Gambino the cat is a hospitable sort. He's open and casual with his welcoming meow of "well, hi." I don't know if he's a true Southerner, but he's got a bit of the old South in him.
Hi right back atcha, fella. Sit down a spell and chat.
-via Twisted Sifter
When you look like an elf, play up the role to your advantage, as Lady Demosthenes did.
For the rest of us orcs, well . . . we have fewer options. No one wants us behind the counter at Starbucks. We can do pretty well hanging onto a garbage truck, though.
-via Aelfred the Great
The tech retailer Game developed the original Christmas Tinner back in 2013. It was for gamers in a hurry to eat their Christmas dinner and get back to playing. There was no need to cook. Just open the can and start eating with a spoon. It contained 12 separate courses in layers.
It wasn't an option for vegan gamers, as it contained many animal products. To accommodate their needs, the company has debuted its new vegan option. Metro describes its delicious layered courses:
There’s vegan gravy, mushroom wellington, pigs in aubergine blankets, tofu and stuffing, as well as your go-to winter veggies including squash, sprouts, and parsnips.
Each of those layers sound pretty good, it’s just the aspect of it being crammed into a cylinder that might (definitely) alter the tastes and textures.
There’s also a dessert layer, including vegan custard and choccy cake. Which raises the obvious question, are festive feasters meant to meticulously section off the dessert portion, or simply enjoy a bit of sweetness with every savoury bite?
Yum! Where else could you possibly get red cabbage and chocolate cake in the same mouthful?
-via @ProperOpinion | Photo: Game
David Keller of Prescott Valley, Arizona thinks that it's too easy to call a pet a "service animal" and take it everywhere. It's a system that can be abused, leading to people bringing bags of snakes into public libraries.
To prove his point, he went to a website that registers service animals and created a registration for a beehive as a service animal. AZ Family reports:
A quick web search turns up many service animal registration sites. But Keller's stunt showed that some of them do very little to verify the animals they're registering. "They're very silly. They don't mean anything," said Jaymie Cardin, who trains service dogs at AZ Dog Sports in Scottsdale. "You can go pay for a registry on one of those web sites, and basically, you're just paying for a piece of paper and to put a name on a list."
Cardin says these sites do highlight a real problem -- people trying to pass off pets as legitimate service animals. "Training is how you tell whether it's a service animal or not," Cardin said.
-via Dave Barry | Image: AZ Family
Chris Long of Reno, Nevada received a bone marrow transplant. Four years later, his colleagues at the Sheriff's Office tested his DNA to find out of the transplant had affected his DNA. If a transplant could alter DNA evidence, it could impact their criminal investigations.
The result was shocking: the sperm in Long's semen contained no trace of his own DNA. It all belonged to his donor, a German man. The New York Times explains what happened:
Mr. Long had become a chimera, the technical term for the rare person with two sets of DNA. The word takes its name from a fire-breathing creature in Greek mythology composed of lion, goat and serpent parts. Doctors and forensic scientists have long known that certain medical procedures turn people into chimeras, but where exactly a donor’s DNA shows up — beyond blood — has rarely been studied with criminal applications in mind.
Brittany Chilton, a criminologist, found that chimera DNA had confused other criminal investigators in the past:
And it has misled them, Ms. Chilton learned once she began to research chimerism. In 2004, investigators in Alaska uploaded a DNA profile extracted from semen to a criminal DNA database. It matched a potential suspect. But there was a problem: The man had been in prison at the time of the assault. It turned out that he had received a bone marrow transplant. The donor, his brother, was eventually convicted.
Abirami Chidambaram, who presented the Alaska case in 2005, when she worked for the Alaska State Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory in Anchorage, said she had heard about another disconcerting scenario since then. It involved police investigators who were skeptical of a sexual assault victim’s account because she said there had been one attacker, though DNA analysis showed two. Eventually the police determined that the second profile had come from her bone marrow donor.
"You can't have Christmas without Star Trek, right?"
Truer words were never spoken, Mr. Ahern.
Martin Ahern of Moncton, New Brunswick gradually built up his annual Christmas light display. It's become his hobby. All year, he prepares his precisely engineered lighting arrangements. Most recently, he's launched a 16-foot scale model of the Enterprise NCC-1701, no bloody A, B, C, or D. It's made of wood and duct tape, but flimsier craft had made it into interstellar space.
-via Geekologie | Image: Global News Canada
Musician Dimitri Manos offers this unique object: a record with six playable . . . well, sides isn't quite the right word.
Each side of the two-sided record has three overlapping circles, each of which has its own track. You can play by placing the record on the turntable with the right hole among the five in the center.
In this video, Mike Dixon gives a demonstration of how it works. Manos's band American Monoxide composed a piece specifically to make use of the record's unique properties. Because the record makes a chirping sound when the needle crosses two overlapping tracks, the composition incorporates that sound.
Content warning: foul language.
-via Core77
British tinkerer Colin Furze builds amazing things and screams (which is why I usually watch his videos muted). In the past, he has made a lamp powered with a chainsaw motor, a bumper car with a 600 cc engine, and a bicycle with wheels made of ice. They're amazing, unconventional machines. When the apocalypse comes, you want him on your survival team--especially since he has literally built a bunker for that purpose.
Whatever trouble is coming, he saw it long ago in a galaxy far, far away. To promote the new Star Wars film, he built a functional landspeeder. Yes, it has wheels instead of hover engines. But it's otherwise a completely-scaled up model of a landspeeder toy--the ideal commuter vehicle.
-via Nag on the Lake
Meghan Hughes used her powers to transform into a unicorn. Then she brought the warmth of her love to her neighbors by clearing snow in her neighborhood in Schenectady, New York. CBS 6 Albany reports:
She says she's pleasantly shocked by all the attention.
“I thought it would be fun to put the Halloween costume on and bring some joy to something that isn't very joyous,” she said.
Meghan says she may have a business on her hands! She tells us people have asked her to snow plow their driveways and even attend birthday parties for kids.
-via Swiss Miss
The season is upon us, so it's time to watch the greatest of all Christmas movies: Die Hard. Redditor lammage01 is helping to spread that special Christmas cheer with this Advent calendar inspired by the classic Bruce Willis film. He used artwork borrowed from A Die Hard Christmas: The Illustrated Holiday Classic, a storybook that retells the classic tale.
Each day of this time of expectation and preparation, pull a tab out. Terrorist leader Hans Gruber will fall just a little bit more to the bottom of Nakatomi Tower.
-via Ace of Spades HQ
The artist known as My Dog Sighs is fascinated by faces, especially eyes. Some of his eyes are enormous, all-consuming images. Others are smaller, but equally vivid. I especially enjoy his cans, which he paints to add faces to pre-existing bodies.
That's not a sculpture of a banana. Artist Maurizio Cattelan had considered making one out of resin. But, instead, he simply stuck a real banana to a wall with a strip of duct tape. It sold at auction at the Art Basel event in Miami Beach.
Although the art news website Artsy does not say precisely what the price was, it does mentioned that the sculpture had been priced at $120,000.
It's called Comedian. Cattelan intends it as a joke. I suspect that his audience, especially the person in it who purchased the banana, may be the butt of the joke.
-via Chris Arnade | Photo: Zeno ZottiJacopo Zotti
Cartoon Network and its plethora of characters will get a themed-hotel in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Although it isn't an amusement park, there's one right next to it called Dutch Wonderland.
There are rooms for fans of particular shows, including Adventure Time, The Powerpuff Girls, Steven Universe, and Ben 10. The company hopes to offer outdoor screenings at a custom theater and swimming opportunities at a pool with splash pad. You can read more about the hotel at Penn Live.
-via Dornob | Photos: Cartoon Network Hotel
What creatures live in the depths of the sea? Manatees go about 6 meters into the depths of the water. Polar bears will dive down as far as 24 meters. A thick-billed murre, which is a bird, will search for food as deep as 210 meters.
It's a long, long way down past that. Neal Agarwal, who previously brought us a scroll-able scale model of space, now offers the same for the ocean depths. Just click here and keep scrolling down.
Eventually, you'll find the hadal amphipod, which lives at over 10 km down. Then you'll find even deeper waters.
-via Flowing Data
Toni Patanen--"Pupsi"--of Finland is a professional ocarina maker. His works are usually ceramic, but what's wrong with taking the back streets? He gets the same effect with melons which he has carved into practical instruments.
The first part of the video consists of the instrument construction. At 1:45, he begins playing. He plays so well that he can ignore that shape of an L on your forehead.
-via Geekologie
