Carl Jara goes far beyond sandcastles. This Cleveland-based artist who also goes by the name Grain Damaged sculpts sand into astoundingly complex and surreal images.
The journey to the incredible creations that you see above began with a chance encounter in high school. Mr. Jara was working on a stage crew with Tom Morrison, a master sandcastle builder. While attending art school for illustration and graphic design, he became involved with a thriving community of sand sculptors. After receiving critical acclaim for a 15-foot sand sculpture that he erected in the student gallery, Mr. Jara switched crafts.
In 1944-45, 12 inmates at Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania dug a tunnel with spoons to make their escape. Bank robber Willie Sutton took credit for the scheme, although burglar Clarence “Kliney” Klinedinst was the one with the trade skills to get it done. The caper was ingenious, not only for its engineering, but also for the fact that no one snitched and the guards did not find it.
Working in two-man teams of 30 minute shifts, the tunnel crew, using spoons and flattened cans as shovels and picks, slowly dug a 31-inch opening through the wall of cell 68, then dug twelve feet straight down into the ground, and another 100 feet out beyond the walls of the prison. They removed dirt by concealing it in their pockets and scattering it in the yard a la The Great Escape. Also like The Great Escape, the ESP tunnel was shored up with scaffolding, illuminated, and even ventilated. At about the halfway point, it linked up with the prison’s brick sewer system and the crew created an operable connection between the two pipelines to deposit their waste while ensuring that noxious fumes were kept out of the tunnel. It was an impressive work of subversive, subterranean engineering, the likes of which can only emerge from desperation. As a testament to either clever design or the ineptitude of the guards, the tunnel escaped inspection several times thanks to a false panel Kliney treated to match the plaster walls of the cell and concealed by a metal waste basket.
Did they escape? Yes, they did, although freedom for the twelve inmates lasted between a couple of minutes and a couple of months. For at least one, it would not be his last prison escape. Prison employees filled in the escape route, and Eastern State was closed permanently in 1971. But that's not the end of the story. The public was still fascinated by the famous escape, so in 2005 a crew of archaeologists went to find the tunnel that prison officials hoped would be hidden forever. Read the entire story at Smithsonian's Design Decoded blog.
(Image credit: Philadelphia Inquirer via Eastern State Penitentiary)
You go, I go, we all go the bathroom, but can you do your business in THESE bathrooms?
Can you go if it feels like other people can look into the bathroom? Or that you're suspended in the air 15 stories up? How much do you gotta go anyhow?
Take a look at these 5 fearsome toilets, where the pressure you feel ain't just that of your bursting bladder:
This unique bathroom in the PPDG Penthouse in Guadalajara, Mexico, is designed by Hernandez Silva Arquitectos. The space was intended for an elevator which was never installed - instead, the homeowner installed a powder room with a glass floor that lets you look straight down all 15 levels of the empty shaft.
You've probably seen the viral photo above of a man using a urinal against a wall picture of women laughing at them, taking photographs and even, ahem, taking measurements, and you've probably thought that it's Photoshopped.
But the photo is real: that's the men's restroom in the 5-star Sofitel hotel in Queenstown, New Zealand. According to Snopes, hotel manager Mark Wilkinson said that the restroom was "just a way to put a little levity into the posh hotel."
When nature calls, why not go in a toilet that's, well, full of nature? The public toilet at the Itabu train station in Ichihara, Japan, is enclosed in a see-through glass box. It is surrounded by a lush garden and a 6-ft tall fence so you can go to the bathroom "outside" yet in complete privacy (well, at least until someone stands on a ladder outside the fence).
Cake Wrecks has a post with a half-dozen cakes on which something is misspelled, and it makes the entire message mean something completely different. If you think for a while, you'll figure out what this cake was really supposed to say. The others are a bit more obvious, but just as funny.
After several years of reading Cake Wrecks, if I ever buy a fancy cake from a bakery, I'll just go ahead and get a blank one with some fancy icing trim and put my own message on it. That way, I'll be totally responsible for my own typos! And I'll already have a tube of colored icing to fix it.
It’s tough being brilliant. It’s even tougher when you hate your own masterpieces.
1. Tony Kaye: The Forgotten History of American History X
Before director Tony Kaye embarked on his first feature film, 1997’s American History X, he’d already been declared a genius of the advertising world. Kaye was famous for taking months to craft the perfect 30-second commercial, and his meticulousness only bolstered his reputation. Top brands including Guinness and Volvo sought out his services, because he was just that good.
But Kaye was more than a perfectionist; he was an egoist and an eccentric. During a period of unemployment in the mid-1980s, Kaye ran a full-page ad in London’s Evening Standard proclaiming, “Tony Kaye is the Greatest English Director Since Hitchcock.” He also attempted to start his own art movement, which included an “exhibition” of a homeless man in London’s Tate Gallery.
So, perhaps it should come as no surprise that American History X turned out the way it did. Studio execs at New Line Cinema were impressed by the concept behind Kaye’s pitch—to create a film about a former skinhead who tries to keep his younger brother from following in his footsteps. But after shooting 200 hours of footage and delivering a rough cut to the producers, Kaye still wasn’t satisfied with the movie. He wanted to tweak the storytelling, and the studio agreed to give him another eight weeks to complete the project.
During those two months, Kaye did virtually no editing.
Instead, he went to a Caribbean island to consult with poet Derek Walcott, who plied the director with a few vague ideas about how to improve the film. Upon returning, Kaye decided to add in footage of actual neo-Nazis, but he had no idea how long that would take. Exasperated, the studio execs eventually pried the movie out of Kaye’s hands, and New Line released an earlier cut of the film.
At that point, Tony Kaye lost it. He sued the studio for $200 million and demanded that Humpty Dumpty be credited as the director. He also spent $100,000 on print ads that trashed the movie. In interviews, he badmouthed the script and claimed that actor Edward Norton had been wrong for the lead role. Yet in spite of Kaye’s insistence that the movie was horrible, American History X went on to garner terrific reviews—not to mention a Best Actor Oscar nomination for Edward Norton.
2. W.H. Auden: The Poem That Wouldn’t Die
W.H. Auden’s best-known poem, “September 1, 1939,” was written the day that Germany invaded Poland, launching World War II. From the moment it was published in The New Republic that year, the work was instantly popular—but Auden wanted to revise it. He thought parts of the poem rang false. He especially hated its most famous line: “We must love one another or die.” Auden later reflected, “That’s a damned lie! We must die anyway.” So in the next version of his poem, Auden altered the text to read, “We must love one another and die.”
Even after making the change, Auden continued to despise the line. In subsequent versions, he resorted to cutting the entire stanza, and eventually decided he wanted to do away with the piece altogether: “The whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty—and must be scrapped.”
To Auden’s dismay, people kept reading and quoting “September 1, 1939.” The poet was particularly irritated when President Lyndon Johnson used the poem in his 1964 “Daisy” TV spot attacking opponent Barry Goldwater. The ad featured a little girl plucking petals off a flower, as the image of a nuclear explosion emerges behind her. As the mushroom cloud balloons to fill the screen, President Johnson says in a voiceover, “We must either love each other, or we must die.”
The Addams Family isn't just creepy and kooky, or even just spooky, they're also pretty gosh darn rocking -especially when The Human Tim gets a hold of it. The Human Tim has already taken on such classics as Duck Tales, but it's hard to beat the classic tune of the Addams Family, which might just be one of the most famous theme songs ever created.
And man, does Tim really make it rock -and the outfits were a perfect choice as well. Coincidentally, I'm going as Wednesday Addams tomorrow, so maybe I should download this and use it as my theme for the day.
Light painter Darren Pearson (previously at Neatorama) has a new video that follows a skeleton as it skateboards all around, blowing away any possible competitors. The skeleton is made from over 700 light painting photographs taken over a year's time. -via Laughing Squid
This is the Seikilos Column. It’s a marble tombstone from the first or second century A.D. A railroad engineer found it 1883 in Tralleis, Turkey. He sliced off the bottom so that his wife could use it as a flower display. Fortunately, the damage did not destroy the essential parts of this archaeological wonder. The Seikilos Column has an inscription of the Greco-Roman world's oldest surviving completely intact song—both the lyrics and the musical notation.
Here are the Greek lyrics in modern English:
While you live, shine Have no grief at all; Life exists only a short while And time demands its toll
It is a timeless sentiment. Along these words, archaeologists found the notes for the song. Below, you can watch a video of ancient musical researcher Michael Levy performing it on a lyre. Or you can go here, scroll down, and listen to a performance of it being both sung and played at the same time.
Today is the 75th anniversary of the legendary radio broadcast The War of the Worlds as interpreted by Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre On The Air. The radio play was based on the 1898 novel by H.G. Wells about an invasion by aliens from outer space. Welles and his team clearly labeled the play as such at the beginning and the end, but as they "interrupted" the music to bring news of the invasion during the play, some people took it seriously.
Media historians have noted that, just as television viewers today tend to channel-hop when boredom kicks in – or ad breaks start – listeners back then would twiddle their radio knobs back and forth between shows. As a result, some listeners joined the broadcast having missed Welles’ intro, and mistook it for a bona fide bulletin.
Since then, ‘The War Of The Worlds’ radio play has taken on an almost mythical status, and the notion that huge swathes of the U.S. public was gripped by fear of Martian intruders has gained a foothold in the popular imagination. A patchy-but-enjoyable 1975 made-for-television movie, ‘The Night That Panicked America’, reinforced newspaper stories at the time suggesting the alarm sizeable: farmers grab their shotguns and fearful families jump into their cars and hit the freeway, while others seek refuge in churches.
BBC Radio 4’s ‘Archive on 4’ series, which last week examined the broadcast’s legacy in ‘Myth or Legend: Orson Welles and The War of The Worlds’ and questioned the extent of the panic, noted that out of an estimated 6 million listeners, around 1.7 million believed the play to be true. Only 1.2 million were said to be “frightened”, according to a study, and just 20 people – a tiny fraction of those who actually heard the show – had to be treated for shock.
However, the media covered the reaction as though it was a nationwide panic. Newspapers at the time wanted to discredit radio, which was cutting into their territory. However, the overblown stories of panic in the streets caused the broadcast to go down in history as one of the earliest lessons in the power of broadcast media. Here is that broadcast in its entirety.
A beautiful and idyllic landscape painting or a Norman Rockwell classic may look like finished pieces that belong on the wall to you and me, but to Robert Brandenburg, they're merely starting points for his artwork. You see, Brandenburg takes (or some say, hijacks) existing artwork and adds his own twist to create an entirely different effect.
Pope Francis addressed families in St. Peter Square at the Vatican last Saturday. There's a video of the event, but it is four hours long. One of the highlights was a little boy who became attached to the pope, and came to stand beside him on stage. When some cardinals tried to remove him, the pontiff allowed the child to stay. The charming sequence is captured in a series of gifs and photographs at Buzzfeed.
College Humor has a set of Google Maps-style directions for negotiating Halloween. The "early childhood" panel shown here is only the first: there are also directions for late childhood (in which you are the older sibling), the teenage years, college, and the adult years. The adult version is my favorite, for more than the obvious reason. It took a real genius to come up with the scheme of putting an empty candy bowl on the porch, since every trick-or-treater will just assume the kids in front of him took all the candy! You can pretend that it was an unintentional slip, but we know better. Check them all out!
Listed here are some of the reasons you could have gotten committed to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia in the late 19th-century. If they still put people in institutions for problems such as these, we would all be inmates. "Bad Company" would have covered the majority of people I know. Asthma? Kicked inthe head by a horse? I think they found the wrong hospital. Apparently, any kind of masturbation meant you were shipped off. "False confinement" really gets me- that's probably related to "Politics."
What is really chilling is to think of how difficult it was back then to get OUT of an asylum. Found at Dangerous Minds.
Modern treasure hunting isn’t all maps and shovels—it takes science, too.
STEP 1: PICK A SHIPWRECK
There are plenty of ships in the sea. According to UNESCO, roughly three million shipwrecks across the globe are just waiting to be found, and at least 100 of them boast potential values that top $50 million. So what’s the best-case scenario? Finding the Flor de la Mar, a Portuguese ship that sank north of Sumatra. The storied treasure includes 60 tons of gold and 200 chests of diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires worth up to $3 billion.
The Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Ashlee Owens’s license. It said that it did not have proof of her car insurance. Ms. Owens insisted that the DMV was wrong and that she had mailed it in. She made a good faith effort to resolve the problem over the phone. But the DMV kept her waiting on hold for very long periods, then hung up on her.
Over and over again.
Ms. Owens was sick of it all and decided to head down to the local DMV office to resolve the issue in person. But she was no longer legally able to drive.
It was illegal for her to drive all the way from her home in Amelia, to Richmond, so Ashlee had a friend drive her to Richmond with a horse trailer...and that's when Ashlee, Sassy and her dog, Tuff, had their protest parade.
Ashley left Sassy and Tuff, for a tough battle. $645 dollars in fees, just to get her license back. While she was inside, the DMV came outside. Drawing a crowd of people who said, now, they've seen everything at the DMV. And after two hours…victory.
"I went in. The lady that's the head of DMV came and found me and she asked me if I was the lady with the horse outside and said ‘well come over here'. Took me to the side and she took all my paperwork upstairs and handled it immediately and sent me on my way," Ashlee said.
