Banksy has published footage of the creation of the his latest work, which appeared on the outside wall of HM Prison in Reading, Berkshire, UK. The artwork depicts poet and onetime inmate Oscar Wilde escaping not with knotted bed sheets, but on a long page of typewriter paper. The video uses Bob Ross' television show The Joy of Painting as a framework, and Ross himself narrates in exquisitely edited clips from the show. -via Geekologie
Overseas Filipino workers send stuff to their families in the Philippines through balikbayan boxes. The Filipino word “balik” means return and “bayan” means country. It is usually a big box of souvenirs for the whole family and the extended family members. These boxes are usually thrown away after being unloaded.
But Anthony Gonzales (AG), a Filipino fine arts graduate, found another use for the boxes. From the empty boxes he created a costume for his daughter Agatha.
His handcrafted costume helped her win in the Best in Recycled Costume Category at her school’s annual beauty pageant.
The idea to create a costume inspired by different birds came to mind when he remembered a feature of a Philippine eagle he saw on a magazine he used to design. “We thought of something unique, at the same time still in line with the theme of protecting the environment,” he recalls.
Agatha’s bird costume has the body of the Philippine eagle, the arm of a maya, and the tail of a peacock. In lieu of a headdress, AG created a fascinator inspired by the sarimanok, an iconic symbol of Maranao art.
I think it was a pretty cool costume for Agatha.
(Image Credit: Anthony Gonzales/ABS-CBN News)
In the 13th century, two chronicles were written that tell the tale of Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, a native of Iceland who sailed to Greenland and then the New World, known to Vikings as Vinland. The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Eirik the Red both tell of events that were passed down orally for a couple hundred years already. According to the longer saga Greenlanders, Gudrid also later traveled to Rome! But was she a real person, an amalgamation of characters, or completely fictional? Author Nancy Marie Brown, as well as some archaeologists, believe the story is plausible.
While some of the Gudrid story handed down in the sagas might be apocryphal—like her husband’s ghost coming back for a chat—Brown and other scholars argue that portions of the narrative are based on actual events.
Archaeology can often verify saga events. “When archaeologists pay attention to the sagas and actually go looking for stuff where the sagas say they should look,” Brown says, “they have often found [what they’re looking for].”
In Gudrid’s case, archaeologists have excavated the Glaumbaer turf house described in the sagas as her final home in Iceland. The structure is unlike any other Viking age turf home in Iceland, most resembling one built hundreds of miles away in a North American Viking settlement—the very settlement Gudrid and her husband supposedly built on the tip of a Newfoundland peninsula.
That's not the only evidence of a real Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir. Read her story and the research confirming it so far at Smithsonian.
Samantha Hartsoe of New York City was long puzzled about why her apartment is always so cold. She carefully studied it and realized that cold air was blowing from the edges of her bathroom mirror. When she took it off the wall, she found a large hole behind it.
When Hartsoe climbed through the hole, she found an entire apartment. Aside from trash and unfinished utilities, it was empty. But had someone been there?
-via Laughing Squid
In the movie Finding Nemo, a school of fish snap into a formation that resembles a much larger fish. Photographer James Crombie caught that sort of thing happening in real life, with a flock of starlings over Lough Ennell in County Westmeath, Ireland. Crombie, who was recently named photographer of the year by the Press Photographers Association of Ireland, usually covers sports, but with extra time over the past year, has turned his attention to nature.
“A friend of mine, Colin Hogg, lives near the lake, and he said to me last year that the starlings would make a great picture,” says Crombie, who works for the Inpho photo agency. “They nest in the reeds around the lake, and they move every four or five days, towards sunset, and when they move they make shapes.”
Crombie made, he thinks, about 50 trips to Lough Ennell in the past few months. “I’m usually a sports photographer, so for a while I’ve had a bit of time to think about other things. I had an image in my head,” he explains. “I could see they were making shapes. I kept going back, to get the image I had in my head.”
Tuesday night, Crombie shot hundreds of frames and captured the amazing image he had been seeking: a murmuration of starlings in the shape of a starling. Colin Hogg caught the moment on video.
Read more on how it happened at the Irish Times. -via Kottke
Dungeons & Dragons player Professor Olaf introduces us to this tasteful and elegant kitchen backplash design. Yes, it would be hard to clean, but you're thinking too far ahead. As long as what you're splashing around is blood, your kitchen will not lose its appeal over time.
-via Super Punch | Photo: unknown
A scheduled flight from Sudan to Abu Dhabi was forced to return to its origin after the cockpit… https://t.co/6lAjjM4NE2
— Simple Flying (@simple_flying) March 1, 2021
A plane bound from Khartoum, Sudan, to Qatar was forced to make an emergency landing earlier this week when a stowaway attacked the pilot. The suspected terrorist was a cat.
According to reporting in Al-Sudani, the kitty was not a happy passenger, and proceeded to attack the captain. While the crew made every attempt to capture the aggressive stowaway, it proved impossible to get near the furry hijacker. Unable to continue the journey, the pilots set about returning to Khartoum, to the surprise of the passengers onboard.
While you might assume the naughty cat was an escapee from a passenger’s on-board belongings, it seems he was more likely to be a feral feline who sought a comfortable place to rest. Al-Sudani reported that the plane was stationary in the hangar overnight for cleaning and preparations. It is believed that the cat crept onboard and found a comfortable spot to rest in the cockpit.
There is no word yet on the condition of the pilot. Read more about this incident and other animal shenanigans on planes at Simple Flying. -via reddit
It's been a year since the Skywalker saga closed for good. The latest Star Wars trilogy grossed $4.5 billion worldwide, outstripping what Disney paid for the franchise, and led to plenty of spinoffs. But how does that compare to the damage it left behind? The arc of the three movies left a bitter taste in the mouths of many of the people connected with it. At the top of the list are Kelly Marie Tran and John Boyega.
Lots of great movies had tortuous paths to the big screen, but they tend to be more of the “director and star didn’t get along” variety. The treatment that Tran endured was something uglier and more modern — and she wasn’t alone in the Star Wars universe. Likewise, Boyega had to deal with racist fans on social media, although he was outspoken about his frustrations with how Disney sidelined his character along the way: “They gave all the nuance to Adam Driver, all the nuance to Daisy Ridley,” he said last summer. “Let’s be honest. Daisy knows this. Adam knows this. Everybody knows. I’m not exposing anything.” Both he and Tran have reason to complain: By The Rise of Skywalker, they felt like supporting characters that the filmmakers didn’t know what to do with. So much for diversity.
Others were affected, too: Driver and Ridley, Oscar Isaac, Rian Johnson, Mark Hamill, George Lucas, and millions of lifelong Star Wars fans. Read how they feel about the last Star Wars trilogy at Mel magazine.
PS: If you're interested, there's more in a new interview with Kelly Marie Tran at The Hollywood Reporter.
(Image credit: Gage Skidmore)
Botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov had a lifelong mission to prevent starvation by improving food production. His native Russia suffered numerous famines under both the tsar and the Soviets. The scientist would walk hundreds of miles in remote locations all over the world to collect seeds that might be bred to grow grain in the cold Russian climate. He initiated experimental growing programs that harnessed Mendel's gene theory for crop improvements.
At the end of 1920, Vavilov was promoted to director of the Institute of Applied Botany in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg). The previous director, the plant biologist Robert Regel, had died of typhus the previous year. Shortly before his death, he had written to the Commissariat of Agriculture, recommending Vavilov as his successor. Vavilov was not only ‘the future pride of Russian science’ but an especially agreeable person, belonging ‘to a category of people of whom you won’t hear a bad word from anybody at all’. The Institute, under its new leadership, was envisaged as a scientific centre for testing and improving crop varieties to prevent future famines. It was also to be the home of Vavilov’s grand new project: A vast seed collection, acting as a genetic library, a repository of useful genes which he could use to breed new, superior plants. Arriving at the Institute, Vavilov quickly realised that he was at the helm of an institution devastated by poverty. The rooms were in a state of complete disrepair, a chaotic mess of dust and broken furniture. The pipes had burst, and the existing stock of seeds devoured by the starving masses.
The Institute was not alone in its state of neglect; the whole city was in ruins. Hospitals had been abandoned, public transport was at a standstill, and there was an atmosphere of hopelessness among the dwindling population. Leading academics didn’t escape the clutches of poverty and hunger. In Petrograd, seven out of the Academy of Science’s 44 members died of starvation. Even Ivan Pavlov, a national treasure famous for being the country’s only living Nobel laureate, had to scavenge for firewood and food. Laboratory animals disappeared from their cages and appeared on dinner plates. Lab equipment was repurposed to make moonshine in exchange for food on the black market. Hunger wasn’t the only obstacle academics faced. Scientists returning from a conference or a field trip often found their laboratories looted and houses occupied by refugees from the countryside.
Vavilov managed to turn that situation around, collect more seeds from around the world, and continue the Institute's work. Vavilov's adventures in the field continued, and his reputation grew as the USSR went from the era of Lenin to the era of Stalin. But Vavilov then had to deal with Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist with lesser experience and education, but with a philosophy that meshed better with that of Stalin and the Communist ideologists. When it came time to lay blame on someone for the Soviet Union's agricultural failures, Vavilov had a target on his back. Read about the life and legacy of Nikolai Vavilov at Damn Interesting. You can also listen to it in podcast form.
Thomas Ramsey (left), of Gallman, Mississippi, is a Civil War reenactor. Peep, his pet rooster, accompanies him into the mock battles. It's solid history, Ramsey says, because of the account of a Confederate soldier who kept a pet rooster in this manner until he was finally eaten by Union soldiers (the rooster, not Johnny Reb).
All was merry for Ramsey and Peep until the pair was travelling from a reenactment and stopped at a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Cullman, Alabama. The restaurant did not allow chickens inside, and so Ramsey tied Peep by his leash to his truck while Ramsey and his friends went inside.
When the reenactors returned to their truck, Peep was gone. The Cullman Times quotes Ramsey:
“I went back into the Cracker Barrel and it was very hard for me to say this with a straight face, even though I was panicking: ‘Do you have cameras in the parking lot? I think someone stole my chicken,’” he said. Someone overheard and said they’d seen Peep wandering in the parking lot.
Animal control authorities searched, but were unable to locate Peep. The call went out on Facebook and the people of Cullman sought out Peep. Eventually, a local farmer located the rooser and reunited him with Ramsey:
[...] Ramsey felt like Peep was happy to be back with him. “He stood up and kind of jumped when I got him,” he said.
There’s no doubt about Ramsey’s affection for Cullman. “I was really impressed; I love y’all’s town now,” he said. “I can’t think of many places where there are that many people willing to take the time to help out like that.”
-via Dan Lewis | Photo: Thomas Ramsey
Tom's body suffered a lot of abuse in his long and ill-fated quest to vanquish Jerry the mouse. At one point, he was flattened against a set of stairs. Now you can enjoy that moment forever with this rug by Nellaf, an artist in Florida. He calls it, appropriately, "Flat Tom."
-via Born in Space
Adidas approached Tommy Cash, an Estonian rapper of some prominence, and asked him to collaborate on a shoe design. His response was to insist on creating the longest Adidas original shoe design in the world. Cash comments on the duality expressed in the color choices:
both the ‘angel’ and the ‘devil’ live in me at the same time — two opposites that are constantly fighting with each other. so why hide one side of your personality when they can perfectly coexist with each other. shouldn’t be too good or too bad. balance is needed. as two opposites of yin and yang, forming one whole. yes, these sneakers are different colors. after all, they reflect my mood, which changes every day. and I will proudly wear both versions of the iconic silhouette at the same time
They're available for sale in Russia, so be prepared for a quite a shopping trip if you want to pick up a pair to impress people while clubbing this weekend.
-via Design You Trust
Photos: Tommy Cash (content warning: nudity)
Highly realistic felting work makes this monstrosity all the more adorably frightening. These are the creations of Sacocho Kisou, an artist and presumably necromancer. His felted cats take on unnatural forms. They're what every home needs!
Dance show enthusiasts in Japan can now watch performances live with the necessary precautions and adjustments made. Japanese dance company Moonlight Mobile Theater was able to come up with a way to bring its live audience back to their shows while maintaining the proper health protocols. The viewers sit in separate cubicles surrounding the stage, where they can watch the dancers perform via the letter-drop slots provided on their seats:
“We intentionally created small holes and slots resembling mailbox slots,” said Nobuyoshi Asai, the theatre’s artistic director and choreographer, explaining how limiting the scope of viewing allows the audience to become more absorbed in the performance.
The theatre company began this peephole viewing in December after cancelling most of its shows last year because of the pandemic. Since December, all 12 of the peephole performances have sold out.
Though this response has been encouraging, only 30 people are allowed in the audience at each show. This does not cover the cost of the performance, including additional safety measures such as disinfecting the venue. Government subsidies barely help the company make ends meet.
While acknowledging the difficulties, Asai is steadfast in the advantages of this idea.
“If we don’t do it, artists will lose opportunities to dance and act,” he said. “We want to propose this as a model to bring audiences back to theatres.”
Image via Reuters
