The Acme Foundry Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has been in business over 100 years, but it was only this week that a graffiti artist gave them the appropriate art for their entry. On Monday morning, employees arrived to find someone had mounted cardboard cutouts of Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner to the building. The company produces iron pieces, which may possibly include anvils.
Business manager Monica Sweeney said Acme's employees all found it to be very humorous. In fact, they have thought about adding a roadrunner and coyote to their building for years, but a mystery artist beat them to it.
“We see and appreciate the humor,” Acme said in an email to Fox 9. “It is the best graffiti that anyone has ever done to our building.”
Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin & Hobbes, drew a new comic, but you won’t see it in the funny pages. The wordless 15-panel comic was drawn for this year’s Angoulême International Comics Festival in France. Watterson won the Grand Prix award from the festival last year for Calvin & Hobbes.
In an interview, Watterson said he drew his latest comic without text in order to break any language barriers. “Telling a story only in pictures is one of the great strengths — and greatest pleasures — offered by comics,” Watterson said.
Watterson rarely releases drawings since he retired the comic strip in 1995.
Redditor Rcrowley32 said, “My daughter had a very specific birthday cake request 'animals wearing birthday hats, having a party'. I think I managed to pull it off.” The birthday girl also asked for strawberry cake with whipped cream frosting, so that’s exactly what she got. It’s a serious challenge to fulfill such specific requests, but mothers get a lot of satisfaction from accomplishing it. These are some real party animals!
In 1860s Prussia, Minister President Otto von Bismarck and Progressive Party leader Rudolf Virchow (who was also a scientist) were political rivals in the Prussian legislature. A particularly nasty argument over funding for the navy in 1865 left von Bismarck feeling humiliated by Virchow.
At the end of a particularly severe attack, Bismarck felt himself personally affronted, and sent seconds to Virchow with a challenge to fight a duel.The man of science was found in his laboratory, hard at work at experiments which had for their object the discovery of a means of destroying trichinæ, which were making great ravages in Germany. “Oh,” said the doctor, “a challenge from Prince Bismarck, eh? Well, well, as I am the challenged party, I suppose I have the choice of weapons. Here they are!” He held up two large sausages, which seemed to be exactly alike. ” One of these sausages,” he said, ” is filled with trichinae—it is deadly. The other is perfectly wholesome. Externally they cannot be told apart. Let His Excellency do me the honor to choose whichever of these he wishes and eat it, and I will eat the other.” Though the proposition was as reasonable as any duelling proposition could be, Prince B.’s representatives refused it. No duel was fought, and no one accused Virchow of cowardice.
It seems like a clever response by Virchow, and we don’t know what would have happened if von Bismarck had called his bluff. In fact, the story seems altogether too good to be true. Skulls in the Stars tracks down the documentation of the incident, and along the way gives us the scary lowdown on the Trichinella spiralis parasite that terrified the people of Europe. -via Science Chamber of Horrors
In this week’s mental_floss List Show, John Green has some very diverse and sundry tips concerning your money. And that’s something we all care about! I have to wonder about research that “coated people in testosterone gel,” because that stuff is kind of dangerous. And that bit about wearing stiletto heels to shop in sounds more like correlation than causation. Still, it’s all food for thought, from our friends at mental_floss.
A postal worker in Carlsbad, California, detected a package that was “ticking.” He alerted authorities, and police cordoned off the entire block and evacuated several houses while the package was investigated.
When the package was opened, the feared bomb turned out to be nothing more than Mexican ”jumping beans,” police said.
It took the San Diego Sheriff’s Bomb/Arson Unit three hours to determine the package was safe. No one was injured and no property was damaged.
The master trash-talker of the 1980s wasn’t a sports figure or even a politician -it was Skeletor, the eternal antagonist of He-Man and the Master of the Universe! DreamWorks TV put together a supercut of the vilest and goofiest insults he hurled at his minions and enemies alike. -via Geeks Are Sexy
I know millions of people are interested in forensics, but there's little to no accurate information available about forensic art. I felt it was important to dispel some of the myths that are out there, and explain from start-to-finish what forensic artists do, and exactly how we do it. We need the public to help solve our cases, but they can't do that if they believe what they see on TV. Besides, the reality is a lot more interesting!
Neatorama is proud to present an excerpt from Ask a Forensic Artist, in which Bailey explains the process of facial approximation, or reconstructing a face from a skull.
Facial approximations (creating a likeness from an unidentified skull) are the coldest of all cold cases. By the time a skull gets to a forensic artist, all other means of identification have been exhausted. Years, maybe even decades, have passed. That’s why a facial approximation can literally be the last chance a person has to be identified. Which means it can also be the last chance for that person’s killer to be identified. Logically, an investigator can’t begin to figure out who the murderer is until the name of the victim is known.
Most people are fascinated by skulls, and I’d be lying if I said I were any different. But my curiosity isn’t morbid; I see every skull as a puzzle, and I’m in a constant search for answers. The more I know, the better I can do my job. I try not to stare in public when I see a particularly interesting-looking person, but I can’t help but look at the face and think, ‘what is going on under there? Why does she have that dimple in her chin? What causes her eyelids to fold that way? Why is one cheek higher than the other?’ The answers lie with the skull.
No two are alike. I used to think they were, until I got into this line of work. Not everyone has the opportunity to see even one skull in their lifetime, so there are no words for the first time I stood in a room with twenty skulls lined up in a row. All imaginable shapes, all imaginable sizes, and as different from each other as snowflakes.
And that right there is the key to facial approximation. The reason we each look like the individual we are is because of the shape and structure of our skull. Think of your skull as an armature, and the muscles, fat, and flesh as the fabric that is draped on top of it. If forensic artists can capture the basic facial structures and “look” of people based on their skulls, then we might just be able to help get them identified.
Cake designer Kylie Mangles challenged herself to do something new and different with cake that she’d never done before. She selected an image of Ralph Wiggum from The Simpsons by Erick Flores called Cutout Ralph. How do you translate this into a cake? Mangles combines a lot of art and cake techniques to get it done, and described the process at Threadcakes. A snippet:
Then the fun part began: adding the intestines, spine, ribs, what I suspect might be a gallbladder and spleen or maybe a kidney. Then I added the cut up leg and arm. There was one more support dowel in the arm to hold everything up. I wanted to do the black outline but I wasn't sure how it would turn out, so I put him all together first and then added the black outline after. I think it would have been easier to add the black lines as I went along but it worked out in the end, just with a little more patience and a lot more coffee. While I was doing this I also removed all his lower teeth and added to his lower jaw to bring it out and put his teeth back on.
Thanks to the black outlines, the finished product really did look like a drawing. But they ate it anyway, and enjoyed it. There are lots of pictures to remember him by. By the way, the image above is of the cake, not the drawing!
Freelance illustrator Tracy Worral and the Dorothy art collective have produced a series called Rock ’N’ Roll Zoo. The print is a collection of 77 animals from songs or other rock ’n’ roll references, illustrated literally whether they were meant that way or not. Purchase the print here. Some of the individual images are also available alone or in sets. Continue reading to see more. Bonus points if you can name all of them.
I never knew lobster diving was a thing. It’s a bit like noodling -you catch them with your hands! Rick Coleman is an experienced lobster diver, but his wife Susie had never done it before. In this video, she gets a lesson in how quick and slippery lobsters are -after all, they’ve lived in the ocean their entire lives! And I see now why commercial fishermen use traps. The sound effects make it even goofier. Don’t feel bad, Susie, like I tell my kids, anything is hard if you’ve never done it before. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
When you don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground, they can get mixed up. In Pratteln, Switzerland, that is exactly what happened when a 13-year-old donkey named Nilo fell down a manhole early Saturday morning. It was definitely a manhole -and not an asshole- because it was too small for the donkey to maneuver in, and he was stuck. Passerby Bruno Schneider saw the donkey’s predicament and called the local fire brigade, who came and saved his ass extracted the donkey from the manhole. Except for some cuts and bruises “at the rear of him” (as Google Translate puts it), the donkey is fine. Nilo is back at home at the petting zoo from which he escaped Friday night. However, a photograph handed out by the Basel Landschaft police department has gone viral globally, with the expected puns and comparisons to Donkey from the movie Shrek. -via Buzzfeed
You know it's true. Your cat has high standards that you'll never live up to. But take comfort in the fact that every other house cat is judging their person the same way. -via Tastefully Offensive
Not every website lives up to your expectations. Actually, none do, because websites live on hype to get people to visit. So lower your expectations and enjoy them for what they are. That said, I’m glad that MercWorks and Andrew Bridgman of Dorkly didn’t poke Neatorama’s soft underbelly for their latest comic. Scroll down on the picture above to see it all.
Neill Blomkamp, the filmmaker who brought us District 9 and Elysium, has a new feature film coming out next year. Chappie is a robot who can learn to think on his own, and he becomes the kind of robot that everyone loves, except, of course, for the bad guys. The story seems to be a touching modern combination of Pinocchio and Short Circuit. Chappie stars Hugh Jackman, Sigourney Weaver, and Die Antwoord’s Ninja and Yolandi Visser. It is scheduled to hits theaters in March. -via The A.V. Club
