The students at North Farmington High School in Michigan have a neat tradition: they can dress up as their favorite pop culture character for their student ID photos.
Take a look at this year's photos | Last year's photos - they're all fantastic!
First, we got to know Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy. Then we met Baby Groot. By the time Avengers: Infinity War came along, he'd grown into a moody teenager, completely attached to his handheld device, or phone, as we still call them. LEGO sculptor Ochre Jelly (Iain Heath) has recreated that version of Groot out of LEGO pieces- and he's posable, which means he can check messages, play games, and listen to music wherever he happens to be.
Ochre Jelly used his own phone-obsessed kids as inspiration for the series. See more pictures of Moody Groot in his Flickr album. -Thanks, Iain!
Illustrator Jeff Victor (previously at Neatorama) does "Pop Culture Evolutions," meaning a series of pictures showing how a character has changed over time. For comic book superheroes, that means drawing from the styles of movies and comic books, going way back, as far as 80 years in the case of Superman, and Wonder Woman is almost as old.
He also does villains, monsters, and heroes without superpowers. But it's not just characters. Victor also shows the evolution of actors and the roles they select over time, like John Goodman, Nicolas Cage, Andy Serkis, Samuel L. Jackson, Bill Murray, and Jeff Goldblum.
Victor doesn't limit himself to actors and characters, as he has illustrated evolutions of people like Michael Jackson and Stan Lee. See more of Victor's art at his blog and at Instagram. -via Buzzfeed
How bad is the car break-in epidemic in San Francisco? Let's put it this way: recently a TV crew reporting on car break-ins got both their bait car and camera crew vehicles broken into!
Remarkably, as Guerrero was conducting the interview, a car belonging to the Inside Edition crew was broken into, resulting in two broken windows and the theft of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment. That robbery was also caught on by surveillance cameras.
"We actually got hit twice in one day," Guerrero declared.
What is your earliest memory? In a study of more than 6,000 people, the average age of a first memory was 3.24 years, but 40% reported memories from age two or earlier. Some even recall being an infant. Is that even possible?
Researchers who have investigated memory development suggest that the neurological processes needed to form autobiographical memories are not fully developed until between the ages of three and four years. Other research has suggested that memories are linked to language development. Language allows children to share and discuss the past with others, enabling memories to be organised in a personal autobiography.
So how can I remember being a baby? And why did 2,487 people from our study remember events that they dated from the age of two years and younger?
Read about the study and possible explanations for people who remember infancy at Quartz.
(Image credit: Martin Falbisoner)
It had to happen sooner or later, considering how iconic the image is. You can now buy an inflatable Halloween costume that makes you Han Solo frozen in carbonite! Entertainment Earth expects the costume to begin shipping some time this month, and you can pre-order it now for $60. That includes the inflatable, a fan, gloves, and a mask. It's up to you to provide a friend to help you through doors and hand your drink to you. See a diagram of how the costume works at Boing Boing.
Dr. Ashley Seawright is an ophthalmologist in Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia. He is a prime example of nominative determinism. It turned out well, as his patients want to "see right." This is just one name from the Buzzfeed list 23 People Who Were 100% Born To Do Their Jobs. Go there to see what Todd Cutright, Andrew Drinkwater, and David L. Dickensheets are doing for a living.
(Image source: Mark Gribble)
Meet Austin Koslow, the most decorated Boy Scout ever:
Koslow has not only earned every single one of the 137 merit badges the Boy Scouts has to offer, but also seven silver and one gold Eagle Palms — the maximum number of the awards attainable after becoming an Eagle Scout.
Margaret Goff of Japan Times has the story. (Photo: Margaret Goff)
The legends that surround the character of King Arthur give us wonderful tales of conflict, justice, magic, the rule of law, wars, romance, honor, religion, and the uniting of all Britain under one hero-king. However, the roots of those stories and the man Arthur are pretty murky. The earliest written mention of the name assumes the reader has knowledge of the oral history that was once passed down. Alan Lupack tells us what we know and what we don't in this TED-Ed lesson. -via Geeks Are Sexy
After they noticed how much potato peels were wasted in the making of french fries, Milan-based designers Simone Carroni, Pietro Gaeli and Paolo Stefano Gentile decided to do something about it. So they created "Peel Saver," a 100% biodegradable packaging made from potato peels.
via Yanko Design
You know the painting in this picture: a pulp paperback version of Luke and Leia before we ever met the characters, posed in front of a menacing Darth Vader helmet and Death Star. The painting is known as the Style B poster for Star Wars. Beside it stands Greg Hildebrandt, the artist who produced it along with his late brother Tim.
Greg Hildebrandt, now pushing 80, remembers well the circumstances of that painting’s creation. “When the agency in New York called me at my studio about doing the job, they hadn’t seen the film,” Hildebrandt says, even though the movie’s release date was only a week away. “I asked them if they knew what it was about, and they said, ‘It’s some kind of science-fiction movie.’” The film already had a poster by Tom Jung, but Lucas wasn’t totally happy with it. “The guys at the agency told us that Lucas wanted it to be more comic-booky—that was our only direction. So, we went to the agency’s office in New York, were given some black-and-white film stills for reference, and then hopped a train back to my studio in Jersey. We were given 36 hours. On the train, we started asking ourselves, ‘What do they mean by comic-booky?’ They obviously didn’t literally mean a black-ink outline with flat colors, so we went for more of a pulp look and a broader approach in terms of color.”
All these years later, Hildebrandt has painted the image again, an original artwork that will go up for auction in November. Read about the artist, the origin, and the legacy of the Star Wars Style B painting at Collectors Weekly.
You may have heard any of a dozen origin stories for the word "Okay." Or maybe you use "OK." It goes back as least as far as 1839, but could have been around before that. It's had quite a history since then.
The 28th First Annual Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded last night in a ceremony at Harvard University's Sanders Theater. These are awarded by our friends at The Annals of Improbable Research every September for scientific research that makes us laugh, and then makes us think. This year's winning research told us how to give ourselves a colonoscopy, how many calories cannibals consume, how riding a roller coaster can help with kidney stones, and how well your mother's spit shine worked on your face. The scientists involved always have a sense of humor about their work, even though they are pushing the limits of human knowledge in one way or another. The awards went to:
to everyone who keeps trying to join our Facebook page:
— nickie (nicole) (@manaognickie) September 10, 2018
what's your name?
there's only one right answer.#nicolefromlastnight pic.twitter.com/fR4C1WFkPQ
This guy met a girl at a bar and didn't get her number. But he knew that her name was Nicole, and that she attended the University of Calgary. Instead of hiring an investigator, he emailed every Nicole that had a University of Calgary email address- all 246 of them!
"Hi, this is a mass e mail to all Nicole's [sic] if you don't fit this description then ignore and if you are the one and just don't want to talk to me that's ok as well. If you name is Nicole and you're from Holland and you think Nietzsche is depressing then text me ... I'm Carlos btw I'm the guy who took you and your friend home last night."
None of the Nicoles was the one he was looking for, but his email had an effect. The Nicoles made friends with each other! They even started a Facebook group.
Some dude emailed every Nicole at U of C to try to find the girl he met last night and instead they formed a girl gang and I am legit DYING @ucalgary #nicolefromlastnight pic.twitter.com/ql4sxuBADQ
— sarah jurassic park (@ParisEsther) September 8, 2018
Oh yeah, eventually, the Nicole from Holland was found. You can read the entire story at Mashable, and follow updates with the Twitter hashtag #nicolefromlastnight.
Watch these guys build a chocolate boat -and a monster to attack it! This work of art is a collaboration between Las Vegas pastry chef Amaury Guichon and Montréal chocolatier Christophe Morel. We can assume that the artists noshed on the raw material, so they felt no temptation to sample the finished product. After all, they are professionals. -via Metafilter
