Ernest and Ruth Norman founded the Unarius Academy of Science in 1954. It’s a philosophy that includes reincarnation, extraterrestrials, and visions of utopia. From Ernest’s death in 1971 to her own passing in 1993, Ruth Norman led the group as the Archangel Uriel.

In 1978, Ruth, now referred to as Uriel, began to film "psychodramas" with the students. This is when things got next level. These psychodramas were improvised performances of the students’ past lifetimes — spent together in ancient civilizations — for the purpose of healing the karmic damage done in the past. The Unariuns believe if you were able to work out this old baggage through dramatic reenactments, you’d be free to move forward to a better future. But these reenactments weren’t performed on a small stage in plain clothes; they were elaborate productions featuring Uriel and her students in flamboyant garb.

The movies were one part Alejandro Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain, two parts early John Waters, with costumes that would make Liberace and Lady Gaga’s jaws drop. Uriel looked like Endora from Bewitched crossed with Glinda the Good Witch — a septuagenarian goddess in glittery gowns and candy-colored wigs. 200 videos were completed, as well as 80 public access shows; many of them available to view today on demand.

An article at Racked has some background on Unarius, which is still a functioning organization, but mainly focuses on Uriel’s clothing, particularly the costumes used in the films she left behind. It’s a dazzling trip through a girl’s dress-up fantasies crossed with New Age spiritualism. And it has quite a few nifty pictures. -via Digg

(Image credit: Courtesy of Unarius Academy of Science)

When Almine Barton bought a normal middle-class house in Newport, Oregon, in 1979, she knew she had to change it to suit her taste. But she left the outside as it was, because she didn’t want a higher property tax assessment. The interior underwent a complete overhaul. She brought in stained glass salvaged from churches in England, imported velvet curtains, antiques, crystal chandeliers, and even a full suit of armor to decorate her home. 

It’s an insanely impressive home, one that Barton crafted especially for herself, relying on construction methods so precise she frequently had to teach the local craftsmen how to perform them.

Some of the craftsmen were even afraid of damaging the raw materials: Barton found the perfect Schumacher fabrics from France for $150 a yard, and had to search for months to find someone willing to mount them to the walls. “They were scared to mess it up because of the costliness of the fabric. The man that hung that wallpaper used to come in drunk every day because he was nervous of messing it up,” she says with a chuckle.

There are a few normal contemporary rooms in the back, hidden behind closed doors. Barton is selling the home now for $399,000. See 47 pictures of the house at Yahoo! Real Estate. Get more details on the property at its listing. -via Fark

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What you will see is an adorable little bunny who hops around in her little pink dress and then gets a drink from a syringe. Squee! The really weird part is the title of the video at YouTube: “Rabbit Female Wearing Ladies Dress Walking And Jumping , Drinking Milk From Injection Nipple.” Those are obviously words strung together for search engine optimization, and the overall effect is downright industrial. -via Metafilter

Is it any wonder we hide from mass communication these days? The only people we hear from are those who want our money. Sifting through the mess to find anything worthwhile is a chore. I do get an occasional email or call from my kids, but it turns out that they want money, too. This is the latest comic from Sarah Andersen at Sarah’s Scribbles.

The staff of Jimmy Kimmel Live went out on the streets to ask children which country is the best country in the world. Their answers show that U.S. schools have dropped patriotic indoctrination lessons, and they’ve apparently also dropped basic geography.

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Considering what they had to work with, the kids came up with some imaginative and amusing responses. What kid wouldn’t want to move someplace where they could have their own koala? -via Uproxx

Marie-Helene Bertino wrote an essay in the persona of an alien, sent from a planet with an untranslatable name, to study humans and send back reports via fax. Musings on human beings and their strange ways from an alien point of view is nothing new, but this is funny.    

Five days ago, the bathroom key went missing. Landry Business Solutions has a PA and I made an announcement over it. Why we have a PA is beyond me since only twelve people work here and they sit in one room. I could have easily walked into that room and made a medium-volumed inquiry but I don’t like to leave my desk. My announcement over the PA was: WILL WHOEVER HAS THE BATHROOM KEY PLEASE RETURN IT! Three hours later Delilah slammed the key on my desk. The door had gotten stuck, and she had been trapped in the bathroom for hours. No one heard her yelling. She missed a meeting, and still no one thought to look for her. She heard my announcement in the bathroom where she sat, hating me. Someone from another office finally heard her and climbed through a heating duct to free her. Delilah, disoriented, left early. It’s a bad day when you realize how unimportant you are.

Of course, the above observation could have been written by any earthling. How about this:

I am bad at asking for help. When you ask a human being for help, there is a chance they will say later: remember when you asked for help, can I have five dollars? That goes for medicine, too. I don’t like asking help from pills in a bottle. I don’t want to be woken up at night by a tab of aspirin asking to borrow five dollars.

Read other disjointed observations of life on Earth at Indiana Review. -via Metafilter

It’s pretty common to watch a movie, see a fictional gadget, and say “I want one of those!” Sadly, coming up with something wonderful in fiction is much easier than making it work in real life. Luckily, we have geniuses working on making those movie inspirations reality. What have you seen in movie that you wish were available in real life? While most of those futuristic gizmos are cool and fun, I think the Medbay would be the most useful.

When I saw Elysium last year, this stood out to me as one of the best, most useful, and most desired technologies in movies. The medbays in Elysium essentially heal anything and everything. The common cold? No need to take any Advil. You’ve got a broken arm? Boom. It’s fixed. A life-threatening disease? Yeah, don’t worry – you’re good. Even if they were only offered up to the incredibly affluent and wealthy, like they were in Elysium, just to have the medbays exist in real life would be an astonishing achievement on all its own.

Read about nine other movie technologies we could really use at TVOM.

Evie has a balloon, and it’s her favorite thing ever! She carries it around with her all the time. Maybe it’s her security balloon!

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And like any small child with a balloon, she goes into a panic when it gets away from her. There’s a bit of tension in this story, but things work out in the end, and Evie gets her balloon back. -via Tastefully Offensive

This. Face. #kitten #kittensofinstagram #kittenoftheday #tabby #rescuekitten #rescue #adopt #adoptdontshop #humanesociety #spca #sandiego #oceanside #nursery

A photo posted by Courtney (@courtneyskitsandk9s) on Oct 20, 2014 at 9:17pm PDT

This adorable kitten looks aghast, but he’s okay. That’s just the way his eyes look all the time! Bum was brought into the San Diego Humane Society’s Kitten Nursery and was adopted by employee Courtney Morman. Bum is all grown up now, and helps Morman with the other kittens she cares for. Morman gave Bum his own Instagram account because so many people love his worried eyes. You can see plenty of pictures of him there.

Did you notice a theme developing in our feature banner at the top of the blog this week? We had dogs with degrees, research on dogs barking, Marilyn Monroe’s dogs, and even corn dogs. And now that we’ve made it to the end of Dog Week at Neatorama, it’s time for something just plain silly. We are going to examine the phenomena of The Good Dog. Who’s a good dog? We ask our dogs that all the time, and them, being dogs, just have no idea. 

*cover* #snackbooks @roseperson pic.twitter.com/RK2PUkpIEf

— darth™ (@darth) January 28, 2016

The Twitter hashtag #snackbooks is a challenge from Barnes & Noble to come up with the best literary food puns. The titles flew thick and fast, and Twitter user @darth lent his artistic skills to illustrating covers for some of them.

#snackbooks For Whom the Bell Toll House Cookies

— Kenneth Brody (@KenBrody61) January 28, 2016

*cover* #snackbooks @BNBuzz pic.twitter.com/EBODpeiqWR

— darth™ (@darth) January 28, 2016

Catcher in the Pastrami on Rye #snackbooks https://t.co/FFm6jM88md

— Wendy Leung (@Leung__Wendy) January 28, 2016

These titles will make you want to curl up with a good bag of Doritos. See a collection of the best titles at Buzzfeed.

Thirty years ago today, January 28, 1986, the world watched as the space shuttle Challenger took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida, after several delays, on a mission that included the first Teacher in Space. The flight crew was the most diverse that NASA had ever deployed: two women, an African American, an Asian American, a Jewish American, both scientists and test pilots, military and civilian. The flight lasted 73 seconds, the the shuttle disintegrated as we watched on TV. All seven crew members were lost.

That was the day we were all reminded that while space flight may have become routine, it still wasn’t without risk. Popular Mechanics interviewed more than two dozen people who were involved in the Challenger launch in some way: NASA employees, contractors, astronauts, journalists, family members, investigators, and observers, to assemble an oral history of what happened that day and the aftermath.

See more pictures of the Challenger mission, and the biographies of each astronaut.

(Image credit: NASA)

What if you drank soda every time you took a drink? This seems like a strange question, as I know quite a few people who drink nothing but soda pop. We know it’s not good, but how downright bad a lot of carbonated soft drinks are for you is scary.

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AsapSCIENCE gives us the rundown of the detrimental effects too much soda can have on you. Whether this kind of information will do any good is unclear, as people who drink too much soda have been told that it’s bad for them all their lives. What do you drink all day? -via Geeks Are Sexy

What makes a weapon "bad" (meaning good) in cinema? Is it destructive power, the skill behind it, or how cool it looks being used? When a weapon is completely made up, it can be all of those things! If you can't decide on a favorite, or remember all the fictional weapons you've seen, check out the list of the ten baddest fictional movie weapons at TVOM, with descriptions and video evidence. There’s even an hour-long video of lightsaber battles included for your enjoyment.

Simon Tofield, the animator behind Simon’s Cat, talks with Nicky Trevorrow, a cat behavior expert at Cats Protection about why our furballs do the odd things they do, specifically the sudden craziness. You’ve seen your cat switch off his senses and explode in a flurry of activity like a scalded haint. That’s crazy time.

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Better yet, Trevorrow gives us tips on how to help cats release that energy in a more productive way. Tofield is beginning a new series of videos called Cat Logic. Future episodes will explore other cat behaviors that seem incomprehensible to us mere humans. -via Tastefully Offensive