Marianne Jetté, a professional theatre costume designer in Ontario, describes herself as “Baba Yaga but with may more glitter.” She weaves supernatural and folkloric themes through her cosplays and crafts. This funny cross-stitch sampler illustrates the dark side of this “cosplay witch”.
Jetté takes the classic “Don’t Do Cocaine in the Bathroom” cross-stitch meme and suggests that summoning demons may be an even worse choice when taking a sanitary break while visiting her home. But turn off the lights and glow-in-the-dark thread indicates that she’s totally chill with your lifestyle choices.
If you like her design, you can buy the pattern on Etsy.
Katmai National Park in Alaska is holding their annual Fat Bear Week tournament today through October 11th. Which of the park's brown bears have gained the most weight during the summer to ensure a safe and healthy winter hibernation? You can't just ask a bear to step on the scales, so these bears are judged on appearance (from a safe distance). People who have been following the bears all summer have their favorites, but if you don't, you can read up on the contenders in their profiles. The bears that have been around long enough have names, like Holly, Otis, Grazer, Walker, and Chunk, but they all have numbers.
The first round matchups today pit Bear 335 against Bear 164, and Bear 747 against Bear 856. If either advance far enough in the tournament, they will probably earn their own nicknames. Voting begins at noon Eastern Time. Cast your vote for both matchups here. You can vote in different matchups each day as the tournament advances. The final championship round will be Tuesday the 11th, and the winner will be announced some time after that.
In the wake of hurricane Ian, a boat washed ashore on the coastline near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. To warn people away from the wreck, the local police Tweeted what surely seems like a sociology experiment. They should have known what would happen. Or maybe they did.
From the comments, we can assume that the boat is now the site of the world's largest party, filled with people from all over who didn't know where Myrtle Beach was until this warning was posted.
Lucy Bruzzone earned the position of Base Leader. She is a scientist who already spent three months in the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.
Mairi Hilton is a conservation biologist from Scotland, and will be monitoring the gentoo penguin colony.
Clare Ballantyne recently earned her master's degree in earth science at Oxford University. She will be in charge of the post office, which sends out around 80,000 cards a year from tourists who visit Port Lockroy on Goudier Island.
Natalie Corbett will run the gift shop and museum and count penguins. She's an experienced retail worker who just got married in June. Her new husband George is supportive of her leaving for five months.
The four are looking forward to subzero temperatures and constant daylight for their five-month contract in Antarctica.
Sometimes we ponder the infinite size of the cosmos and think about how insignificant we and all our problems are. Will we ever travel beyond our physical limits? But that's all relative. If we were to shrink down to an exponentially smaller size, we would be in a whole different universe, where we will never move beyond our physical limits even if they are the size of a small patch of lawn. We might escape human world problems, but we would encounter other problems dealing with physics and the influence of the wider world that microscopic life can never even perceive. As mind-blowing as that is, this video from Kurzgesagt takes us down to exponentially smaller sizes to see what those worlds are like.
While we are sure to learn something new about the physics of the tiny worlds around us, it also might remind you of the kinds of things you ponder during a psychedelic experience (or is that just me?). Once we are back to our normal scale, you can't help but think about the parts of our universe that are so large we cannot imagine them while we inhabit the world we know. What if some intelligent life form were experimenting with us right now, but we could never detect it because they are bigger than our known universe? In other words, size matters.
The main video is only a little over ten minutes long, the rest an ad, although an interesting one.
The Fisher & Norris Factory Museum in Tinton Falls, New Jersey is a private museum devoted to one subject: the anvil. This humble tool used by blacksmiths and best known for falling on top of coyotes is an object of fascination to Joshua Kavett, the founder of the museum.
A company named Fisher & Norris manufactured anvils until 1979. Kavett toured its defunct factory shortly before it was demolished and rescued many anvils from it. He became fascinated with anvils and this particular company and wrote the definitive history of it before opening his museum.
Tom Scott never liked monorails and didn't mind to tell us why. Then he heard from the German engineering company that builds the Doppelmayr Garaventa Monorack. It's a monorail system that addresses the problems Tom found with other monorails, and it is particularly suited for traveling up and down the Alps without wearing yourself out. I don'tknow all that much about engineering, but I hear that Germany is good at it.
Once a staple of everyday party-hosting, the punch bowl is rarely considered these days. You wouldn't buy one unless you were outfitting a restaurant or catering service, but I can guarantee if you live long enough, you will inherit one. Now, anything that is large enough to serve drinks to an entire party can be a punch bowl, and bowls made to serve parties can also be used for other things. Some of the world's most famous punch bowls (and there are some) have been used for other purposes, like to cool wine bottles, feed the dog, row a boat in, or baptize a baby, and they have served as swimming pools, sports trophies, and grave makers.
What makes a punch bowl famous? Using a punch bowl for a dog dish isn't enough, because anyone can do that. But some punch bowls are works of art, while others get their gleam from the celebrities who used them. Most notable are the epic parties they have served. Read the stories of four punchbowls that went down in history at Atlas Obscura.
When we read about incidences of sea monsters attacking ships, we think of the Age of Exploration, when sailing ships traveled oceans the sailors knew little about, and brought back amazing stories months later. But a US Navy ship was attacked by an unknown kraken in 1978! The USS Stein, being large and metal as modern destroyers are, suffered a mysterious technical breakdown that turned out to be an attack that no one witnessed. The sonar system went down, and the Stein returned to port to assess the damage. Upon examining the huge dome on the front of the ship that housed the sonar unit, they found scratches up to four feet long in its rubber coating. They also recovered several claws from underneath the rubber.
The most likely suspect is a colossal squid, the only known squid to have these kinds of claws on their tentacles. It's possible the squid identified the ship's dome as a sperm whale, its natural enemy. However, the size of the claws were big enough to indicate that the squid would have been larger than any colossal squid observed yet. And colossal squid are thought to inhabit the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. It seems that either colossal squid are larger and more free-ranging than previously thought, or else the creature that attacked the Stein is something else that we don't yet know. Read the tale of the USS Stein attack at IFL Science. -via Nag on the Lake
👹 You've undoubtedly heard of AI-generated images, where surprisingly life-like images are generated from text descriptions by AI tools. Well, it didn't take long for the ghost (demon?) in the machine to start showing its face. Meet Loab, an AI-generated demon that spontaneously emerged and now shows up again and again in many of the generated images.
🪓 That escalated quickly! In Cårven Der Pümpkîn, the Swedish Chef used ever-increasingly violent weapons to carve two Jack-O-Lanterns. LOL! Now I want to carve a pumpkin with a Viking battle axe!
Love cute animals? We've got them over at Supa Fluffy:
🦝 This raccoon channeled his inner Winnie-the-Pooh and got his head stuck in a peanut butter jar. Thankfully there were some really nice humans that got him out of that sticky situation!
I know you wouldn't want to take revenge on people for their rude, thoughtless, or even evil deeds, but the arc of justice will sometimes do it for you. The rest of us can sit back from a distance and enjoy the satisfaction in comeuppance for a slight we had nothing to do with. Redditor Veriera, who posted the picture above, said he was glad to have a dirty car when another driver rear-ended his son, and then left without identifying himself.
To the lady who flipped me off when I honked at you...your phone probably isn't still on top of your car anymore.
Some of these cases of eventual justice are even self-reported. This woman just had to take her lumps and chalk it up to experience.
Told my Dad I ran out of alcohol and didn’t have any money to buy any for the weekend..so he gave me the huge bottle of vodka from the cupboard that I stole and replaced with water when I was 16... life really does come back to bite u in the ass
Look at this beautiful oak table. Each wooden plank in the tabletop is 44 feet long! Vladimir Putin would be so envious.
This is a table like no other in the world. We know that Britain's peat bogs are full of prehistoric treasures preserved underneath. In 2012, a preserved oak tree trunk was discovered in a peat bog in Cambridgeshire. At 44 feet long, it is the longest oak trunk ever retrieved from such bogs, and it is only a portion of the original tree! Unearthed after 5,000 years, what would they do with this tree? The Fenland Black Oak Project was launched, with a goal that a massive table would be made from the bog oak's beautiful wood, blackened by thousands of years soaking in peat. The planks were carefully cut, then dried in a kiln that had to be specially built for the project. It took nine months to extract 1.8 tons of water from the planks. The estimated 2013 completion date for the project had to be abandoned, but earlier this year, ‘A Table for the Nation’ was installed in Ely Cathedral so people can see it. Read the story of the magnificent Fenland bog oak table at The History Blog. -via Strange Company
There are a lot of reasons wild animals are kept away from their natural habitat. Some undergo medical treatment for illness or injury. Some lived in inhumane institutions for breeding, entertainment, or labor purposes. Some are in abusive homes. Some were bred in captivity for the purpose of later being freed. Some were destined to be eaten. Some are in scientific studies, either long-term or just to be examined or tagged. And some were trapped by manmade structures they don't understand. The one thing all the animals in this compilation have in common was that they were eventually freed to return to the wild, and someone was there to record the moment. What do these animals feel at the moment? You can imagine joy or relief, or possibly they feel they are making their adrenaline-fueled great escape, and will process the experience later. Maybe they are surprised or even confused. For some, it may be a first time discovery of a strange new place where they sense they belong. We can't know, but we can be happy they are free. -via Nag on the Lake
What was notable about the date 5-25-77? Oh yeah, that was the day the original Star Wars was released! Of course, back then, movies didn't open in every theater nationwide at once, so many of us had to wait until later in the summer to see it. Patrick Read Johnson actually got to see some of it even earlier. As a 15-year-old aspiring filmmaker, he was treated to a trip to Industrial Light & Magic, among other places, courtesy of American Cinematographer magazine. While at ILM, effects artist John Dykstra screened some footage of the upcoming Star Wars for the magazine editor, and Johnson watched in fascination.
You may have heard about the movie called 5/25/77, which Johnson, now an experienced filmmaker, shot mostly in 2004. While the unfinished film has been shown in some theaters and notably at Star Wars Celebration IV in 2007, the project languished because of budget problems and because the Star Wars prequels turned off many of the franchise's original fans. But it is now finished, and is playing in a few select theaters, soon to be released digitally in November. Read the story that inspired the movie, and the story of the long process of getting it completed, at Mental Floss.
Chung Ling Soo was a magician at the turn of the 20th century who had all the skills and none of the authenticity. Billed as a Chinese magician, Chung Ling Soo's real name was William Ellsworth Robinson and he was a white American. Robinson has been performing magic tricks since he was a teenager, and had some success in vaudeville and tours, but a chance to go to Paris was too tempting. The ad was for a Chinese magician, so Robinson became Chinese. The name Chung Ling Soo was chosen because it resembled Ching Ling Foo, an accomplished magician from China who Robinson had encountered. Not only did Robinson almost copy his name, but also copied his act, including tricks Ching Ling Foo originated. The real Chinese magician was furious, and tried to call Robinson out, but audiences really didn't care as long as they were entertained. Robinson certainly put on a good show. His most spectacular trick was catching a bullet in his teeth. The bullet was marked by an audience member to show that it was the same one shot from a gun on stage. About that gun...
The gun was also specially built to have two chambers, one that was loaded and the empty chamber below, which was ignited.
What could possibly go wrong? Something finally went horribly wrong on March 23, 1918. When Robinson was shot during a show, he was so shocked that he spoke English in public for the first time in years. Read about the life and death of Chung Ling Soo at Amusing Planet. -via Strange Company
