Slap a few more kebabs down on the griddle. French multimedia artist Thomas Mailaender (NSFW) is making me hungry. In 2012, he converted a clothes iron into a functional cook plate and used it to prepare food for visitors at the Centre d'Art La Cuisine in the town of Negrepelisse in southern France.
Mailaender calls the piece "L’Union Fait la Farce", which I can translate literally as "the union is the farce," but not idiomatically. All I know is that I want beef right now.
-via Toxel
Lucy Smalls is going stir-crazy after two weeks of isolation in Florida. This is when the notion of building a picnic table for local squirrels made perfect sense.
I'm three weeks in and completely agree. I should line my fences with these tables.
-via The Mary Sue
If you go the website for the car parts retailer O'Reilly Auto Parts and search for part 121g (that stands for 1.21 gigawatts), you'll find a listing for the flux capacitor from the Back to the Future movie franchise.
Mind the safety warnings.
Doc Brown would have liked this option in 1955.
-via Dave Barry
It's well into the afternoon and I'm still in my pajamas. Of course, I'm a blogger, so that's a day that ends with the letter Y. I'll probably maybe shower later after I finish watching Tiger King.
Are you working from home? Are you attending meetings or classes through Zoom or WebEx? Penn and Kim of the Holderness Family sympathize with your struggles, like getting dressed or muting the mic when going to the bathroom. In this musical parody video, they sing along as we try to join the meeting and share our screens.
-Thanks, Katherine!
Heidi Oley, a hairstylist at the Chroma Station Salon in Atlanta, can't work on her clients due to the coronavirus shutdown. But she has a boyfriend, Geoff Clark, to work on while they hole up in a cabin in the woods in northern Georgia.
Heidi keeps creative and Geoff keeps beautiful as she gives him daily makeovers. You can find his many transformations on Instagram.
Redditor and Trekkie Naelavok gathered blooper reels from Star Trek: The Next Generation and spliced the failed elements into the final scenes. For example, this scene from the episode "Future Imperfect" now features LeVar Burton and Michael Dorn high-fiving each other.
And here is Worf revealing a little too much about his childhood during "Booby Trap."
Now I want to see all of the Star Trek canon re-edited this way.
Lee Heng Swee, an artist in Kuala Lumpur, says that his motto is to "doodle with a smile." His goal is to make images that bring a grin to your face.
His cat-filled landscapes certainly do the job. You can see more on his Instagram page.
Dr. Daniel Reardon, an astrophysicist at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, was admitted into a local hospital after being unable to retrieve the magnets that he had stuck up his nose. He had placed them there in the hope of finding a way of reducing coronavirus infections.
How were nasal magnets supposed to help? The Guardian explains:
The 27 year-old astrophysicist, who studies pulsars and gravitational waves, said he was trying to liven up the boredom of self-isolation with the four powerful neodymium magnets.
[...]
“I had a part that detects magnetic fields. I thought that if I built a circuit that could detect the magnetic field, and we wore magnets on our wrists, then it could set off an alarm if you brought it too close to your face. A bit of boredom in isolation made me think of that.”
During his experiments, Dr. Reardon a magnet up each nostril. These became stuck. So he decided to use the other two magnets in an attempt to retrieve the nasal magnets. These got stuck, too:
“After struggling for 20 minutes, I decided to Google the problem and found an article about an 11-year-old boy who had the same problem. The solution in that was more magnets. To put on the outside to offset the pull from the ones inside.
“As I was pulling downwards to try and remove the magnets, they clipped on to each other and I lost my grip. And those two magnets ended up in my left nostril while the other one was in my right. At this point I ran out of magnets.”
Fortunately, hospital staff were able to remove the magnets, although the Guardian article does not explain how. Presumably their method did not involve additional neodymium magnets.
-via Richard Hernandez | Photo: Daniel Reardon
Twitter user @Dope_chakra writes that "sometimes my cat walks around with my slipper like he’s wearing it." His name is Meeko and, like many cats, he is an Instagram influencer. Soon, everyone will be walking around with one shoe on the front left paw.
-via Super Punch
Three days ago, Twitter user @meghanbits adopted a puppy. Yesterday, that puppy adopted a potato as his best friend. Such is the way with almost all young children.
His sibling, whom I gather is named Kash, is equally normal.
The most Reagan Era movie of the Reagan Era was, I think, Red Dawn. This Cold War film depicted a sudden invasion of the United States by communist nations led by the Soviet Union. The are ultimately defeated by American courage and pluck as exemplified by a band of freedom fighters led by Patrick Swayze.
Or a character that he played. I forget which. It's been about twenty years since I've watched it.
David Hookstead, a writer for the Daily Caller, has enjoyed the movie for many years. He recalls a time in college when he once persuaded a young lady of his acquaintance that Red Dawn was based on the real, historically true Soviet invasion of the United States in 1980. It was a brutal war that killed 80 million Americans.
You know, that war. The once that was a mere forty years ago. Hookstead reminisces:
That’s when I paused the movie and just took a deep dive into this great war America won in 1980. I explained to her how the Soviet nukes had knocked out key tactical strongholds of America in the Dakotas, and how “crack” paratroopers took the Rocky Mountains.
[...]
I mean, she didn’t just buy it. She was asking genuine questions about why this was never taught in high schools or colleges. I had to explain with a quivering lip that after America lost 80 million men in the great war of 1980 that we couldn’t discuss it in schools because the pain was too great.
[...]
At one point, I explained to her how D.C. took a direct nuclear strike, but we were able to hold off the Soviets at the Mississippi River (again, a direct reference to the plot of the film).
[...]
Then, later at night, she was literally talking to people how she had just learned the USA lost 80 million men in the great war of 1980. Eventually, somebody told her she was being pranked and she was far from pleased.
Still, to this day, I consider it my greatest accomplishment. If you aren’t smart enough to know Washington D.C. didn’t get nuked in 1980, then you deserve to get made fun of.
-via Kurt Schlichter | Image: MGM
Kirk, a border collie named for Star Trek's Captain Kirk, won in the small dog agility category of the 2017 Purina Incredible Dog Challenge. Her human, Channan Fosty, played a recording of Kirk's performance, which delighted the pup. She knows who's on the screen!
-via Kurt Schlichter
For this production of Hamilton, the lead role will provide his own accompaniment. Appropriately, his choice of instrument is Yankovic's, too.
Cosplayer Smart Alex offers this appealing mashup. For those of you with more classic tastes, he offers a Lord of the Rings/Elvis Presley mashup. The one true king of rock and roll will rule them all.
Marta del Valle, an interior designer based in Madrid, designed a chair series that she calls The Merlot. Each chair looks like a huge glass of red wine with an open side in which you can immerse yourself. The chairs are made of stainless steel and thermoplastic polycarbonate. Yanko Design describes them:
A product of wanting to have fun while designing, Del Valle herself admits that the Merlot chairs aren’t ideal for tedious and work-oriented actions such as studying, working or consuming long meals. But for all you fun-loving design enthusiasts, and not to mention wine lovers out there such a piece would only liven up any space it is placed in. So if you’re in the mood to “Take a seat, have a sip”, well then the Merlot may just be the next quirky piece of furniture you need in your home!
-via Toxel
Itsuo Kobayashi is a master of his crafts, which include both cooking and drawing. For decades, he worked at restaurants, lovingly crafting each dish for his happy customers. He made careful notes about these meals and illustrated over 1,000 of them in a notebook.
Although Kobayashi is now medically retired from front line cooking, he still prepares and draws meals from home. Lately, he's been offering them as little pop-up books. You can almost smell the flavors and feel the steam rising from these hot dishes. You can see more examples at Colossal.
