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Ice floes on the Black Sea are scraping past each other, creating weird noises. If you couldn’t see the video, what would you guess is making the sound?
-via The Presurfer
This might just be a better movie than both the Phantom Menace or The Adventures of Tin Tin. Would you go see it?
I don’t know about you guys, but unless the applicant was absolutely terrible, I would totally hire him after that.
This might just be one of the strangest scenes in The Shining, but The New York Times Correction on the matter might just be even weirder. Here goes:
Correction: January 29, 2012
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described imagery from “The Shining.” The gentleman seen with the weird guy in the bear suit is wearing a tuxedo, but not a top hat.
It’s darn good they changed that. I mean how would the readers possibly lived without knowing the bear was not, in fact, wearing a top hat?
Wikki wikki wikki what. Go Frenchie, it’s your birthday.
Via I Has A Hot Dog
FreddeGredde’s medley of songs from The Simpsons gives me an idea: turn the show into a musical. You know, like Cop Rock or Rags to Riches. It’s guaranteed to breathe new life into the series.
-via The Uniblog | FreddeGredde’s Website
Previously by FreddeGredde: Classic Cartoon Theme Song Medley
In 1956, 12-year old Jim Berger wanted to build a house for his dog. So he asked the Frank Lloyd Wright to design one.
In Berger’s favor, Wright had designed his family’s house. So he knew Berger and was on good terms with the kids’ family. The famous architect composed a complete set of plans for a dog house that would fit the same style. Berger never built it, but his family did in 1963. The family dogs, however, disapproved of its organic style and refused to live in it.
Link -via Flavorwire | Photo: Architects + Artisans
I am at a loss to explain why I love Downton Abbey, but I do. This is not an unusual sentiment. And the Dowager Countess has become my favorite character. She’s unflappable, faithful to her sense of honor, and knows how to lay down a few words. Sunday Avery summarized her neatly in this cross stitch.
Vinnie’s Pizza in Brooklyn gets creative with its menu board, showing themed meals for fans of A Clockwork Orange, Lost, Sons of Anarchy, and more. Stop by and exterminate a pizza during lunchtime.
Link -via reddit | Official Website
These videos by James Hutson are designed to introduce high school students to rational thinking. The style is reminiscent of the animated title sequences of Saul Bass. Therefore Saul Bass wanted people to think rationally. So watch the other five videos in the program at the link.
3d printing continues to take us boldly into the brave new world of the 21st century, and not surprisingly medical applications are at the top of the innovation ladder, since replacement parts are always in demand.
Recently, an entire mandible was created in a 3d printer by mixing titanium with the printing compound, and an elderly woman got a new lease on life thanks to the 3d printing of this replacement part. Here’s the scoop:
The patient was an elderly woman of 83 years who had developed a chronic bone infection in her lower jaw. Reconstructive surgery would be risky (and expensive) at her age so they decided to try something new – an operation that is literally the first of its kind.
They crafted a brand new jaw for her, made from titanium powder fused in a 3D printer. The complex body part comes complete with articulated joints, cavities to promote muscle attachment, and grooves to direct regrowth of nerves and veins. It will also be equipped with a specially made dental bridge into which false teeth can be screwed into holes. That will happen later this month during a follow-up surgery.
The operation was done in June last year, but has only recently been publicized – probably because they decided to make sure it actually worked first!
And work it did: our lovely old granny got to walk away from the hospital only four days after a surgery that only took four hours – a fifth of the time it would have taken to do a traditional reconstructive surgery. The day after the surgery the woman was already able to swallow with her new mouth!
Now, doctors just need to team up with Pirate Bay and start sending bones to each other via torrent file. Modern medicine just keeps getting cooler and cooler!
Link –image credit: organprinter
The iconic weapon wielded by the main character(s) in the Portal video game franchise is about to become a reality thanks to the team at Neca, makers of fine replicas and awesome action figures.
This 1/1 replica looks so good that your fellow cosplayers will be sooooo jealous when they see you sporting this bad boy! And the quite affordable $208 price tag makes it perfectly accessible to all who want to strap this sucker on during playtime.
You can see lots more pretty pictures of this cool life-size replica at the link below. I predict a flood of Portal cosplayers will be in attendance at Comic-Con this year, and every one of them will have one of these strapped to their arm. The world could use a few more Portal costumes, and about a thousand less anime cosplayers!
I'm sure you all agree that a little Jar Jar Binks goes a long way to improving your filmgoing experience. Why, just take a look at these 8 movies recast with the famous Gungan. After all, he rose from humble beginnings to become a Senator of the Galactic Republic.
Link - Thanks Andie!
No? Then you're just a Gungan hater.
Is
the key to losing weight as simple as replacing "om nom nom"
with just "om"? That's the principle behind Mindful Eating,
a movement which invites you to meditate with your food:
The concept has roots in Buddhist teachings. Just as there are forms of meditation that involve sitting, breathing, standing and walking, many Buddhist teachers encourage their students to meditate with food, expanding consciousness by paying close attention to the sensation and purpose of each morsel. In one common exercise, a student is given three raisins, or a tangerine, to spend 10 or 20 minutes gazing at, musing on, holding and patiently masticating.
Lately, though, such experiments of the mouth and mind have begun to seep into a secular arena, from the Harvard School of Public Health to the California campus of Google. In the eyes of some experts, what seems like the simplest of acts — eating slowly and genuinely relishing each bite — could be the remedy for a fast-paced Paula Deen Nation in which an endless parade of new diets never seems to slow a stampede toward obesity.
Jeff Gordinier of The New York Times has the juicy morsels: Link
Is that a woman dressed in a burka or ninja gear? Perhaps we shouldn't be suprised to find that thousands of Iranian women are now training to become ninjas.
From Oddity Central:
The Ninjustu school in Iran was started in 1989 by Sensei Akbar Faraji. This was the first time the martial art was introduced to the country. While the club now has over 24,000 members, the number of female participants is slowly on the rise. According to Faraji, in Ninjutsu, men are called ninjas, while women are addressed as kunoichi.
So.
Do you carry reusable bags to shop at the grocery store? Do you sort empty
plastic containers into the correct recycling bin? Did you trade-in your
gas guzzler for a well-worn pair of sneakers?
Do you think that all those enviro-goody-two-shoes things you did matter? Think again.
No hate mail, please! That's what economist Gernot Wagner at the Environmental Defense Fund said. He argued that in order to save the planet, we need much more than environmentalists. Instead, we need smart economic policies.
Here's an interesting interview at Co.Exist:
Co.Exist:What does the average environmentalist get wrong?
Wagner: Environmentalists, all too often, think that the best way to go about solving the problem is to get everyone to do as they--we, I included--do. I don’t eat meat. I don’t drive. But individual do-gooderism won’t solve global warming.
And it may actually be counter-productive, for two reasons. First, there’s a well-documented psychological phenomenon called “single-action bias.” You do one thing, and you move on. You carry your groceries home by foot, in a cotton canvas bag, and you think that single act of environmental kindness makes up for other sins.
Second, you spend all your energy thinking about these tiny things. Should you buy the local apples that have been stored for months in a cool house somewhere, or should you buy the fresh apple flown in from across the world? Or should you not buy apples at all when they are not in season and risk not getting enough vitamins?
You’d go positively crazy trying to figure out what to do, and you’d miss the big picture: That, at the end of the day, none of that really matters.
So what should we do? Read on at Co.Exist: Link
Nisheisha lives in Jamaica, but there’s no chance you will find her home. I have learned from experience that you never trust directions given by children or by people who do not drive. I’ve also learned from experience that those are the people who will ask you for a ride. Oh, they may be able to show you where they live, but you’ll be past a turn before they tell you to turn “back there.” Go ahead, ask a child near you for directions to some nearby landmark! -via Cynical-C
Grant Snider at Incidental Comics found the secret to making life a lot more artful, interesting, and …strange. Link -Thanks, Rich!
Scientific breakthroughs inspire science fiction. But that door swings both ways, because popular science fiction and its reception also affect scientific research and its reputation, as the general public is more likely to read a science fiction novel or see a movie than to discuss the merits of the latest genetic studies. The most popular science fiction comes from someone who follows science and thinks, “What could possibly go wrong?” The classic example is the group of young educated writers who got together around the time Luigi Galvani was getting publicity for his experiments in animating frog muscles with electricity.
While the group of friends at Lake Geneva imagined the ghoulish possibilities of galvanism, one young woman was so horrified by the idea of reanimating corpses that she subsequently had a dream in which she saw “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.” This dream inspired her to write a horror story in which a “mad scientist” creates a monster out of dead body parts, a monster that wreaks havoc and kills innocents. The author is Mary Shelley. The story, of course, is Frankenstein. Considered by many to be the first true work of science fiction, it was certainly the world’s first cautionary tale about the perils of science messing around with life.
There are other examples in a post at Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Author Laura H. Kahn wants to encourage scientists to write more fiction, so that stories about science could be more informative, and maybe a little less horrifying. Link -Thanks, Janice!
The person who submitted this photo to Black and WTF took the picture himself in the 1950s. Link -via Buzzfeed
When we heard of the death of Florence Green, the final surviving veteran of World War I, many people stopped and thought about the old people who are our living links to history. Robert Krulwich at NPR has a list of people and stories that span a lot of years, like the guy he met in 1973 who recalled living near Rasputin, the mad monk of Imperial Russia.
How could somebody talking to me in a diner on 7th Avenue have also talked to somebody that ancient? It just didn’t seem possible. Yet the old guy said, “Rasputin and my dad were friends. He used to come over for tea.”
I thought about it. Rasputin was assassinated in 1916. A 70-year-old man in 1973 would have been 13 when Rasputin was alive. It was not inconceivable that this guy had actually met Rasputin.
Other stories involve an eyewitness to the Lincoln assassination who appeared on television, Civil War widows who saw the 21st century, and the man who met both President John Quincy Adams and President John Kennedy. Link -via Breakfast Links
Caleb Kraft decorated his 1977 VW Microbus with a mural of an “octophant,” an elephant head with a trunk and tentacles! That’s not all -he installed handmade stained glass in the van as well. So if you see a Microbus with stained glass and an elephant inside, you know who it is. Or continue reading for a video of the project.
You have to wonder if the eight-foot-tall woman has to pay extra to get her legs waxed. Or is the aesthetician just very small? There’s some question of whether this picture is a Photoshop disaster or just a photo taken at a strange angle. What do you think? Link
Zookeepers at the Tama Zoo and the Ueno Zoo, both in Tokyo, undergo annual training in what to do if an animal escapes. Although the training is serious business, it appears ridiculous to onlookers because they cannot use real animals. This year’s escaped animal drill at the Ueno Zoo featured a papier mâché rhinoceros. It appears to be the same fake rhino they used for the drill in 2008. Link -via Arbroath
See also: the Ueno Zoo’s zebra drill and the tiger drill at the Tama Zoo.
Here it is, our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog! Tell us what this object is, if you know. If you don’t, make a wild guess!
Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you’d like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. We’ll have two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don’t include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?
There are more pictures of this thing at the What Is It? Blog. Have fun and good luck!
Update: the exact purpose for the item in question was never actually verified, but Rob at the What Is It? blog thinks it might be “a form for a medicine ball.” Since we don’t know for sure, we are awarding t-shirts for the TWO funniest answers this week. One came from meiao, who said it’s the ball for Mortal Tetherball. Another good one was from Steve Pauk, who said it was a Rubik’s globe! Those are both worth a t-shirt from the NeatoShop. See the results for all the mystery items of the week at the What Is It? blog.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Abraham Lincoln, our 16th U.S. president, was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865. He died the next day. Okay, what is this, a history class? Everybody knows that! But who shot Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth? Well, let’s find out by looking into the life of one of the strangest, little-known men who had a part in United States history. Let’s look at the strange life of Boston Corbett.
Thomas Corbett was born in England in 1832. He immigrated to Boston where he became a born-again Christian. He adopted the city’s name in honor of his conversion. But Corbett wasn’t your normal convert. His religious zeal knew no bounds.
Fearing temptation by prostitutes, he used a pair of scissor to castrate himself. After which, he casually attended a prayer meeting (he did receive medical attention afterwards). Corbett had been married earlier, but his wife died in childbirth.
During the Civil war, Corbett became a Cavalry sergeant. After the 1865 assassination of President Lincoln, his unit took part in the search for John Wilkes Booth. On April 26th, his unit surrounded the barn where Booth was hiding and set it on fire. Corbett saw Booth through a crack in the barn and fired a single shot, mortally wounding him.
“Providence guided my hand,” Corbett told his commanding officer. By an odd coincidence, Corbett’s bullet had struck Booth in the same spot Booth’s shot had hit president Lincoln. When told of this, Corbett said, “What a fearful God we serve.”
His reward money for killing Booth was $1,653.84, the exact same amount as every other man in his unit.
Corbett instantly became famous as “Lincoln’s Avenger.” He was flooded by requests for autographs and cheered when he walked the streets. But fame, once hot and heavy, gradually died down.
Boston Corbett started suffering from severe delusions. He imagined John Wilkes Booth’s men were stalking him and thought he was in grave danger. He fled to Kansas.
In 1887, he was given
a job as doorman to the Kansas House of Representatives. One day he showed up waving a gun, declaring the House adjourned. Corbett was declared insane and sent to an asylum. The following year he escaped, and no one ever heard of Boston Corbett again.
He is thought to have settled and spent the final part of his life in the forests of Hinckley, Minnesota. There is no conclusive proof of this, but the Great Hinckley Fire of September 1894 lists a “Thomas Corbett” on the list of the dead or missing.
Corbett was a hatter by trade. The mercury used to cure beaver pelts is thought to have contributed to his madness.
Visit guest author Eddie Deezen at his website.
What could be cooler than a compilation of nuclear cooling towers undergoing demolition? Those towers imploding with surprised faces drawn on them! It’s an ad from Ecotricity, a wind-power advocacy group. -via Geekosystem
Are you tired of catching flack from hardcore Harry Potter fans about how you’ve never sat through all eight of the movies?
Do you want to check out all the films without committing more than a minute of your time to the task?
Is watching a recap of Harry going from apprentice wizard to defeater of Voldemort the only way you can start your day?
Well then this snack sized video should satisfy any/all of these requirements as quickly as possible.
–via The Mary Sue
This illustrated chart by H. Caldwell Tanner shows how much time is needed to properly enjoy each genre of video game, from casual games to epic length RPGs, and in my opinion it pretty much sums up what all hardcore gamers know-each genre has a different level of commitment, and appeals to a particular type of gamer.
This chart is a great way for newbie gamers to figure out what kind of games they’re looking for, instead of borrowing your copy of Mass Effect 3 for six months just to discover that they don’t really like RPGs.
Link –via Geeks Are Sexy
Meet Agata Oleksiak (aka OLEK), a “New York-based Polish artist” who’s the world’s first crochet street artist. Her works have been seen all over New York and London, and she’s bringing a bit of crocheted color to the world with her psychedelic yarn works and twisted gimp-esque crocheted bodysuits.
Head to the link to see some of her awesome guerilla artworks, from a crocheted car to the Wall Street Bull and some seriously twisted yarn covered rooms in-between. Olek seems hell bent on making the world a warmer place, one bright pink skein at a time.
Link –via DesignTAXI
