Laura Cooper is the artist behind the webcomic XP. She also does commissioned art. A side project of hers is Velociprincesses, that is, Disney Princesses reimagined as velociraptors. On the surface, that could be one of many Disney Princess mashup ideas, but her quotes that go with each dino-princess are priceless. There are a dozen in all.
Since the demand is suddenly there, Cooper is working making prints available of each Velociprincess. Follow Cooper at Twitter to see when they will be available. -via Geeks Are Sexy
We’ve featured the awesome Star Wars costumes of Julian Checkley before. Now let’s get a load of his Batman! The suit design is from the video game Arkham Originals.
Some cool features of the costume:
The armour parts are 3D printed It has a working fireball gauntlet The batarangs fold for storage Batman’s wrist computer displays a loop of the sonar pings from detective mode!
Stowaways come in all shapes and sizes. French pilot Romain Jantot did his preflight checklist, but did not specifically scan for flying cats before he took a woman for a ride in his ultralight plane in Kourou, French Guiana. The cat was well hidden, but apparently woke up during the flight and slowly approached the pilot to ask something like, “What the hell is going on?” (Que se passe-t-il? Mettez-moi en bas à droite en ce moment! Es-tu fou?)
Jantot’s face when he notices the cat is priceless. As is the cat’s. The plane immediately heads back to the runway to offload the kitty. Jantot said, “The cat is doing well, she is still our mascot.” But she probably won’t be napping in the wing again anytime soon. -via reddit
George Clooney is a huge star— but not nearly as huge as these guys. Here are a few of the tallest actors who ever appeared on the big (and little) screen.
SHORT BIO: Sizonenko was born in the Ukraine in 1959, and was a professional basketball player in the Soviet Union during the ’70s and ’80s. In 1991, he appeared in the Czech film The Brave Little Tailor in which he played— big surprise— a giant. It’s the only acting role he’s ever had, but that’s enough to make him the tallest actor in history. (He has his own page on the Internet Movie Database.) Bonus: For a short time in 1991, Sizonenko was listed in Guinness World Records as the tallest man alive.
SHORT BIO: Another basketballer who dabbled in acting. Muresan was born in Romania in 1971, became a star player in Europe, and then had a respectable career in the NBA (1993– 2000), mostly with the Washington Bullets. His only major acting job was playing the title role in the 2003 Billy Crystal film My Giant (see next page). But he had a few minor roles, too, including appearing as “the ventriloquist” in Eminem’s breakthrough 2000 “My Name Is” music video, and playing himself in the 2003 TV documentary Giants: Friend or Foe.
The Telegraph political cartoonist Bob Moran tells the story of how he became a father for the first time. It wasn’t anything at all like he expected, and illustrating it in pictures helped him come to grips with the experience. Fathers are supposed to be heroes, right? But life doesn't always follow the script.
But heroes come in all shapes and sizes, and you find them everywhere. You might want to have a hankie ready when you watch his Fathers Day tale. -via Metafilter
The movie The Blues Brothers hit theaters 35 years ago this weekend. The first movie to be born from a Saturday Night Live sketch brought the story of Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues and their “mission from God” to theaters everywhere. You already know about the drugs that fueled the production (and eventually led to John Belushi’s death only a couple of years later), but there are more stories behind the scenes to learn. Some will evoked images that never made it onto the screen.
7. DAN AYKROYD AND CARRIE FISHER BECAME ENGAGED DURING FILMING.
The two were a couple, set up by Belushi, who became engaged after Aykroyd successfully administered the Heimlich maneuver on her. "I almost choked on some kind of vegetable that I shouldn't have been eating: Brussels sprouts," Fisher told CNN. "He saved my life, and then he asked me to marry him. And I thought ... wow, what if that happens again? I should probably marry him." (The wedding never happened.)
18. IT WAS REALLY POPULAR IN AUSTRALIA AND OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD.
Similar to The Rocky Horror Picture Show in New York, The Blues Brothers was shown regularly in Melbourne’s Valhalla Cinema on Friday nights throughout the 1980s and '90s, where as many as 400 costumed fans would watch as 30 actors re-created the scenes as the movie played, with everybody singing along to the musical performances. Due partially to the domestic movie chain boycotts, but saying something about its international appeal, Landis said the film was the first to ever gross more money overseas than in the U.S.
LEGO Jurassic World is a series of animated vignettes from Brotherhood Workshop. In this episode, T. rex wants to join in the fun when the velociraptors are playing catch. There’s just one problem -those tiny, useless little arms.
When the apocalypse comes, this is the guy you want to be friends with. He starts out by making himself an axe out of a stone. Then he builds a complete wattle and daub hut from just the materials around him in Queensland, Australia. When you think he’s finished, he comes up with more amazing survival skills to improve upon it. Without a word, he makes it easy to follow each step.
I built this hut in the bush using naturally occurring materials and primitive tools. The hut is 2m wide and 2m long, the side walls are 1m high and the ridge line (highest point) is 2m high giving a roof angle of 45 degrees. A bed was built inside and it takes up a little less than half the hut. The tools used were a stone hand axe to chop wood, fire sticks to make fire, a digging stick for digging and clay pots to carry water. The materials used in the hut were wood for the frame, vine and lawyer cane for lashings and mud for daubing. Broad leaves were initially used as thatch which worked well for about four months before starting to rot. The roof was then covered with sheets of paper bark which proved to be a better roofing material. An external fireplace and chimney were also built to reduce smoke inside. The hut is a small yet comfortable shelter and provides room to store tools and materials out of the weather.
He says in the comments that he put in about a month’s work on this, although the video covers nine months of time, since he had other things to do and didn’t work on it every day. By the time the video was finished, I wouldn’t have been surprised if you told me he fashioned the camera out of found materials. He has other videos under the account Primitive Technology that goes into detail about some of his skills. -via reddit
How do you sell signs? With a sign! Everyone who took advantage of this offer already knew how effective the signs are. After all, it worked on them! The price may seem a bit high, but it includes custom sign printing, and you’ll end up with a weather resistant sign your business can use for years. I'm not really endorsing this particular sign sale, but several sign professionals at reddit gave details. You might find the same thing for less money, but not a lot less. -via Boing Boing
Cats just love those enclosed spaces! Ignoramusky compiled a collection of clips featuring cats putting themselves into bags and boxes, against all odds, because that is what they want. -via Tastefully Offensive
How hard is it to tag starfish? The modern technique is to implant a microchip, like a veterinarian implants under a pet’s skin. In fact, the procedure for implanting chips in starfish wasn’t all that difficult for Frederik Ekholm, Gaardsted Christensen, and Trine Bottos Olsen of the University of Southern Denmark. But keeping them tagged turned out to be a problem.
Starfish came to the university from local fishers who had caught them by accident. The students injected the tags into the animals as directed. But within days, those same tags showed up at the bottom of the tank. Somehow, the starfish were expelling the foreign objects from their bodies.
When the students witnessed the act, it was a little like a magic trick—one moment a magician’s hand is empty, and the next she’s holding a bird. The starfish pushed the tags out the ends of their arms, straight through the skin.
To find out more, the students and professor Daniel Levitis set up some experiments. First they injected tags into 53 starfish and scanned them each day to see how many of the tags were still there. In less than 3 weeks, all the tags were gone.
Well, this is what science is like. Your original research idea hits a snag, and now you have something completely different to investigate. They used magnets. They used ultrasound. And they found out that starfish have a magical power to get rid of foreign objects in their bodies. Read about the research at Discover magazine. The conclusion: starfish are weird. -via Metafilter
Alexander Fredriksen enjoys relaxing at home and watching TV or playing video games. But his cat Nala (previously at Neatorama) sees him lying on the couch as an opportunity for some snuggles. Lots of snuggles and scratches! Cats are creatures of habit, and Nala is not giving up until she gets what she wants. See more of Nala at Instagram. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
Banana ban signs have been posted, a banana amnesty has been introduced and local businesses have come out in support of the action, with Portsoy Ice Cream removing banana flavoured ices from its range until after the event.
Roger Goodyear, chairman of the Aberdeen Asset Management Scottish Traditional Boat Festival, says: “Bananas may be a delicious fruit but they are considered bad luck on boats.
“We want to do everything possible to make sure our 2015 festival is a success and we don’t want to take any chances. Our ban on bananas is a tongue-in-cheek nod to our seafaring heritage and is a reminder that the ocean can be a mystical, but dangerous, place and as such there are many traditional superstitions among fisher people.”
Several possible origins of the banana superstition are offered, but you can’t read them without thinking about that song. -via Arbroath
Moosie the cat was always a survivor. He was rescued from a wall at three weeks of age after his mother died. Two years later, his family, Kymberly and Jesse Chelf, moved from El Paso, Texas, to Fairbanks, Alaska -and that’s when he went missing.
The family searched for their cat everywhere they could think, but came up empty time after time. They stayed in Texas for three days after the movers took their things. Several times each day they returned to the home and searched again.
At first they thought he may have jumped into one of the moving boxes, but all the boxes had been packed and sealed before he went missing. Only the furniture had been left unpacked for the loaders.
“We just assumed he had run away, which was very unlike Moosie,” Kymberly said. “He’s just a very loyal, loving cat.”
They put out the word to all their friends and neighbors. They activated his microchip in case anyone found him and reluctantly left.
The Chelfs’ furniture arrived in Fairbanks two months later, and when the movers had a futon halfway up the stairs, Moosie popped out of the mattress! Moosie was taken to Mount McKinley Animal Hospital, where veterinarians battled his dehydration and nursed him back to health. You can follow Moosie’s progress at his Facebook page. -via Arbroath
As far back as 120 years ago, filmed advertisements entered movie theaters -because theaters needed all the film they could get. In the early 20th century, “trailers” were tagged into the ends of serials to promote what would happen in next week’s episode. And the movie trailer was born. Over the next 100 years, trailers would become more formulaic, then more experimental, and formulaic again in cycles. They tried not to give too much away.
However, the closer Hollywood gets to the age of the blockbuster, the more the modern trailer starts to reveal itself, and it all starts with Jaws -- the film phenomenon of the summer of 1975. Adjusted for inflation, the movie has the seventh largest box office gross in movie history, so it seems fitting that so many would pull influence from its trailer. It introduced something new to trailers: relying almost entirely on the narrative of the film to advertise it. In 3 minutes and 21 seconds, the entire story arc of the film, save for the ending, is given away. There’s a shark terrorizing the beach on the 4th of July, it’s up to a local sheriff to take care of it, and he teams with a scientist and a fisherman to get the job done.
