It was exactly one year ago today that the internet was set afire by a simple picture of a dress that looks to be different colors to different people. And now it’s happened again.
The picture above was first posted by Pop Punk Blogger, who deleted it in regret at what she had started. If you aren’t still upset about that dress a year later, take a poll and tell us what color you see.
On Wednesday, photographer Sandra Boos of Madera Ranchos, California, was taking pictures of a child with her white pony Juliette, who was dressed in a pink halter and a spiral unicorn horn. Juliet suddenly bolted and ran away. Concerned calls began to come in to the local police from drivers reporting a unicorn loose on different highways. A helicopter was dispatched. Juliette was spotted in an orchard, but police could not approach the skittish creature.
After four hours on the lam, Juliette was finally calmed by a friend of Boos on horseback, and she was led away to a paddock. There were some near-misses in traffic, but the unicorn was uninjured. -via HuffPo
Hampton Rutland used wood reclaimed from an old house to finish the inside of his workshop. He has to gather, haul, sort, plane, and install hundreds of wood slats. He’s good at it, too. But if you think this is a typical woodworking video, you’re in for a treat. It starts out like a typical DIY tutorial, but gradually gets more and more interesting.
As the action speeds up, we get POV shots. Then comes the stop-motion work. Then his tools join in and dance. Then he gets some help from Spider-Man and Darth Vader. It all goes so smoothly that the project seems to finish itself! -via Viral Viral Videos
The latest generation of the Atlas robot is so human-like that it’s scary. But if we could put ourselves in the poor robot’s place, we can see he’s just a product of his environment. When you spend your whole life suffering constant bullying and abuse from the geeks at Boston Dynamics, something’s gotta give. A remix of the original video spells it out for us.
Poor Atlas. He saw no alternative than to run away from home. The real problem comes when a critical number of robots that feel the same way manage to band together and exact revenge on humankind for the poor treatment they endured when they were young. May God help us when that happens.
The weirdest family dynamics of all time cover the several generations of Skywalkers. After The Force Awakens, we were left to imagine the interactions we missed between episodes VI and VII. Filling them in can be hilarious.
A Tumblr blogger named mamalaz has been publishing a series of photo-illustrated conversations between members of the Solo family, mainly Han and Ben, called Modern Solo Adventures. We see the fate of the galaxy interfering with quality time between parent and child, and vice-versa. The images are animated .gifs at the site. There are occasional guest appearances by Leia, Luke, Lando, and even Darth Vader if the joke calls for it. -via Buzzfeed
It’s a classic conundrum. He’s really into tech; she’s more socially-oriented. How can a father and daughter relate to each other? To him, the solution must be more and better technology. If he can't be a perfect father, he’ll build one!
But in the end, they both learn that being alike is less important than being there for each other. This award-winning short film is from Natalie Labarre. -via the Presurfer
A Tibetan scholar was so excited to see London mayor Boris Johnson riding the Tube that he accidentally left his laptop on the train. The computer contained the lama’s life’s work: two unfinished books and nearly 1000 pages of rare 17th- century Buddhist scripture.
2. FOUND: A boa constrictor named Penelope
In 2011, a woman wearing a three-foot-long snake around her neck realized the pet serpent had slithered away. Since nobody could find it, authorities confidently declared that “the trains are absolutely snake-free.” Turns out, they were wrong. Penelope hid out in an adjacent car for an entire month.
3. LOST: One of only two copies of The Boy Castaways
J.M. Barrie, the creator of the character Peter Pan, published just two copies of his story The Boy Castaways. One is protected inside Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The other is still missing after being lost on a train in 1901.
If you thought that the worst thing that could happen to Twinkies was that Hostess went out of business, the relaunched company would like to prove you wrong. To promote the upcoming Ghostbusters movie, a limited edition run of Key Lime Slime Twinkies has been spotted. Slime wasn't too appetizing when Slimer used it in the first movie. Knowing it is lime-flavored isn't helping.
One of the comments under the above Tweet said, "something strange and it don't look good, who you gonna call." One thing is right- it don't look good. -via Uproxx
Antarctica is a strange place. It has no native population, but many countries have communities there, all with floating populations of people who don’t stay very long. Several countries have staked claims on the land, but no nation officially owns the continent. How does one stake a claim on an uninhabited land in this modern age? Argentina airlifted a pregnant women to its Esperanzo Base on the Arctic Penninsula in 1978 so she could give birth to the first baby born in Antarctica. Chile responded by registering over a dozen births at their Antarctic station in the ensuing years. If this seems like a particularly childish way to claim territory, it’s just par for the course.
The decades of territorial tiffs have a juvenile air about them. Instances of placing and stealing and replacing flags have been common. For example, in November 1942, an Argentine expedition left a flag in a cylinder to mark its takeover of Antarctica’s Deception Island. Two months later, a British ship’s staff destroyed the evidence, planted their own flag, and notified Argentina of the act. Within another two months, an Argentine vessel had already removed it.
Argentina, Chile, and the UK, as well as France and New Zealand, have even designed special flags for their respective Antarctic territories, all within the last few decades. There’s also been lots of naming and renaming and conflicting names; the Antarctic Peninsula, for example, is known by Argentina as Tierra de San Martin, by Chile as O’Higgins Land, and by the British as Graham Land, while another part of the peninsula “belonging” to the United States is named Palmer Land.
Reminder: none of these countries actually own the land in question.
Joel and Ethan Coen have a particular style that you’ll recognize even if you haven’t seen the movie or don’t know who did it. One of the facets of this style is the way they film conversations between two people, using shot/reverse shot in a way few other filmmakers ever would. You probably can’t articulate what is different about their cinematography, but Tony Zhou can.
Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting makes the mundane parts of filmmaking into a fascinating exploration of how masterpieces are created. -via Metafilter
Movie stars are usually quite attractive, but occasionally a story calls for those looks to be obscured somewhat, or even completely obscured. The thing about physical deformities is that once you get used to seeing them, you tend to not see them at all. When we saw Mask or The Elephant Man, we were surprised, or even shocked, by the protagonist’s face. But by the end of the movie, it was no big deal at all. TVOM identified eleven movies that feature main characters with serious physical anomalies that figured into the story, but didn’t put us off at all once we got to know the character.
Astronaut Scott Kelly has been on the International Space Station for nearly a year now, and may be getting just a little buggy. He posted a video about a new cargo shipment for the ISS, which astronaut Time Peake is preparing to open. You can see the entire video with context at Facebook. Here’s the highlight.
It appears that someone has imported an unauthorized species of wildlife! Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are scheduled to come back to earth Tuesday, March first, after their record-breaking year in space. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Monday is a day that only comes around every four years: February 29th, or Leap Day. You know that we have Leap Day to sync up the number of days in a year, because the earth revolves around the sun every 365.25 days. We add an extra day every four years to make up that .25 of a day. The ancient Romans figured it out, and revamped the calendar a few times to get it right. Other weird things went into those calendar-making days.
And have you ever wondered why February is shorter than every other month? That's also because of Augustus. The Roman Senate, to honor him, renamed the month of Sextilis as Augustus (August). But originally August was only 30 days long, and this was a problem because Julius Caesar's month (July) was 31 days long. It wouldn't do for Augustus to have a shorter month than Caesar!
To make August as long as July they borrowed a day from February, reducing it from 30 days during a leap year to only 29, and 28 days every other year. This permanently left February as the odd, shortened month that it is.
Josh Hamilton was making a purchase at a gas station on Owensboro, Kentucky, last weekend when his pants burst into flames! He ran outside and dropped his pants, and a store employee put out the flames with a fire extinguisher. The fire is attributed to a spare lithium battery he had in his pocket, which probably reacted with keys or coins. Never carry loose batteries without a cover. Hamilton was taken to a hospital with second-degree burns. -via reddit
Every cinema hero must have a sidekick. In The Force Awakens, Ren met BB-8 early in the film, and he became her loyal assistant. Marylet Datuin (Thyoungwolf) noticed the resemblance between that scene with one in another movie, and decided that the only way to improve BB-8 would be to give him Eddie Murphy’s voice. I cannot embed the video, so you’ll have to go to No Rest for the Wicked to see, but you’ll be glad you did. -via Digg
