Strictly speaking, Jamie Wolfe of Nampa, Idaho just provides the canvas. It is his friend Tyler Harding who shaves Wolfe's luxurious back-mane into works of art.
Growing that canvas takes Wolfe about 4 months. Then it's time for Harding to go to work. After a few years of steady creative effort, the pair have created a 12-month pin-up calendar of back hair images (auto-start video). They call it the Calend-Hair. There's a back hair scene for every month, focusing on major holidays. So there's back hair art for Easter, Halloween, the Fourth of July, and Cinco de Mayo, among others. You can find them all here.
Wolfe and Harding are selling the calendar to raise money for an orphanage in Kenya. And being sensible fellows, they're also setting aside money to give vacations to their wives "for putting up with them."
On February 8, the Chinese New Year inagurates the Year of the Monkey in the Chinese zodiac. To mark the occasion, YouTube user 10 Cats dressed one of his cats in a monkey costume--much to the mockery of the other cats in the house.
James Myrick is among the world's foremost beard artists. While you and I may grow scraggly tufts of fur on our faces, Myrick is capable of growing his beard into remarkable shapes, such as a spiral and the word "beard".
Myrick's latest accomplishment is a beard that looks like the logo for the Rebel Alliance--the vile and treacherous organization that seeks to destroy the peaceful order of the Empire. I advise him to keep his head down when passing by any stormtroopers. Many lost friends on the Death Star and won't take kindly to Rebel paraphernalia, even if offered in jest.
R2-D2 and C-3PO are cute, often funny characters that add a bit of comedy to Star Wars. But there's nothing amusing about this minstrel show that suggests that the droid life is a happy life. They're actually slaves. Jonathan V. Last published a comprehensive and absolutely damning indictment in the Washington Free Beacon. First, Last argues convincingly that the droids are, though mechanical, sentient begins:
The first thing you notice is that C-3PO would easily pass the Turing Test: in a conversation, he’d be hard to distinguish from a normal humanoid. But they’re so much more than that. The droids are conscious. Speaking of R2-D2, Luke says that he’s “never seen such devotion in a droid.” The concept of “devotion” implies choice. A droid who is “devoted” to a task, or a person, is choosing loyalty over abandonment. And choice implies free will. Around that same time, C-3PO begs an annoyed Luke not to “deactivate” him. Deactivation is clearly seen by C-3PO as something to be feared, like death. Which means that droids both understand their own mortality and experience emotions, too.
They also have their own theology. When C-3PO is lowered into an oil bath to repair his joints, he exclaims, “Thank the Maker!” It’s one of only two times in the series that a character references theism. We’ll get to the other instance in a moment, but it’s instructive that in both cases, it’s a droid, not a humanoid, who refers to a supreme being.
Free will, emotions, and their own elementary religious system? We’re way off the AI scale now. C-3PO isn’t just intelligent. He’s conscious. He’s sentient. He’s a person.
Run, run, as fast as you can. You can't catch him. He's the gingerbead droid! And Imgur member bokkototto shows you how to make your own with step-by-step instructions and photos. The forms are the result of aluminum foil shaped around styrofoam balls and used as baking pans. Melted sugar served as glue, so the entire cake is edible--if you can bear to eat the adorable little droid.
Did you fall and get a boo-boo? Let Mommy kiss it. Mommy kisses are super good at making you feel better, right?
Wrong! My mother lied to me! And so did yours and everyone else's mothers! According to the results of a study published in the Journal of Evaluation in Medical Practice, mommy kisses have no discernible healing effect on minor injuries.
The study tested 943 toddler and mother pairings in outpatient clinics in Ottawa, Ontario. The examiners induced self-imposed injuries on toddlers, who sought maternal first aid after getting hurt. Sean Davis The Federalist acquired a copy of the full text of article, which describes the experimental procedure:
To induce head boo-boos, a piece of chocolate was placed under a low table edge and the child would be allowed to crawl to the candy. Invariably, the child would then stand to eat the chocolate and would strike his or her head on the table edge. All tables were constructed of soft wood (pine or fir) and edges were appropriately rounded enough to guarantee that skin would not be broken. Hand boo-boos were induced by placing a favourite object (lovey) of the child just out of reach on a counter behind a heated coil. Attempts to obtain the lovey would result in a noxious thermal stimulus to the fingertips. The coil was heated to 50 degrees Celsius (120 F) in order to produce a significant but non-damaging stimulus.
Not only were the resulting mommy kisses ineffective, they actually harmed the children by necessarily depriving the toddlers of more productive uses of maternal time:
Second, maternal resources are very limited, and time spent on delivering ineffective kisses to boo-boos means that maternal attention is not devoted to other activities that have clearly been shown to be beneficial to toddlers, such as the introduction of algebraic functions and the teaching of conversational Mandarin [8].
Davis suspects that the editors of the journal have fallen for a hoax. But given that the joke is given away in the abstract, I think that it's more likely that the editors knowingly participated in a prank. And I don't see any indication that this journal is open access and thus more vulnerable to hoaxing.
Chinmai Mori is a Japanese fashion designer who specializes in a free-form weaving technique called Saori. Her shawls, scarves, and hats are vibrant displays of color set in eye-popping patterns.
So, naturally, Mori asked her grandmother, Emiko, to serve as her primary model. At the age of 93, the grand lady is the perfect person to exhibit what Mori is trying to express. In an interview at the Instagram Blog, Mori explains:
And no one wears — or personifies — her work better than Emiko, who spends time at Chinami’s workplace almost every day. “She’s my favorite person in the whole world,” says Chinami. “I make grandma happy, and that’s just so much fun for me, too.”
Where does your pet belong when you go to sleep? Right with you, of course! The Brazilian company Colchão Inteligente Postural makes that possible with a box spring that has a little pet bed built inside.
It comes with a cushion, a pillow, and even privacy curtains.
Colchão Inteligente Postural has been developing the idea for 2 years after a client expressed a need for a bed that would permit her to sleep with her dog. The resulting product is available in a variety of sizes. You can remove it from the box spring to clean it.
When you lie down to sleep in Edo period Japan, will you wake up in the morning? By the 17th Century, the threat of assassination by ninjas had become serious enough that architects in Japan developed a special alarm system to help aristocrats stay safe.
It's called the Nightengale Floor. Here's an example from Nijo Castle in Kyoto. The floorboards are attached to support beams with metal brackets that scrape against each other. When someone steps on the joint, the brackets make a sound like a nightingale chirping.
Europeans first experienced pineapples on Columbus's first expedition to the Americas. This uniquely delicious fruit became a prized import from the New World. Sailors would often leave them at the entrances to their homes in Europe as a way to announce their return. Thus the pineapple became a symbol of exotic luxury and worldly travel.
In the United States, the Dunmore family of Scotland is most widely known for the 4th Earl of Dunmore, John Murray, who was the last British governor of Virginia. He was a commited Loyalist who commanded troops in battles against the American rebels.
In 1761, his family built this home in Falkirk, Scotland. It was a gift to Lady Susan, the wife of the Earl of Dunmore. The garden home served as a rural retreat. Nestled between two greenhouses stands a rotunda that looks like an enormous pineapple.
Twice a year, Tokyo hosts Comiket--one of the largest fandom conventions in the world. On December 29 of this year, 150,000 people attended. On the 30th, 170,000 people showed up.
That's a lot of human bodies to move around. Managing crowd control safely on this scale is a refined science that looks like an artform when properly performed. This video from 2011 demonstrates why.
Remember that your fingernail and toenail clippings aren't a waste product. They're "human ivory." You can turn them into art, as Mike Drake of Queens, New York has. For the past 11 years, he's collected his clippings and embedded them inside beautiful paperweights. He sells the decorative orbs for about $300-500 each.
Drake first began this work by diligently bagging his clippings, gathering approximately 1,040 in the first year. Then he mixed them into a ball of green-tinted acrylic. The result was a lovely and tasteful conversation piece. The Huffington Post quotes him and describes paperweights that Drake has made with prosthetic eyeballs:
"I like the jade color because it gives off an emerald quality," he said.
Nail clippings aren't the only bizarre paperweights Drake makes.
In 2011, he helped raise money for a veteran's hospital by making paperweights using prosthetic eyeballs that once belonged to soldiers.
"Each eyeball came with a story about how the vet lost his eye," Drake said.
In the upper right corner of the security camera footage, a woman dressed in yellow speaks to someone on a motorcycle. A man passes by and grabs her butt.
The woman responds instantly, punching the man so hard that he flies through the air, landing roughly on a display of store merchandise. According to news reports, he didn't regain consciousness for two hours.
The Independent reports that this scene is from Inezgane, Morocco, where street harassment of women is an ongoing problem--but presumably not for this lady.
YouTube user CharlotteSometimes doesn't explain, but commenter Nyphetamine Blue says that it's done by airbrushing color onto the icing from different directions. The ridges help delineate where one color begins and another ends. Turning the cake exposes alternate sides of the ridges.
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