Ted Sabarese had a great idea for a photoshoot: people paired with fish that look like them. There are four more at the link. Now when you tell someone that he has a face like a fish, you'll have to be more specific.
Ed Barbeau, a retired math professor at the University of Toronto, made this object from a single rectangular piece of paper. Can you figure out how he did it? Check the solution at the link.
The anonymous blogger behind Lunchbox Awesome makes truly awesome lunchboxes. S/he has arrangements inspired by Pinocchio, Phineas & Ferb, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and more.
The late Belgian artist Tom Frantzen erected this playful outdoor sculpture in Brussels. De Vaartkapoen shows a man emerging from a manhole to trip a police officer passing by. The cop wears the badge number 15, just like Officer 15 from Hergé's Tintin comics.
The drinking straw was invented by 3000 B.C., as attested by Sumerian artifacts. Until very recently, these straws were tubes from plant stems, such as rye. Besides dissolving in water, these straws often added unwelcome plant flavors to drinks. In 1888, Marvin Chester Stone patented a waxed paper straw that didn't add a grassy flavor to drinks, and these quickly replaced plant straws. But we would have to wait a few more decades before straws became flexible.
Sometime during the 1930s, tinkerer Joseph B. Friedman watched his young daughter struggle to drink a milkshake from a high counter at a soda shop. There had to be a way to improve the design to make it flexible. Here's what he did:
Friedman inserted a screw into the straw toward the top (see image). Then he wrapped dental floss around the paper, tracing grooves made by the inserted screw. Finally, he removed the screw, leaving a accordion-like ridge in the middle of the once-straight straw. Voila! he had created a straw that could bend around its grooves to reach a child's face over the edge of a glass.
The modern bendy straw was born. The plastic would come later. The "crazy" straw -- you know, the one that lets you watch the liquid ride a small roller coaster in plastic before reaching your mouth -- would come later, too. But the the game-changing invention had been made. In 1939, Friedman founded Flex-Straw Company. By the 1940s, he was manufacturing flex-straws with his own custom-built machines. His first sale didn't go to a restaurant, but rather to a hospital, where glass tubes still ruled. Nurses realized that bendy straws could help bed-ridden patients drink while lying down.
Hongtao Zhou's clever lounge chair design uses two discarded stumps and scrap wood from a sculpture studio. Take a break from chopping wood and sit down.
This time, to win the game, you have to eat instead of shoot the aliens. An artist who goes by the name Invader (and makes art inspired by the game Space Invaders) is currently exhibiting his work at The Outsiders gallery in London. Among his other pieces on display is a mosaic that blends an alien with the Union Flag.
Did you think that the printed emergency instructions at every seat in a jetliner simply sprung ex nihilo from the mind of the graphic designer? No, they are grounded in the rich traditions of Western art. Avi Steinberg, who hates flying, explains using several examples, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Mary Magdalene:
Thus the “fallen woman” motif is reimagined in the most urgent terms: this airline Magdalene is a woman who has quite literally fallen. And this is where we find her, floating in limbo, clutching a lily-white life preserver to her breast (instead of a vase, as in the 1877 portrait). Like Rossetti’s romantic Pre-Raphaelite Magdalene, this woman’s lowly state serves only to magnify her elemental beauty. Here she is, Our Lady of the Plane Crash. “I will make you fishers of men,” says the Christ. “We will rescue you in any corner of the globe,” says a Pan Am safety card. The fallen woman will not remain cast away forever—and, if we follow her lead, the artist assures us, neither will we. It is a pretty vision of earthly salvation.
Are you unemployed? More to the point, are you underemployed and have extra time, but no job to fill it? A website called TaskRabbit is one of several that are hiring people to do immediate, temporary jobs for anyone. Need someone to do a chore for which you don't have time? There might be someone who has time right now to do it:
Erika Dumaine, 24, logged onto TaskRabbit this April and saw the following plea for help: "Buy me shoes ASAP. I stepped in dog poop." So Ms. Dumaine, now a full-time nanny, bought and delivered a requested new pair of navy blue Toms shoes from Nordstrom's to the poster, Guillermo Rauch. (Her payment: $17.) Aura Montano, a 21-year-old nursing student, stood on the Brooklyn Bridge holding an "I heart Anie Lewis" sign one Friday evening in August so she could attract the attention of Eric Lewis's wife and hand her flowers as she walked home from work. (She earned $19.)
Those handful of dollars per job can add up to a substantial sum:
After submitting an online application, completing a video interview and going through a Social Security number trace and a federal criminal background check, Ms. Greenham joined the San Francisco-based company's crew of about 2,000 "TaskRabbits." She does odd jobs via the service every day, aiming to clear at least $25 an hour. So far, she's completed about 250 jobs and has racked up around $1,500 a month.
Like the guy who started renting out his personal possessions, we're seeing more and more people using the Internet to create their own jobs and run microbusinesses. Isn't that awesome?
The Pin Pres is a storage system that lets a child change the positions of sliding pins to create custom shelving arrangements. My kids could have hours of fun with this. And when no one is looking, I could, too!
Psychology professor Richard Wiseman sure knows how to entertain guests. Here are ten easy tricks that he uses to wow people at parties. He seems to like fire quite a bit, so keep an extinguisher nearby if he visits your house.
Lookit 'em, boss! Great, big, fat sugary treats! Rachel Klemek of the Blackmarket Bakery made this gingerbread assault vehicle. Luke Skywalker is about to slice it open.
Austrian artist Klaus Pichler became intrigued by a stuffed antelope that he saw through a window at Vienna's Museum of Natural History one night. He later toured the museum's taxidermy division and received permission to re-arrange and photograph the displays. Many of his pictures suggest that the animals are interacting with each other or the humans in the museum. If you opened an elevator and found a bear inside, would you share the ride or take the stairs?
A school in São Paulo, Brazil trains people who are visually impaired -- many completely blind since birth -- to be graceful and coordinated ballet dancers. Fernanda Bianchini opened her school in 1995 and developed an effective way of teaching dance by touch to hundreds of students. A few of her students have even become professional dancers.
-via Oddity Central | Previously: Super Mario Bros. Ballet
