I can't find much information about the contraption pictured above, but I gather that an artist in Asheville, North Carolina made a machine that launches rubber chickens a considerable distance using a motorcycle engine. The video shows him firing the chickens at what appears to be a sculpture made of boxing gloves.
UPDATE 4.23.11: Commenter Ashevilleisawesome lets us now that the artist is named Sean Pace, and you can read an excellent article about his work (including the Chicken Shooter) here. Thanks!
The end of this video shows the homeowners' rather emphatic 'no trespassing' signs. I would imagine that if the tiger is allowed to play outside on a regular basis, they don't have a problem with solicitors.
I grew up a devoted fan of The Dukes of Hazzard. It was, to my childhood self, an exciting, funny, and understandable grown-up show. I was never able to convince my father to jump our car like the Duke boys jumped the General Lee, although I sure did try. Popping wheelies and rolling over logs with my Big Wheel would have to suffice -- and I'm sure I'm not the only boy who did the same. So let's look back at that wonderful show and some things that you might not know about it.
1. The basic story of the show can be traced back to Jerry Elijah Rushing, an actual moonshiner in North Carolina. At the age of 12, he began making deliveries, eventually using a modified 1958 Chrysler 300D for the job. The car, named “Traveller” after General Lee’s horse, was rigged to dump oil on the road to impair law enforcement vehicles in pursuit. Rushing was often joined by his brother Johnny, and sometimes by his female cousin Delane. But they just delivered the moonshine, which was actually made by Rushing’s Uncle Worley. Rushing eventually left the business and became an accomplished hunter, especially with a bow. His stories about his adventures inspired the 1975 movie Moonrunners, which in turn led to The Dukes of Hazzard.
2. Producer Gy Waldron created the show because he saw that one sixth of all music record sales were country, but there were no television shows aimed directly at the country market. Episodes were written in the country music narrative style, or as Waldron put it “...when you get through watching an episode, replay it in Nashville, and somebody should be able to write a pretty good country song about it.”
3. John Schneider (Bo Duke), a New Yorker, presented himself as something of a redneck when he auditioned for the role of Bo Duke. He grew stubble, carried a can of beer, put a wad of chewing tobacco into his mouth, and claimed to be from a small town in Georgia. Schneider also knew that driving skill could be useful, so he claimed to be a graduate of the Georgia School of High Performance Driving, which didn’t exist. He got the part.
4. Tom Wopat (Luke Duke) has made some success in the music business, releasing albums and touring since 1981. When the show was canceled, Wopat held the #1 slot in the Billboard country chart.
5. Sorrel Brooke, who played Boss Hogg, was a great intellect. A classically trained Shakespearean actor, he was a graduate of Columbia and Yale and fluent in five languages. Brooke was especially accomplished at replicating dialects, and based his character’s accent on that of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond. His belly was also fake -- Brooke wore a padded suit to give him the extra girth that he needed to play the rotund Hogg.
6. James Best grew up in poverty and from a broken family to become a phenomenally successful actor by the time that he was cast as Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane. He worked as an accomplished acting teacher for decades and provided instruction to, among other actors, Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, Farrah Fawcett, and Quentin Tarantino, as well as less famous students while serving as a professor at the University of Mississippi. In his spare time, he acquired a black belt in karate and now paints (warning: auto-sound).
7. Ben Jones (Cooter Davenport) was a member of Congress from 1989 to 1993. His writings have appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today, and The Weekly Standard. Like some other cast members from the original show, he disapproved of the 2005 movie and referred to it as “sleazy”. In an interview with Billy Rae Bates, Jones said:
I don’t know what they were thinking (with the movie). They totally missed the whole point of the show. Our show was sort of like a western, a 1940s western. The Old B westerns, the Roy Rogers ones, they weren’t realistic; they were fantasies; you could fall off a cliff and not hurt yourself. There were values and a good sense of right and wrong...The reason people watched this show and encouraged their kids to watch it is it’s a good old-fashioned American show. These Duke boys are heroes; they risk their lives to do the right thing. If I hear it once, I hear it a thousand times a day, ‘Thank you for making a show that our kids can watch.’ You don’t take that audience and that show and do what they did to it.
8. Catherine Bach (Daisy Duke) herself came up with her character’s denim short-shorts, leading to the garment being dubbed “Daisy Dukes”. The original plan was to have Daisy wear a miniskirt.
9. The first five episodes were shot in northern Georgia. Street scenes for the county seat are actually from Covington, Georgia, which has a small Dukes of Hazzard museum in the back of the A Touch of Country cafe. The rest of the show was filmed in California.
10. During the filming of the pilot episode, two directors were eating breakfast in the town square of Covington when they heard a car drive by that played the opening bars to “Dixie” as the horn. This, they thought, must be in the show. They chased down the owner, bought the horn out of his car for $300, and installed it in a General Lee.
11. The building used as The Boar’s Nest set is still around, but it’s now a church.
12. After the first season, it distressed producer Gy Waldron that the cast was entirely white. So in subsequent seasons, visiting federal agents that investigated Boss Hogg were black, as was the sheriff of the adjoining Chickasaw County.
13. Before the fifth season, Tom Wopat and John Schneider left the show over a merchandising royalties dispute and were replaced by actors Christopher Mayer (Vance Duke) and Byron Cherry (Coy Duke) as a different set of Duke cousins. Eventually, Wopat, Schneider, and the studio compromised and resolved their dispute. They returned before the fifth season was over.
14. A Dukes of Hazzard convention called DukesFest was held annually from 2001 to 2007, hosted by Ben Jones. In 2004, it attracted about 25,000 people. Among its occasional features were stunt drivers jumping (and demolishing) General Lee replicas.
15. The show used about 150 General Lees, because usually one was destroyed in each episode as a result of the stunt work. That’s a lot of Dodge Chargers, and during one period of the show’s run, Warner Bros. had a shortage. So its employees left notes on the windshields of Chargers in grocery store parking lots offering to buy the cars.
16. When the show ended, Warner Bros. had 17 General Lees left, as well as many spare parts. It invited a fan named Wayne Wooten to set up a non-profit corporation to distribute the leftovers to dedicated fans, provided that the fans never charge money for public appearances of these cars.
17. To make the jumps work, General Lees had to be weighted down in the back to compensate for the weight of the engine in the front. The stunt managers welded steel boxes into the trunks of the cars and added weights as necessary, usually 300-400 pounds. The farther and higher a jump was, the more weight was necessary to balance the car.
18. So that the jumping scenes were fresh, stock footage was rarely used. Each jumping scene captured on film was usually presented only once.
19. The first hood-slide across the General Lee was actually an accident by Tom Wopat. The directors liked it so much that they decided to make it a staple of the show.
20. Sonny Shroyer (Enos Strate) got his own spin-off series in 1980 entitled Enos. It featured the Dukes of Hazzard character a LAPD officer. It lasted a single season.
21. There was a crossover episode with Alice. In a 1983 episode of that show entitled “Mel Is Hogg Tied”, Boss Hogg appeared in Phoenix and tried to buy Mel’s diner.
22. In 1983, Hanna-Barbera launched an animated series called The Dukes. It was about the worldwide travels of the Dukes and Boss Hogg. The show endured only one year.
23. There was a 1997 reunion movie called The Dukes of Hazzard: Reunion! Only one General Lee was found in the possession of Warner Bros., and it was dilapidated and covered with bird droppings. The directors left it in that condition, unwashed, and shot the General Lee being hauled out of retirement by the Duke boys.
Sources: Bates, Billie Rae. Them Dukes! Them Dukes! A Guide to TV's "The Dukes of Hazzard". North Charleston, SC: Booksurge, 2006. Print. Hofstede, David. The Dukes of Hazzard: The Unofficial Companion. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1998. Print. Images: Warner Bros.
CORRECTION 4/14/15: Chris Bragwell emails that I have confused Mississippi State University and the University of Mississipi. I've corrected my error.
Artist Erin M. Riley found images of people caught in embarrassing situations, kept in perpetuity by the Internet, and turned them into tapestries. In an interview about her work, she wrote "I like the images to be attractive and alluring while also showing you how creepy and depressing life can be."
The most agonizingly complex language that I've ever tried to learn is OT Hebrew, which (among other challenges) expresses vowel intonations through a vast variety of tick marks, jots, and tittles surrounding the consonants. These are not constant; rather, the meaning of the different markings varies depending upon the order of the letter within the word, order within the syllable, the nature of the preceding consonant and the following consonant, and all possible combinations thereof. But I gather that Hebrew is comparatively simple to Mandarin. As a necessary result of that complexity, Mandarin typewriters are sophisticated machines:
As you can see, the typewriter is extremely complicated and cumbersome. The main tray — which is like a typesetter's font of lead type — has about two thousand of the most frequent characters. Two thousand characters are not nearly enough for literary and scholarly purposes, so there are also a number of supplementary trays from which less frequent characters may be retrieved when necessary. What is even more intimidating about a Chinese typewriter is that the characters as seen by the typist are backwards and upside down! Add to this challenging orientation the fact that the pieces of type are tiny and all of a single metallic shade, it becomes a maddening task to find the right character. But that is not all, since there is also the problem of the principle (or lack thereof) upon which the characters are ordered in the tray. By radical? By total stroke count? Both of these methods would result in numerous characters under the same heading. By rough frequency? By telegraph code? Unfortunately, nobody seems to have thought to use the easiest and most user-friendly method of arranging the characters according to their pronunciation.
Engineering students in Palwal City, India, built a motorcycle that runs on a tank of compressed oxygen:
"This bike is different from others because the engine doesn’t burn fuel, nor does the temperature rise. The air is compressed and transferred to the engine without any combustion. The piston reciprocates from the air pressure leading to an up-down movement, making the flywheel run and the bike move.”
Students say the basic concept behind the invention is to achieve an equivalent thrust of blast inside the engine without using any combustion.
The bike can run at a speed of six to 12 miles an hour for up to 370 miles using 100 liters of 300 PSI oxygen.
Silvas' girlfriend April loves Super Mario Bros., so he decided to propose marriage to her in an appropriate way. He decorated his living room with game backgrounds and placed the wedding ring in a yellow cube hanging from the ceiling. And then, once she said 'yes'....
Colin Bleasdale, an ice cream maker in Lancashire, UK, hopes to be entered in the Guinness Book of World Records for an ice cream concoction that he is making for the upcoming British royal wedding:
Mr Bleasdale, who teaches art at Larches House in Preston, said: “The ice cream will resemble a wedding posy that will be covered in fake jewels made from jelly or melted toffee.
“Fifteen cones will be used to create the bouquet and each one will be covered with real gold leaves. I may also include a champagne sorbet and black truffles.”
Mr. Bleasdale hopes to top his creation with a large sapphire. Question: if one wanted to make the world's most expensive ice cream, couldn't one just get a generic brand then charge a really high price for it? Anyway, I post this story with some hesitation, keeping in mind Tamara Keel's admonition about Americans and royalty:
If George Washington knew you were Tweeting about the British royal wedding, he'd snatch the iPhone from your hand and kick your ass.
A few months ago, Volkswagen released a simply adorable commercial featuring a young, would-be Darth Vader. Marvel has released a parody of it, almost shot for shot, to promote the upcoming Thor movie. Be sure to watch until the end.
In retrospect, it may have been a bad idea for Anthony Garcia to commemorate his first killing by having it inscribed on his chest. When a LA County homicide investigator was later looking through pictures of gang members, he noticed something important:
Each key detail was right there: the Christmas lights that lined the roof of the liquor store where 23-year-old John Juarez was gunned down, the direction his body fell, the bowed street lamp across the way and the street sign — all under the chilling banner of RIVERA KILLS, a reference to the gang Rivera-13.
As if to seal the deal, below the collarbone of the gang member known by the alias "Chopper" was a miniature helicopter raining down bullets on the scene.
Lloyd's discovery of the tattoo in 2008 launched a bizarre investigation that soon led to Anthony Garcia's arrest for the shooting. Then sheriff's detectives, posing as gang members, began talking to Garcia, 25, in his holding cell. They got a confession that this week led to a first-degree murder conviction in a killing investigators had once all but given up hope of solving.
As a promotion for Audi, artist Taras Lesko made a scale model of an Audi A7 out of paper. It's amazing what he was able to do with only 750 pieces. I chose the above screenshot from the video about the project because it shows how much attention Lesko put into depicting even the interior of the model as accurately as possible.
Toy modder Jonathan Kuriscak made an intricately detailed steampunk Iron Man figure, along with Tony Stark. You can view several more pictures at the link.
Really, giving Stark a big handlebar mustache was a great decision and should probably be used in the next Iron Man movie, regardless of time period.
Livejournal user kproche built a tiki-themed Dalek. It won Best in Show at the recent Gallifrey One Masquerade ball. The link goes to a reverse-chronological order presentation of kproche's posts about building and displaying the Dalek.
Crystal Gregory calls her project "Invasive Crochet" -- the imposition of dainty doilies into harsh places. She writes that it:
[...] challenges gender roles by placing handwork on hardened city surfaces around New York. Crocheting lace doilies onto the razor wire of an abandoned lot for the 14th Street public art show Art in Odd Places, smothering the urban landscape in a soft, decorative, and familiar juxtaposition.
