Dallas meteorologist Jennifer Myers belongs to a Facebook group for women meteorologists on TV. One of the things they discuss is clothing, because there are many restrictions on what you can wear: no green, no patterns, no stripes, no reflective material, no noisy fabric, no cleavage, must be dressy, and you can’t wear the same dress too often. Still, most buy their own work clothes, so when one member posted a link to a dress for only $23, they all bought it. Myers tells us,
I'm on here twice. Top second from left in the purple and second from the right on the bottom in the blue.
“Return of The Nigo,” the first Star Wars auction in Sotheby’s history is set to roll on December 11th, only a few days before the movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens. Up for sale will be 175 items (actually more, because many are sets) from the private collection of Star Wars super fan Nigo.
In an auction house not so far away… Sotheby’s has joined forces with Japanese designer, music producer and creative entrepreneur NIGO® to stage its first auction dedicated solely to Star Wars. These prized collectibles from the iconic movies feature more than 600 original action figures (including a rare Luke Skywalker with “double-telescoping” Lightsaber), Darth Vader and Stormtrooper helmets, complete sets of collectible “Power of the Force” coins, limited edition toys and autographed rarities, such as a Count Dooku Lightsaber signed by Sir Christopher Lee.
All of the lots on offer come from NIGO®’s private collection, which the A Bathing Ape (BAPE), Ice Cream and Billionaire Boys Club founder spent decades amassing out of his Tokyo atelier.
The rare 1978 Luke Skywalker action figure is expected to fetch between $12,000 and $18,000, and there are two complete sets of collectible coins that will bring even more, so you may have to smash your piggy bank. You can look through the items at Sotheby’s website. -via Worthly
Redditor TheOnlyJuanEver attends an elite public high school in Mexico City. For years they’ve set aside a day for gender-bending dress called Skirt Day. The boys dress in skirts (or in rare cases, a dress), and the girls all wear ties. He says,
It's a movement to support gender equality and to fight gender roles in society. I don't know exactly how it started, it was celebrated long before I got into the school.
Sadly, my highschool is the only one I know of that does this.
Almost everyone participates, and they all have a great time with it. You can see that they don’t have to worry about the school administration measuring how short the skirts are. See 22 pictures in this imgur gallery.
Of course, if they really wanted to experience what it’s like to dress as the opposite sex, they’d have High Heels and Pantyhose Day, but none of the guys would want to participate. The same school went all out for Costume Day a few weeks ago.
13 of the 100 top-grossing films of all time were made by Steven Spielberg or George Lucas.
In 1968 Steven Spielberg and George Lucas took a directing class taught by Jerry Lewis.
During the famous “chest bursting” scene in Alien (1979), director Ridley Scott got the reaction he wanted by unexpectedly showering the actors with real blood.
Youngest movie director: Kishan Shrikanth of India directed a full-length film at age nine.
Only one person has won Emmys for acting, writing, and directing: Alan Alda (for M* A* S* H).
Supposedly, Wes Craven named his horrifying character, Freddy Krueger, after a kid who used to bully him in school.
Of the more than 250 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Alfred Hitchcock directed only 18.
The sketch that Jack drew of Rose in Titanic was actually drawn by director James Cameron. (Cameron has many talents: he was also once a school bus driver.)
David Lynch turned down the chance to direct Return of the Jedi.
Woody Allen disliked his film Manhattan so much that he offered to direct another movie for United Artists for free if they shelved it. (They refused.)
Italian director Frederico Fellini was nominated for 12 Oscars for writing or directing. Number of wins: 0.
Francis Ford Coppola is an honorary ambassador to Belize.
First movie Steven Spielberg ever saw: The Greatest Show on Earth, at age four.
Giraffes don’t make a lot of noise, but they are able to make sounds like grunts, hisses, snorts, and even moos.
Baby giraffes grow about an inch every day during their first week of life. But only about one giraffe baby in four makes it to adulthood. Big cats and jackals hunt them, and their mothers aren’t great at defense.
Giraffe males can be as tall as 18 feet; females, 14 feet.
Like cows, giraffes are ruminants, which means they have four compartments in their stomachs and they regurgitate and chew their cud.
A giraffe tongue measures about 2 feet long and is blue-black in color. Scientists think that might be so their tongues don’t get sunburned.
A giraffe’s legs are taller than the average human adult.
Giraffes have seven vertebrae in their necks— the same as every mammal.
A giraffe newborn falls from a height of about 6 ½ feet. Luckily, it’s already about 6 feet tall at birth, so the fall isn’t really that bad.
Male giraffes are often at more risk from predators than females, even though they’re larger, because they spend a lot of time alone and are easy to sneak up on.
The giraffe has only one known relative: the okapi, a mammal native to rain forests in central Africa. Okapis somewhat resemble giraffes, but have black and white striped legs and short necks.
Floreana is a small island in the Galapagos that became home to a few very adventurous people almost 100 years ago. They came a few at a time, each with bizarre stories, beginning with Dr. Frederick Ritter and Dore Strauch, who left their lives in Germany behind in 1928 for what they thought would be an island paradise.
Strauch wrote a memoir about her life on the island, and it’s like Into the Wild written by an old-timey German lady with Stockholm syndrome. She met Ritter, a doctor fifteen years her senior, when he treated her for multiple sclerosis. They bonded over their shared hatred of bourgeois domesticity.
Ritter was a sort of reverse Henry Higgins for Strauch, pushing her to change from a bored city wife into a stateless, toothless hermit. He told her she could overcome her physical ailments through sheer willpower, she believed him, and they left their respective spouses and families to move from Germany to Floreana.
He also held, uh, unorthodox views for a doctor. Ritter preemptively removed his teeth before the trip because he wanted to see if his gums would toughen up in the wilderness. He didn’t bother arranging for Strauch to get her teeth removed, nor did he bring any dentistry tools, so her teeth rotted and had to be yanked out with gardening supplies while they were on the island. Then they shared the one pair of DIY stainless steel false teeth Ritter had made. They also didn’t wear many clothes.
Other people followed, but they didn’t form a community because they didn’t have anything in common. They didn’t even like each other. First came a family with a pregnant mom, then a baroness with two lovers, and occasional visitors who might be shot at. The animosity between the Floreana islanders led to accusations of murder when two of them disappeared. Read the whole sordid story at Gizmodo.
We don’t know anything about Luke Skywalker’s role in the Star Wars: The Force Awakens. He’s not in any of the trailers, and he’s not even on the poster. It’s supposed to be a surprise. Such a surprise, in fact, that Mark Hamill gets a bonus payment if he can keep it a secret until the movie comes out on December 18th.
PC Gamer got an interview with Hamill all decked out in motion-capture equipment as he worked on the the upcoming game Squadron 42 (Star Citizen). Hamill tells the story of how he kept the revelation of Skywalker's genetic lineage a secret until the premiere of The Empire Strikes Back. He should be able to keep an expected plot twist a secret for another month. This is a small portion of a longer interview that you can see here. -via Geeks Are Sexy
You know these things are going to happen, but it’s somehow comforting to know that they are not only universal, but now set in a handy timeline. John Atkinson of the webcomic Wrong Hands has charted and graphed the holidays for us. These timelines are not to scale. Thanksgiving is one day, News Years is really just the New Year’s Eve party, and Christmas spans a couple of months. -via Laughing Squid
Food artist Michelle Wibowo (previously at Neatorama) has just blown all gingerbread competition away this year with her project for this weekend’s Taste of London food festival. HBO has a room set up at the festival called Taste of HBO that focuses on the fantasy series Game of Thrones. They have an Iron Throne for visitors to sit on, Winter Wild Beer to sample, and a huge gingerbread replica of King’s Landing! Just looking at it makes that theme music pop into your head, doesn’t it? Check out more pictures of Wibowo’s gingerbread city at Mashable. -via Uproxx
Isn’t this the classiest, coziest bar you seen in a while? Redditor marauder09 has this in his home! He designed it after the speakeasies of the Prohibition era. Among the actual liquor bottles are antique bottles. On the walls, he has prescriptions for alcohol written by doctors during the ‘20s, as well as tintypes of entertainers from the era.
He’s gradually collected bar equipment, furniture, art, and other accoutrements of the era to make it authentic, down to the ceiling tiles. He made the chandelier himself, and his sister gave him several homemade bitters for the bar.
Since the earth is spinning to the east, why doesn’t flights to the west take less time than one going east? According to this video from Minute Physics, it’s kind of complicated.
I know it takes a lot longer to drive east than to drive west, but only if you cross into another time zone. Even without factoring in the effect of jet lag, driving or flying, you are going to be tired either way. -via Digg
The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus has been traveling for over 100 years, and even longer than that under different names before they combined. It still travels, two shows on two trains, populated by performers who carry on the family business for generations and for the final time, elephants. The elephants will be retired to a Florida sanctuary next year, along with some of their handlers. But the show must go on, tow to town, in the trains called the red unit and the blue unit.
There are more than 300 people in the blue unit, representing 25 different countries and speaking everything from Russian to Arabic to Guarani. A few travel in cars and trailers, but a majority, 270, live on the trains. Only about 100 of them are actual performers; the rest are support staff like trainers, teachers, animal minders, carpenters. (One of the show’s publicists lives on the train, too.) Most come from multigeneration circus families, to the extent that collectively, the circus staff represents thousands of years of circus history. They spend 44 weeks of the year traveling an average of 20,000 miles from coast to coast on a train that is 61 cars — a full mile — long. In total, the train comprises four animal stock cars, 32 living coaches, two concession storage cars, 19 equipment cars, a generator car, a shop car, an auxiliary shop car and, of course, the pie car, which is the train’s diner, open whenever the train is moving.
The New York Times talked to the owners and employees of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus about how the circus has changed over the years, and how it will continue to change in order to survive.
Think of all the cool stuff you see in DIY videos. Arduino is on the list because it makes all kids of cool things happen. Tentacles are cool. Knives are cool. Robots are cool. YouTube member outaspaceman put all these together in one project. I love his deadpan announcement, "It appears I have invented a knife wielding tentacle.”
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. It’s been four days since this video was posted. I have to wonder whether it’s still going, and whether outaspaceman is still with us. -via reddit
Trent and Bronwyn Duggan of Melbourne, Australia, heard a crash on their roof Saturday morning. They went to investigate and found an Eastern Grey kangaroo sitting on the roof! The animal had hopped up about twelve feet to land above his comfort zone.
"It sort of sounded like three grown men line dancing on the top of my roof," Mr Duggan said.
The kangaroo didn’t know what to do, so the Duggans summoned wildlife authorities. The ‘roo was up on the roof for six hours when wildlife expert Sharon Bonnici ended the standoff by climbing up and sedating him with a tranquilizer gun. Or, as the news story puts it, "encouraged him down." You can see a raw video of the kangaroo at YouTube. -via Arbroath
The final Hunger Games movie, Mockingjay Part 2, opened nationwide last night, so it’s perfect timing to see Katniss in a rap battle in Whitney Avalon’s Princess Rap series. Her opponent: Hermione Granger, played by Molly C. Quinn.
