Ooh ... This. Is. Awesome. No, it's SUPER AWESOME: Dan Kressin made a Donkey Kong diorama, complete with Kong throwing barrels and Mario jumping over them out of LEGO MINDSTORMS:
During a random discussion at the April NELUG meeting, Robyn (my wife and muse) off-handedly said, "You should make Donkey Kong!" As is her way, she followed this remark with a brief musical rendition, firmly planting the idea in my skull.
The Goal Donkey Kong is a classic, so I wanted my MOC to do it justice. At a minimum it would need to have:
* rolling barrels (using LEGO barrels if possible) * Donkey Kong throwing the barrels * a barrel-jumping minifig * ladders and ramps that closely resembled the originals
The rest is an epic win: Link - via Brothers Brick | Gizmodo has a YouTube clip of the Donkey Kong LEGO in action: Link
Poor Bugatti Veyron: it wasn't enough that the $1.4 million car was dethroned as the fastest production car on the planet, it's now not even the most expensive one ...
Here's the One-77, a $2.3 million hand-made coupe by Aston Martin:
Paying $2.3 million for anything that doesn't have wings is beyond excessive, but then, those few who get a One-77 aren't buying a car. They are, according to Aston Martin, buying An Experience. Autocar says buyers will be invited to the factory in Gaydon, where they'll meet with designers and engineers to develop the car to their exact specifications.
"It's a very special car for customers who want to take the bespoke experience to a higher level," company chairman David Richard told Autocar. "Every car will be entirely individual."
And bookies are taking bets on who would be the first to buy the car (so far David Beckham is the favorite!)
Our pal Marilyn Terrell of National Geographic Traveler's Intelligent Travel blog told us about Flashback, a gem of a monthly photograph archive from NatGeo (some published before in the magazine, some never before seen).
I particularly like these two, of a baboon trying to teach a kitty how to sit properly (like a baboon, that is) and a man mowing the lawn at Stonehenge:
Photography by Kurt Severin, National Geographic Image Collection
SITTING KITTY A patient little cat endures lessons in baboonery. According to notes accompanying the photograph—which arrived at the Geographic in 1956 but was never published by the magazine—"Baboon mother tries to make Fluffy sit up like a good monkey baby. But the kitten always falls back on her four legs. It seems like such a hopeless case." The baboon, named Helen, was an attraction at Ross Allen's Reptile Institute, a roadside zoo funded in 1929 in Silver Springs, Florida. She may have been a holdover from the days when Tarzan movies were filmed in the region and Allen provided animal actors for visiting Hollywood productions. —Margaret G. Zackowitz
Photograph by Barbara Maddrell, National Geographic Image Collection
CUTTING IT CLOSE Mowing among the megaliths at Stonehenge must have been a mighty task. England's Salisbury Plain—home to the famous standing stones as well as hundreds of other prehistoric sites—is one of the largest expanses of rare chalk grassland left in Europe. The man in this 1950s photograph (never previously published in the Geographic) was unavailable for comment on his labors. His name did not accompany the image, and his origins, much like Stonehenge's, remain a mystery. - Margaret G. Zackowitz
Check out the 2008 archives here: Link - Thanks Marilyn!
Julie of wine me, dine me blog, was miffed when she read a local article that virtually ignored female bloggers. When her male friend asked her "does that really matter?" she replied:
Yes, it does. Women's voices are often ignored (as this article details), and we really aren't taken as seriously. Though there are tons of successful female food bloggers (Accidental Hedonist, I'm looking at you), it's still a bit of a boys' club. (Source)
Though I can honestly say that the issue of gender has never reared its ugly head when I pick posts for Neatorama, apparently a lot of women bloggers feel they aren't taken seriously. To wit, this post by Megan Carpentier of Glamocracy, a blog of Glamour magazine:
For political bloggers who happen to be women, such as myself, my colleagues here at Glamocracy and elsewhere, the blogosphere can seem like a very testosterone-filled place. Sure, you've got Arianna Huffington and Patricia Murphy of Citizen Jane Politics. But the list of other must-read blogs is dominated by dudes: Andrew Sullivan, Markos Moulitsas (of the Daily Kos), Mike Krempasky (of Redstate.com) and of course Matt Drudge. (Also, why do so many of their names start with "M"? I've got that part down!) A museum exhibit dedicated to blogging here in D.C. (I know) has a small display referring to former Wonkette Ana Marie Cox, but the room is dominated by several TV screens featuring male blogger-pundits like Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein. So, why do the boys of the political blogosphere command so much attention? (Source)
Even the New York Times, in its first coverage of the BlogHer convention, put it as such:
A study conducted by BlogHer and Compass Partners last year found that 36 million women participate in the blogosphere each week, and 15 million of them have their own blogs. (BlogHer, which was founded by Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins, has itself grown into a mini empire that includes a Web site that helps publicize women’s blogs, and an advertising network to help women generate revenue for the site.)
Yet, when Techcult, a technology Web site, recently listed its top 100 Web celebrities, only 11 of them were women. Last year, Forbes.com ran a similar list, naming four women on its list of 25.
“It’s disheartening and frustrating,” said Allison Blass, a BlogHer attendee whose personal blog at www.lemonade-life.com is about living with Type 1 diabetes.
At the seminar “How to Take Names and Be Taken Seriously as a Political Blogger,” many women said that their male colleagues and major media groups tended to ignore them, and to link to them less often (unless they are Arianna Huffington). They pointed to the Netroots Nation gathering (formerly known as Yearly Kos) for politically progressive bloggers, occurring that same weekend in Austin, Tex. (Source | Photo by Jessica Brandi Lifland/NY Times)
(Note: the article was written by a woman, Kara Jesella - which garnered an interesting retort by Rebecca Traister of the Broadsheet blog over at Salon.com)
My short answer to the question of if female bloggers are taken seriously is the same answer to the question of if male bloggers are taken seriously: No. Bloggers are not taken seriously solely as a function of gender. If the content is good and should be taken seriously, then they are — and should be — taken seriously as bloggers. Regardless of gender. [...]
The broader question — are bloggers taken seriously? — is a salient one even removing the gender issue. As a blogger of more than 12 years (and sysop of The Cafe’ BBS for years before that), I believe that bloggers are not taken as seriously as “traditional” journalists. And, in my opinion as a long-time blogger, that’s okay. I take my blogging seriously, but do not think that I am doing anything more than sharing my opinion with those who care to read it. (Source)
What do you think? Do women get shortchanged when it comes to blogging? Does gender matter in the blogosphere?
This wall-climbing sofa by Lila Jang is the perfect for that odd corner of the house where no other furniture fits :) It's part of the 2007 contemporary art exhibition Parcours Saint Germain in Paris - via basic_sounds
You're looking at the Aurland Lookout in Norway - this amazing structure was designed by Todd Saunders and Tommie Wilhelmsen of Saunders Architecture, and is part of Norway's effort to get rid of stupid tourists by telling them it's a giant slide, ... er, promote tourism: Link - via svet koji se menja
So, how do they avoid people accidentally falling off the lookout? There's a glass fence:
This has got to be one of the strangest monument ever: a sculpture of a Martian invader (a Tripod, actually) in Working Woking, England (H.G. Well's hometown and the area in which the Martian first arrived in his novel War of the Worlds.
Deputy Dog has some awesome pics: http://deputy-dog.com/2008/08/03/horsells-awesome-martian-fighting-machine/
To advertise its Shark Week, the Discovery Channel commissioned Stefan Paulos to create this awesome Shark Pedicab! Just wait till you see the bill for the ride ...
The Big Picture blog by Alan Taylor at Boston.com has an excellent gallery of (huge!) photographs from the (4-hour long!) opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.
This one to the left is taken by Vladimir Rys/Bongarts/Getty Images.
There may be no such things as vampires, but there are vampire bats. And they're deadly:
At least 38 Warao Indians have died in remote villages in Venezuela, and medical experts suspect an outbreak of rabies spread by bites from vampire bats. [...]
Outbreaks of rabies spread by vampire bats are a problem in various tropical areas of South America, including Brazil and Peru, Rupprecht said.
He said researchers suspect that in some cases environmental degradation — including mining, logging or dam construction projects — may also be contributing to rabies outbreaks.
"Vampire bats are very adaptable," Rupprecht said. And when their roosts are disrupted or their normal prey grow scarce, "Homo sapiens is a pretty easy meal."
We had a few posts on ambigrams before on Neatorama (I love that stuff!) , but never this: Erik R. of the aptly-named Erik's blog was thinking of domain names that look the same when rotated 180° and came up with a couple.
Can you guess the titles of these movies just by one letter from their movie poster fonts? Here's a neat little quiz from Empire: Link - via Interesting Pile
I stopped buying CDs because, besides them being outrageously expensive, I found they sounded flatter than ever - I thought it was my hearing (which may still be) but it turns out there's an alternative explanation.
If you ever wonder why your CD sound quality has progressively gotten worse, you can probably blame the music industry's penchant for loudness.
In a term dubbed the "loudness war," artists and producers have been recording CDs and DVDs at louder and louder settings (in effort to sound louder than competing artists or record labels). This is done at the expense of the dynamic range, which makes soft sound just as loud as loud sounds.
There's a big difference of how most people today shop as compared to their parents (or grandparents) - and that difference is quality vs. quantity.
In this interesting article for MSN Money, Emma Johnson takes a look at her wardrobe and wondered why "our forefathers were poorer than we are, and yet they had better stuff, relatively speaking."
But appreciation for quality craftsmanship has been swept aside by freely available consumer credit and high-end design on low-cost merchandise, says Dayana Yochim, personal finance writer at The Motley Fool.
"Credit cards let us instantly satisfy our retail desires," Yochim says. "Our grandparents had to delay that gratification. They figured that if they had to save for it, they'd better get the best they could. Now retailers want to catch that fleeting desire."
This trend has given birth to the "fast fashion" phenomenon, where retailers like H&M and Forever 21 sell runway rip-offs for pennies on the couture dollar, and consumers wear these garments for a single season before replacing them.
If you've bought a lot of cheap junk thinking that you just saved a lot of money, this story is for you: Link - via DonationCoder
