Everyone, meet the 'ravioli' starfish pic.twitter.com/EOSYr5aiyc
— Mashable (@mashable) June 22, 2020
The Plinthaster dentatus looks like a raviolo (I looked up the singular form of ravioli because I care about you, dear reader), but it's actually a starfish that lives in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. It presumably goes well with marinara sauce and a good Moscato.
I imagine that a good chef has probably already looked at this video and reproduced the starfish in pasta form.
-via The Mary Sue
Filling my PC with Beans and Hiring a Repairman to Fix it pic.twitter.com/xFepzUDVvC
— RossCreations (@CreationsRoss) June 21, 2020
Twitter user Ross filled his desktop computer CPU with beans, then summoned a repairman to fix it. The technician was surprised (and so, obviously, was a novice in the profession) at what he found when he opened the case.
Ross's Twitter feed is filled with similarly wonderful pranks and inventions.
-via Super Punch
I love this simple stained glass piece by Colorado Glass Works. It's perfectly positioned to take advantage of the sun, water, and beach. Best of all for the artist, it was made with a friend, as the caption sentimentally explains.
Look, I'm not saying (out loud) that there's something necessarily wrong with being a cat person. But maybe keep that stuff off your dating profile. Wait until a lady friend starts to trust you before exposing a foible like that.
This handy tip is backed up by social science research. In the journal Animals, Lori Kogan and Shelly Volsche let us know that posing with a cat in your online dating profile may hurt your chances of finding female companionship:
Women responded to an online survey and rated photos of men alone and men holding cats on measures of masculinity and personality. Men holding cats were viewed as less masculine; more neurotic, agreeable, and open; and less dateable. These results varied slightly depending whether the women self-identified as a “dog person” or a “cat person.” This study suggests that a closer look at the effects of different companion species on perceived masculinity and dateability is warranted.
Emphasis added. Be yourself in your dating profile, but be your best self. So put the cat aside and change out of that brony t-shirt.
-via Dave Barry | Photo: Vladimir Agafonkin
14/ Glass was everywhere on the streets, people out, traffic everywhere but he made it back there...
— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) June 22, 2020
Here's the thing, if you live in San Francisco and if you're in the commercial real estate you know my dad.
In 1989 his office was at the top of this building. The top floor. pic.twitter.com/PsL8WKqbaC
On Father's Day, Twitter user Justin Hart shared the story of how his father encouraged and supported him as he tried to become an Eagle Scout.
Hart had to submit his Eagle paperwork to the Boy Scouts before he turned 18. The deadline was 5 days away. The papers were in his father's office at the top of a skyscraper in San Francisco.
Then the 1989 San Francisco earthquake struck. The city was devastated. Hart's father knew that Justin's only chance of making Eagle lay in retrieving those papers from his office. So he climbed more than 50 floors up to retrieve them, then drove back home through the shattered city.
You can read the whole thread here.
-via Scott Adams
During World War II, US Army airborne forces needed a cheap dispatch vehicle that could be easily dropped by parachute into the field. The Cushman company, then producing scooters, quickly converted its line to fill military purchase orders with the Model 53 scooter. Harley Davidson and Indian picked up the slack to produce even more military scooters.
The National Museum of the US Air Force describes the capabilities of this tough little vehicle:
[...] it had a hitch to pull a model M3A4 general-purpose utility cart. By adding certain equipment, the cart could be converted to carry a .30-cal. or .50-cal. machine gun or an 81mm mortar, though the scooter often could not pull a heavy load. [...] Cushman made nearly 5,000 airborne scooters for the military beginning in 1944. The rugged, simple Model 53 could travel through a foot of water, climb a 25 percent grade and had a range of about 100 miles.
A surviving example of the Cushman airborne scooter was once featured on the reality TV show Pawn Stars.
-via David Burge | Photo: War History Online
P.S. Check out the French Army's anti-tank Vespa.
Remove one of the Hippos from the tabletop game Hungry Hungry Hippos and let a dog step up to the table. Pour in the kibble and he'll out-eat any hippo in the jungle. For some dogs I've known, it might have worked just as well with the original plastic beads.
-via Five
Johannes Vermeer's 1665 painting Girl with a Pearl Earring metamorphoses into an onion in this piece by Russian photographer Olga Pavolga. Perhaps, as one commenter suggests, the painting should be remade into Girl with an Onion Ring.
-via I Need a Guide
In 1925, the Green Giant brand of preserved vegetables began promoting its huge peas with a giant figure offering his fare to the world. There's a 55-foot tall statue of the company's mascot in Le Sueur, Minnesota.
In brightest day and darkest night, no hunger shall escape this giant's sight when cosplayer Gordon Buri is on the job with his Green Giant and Green Lantern mashup costume.
Marta Grossi lives in Milan, Italy--the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in her country. Locked down since March 8, she's needed space to be creative. She found it in her own bathroom sink, which she paints and repaints with colorful images of less confined life.
Grossi calls her series Wash Your Hands and Keep Creative. She explains that:
Few weeks ago I thought about the perception of things, about how many times we are reminded to wash our hands since we met the corona virus. The sinks of all the world are now becoming silent companions, we look out every day - and under this tragic circumstances - a simple piece of furniture is changing in front of our eyes.
It's easy to unfriend someone, even face to face. What's hard is befriending someone. It takes a lot more than a click. Doug Savage of Savage Chickens shows what works and doesn't work among the two platforms.
Alexi McCarthy, an art director, designed and built Face Shelving with his son. It's a cute look and easy to build with the step-by-step instructions that McCarthy provides. Screws hold the pieces together. McCarthy mounted the eyes with double-sided poster tape.
-via Toxel
Free Range Designs, a furniture workshop in Wales, makes beds and storytelling chairs inspired by fairy tale images and fantasy art. But what caught the attention of the internet was this marvelous bed with images from the film The Nightmare Before Christmas. Like the company's other products, this bed is made of reclaimed wood using environmentally friendly methods.
A hummingbird helmet is a helmet with a hummingbird feeder attached to attract hummingbirds to your face. Think of it as similar to a Bear Vest, which is a vest made of beefsteaks to attract bears.
Spencer Staley goes all-out with a total of seven feeders hanging from rods extending from a helmet.
I really don't see why, with proper supports, it wouldn't be possible to build a helmet with ten times as many supports. I mean, humans went to the Moon and invented Twitter. A hummingbird helmet with seventy feeders is within our potential.
-via Born in Space
Rainbow lightning, which is the name of my next Queensrÿche cover band, was spotted by the BBC's Weather Watchers over the past weekend. Why did these two meteorological phenomena appear together? The BBC explains:
Firstly, there was a lot of energy within the atmosphere so when the thunderstorms developed there was plenty of electrical charge which produced a lot of lightning. The storms were also quite localised so there were sunny spells between the showers. And lastly, the timing was spot on. As the sun was setting, the angle of the sun was just right with the thunderstorm to form rainbows.
So: sorcery.
-via Aaron Starmer | Photo: CREEZ1993
