Tom's body suffered a lot of abuse in his long and ill-fated quest to vanquish Jerry the mouse. At one point, he was flattened against a set of stairs. Now you can enjoy that moment forever with this rug by Nellaf, an artist in Florida. He calls it, appropriately, "Flat Tom."
-via Born in Space
When Mommy and/or Daddy are busy trying to get Zoom to work and fix errors in Excel formulas, we need to be quiet and not distract them. Or we can join in the obvious fun they are having talking with their boss, who is using a cat filter, and can't figure out how to turn it off.
Fisher-Price recently unveiled a toy set appropriate for the coronavirus era. It gives children the opportunity to be as stressed as their parents.
What would you add to this set to make it more realistic?
-via Marginal Revolution | Image: Fisher-Price
Would you like to propose marriage to your partner? Do you have a $100,000 to spend? Then I have a great service for you!
Heather Vaughn operates The Yes Girls, a business that creates perfect, customized marriage proposal scenes. Business Insider quotes her:
We've planned some really high-end proposals — some that we haven't been able to share online due to privacy requests — but our most expensive was over $100,000.
It was on a private island off of Charleston, South Carolina where the gentleman flew in over 30 members of his closest family and friends on a private jet. We did a full-blown engagement party afterward, so it was a "proposal meets engagement party" all-in-one experience. She was really surprised, and it was gorgeous — like something out of a Nicholas Sparks movie, complete with a private villa and a boardwalk right up to the beach.
If you'd like to have this kind of proposal experience, you can use Vaughn's Wink Wink feature to subtly signal to your partner about your expectations for getting engaged. It would no doubt be illuminating to receive such a suggestion from one's partner.
-via Marginal Revolution
Simon Sörensen builds remote controlled vehicles and handy gadgets of all kinds, including a hovercraft, an electric hand warmer, and an airboat. His latest invention is appropriate for winter weather. It takes all of the hard labor out of ice skating with two electric motors.
Sörensen wears a battery pack on his back to juice up each motor mounted on the skates, held in place with custom 3D printed parts. Screws in the drive wheels provide traction. You can see his invention in action at the 9:07 mark.
-via Hack A Day
Pufi, a dog in Romania, knows how to enjoy a snowstorm. In this video, his human, Andrei, towed Pufi on a sled behind a bike.
After this video went viral, CERT Transylvania, a disaster relief organization, provided Andrei with a new bicycle to make his transportation duties easier.
-via The Dodo
Yes, your dog can buy a stick. Or you can buy a stick for your dog. But the dog gets bored and wants another stick. And other dogs want your dog's stick.
This is why the Stick Library exists. Jeremiah Carter, a 10-year old boy in Saskatchewan, Canada, created this lending stick library for dogs in his neighborhood. It's like a Little Free Library, but with canine patrons in mind. Jeremiah and his father built this library and hung it at a local dog park. A CNN affiliate quotes the father:
"We took it and zip tied it to the fence so it wouldn't disappear, we gathered sticks that we figured dogs would enjoy, and filled it up and waited to see what happened," Carter said.
He and Jeremiah were surprised when they came back to the park one day to see that the stick library was actually used.
"When we would go to the dog park, there would be no sticks in there, or lots of sticks lying around," Carter said.
I should open a branch library in my own neighborhood.
-via Super Punch | Photo: Dave Carter
Fong's Pizza in Des Moines, Iowa, is locally famous for unusual pizza toppings, such as ramen, General Tso's chicken, roast turkey and cranberry sauce (for Thanksgiving, of course), and Mongolian beef.
The pizzeria's latest ingenious creation is Froot Loops Pizza. The Des Moines Register reports:
The new pizza, made with Froot Loops and cheese, is one of the new breakfast pizzas Fong's is rolling out at their Fong's location at 3018 Forest Ave., Des Moines. (As we all know, Iowans have a thing about breakfast pizza.) Alongside cereal pizza, there are steak and eggs, bacon popper and vegetarian breakfast pizzas on the menu.
"Making pizzas that are outside the box has always been a staple of Fong's," owner Gwen Page said. "Now we're trying things out for breakfast pizzas."
-via the appropriately named subreddit Pizza Crimes | Photo: Des Moines Register/Olivia Sun
Our heartwarming news story of the day comes from Australia (AKA "British Texas"), where a grandmother celebrating her birthday fell prey to a purse snatcher. The purse snatcher then fell prey to her. She chased after the thief, tackled him, and wrestled the bag away from him as he tried to escape from her clutches.
The thief fled in his truck, but was later arrested.
-via Dave Barry
It looks like a mirrored hemisphere, but what redditor Melissa Rags has made is actually a perfectly glazed cake. How does she get the glaze so perfectly smooth? Her secret is a little bit of corn syrup:
I’ve used a lot of different recipes for this and have noticed that any one you find that includes a little corn syrup always comes out beautiful and shiny! That and lot of recipes don’t state this but I recommend shaking your container of glaze upon completion. All the bubbles and thick parts with go to middle where you can easily ladle it out. All that’s left is a smooth glaze!
I really like this cute silver ring by Etsy seller Astha. When viewed from the right angle, it looks like a high quality piece of dollhouse furniture resting on your hand, offering a hospitable cup to guests.
-via Arsenic in Shell
This is super cursed and also the funniest goddamn thing I’ve seen all week pic.twitter.com/OOAblOwomM
— JR (@USofJR) February 24, 2021
How do you fry an egg? It's a great mystery. So in trying times like this one, summon an unholy monster from the depths of Hell to teach you. The modern urban legend Slender Man, who reaches toward you from the dim light of your peripheral vision, is an excellent chef, despite his cumbersome arms.
-via Super Punch
Woofbowl, a food truck in New York City, offers visually appealing foods for non-human consumption. Trot up to the side window to order your favorite snacks or ask your two-legs to do it for you. The gourmet menu includes non-alcoholic beer, hamburgers, and goat milk donuts.
Last year, Washington Business Journal interviewed Ron and Solo Holloway, the founders and owners of Woofbowl. Solo described the origin of this novel business:
For most millennials, our dogs are our kids. Therefore, I made all of our dogs’ meals and treats. One day, I was just exhausted and I said to Ron, it would be nice if I could just buy it and not have to make everything myself. He simply said to me with a smile, “Then make it a business.” Necessity is the mother of all inventions. Since the day I met Ron, he had the entrepreneurial spirit; he can be very persuasive. And the more I felt discouraged at work, the more Woofbowl became a reality.
-via Laughing Squid | Photo: Woofbowl
Beef Wellington is a British dish consisting of a steak wrapped with mushrooms duxelles and a pastry shell. Legend holds that it was named to honor Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington and vanquisher of Napoleon Bonaparte. Cooking one is difficult and thus commonly a challenge among cooking hobbyists and culinary students.
It had never occurred to me before I saw these photos, but beef Wellington is a pastry dish. So should not the fine arts of a pastry chef be applied to its shell? That's what chef Anthony Rush at Restaurant Siena in Honolulu does. The results are stunning.
What could possibly go wrong? Absolutely everything in this commercial for Etisalat, a telecommunications company. Helsinki-based filmmaker Nalle Sjoblad made this ad titled Moonwalk.
It makes no obvious sense at all. Why is it called Moonwalk? How does it promote Etisalat's services? Why are the people featured in 1 minute and 9 seconds of video making so many poor life choices?
I don't know the answers to any of these questions, but I want to watch this commercial over and over again.
-via Colossal
British YouTuber Tom Scott takes his audience on tours of strange places, events, and historical relics. Every video is an adventure in new knowledge.
Scott, like a lot of Britons, is in lockdown. So he can't travel widely, especially to indoor locations. He has run out of ideas that he can carry out while still in lockdown.
So Scott asked the AI program GPT-3 to create titles for videos based on his previous work, as well as a complete script for one of them. At the 5:32 mark, he reads a completely fictitious script given to him by GPT-3 about a Russian utopia built in Yorkshire by Nineteenth Century eccentrics.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly providing content creation, management, and curation tasks. Our own resident AI, a program called "Miss Cellania" does an excellent job of automatically searching for neat content and posting it here. We should expect to see similar AI encroachments in the future.
-via The Awesomer
