There’s a cat stuck in a very tall but not too sturdy tree somewhere in Russia. A crowd gathers, offering plenty of advice about what to do. What they end up doing is a little extreme -kind of like swatting a fly with a bazooka. -via Dark Roasted Blend
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Anecleto “Clet” Abraham is a French artist living in Italy who decorates street signs with stickers all over Europe, and recently in New York City.
Clet hand-draws his designs, then has them digitized and made into vinyl stickers, which he calls adhesives. He carries around dozens at a time and brought them with him to New York. The signs in New York, he notes, are less varied and more minimalist than those in Europe. “A difference is that in New York, there’s fonts on the signs,” he adds.
Continue reading to see more of Abraham's art.
Welcome to the world of work. My kid spent most of the summer working as a nanny, and was amazed at the “huge” amount of money she ended up with. She bought school clothes, a couple of tanks of gas, and a few movie tickets, and now she’s broke until she finds another job. That’s one of the biggest lessons about becoming an adult -how hard you work for money, and how fast it goes away. This comic is the latest from Sarah Andersen.
Rafi the Labrador retriever has discovered that the snow is just right for sledding. And if he gets himself in the right position, he can slide downhill and have a great time! Some dogs just know how to have fun. This almost, but not quite, makes me look forward to snow. -via Tastefully Offensive
Miss Cakehead and London Mess catered a dinner to promote the Surgeon Simulator game for the iPhone. It was pretty gruesome! The food was served in an operating room, around a live surgical patient, called “Bob” just like in the simulator. The first course was served in pulp trays, with Miso added from drip bags. The meat dish was disguised as Bob’s ribcage. Drinks came in urine specimen jars, and candy was distributed in pill form.
Dessert? That was a Brain Piñata, which guests cracked open to reveal delicious chocolate inside. And there were no eating utensils besides surgical instruments! See more from the Surgeon Sim Dining Experience at Miss Cakehead’s site.
Gavin and Dan, the Slow-Mo Guys, have some fun with their slow-motion camera and some non-Newtonian fluid -in this case, simple cornstarch and water. We’ve seen videos where people run across the surface of cornstarch and water, but if they stop, they sink. The same principle is at work here, as you see Dan has trouble scooping the stuff out of the bowl, because he’s exerting force on it. But then it drips off his hand like a normal liquid. Once the speaker starts pounding, the mixture solidifies into the weird shapes you see, but reverts back to fluid when the music stops. Looks cool, huh? -via Geeks Are Sexy
Get a glimpsed of what a crossover episode of The Simpsons and Futurama is going to be like this Sunday, with the pre-released couch gag from AnimationDomination. It’s short, silly, and surreal. -via Digg
Funambulism is a Greek word meaning tightrope walker. Rope walkers in ancient Greece and Rome couldn’t get into the Olympics, but their skills instead entered the show business arena. Over the centuries, competition among these acrobats led to the development of other acts, such as the flying trapeze and other aerial stunts, and also led to ever greater stunts, like walking a wire above Niagara Falls.
In the 1800s everyone wanted to walk across Niagara Falls. The first to do so was Jean François Gravelet, known as the Great Blondin, who was the most famous wire-walker of the time. He crossed the Falls in 1859, pausing in the middle to sit down and drink a beer he pulled up on a rope from the Maid of the Mist. He would return to the Falls again and again, doing crazier highwire stunts each time: riding a bicycle across, cooking an omelet in the middle, going across blindfolded or on stilts, and even carrying his manager across on his back. Next up was the Great Farini (né William Leonard Hunt), one of the most celebrated acrobats in Europe at the time. He duplicated many of the Great Blondin's stunts, and his coup de grâce in 1860 was crossing the Falls with a washing machine strapped to his back; in the middle he stopped to wash several handkerchiefs, which he then gave to his waiting admirers. Maria Spelterini, a circus performer from the age of 3, was the first woman to wire-walk across the Falls, and she also did it many times — once with her wrists and ankles manacled, once with a paper bag over her head, and once with peach baskets on her feet.
Maria Spelterini is pictured above. Read more stories of funambulists in history at Atlas Obscura.
During the Cold War, East Germany had very little money, because the Soviet Union had stripped the country of its assets. What they had plenty of were political prisoners, so there was a clandestine program to sell these prisoners -and their family members- to West Germany. Journalist Gavin Haines wrote about the practice for the BBC.
"Figures do vary, but between 1964 and 1989 there were approximately 33,700 political prisoners that were sold," Haines says. "In addition to that, they obviously had lots of family members. So there was an additional 250,000 people who were sold."
It's a huge number. German media wrote about the practice, but few people in the English-speaking world knew about it until Haines' article came out. He says both sides, East and West, weren't interested in having the story come out. Why? It makes both countries look terrible.
NPR has an interview with Haines in which he describes the secret practice of buying political prisoners from East Germany.
Baby Alexis is having a good time in her bouncy contraption. She’s making shadows on the floor, which fascinates the dog Day (short for Daykota). Day makes a spectacle of himself jumping on the shadow, which in turn tickles Alexis to no end. It’s just altogether a cute scene. -via Tastefully Offensive
Do you ever get the feeling that maybe we rely too much on the information right at our fingertips on the internet? Sometimes it seems easier to look something up than to just think about it. Speaking of thinking about it -see if you can guess the obvious pun in the hover text at today’s xkcd comic.
European car owners are confronted with the very real possibility that wild animals will invade and eat their vehicles. To combat this danger, engineers at Audi rigged a car with multiple cameras and recorded what happened when martens were allowed access. From Autoblog:
In Europe it is a common problem to have wild, ferret-like animals crawl into the engine bay of cars while parked and idle and bite through brake/power steering and other lines/hoses. Audi Deutschland's quality control is seeing where the ferrets go within the engine compartment, which lines they chew on. Based on the video, they will then look to use different materials that a ferret doesn't like biting into. Looks totally random, but it is an issue in Germany and Europe in general.
The video is in German, but that really doesn’t detract from the content. -via Metafilter
The guys from the Norwegian comedy Kollektivet (previously at Neatorama) got a DJ gig and finally have a chance to show off all the new equipment they have obviously never used before. Famous last words: “I wonder what this button does…” See more from their TV show here. -via Daily of the Day
Windmills harness the power of wind to turn mill wheels to grind grain. That’s why they are called windmills. When you see a whole slew of windmills, you have to wonder why a town would need more than one mill to grind everyone’s grain. That’s American thinking. In the village of Kinderdijk in the Netherlands, there are 19 "windmills" that are actually water pumps, built between 1738 and 1740. The pumps are necessary because the land is below sea level! Read about the windmills of Kinderdijk and see some awesome photographs at Amusing Planet. -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Flickr user bert knottenbeld)
The Rosetta spacecraft will deploy the Philae lander to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on November 12th. The ESA made a charming animation to explain this stage of the mission to all ages. What a cute little Philae lander! -via Laughing Squid
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