If the actors for Episode VII get injured or walk off the job, these kids are ready to step in. Mashable asked Arwen (10), Leia (8), and Neo (5) to dub over the dialogue and sound effects for the trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. They're completely convincing. Hire them for every movie!
-via Uproxx
(Image: 9News)
Rebekah Aversano says, "This is the face I grew up with."
(Photo: AP)
In 1997, Richard Norris's face was blown off in a terrible accident. Five years later, plastic surgeons attempted a revolutionary new type of treatment: a full face transplant. Surgeons have performed this operation since 2005. 23 of the 27 transplants have been successful. In this happily successful surgery, the donor was 21-year old Joshua Aversano, who died in a car accident.
Recently, the Australian news program 60 Minutes introduced Norris to Aversano's family. He met his donor's sister, Rebekah.
How do you become a great artist? Or even just a good one? With practice. Lots and lots of practice.
That's a problem for tattoo artists. Not many people want to be an inker's sketchbook. That's why Tattoo Art Magazine invented the SkinBook. It's a book filled with sheets of a synthetic product that behaves like human skin. The pages are photographs of human body parts that are commonly tattooed. This permits artists to get a sense of what a design will look like when applied to an actual human body.
You once tried to eat a hamburger, but it got away from you. It never forgot you. But that's all in the past, of course. Water under the bridge and all that. Now it just wants to be your friend. The hamburger nightlight will watch over you as you sleep. Its bright, shining teeth and unearthly eyes faintly illuminate the room. It looks at you. It remembers.
Designer Jun Takahashi unveiled the Hamburger Lamp in 2002. Now, High Snobriety warns, it's back.
-via Home Crux
Redditor Loocylooo works for a county government in the southwestern United States. The county animal shelter has a facility in the front lobby of her office building: a cat library. Employees who work in the building can check out a cat for up to an hour at a time. They can also adopt a cat from the cage, which has led to so far over 100 adoptions.
This is brilliant! And regular libraries could do this, too! Most library management systems have reserve modules, so it's just a matter of barcoding the cats, adding them to the circulating reserves collection, then making them available to library patrons. When the lending period is over, patrons could return the cats at the book/cat drop or the circulation desk.
Standard reserve requirements would stand: no interlibrary loan or in-system transfer. Heavy fines would apply for late returns.
-via Tastefully Offensive
(Photo: Joe King)
Tripp and Tyler are the comedians who previously brought email cliches into real life and developed a subtle way to get people to pay attention to you. In this video, they introduce a great idea for a sport: reverse bowling.
In bowling, your goal is to knock down as many pins as possible. In reverse bowling, your goal is to knock down as few pins as possible without landing your balls in the gutter. Their description begins at the 2:13 mark in the video. The scoring system doesn't change, except that a gutter ball is worth 10 points and the winner is the person with the lowest score. You can play in a regular bowling alley so as long as you keep up with your gutter balls.
In the Pacific island nation of Palau, there's a seawater basin called Jellyfish Lake. Approximately 13 million jellyfish live in its waters. Most of them are Golden jellies (Mastigias papua etpisoni) and Moon jellies (Aurelia aurita), both of which sting so softly that they effectively can't harm humans.
So it's a popular diving spot. Visitors swim in the pristine blue waters surrounded by millions upon millions of these beautiful creatures. YouTube user mikeyk730 was among them. He shot this video showing himself immersed in a blue universe of jellyfish. The music that accompanies his footage is Ludovico Einaudi's "Nuvole Bianche."
-via Colossal
(Photo: Kaffeeform)
You can now drink coffee from coffee cups--literally! After 5 years of research, Julian Lechner hit upon a formula that works. He combined used coffee grounds from cafes in Berlin with glue and wood to create Kaffeeform Cups--espresso cups that are made of compressed coffee grounds.
The combination forms a liquid that Lechner injects into a mold, then seals with a waterproof resin. Despite this industrial processing, the cups still smell like coffee. They're sturdy enough to withstand a dishwashing machine and have already been tested for durability in a commercial cafe.
-via Unconsumption
Wednesday Martin is an anthropologist who is currently studying the natives of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She and her family are living amongst the locals, trying to integrate into tribal life in order to better understand them. Martin has discovered a unique phenomenon among the elite mothers there: wife bonuses. These are annual financial incentives that mothers earn from their husbands in exchange for reaching certain performance benchmarks. Martin writes in the New York Times:
And then there were the wife bonuses.
I was thunderstruck when I heard mention of a “bonus” over coffee. Later I overheard someone who didn’t work say she would buy a table at an event once her bonus was set. A woman with a business degree but no job mentioned waiting for her “year-end” to shop for clothing. Further probing revealed that the annual wife bonus was not an uncommon practice in this tribe.
A wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done but her own performance — how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a “good” school — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks. In turn these bonuses were a ticket to a modicum of financial independence and participation in a social sphere where you don’t just go to lunch, you buy a $10,000 table at the benefit luncheon a friend is hosting.
Women who didn’t get them joked about possible sexual performance metrics. Women who received them usually retreated, demurring when pressed to discuss it further, proof to an anthropologist that a topic is taboo, culturally loaded and dense with meaning.
I read Martin's article when it came out 2 weeks ago. I considered posting it at Neatorama, but passed because the story seemed to fanciful to be real. But now a woman who earns a wife bonus has come forward to confirm the story. Polly Phillips, the wife of a wealthy petroleum engineer, writes in the New York Post that she earns every penny of her wife bonus. Most recently, she spent her bonus on new shoes:
These pricey pairs of designer footwear will join a lineup of Jimmy Choo, Manolo Blahnik, Diane Von Furstenburg and Rupert Sanderson heels and a closet crammed with handbags from Prada, Chanel and Anya Hindmarch. Every single one was bought with one of my annual bonuses — the nod from a happy boss for a job well done.
But, in this case, the boss in question is my husband, Al. The role he’s rewarding me for is my work as a stay-at-home wife and mother. And the luxury labels are purchased with the “wife bonus” — 20 percent of his own company bonus — that I’m proud to receive for putting his career before my own, and keeping our lives together.
After all, he readily admits that, without me staying at home with our 19-month-old daughter, Lala — not to mention the support and understanding I offer when his work intrudes on our home life — he couldn’t do his job. And he also knows that if we hadn’t followed his career abroad, I might still be doing very well in my own.
Phillips does insist that her bonus isn't tied to her activity. It's just a fixed portion of her husband's bonus. I'd like to hear from one of the moms that told Wednesday Martin about her wife bonus.
-via Marginal Revolution | Image: Amazon
Perhaps you've occasionally seen a man standing on the street corner offering free hugs. Don't judge me because I'm lonely.
The Japanese comedy troupe Guts and Death offers a different take on the practice. Its members stood in a busy area of Tokyo and offered to let people slap them--for free! Some people hesitated to slap with any force. Others seemed to enjoy it a bit too much.
I want to see if this works in America. Let me go find one of Neatorama's interns.
-via Lawrence E. Forbes
Quentin Tarantino is more than just a filmmaker. He's a scholar of film who loves the craft. Tarantino's works are filled with references to other movies that inspire him--some of which you've probably never heard of. In this video, Jacob T. Swinney shows you some of those allusions in Tarantino's movies.
When his human friends sang "Happy Birthday," JD the horse knew exactly what to do! He blew out the candles, then laughed. He's so happy to be the birthday boy!
JD lives at Ilithien Stables (yes, that's a Lord of the Rings reference) in Whitehouse, New Jersey. Hopefully he got some good presents to go with his cake.
-via 22 Words
According to internet rumor, this photo shows a form that sailors in the Royal Norwegian Navy fill out if they wish to grow beards. A sailor completing this form will explain why he wants one, then draw a picture of what it would look like when fully grown. Redditor alleguta offers this translation:
On the top it says "BEARD APPLICATION", then it's rank/ military ID-number, full name and platoon/ division. Then it says "Reason:" to which I wrote "I get irritated skin from daily shaving and it's starting to get cold outside." Under the sketch I drew, it says "DRAW HERE!" and at the bottom the Lieutenant has written that he will inspect it after the next excercise (which gave me about 2,5 weeks) followed by a stamp to show my application was accepted.
Beards are serious business in Norway (as is proper). In 2011, the worldwide beard champion wove a moose and the Norwegian flag into his beard.
-via Weird Universe
This mysterious photo is circulating the internet. Redditor leability describes it as a wheelchair for a goldfish that has trouble staying upright. The dorsally-mounted cork presumably encourages proper balance. An Australian news site points to this 2011 video of a goldfish named Ada using a similar contraption.
-via The Soul Is Bone
Japanese balloon artist Matsumoto is a master of his craft. These aren't ordinary twisted balloons, but impressively realistic depictions of animals and anime characters. Someday, I want to see a video in which he demonstrates how he makes these wonders possible.
You can see other great selections from his gallery at Kotaku.
