Rebecca Ehalt moved to Slovenia. For two years, her dog, Casey, lived with her parents in Pennsylvania. Their reunion was unexpected but joyful for the nine-year old schnauzer. He got so excited that he fainted.
Don't worry! Casey recovered. It was just an overwhelming emotion. Ehalt concedes that although it was only a two-year separation for her, "in fairness [that] is 14 years in dog years."
-Thanks, Wifey!
Robin Barcus Slonina is an artist who creates novel items of clothing from unusual materials, such as a bikini made out of poker chips and a dress made of wiffle balls. For a while, she was composing "a site-specific, interactive 'dress' sculpture in each state of the union." This dress made of garbage bags represents New York.
Slonina is a native of Chicago. Her first visit to New York City was during a sanitation workers' strike. There were huge piles of uncollected garbage everywhere. They left a lasting impression. In her mind, "the sanitation workers that mange these tiny mountains every week are the true heroes of the city."
Slonina made her dress out of garbage bags filled with newspapers--specifically, The New York Times. The entire dress is thus recyclable. You can see more photos of it on her Facebook page.
-via Recyclart
(Image: redditor: drain65)
We've seen dog shaming--where humans place signs in front of their dogs, calling out their disgraceful behavior in the first person. Now man's best friend is turning the tables on us, forcing us to admit how we cheat them.
I will confess that sometimes I just pretend to throw the ball. And sometimes I act like a piece of ordinary dog kibble is a treat. I'm a bad human.
-via Tastefully Offensive
Dr. Michael Darden is a highly trained pediatrician and allergist. But he's more than just a man of science. He also has a gifted bedside manner. Here he is in his D.C.-area clinic giving two shots to a toddler. This would normally cause a young child to howl in pain. But Dr. Darden is so entertaining that instead the little boy laughs.
Here's another interesting video. It's an interview with Dr. Darden. At the 5:10 mark, he shares a fascinating story. When he was still in high school, he worked in a hospital. At the age of about 16 or 17, he had the opportunity to observe an autopsy. The body was that of someone that he knew well. It was, for Dr. Darden, an early encounter with the mysterious boundary between life and death.
-via Huffington Post
Fans of both the Game of Thrones TV show and the Song of Ice and Fire novel series can appreciate the extensive worldbuilding that George R.R. Martin engaged in prior to publishing his work. Martin's stories are predicated upon carefully-developed history, geography, and ethnography.
The world in which the stories take place is huge. It can be helpful to understand its history. Thanks to a series of 16 maps by redditor hotbrownDoubleDouble, we can do so quickly. They take us from the dawn of known history in Westeros and Essos to the complete conquest of Westeros by House Targaryen. Each one contains a summary of historical events during that period.
-via Geek x Girls
How can you beat the scorching summer heat? Break open a watermelon and enjoy some cold, sweet, fruit. A friend of Twitter user @min18rff had that idea, but he bought the wrong watermelon. He could still turn it into a huge watermelon Jell-O shot. But only one.
A young boy bodyboarding off Crooklets Beach in Bude, Cornwall, UK, encountered a rip current and was pushed out to sea. He screamed for help. Joby Wolfenden-Brown, a lifeguard working for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, jumped into the water to save him.
Wolfenden-Brown was wearing a camera at that moment. Watch this heart-pounding footage of him saving the boy from drowning.
(Image: NOAA)
What's are rip currents? The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (US) defines them as "narrow, and sometimes strong, currents that flow away from the beach." They can go faster than 6 miles an hour, and thus are dangerous to even strong swimmers.
What should you do if you find yourself in a rip current? RNLI lifeguard Chris Wafer advises:
If you're stuck in a rip current do not panic or swim against the current, keep hold of your flotation device and raise your arm to signal for help.
-via Twisted Sifter
Don't panic! Just hang this cross stitch on your wall to understand what other people are saying to you. In the universe of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel Fish is an incredibly useful yet entirely natural object that translates speech:
The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconcious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
Etsy seller Jen made this cross stitch piece illustrating the internal composition of the wondrous animal. You can buy her pattern here.
He is more machine than man now. Twisted, welded, and evil. This is Darth Vader, an outdoor wood stove built by Instructables member doddieszoomer. He made it from an old gas steel bottle. He used an angle grinder to shape the helmet accents. Doddieszoomer then finished the project with spray paint for the rich black Vader look.
-via Technabob
iDLights took two old plastic popcorn bins (like this one) and turned them into a cute lamp. There's a 15 watt bulb in the bottom and a 9 watt bulb in the top. With its warm light and appropriate theme, the lamp would be perfect for a home theater.
-via Recyclart
Genki Sudo's techno musical group World Order is noted for its videos of Japanese men in business suits moving in lockstep, often out of sync with the world around them. The visual impact of the precision movement is stunning.
World Order brings their skills and looks to this odd commercial for Toyota. The suited men drive into a jungle and experience a series of unexpected adventures. How buying a Toyota is a logical consequence of them is unclear, but the effect gets eyeballs on the screen, which is sufficient.
-via American Digest
A mini domino is so small that it weighs only a hundredth of the weight of a regular domino. Setting them up for an orderly fall requires great concentration and precise movements. Sinners Domino Entertainment proved up for the challenge when it set up and knocked down a record-breaking 2,000 piece domino arrangement. The teenagers in this video performed this feat at the Wilhelm-Lückert-Gymnasium in Büdingen, Germany, on July 12, 2013.
Sinners Domino Entertainment usually operates on a grander scale. You may recall their domino arrangements with 277,275 pieces and the flags of the world.
-via Gizmodo
My little pony, my little pony
What does the future hold?
My little pony, my little pony
Isn’t the world a lovely place?
My little pony, my little pony
Everywhere you go is a smiling face.
Running and skipping
Merrily tripping
Watching the morning unfold
My little pony, my little pony
What does the future hold?
Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox presents this slow jam version of the theme song to My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. We've previously seen them rework "Royals," "Sweet Child O' Mine," and the theme songs of Game of Thrones and The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Now Bradlee's band shows the Elements of (musical) Harmony from Equestria. Welcome to the herd, Mr. Bradlee. *brohoof*
-Thanks, Lisa Marcus!
(Photo: John Halsam)
It's not easy to hit a golf ball several hundred yards and have it land neatly in a cup 4.25 inches in diameter. But, sadly, some golfers do experience this problem.
Yes, that's right: hitting a hole-in-one can be a bad thing.
That's because in some golfing cultures, particularly Japan the the UK, golfers who sink a ball in one shot are expected to throw a party. They should, at minimum, treat everyone in their group to drinks back at the clubhouse. In more extreme cases, social standards compel successful golfers to host lavish celebrations costing thousands of dollars.
That's why some golfers purchase insurance to protect themselves from an unfortunate hole-in-one. Alex Mayyasi writes for Priceconomics:
After spending $650 buying the entire clubhouse champagne at England’s South Winchester Golf Club following a hole in one, Paul Neilson told Bloomberg, “I couldn't afford to go through all that again. I used to have a policy but never got around to renewing it.” Among the stories from Japan, the same article quotes Eiji Yoneda, who was one of 200 people invited on a dinner cruise by someone celebrating a hole in one.
A number of firms offer hole in one insurance, frequently bundled with other services that golfers commonly buy like insurance for golfing equipment or personal liability. (Apparently yelling “Fore!” can’t ward off lawsuits if you hit a ball right at someone.) Golfplan, a U.K. insurer, covers $340 to $510 worth of drinks for hole in one celebrations. (Clubs’ set of rules for validating a hole in one makes it easier to process claims.) When it is sold unbundled, hole in one insurance can be cheap; Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Co. Ltd offers Japanese golfers hole in one insurance for as little as a $3 premium. Outside of individual policies, golf tournaments also get hole in one insurance so that they can offer huge cash prizes for a hole in one as a marketing promotion -- it's the same type of "prize indemnity" insurance that covers teams when a fan sinks a half court shot or makes a field goal.
-via Marginal Revolution
It’s critical that we get this thing working properly. When the economy tanks, I need this flamethrower to defend myself and my own.
That's Nick from Doomsday Preppers, a reality show on the National Geographic television network. He wants to be prepared for the worst. Since he owns many rabbits, he wants to use their poop productively. With lots of nitrogen and phosphorus, rabbit poop is an excellent fertilizer. That may help feed Nick, but it won't protect him from predators.
To make his rabbit poop into a formidable flamethrower, Nick first used a kitchen blender to grind it into a fine powder. He explains:
In order to weaponize rabbit manure, you have to grind it into a fine powder that will allow more oxygen to mix very well with the hydrocarbons and nitrogens that are in rabbit manure.
He then used the rabbit poop to produce methane gas and a flammable powder. The results were, as you can see in this video, beautiful:
-via Nerdcore
