Anthony Vincent of TenSecondSongs performs Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” in the styles of twenty different singers. Well, not all of them are singers, but the ones that aren't are still appropriate for a Halloween-themed video. Each style is distinctive, and most of them will be familiar to you. He does those voices well! -via Tastefully Offensive
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If it seems all your friends are having babies at the same time, or you just like to look at babies on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you might have noticed they all appear to be wrapped in the same white blanket with blue and pink stripes. It’s called the Kuddle-Up blanket, and it’s made by hospital supplier Medline, a company founded by A.L. Mills in 1910.
In the early 1950s, receiving blankets were usually made from dull beige cloth. Mills, ever the innovator, wanted to do for blankets what he had done for scrubs. “He asked the women in the office what they would do differently to spice it up a little bit,” says Abrams. They went through a number of iterations and finally settled on the blue- and pink-striped version because, as you might have suspected, it’s good for both girls and boys. The pattern is strangely appealing—before I knew that 99% of newborns are wrapped in identical blankets, I thought it was handsome. It never appears dated or cutesy or Disney. It is truly a classic.
Clearly, many people agree. Sixty years later, Medline sells 1.5 million Kuddle-Up blankets in Candy Stripe every year (the other patterns, with elephants or ducks, are less pervasive). At the HealthAlliance Hospital in Kingston, NY, for instance, the housekeeping staff buys 3,100 100% cotton blankets a year, and often uses four to five of them for each newborn.
But few people realized how ubiquitous the blanket was until social media gave parents a platform for showing off their newborns even before they leave the hospital. It’s very possible that three or four generations of families have been swaddled in a striped Kuddle-Up. Read the history of the blanket and see some adorable newborns in an article at Quartz. -Thanks, Daniel Kim!
(Image credit: Bonnie U. Gruenberg)
The communication gap between humans and our cats is huge. That’s because cats are not human, and don’t perceive or learn our attempts at communication the same way infant humans, or even dogs, learn them. Nick Stockton talked to OSU veterinarian Tony Buffington about the way cats see us.
You hear the unmistakable sound of claws on couch. You snap, shout, squirt water, and maybe even throw a pillow. It’s all futile, because eventually he’s at it again. Your cat isn’t ignoring you, Buffington says. He just doesn’t know how to connect your negative reinforcement with his behavior. This is because cats evolved as solitary hunters with little need for reading social cues, especially those for behavior modification.
“How the hell is your cat supposed to know that you’re yelling at him because you want him to stop scratching the couch?” Buffington says. Without the cognitive ability to connect your outburst to their scratching, cats see only chaotic aggression. “To the cat, you’re this crazy primate who is attacking him for no reason,” he says.
Of course, the cat is right: we are crazy primates. Buffington offers an alternative to “attacking” your cat, plus some other tips on getting down to a cat’s level. While my cats have learned to tell us exactly what they want in ways we humans can understand, they still haven’t figured out what we want from them -or maybe they just don’t care. Read more about a cat’s inner thoughts at Wired. -via reddit
Quebec City was invaded by zombies over the weekend! The city’s 7th annual Zombiefest was held on Saturday, which features a zombie walk (Marche des Zombies de Quebec) that shambled past Quebec City’s first Comic Con. The hoard banged on the windows of the convention center, to the delight of the comics fans inside. Kiltak caught them on video and posted it, along with quite a few photographs, at Geeks Are Sexy. Don’t miss the closeup of the zombie with an eggbeater embedded in his/her face!
Get ready for an amazing music video. OK Go released the video for their new song today: “I Won’t Let You Down.” The innovative video features kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley-style dance formations in what appears to be one continuous take, although I can’t picture how they did it. The credits list one cameraman, Makoto Okuguchi, plus a “Multi-Copter Pilot,” Kenji Yasuda. The band members are each riding a UNI-CUB personal mobility device, previously featured on Neatorama. I am looking forward to the “making of” video. -via Viral Viral Videos
Update: According to OK Go singer Damian Kulash, the video was recorded at half-speed, and this is the camera setup.
Redditor drbonedaddy posted a picture of his girlfriend’s Halloween costume. She is the Marvel character Mystique, as portrayed in the X-Men movies. The process of constructing the costume went like this:
Wasn't easy at all. The spandex suit had to first be landmarked, then painted. Each side took three to four hours and had to be allowed to dry overnight. Applying the latex for the scales on her face and painting it took two to three hours as well. She dyed her hair for the costume which was another hour. So in total it was roughly a 10 hour process over the course of a few days. I'm sure there are some very intricate costumes posted on here, but it really was a painstaking process to make it come together
She even dyed contact lenses to make her eyes yellow! And what did drbonedaddy select for a costume? He was also an X-Men character, the lesser-known Gambit.
A backlot known as “the 40 acres” in Culver City, California, has been the setting of so many movies and TV shows that it takes an extensive website to cover all of it. It was owned successively by RKO, Desilu, and Paramount, among other owners. The lot contained the entire town of Mayberry used for The Andy Griffith Show, but that wasn’t the only use for the fake town. It was built long before Andy Taylor and his family inhabited it. You might recognize the buildings when you watch old reruns of Superman from the 1950s, because the town was also Metropolis.
Hardcore Star Trek fans already know this, but casual fans might be surprised to know that a couple of episodes of the original series were filmed on the Mayberry set: "Miri" and "The City on the Edge of Forever.” They didn’t even change the name of Floyd’s Barber Shop.
They should have used some of the Mayberry characters, too, as imagined by this image manipulation by Brian Hague. See his Thelma Lou T’Pau as well. -via Metafilter
You think you spent a lot of time carving a Jack-o-Lantern for Halloween? Yuliya Tsukerman took a bunch of pumpkins and carved images from the iconic Psycho shower scene on them. Several dozen images, in fact, with up to three images on a pumpkin. She spent two weeks carving pumpkins.
She then lit up the pumpkins, took photographs of each carved image, and synchronized them with the soundtrack from the original Hitchcock film.
You can see that video at Tsukerman’s site, as well as the full gallery of carved pumpkin images, and photographs of process. You can even see a comparison of the pumpkin video with the original Hitchcock footage. -Thanks, Yuliya!
Max-Arthur, the cat who became famous by riding a roomba dressed as a shark, has his Halloween costume ready for 2014! Here he is dressed as Princess Jasmine from the Disney movie Aladdin, riding a magic carpet that moves by the power of the roomba. When you combine a cat, a robot, and a Disney princess, you've got a surefire viral video. -via Buzzfeed
Friday on Twitter, Commander Chris Hadfield (previously) announced a Halloween costume contest for the cool kids who choose to dress as an astronaut. Great idea!
Halloween costume contest! Show us your best astronaut, we'll send signed books as prizes. @parkertoons pic.twitter.com/jsqOP53Nru
— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) October 24, 2014He got a reply that just floored everyone. Inked Frog’s son is in a wheelchair. His father made it into the Mars Curiosity Rover for Halloween! And her son is made up to look like like NASA engineer Bobak Ferdowsi, who wore a red, white, and blue mohawk during Curiosity’s historic landing on Mars.
@Cmdr_Hadfield I hope this quailfies! My son's wheelchair costume - Mini Bobak, and Mars Rover Curiosity! pic.twitter.com/q8h6FrGiSr
— Frog (@InkedFrog) October 24, 2014Ferdowsi’s reaction to the costume: Rad! Is that not the coolest idea you’ve seen for a Halloween costume in a while? -via a comment at Metafilter
Dave Hax always finds a clever and easy way to do things you were going to do anyway. He’s been super busy lately making Halloween decorations, most of which are perfect for kids to participate in making, like these spooky Halloween eyes. I love the idea of shoving these into the shrubbery around your porch just as it gets dark on trick-or-treat night! -Thanks, Dave!
See also: Dave’s Jack O’Lantern Tips.
When you don't have a home, the list of difficulties goes beyond a meal and a place to sleep. Cleaning your clothing and bedding is both difficult and low priority, but cleanliness not onlly contributes to good health, but makes one feel human.
Orange Sky Laundry is two guys with a van (and some other volunteers) who go to homeless people in Brisbane, Australia, and wash their clothes and bedding. Lucas Patchett and Nicholas Marchesi, both 20 years old, founded the nonprofit just this year in order to help improve the hygiene of people with no access to laundry facilities. They hope to expand the project with bigger vehicles to serve more people, and partner with a food charity to feed those waiting for their laundry to finish. See pictures of the project at imgur, and even more at Facebook. -via reddit
This past week, Mike Powell and Juergen Horn suddenly came across the opportunity to become urban explorers in Macedonia. They were staying at a resort hotel near Lake Prespa and saw Hotel Evropa, built during the Communist era when Macedonia was part of Yugoslavia.
We spotted the Evropa while driving along the coastal road. It would have been impossible not to, because the building is monstrous. And at least for us, it was irresistible. When I say this place has been “forgotten”, I mean it. The Evropa is not “under new management” or “scheduled for demolition” or under any sort of protection, private or governmental. It’s simply there, totally deserted.
With nothing prohibiting us from doing so, we explored. The Evropa has been ransacked, everything of value stripped and stolen. We went up to the upper floors, into the hotel rooms, out onto the balconies, down to the lounge, and into the basement. I’m not given to panic, but while exploring this hotel, I felt the clammy hand of terror on my heart. Every time I turned a corner, I did so half-expecting to discover something gruesome. If I had been captured and subsequently tortured by some disfigured Macedonian maniac… it would have been awful, of course, but not all that surprising.
Of course, they took a ton of pictures of the crumbling resort. See the best of them at For 91 Days.
The hit HBO series Game of Thrones films in Belfast, Northern Ireland and Dubrovnik, Croatia. For the show’s upcoming fifth season, scenes are also being shot in Spain, which is a stand-in for the kingdom of Dorne, the homeland of House Martell. Filming began at Alcázar palace near Seville, then moved to Osuna where a large battle will be staged. The opportunity to be an extra led to a response that shows how popular the production is in Spain.
When the local production company Fresco Film put out a casting call for roughly 600 extras for a key battle Thrones scene, fans responded with an incredible 86,000 applications. The company needed to add more server space to accommodate the load. Many applicants needed the work, but one hired extra told the production he took a vacation from his high-level banking job to be on the show.
Meanwhile, others have clamored to get a glimpse of the show’s cast, with one even asking a random production staffer to post for a photo merely because he was wearing a Thrones badge.
Learn more at Entertainment Weekly, but be aware there are spoilers if you’re not current on the series through season four. -via Warming Glow
Did you know that an instance of cosplay back in 1910 led to a man being arrested for “public masquerading”? What made that costume different from the usual fancy dress was that it was designed to resemble a well-known pop culture character, instead of animals or literary characters. In 1939, the first costumed characters showed up at a science fiction convention. We didn’t yet have the term “cosplay,” or even “sci-fi” for that matter, but the hobby itself is a lot older than you thought.
These are things you’ll learn in the new book Cosplay World by Brian Ashcraft and Luke Plunkett of Kotaku. Ashcraft and Plunkett talked to writers, historians, photographers, and costume builders about the history and culture of cosplay, but the book is also packed with profiles and pictures of top cosplayers from around the world. Neatorama is proud to present an excerpt, featuring cosplayer Julian Checkley.
(Image credit: Julian Checkley)
‘I’ve been cosplaying almost all my life, ever since I made my first Darth Vader costume at the age of seven,’ says cosplayer Julian Checkley. ‘It was one of those papier mâché jobs plastered onto a balloon, and I had to steal my grandfather’s sunglasses so I could pop the lenses out and glue them on to complete the helmet eyepieces.’
This boyhood love of papier mâché developed, and Checkley decided to pursue an education and a career in making costumes.
(Image credit: Kamil Krawczak)
But he may have thought he’d made a mistake when he found himself studying hair and make-up alongside fashion industry hopefuls in London. A job in TV creating monster suits and special effects would soon follow, however, where he would not just learn how to develop visual effects and make fantastical creatures, but gain experience performing inside them as well.
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