People living today will not be impressed if you curse them with withering flesh, perpetually bleeding eyeballs, or nightmares every night. Gemma Correll shows you how to really destroy lives in the 21st Century. Here are a few more suggestions:
May you always discover a typo in a blog comment immediately after you've submitted it.
May your black sweater attract every piece of cat hair in a room.
May the WiFi signal always be just high enough to get you to use it but low enough to cause webpages to load very slowly.
Perhaps Chewie Knievel's greatest stunt was jumping the Millennium Falcon over the Snake River Canyon. He was larger than life and a character that he created himself. Etsy seller and artist Matt Dawson combined two of the greatest figures of the 70s in this painting. It's one of several great pop culture mashups, including George Washington as a G.I. Joe character and Ronald Reagan as the Knight Rider.
Wait, isn't the rule that women, children, and cats get first call on the lifeboats? Someone forgot to tell Captain Whiskers, who is going down with his ship using this cat condo from the Hollywood Kitty Company. It's 6 feet long, 4 feet tall, and has 3 interior levels. It's accessible through 6 port holes, 1 deck hole, and a gaping gash along the underside left by an iceberg.
For 28 years, Lillian, a woman in Glanmire, County Cork, Ireland has been fascinated with Coca-Cola. She's collected cans, bottles, and paraphernalia related to it from all over the world. Her entire house is covered with images of Coke and Coke collectibles. The interior is even painted to reflect the iconic red and white Coca-Cola colors. That chandelier? Yes, it's made of Coke bottles. Even the wallpaper and bedsheets are decorated with images of Coke. You can see more photos of her home at the tabloid Irish Mirror.
In Taylor Swift's song "Blank Space," the singer says that the rumors are true: she's got a long list of ex-lovers who can testify that she'll take you to new heights of "magic, madness, heaven, sin." If you want to risk that, then she's got a blank space where she'll write your name.
Watching Game of Thrones is like that, as this parody video by Nerdist shows. George R.R. Martin sings that he'll create characters you'll love. Then he'll kill them horribly and pointlessly. If there's someone that you like, then he's got a blank page.
Step 1: attach a parachute to your snowmobile. Step 2: drive your snowmobile as fast as you can off a cliff.
Let me know when you get to that point and I'll tell you step 3. I don't want to overtax your working memory, so just work on those two parts right now.
Stunt Freaks pioneered a new sport that will no doubt become very popular soon. Watch this man ride a snowmobile right off a snowy cliff in Sweden while a camera in a hovering helicopter records this fun and surely entirely safe activity.
St. Patrick's Day is on Tuesday and Beth Jackson Klosterboer of Hungry Happenings is ready! She made this shamrock-shaped bread bowl with canned French bread dough. She shaped the sides over a dough layer bottom, then cut away the excess dough. After baking it, Beth filled the interior with white chicken chili.
Archery tag is a sport similar to paintball. They key difference is that players shoot each other with foam-tipped arrows fired from bows instead of paint beads from a compressed air gun. A flyboard is a cross between a jet ski and a jet pack. Users fly over the water, held aloft by jets of water.
Together, they form the elements of a great combination sport: flyboard archery. John Jackson, an expert in archery tag, and Austin, a watersports professional, joined forces to demonstrate how it works. It looks like an awesome game to play!
Ride like the wind. You are a master horseman traversing the plains on a majestic steed. People will look at you with respect and honor if you style your hair like this.
In 2013, Mr. Stubbs was an 11-year old, 7-foot long alligator living at the Phoenix Herpetological Society in Arizona. He had lost his tail when he was a baby, so it was very difficult for him to swim. His swimming stroke resembled a slow dog paddle, rather than the quick, graceful movements of a healthy alligator.
Mr. Stubbs's handlers wanted to give him the freedom and ease of movement that a normal alligator has. So they built a prosthetic tail and attached it to his body.
That's not a decorative mound of rubber. It's a functional tail thoughtfully engineered to move in a manner similar to a living alligator tail. A 2013 article in USA Today (warning: auto-start video) describes it:
Using cameras and a computer, Justin Georgi, an assistant professor in the department of anatomy at Midwestern University in Glendale, Ariz., studied Mr. Stubbs for weeks. Georgi studies alligator and reptile locomotion. At times he would attach reflective dots to the gator, whose jaws were secured with electrical tape before each session. The dots would form a 3-D computer model, allowing Georgi to see exactly how Mr. Stubbs got around.
Georgi used the research to devise the tail's specifications. It had to be buoyant, and weigh just seven to nine pounds. It also had to be flexible, so when Mr. Stubbs wiggled his rear stump, the tail would swing to propel him forward.
The Diving Bell Spider (Argyroneta aquatica) is the only spider species that lives its entire life underwater.
It accomplishes this amazing feet by maintaining subsurface air bubbles. The spider's body is covered with tiny hairs. Air bubbles adhere to that textured surface. The spider then weaves protective cases for these air bubbles with its silk. It attaches these air tanks to underwater plants and rocks and then climbs inside.
In addition to maintaining the air inside the bubble, the spider silk cover functions like a gill, pulling breathable air out of the water. The Encyclopedia Britannica explains:
Research has shown that the inflated web serves as a sort of gill, extracting dissolved oxygen from the water when oxygen concentrations inside the web become sufficiently low to draw oxygen in from the water. Slowly, however, the inflated web collapses, and the spider must travel to the water’s surface for bubble renewal, which it does about once each day.
This video shows a pipe covered with ice. The heat in the pipe is melting the interior of the ice sheath. As the water flows down, it creates otherworldly images of shapes and movement.
Michael Beitz warps reality with his surreal sculptures, such as a liquefying picnic table and a wall that literally has an ear. One of his recent works is Not Now, an enormous conference table that loops in the center. That may be occasionally inconvenient in an office environment. But there are some meetings in which it could be handy.
So you want to be a supervillain. Good for you! It's important to have ambition. But you'll need more, such as a great name, a character hook, a costume, and some henchmen. Once you have those taken care of, you'll need to choose a lair.
A mere storage rental facility won't do, nor your studio apartment. You need a place that impresses people as the domicile of a serious, dedicated supervillain. When on Earth has 15 sites you should consider. Pictured above is one of them: Ball's Pyramid. It's the tallest volcanic stack in the world, which makes climbing it difficult. The island is located a few hundred miles off the coast of Australia, so there's no nearby shopping. Still, when you need quiet time to think away from the hustle and bustle of your day job in retail, Ball's Pyramid will be ideal.
Faig Ahmed, an artist from Azerbaijan, creates surreal carpets that appear to bend and distort reality. Some pop out in 3D dimensions. Others seem to be physical manifestations of digital image glitches. In an interview with Art Radar Journal, Ahmed explains how he designs and weaves them:
I work with a group. Usually there are twenty to 25 people involved in the process. This group experience gives my work vitality and I’m the spark that ignites it.
When I decide to begin a piece, I first talk to the carpet makers and then edit and correct their work alongside my own sketch. Next, my artwork is transferred onto engineering paper. After these preparations, the weaving process begins. As a rule, the process itself is not that easy, and I have to visit the workshop often and make corrections all along the way.
Each work needs a different type of research. For a carpet from the “Fluid Forms” show, for example, I was pouring paint onto the walls to see how different colours blend into each other and flow. For the Geometric series of carpets, I was cutting different shapes from paper to place over the surfaces to see what kinds of shades they create.
