We've previously seen a house that was plumbed with beer. The advantage to this household feature is that you've got beer flowing through every tap. But you may not want to drink or bathe in beer all day. For example, if you're getting ready for work or school in the morning, beer may not be the ideal beverage choice.
Coffee works better. So Teddy Wilson and Norm Sousa of the comedy/reality TV show Never Do This at Home turned a home water heater into a 40-gallon coffeemaker. They used instant coffee, which is not ideal, but it's a step in the right direction. Now it's possible to take a bath in a tub full of coffee, which is something that I've always wanted to do.
A fluffernutter is a traditional food of the natives of Massachusetts. It consists of a sandwich made on white bread with marshmallow fluff and peanut butter. Tieghan of Half Baked Harvest made a luxurious version with chocolate for, she says, "I think that chocolate is mandatory today."
She made her fluff from scratch with cream of tartar, egg whites and sugar. Her chocolate fondue recipe is unusual. It contains espresso powder and a Cabernet wine.
Paying $4 for a cup of coffee? That's dumb ... or maybe not. Maybe it's genius because that's basically the premise of Starbucks, the world's largest coffeehouse company worth over $56 billion that we know and love.
Similarly, the jury is out whether this next venture is dumb or genius: a coffeehouse called Dumb Starbucks has recently opened in the city of Los Feliz, California, as reported by Los Angeles radio station KPCC. It looks and feels just like a regular Starbucks, except everything has the word "dumb" in front of it.
Dumb Starbucks' menu includes "Dumb Iced Coffee," "Dumb Frappucinnos," "Dumb Espresso," and so on, that you can buy and drink while listening to "Dumb Norah Jones" and "Dumb Jazz Standards" CD.
The story of the Dumb Starbucks went viral on social media just days after the store opened, and people flocked to check it out - some waiting hours to get get their drinks, which are free at the time being.
(Image Via Advertising Agency: Terremoto Propaganda, Curitiba, Brazil)
(Image Via Advertising Agency: DDB Tribal Berlin, Germany)
Ads are often created to evoke a thought or feeling from the viewer, and print ads are meant to capture the target audience’s attention with bold imagery, so when we think of ads as being creative or noteworthy it’s typically because they’ve succeeded on these levels.
The ads that make up Bored Panda’s list of “33 Powerful and Creative Print Ads” are bold, and the messages vary between serious and lighthearted, art and photography, but all are sure to get your attention and deliver their message quite effectively, even if that message is simply “wear a condom” or “get a dog so you can feed them this brand of dog food”.
Over at Homes and Hues, we already showed you a great selection of designs inspired by nature, but if you just can't get enough, here's another fantastic option -Natalia Rumyantseva's Cosmos Bed. As you can see in the image, the cool egg-shaped bed features lights offering you a lovely view of the night sky, but that's not all. It also has a built-in alarm, a sound system that can play relaxing sounds to lull you to sleep and it can even pump aromas into your sleeping space to make sure you can dream about that wonderful camping trip you took as a teenager without having to deal with all the bug bites and sleeping on the cold, hard ground.
A documentary producer and a journalist took a road trip from Moscow to Sochi to see the Olympics. Their rented vehicle was a Lada Niva, a car selected because “it is the closest thing to an automotive version of the Russian soul.”
With its snub nose and mile-apart headlights, the Niva looks like a dimwitted but scrappy puppy, and the ride is about as comfortable as a minor earthquake. When driving at highway speeds, the wheel squirms in your hands as if you’ve offended it. Gear changes are about as smooth as eating a spoonful of hot gravel, and the gas pedal might as well be made of soft cheese. The Niva is as drafty as a paper bag and about as fast as you’d expect of a Russian car that originated, for all intents and purposes, while Elvis was alive.
Along the way, they attended a wedding and an Orthodox Christmas celebration, but the star of the story is the Niva, a tough little car that can be reliable if you are good with a hammer. –via Metafilter
At the elite level, truck drivers are like the Top Gun fighter pilots of the highways. They can quickly move enormous, complex vehicles into tight spots and make it look effortless. Watch this driver move his 53-foot trailer into a parking spot like he's going for a casual trip.
They're called Nuzzles, but I thought of Koosh toys as soon as I saw them. Raw Design, a studio in Toronto, recently won a competition in Canada to design warming huts that people enjoying outdoor winter fun could use to warm themselves. All submissions had to be transportable and no higher than the trees in a recreation area by the Assiniboine River in Winnipeg.
Nuzzles consist of a geodesic dome with a heat source beneath them. Pool noodles radiate from the surface of the dome, carrying heat. People who want to warm themselves can nestle inside the warm tentacles.
How cold has it been in the midwest and northeastern United States? So cold that even this snowman is hitchhiking to Florida! (Does anyone know the story behind this photo?)
Update 2/18/14: The snowman is from Andover, New Hampshire - Thanks Jennifer!
Isn’t it wonderful when you see children react to something they’ve never experienced before with joy instead of fear? Nicole Byon captured her 15-month-old daughter sister Kayden discovering the feel of rain for the first time, which she found delightful and fascinating -and went back out in over and over. May you always look at the world with that sense of wonder, kid. The accompanying song is "In My Arms" by Jon Foreman. -via Laughing Squid
With a clever use of glass, cement and wood siding, the T House by Natalie Dionne Architecture both fits in with and stands out from its stunning mountain surroundings. As the name implies, the building is shaped a T, but the design is far more elabroate than you might imagine. In fact, it's more like two structures connected by one large glass dining room than a solid T-shaped building. One of the buildings is wood-covered and used for the master bedroom and the kitchen. The other structure is cement that juts over the mountain side, providing unparalleled views of the hills below through the guest room and the living room.
Remember the Magic Eye books from the 90s? If you've been waiting for someone to make it in video form, your wait is over.
The Young Rival has released the music video to its song Black is Good completely in autostereogram. The random dot autostereogram music video is best viewed in HD (this one is meant for the "parallel-eye" method - if you have trouble seeing it, you can view it in the cross-eyed version).
Jared Raab and Tomasz Dysinski who created the video explained how it's made:
BUT WAIT, THIS IS A VIDEO. HOW DID YOU MAKE IT?
This is where it gets technical. To make your own autostereogram, one must first create a thing called a "depth map" which is a 2D representation of 3D depth information. We collected real-time depth data of Young Rival performing the song using an X-Box Kinect hooked up to a computer. The computer was running software called RGBD toolkit, designed for capturing the depth information from the Kinect using its built-in infrared system. Once we had our depth information, we unpacked it into image sequences and edited these sequences as if they were regular video. The only difference in the editing process was that depth was represented by luminosity. For fun, you can view the black and white depth-map version HERE (password required - hint: what type of animal appears at 2:30?). With much trial and error, we then ran the data through an algorithm which took each frame of depth information, converted it into a random dot stereogram image, and repacked it into the final video. Lastly, there was one more colour pass at the end, and voila.
Simon Winchester tells a story about working in a morgue when he was 18 years old. His job was to remove certain parts from dead bodies for pathology investigations before sending them to the funeral home. He was young and inexperienced, and often was left alone to "prepare bodies." One day, a leukemia patient arrived, and the manual instructed him to remove the femur and send it to pathology. He did, but then things got weird.
It was approaching lunchtime when I had the elderly gentlemen blanket-stitched back to normal and his clothes back on. He looked in pretty fair shape, except that his leg, unsupported by any internal skeletal scaffolding, kept flopping off the table. No matter how often I pushed it back up, it always contrived to free itself and flop off toward the floor.
It was at this moment when the undertaker arrived. He was called Sid, and when he saw the pendulum swinging of the boneless leg, he displayed what I can best describe as an animated vexation. He declared vehemently that he was not effing taking that body with that effing leg, or words to that effect.
What to do, I asked. "Not my effing problem, mate," he returned. But then, taking pity: "Tell you what. I'm just going for me dinner. Be back in an hour. Just go and find something to stiffen up the leg, put it in the old bugger, and then I'll be back at 2. Sound like a plan?"
What to do? Winchester figured it out on his own, which leads to a rather embarrassing (and funny) end, which you can read in full at The Week.
Alabama is covered with snow. That doesn’t happen often, and neither the highway department nor local drivers were prepared for it. Redditor bat2c posted a collection of images from roads around Birmingham at imgur. It’s not a pretty sight. But I was heartened by this sign spotted in a neighborhood off the highway. Talk about Southern hospitality!
1. The First to Throw Glass in Stone Houses: Martha Washington (First Lady, 1789-1797)
George Washington might have been America's first president, but he could never claim the title of Martha's first love. Prior to Georgie, Martha had been married to a wealthy Williamsburg plantation heir named Daniel Parke Custis, who was a scandalous 20 years her senior. While blissful for the most part, Martha and Daniel's short marriage was saddled by the antics of Custis' cantankerous father-in-law, John Custis IV, whom Martha absolutely abhorred. Shortly after Daniel died (only seven years into their marriage), she paid a not-so-friendly visit to the Williamsburg mansion that had been John's main residence and auctioned off the remainder of her father-in-law's valuable possessions. Everything, that is, except for his priceless collection of hand-blown wineglasses. Those she proceeded to smash in a spectacular act of vengeance.
2. The First to Don a Party Hat: Dolley Madison (First Lady, 1809-1817)
One thing is certain about Dolley Madison: The girl knew how to throw a party. From the moment she stepped foot in the White House, the stiff, humorless receptions of her predecessors became a thing of the past. At Dolley's affairs, people mingled, joked, laughed, and treated themselves to ice cream. Such graces were indispensable, but not only to her husband. Dolley once got two congressmen, John Eppes and Thomas Randolph, to call off their duel over a nasty political argument. When husband James died in 1836, she moved back to the capital to resume her role as First Entertainer and was even granted an honorary seat in Congress (by unanimous vote, no less). In fact, until her death in 1849, it was customary for newly inaugurated presidents to call on Dolley to receive her blessing.
3. The First to Be Suspected of Murder: Margaret Taylor (First Lady, 1849-1850)
When Zachary Taylor passed away unexpectedly in 1850, it hit his wife hard. On several occasions, Margaret, saddened to the point of hysteria, pawed the preserving ice from his corpse so that she could gaze upon his frozen face. She also did something slightly more questionable: She refused to have him embalmed. Such an unorthodox demand raised eyebrows, and a rumor quickly circulated that Margaret wanted to prevent anyone from learning that she'd poisoned her husband. Not until 1991, when historians convinced Taylor's descendants to exhume his remains, were the rumors finally put to rest.
4. The First to Sell White House Manure for Cash: Mary Todd Lincoln (First Lady, 1861-1865)
