Mendl Weinstock promised his sister that he’d crash her wedding with a llama in a tuxedo. Five years later, Weinstock fulfilled that promise, costing him $450, and making his sister’s wedding even more memorable. Boredpanda has the details:
The bride’s first reaction to the llama waiting outside was to say “I hate you so much” to her brother, although she later revealed that she wasn’t really mad and wouldn’t let it change the good time she had. Mendl even wrote in response to some people thinking this would ruin the newlywed’s day: “Actually despite many Redditors telling me I “ruined” her big day, she still had an amazing time and has told me 100x that I did not ruin it but instead made it 10x more memorable.”
This movie ticket can now help you locate your seat as the movie plays. Li Peitong has created the ‘shiny movie ticket’ design. The seat and row number is punctured on the ticket, allowing users to use the light emitted by the screen to see their seating location. Users would only have to hold the ‘shiny movie ticket’ by the cinema screen, and then be able to identify their seat. The ticket has been awarded the A’ design award winner for idea design category in 2018.
An image posted to the NASA science blog and Astronomy Photo of the Day shows a mountain that seems hollowed out. It actually isn’t a hollowed mountain on Mars, but a lava tube ‘skylight’. The lava tube ‘skylight’ is a product of ancient volcanic activity below the surface of Mars. The feature is on the slopes of a volcano called Pavonis Mons, home to grabens, or long snaking lava tubes, as ScienceAlert details:
Lava tube caves like this are exciting because they offer some protection from the harsh radiation that bombards Mars. This means that they could be good sites to establish underground bases (if they are accessible; this particular one doesn't look like it's easy to get in and out of).
But there's another implication, too. If we're going to look for signs of life on Mars, caves might be the best option.
"Holes such as this are of particular interest because their interior caves are relatively protected from the harsh surface of Mars, making them relatively good candidates to contain Martian life," the APOD post explained.
"These pits are therefore prime targets for possible future spacecraft, robots, and even human interplanetary explorers."
There are numerous songs out now written around the coronavirus outbreak. This one from the national health department in Vietnam is taking the world by storm after John Oliver featured it on his showLast Week Tonight. The tune is based on the hit song "Jealous," performed by the original artists with new lyrics informing the public how to deal with the threat of the virus. The song itself is an earworm, but earworms are not deadly. -via Boing Boing
Car dealers rely on commissions for their income, and that means a sale could be an act of desperation. Some dealers are highly professional, some will cut corners wherever they can, and occasionally you may run into one who'll do anything, no matter how shady, to close a deal. Two consumer protection attorneys talk about the things car dealers have done that you need to be aware of. Whether these tactics are illegal depends on where you live, but they can all cost you money -and headaches.
Dealers that curbstone. They have a hard time moving the car off their lot so they advertise it on craigslist and pretend it is a private sale. (This may be legal in some states but it certainly is shady). The key? Beware of a private seller claiming they have a dealer doing the paperwork as a favor.
Dealers that don’t pay off trade ins (when they have agreed to do so to make a sale). I’ve heard of dealers dragging their feet and of the occasional dealer that never paid it off. The key is to follow up quickly and be wary of dealing with smaller, lesser-known car lots when it comes to a deal like this.
Remember Perdita, the world's worst cat? Mitchel County Animal Rescue received more than 200 applications to adopt her after her story went viral in January. She was taken home by a family in Tennessee who already had four cats.
“We had an instant connection to her and her to us as well,” Betty Samimi, one of the cat’s new humans, told HuffPost in an email.
Perdita, aka Noel, is still adjusting to her new situation, with “some days better than others,” Samimi said. While there have been some scratching and biting incidents, Samimi noted Perdita is “very lovable,” playful and runs up to greet Samimi when she walks in. She’s also already bonding with one of her new feline housemates.
A new name came with her new life. They are calling her Noel. Read more at HuffPo. You can follow Perdita/Noel's progress at Instagram. -via Digg
Daniele Barresi, an Italian artist who lives in Australia, is a food sculptor. He has developed a specialization in avocados, which offer him the perfect medium for naturally framed, enigmatic images.
The results are astonishingly detailed and precisely carved. You can see more of Barresi's work on his webpage or his Instagram feed.
If you by any chance watched The Rise of Skywalker and thought "This would be better as an old-style video game," here you go. No one thought this, of course, except maybe John Stratman who went ahead and made it happen. However, this sequence does show us the slew of Force ghosts we didn't get to see in the movie. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The Batmobile from the new Batman film starring Robert Pattinson has been revealed in pictures from Matt Reeves at Twitter. It's strange how different people look at it. The breakdown from Jalopnik is all about the automotive side.
The Batmobile in these pictures is almost certainly some sort of custom body built around a truck chassis with fake cages and dramatic plumming tacked all over the place, as most prop cars are. But if we indulge our suspension of disbelief a little it looks, to me, like a 1970 Barracuda with a Ford Triton V10 mounted between the rear wheels.
While the response from io9 is more about how it makes us feel.
Spud Buddy is the mascot for the Idaho Potato Commission, which promotes the cultivation and sale of Idaho's most famous food product.
Spud Buddy is friendly, helpful, and eager to devour the flesh of his own kind. A recent Tweet showed the grinning cannibal eating fellow potatoes as French fries. He's a sick, vicious monster.
KTVB 7 News argues that this act was not only revolting, but a crime under Idaho law:
Under Idaho's "Mayhem" clause (Title 18: Crimes and punishments):
CANNIBALISM DEFINED — PUNISHMENT. (1) Any person who wilfully ingests the flesh or blood of a human being is guilty of cannibalism.
(2) It shall be an affirmative defense to a violation of the provisions of this section that the action was taken under extreme life-threatening conditions as the only apparent means of survival.
(3) Cannibalism is punishable by imprisonment in the state prison not exceeding fourteen (14) years.
Spud Buddy appears to have options other than potatoes on his plate, so he can't claim that cannibalism was necessary for survival.
We've linked quite a few articles about 1960s rock concert posters, which might be called the heyday of the medium. However, one young artist is bringing back the art of that medium in a big way- not by copying what was great in the past, but with his own style. Baltimore artist Luke Martin is only 22 years old, but his posters for Dave Matthews Band, Foo Fighters, The National, Eddie Vedder, Phish, and Death Cab for Cutie are already collector's items. Martin's rise has been meteoric.
“When I was in high school,” he says, “my art teacher, Kurt Plinke, who is one of my main mentors, would always take my black and white paints away from me. He’d put them in his desk, and then tell me that I needed to learn how to do what I wanted without the crutch of white or black. It took me a while to learn how to do that, but he was right, especially when it comes to black. To this day, I don’t think I’ve ever used straight black in any of my posters. Usually, I default to a muted brown because it gives the piece an almost vintage feel, like a sepia tone in an old photograph.”
Another self-imposed constraint is how he treats text, the Dave Matthews Band diner being a good example of what he’s striving for. “As much as I can, I try to avoid placing text on top of the illustration. It makes a more interesting gig poster when you can incorporate the text. I want the art to be first and the text to be secondary.”
Usually that art, regardless of the placement of its accompanying text, feels as if it’s from another time, and the places Martin scratches into his boards often resemble parts of Caroline County on the eastern shore of Maryland, where he grew up in a tiny town called Greensboro with two older brothers and a twin sister. “That’s definitely where it comes from,” he says of the retro scenery that fills many of his prints. “I moved away from the shore about five years ago. Now, whenever I go back, everything’s exactly the same. It’s like stepping into a time capsule.”
When you've got to go, go with class. Heritage Auctions offers this 18th Century European privy that is ideal for readers who would prefer to remain in the library's stacks. The 20-inch tall box is framed with a leather-bound cover titled Historia Universalis. It's in good condition; Heritage reports that it shows few signs of prior use.
Many of us want to live a long and full life. But what really is the secret to long life? 109-year-old Jessie Gallan would tell us that avoiding men is the secret. Others would say that doing crossword puzzles, or tap dancing, is the secret. Another answer can be eating healthy food and exercising regularly. But there’s one thing rarely mentioned when it comes to living a long life, and that is our chromosomes.
… across the animal kingdom, individuals with identical sex chromosomes—including women with double Xs—live nearly 18% longer than their counterparts with mismatched chromosomes, a new study reveals.
The staff of your local Costco regrets to inform you that we have depleted our stock of summoning orbs. There should be more available after the overnight truck is unloaded and the shelves are re-stocked.
Danielle Baskin, an entrepreneur who is trying to revive the telephone, recently visited a Costco. She was equipped with signs that look just like those normally available in one of those stores, except they are for more unusual items. Baskin placed the signs in empty slots to the doubtless confusion of employees. You can see her whole Twitter thread here.
Sleeping people have fast zags of neural activity. One idea is that these sudden bursts of neural activity help lock new memories into the brain while the person is asleep. Sleeping sheep, like us humans, also experience these bursts. But there’s something strange going on in their brains: these bursts also appear in awake sheep’s brains.
Jenny Morton, a neurobiologist at the University of Cambridge, and her colleagues studied six female merino sheep with implanted electrodes that spanned their brains. The team collected electrical patterns that emerged over two nights and a day. As the sheep slept, sleep spindles raced across their brains. These spindles are akin to those in people during non-REM sleep, which accounts for the bulk of an adult’s sleeping night.
But the electrodes also caught spindles during the day, when the sheep were clearly awake. These “wake” spindles “looked different from those we saw at night,” Morton says, with different densities, for instance. Overall, these spindles were also less abundant and more localized, captured at single, unpredictable spots in the sheep’s brains.
What could be the possible role of these daytime bursts? Morton says she doesn’t know, but she and her colleagues suspect that studying these daytime bursts may reveal clues about human disorders.
Check out ScienceNews for more details about the study.
