Nae Design tells us that the Japanese company Yamasu sells tea bags with tags that resemble characters from an old Japan. You can brew your tea with sumo wrestlers, ninjas, samurai, or finely-dressed aristocrats.
-via Lustik
John Farrier's Blog Posts
In Guardians of the Galaxy, Star-Lord reads a letter from his mother. But if you watch carefully, you'll notice that the voice-over narration doesn't match the words on the paper.
This is 1 of 20 movie bloopers that made it past all the editors and into the final cut. This video by Looper also shows blunders in Braveheart, The Shining, Back to the Future 3, and The Dark Knight Rises.
-via Gizmodo
Attention, San Franciscans! If you're tired of paying outragously high home rental fees, then I've got a deal for you!
The BBC 2 program Natural World tells us about the unique relationship between the pearlfish and the sea cucumber. The sea cucumber is a "walking colon"--an animal that sucks in sand along the ocean floor, then squirts waste out the back end.
To the pearlfish, that back end is attractive. In search of a good home, it finds a sea cucumber butt and slides right in. In fact, it's such a comfy abode that it invites other pearlfish to join it. Everyone is welcome to crash at the pearlfish's pad.
-via Geekologie
On the streets, they called him Happy Ronnie. You'd better call him that. Because the alternative was Angry Ronnie, who was a criminal terror.
Well, the long arm of the law finally caught up with Happy Ronnie. He's heading off to the big McHouse for a few years. Rocket News 24 reports that police in Guangzhou, China told the owner of a McDonald's restaurant to remove the statue that he kept outside. When he failed to comply, they hauled off the statue.
Now photos from the event are going viral . . . .
(Photo: Rob Young)
Is that impossible? Not for Rob Young, the Marathon Man.
It all started very casually in 2014. The Telegraph explains:
. . . he was watching the London Marathon on TV with his partner when he decided, on a whim, that he would run a marathon every day for a year. He had never run a marathon before; he didn’t much like running. He just set off and did one around Richmond Park.
Then he started waking up at 2:30 in the morning to run full marathons in a local park. He'd then shower, changes his clothes, and go to work as a manager at a car parts store. Young did this for a year, running 370 marathons over 365 days.
This is sometimes a logistical challenge. The New Statesman describes how Young is able to pack it into his schedule:
One evening in July, he catches a train to Watford, alights and jogs 56 miles alone through the night to the start line of a marathon in Northampton, and then on to the finish.
-via Oddity Central
(Photo: Go to Bermuda)
That's what the Freemasons in Bermuda, a British Overseas Territory, do. In 1816, the Crown leased to the local chapter of the Freemasons a fine old building from 1620 called the Old State House. The payment was small: a single peppercorn, rendered annually.
This is the origin of the Peppercorn Ceremony, which takes place on the Wednesday closest to St. George's Feast Day, which is April 23. It is a time of grand parades featuring a march of the Royal Bermuda Regiment and the most esteemed citizens of Bermuda in antique style livery.
The climax of the event is the actual payment. The Governor of Bermuda, acting on behalf of the Crown, demands the payment. The leader of the Freemasons presents the single peppercorn on a velvet cushion which itself rests on a silver tray.
This year marks the 200th anniversary of the business arrangement.
-via Marilyn Terrell
The bad news is that Elliot was not able to rescue E.T. and ensure that he got back home.
The good news is that E.T. is delicious!
(Photos: Bengt Pettersson and Helga Steppan)
Eating E.T. is an occasional project by Terje Östling and Unsworn Industries, a design firm in Malmö, Sweden. They crafted an E.T. sculpture out of vegan-friendly foods and roasted it at the Exploring the Animal Turn symposium in Lund, Sweden in 2014. Later they made another E.T. and roasted him at the Foodycle festival in Helsinki, Finland.
The purpose of the project, beyond eating good barbecue, is to explore how being human impacts ethical food choices:
What would it feel like to eat an alien? How can we dearly love and grieve some non-human species while accepting the industrialised slaughter of others? How can we cater to the needs of eaters who seek a surrogate for the sacrificial and ritual aspects of convivial, meat-based, barbecues? What are our ethical responsibilities towards fictional organisms?
-via Nerdcore
Angela Nuñez calls herself the Horse Yoga Girl. One day, when she was 8 years old, she spent hours riding her pony named Trixie. Nuñez returned to the stable in joyful excitement. But she was about to learn a hard lesson:
One day Trixie and I returned to the barn and my mom noticed with horror that Trixie was huffing and puffing and lathered in sweat. My mom pulled me aside and explained to me in a stern voice that I couldn’t just go out and run Trixie as much as I wanted to. She said to me, “Horses aren’t machines. They have feelings. You have to be considerate of them. You should never cause them suffering.”
Nuñez never forgot that moment. She resolved to always treat horses with kindness and never inflict pain on them. But, she says, pain is inevitable:
Pain is part of life. Pain enables us to heal and grow. My journey of healing began with horses and continues with my yoga practice, both on the mat and with Snowy. I began practicing yoga on horseback out of curiosity. My passion for yoga and horses fueled a quiet, but nagging thought in my mind—what would happen if I combined the two?
So she did. Now Nuñez peforms yoga with Snowy, her horse. She always makes sure that Snowy is safe during the experience.
Snapchat is a social media app that lets people share photos. It includes fun filters that let users edit the images, such as giving people animal ears.
Twitter user @twentyonedorks applied them to her hamster, Murphy. Now he's even cuter than before!
(Photo: Studio Sebert)
In the deuterocanonical Book of Judith, the pious Judith cuts of the head of the Assyrian general Holofernes. In the Sixteenth Century, the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted the scene at least twice. One of those paintings now hangs in Rome. The other vanished from Naples centuries ago.
At some point, a French Army officer serving under Napoleon took the painting as loot back to his home in Toulouse, France. Two years ago, the current owners of the house found the painting in their attic.
As a long-lost treasure of art history, it's an incredible find. It's also worth a lot of money. Art dealers estimate that it could sell for $135 million USD. That's because it's indisputable authentic and unique. The Telegraph reports:
“This particular lighting, this energy typical of Caravaggio without corrections, with a sure hand and the pictorial material make this painting an original,” said art expert and gallery owner Eric Turquin.
Experts concur there is no way it could be a copy given the bold, spontaneous brushstrokes known as “alla brava” in Italian – Caravaggio never sketched first - and the fact that the painter made some clear corrections to hands, something that a careful copier would not do. […]
The Turquin gallery said the work was a “darker, crueller and more naturalistic rendering of the scene” than the other known version hanging in Rome.
Judith, with her “terrible determined stare looks directly at the viewer” while her maid, Abra, appears to encourage her to commit the act.
Unlike in the Rome version, the soldier comes across as a “vulnerable and common man” rather than a glorious general, with “the sunburnt hands of a soldier, and face that grimaces in pain, with eyes that are already dead”.
-via Marilyn Bellamy
(Photo: Specs4usUS)
About 60% of people with Down Syndrome have vision problems. But most eyeglasses frames won't fit the facial features of people with it.
For Maria Dellapina, a single mother of 4 children, that was a problem. Her daughter, Erin, couldn't find glasses that fit her. So in 2004, she founded SPECS4US, a company that produces glasses for children and adults with Down Syndrome. The Erin's World line of frames gives users fashionable, practical choices for glasses.
The Huffington Post describes how the Erin's World glasses are different:
However, because many people with the disorder have flattened faces, particularly the bridge of their noses, it’s difficult to find frames that fit.
“I noticed a typical frame wouldn’t fit properly,” Dellapina, who had originally designed some frames for her daughter on a piece of paper, said at the conference.
To help alleviate the issue, Specs4us’ “Erin’s World” frame line, inspired by Dellapina’s daughter, is crafted to accommodate a low nasal bridge, according to the company’s website. The arms of the glasses are also modified to prevent them from slipping down.
(Image: McAndrew and Koehnke)
What does it mean to be creepy? We recently looked at cartoon illustrations. Now let's look at the science of creepiness. Francis T. McAndrew and Sara S. Koehnke of Knox College recently published an article on the subject in New Ideas in Psychology. They define creepiness as not obvious danger, but the ambiguity of danger:
A mugger who points a gun in your face and demands money is certainly threatening and terrifying. Yet, most people would probably not use the word “creepy” to describe this situation. It is our belief that creepiness is anxiety aroused by the ambiguity of whether there is something to fear or not and/or by the ambiguity of the precise nature of the threat (e.g., sexual, physical violence, contamination, etc) that might be present. Such uncertainty results in a paralysis as to how one should respond. In the mugging situation, there is no ambiguity about the presence or nature of threat.
You know what the stranger pointing a knife at you wants. But you aren't sure about the guy at work who touches you just a bit too much. In modern civilized life, you can't simply punch him. But neither can you ignore what's going on. You don't know how to respond, which is the core problem in creepiness:
It would be considered rude and embarrassing to run away from an odd person who has done nothing overtly threatening, but, on the other hand, it could be perilous to ignore your intuition and remain in an interaction that is dangerous. This ambivalence leaves you frozen in place, wallowing in unease.
-via Nerdcore
Chaco the Owl lives a quiet, domesticated life. But this only conceals his inner cowboy who is ready for wild west adventures. He mounts his trusty steed, which is a singing toy horse, and prepares to battle gunfighters, cattle rustlers, and the lonesome range.
-via Gifsboom
(Photo: Tom Phillips)
What's in a snout? A lot. Jon Tennant, a doctoral researcher at Imperial College London, surveyed the shapes of the snouts of different cud-chewing animals. He found that both blunt and pointed snouts offer particular advantages.
(Photo: Milky Lane)
Churro is nature's perfect building material. Sure, we've all seen the pastry used for home construction and clothing. But now it's time to put the well-proven treat to a new purpose: ice cream bowls.
Milky Lane, a burger joint in Sydney, Australia, hasn't even opened yet. But I'll bet that there's already a line at the front door. The Urban List reports that the shop offers its ice cream sundaes in bowls made entirely of churro:
Let me walk you through the Churro Bowl, because anything short of a full introduction would be impolite. Picture a long snail of churro crafted in to the shape of a cereal bowl, then doused in cinnamon sugar and filled with homemade soft serve. It is then drizzled with Nutella and liquid caramel, but Milky Lane have also promised to add their delicious toppings into the mix. Think crushed nuts, fresh fruit, pretzels and Maltesers to start.
-via Foodiggity
Email This Post to a Friend