wear them. I’m particularly drawn to this prophetic guide: Don’t Wear Acid Washed Jeans.
Link – Thanks Kasey!
If the name Kasey McMahon seems vaguely familiar, that’s because she created the world famous CompuBeaver (previously on Neatorama here).
Other shenanigans by Kasey: Meat Shorts | Text-O-Possum
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The Triple Crown never seemed so two-sided.
There are those who go to the races to see and be seen. The rich and famous, and the classy entourage they bring with them.
And then, there’s this crowd…sound is mildly NSFW.
Sure, it may not be the smartest behavior, but doesn’t this spontaneous-looking game say something about culture?
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Grandma’s Graphics has a neat collection of vintage art and public domain images perfect for that children’s book you’ve always wanted to write.
From Harry Clarke to 1890’s storybooks, if you’re looking for unique images or clipart for use on your web pages or in other design or craft projects you’ve come to the right place. There’s a treasury here at Grandma’s Graphics that you probably won’t find anywhere else online. Some of these graphics are quite large and take time to load, but be patient, they’re worth the wait.
Link – via boingboing
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Photographer Justin Quinnell took this photo of The Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol over a six month period using a pin-hole camera made from a soda can.
A series of majestic emerald arcs light up one of Britain’s most iconic landmarks in this stunning photograph taken with one of the longest-ever exposures. The spectacular picture shows each phase of the sun over Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge taken over a six month period.
It plots the sun’s daily course as it rises and falls over Brunel’s famous structure, which spans the 702ft (214m) Avon Gorge. Incredibly, the eerie image was captured on a basic pin-hole camera made from an empty drinks can with a 0.25mm aperture and a single sheet of photographic paper.
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What would Edvard Munch’s "The Scream" look like if Matt Groening painted it? Or how about Van Gogh’s self-portrait? Or Vermeer’s "Girl With a Pearl Earring"?
See what happens to great masterpieces when Simpsonized via the Phoenix image editor, a design tool made by Aviary.
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How many cups of coffee, Diet Cokes or Red Bulls will it take to kill you with its caffeine content?
This website can do the math for you.
Don’t miss the disclaimer : "If you actually try this and end up dying after only 140 energy drinks instead of 143, it’s not our fault."
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David Baird has just completed his Herculean 112-day journey pushing a wheelbarrow across Australia (that’s 4,115 km or 2,557 mi on foot). He did this to raise money for breast and prostate cancer research.
The fit looking 65-year-old said he was feeling ‘amazingly good’, considering he had traveled a massive 4115km on foot.
Taking in about 70 towns along the way, Mr Baird said he pushed the wheelbarrow for between 10 and 12 hours a day. [...]While he never had any doubts he wouldn’t complete his journey, he admitted each day “was hard”.
“My most concern was my survival with the traffic, he said. That was quite horrendous.”
(Photo: POST Newspaper Online)
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For a small fee, you can tour the underground catacombs of the Capuchin monastery in Palermo, Sicily, where 2,000 well-dressed but decaying bodies, mostly from the 19th c., are on display. Nobody knows exactly why they have been preserved.
From the February issue of National Geographic:
“Their jaws hang open in silent yowls, rotting teeth grin with menace, eye sockets stare bleakly, shreds of hard skin cling to shrunken cheeks and arthritic knuckles. These people are mostly small, their arms crossed as they sag against the wire and nails that hold them upright, their heads lolling on shoulders, bodies slowly collapsing with the effort of imitating a past life…”
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The economic crisis got you down? Well, here’s the silver lining to the current economic mess we’re in: it makes America stronger.
Walter Russell Mead of The New Republic explains:
Setting aside the flaws in both these overarching theories of capitalism, this analysis of economic crises is fundamentally sound–and especially relevant to the current meltdown. Cataloguing the early losses from the financial crisis, it’s hard not to conclude that the central capitalist nations will weather the storm far better than those not so central. Emerging markets have been hit harder by the financial crisis than developed ones as investors around the world seek the safe haven provided by U.S. Treasury bills, and commodity-producing economies have suffered extraordinary shocks as commodity prices crashed from their record, boom-time highs. Countries like Russia, Venezuela, and Iran, which hoped to use oil revenue to mount a serious political challenge to American power and the existing world order, face serious new constraints. Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must now spend less time planning big international moves and think a little bit harder about domestic stability. Far from being the last nail in America’s coffin, the financial crisis may actually resuscitate U.S. power relative to its rivals.
Link – Thanks Daniel Belkin!
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(image credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite)
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In a new book, an Argentine historian asserts that Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele is responsible for the astonishing rate of twins in Candido Godoi, Brazil. Jorge Camarasa makes the claim that Mengele ministered to both humans and livestock of the town during the 1960s under the name Rudolph Weiss in the book Mengele: the Angel of Death in South America.
For years scientists have failed to discover why as many as one in five pregnancies in a small Brazilian town have resulted in twins – most of them blond haired and blue eyed.
But residents of Candido Godoi now claim that Mengele made repeated visits there in the early 1960s, posing at first as a vet but then offering medical treatment to the women of the town.
The normal rate of twin births is one out of every 80 pregnancies. Link -via Reddit
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If we could select the US president from the movies, who would be elected? That’s not really the aim of this list; it’s about the presidential portrayals we enjoyed watching the most. When I got to #2 (my personal favorite), I knew who #1 would be. Still, I think Kevin Kline’s character in the movie Dave should have been included. Shown here is Bill Pullman as the US president in Independence Day. Link -via the Presurfer
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Hooray! It’s time for our collaboration with the ever-awesome What is it? Blog. This week brings us this strange lookin’ object. Can you guess what it is for?
Place your guess in the comment section – no prize this week, so you’re playing for bragging rights only.
For more clues, check out the What is it? Blog! Good luck!
Update 1/24/09 – the answer is:
A tool used to remove carbon deposits from the gooves of a piston, patent number 1,768,692. Text on it reads: “Owatonna Tool Co. #840, Made in Owatonna, Minn. USA”.
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You don't have to go far to find fascinating stories behind some of the world's most famous logos. Just take a look inside your kitchen cabinets ...
Morton Salt, as its name clearly states, makes salt. The company got its start as a small Midwestern sales agency in 1848. In 1889, Joy Morton bought a major interest in the company and in 1910, he changed its name to Morton Salt Company.
The Morton Umbrella Girl got her start in 1914. The logo was produced as part of a series of ads in Good Housekeeping. The concept was that Morton Salt - unlike regular salt of the day - poured without clumps, even in damp weather. The company added magnesium carbonate as an absorbing agent to ensure that its table salt poured freely (it had since been changed to calcium silicate).
At first, the advertising agency suggested "Even in rainy weather, it flows freely" as the company's motto. Morton felt that it was too long, and the motto was changed to the catchier "When it Rains it Pours."
Source: The History of the Umbrella Girl
Did
you ever wonder why Heinz Ketchup bottle has a label that says "57
Varieties"? (Photo: williamhartz
[Flickr])
Well, it turns out that while riding a train in New York City in 1896, Henry John Heinz noticed an ad for "21 styles of shoes." He thought that it was a clever way to advertise the great number of choices of canned and bottled foods that his company sold. Back then, the company already sold more than 60 items but Heinz put together "5" (his lucky number) and "7" (his wife's lucky number) to get "57 varieties".
That number must be really lucky, because H.J. Heinz Company grew to be a behemoth in the food industry. It currently sells more than 5,700 varieties in 200 countries and territories.
Oh, and by the way, Heinz' first product wasn't ketchup. It was bottled horseradish made from his mother's own recipe.
Sources: Snopes (a very interesting history on the life of H.J. Heinz) and Heinz
In 1925, Minnesota Valley Canning Company wanted to market its canned peas (a particularly large variety of peas, actually), so it came up with an unusual mascot: a grumpy grey gnome, wearing a scruffy bearskin, stooping and scowling. If that doesn't seem like a mascot that would induce you to buy products, you'd be right.
So the company hired an ad agency to revamp the mascot's image. A young ad man named Leo Burnett (who later became a legend in advertising) was assigned the task and he revamped it into a smiling green giant wearing a skimpy tunic, wreath and boots made of leaves. He also named it "Jolly." (Source)
The Jolly Green Giant was such a successful marketing ploy that in 1950 the company changed its name into Green Giant.
The company's first TV commercial in 1953 featured the Jolly Green Giant as a puppet (in a stop-motion animation) roaming the valley and saying "fo fum fi fe." What they didn't anticipate was how scary he turned out to be to children! Needless to say, they didn't continue the ads ...
In 1978, the town of Blue Earth, Minnesota, put a 55-foot (~ 17 m) tall fiberglass statue of the Jolly Green Giant to welcome visitors to the local Blue Earth Green Giant plant. Every Christmas, the townspeople put a red scarf around its neck, so it doesn't get too cold!
1921
photo credit: Illustration de Benjamin Rabier, ProLitteris Zurich;
1949 red cow via Les
Arts Decoratifs; current logo via wikipedia
At the end of World War I, a French cheesemaker named Léon Bel had a lot of leftover comté, gruyere, and emmental cheeses and decided to melt them down to create a new type of cheese.
In 1921, Bel saw a traveling meat truck nicknamed "Wachkyrie," after "Valkyries," the creatures in Norse mythology that determine the victors in the battle, and thought that it would make a good name for his cheese. Well, actually a pun of the name: La Vache qui Rit ("The Laughing Cow"). Bel commissioned Benjamin Rabier, who later became a famous cartoon artist, to draw the laughing cow logo.
The original La Vache qui Rit wasn't laughing. It also wasn't red and it didn't wear the tiny cheese earrings. Bel asked his printer Vercasson to make the changes - but that's not all that Vercasson did: he also trademarked the "Red Cow" design. Bel was later forced to pay for the right to use his own logo! (Source)
If you look closely at the cow's earring, you'll see that it's actually a package of La Vache qui Rit cheese, with a picture of the red cow on it. And yes, that cow has earrings of cheese, which have another picture of a red cow ad infinitum. (It's an example of the Droste effect, if you must know).
But why is the cow laughing? (Indeed, that is the motto of the cheese) Well, given that the Laughing Cow cheese is now sold in more than 90 countries, with 125 portions of the cheese wedge eaten every second around the world - it seems that the cow is laughing all the way to the bank!
In 1889, Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood developed a ready-mixed, self-rising pancake flour. All they needed was a name. One evening, Rutt heard a song called "Old Aunt Jemima," sung by a black-faced vaudeville performer clad in apron and a bandana headband, and so "Aunt Jemima Manufacturing Company" was born.
A year later, the duo sold their business to R.T. Davis, who brought Aunt Jemima to life - literally - by hiring Nancy Green, a former slave to play her. Green portrayed Aunt Jemima for 30 years till her death in 1923. Davis' campaign was so successful that people thought that Aunt Jemima was a real Southern cook who came up with the pancake mix recipe. Since then, six more women had portrayed the jovial cook (Source)
(Photos: Nancy Green via African American Registry; Anna Robinson via NY Times/Bettmann/Corbis; Edith Wilson via Redhotjazz; Rosie Lee Moore Hall via RTIS; Aylene Lewis via Stuff from the Park; not pictured: Ethel Ernestine Harper and Ann Short Harrington)
In her book Aunt
Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus
The story of how Betty Crocker came to be is quite interesting. In the early 1920s, the Washburn Crosby Company of Minneapolis (a big milling company that later merged with other companies to form General Mills) got a lot of mails from its customers asking baking questions.
In 1921, the company thought that it would be better to sign the responses personally, so they combined the last name of its director, William Crocker, with the first name "Betty" (chosen because "it sounded cheery, wholesome, and folksy.") (Source) The famous Betty Crocker signature was penned by a company secretary who won a contest.
The whole Betty Crocker persona was carefully engineered to appeal to women:
A group of college educated women were hired to develop Betty’s persona. Her picture and signature appeared in print ads. Cooking demonstrations were organized showing off Betty’s “solutions to domestic woes.” [...]
On the radio, Betty could speak to her loyal followers. Cooking and Gold Medal Flour were central to the script. But so were housekeeping, time management, friends, family, and husbands. “If you load a man’s stomach with boiled cabbage and greasy fried potatoes,” Betty once told listeners, “can you wonder that he wants to start a fight, or go out and commit a crime?” But she also reminded women that their role as homemakers was important, and that their aspirations could be “as great as woman could have in any occupation.” (Source)
In 1924, Betty Crocker debuted on the radio (on the nation's first cooking show). In 1936, Betty Crocker got a face: artist Neysa McMein brought together all women in the General Mills' Home Service Department and created a composite face. Over the next eight decades, Betty had several makeovers to update her look to fit the times!
Images: Susan Marks - via Minnesota
Public Radio
(If you're interested in finding out more about Betty Crocker, Susan
Marks wrote the definitive book, Finding
Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America's First Lady of Food
Legends have it that Chef Boyardee was named for the men who created him (Boyd, Art, and Dennis), and given the other made-up food mascots, you'd be forgiven if you believed it.
Chef Boiardi appearing in his own TV commercial, c. 1953 [YouTube
Link]
But in this case, there actually was a real-life Chef Boyardee! His name was Ettore "Hector" Boiardi (1897-1985). Boiardi immigrated to the United States when he was 16 years old and worked himself up to head chef at the Plaza Hotel in New York. When Chef Boiardi opened his own restaurant, so many of his customers asked for extra portions of his spaghetti sauce to take home that he opened a factory to keep up with orders. To help Americans pronounce his name correctly, he named his brand Chef Boy-Ar-Dee (later the company got rid of the hypens).
In
1932, Charles W. Lubin pooled his money with his brother-in-law to purchase
a small chain of bakeries called the Community Bake Shops. When he came
out with a new line of cheesecakes, his wife Tillie told him that he should
name it after their daughter, Sara Lee.
The Sara Lee cheesecakes were so popular that in 1950, Lubin renamed his company the Kitchens of Sara Lee. When his company was bought out by Consolidated Foods, that company also renamed itself Sara Lee Corporation!
The real Sara Lee Lubin never held management position in the company, though she did appear as a spokesperson in some ads. Today, Sara Lee Lubin Schupf is a philantrophist and devotes her time to support the advancement of girls and women in science. (Source)
Quick: what does the Quaker Oats cereal have to do with the religious Christian denomination The Religious Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers? Turns out ... nothing - only clever advertising.
In 1877, Henry D. Seymour and William Heston founded a mill in Ravenna, Ohio, and named it the Quaker Mill. There are conflicting stories as to how the name came to be. One legend has it that Seymour chose the name after reading an encyclopedia entry on the Quakers:
"The name was chosen when Quaker Mill partner Henry Seymour found an encyclopedia article on Quakers and decided that the qualities described — integrity, honesty, purity — provided an appropriate identity for his company's oat product." (Source)
Another story said that Heston was walking on the streets of Cincinnati when he ran across a picture of William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania and a famous Quaker (Source). In whichever case, later that year the company trademarked the Quaker Man, described as "The figure of a man in Quaker garb." It was the first US trademark ever registered for a breakfast cereal.
The original 1877 Quaker Man was a full-length picture of a Quaker holding a scroll with the word "pure" on it (just in case the integrity/honesty/purity point didn't get across). In 1946, graphic designer Jim Nash created a black and white head portrait of the smiling Quaker Man and in 1957, Haddon Sundblom made the full-color portrait. The last update to the logo was in 1972, when Saul Bass created the stylized graphic that still appears on Quaker Oats product packages today.
In 1928, Frank Daniel Gerber and his son Daniel Frank Gerber (yes, I know) of Fremont Canning Company wanted to promote their new product: baby food. The company had been a small packager of peas, beans, and fruits in rural Michigan. Daniel convinced his father to manufacture and sell strained baby food (at the time, preparing food for infant was a tedious chore of cooking and mashing things).
The
Gerbers wanted a baby face to brand their new baby food, and held a contest.
Amongst the many drawings and paintings submitted (including some elaborate
oil paintings of baby portraits) was an unfinished charcoal sketch by
Dorothy Hope Smith of Boston. Dorothy drew a five month old baby with
tousled hair and bright blue eyes, using her neighbor's baby as a model.
She offered to finish the sketch if she won, but the judges decided to
use it as it was.
The Gerber Baby turned out to be so popular that over a decade later, the company changed its name to Gerber Products Company.
Oh, and who was the original Gerber Baby? Her name is Ann Turner Cook, a mystery author and former high school English literature teacher. You can find out more about Ann and her three published mystery books at her official website.
If you enjoyed this article, you'll love the rest of the Logo series on Neatorama:
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| Evolution of Tech Logos | Evolution of Car Logos | Stories Behind Hollywood Studio Logos |
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Here is a sweet video of a cupcake who dreams of sailing away and leaving it’s life all behind for an adventure. A very cool stop motion video created by Kirsten Lepore using veggies, fruits, and sweet snacks. After watching this I just felt like having a salad and then a cupcake afterward as a treat. It’s a good 10 minutes of a video so I highly suggest you eat along as you watch…so grab a snack and enjoy!
Kirsten’s website – Link
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