When dumplings are this cute, it's hard to know whether to eat them or cuddle them and take them on walks. You can find these lovely little snacks at the Richmond Summer Night Market in Vancouver.
Link Via Cute Overload
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Cats make the best gardening companions. At least they keep the rabbits out of the beans. This is the latest in the Simon's Cat series by Simon Tofield. An accompanying post lists some plants you might grow that are safe and enjoyable for cats. Link
Over on the Twaggies blog, we posted a cartoon version of @Aspersioncast's amazing tweet:
I bet cats are pissed they can’t sit on televisions anymore.
— Aspersioncast (@Aspersioncast) June 21, 2012
Today, the talented creator of the Nyan Cat, PRGuitarman, tweeted back to us and told us we were wrong, and included some photos as proof of his grandmother's cat balancing atop a flat screen TV. Check out the photos:
Pretty amazing! Anyone else have any experience with this kind of feline talent?
Oh, Beemo! There's nothing you can't do, except make yourself understood to Finn and Jake.
I drifted away from Aventure Time after the second season. But I caught an episode last week--"Simon & Marcy"--that leads me to believe that I've missed very good content. That episode was magnficent: a heroic and tagic tale perfectly executed.
Rhiannon's cake is delicious, right down to the core. She made it for her sister, a teacher, who wanted to show her students how the Earth is structured. The baking challenge was to bake a hemisphere within a hemisphere within a hemisphere. At the link, you can read about how Rhiannon did it.
In the Nineteenth Century, artisans in Eastern Europe made amazing smoking pipes out of meerschaum, a soft mineral. Roy Ricketts has assembled a collection of outstanding examples of this crafting tradition. Ben Marks of Collectors' Weekly explains why craftsmen used meerschaum:
Meerschaum is a relatively new material to pipe making, appearing no earlier than the 18th century. Found primarily in and around the city of Eskişehir in western Turkey, meerschaum is a porous mineral that’s soft enough to be carved but hard enough to be polished, revealing the carver’s artistry. Unlike hardwood briar pipes, which are also finely carved, meerschaum does not burn, which means the bowl is cool to the touch when it’s being smoked and the pipe material imparts no flavor to the tobacco. And because meerschaum is porous, meerschaum pipes change color over time as they are smoked. Thus, the stone, which is carved white, turns butterscotch brown when made into a pipe, filled with tobacco, and smoked, a process that’s frequently hurried along by rubbing a finished pipe with beeswax and, occasionally, ox blood.
At the link, you can see more photos of pipes in Mr. Ricketts's collection.
Seulbi Kim, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, offers this one-handed solution to transporting food from your local burger joint. She writes:
The carrier will reduce the volume by about 50% compared to that today because I tried to simplify the design and minimize the amount of paper used with a hook for French fries, a sleeve for a burger, and a hole for soda drink, which causes people to carry it easier, and more materials saving. It is one-handed, convenient, practical, and compact, so your hands can be more free by holding all in one.
Link -via Foodbeast | Designer's Website
The brother and sister cooking duo Bob and Carlene Deutscher prepared a luxurious Mother's Day breakfast. Their crêpe batter contains cocoa and apple cider and the filling has strawberries and heavy cream. This is how breakfast should be on every day of the week!
Link -via Tasteologie
Stop motion visual effects master Ray Harryhausen died yesterday in London.
Harryhausen’s fascination with animated models began when he first saw Willis O’Brien’s creations in KING KONG with his boyhood friend, the author Ray Bradbury in 1933, and he made his first foray into filmmaking in 1935 with home-movies that featured his youthful attempts at model animation. Over the period of the next 46 years, he made some of the genres best known movies – MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949), IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (1955), 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957), MYSTERIUOUS ISLAND (1961), ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. (1966), THER VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969), three films based on the adventures of SINBAD and CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981). He is perhaps best remembered for his extraordinary animation of seven skeletons in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963) which took him three months to film.
In a career spanning more than half a century, Harryhausen brought a new level of imagination to movies, and influenced generations of visual effects artists. The video here is The Ray Harryhausen Creature List, featuring his stop-motion characters in chronological order. Harryhausen was 92. Link
The Art of Manliness shows you how to shave the old-fashioned way, like your grandpa did, with proper shaving cream and a double-edge safety razor. This kind of shave is economical, environmentally-friendly, and results in a better overall shave compared to using modern disposable razors. And the best part:
You’ll feel like a bad ass. It’s nice taking part in a ritual that great men like your grandfather, John F. Kennedy, and Teddy Roosevelt took part in.
Find complete instructions and links to recommended products at The Art of Manliness. Link -Thanks, Brett!
Alexander Graham Bell worked with sound, tinkering with gadgets to help his wife, who was deaf, communicate. He is known as the inventor of the telephone. He gave the Smithsonian more than 400 discs and cylinders of his audio experiments, but until recently there was no way to play them back.
As a result, says curator Carlene Stephens of the National Museum of American History, the discs, ranging from 4 to 14 inches in diameter, remained “mute artifacts.” She began to wonder, she adds, “if we would ever know what was on them.”
Then, Stephens learned that physicist Carl Haber at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, had succeeded in extracting sound from early recordings made in Paris in 1860. He and his team created high-resolution optical scans converted by computer into an audio file.
Stephens contacted Haber. Early in 2011, Haber, his colleague physicist Earl Cornell and Peter Alyea, a digital conversion specialist at the Library of Congress, began analyzing the Volta Lab discs, unlocking sound inaccessible for more than a century. Muffled voices could be detected reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy, sequences of numbers and “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
In autumn 2011, Patrick Feaster, an Indiana University sound-media historian, aided by Stephens, compiled an exhaustive inventory of notations on the discs and cylinders—many scratched on wax and all but illegible. Their scholarly detective work led to a tantalizing discovery. Documents indicated that one wax-and-cardboard disc, from April 15, 1885—a date now deciphered from a wax inscription—contained a recording of Bell speaking.
You can hear that recording and read more about it at Smithsonian. Link
April is Grilled Cheese Sandwich Month, so many clever chefs are generating innovative takes on the classic comfort food. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt combined it with one of my favorite foods: cheese-stuffed jalapeño peppers. You can find the full recipe at the link.
Link | Photo: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt
Attention Adventure Time fans! Are you looking for the perfect scarf to help you navigate this unpredictable spring weather? Behold the Lady Rainicorn Scarf from the NeatoShop. This warm scarf looks like your favorite Korean speaking unicorn.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Apparel & Accessories.
Ben Marks of Collectors Weekly talked with Francis Boyd, who makes and repairs swords and teaches his craft to others. His shop has swords that are thousands of years old, and each has a story to tell -not necessarily a good story.
“When I got this sword, it was completely covered in blood rust.” Sword maker Francis Boyd is showing me yet another weapon pulled from yet another safe in the heavily fortified workshop behind his northern California home.
“You can tell it’s blood,” he says matter-of-factly, “because ordinary rust turns the grinding water brown. If it’s blood rust it bleeds, it looks like blood in the water. Even 2,000 years old, it bleeds. And it smells like a steak cooking, like cooked meat. I’ve encountered this before with Japanese swords from World War II. If there’s blood on the sword and you start polishing it, the sword bleeds. It comes with the territory.”
Blood rust: I hadn’t thought of that. I guess it would turn water red, but the steak comment is kind of creeping me out, as is the growing realization that if these swords could talk, I couldn’t stomach half the tales they’d have to tell.
Boyd has the lowdown on how such ancient swords were made, and how the process has changed over time. It's a great read, whether you into weaponry or not, because of his extensive knowledge and care for the historical artifacts. Link
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