Do you need to put our a candle flame? Throw a knife at it. That's what this master thrower does. I suspect he's equally skilled at flipping light switches, changing diapers, or creating pivot tables in Excel from 23 feet away. Just give him a well-balanced knife.
-via Born in Space
It's a classy and elegant look that shows your houseguests or new romantic partners what they're getting into. Etsy seller Jack Lebond of Austin makes these 18 and 24 inch tall tables out of plywood. They're unfinished, so you can paint them however you like. I suggest bright pastels for the children's bedrooms.
-via The Awesomer
i put eyes on the cat’s bed and could not be happier with the result pic.twitter.com/0D72nyc0aq
— towler (@HeyitsTowler) January 25, 2021
Twitter user Towler's cat uses a clamshell bed. To make it more amusing and ominous, he added eyes so that it consumes its feline prey. What was hidden in the mouth of this bed that so cunningly lured in the cat?
-via Richard Eisenbeis
That's 5.56 full extension punches every second.
Russian boxer and biological punching machine Pavel Trusov secured a Guinness World Record at a gym in Slovakia last year in this amazing display.
I notice that for the first half of the event, he appears to be breathing entirely through his nose. I wonder why. Would mouth breathing be slower even though it would take in more air?
Master woodcarver Acangelo Ambrosi offers this loving tribute to a favorite character from My Neighbor Totoro. It's made of ash and bog oak, the latter of which appears to be oak that has been buried in a peat bog for centuries. Turn Totoro's head to grind the pepper.
As a gift for his father, Zachary Tipton made his first pair of frames from one of his father's Creedence Clearwater Revival records. This was a gift to his father, who was hopefully aware of what his son was doing with such a precious piece of vinyl.
From a small factory in Hungary, Tipton and his team at Vinlyze make frames for their customers from their favorite records. He starts with surplus vinyl from London, then coats the records in cellulose acetate. His employees make about 70 frames for each model of eyewear. The finished product, he stresses, may vary in shape because each piece of music is unique.
What classic song would you wear?
-via Core77 | Photo: Vinylize
AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH would like to be well known for his landscape photography or the perfect espresso he serves on game nights. He's a team player at work who is valued for his emotional intelligence. But most people think of him as a relentless killing machine, which is true, too.
Naomi Miller-Dawson, a Barbadian immigrant to the United States, lived in Brooklyn. Her profession was postal clerk, but her joy was baking for her family. In Medium, Madeline Muzzi reports that Miller-Dawson's son, Richard Dawson, remembers spritz cookies as a special family symbol:
Richard Dawson described her lemon squares and oatmeal raisin cookies fondly, and joked that she had other recipes that she refused to share with him. To him, spritz cookies are the ultimate embodiment of their family gatherings. He remembered his mother making them most frequently around the holiday season, and recalled the excitement he and his siblings would share whenever they saw them go into the oven. “Me, my sister, and my cousin George … would literally sit around waiting for these things to come out of the oven, and when she turned her back, we’d eat them. … If she wanted to make two dozen cookies, she’d have to make about six dozen because we’d eat them.”
Thus it seemed appropriate to top her tombstone with not a Bible verse or proverb, but a recipe for those favorite cookies.
-via Atlas Obscura | Photo: Sam O'Brien/Atlas Obscura
This adorable animal moment was brought to us by Peter Lambie and Gretchen Cooper as they fished off the Gulf coast of Florida. They lured the shark by tossing it fish, then petted the beast when it began chomping on the boat engine. NBC 8 News, which has a video of the incident, reports the encounter lasted a long time:
The group, which included Lambie, Cooper and two others, Captain Tyler Levesque and Erika Almond of “Girls that Fish,” played with the shark for an hour. The captain even got close enough to pet the animal after feeding it some fish.
-via Dave Barry | Photo: Gretchen Cooper, Captain Tyler Levesque, Peter Lambie, Erika Almond
Representative Justin Humphrey would like for the people of his state to have the opportunity to lawfully hunt sasquatches. Or to be more precise, his bill states:
The Oklahoma Wildlife Conservation Commission shall promulgate rules establishing a big foot hunting season. The Commission shall set annual season dates and create any necessary specific hunting licenses and fees.
This language seems dangerously vague, as one might interpret "big foot" to refer to creatures other than the cryptid and his kin. The Associated Press reports that Humphrey's project would more likely promote tourism in his district:
Rep. Justin Humphrey’s district includes the heavily forested Ouachita Mountains in southeast Oklahoma, where a Bigfoot festival is held each year near the Arkansas border. He says issuing a state hunting license and tag could help boost tourism.
Before you start contemplating caliber options, be aware that Humphrey claims that one may only hunt Bigfoot by trapping:
Humphrey says his bill would only allow trapping and that he also hopes to secure $25,000 to be offered as a bounty.
Image: Pixabay
Two waddles of rockhopper penguins in the Falkland Islands meet each other. After a brief conversation, they go their separate ways. But one inattentive penguin loses his waddle until a buddy gets his attention.
We all have a friend like that in our groups. And if you can't think of a friend who is like that, then I have bad news for you.
-via Born in Space
Do you want to adopt the New York look? How about the Paris look? No, I don't mean looking as fashionable as the residents of those cities. Do you want to look like the cities themselves? Think of it as urban cosplay.
Fashion designer Virgil Abloh made this opportunity possible. At the recent Paris Fashion Week exhibition, Abloh debuted puffer jackets that show the skylines of Paris and New York City. Dezeen reports that Abloh chose specific buildings of architectural significance:
Abloh studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago where modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was head of the department of architecture in the 1940s and 50s and built the Crown Hall.
The emerald green marble set used for the show recalls the material used by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich at the Barcelona Pavilion, and several Barcelona chairs, which were designed by the pair, can be seen in the show.
"The building's material constructions and combinations informed aspects of the set created for the Fall-Winter 2021 presentation. 'Mies is my other Michael Jordan'," wrote Abloh in the show notes.
-via Nag on the Lake | Photo: Dezeen
This is a skateboard. Hannah Jensen, an artist in New Zealand, covered it with 57 layers of paint. Then, drawing upon her background in printmaking, cut away selected layers until she was left with this eye-popping image of a kingfisher on the hunt. In an interview for Museum Week, Jensen succinctly described her technique as "textural and topographical."
Nathan Shipley, a graphic and digital artist in San Francisco, rendered famous paintings and cartoon characters as photographic images with the assistance of an artificial intelligence. You can find more examples of this project and an interview with him at Bored Panda. He explains that the AI has its own unique view of its subjects:
it’s fascinating to explore how an AI model built on a particular dataset with a particular framework can 'see' the world and then transform images. The AI 'knows' only what it has already seen and filters the world through this lens. Each little tweak to the dataset, the training parameters, the model, and the input imagery all have the possibility to change the output. This is a space to explore how artificial neural networks interpret the world in a way that can be similar to our own minds. I’m not saying that an image I created is what Mona Lisa actually looked like, but it is how the machine sees her based on this particular arrangement of variables. That, to me, is fascinating.
-via Design You Trust
Scotland brought into the world the best possible music (bagpipes), the best possible clothing (the kilt worn regimental fashion), and the best possible food (haggis). The latter is, of course, the heart, liver, and lungs of a sheep, ground up and boiled inside the stomach of said sheep.
Scotland gave the world haggis and now it is giving that culinary wonder to the universe. A Scottish butcher named Simon Howie has arranged for a package of his finest to be launched into low Earth orbit.
This was done in preparation for Burns Night, an annual Scottish celebration in honor of that nation's most famous poet, Robert Burns. One traditionally eats haggis on that evening, which is January 25. Sky News reports:
The haggis was attached to a weather balloon and soared more than 20 miles (107,293ft) above the Earth - equivalent to nearly four times the height of Everest.
After taking off from the Simon Howie headquarters in Dunning, it travelled over Stirling, Falkirk, Edinburgh and the Pentland Hills before landing safely in Lauder in the Borders.
Mr Howie said he wanted to start the year by "lifting the spirits of the general public" and was thrilled to work with Stratonauts "to take Scotland's national dish to new heights".
-via Dave Barry | Photo: Stratonauts/Simon Howie
