At 627 feet, the British Telecom Tower is one of the tallest buildings in London. As a promotional gimmick for the new Blu-ray version of Star Wars, LucasFilm had it rigged to project a beam of light high into the sky. When viewed from the right angle, it looked like a lightsaber.
This water rocket is no mere toy. George Katz has built a machine that looks like kludge, but is all genius. The first stage rises 163 feet into the air before detaching the second stage, which clears 810 feet before parachuting to the ground.
Amelia Harnas carefully and repeatedly stained fabric with wine using a wax resist dyeing technique. Then she embroidered highlights onto the fabric, creating lovely and unique portraits.
http://www.trulyamelia.com/wine-stains.html -via Nag on the Lake
Damariscotta, Maine, hosts an annual regatta of pumpkin boats. Yes, pumpkin boats. People take huge pumpkins, hollow them out, and then use them as boats. Some even attach outboard motors. Then contestants race each other. Why? Because they are awesome.
Guinea pigs and other small mammals don't do well as solitary pets. They need at least one companion or they get lonely. Guinea pig owners know this, but the Swiss government takes it very seriously. In Switzerland, it's illegal to keep a single guinea pig, which causes a potentially endless problem:
[...] the owner would have to purchase a new, probably younger guinea pig as a companion to the ageing survivor, whose eventual death would force the purchase of yet another guinea pig, locking the owner into an endless cycle of guinea pig purchases in order to adhere to Swiss law -- even though he or she may only ever have wanted one guinea pig in the first place.
Animal lover and entrepreneur Priska Küng found a solution. She owns eighty guinea pigs and rents them out to owners of solitary pigs, who can return them after their own pigs has passed on:
She takes 50 Swiss francs (€41) for a castrated male and 60 francs for a female, "as a deposit," Küng explains. In effect, she sells the animals but pays back half the purchase price when they are returned. The job of the leased rodents is to cheer up companions in their twilight years.
Some return after just a few poignant weeks, others after months, but some stay away for years. "Sometimes people realize that they still get so much enjoyment from the guinea pigs that they want to go on keeping them and come back for another one once their supposed last pet has died," says Küng.
The banana fan has been around since 2002. This video was uploaded in 2007. Yet somehow these things are still not in mass production. How can that be?
Giganten aus Strahl is an art studio in Germany that produces fantastic sculptures out of scrap metal, including this sadly nonfunctional Mercedes 300 coupe replica. You can see more photos at the link, including ones that show the scrap metal spare tires in the trunk and the scrap metal engine under the hood.
Mind = blown. Debbie Smythe, a textile artist from the UK, makes enormous installations composed of threads strung along pins. Although what you're seeing may look like a pen and ink drawing, it's actually hundreds of pins and narrow threads. Take a look at her website to see close-in, detailed photos of how she assembles these works.
Get in mah belleh! Naomi of Bakers Royale created these cheesecakes. The crust is made out of Butterfinger candy bars and prezels and the whole concoction is topped with chocolate sauce and peanut butter cream cheese frosting.
A decision by a single character, often a very small change, would have completely altered the Star Wars trilogy. Brian Murphy of Dorkly offers eight examples. Sadly, no change to the original trilogy could have prevented the prequels from taking place.
On the other hand, maybe trying to figure out where they are will help the residents of this Zürich retirement home will keep their minds active. Anyway, this design by Information Architects is certainly aesthetically appealing.
Barbara Bush, the First Lady of the United States from 1989 to 1993, didn't think much of The Simpsons, and said so publicly. Marge Simpson took offense and wrote a polite but firm letter objecting to Bush's characterization of the show as "the stupidest thing I've ever seen." The First Lady responded to Mrs. Simpson's note and apologized for the remark.
The Neustadt Kunsthofpassage, if I understand my sources correctly, is an artsy neighborhood in Dresden. One wall of a building there is covered with funnels and gutters shaped like musical instruments. It's like a Rube Goldberg machine with water.
YouTube user Buchan39 has figured it out: adding Tom Selleck's iconic mustache immediately elevates the quality of any movie. Toy Story? Check. American Beauty? Check. The Exorcist? Check. Steel Magnolias? Well, that's not in the video, but the 'stache could only help.
