Yan Fortin from Geeks Are Sexy got to attend a convention in his own backyard (relatively) during the Quebec City Comiccon over the weekend. It’s the second year for this con, and cosplayers came out in droves. Patrick-Michel Dagenais took plenty of pictures.
The artistry, variety, and attention to detail in the costumes is quite impressive. See dozens of them in two galleries at Geeks Are Sexy: part one and part two.
What happens when too much power goes to a hero’s head? You send in another superhero! The upcoming movie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice pits the two comic book icons against each other. They’ve been in movies for so long that you could put together such a movie just from old serial footage. Which is exactly what Vulture did.
Watch Superman smash chairs for no reason! Watch him push Lois Lane’s car off a cliff! Watch Batman come to the rescue! In a ragtop sedan! And a parachute! This is a movie I’d want to see.
Postal memorabilia collector Dale Speirs has done extensive research on mail bombs and even wrote a book about them. He tells us about the different sorts of mail bombs used through history, and the different types of people who used them, like Ted Kaczynski, the Unibomber. Kaczynski was caught after 17 years of mail bombings that killed three and injured many others.
Still, according to Speirs, a glaring loophole has persisted long after Kaczynski was incarcerated, and even after heightened anti-terrorism measures were put in place by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security post-September 11, 2001. The loophole concerns packages weighing more than 13 ounces, which must be presented to a retail postal clerk rather than being dropped in a street-corner letterbox, even if they have proper postage. “The idea was to force a face-to-face meeting with a postal clerk or letter carrier,” Speirs says.
Unfortunately, postal customers who ignore this rule, or who are simply unfamiliar with it, routinely receive their parcels back in their own mailboxes marked “Return to sender,” as many legitimate USPS patrons have found out. For Speirs, this raises a troubling prospect: “Mail bombers obviously do not put their real return addresses on a package” he says. “The Unabomber used this method to aim at two targets with one bomb; if his package was not delivered, then it would be ‘returned’ to another victim.”
Read an overview of the history of mail bombs at Collectors Weekly.
(Image credit: The Wreck & Crash Mail Society)
A group called the Tombstone Vigilantes reenact Old West gunfights three times a month in the streets of Tombstone Arizona. This past weekend, they were involved in the annual Helldorado Days festival. During the gunfight in front of the OK Corral on Sunday, group member Ken Curtis was shot by a real bullet and had to be airlifted to Banner-University Medical Center in Tucson. One of the reenactors had live bullets in his gun!
An investigation by the Tombstone Marshal's Office revealed the actor, Tom Carter, was late to the show and his weapon was not checked before the reenactment. He fired a live round during the gunfight and hit Ken Curtis, who is another actor.
The show was immediately stopped to care for Curtis. He is undergoing surgery Sunday night to remove the bullet.
Carter's weapon was checked after the incident. Investigators found that there was one live round in the cylinder with five expended casing, which indicates the gun had held six live round before the reenactment.
Curtis is in good condition after surgery to remove the bullet, and will be released soon. A spectator, Debbie Mitchell, was grazed in her neck but refused medical treatment. A couple of other bullets were found to have hit buildings. The mayor of Tombstone has suspended further gunfights until safety issues are addressed. -via John Walkenbach
(Image credit: The Tombstone Vigilantes/Facebook)
It's once again time for our collaboration with the wonderfully entertaining What Is It? Blog. Do you know what the pictured item is? Can you make up something totally wacky? That's what we're looking for: the funniest and most creative guesses. We will award t-shirts from the NeatoShop to two commenters who post the cleverest, funniest, or most outlandish use for this thing!
Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many guesses as you'd like in separate comments. You have until Friday evening to come up with great guesses.
Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize. May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts? Since we have so many shirts, it would help if you included the artist's name or the URL at the NeatoShop.
See, you don't have to know the answer to win! See all the mystery items of the week at the What Is It? Blog. Good luck!
Update: The What Is It? blog tells us that this object is a mold for making glass lenses. See, there you would have found out that the object is less than six inches tall. No one here guessed anything close to the right answer, but it doesn’t matter, because we were looking for funny answers anyway.
Berhard had a great idea for this thing, which wins him a t-shirt from the NeatoShop:
This is a martian mammography breast support table specially designed for three breasted mutant Mary from “Total Recall”...
And ladybugs brings up a picture as well with her idea:
Pedicure footrest for the three toed sloth.
Congratulations to both! And thanks to everyone who entered this week. We’ll do the What Is It? game again soon, from Neatorama and the What Is It? blog. http://55tools.blogspot.com/
Watch Tiny Hamster (previously at Neatorama) and his friends go trick-or-treating and gobble up delicious pumpkins.
If you were a cutting-edge internet star -and a hamster- it only makes sense to trick-or-treat as the Pizza Rat! That’s almost as funny as Bunny Trump. And the guinea pig gets to go as the airplane scene from Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation. -Thanks, Jake!
Christine McConnell (previously at Neatorama) went all out in decorating her parents’ house for Halloween! It involved covering up some windows, but worth it for a couple of weeks of frightening the neighborhood children. The eyes and teeth are painted foam board. An album at imgur has photos of both the process and the finished product. Don’t miss the nighttime picture, where it’s all lit up in green! -via reddit
The University of Virginia (UVA) was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819. He designed the curriculum to be heavy on science, and also designed the school’s rotunda. The rotunda is undergoing a renovation, and Matt Scheidt of the historic preservation firm John G. Waite Associates made a peculiar discovery.
"I was laying on my back looking up inside this little space. I saw that there was a piece of cut stone which is very unusual to have in this location. You could see that there was a square cut in the stone and that there was a finished space around that with plaster and painted walls," Scheidt said.
Upon further investigation, he realized he uncovered a piece of history. A chemistry lab designed by Thomas Jefferson and built in the early 1820s, toward the end of the Rotunda's construction.
The lab was bricked up in the 1850s, and then forgotten until now. There were few academic chemistry labs in existence in the 19th century, and even fewer of them survive today. Read the history and description of the lab, and see pictures, at UVA’s website. -via Buzzfeed
(Image credit: Dan Addison/UVA)
The Mormon majority in Utah makes it a particularly difficult place to own a bar. The liquor laws are unlike those anywhere else. One Salt Lake City restauranteur opened what became a very popular restaurant and closed a little more than two years later -because the restaurant had always been a place-holder until a liquor license became available and the originally-planned bar could be launched. And that’s just the beginning of the quirky alcohol restrictions.
Whether it's served neat, on the rocks, or in a cocktail, hard liquor is restricted to a 1.5-ounce serving. But in a cocktail, you can use 2.5 ounces of spirit in total, as long as the other ounce comes from a secondary spirit. "The one thing I always try to explain to our guests is, 'If you're looking for a stiff drink, you need to go after a cocktail, not just something neat to sip on,'" says Copper Common beverage director/bar manager Maureen Segrave-Daly. "I can't pour you two-and-half ounces of bourbon, but I can make you a bourbon cocktail with an ounce and a half of bourbon and an ounce of something else."
Theoretically, you can order an ounce-and-a-half of bourbon with a one-ounce chase of something else. You just can't have two servings of the same spirit, and the 2.5 ounce limit means there's no way to serve a "double" even if you could. "What's more difficult than anything else," says Segrave-Daly, "is explaining to someone why he can't get a double scotch, even though the person next to him has a scotch cocktail that's twice the size of a neat scotch."
Those restrictions mandate some creative cocktail recipes and constant experimentation. Read about more of the strange Utah liquor laws enacted by people who don’t drink alcohol at Eater. -via Digg
(Image credit: David Newkirk/Copper Common)
Monsieur Caron (Previously at Neatorama) celebrates the nearing future date from Back to the Future Part Two with a LEGO version of the time-travel scene.
But look carefully at 2015. You’ll see characters from other fictional worlds. A lot of them! Blink and you might miss the TARDIS. The Ghostbusters ambulance is easier to catch, and all the townspeople seem to be from some movie or TV show. -Thanks, Monsieur Caron!
The official poster for Star Wars: The Force Awakens has been released. Look at it! Look at it!
Let’s look closer. There’s Kylo Ren, the bad guy, lurking menacingly in the back. There’s tight-lipped Han and Leia, looking their age in galactic time, but pretty young compared to the actors’ ages (of course, all posters are airbrushed). There’s Finn, wielding a light saber. And in the middle, it’s Rey, with some kind of stick for a weapon, which diagonally lines up with the bad guy’s light saber. That must be intentional, but it’s also confusing. Scattered about are C-3PO, R2D2, BB8, Chewbacca, storm troopers, X-wings, and the Millennium Falcon. Also a rebel pilot and an alien of some sort. In the upper right... is that a Death Star? Well, yeah, it sure looks like one. So there’s every important element, ranked in descending order of importance by size.
The new trailer for the movie will debut tomorrow night during Monday Night Football. Of course, it will be on the internet immediately, so you don’t have to sit through the game if you don’t want to. Star Wars: The Force Awakens will open in theaters everywhere December 18. -via Uproxx
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Long before we watched The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, in a land far, far away... (Sorry to be so snarky.) On December 20, 1965, a new and different game show called The Dating Game came on the air.
The usual concept was an attractive bachelorette questioning three bachelors, as they were hidden behind a big screen, so the bachelorette couldn't see them. She would ask the guys several questions, then choose one to go on a date, all the while never seeing what the guy looked like.
Sometimes the concept would be reversed and there would be a bachelor grilling three bachelorettes, but the three guys idea was much more prevalent. I always liked the three bachelorettes concept better. Heck, three cute girls to look at instead of one!
All female guests on the show, whether the questioning bachelorette or one of the three questioned bachelorettes, always wore an obligatory miniskirt (the better to attract male viewers).
Although kind of similar to The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, The Dating Game was more like a blind date, albeit one where you could hear your potential partner and even grill them a little before an ultimate meet took place.
According to the show's creator, Chuck Barris, although The Dating Game was taped in the relatively tame '60's and '70's, some of the male guests answers to the girl's questions were incredibly lewd and raunchy. All tapes of the show were carefully censored by the suits at ABC to make sure nothing too suggestive got through to shock or offend the home viewers.
This couple went to get their portrait taken at a photography studio and look what happened. They fell into a fit of giggles and the photographer kept shooting! Or could it possibly be a photo booth sequence? The first automatic photo booth was exhibited at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1889. Either way, this surviving sequence is priceless. What could have caused the descent from formal portrait into candid shots?
See more Victorian photographs of people smiling here. -via reddit
One of these things is not like the others. A family that had six male ferrets took in an abandoned 5-week-old kitten. They named her Komari, and the ferrets took to her like she was one of them.
Komari eventually grew to be bigger than any of the ferrets, but they still regard her as their little sister. See an adorable album of pictures of Komari and the ferrets at imgur. -via Daily of the Day
"I don't find Jimmy Carr funny and therefore men aren't funny". Tony, age 50. Can't argue with that logic.
— manwhohasitall (@manwhohasitall) October 17, 2015
RISE & SHINE BUSY DADS! Saturday is your day. Ask your wife to babysit for a couple of hours so you can do the laundry. 'Me time'.
— manwhohasitall (@manwhohasitall) October 17, 2015
A Twitter feed by manwhohasitall poses the question, “Can men ever really ‘have it all’?” Ha! It’s a Twitter account that takes things that women hear all the time -sexist remarks, pandering magazine headlines, op-eds, and internet comments- and turns them around to be about men. It appears to be partly machine-generated, with “man” and “Dad” replacing “woman” and “Mom,” for example, with some human input to make it even more absurd.
I have absolutely no problem with male managers, as long as they leave their hormones at home.
— manwhohasitall (@manwhohasitall) October 17, 2015
Read it for advice to men on getting all that stuff done, and looking good doing it. Then treat yourself to some “me time,” if you have any left. And don’t forget- yogurt is your friend! -via Metafilter