Mark Rayner of the Skwib blog and author of the novel "The Amadeus Net" (plot: turns out that Wolfgang Amaeus Mozart is immortal and has been making a living by selling "lost" works of Mozart!) has a fun photoshop contest: a vintage ad poster of a product from a fictional future!
Here are the top ten finalists: Link - Thanks Max!
Photo: ehpien [Flickr]
Hooray! It's time for the weekly Neatorama and Hobotopia's Caption Monkey game! Your task - should you accept it - is to caption this great photo of a cute cat!
Funniest caption wins a free copy of Meet the Laugh-Out-Loud Cat book by Adam "Ape Lad" Koford (how appropriate!). Adam's book is a compilation of over 250 comic panels depicting the adventures of Kitteh and Pip (along with some ne'er before seen comics).
Contest rules are simple: place your caption in the comment section. One caption per comment, please, but you can enter as many funny ones
as you can think of.
Good luck - and don't let laughing cat discourage you from submitting what may be the winning entry!
Update 4/27/08 - congratulations to inkedgal who won with this caption: "Wait, you think I'm YOUR pet?!"In movies, as in life, things often don't go as planned. And when plans go awry during film robberies, things can quickly spiral out of control.
The folks at Always Watching blog have a list of 10 scenes from botched movie robberies. The results are sometimes funny and sometimes tragic, but always extremely and uncomfortably tense: http://www.alwayswatching.org/features/top-ten-great-scenes-movie-robberies-gone-wrong - Thanks David!
Jeff Simmermon of And I Am Not Lying for Real blog saw this Star Wars ad on the subway that someone had "mashed up" with bits and pieces from a beer ad and a poster for a Takashi Murakami exhibit:
Those great big billboard ads you see on the subway are nothing but giant peel-and-stick Coloforms, really. I love the accidental collages you see when people randomly pick and peel those thing like they’re great big scabs, and I just knew it was a matter of time before someone started making art out of them.
Then I saw this ad for Star Wars that had been chopped and remixed with bits from a beer ad and a poster for a Takashi Murakami exhibit and I heard a horde of angels singing a song titled “Shit Yeah!”
Check out the Princess Leia/Iron Man poster ad mash up too (why, the possibility is endless, you creative vandals!) : Link - Thanks Jeff!
Yipee! It's time for our weekly collaboration with What is it? blog - can you guess what this strange tool above is for?
Place your guess in the comment section - you're playing for fun and bragging rights only this week (no prize). For more clues, check out What is it? blog!
Update 4/25/08 - the answer is: scarificator, used for doctors for bloodletting. Congrats to PCim who got it right first!
Photo: Crys [Flickr]
When Alice Taylor of the wonderful Wonderland Blog visited her in-laws, she was greeted by the best bed linen evar: ET bed sheet with Star Wars pillow case! Link
The tradition of the class ring began in 1835 at West Point.
Members of the United States Military Academy at West Point class of 1835 designed their own rings, which were purchased privately and made to order for the individuals. (Source)
Many military programs are "black" or so top secret that they appear only as a single line item in the Department of Defense's expense report.
But just because they're secret, it doesn't mean that they are without style or a sense of humor. Photographer Trevon Paglen has stumbled upon a strange way of documenting these black ops: each and every one of them has wonderfully strange military patches, the kind worn on uniforms:
“It’s a fresh approach to secret government,” Steven Aftergood, a security expert at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, said in an interview. “It shows that these secret programs have their own culture, vocabulary and even sense of humor.”
One patch shows a space alien with huge eyes holding a stealth bomber near its mouth. “To Serve Man” reads the text above, a reference to a classic “Twilight Zone” episode in which man is the entree, not the customer. “Gustatus Similis Pullus” reads the caption below, dog Latin for “Tastes Like Chicken.”
Military officials and experts said the patches are real if often unofficial efforts at building team spirit. [...]
Trevor Paglen, an artist and photographer finishing his Ph.D. in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, has managed to document some of this hidden world. The 75 patches he has assembled reveal a bizarre mix of high and low culture where Latin and Greek mottos frame images of spooky demons and sexy warriors, of dragons dropping bombs and skunks firing laser beams.
“Oderint Dum Metuant,” reads a patch for an Air Force program that mines spy satellite images for battlefield intelligence, according to Mr. Paglen, who identifies the saying as from Caligula, the first-century Roman emperor famed for his depravity. It translates “Let them hate so long as they fear.”
Wizards appear on several patches. The one hurling lightning bolts comes from a secret Air Force base at Groom Lake, northwest of Las Vegas in a secluded valley. Mr. Paglen identifies its five clustered stars and one separate star as a veiled reference to Area 51, where the government tests advanced aircraft and, U.F.O. buffs say, captured alien spaceships.
And now, Trevor has published photographs of these military black ops patches in a book, aptly titled "I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me," which itself is a translation of a patch for a Navy black project.
Link: NY Times Article by William J. Broad | Trevor's website - via Kuro5hin
Bespectacled four-eyes take heart! Here's a clever print ad for Oogmerk opticians in Belgium by LG&F ad agency reminding you that sometimes four eyes are better than two!
More at AdFreak: Link
We all know that the Japanese can be weird sometimes. Really weird. Well, it turns out that their craziness is not a modern phenomenon - it's been around since at least the feudal period! Consider this: the Kage-e or shadow pictures, a popular form of woodblock print from the Edo period.
These pictures consist of two parts: a “shadow” image and a “real” image. The shadow image, which typically bears the shape of a common, easily identifiable object, is viewed first. The real image, viewed second, reveals the surprising true identity of the shadow.
The kage-e above is by ukiyoe master Kuniyoshi (ca. 1852). The shadow looks like goldfish, but it's actually flying tanuki (raccoon dog) crushing a man with its giant testicles!
Pink Tentacles blog has more: Link
That gibberish on a blackboard is actually a clock, made by Dutch industrial designer Christiaan Postma. He used over 150 individual clock mechanism to spell out the hour!
Link - via CrunchGear
To get a full appreciation of how it works, see this Flash animation of the clock in fast forward.
"Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty."
- Mark Twain, writer and humorist
