Jennifer Stetler's 8-month old daughter and her kitten took a nap together. They woke up at the same time, but the kitten wasn't quite ready to resume play. It's baby's job to soothe her.
-via Tastefully Offensive
Blog Posts Clippy Likes
Unhappy days,film shut down. I wanted to change the body of the ET,the mantis like arm placement just didn't work imo pic.twitter.com/mNMEAP9yem
— Rick Baker (@TheRickBaker) May 26, 2014
Recognize the alien in this picture? Of course you don’t, because it was just a prototype that never appeared in the film. Good thing, too, because it would be hard to build a relationship with such a creature. Imagine if this was really E.T.’s race.
Fresh off a hit in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg found himself beset with requests to make a sequel, because Hollywood's problems are not new. After Close Encounters of the Third Kind 2: Closer Encounters of the Fourth Kind was shot down, Spielberg pitched a dark and gritty follow-up in Night Skies, about a group of alien scientists terrorizing a farmer's family and violently mutilating their livestock like so many kidnapped hitchhikers.
Everyone was enthusiastic except Spielberg himself, who couldn't get in the cattle mutilation mood and wanted to make something more optimistic. Luckily, Harrison Ford's girlfriend, screenwriter Melissa Mathison, was around to tell Spielberg that she thought the best part of Night Skies was the subplot where the family's young son befriends one of the younger, less mutilation inclined aliens. Spielberg, liking Mathison's vision, asked her to write the first draft of a little film that you now know as... Schindler's List.
Okay, not really. It was E.T.
The earlier version of the aliens in E.T.: The Extraterrestrial are just one of 8 Iconic Characters That Were Originally Insane, meaning very different from the product we know, at Cracked.
Why would you just throw a log on the fire? Making firewood isn't just a matter of chopping down a tree and drying out the logs. It's a traditional craft that, sadly, has been largely lost in modern times.
Jesse Horn, the owner of Smoke & Flame in Vancouver, has not only recovered that craft, but perfected it. No matter how long it takes, a log never leaves his workshop until he's washed and shaped it into the ideal piece of firewood. CBC Radio reports:
In his tiny shop in Vancouver, BC, he and an apprentice labour over perfect bundles of kindling, twigs, moss, and logs which sell for upwards of $1000 each.
According to Horn, people are not at all shocked by the sticker price: "My customers want to know that they're burning quality and they are happy to pay a little bit more to achieve that."
This is, of course, a satire. There's no artisanal firewood studio in business . . . yet. The CBC comedy news program This Is That created this video to lampoon the rise of artisanal versions of everyday products.
-via Ace Spades HQ
(Photo: Mike Persons/Booksmith)
The Alabama Booksmith in the suburbs of Birmingham is a rarity: all of the books it sells have been signed by the authors. Neil Gaiman, Harper Lee, Sue Grafton, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Roth and other famous authors have all contributed. The shelves are filled with books that are not only loved, but also personalized by the authors. Brian Barrett of Atlas Obscura talked to owner Jacob Reiss:
“If a book is not important to us, we don’t buy it,” says Reiss. “When we select a book, we’re as strong in depth with that title as any chain of stores.” There are also no interior shelves so book covers line the walls with plenty of space to roam, making Alabama Booksmith feel more like a boutique art gallery than a mini-Barnes & Noble.
When you're trying to add some imaginative elements to your home by painting a mural on the wall it doesn't hurt to paint in a few visual surprises, some hidden elements that delight the viewer upon discovery.
And if you really want to transport visitors and residents alike to a world of wonder you should take a note from artist Giorgi Makharashvili and add some black light reactive paint to the piece.
Giorgi was recruited to paint a transforming mural on friend Keti Sidamonidze's bedroom wall, and he delivered a piece that goes from sitting cat and simple landscape in the light to fierce tiger face and magical moonlight dreamscape under the black light.
See more pics of the painting process and finished piece at Nerd Approved
Reimagining Disney characters is all the rage these days, and the princesses are ever popular subjects for transformation. Illustrator Joel Santana is a designer based out of Tampa, Florida who decided to strip the princesses of their wholesome costumes and outfit them in sexier garb. On top of that look, they are freshly inked, to boot.
Santana aptly named his bold collection the "Inked Princess Series." What do you think? Do you like your princess with a little "bad girl" thrown in?
Check out other illustrations from Santana’s series and see a video of his process here and here, and view the rest of his work at his site.
A man got his husband a BB-8 toy and secretly tucked it into his luggage when they were packing for a trip. He set up a camera to film his reaction upon finding the gift. As it turned out, he was ecstatic and couldn't contain his glee. Like it's going out of style he shall play! (Contains one NSFW word.) Via Daily Dot
In a recreation of The Great Escape, two kindergarteners in Magnitogorsk, Russia, secretly used spades for several days to dig out of their school. After breaking out, they walked for 2 kilometers to a Jaguar car dealership. Their intention was certainly understandable: they wanted to buy a sports car. ABC News reports:
A female driver noticed the unaccompanied children and asked them what they were doing. They told her they had come from their kindergarten to buy a Jaguar but did not have any money.
She put them in her car and drove them to a police station.
The boys might have succeeded in their plot, if they had brought money and maintained a good cover story.
-via Dave Barry
The wife of the president was just that—until a gun-toting geologist named Lou Hoover moved into the East Wing.
In the spring of 1929, the White House was busy preparing for a tea party. This wasn’t some run-of-the-mill White House tea party: It was a top secret shindig, with staffers and the Secret Service under strict orders not to speak of it.
All the fuss was because one of the 15 invitees on the guest list, Jessie DePriest, the wife of Illinois representative Oscar DePriest, was African-American. Not since Theodore Roosevelt had Booker T. Washington over for dinner three decades prior had a black person paid a social visit to the White House. But now, in the height of the Jim Crow era, Lou Hoover, wife of Herbert, was undeterred. She wanted DePriest to come, and her office had drafted and redrafted the guest list to include people who would accept her at the table.
Despite efforts to keep the party under wraps, the press found out, and, sure enough, a furor ensued. Newspapers lambasted the first lady for “defiling” the White House; the state legislatures of Texas, Georgia, and Florida passed resolutions rebuking her. Lou didn’t apologize. Although the reaction bothered her, she refused to acknowledge the controversy publicly. After all, this was nothing compared to the stress she had coolly handled while living in China, where she laughed off death threats during the Boxer Rebellion.
In many ways, Lou Hoover was the first truly modern first lady. She was one of the first first ladies to drive her own car (to the chagrin of the Secret Service), give radio addresses, and create a separate policy agenda for the East Wing. Usually, it’s Eleanor Roosevelt who comes to mind when people think of first ladies who made their own mark. But it was Lou who set an undeniable precedent for Eleanor herself, as well as future first ladies.
A year after their last installment, we get a new video from Melody Sheep in the Symphony of Science series.
This one features narration (turned into singing with autotune) by astrophysicist Brian Cox. It’s about how the origin of the universe is all about light. -via Geeks Are Sexy
YouTube member carsandwater has another mission for his beloved nickel ball. He had a request to see what a red-hot ball of nickel will do to that foam that florists use to hold flower arrangements. Now, we are used to seeing the nickel ball tear through materials as the heat melts them, but this is different. Weirdly different.
It doesn’t so much melt the foam as it …”affects” it. Now I wonder what kind of weird chemistry went into creating that magical material. -via Boing Boing
Calm down, Mr. Shatner. That’s just a drawing on a transparency taped over an airplane window. Claire Harvey, an artist from the UK, calls her series Postcards. They show solitary travelers standing on the wings of airliners, sometimes longingly gazing at the abyss below.
I can find little information about the series from the artist herself. What is notable is how other people explain the meanings that they find in these images. Junkculture sees the subjects as living in existential crises. Taylor Holmes thinks that the transparencies show “removable people.” I am withholding an assessment at the moment, but I do find Harvey’s work here fascinating. You can see more examples from the series at Arch Atlas.
Bananas aren't just for humans and chimps. Cats love them, too! Or, at least, Mao does. He enthusiastically licks one, then chomps down.
-via Gifsboom
(Photo: Devon Knight/The Guardian)
The Spaghetti Incident, a new restaurant in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, has devised an ingenious way to get people to buy its spaghetti. Besides offering several tasty varieties, the restaurant offers its spaghetti for takeout in cones. The result is that people wandering the neighborhood for amusement can grab a cone and a fork and eat it as they stroll. Spaghetti, a food that is normally messy to eat, becomes completely portable by this method. Dave Bry of The Guardian explains:
Eating spaghetti out of a cone is, oddly, easier than eating it from a plate. This is because of the well-known “twirl method” that sophisticated humans have learned to use to eat pasta. The cone shape facilitates the trick by giving natural purchase to the tines of the fork as they twist. The curved sides of the cone help guide the strands of spaghetti into a ball around the fork. (Emily Post recommended using a spoon to achieve the effect). The twirl negates the need for spearing any bit of food with the fork.
-via Carmen Jade
In this footage, a darling elephant calf chases swallows that fly around her as she plays in the roadway. I'm sure I'm projecting my own smile as I watched this, but it almost seems as if the elephant was smiling. She certainly looks like she's having fun, though. Via Uproxx
Email This Post to a Friend
Page 1 of 2
next