This detailed, full-color tattoo by British artist Ian Hopkins shows panels from classic Batman comic books. If you're into pre-Dark Knight Returns Batman, then this is the sleeve for you. It won him a prize at the Titanic Ink Tattoo Convention in Southampton, UK. The tattoo took him 40 hours of work.
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The Reuben sandwich is the world's greatest sandwich. It is heaven between two slices of bread, which is perhaps why my French Toast Reuben Nutella Elvis Sandwich was such a hit.
The finest Reuben that I've eaten was about 15 years ago at a now-defunct restaurant in Birmingham, Alabama known as The Oven. It was naughtily served on pumpernickel, not rye, and was roughly the size of a regulation football. It is a precious memory that I shall carry with me for the rest of my life. Reubens are great and this was the greatest among them.
There is one problem challenge to eating a Reuben. A well-made Reuben will inevitably spill out its contents as you eat it. Eating a Reuben is messy. So Nick Chipman of Dude Foods devised this brilliant variation.
Because it's served in a cone, Nick's Reuben sandwich makes less of a mess. He made the cone by pressing rye bread around a cone form, then baking the bread in an oven for 10 minutes. Then Nick filled it with the traditional ingredients of a Reuben: corned beef, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut and Thousand Island salad dressing.
Two nekkid guys dancing with towels. Need we say more?
Here are Quebec-based performers Raphaël Dubé and Yohann Trepanier of Les Beaux Frères, performing "Serviette" AKA the naked towel dance at the Le plus grand cabaret du monde that you simply have to see.
Jim Andrews's teleporter has a simple interface. You begin in the control room of the TARDIS (naturally). Click on the teleport button to go somewhere on Earth. You'll promptly see the nearest photo in Google's archive.
Andrews calls himself a "programmer-poet," so this device is a work of art. It's also a way to explore the world, albeit not in any particular order. His inspiration for the project was a game in which people are shown panoramic photos from around the world and are then invited to guess the locations. You can do the same thing with the teleporter. Just click on the Map button to see the location of each photo.
Dress in layers. You may end up in a hot desert or in the Antarctic interior.
-via David Thompson
UniverseProjects told us about his Russian wife trying to ask for a tape measure. He knew what she meant. Learning a different language is hard, and it takes years to learn enough words to express everything you need to express. Meanwhile, you do the best you can with the words you have. And we can usually figure out what you mean, but the effort can be amusing.
Everyone has an example, from all different languages. Here are some from the comments at imgur.
Tape measure: centimeter ribbon
Ice cubes: very cold water with corners
Shell: snail houses
Wrists: hand ankles
Napkin: face paper
Volcano: fire mountain (which turned out to be literally correct in Japanese)
Muffin: bread mushroom
Bathroom: ceramics department
Madejyalook took some of the funnier phrases and illustrated them.
Continue reading for more.
Happy Derpy Day, everypony! Today is Derpy Day, an annual brony holiday about Derpy Hooves--the My Little Pony character created by fans and adopted by the show.
Traditionally, bronies celebrate Derpy Day by baking muffins and giving them to people in order to share the magic of friendship. Yesterday, I told my library co-workers about Derpy Day and gave them homemade banana muffins.
Today, I'm baking muffins and drawing pictures of Derpy with my daughters. My 5-year old has expressed skepticism that Derpy Day is a legitimate holiday, but that won't stop us from having fun.
To mark the occasion, I've rounded up some of the best crafts featuring the lovable and ditzy Derpy Hooves. At the top, you can find renegadecow's masterful flying Derpy automaton.
Of all brony crafters, renegadecow is my favorite. He is a master artisan in a complex craft. Here's his other Derpy automaton. This one, as you can see, shows her dozing on a cloud.
Many bronies have made plushes. I like this one by picklz especially well because it shows Derpy in her Nightmare Night (Halloween) costume, which consisted of paper bags.
We share muffins on Derpy Day because according to brony lore, Derpy loooooves muffins. A lot. This hoodie by Lisa Lou Who shows Derpy's colors, cutie mark, wings and a muffin.
Have you heard the one about the cow tunnels underneath New York City? The story goes that railroads enabled a lot more beef to make its way to the city in the late 19th century, but the distance between the railroad stockyards in New Jersey and the slaughterhouses in New York caused problems. Herding cattle through a metropolitan area was difficult, blocked traffic, and left a mess. So they built a tunnel under the streets to move cattle. Or did they? The story now seems almost like an urban legend, as plenty of people had heard about them, but no one has seen the tunnels.
Nicola Twilley looked for documentary evidence that the tunnels actually existed, and found quite a bit. How accurate they are remains questionable, as most accounts were written long after the tunnels were replaced by livestock trucks. And the city’s underground has undergone many changes in the past century. As of today, no one knows exactly where the cattle tunnel was located, if there were more than one, where either the entrances or the exits were, or whether any part of the system still exists. You can see what we know (and what we’ve heard) at Gizmodo, in an article that’s worth clicking for the top picture alone. -via the Presurfer
(Photo: The National Library of France)
The blog of medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel is one of the hidden gems of the internet, which is why I interviewed him 3 weeks ago. He's an expert on manuscripts, which is how he was able to dig up this funny image.
It shows Reynard the Fox, a trickster character in medieval literature, racing Tybalt, the Prince of Cats (who was referenced in Act 2, Scene 4 of Romeo and Juliet). It appears that Tybalt is winning. He turns his head and sticks out his tongue at Reynard in mockery.
P.S. This isn't the first cat-marked medieval manuscript that we've featured. We've previously shown one that has cat paw prints and another that was peed on by a cat.
Elsa is pretty down to earth as far as Disney royalty goes- she’s quite adaptable, brave and doesn’t need a man to make her life whole, so when she hands out advice the Disney princesses in attendance had better sit up and take notice.
This well made musical short features some strong singing skills in the style of Disney, an incredibly animated cast and karaoke style captioning so you can sing along.
It was created by AVbyte, makers of other fine pop culture themed musical shorts such as Super Mario World 3D The Musical and the totally timely Hipster Disney Princess The Musical.
-Via Geeks Of Doom
Jackie Rabbit, an artist in Roanoke, Virginia, made this crisp and striking tattoo. She calls it the "Heart Tree." The blood of the long buried heart flows up into the living tree, emerges as leaves before falling down to the ground in death.
This may start out by seeming a little sad, but it quickly becomes altogether adorable. Redditor lazypoko was awakened by his cat on Valentines Day and got a picture, and then went with it and “just took it a little (lot) too far.” He provided her with the perfect day, which included fine meals, dancing, her favorite movie, and a punch line at the end. You can see the whole thing in a gallery of 19 images and gifs. The best part is, he impressed a lot of human women with the stunt.
When I was 7, my mother sewed a patch of Velcro onto an old towel so that I could turn into Batman. I wore that cape—er, Batsuit—into many adventures.
All children do some form of imaginative play. Artist Craig Davidson came up with a great way to show children using their imaginations to turn into different people, including Batman, Princess Leia and characters from The Wizard of Oz.
-via 22 Words
Drum Pants are a wireless peripheral device invented by Tyler Freeman. They consist of electronic components including Arduino controllers that are wrapped in strips of cloth. Tie those strips around your legs, arms or chest. To play an instrument, just tap the sensor and a mobile device, such as a smartphone, will play the sound.
This makes drumming more portable than ever before. It's no longer necessary to lug around a full set of drums in order to attend a jam session.
You can also use Drum Pants to control computer applications, such as PowerPoint shows.
-via Toxel
An exhibit at the Museum of London in the City of London and the Museum of London Docklands commemorates the 200th anniversary of the last “Frost Fair” held on the River Thames. During the “Little Ice Age” from 1550 to 1850, there were several occasions in which the Thames froze over so hard that people could not only walk on it, but pitch tents and throw a party.
The Frost Fairs were held in 1683-4, 1716, 1739-40, 1789, and 1814. Activities included fox hunting, bull-baiting, roasting sheep, horse-drawn boat rides, games that including “throwing things at roosters,” but more drinking than anything else. A lot of the revelry was the fun of watching people slip and fall on the ice. The fairs lasted until the ice began to crack.
Atlas Obscura has a collection of drawings and paintings from the exhibit Frozen Thames: Frost Fair 1814 depicting the various fairs, with many of the activities labeled for posterity.
Some silly knaves claim that Geroge Lucas, the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the Star Wars plays. But this is sheer rouguery. Indeed, it was the Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare, who composed them. Ian Doescher, a tireless scholar of manuscripts, discovered this and last year published the first play in the sequence: Verily, A New Hope.
Now Doescher has published the second play, which Shakespeare entitled The Empire Striketh Back. It has all that you have come to expect from Shakespeare:
Return to the star-crossed galaxy far, far away as the brooding young hero, a power-mad emperor, and their jesting droids match wits, struggle for power, and soliloquize in elegant and impeccable iambic pentameter. Illustrated with beautiful black-and-white Elizabethan-style artwork, these two plays offer essential reading for all ages. Something Wookiee this way comes!
But pray thee, attend, for there is also a third play: The Jedi Doth Return.
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