(Photo: Grove Farm)
Reuben and April Welch of Grove Farm in Bonnyrig, Scotland grow strawberries. While harvesting their crop this summer, they spotted this unusual fruit. The strawberry looks like a plump chicken, especially after placing a bit of leaf on one side to serve as a beak. They quipped, "Going to have to eat this chicken as it hasn't laid a single bloody egg yet."
-via Boing Boing
(Photo: Alyssa Salazar)
Lolita is a fashion style originating in Japan. It features frilly, brightly-colored outfits that look like they might belong on a little girl from the Victorian Era. There are several subsets of this fashion school, including Gothic, Punk, Wa, Pirate, and Witch.
Alyssa Salazar, who lives in southern California, is a fan of Lolita fashion and wears it frequently. She's also a Muslim who wears a hijab, so calls herself The Hijab Lolita. Vice magazine interviewed Salazar about how she blends these two traditions:
Do you ever get creepy comments from men when you're dressed in Lolita?
Actually, no, I haven't yet. I'm waiting for it, though, because I will pepper-spray them. Sometimes people will lift up my friends' skirts to see what's holding it up. My friends told me that this has happened to them. The creepiest thing a guy has said to me is, "Little Bo Peep, where's your sheep?" But it's mostly women, who might say, "That's cute," or try and snap pictures without my permission.
You must get more comments about your scarf then.
I get drive-by haters that say, "Take it off, it's not Iraq." But when I'm in Lolita, it's different. People think it's a costume.
-via Cosplay America
Anna GoswAmi totally nailed it! She's a fashion designer who recently graduated from the Central Saint Martins art school in London. For her final project, she made several dresses using fake fingernails. They're original but classy expressions of glamour. Take a look:
Charles Pheonix is a speaker, performer, cook, and all-around exemplar of 1950s Americana. From his famous Test Kitchen, he's delivered to the world extraordinary works of food art, such as a cereal cake, a meat Nativity set, and a Santa Claus meatloaf.
Most recently, he's devised a hot summer treat and party activity that is perfect for your Fourth of July get-together. It's called Uncle Watermelon. Think of it as a snowman that you can make in the summer. Offer your guests a watermelon, toothpicks, and an assortment of fruits and vegetables. Put them all together like a Mr. Potato head.
-Thanks, Rusty Blazenhoff!
Kanye West, a singer and occasional college professor, participated in the enormous Glastonbury Festival, a 3-day musical event in the UK that featured The Who and Lionel Richie. During his time on the stage, West led the audience in a sing-along of Queen's famous experimental song "Bohemian Rhapsody." It could have been a time for him to sing alone, but West preferred to get everyone to share in the mystery of it. It must have been amazing to be there in person!
-via Huffington Post
This is Mr. Head. He is an artist. He didn't start that way, of course. He started as a robotic vacuum cleaner. But Mr. Head had higher ambitions beyond tending human homes. He wanted to express his inner experience, and so worked with fellow artist HYdeJII to learn painting. Typically, he creates by roaming over a canvas, dripping paint where he feels inspired. The results are impressive:
Last year, he painted this strikingly emotive piece titled Spring Wormhole. You can see more of his work at Crunchyroll and, hopefully, someday, at a gallery near you.
In Japan, the nation that gave the world cat cafes, felines are cherished and pampered pets--as they should be! They're often photographed in kimonos, which are most likely put on by their human servants. Rocket News 24 has a roundup of the cutest kimono-wearing cats you'll ever see. Now I want to get a cat just so I can put it in a kimono!
(Photo: Yuria)
In 1950, composer Leroy Anderson wrote "The Typeriter"--a short and funny orchestral piece that uses a typewriter as a musical instrument. You can watch a performance of it here. And you should because it's really amusing.
In that version, a professional percussionist played a mechanical typewriter. Chris Gregg and Bruce Molay, however, programmed an electrical typewriter to do the same thing and type a specific, coherent message in the process! Hack A Day describes how it works:
An Arduino Uno converts serial over USB output to a bit stream ready to clock into the shift registers. On the computer side, [Chris] wrote up a basic CUPS driver which allows him to print from his Macbook. The perfect demo for this project turned out to be musical. Click past the break to see The Smith Corona perform “The Typewriter Symphony”, by Leroy Anderson. This may be the first time this particular piece of music has been performed with actual words being typed, rather than random keys.
Pancake art has become such a refined art form that it's now possible to create images in pancake batter that are nearly photographic in their degree of realism. YouTube member Tiger Tomato demonstrates this by recreating cartoon characters, such as Rainbow Dash, Pikachu, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Finn the Human.
It's a father and son team in Melbourne, Australia. Together, they carefully outline the images in reverse, fill them in with layered colors, then flip the pancakes over to reveal the completed pictures. You can see more at their YouTube channel.
-via Incredible Things
Now before you get too upset about this seemingly bizarre superpower: this was 1958. Back then, it was not very unusual for ordinary people to have this ability (atomic testing, you know). So it makes sense that the writers of Superman #125 would endow the Man of Steel with it, too.
Jerry Coleman, Wayne Boring, and Stan Kaye titled their story "Superman's New Power!" In it, Superman faced several challenges that required that he be greatly reduced in size or be in multiple locations simultaneously. This necessitated the Mini-Me Superman. You can see several pages from this freaky issue at Comic Book Resources.
-via The Geek Twins
(Photo: Andy Rae)
The Evil Queen, jealous of Snow White's beauty, ordered the Huntsman to slay her. Snow White responded by stabbing the Evil Queen through the chest. The end.
It would have made for a very short, but certainly compelling movie. This costume worn by cosplayer Andy Rae might have been selected for the 1937 Disney movie. It's one of many great cosplays inspired by the classic Disney princess film. Let's look at others:
Herbie the bull is very excited about getting a new ball to play with. But his human thinks that he's actually frustrated and says, "Do you need a girlfriend, Herbie?" Well, then, help him out, lady. Get him set up on Plenty of Cows.
-via Gifsboom
(Image: Yard Sale Project)
It's called the Cubrick. Does the name remind you of filmmaker Stanely Kubrick? It should. This cocktail cabinet design is inspired by his film 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's supposed to look like a monolith, except that it's red and filled with alcohol.
Ian Spencer and Cairn Young of the design firm Yard Sale Project in London conceive of it as "luxury furniture with a sense of theater." It smoothly opens, unfolds, and spins with a touch, moving much like the mystical flight scenes in the movie. It's priced starting at $7,300.
The recipe is simplicity itself: make scrambled eggs, then add bread crumbs, and mix. Dip the whole Big Mac hamburger into the breading, then deep fry it. The food blog Peep My Eats has a great idea that can work at home. But, ideally, McDonald's restaurants will offer this service on site.
Here's a time-lapse video of the preparation process.
-via That's Nerdalicious!
(Photo: Vice)
It is an ancient ceremony of mysterious origin. Every May, farmers in La Esperanza, Guerrero, Mexico, plant crops. The seeds need water to grow, so the villagers perform rituals that encourage rain.
This means collecting human blood in buckets and plowing it into the ground. The blood is the result of fistfights that the women have for the occasion. Rodrigo Cruz of Vice reports:
The villagers quickly began arriving in their dozens, forming a human perimeter while they waited for their out-of-town adversaries to reach the makeshift battlefield. Once the neighboring communities began to show up, women immediately started seeking out opponents and challenging them to a fight. The mothers and grandmothers, many of whom had been warriors in the past, got busy urging the younger generation of girls to get out in the ring, to split some skulls and spill some blood.
Once they were set on an opponent, the women faced each other, tying their hair up and removing rings or anything else that might get in their way. Then, often with their eyes closed, they threw the first punch. Occasionally they'd grab a handful of dirt to dry the sweat on their hands, or ask for a time-out to clean their bloodied noses, but they'd always carry on relentlessly tearing into each other, with cries of support resounding from all sides of the fight pit.
-via Oddity Central (warning: auto-start video)
