What can you do with Butterfinger candy bars? Besides wolfing them down hungrily, you can cook with them. Christi of the food blog Love from the Oven rounded up 50 great recipes that use Butterfinger candy bars.
Among them is this Butterfinger ice cream cake made by Betsy of JavaCupcake. She made it upon request as her husband’s birthday cake. It’s made of vanilla ice cream, graham crackers, butter, whipping cream, sugar, and, of course, Butterfinger bars.
Steve Miller and Stacy Adams of Fort Mill, South Carolina own a set of poseable human skeleton replicas. Last year, they started putting them in scenes on the front porch of their home. They call their project the Baxter Skeletons.
The settings are increasingly elaborate, using props, backgrounds, and lights. The skeletons aren't just trying to scare you. They're trying to live normal, fun-filled lives.
The City of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, recently put pianos in public spaces for people to play. David Rauch, an urban planner, led the project. He says that the results have been beautiful and fun:
“You just know they’re a total success when you see a homeless guy sit down and play Let It Be for over two hours at a stretch,” he smiles.
“All types of people play all kinds of music,” he says, “children play the A-B-C song, mothers and sons play duets, friends play dueling pianos.
“We’ve had people play wonderful classical virtuosos, and an opera company singing around the piano.”
The above video shows a performance on a piano in Sir Winston Churchill Square. Ryan, the pianist, says that he's been homeless for 30 years. During that time, he's taught himself how to play.
-via 22 Words
Heather Boggs of Madision, Wisconsin knits hats with patterns that reflect the costumes and scenery of Stanley Kubrick's iconic horror film The Shining. She does an excellent job of matching wardrobes, carpets, and paint schemes that appear in the Overlook Hotel and the people who survive in it.
Her model doesn't quite have the Sad Etsy Boyfriend look, but his showmanship really brings out the tone of these crafts.
(That's My Story and I'm Stuck to It t-shirt)
Hanover is a small town south of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. For as long as anyone can remember, it's been a dry town. That means that people aren't allowed to buy or sell alcoholic beverages. Town officials enforced this law, which was not entirely popular.
In 2006, the town held a referendum to repeal the law. By a 30-vote margin, the town upheld the alcohol prohibition statute.
The town held an election last Wednesday. The alcohol law was once again up for referendum. But as they were preparing for the election, town officials discovered an important piece of information: the law didn't exist.
Everyone had assumed that alcohol sales were illegal in the town. But no one could find the actual text of the law. Lawyers poured through records going as far back as 1880 and found no alcohol prohibition law.
-via Weird Universe
For a baking contest, Jessie Oleson Moore made preztels filled with a mixture of chocolate and peanut butter. Using a recipe by Elizabeth Bennett, Moore first shaped canned breadstick dough into pretzel forms. She filled these with a combination of peanut butter, cocoa, whipping cream, and egg yolk. Moore then sealed the pretzel forms and baked them to make these delicious-looking snacks.
Yesterday afternoon, a horse in Mesa, Arizona escaped from its pen and wandered into a swimming pool. It was probably looking for water to drink. The horse was unable to climb out and became stuck.
After a veterinarian tranquilized the horse, firefighters with the Mesa Fire Department rigged a harness around its body and lifted the heavy animal out of the pool. By my count, that's 9 men in the video struggling to pull on the harness.
The horse was, thankfully, uninjured.
(Photo: Pennsylvania State University)
A chief of the Sateré-Mawé people put it like this:
If you live your life without suffering anything or without any kind of effort, it won't be worth anything to you.
It's hard to argue to argue against that point of view.
Are you ready to leave aside boyhood and become a man? If you're in the Sateré-Mawé people of the Brazilian Amazon, then you will stick your hands into gloves filled with angry bullet ants and keep them there for 10 minutes.
And you'll do this 20 times.
The bullet ants (Paraponera clavata) are appropriately named. Each sting is like 30 bee stings. To prepare for the initiation right, the men of the Sateré-Mawé gather them, drug them, then stick the ants into mittens of woven grass.
When the ants awake from their drugged stupor, they're in a foul mood. The boys stick their hands into the mittens and keep them there for about 10 minutes. It hurts a lot. But if they can do this 20 times, the tribe will accept them as men.
(Image: Universal Pictures)
So put your hand in. Remember that fear is the mind-killer. Also horrifically venomous ants.
-via Ace of Spades HQ
(Photo: PurpleHull Pea Festival)
Do you have a rototiller? How fast does it go? How fast can you make it go?
If you can modify your tiller to go faster than any other and run behind it, holding onto the handlebars, for 200 feet, then you might have what it takes to be a rototiller racer.
The capital of this sport is Emerson, Arkansas. There, at annual PurpleHull Pea Festival, the champions assemble to find out who is the fastest rototiller racer.
As long as the engine doesn't produce more than 50 horsepower, you can modify your tiller however you wish. Racers must run, not ride, their tillers for the entire race. They have to attach a kill switch to their wrists so that if they lose control of their tillers, they shut off automatically.
Shane Waller of Junction City, Arkansas holds the current record. He tilled the 200-foot field in just 5.59 seconds. That's a speed of about 24 miles per hour.
-via American Digest
For several months, Darth Vader has been running for the President of Ukraine. That's his real, legal name: Darth Alekseyevich Vader.
He's the nominee of the Internet Party, which is also running candidates for Parliament. Those candidates represent a broad coalition of Imperial and Rebel Alliance leaders, including Yoda, Chewbacca, and Princess Amidala. Lord Vader's campaign has produced high quality campaign commercials, such as the one you see above.
(Photo: Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)
Lord Vader has run an active campaign. He often rides a custom-built bus decorated in Imperial motifs through the major cities of Ukraine, delivering speeches.
Unfortunately for Vader, he was unable to vote. When he approached the polls, an election worker insisted that he remove his helmet to confirm his identity. Lord Vader refused and left (warning: auto-start video).
-via AP
You can dress like a Disney Princess for Halloween. But you probably shouldn't act like one. This BuzzFeed video shows how weird it would look if you do what Ariel, Rapunzel, Mulan, and Pocahontas, did in their movies.
Yeah, Snow White's 7 roommates . . . that could be hard to explain. Especially since they all like to gather around her bed and watch her sleep.
The weather is perfect, so let's stay inside! Natural sunlight and unconditioned air have a certain appeal, but it's hard to watch Netflix from outside and I have to keep careful track of how many people have liked my status update.
If you lined up all of the planets in our solar system with the exception of Pluto, they would fit neatly between the Earth and the Moon with only about 2,729 miles to spare.
Redditor CapnTrip made this illustration of this fascinating fact. Frasier Cain of io9 came up with slightly different numbers from NASA, but found that CapnTrip was mostly correct.
Add in Pluto and the number drops to about 1,299 miles.
(Photo: RM Bradley, The Courant)
Johnsonville is a village in East Haddam, Connecticut. It used to be a small milltown until the 1970s, when a fire gutted the local economy. The owner, Raymond Schmitt, was an eccentric businessman in the aerospace industry. After the fire, he announced his intention to turn it into a tourist attraction.
Schmitt moved quaint, turn-of-the-century buildings from elsewhere in New England to Johnsonville. He envisioned it as a place where visitors could step back in time.
(Photo: DamnedCT)
The tourist town was never a financial success and, in 1994, after a dispute with the local government, Schmitt closed it. He died 4 years later. Now the current owners are selling off Johnsonville.
Would you like to own a ghost town? It's 52 acres of land and a 15-acre pond. There are a dozen buildings and a private waterfall. The opening bid is $800,000.
If you watched MTV during the 90s, you may have already seen Johnsonville. Billy Joel filmed part of the music video for his song "River of Dreams" there.
-via Messy Nessy Chic
(Photo: Austin Donisan)
This enormous sculpture reminiscent of the giant stone head from the movie Zardoz is a monument to Decebalus, the last king of Dacia before its conquest by the Roman Empire in 106 A.D. Dacia is the area now known as Romania (for the Romans thoroughly Romanized it) and Decebalus is a symbol of national identity to modern Romanians.
For 10 years, starting in 1994, stone carvers climbed a boulder along the Iron Gates, a gorge along the Danube near the Romanian-Serbian border. The face is 141 feet tall and 82 feet wide. Here, King Decebalus stands once again to resist foreign invasions of the Romanian homeland.
This is one of 10 incredible monuments and buildings carved into rock rounded up by Kuriositas. You can view them all here.
