These steampunk Ghostbusters costumes are really inventive and visually interesting. Definately click on the link and take a look at all the pics because the old-styled ghosts accompanying them are also super cool.

Well then, let me introduce you to The League of S.T.E.A.M. (Supernatural Troublesome Ectoplasmic Apparitional Management) — otherwise known as Steampunk Ghostbusters, who, according to their webpage, are “taking the 1984 back to 1884.”

Link

A time-lapse video of the Manhattan Bridge in New York City shows the how the bridge bounces as traffic flows over it.

WPIX News asked the NY Department of Transportation what’s up with the wiggles, and got this response:

"The bridge has moved this way for the last 100 years – exactly the way it was designed to  – and it can move up to 16 inches daily with normal traffic conditions.  The long-span suspension bridge flexibility by design allows the bridge to manage the weight of the traffic and subway cars it carries and the temperature shifts that occur throughout the year."

The Manhattan Bridge spans the East River from Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn.  It opened in December, 1909, and has been renovated during the past 20 years.

You may have seen the bridge in such films as "Ghostbusters," and "Independence Day," and "I Am Legend."

Videography by Kevin Vertrees

– via wpix

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.

If you missed out on the San Diego Comic Con this year, you weren’t alone -tickets sold out months in advance, leaving a whole lot of people locked out. If you were one of the many who wanted to go and couldn’t, or if you just are interested in the event, now’s your chance to see one of the best parts of the con -the costumes. These pictures include my top 20 favorite costumes, but there are a whole lot more out there. If you’re interested in seeing more convention pictures, be sure to use the links at the bottom of the article.

There’s always a lot of cross-over costumes at Comic Con and for some reason, they tend to mostly involve Star Wars. These guys were seventies Darth and Boba Fett. I missed out on the opportunity of getting a picture of another one along these lines, the storm troopper with a gold, disco-ball tiled helmet.

More Great Costumes Behind The Jump

Movie fans everywhere should appreciate this once in a life time eBay opportunity -the chance to buy the original Ecto-1 ambulance from the Ghostbusters films. The auction’s over now, but how many of you actually had $45,000 anyway? Personally, I wish I did.

Link Via Laughing Squid

A day late, (Or AM I… maybe I posted this yesterday and you’re reliving it) I’m sorry!
But despite the holiday theme, this movie is pretty fantastic year-round. Enjoy the trivia (sprinkled with video for your viewing pleasure).

The Stay Puft Marshmallow man doesnt only make an appearance at the end of the movie, he is also seen twice before. In Dana Barrett's apartment, next to the eggs on the counter there is a bag of Stay Puft, and in one of the outdoor scenes an ad for Stay Puft can be seen on one of the buildings.

The Ghostbusters Fire House is located at North Moore, & Varick St. in New York, NY. They have the large white Ghosbuster II sign hanging in their bay.

To promote the film, the Ectomobile was driven around Manhattan prior to the release. In the middle of the film's initial release, to keep interest going, Ivan Reitman had a trailer run, which was basically the commercial the Ghostbusters' use in the movie, but with the 555 number replaced with a 1-800 number, allowing people to call. They got a recorded message of Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd saying something to the effect of "Hi. We're out catching ghosts right now." They got 1,000 calls per hour, 24 hours a day, for six weeks.

Link

From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by Muppetmaker.

Remember the know-it-all who ruined your Sunday morning cartoons by over-analyzing it? Well, he now got a blog:

Are there existential dilemmas in Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends? Does Brad Bird’s oeuvre contain creepy Objectivist subtext? Is there a Lorenzo Music/Bill Murray Ghostbusters-Garfield conspiracy? Were Paw Paw Bears simply evolved Snorks with a totemic religion? Or maybe Scooby and Shaggy, like, totally smoked weed, man. These and other questions require more than careful analysis. They demand over-analyzation.

With mind-boggling posts like A Freudian Analysis of Beavis and Butt-Head, The Secret Identity of Dr. Claw (I’d never have guessed!) and my favorite: Alchemical Symbolism in Smurfs, the Journal of Cartoon Over-analyzations makes for some awesome reading!

Link – via MetaFilter

I’ve been roaming across the States the past few weeks – spent a few days in Boston/Providence and a few days in L.A. Although they’re on opposite coasts, the two locations do have one thing in common: residences that make me feel like I live in a shack. A hovel, really. Don’t get me wrong, I really do love my house, but how can you compare that with mansions built by the Vanderbilts and the Winchesters?
Let’s start with the first house that made me feel inadequate.

The Breakers, Newport, R.I.

photo from Stacy Conradt

Believe it or not, this incredible manse is merely a summer home for the Vanderbilts. Cornelius Vanderbilt II commissioned the quaint little cottage in 1893. It cost more than $7 million to build, which is pretty astronomical when you account for inflation – it would be more than $150 million today.
The mansion that had previously occupied that spot burned down the year before Vanderbilt had the Breakers constructed, so one of his building criteria was that the building should be as fireproof as possible, including using steel instead of wood wherever possible. The furnace is even located under the street instead of actually inside of the house.

If the outside of the house isn’t opulent enough for you, venture inside to see vast halls made out of marble from Italy and Africa. The Gold Room was actually build in France, then disassembled and shipped in airtight cases to be rebuilt once it arrived in Newport.

When Cornelius died in 1899, he left the house to his wife, Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt. When she died, the house was given to her youngest daughter Gladys because Gladys didn’t have any American real estate.
In turn, Countess Gladys left the house to her daughter, Countess Sylvia. Countess Sylvia lived there until she died in 1998, but her children, Gladys and Paul Szapary, still summer there. They stay on the third floor, where the 300,000 tourists the Breakers gets every year are not allowed to visit.

The Mansion, Los Angeles, Calif.

photo from Beverlyhills.org

If you’ve seen There Will Be Blood, you’ll recognize Greystone Mansion (aka Doheny Mansion) as the place where Daniel Day-Lewis uttered the now-famous words, “I. Drink. Your. Milkshake. I DRINK IT UP.” And if you haven’t seen There Will Be Blood, then you’ve undoubtedly seen Batman, the Big Lebowski, the Bodyguard, Death Becomes Her, Entourage, Ghostbusters, Indecent Proposal, X-Men or National Treasure. Oh, and the music video for Meatloaf’s I’d do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That). All of those movies (and more) were filmed on location at Greystone.
The mansion actually has the most in common with There Will Be Blood, though – the house was a gift from oil tycoon Edward Doheny to his son, Ned Doheny. It was built in 1928 and cost more than $3 million, making it the most expensive house in California at the time. Ned didn’t get much time to enjoy the house, though – just four months after he, his wife and their five children moved in, he was found dead in his bedroom along with his secretary, Hugh Plunkett. It was apparently a murder-suicide orchestrated by Plunkett.

The Winchester Mystery House, San Jose, Calif.

photo from WinchesterMysteryHouse.com

I’ve always wanted to visit this house. Sarah Winchester, widow of gun magnate William Wirt Winchester, built this house continuously from 1884 to 1922. That’s 38 years that workers were constantly sawing, hammering and building, twenty-hour hours a day. The house stood at seven stories, but the 1906 earthquake claimed three of those stories and today it stands just four stories tall. There are 17 chimneys, 40 bedrooms, two basements, 467 doorways, at least five kitchens, two ballrooms and approximately 52 skylights. Why such a large, distorted house? Sarah believed that the ghosts of all of the people killed by the guns bearing her husband’s name were out for revenge. She believed very deeply in the spirit world, so when a medium told her that she needed to build a house to contain herself and all of the restless spirits, she took it seriously. The medium told her that if construction ever stopped on the house, the spirits would claim her. When she died in 1922, construction stopped immediately – nails half-pounded into the wall can be found in the house to this day.
There are some odd features in this maze of a house, including doors that lead to nowhere, stairs that lead straight into a ceiling, closets with no floors and numerous secret passageways.

Fair Lane, Dearborn, Mich.

photo from wikipedia.com

Now that we’ve visited both coasts, let’s check out what’s in between. Fair Lane was the home of Henry and Clara Ford and was named for an area in Ireland where Henry’s grandfather was born.
Ford isn’t the only luminary to be involved with the house, though. Frank Lloyd Wright helped draw up the original design for the house before leaving for Europe. And Thomas Edison himself laid the cornerstone of the estate’s powerhouse. The top floor of the powerhouse was reserved for Ford’s Experimental Laboratory – the place he would go to tinker around with new ideas.
Despite Ford’s great wealth, the house really wasn’t considered that extravagant by the standards of the day, even though it did have an indoor poor and a bowling alley. That’s not to say that Fair Lane didn’t have it’s share of strange extravagances, though. As an avid bird watcher, Ford had a steam-heated birdbath installed to entice birds to make the estate their permanent dwelling as well.
Oh, and if Fair Lane sounds familiar, it should – the Fairlane Ford cars were named after the mansion.

Bannerman’s Castle, Pollepal Island, N.Y.

photo from Bannerman Castle Trust

Drive just 50 miles away from the sleek, modern skyscrapers of New York City and you’ll find yourself at Bannerman’s Castle – about as opposite from “sleek and modern” as you can get.
Francis Bannerman VI bought the island in 1900 to use as an arsenal. Bannerman bought 90 percent of the U.S. army’s leftover supplies from the Spanish-American War and thought that the island would be an ideal place to keep them. He even advertised that fact by having “Bannerman’s Island Arsenal” engraved into a wall that faced the eastern bank of the Hudson River. In 1920, the arsenal backfired – literally. Two hundred pounds of shells and gunpowder exploded, destroying a good chunk of the castle and its surrounding buildings. New York State bought the island and all of its buildings in 1967, but after a fire consumed the grounds in 1969, the castle and the island were pretty much abandoned by all. In recent years, tours have been conducted by Bannerman’s Castle Trust, but only if tourees consent to wear a hard hat.

Over 500 people (those crazy Minnesotans!) showed up one winter morning in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, to take a plunge into the freezing lake (a hole has been cut in the ice for this specific reason). The Polar Bear Plunge, as the event is called, is an annual event held in many places to benefit the Special Olympics.

Jeff Shaw of City Pages took a plunge over the weekend, and lived to blog about it:

I arrived at the lake early, just as registration was beginning at 9 a.m., so I could photograph the volunteers from local law enforcement cutting a hole in the frozen lake. The quiet registration soon gave way to a throng. There were more than 400 online registrations, and more than 500 people did the plunge overall — a White Bear Lake record.

The outlandish costumes (one man’s top three: the Ghostbusters; Twister; the Wizard of Oz cast) added to the festive atmosphere, and so did some judiciously chosen music playing from outdoor speakers. Strolling down to the jump-off point, I recall thinking "If you’re going to freeze to death, you might as well do so to the tune of Rick James’ ‘Superfreak.’" And then, the water!

Link | Gallery – Thanks Jeff!

If you’re so inclined, you can vote for (or against) this design by clicking on the voting widget:

You can see more Ghostbusters links here. And you can see more of my Threadless picks here.

Neatorama reader Greg Johnson is auctioning off a Vigo the Carpathian oil painting that he had commissioned a while back.

Vigo the Carpathian, you may vaguely remember, is the big enemy in Ghostbusters II.

Link [ebay] – Thanks Greg!

Where would this blog be without haute couture? Here’s the latest creation of Japanese designer Eri Utsugi, called "mercibeaucoup."

It looked like what you’d expect if you combine Dairy Queen ice cream with fashion!

Link

Twinkies [wiki], and American icon, and for some, the symbol of junk food, is the snack food that people love (or love to hate). Today, the "golden sponge cake with creamy filling" snack is ubiquitous: it’s virtually in every supermarket, gas station, and snack vending machine – but how much do you really know about Twinkies?

Here’re some fun facts to ponder while you munch on one of America’s favorite snacks:

The History of Twinkies

Twinkies were invented in 1930, at the beginning of the Great Depression by James A. Dewar, a plant manager at Continental Baking Company (Hostess’ parent company). At the time, Continental was a relatively new company and Dewar was worried that the company might not survive the hard economic times. He noticed that the company had lots of expensive equipments dedicated to baking “Little Short Cake Fingers,” which was baked for only six weeks a year during the strawberry season. During the rest of the year, the equipment laid idle. Dewar thought that the company can make, and sell, shortcake fingers all year long if they only use a different kind of filling. So he mixed a banana-flavored crème and injected it into the shortcake using three syringe-like injection tubes. And so, a new snack was born.

But what to name it? Dewar was having trouble coming up with a name until he drove past a billboard for the Twinkle Toes Shoes factory in St. Louis. A friend suggested the name “Twinkle Fingers” for the snack, and Dewar shortened it to Twinkies.

Remember that banana-flavored filling? During World War II, there was a shortage of banana, so the filling was switched to vanilla.

Twinkies were first sold in packs of two for 5 cents. Now, they still sell ‘em in packs of two, but for more money.

Twinkies Production

There are 17 Hostess bakeries across the countries cranking out 500 million Twinkies every year. It takes 40,000 miles of plastic wrap a year to package them. At 150 Calorie a piece, all those Twinkies have the energy equivalent to nearly 51,500 barrels of crude oil.

If you want to know, that comes out to be about 1,000 Twinkies a minute or 16 a second.

There are 39 ingredients in a Twinkie: yes, there are flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, water, and "trace" of egg. The rest of the ingredient list is, shall we say, less natural.

Twinkies and the Law

In 1986, Twinkies were a central figure in a political scandal known as “Twinkiegate“. 71-year-old George Belair, a Minneapolis City Council candidate was indicted for serving coffee, Kool-Aid, Twinkies and other sweets to court the senior citizen votes. This led to the passage of the Minnesota Campaign Act, more commonly known as Twinkies Law. Belair lost the election, and the charges against him were later dropped.

After San Francisco supervisor Dan White killed the city’s mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk at City Hall in 1978, he argued during his trial of diminished capacity after eating too much junk food. This strategy, dubbed the “Twinkie defense [wiki],” apparently didn’t work – he was found to be guilty.

Twinkies and Science

Twinkie with Digital Multimeter, at the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. website

In 1995 a now legendary project called Tests With Inorganic Noxious Kakes in Extreme Situations (or T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S.), Rice University scientists Christopher Scott Gouge and Todd William Stadler conducted a series of experiments to determine the physical properties of a Twinkie.

Gouge and Stadler subjected the snack food to the forces of gravity (Gravitational Response Test), electricity (Resistivity Test), water (Solubility test), flame (Rapid Oxidation Test), and radiation. There was even a Turing test, which concluded that “Twinkies are not sentient in any way we can understand.”

Roger Bennatti, a teacher at the George Stevens Academy, wanted to find out the shelf life of a Twinkie, so he hung a pack on the edge of his blackboard (later on joined by a pack of Fig Newtons). That was some 30 years ago "It’s rather brittle, but if you dusted it off, it’s probably still edible," Bennatti said. "It never spoiled."

The actual shelf life of a Twinkie is 25 days, which is still long for a "baked" product (baked is in quotation marks because Hostess actually never revealed how Twinkies are made ).

It takes 45 seconds to explode a Twinkie in a microwave. It takes only a second for your mom to get mad over the mess you’re making by doing so. In cases where the Twinkie doesn’t explode, it will emit a burnt plastic smell instead. Either way, your mom will get mad for sure.

Twinkies: an American Icon.

In 1947, Hostess introduced Twinkie the Kid, a Western cowboy cartoon to sell the snack.

Archie Bunker, a character of the 1970s sitcom All in the Family, loved Twinkies. He even called it “the white man’s soul food.” Twinkies have also made appearances in countless Hollywood movies, like Ghostbusters, Grease, and Die Hard.

Americans love Twinkies, too. In 2005 alone, they spent $47 million on the stuff. Actually, most of ‘em probably live in Chicago: they eat more Twinkies per capita than anywhere else, earning Chicago the title of “Twinkie Capital of the World.”

The White House put a Twinkie in their time capsule for the new millennium, as “an object of enduring American symbolism.”

Twinkies: a Healthy Food?

Before he died in 1985, Dewar said that Twinkies was “the best darn-tootin’ idea I ever had.” He said that the key to his long life (Dewar lived to a ripe old age of 88) is to “eat Twinkies every day and smoke a pack of cigarettes.”

Maybe eating Twinkies does lead to a long life: another guy that really likes Twinkies is Lewis Browning. The 89-year-old retired milk-truck driver is the undisputed "Twinkie King of the World" for eating at least one Twinkie every day for 64 years! By rough calculation, he has eaten more than 22,000 Twinkies so far. He now has a lifetime supply of Twinkies from Hostess.

Deep fried Twinkies, invented by Christopher Sell and popularized by Chris Mullen, on the other hand, is definitely not healthy. It is made by freezing a Twinkie, then dipping it into a batter and deep frying it.

Got a spare $150,000? Then buy yourself this 1959 Cadillac better known as Ecto 1, the Ghostbusters [wiki] car from George Barris Star Car Collection.

Link – via A Welsh View