David Unger of the band DUM loves Home Alone, and so for his latest parody music video "Get Back," he had a bit of run rotoscoping himself and fellow band members Scott Marsh and Mahreen Khawaja into the movie and adding a bit of blood and gore effect.
Ready for it? In the immortal words of Gangster Johnny "1 ... 2 .... 10!"
I understand replacing Kevin McCallister's (played by the oh-so-young Macaulay Culkin) face with one's own, but doing that to the beautiful mugs of Harry (Joe Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern)? Now that's a travesty only filthy animals would do!
"To me, a chainsaw is just a 3-D pencil," said Thomas Earing of Maple Valley, Washington to KOMO News. "You start scratching in the details. You try to get shadows. It just starts revealing a surface just like a printer would print."
And to prove that statement, the artist and wood carver has a large portfolio of carved pieces he has made over the last decade, including this beauty: The Bark Knight, a wooden carving sculpture of Batman.
According to redditor ninefivezero, the wooden Batman sculpture is 7 feet tall and is made from silver maple. We are slightly disappointed that it wasn't made from spruce, because, yew know, then the Bark Knight's alder ego would be Spruce Wayne.
Being a doctor and a former editor of the British Medical Journal, Dr. Richard Smith is quite familiar with disease and death. And he has reached the conclusion that the best way to die is from cancer - and that's why society should "stop wasting billions trying to cure cancer."
In a controversial blog post over at the BMJ, Dr. Smith explained that, besides suicide, assisted or otherwise, there are four types of death: sudden death; the long and slow death of dementia; death from organ failure, and death from cancer.
When he asked people how they wanted to die, most chose sudden death. "That may be OK for you," Dr. Smith said, "but it may be very tough on those around you, particularly if you leave an important relationship wounded and unhealed. If you want to die suddenly, live every day as your last, making sure that all important relationships are in good shape, your affairs are in order, and instructions for your funeral neatly typed and in a top draw - or perhaps better on Facebook."
The worse type of death, according to Dr. Smith, is the long and slow death from dementia. "You are slowly erased," but with the upside of "when death comes, it may be just a light kiss."
Death from organ failure, such as from respiratory, cardiac, or kidney failure, usually means that you spend far too much of the last moments in your life in a hospital and in the hands of doctors, who may be tempted to "go on treating too long."
So that leaves death from cancer, which according to Dr. Smith allows you to "say goodbye, reflect on your life, leave last messages, perhaps visit special places for a last time, listen to favourite pieces of music, read love poems, and prepare, according to your beliefs, to meet your maker or enjoy eternal oblivion." It's a romantic view of death, Dr. Smith acknowledges, but it's one that is achievable with "love, morphine, and whisky."
Not every doctor, however, shares Dr. Smith's views. "Of course we are all going to die, but cancer takes far too many people far too young," said Cancer Research UK's chief clinician Peter Johnson said to The Telegraph.
Studying the DSM-5 to study psychiatry is so out of date. The new hot thing is to learn about psychiatric disorders by watching Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer from Seinfeld. Yes, thatSeinfeld.
In a teaching method dubbed "Psy-feld," psychiatry professor Anthony Tobia of Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School teaches third and fourth-year medical students about the various psychiatric disorders using characters from the 90s TV sitcom Seinfeld.
"You have a very diverse group of personality traits that are maladaptive on the individual level," explained Tobia to NJ.com, "When you get these friends together the dynamic is such that it literally creates a plot: Jerry’s obsessive compulsive traits combined with Kramer’s schizoid traits, with Elaine’s inability to forge meaningful relationships and with George being egocentric."
Tobia has even created a database of all 180 episodes of Seinfeld to catalogue nearly all characters in the series and their psychiatric ailments (for example, he diagnosed how five of Elaine's boyfriends throughout the years show symptoms of various delusional disorders).
Learning psychiatry by watching Seinfeld may not be such a crazy idea: in a recent paper, Tobia described how students who participated in Psy-feld found that the exercise to be "enjoyable and [preferable] to the more traditional forms of teaching such as large group lectures."
Now isn't that something for a show about nothing?
The night's sky is full of wonders - and we're not talking just the stars that you can see with your naked eye. You'll want to see it in other wavelengths, too. But since we don't have X-ray vision, this is the next best thing.
We've blogged about Chromoscope before on Neatorama back in 2009, but it's worth revisiting. The Chromoscope project, built by Stuart Lowe, Chris North and Robert Simpson in 2009, lets you move across the Milky Way galaxy and view it in different electromagnetic wavelengths: visible light, gamma-ray, X-ray, Hydrogen alpha, near infrared, far infrared, microwave, and radio.
For examples:
X-ray (ROSAT All Sky Survey)
What are those tears in the galaxy? Don't worry those aren't tears in the space time continuum - those black arcs are gaps in the ROSAT spacecraft survey.
Happy New Year, Neatoramanauts! All of us here at Neatorama and Neatoshop wish you a happy and safe New Year 2015. We hope that the new year will bring you many blessings, joy and happiness!
Ketchup and fries go hand in hand like, ... well, how about potato and tomato?
Meet the "Ketchup 'N' Fries" pomato or tomtato (previously on Neatorama), a chimera plant made from grafting a potato and tomato plant together. It is available from the Territorial Seed Company of Oregon. Above the ground, the plant is a cherry tomato plant, whereas below the ground you'll find white potatoes.
The website states that this kind of frankenplant grafting is possible because both potato and tomato belong to the Solanaceae (nightshade) family.
Blind man driving? I certainly didn't see this one coming! A Gainesville, Florida, window blind installer sure had a bit of fun with his car advertisement.
Congratulations to Neatoramanaut Heather who won our latest NeatoMail-exclusive Ugly Christmas Sweatshirt giveaway. She won NeatoShop T-shirt and sweatshirt of her choice.
If you didn't win, you can still get awesome Ugly Christmas Sweater-style T-shirts, long-sleeve shirts, sweatshirts and hoodies all year long over at the NeatoShop.
Want access to giveaways like this one? Subscribe to NeatoMail! You'll get access to exclusive giveaways and contests open only to our email subscribers:
Shelby Swink, 23, met the love of her life in college and got engaged. The couple started planning for their wedding ...
"I poured my heart and soul into the wedding plans to try and make it the best day it could be. It was going to be a celebration of our love and commitment ot each other, so I wanted it to be absolutely amazing. A few weeks before the wedding I had everything planned out to a T and was so excited for our big day," Swink said to Offbeat Bride.
And that's when the unthinkable happened. Just five days before the wedding day, Swink's fiance told her that he was not in love with her and did not want to go through with the wedding.
"Bam. My dreams of marrying and having kids with what I thought was the man I would spend the rest of my life vanished," Swink told Buzzfeed. The next couple of days was filled with frantic calls to calling guests and to cancel services, but thankfully Swink's friends and family rallied around her.
But what of the dress? Swink said that a few people brough up the idea of trashing the wedding dress. "My mother spent so much money on the dress and alterations, so I was nervous to even think about destroying it ... but after thinking about it, I knew that doing something to mark the occasion was the perfect thing for me. I was not going to let my ex-fiance's mistake of letting me go take away my happiness."
On what was supposed to be her wedding day, Swink and her friends and family had a different kind of ceremony - all captured in photos by Elizabeth Hoard:
"The moment the paint hit my dress ... I was free. All the disappointment, all the hurt ... I just felt it leave me. I can't even describe how liberating and cathartic the experience was for me. I let go of all the hurt and became myself again," Swink said.
Ever wish you could get even with someone who bullied and tormented you when you were growing up? A woman got her chance at revenge years later, when one of the boys who bullied her at school asked her out on a date.
When she was just twelve years old, Louisa Manning was teased and bullied by the boys in her Cambridgeshire school. One boy, who made fun of her weight and called her "Manbeast," in particular stood out. Fast forward eight years later, when Manning, now a beautiful 22-year-old student at Oxford University, got a surprise when she bumped into her old bully at a university ball and that he asked her on a date.
"My gut instinct was to say no," Manning said to Buzzfeed, "but then I realised what a brilliant opportunity it was, and after bouncing ideas off a friend for a few hours, we came up with an idea."
Manning arranged a dinner at a local restaurant and arranged to leave this note to her date:
Hey [name obscured],
So sorry I can’t join you tonight.
Remember year 8, when I was fat and you made fun of my weight? No? I do – I spent the following three years eating less than an apple a day. So I’ve decided to skip dinner.
Remember the monobrow you mocked? The hairy legs you were disgusted by? Remember how every day for three years, you and your friends called me Manbeast? No perhaps you don’t – or you wouldn’t have seen how I look eight years later and deemed me fuckable enough to treat me like a human being.
I thought I’d send you this as a reminder. Next time you think of me, picture that girl in this photo, because she’s the one who just stood you up.
Then, Manning got a second surprise: her old bully apologized. He wrote on Facebook:
"Hey… For what it’s worth, I was actually here to meet up looking for a chance to meet up looking to make friends, not because you are very good looking. I guess I had it coming though, and certainly don’t blame you for standing me up.
I can’t change who I was 8 years ago, and I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending that it didn’t happen, but I hope you believe me when I say I’m a completely different person now. I can only apologise and wish you the very best. I guess I won’t hear from you again but I mean it when I say that I hope you have every success you deserve."
There was plenty of support for Louisa and what she did in her Facebook post comments, but did she do the right thing? No doubt that the boy's bullying caused her significant distress - but do you remember all the stupid things you said to your friends when you were 12 years old? What do you think?
According to The Daily Beast, a leaked email from the Sony hacking incident revealed that Sony Pictures Entertainment co-chairman Amy Pascal suggested that British actor Idris Elba "should be the next [James] Bond."
That's an idea that Elba himself loves. When asked by a fan, "If it were offered to you, would you be the next James Bond?" Elba replied, "Yes, if it was offered to me, absolutely."
But one guy isn't in love with that idea. Last week, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh said that "[James Bond] was white and Scottish, period. That is who James Bond is. But now Sony is suggesting that the next James Bond should be Idris Elba, a black Briton rather than a white from Scotland. But that's not who James Bond is, and I know it's racist to probably even point this out. "
"We had 50 years of white Bonds because Bond is white. Bond was never black. Ian Fleming never created a black Brit to play James Bond. The character was always white. He was always Scottish. He always drank vodka shaken not stirred and all that," Limbaugh added.
Elba tweeted his reply:
Isn't 007 supposed to handsome? Glad you think I've got a shot! Happy New year people. pic.twitter.com/3g9lAl2Uo3
If chosen, Elba would be the first black actor to play James Bond - but he hopes that his ethnicity wouldn't be the defining feature of the character. "I just don't want to be the black James Bond," Elba told NPR, "Sean Connery wasn't the Scottish James Bond, and Daniel Craig wasn't the blue-eyed James Bond, so if I played him, I don't want to be called the black James Bond."
(Idris Elba Photo: IMDb)
What about you: Can a black man become the next James Bond?
The Beastie Boys may have fought hard* for your right to party, but The Man can't be beat.
This sign, posted outside the Palace Hotel in Sydney's Central Business District (CBD), noted that your right to party, fought so hard by Beastie Boys, have been taken away from you by the city's 1:30 AM lockout laws.
Have they've managed to capture the visual styles of Wes Anderson, David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino, Alfonso Cuaron, and Terrence Malick? See if you agree:
