This intriguing idea plays upon a most outlandish insecurity that you probably never even considered. While it's true that your garbage collector knows a lot about you, like what you got for Christmas, what kind of pets you own, and when your child was toilet trained, it's highly unllikely that any of the neighbors ever look at your garbage. My town even has a regulation that all household garbage be tied in bags. My guess is that few, if any, customers expressed interest in paying for this service. Found at Bad Newspaper.
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh altered the film Raiders of the Lost Ark, for educational purposes only, to study the staging of the film. He had it rendered in black and white, and removed the soundtrack. Then mood music was added that has nothing to do with the original soundtrack. The result is an amazingly beautiful version of the movie, reminiscent of a silent film or one of the old-time serials it was designed to imitate.
So I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me. Oh, and I’ve removed all sound and color from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visual staging aspect. Wait, WHAT? HOW COULD YOU DO THIS? Well, I’m not saying I’m like, ALLOWED to do this, I’m just saying this is what I do when I try to learn about staging, and this filmmaker forgot more about staging by the time he made his first feature than I know to this day (for example, no matter how fast the cuts come, you always know exactly where you are—that’s high level visual math shit).
It’s hard to actually think about all those things when you’re just enjoying the movie. You already know the story well enough that you don’t need the dialogue, but someone who’d never seen it before would still enjoy Raiders without color or dialogue. -via Time
Leo Bonten had to have his leg amputated. And he wanted to take his leg home to use it as a lamp. Really. His request stirred up some controversy in the Netherlands. At first the hospital said no.
However, Bonten was told that he could only get his amputated leg back after it had been buried to follow the letter of the law, which was costly never mind a bit ridiculous. Bonten refused and was initially refused the amputation by the hospital. It was eventually sorted out, but Bonten had to fight for a right he already had to keep his own leg and make the lamp he wanted. “The hospital didn’t have a leg to stand on,” says Bonten jokingly.
The leg was preserved by pathologist Frank van de Goot, and make into a lamp by designer Willem Schaperkotter. You can see it at Improbable Research. They also have a screenshot of Bonten’s eBay ad for the leg lamp (he said he was in dire financial need), but it was pulled because the eBay forbids the sale of human body parts. There's also a TV show with a discussion of the medical ethics in the story, if you understand Dutch. -via Metafilter
Paul Roden and Valerie Lueth have been working on a woodcut called Overlook for two years now.
A dense forest huddles tight, with groves expanding outwards, upwards, growing ever further away. The trees move with the motion of a wind, or not; some are rigid & straight, some rustling & reaching. At the middle of the print, the treeline dips down and spreads up and out into a great stretch of rolling fields and forests.
The original artwork is finished, and they are working on carving the “key” woodblock. Next, an additional three or four woodblocks will be carved for the different print colors. Limited edition color prints are available for pre-order from Tugboat Printshop. -via Laughing Squid
Pulp Fiction was released in the United States in October of 1994. Can that movie really be twenty years old? Why yes, as a matter of fact, it debuted at Cannes in May, and was released in several countries before Americans saw it. Want to know some other cool facts about Pulp Fiction? Here’s a sampling:
6. THE MOVIE COST ONLY $8.5 MILLION TO MAKE.
Five million went to the actors’ salaries. It made that all back in its first week at the U.S. box office (the film pulled in $9.3 million the first weekend of release).
20.TRAVOLTA DIDN’T REALLY INJECT THURMAN IN THAT SCENE.
The infamous scene in which Mia is stabbed with a very necessary adrenaline shot was stressful enough, so Tarantino took off some of the pressure: the needle was inserted, and then Travolta pulled it out. The scene was reversed in post-production so it looks as if Vincent Vega really is plunging that syringe into her. Movie magic!
The rest of the list is at mental_floss.
Grant Snider of Incidental Comics continues to enjoy and share the intricacies of life with a toddler. It’s astonishing to watch them develop and become distinct personalities, and so many of them follow the same path that other parents can remember and relate. The process of seeing them learn about the world around them and discover their ability to manipulate it is almost magical, but at the same time chaotic and exhausting for parents.
This is a really simple game. You know that is a loaded statement. Just because a game is simple doesn’t mean it can’t be maddeningly difficult to win, or finish. I’m not sure this game even has a finishing, or winning, point. All you do is click the tile that is a different color. But the further you go, the less contrast there is in the tiles. Eventually you will be seeing waves of color and changing tiles, although that’s in your head. How far will you go? I made it to level 23 once, although I stumbled at 18 the first time around. -via Metafilter
Back in the day, medicine didn't fool around, not even for a cough. This picture shows the alarming active ingredients in One Night Cough Syrup. I’m sure anyone that took this got their money’s worth. It would certainly stop your cough, or at least make you forget you had one. It’s nice that they assured us the alcohol was less than 1%, as if that was the scariest ingredient.
I found a legal case from 1934 involving this cough syrup, in which the FDA ruled that the claims of its therapeutic properties were misleading, and a few dozen bottles that had been shipped across state lines were destroyed.
-via Boing Boing
An artist who goes by the name Wake takes custom action figures and creates entire 1/6 scale scenes from movies and TV shows to showcase them. Some are pretty near indistinguishable from the source material!
Wake posted many pictures of his dioramas at the action figure forum Sideshow Freaks. You’ll find an index with a photo from many of his collections here, and you can follow the page numbers to see more of each collection. However, as the forum thread grows, the page numbers are a bit skewed, and you may have to look around a bit to see them all. Because there are a lot of pictures.
-via the A.V.Club
Remember the research we posted that proved that Kansas is indeed flatter than a pancake? Geographers Jerome Dobson and Joshua Campbell took exception to the methods used in that study, and indeed it is a case of comparing apples and oranges. Still, the two things being compared came straight from the old adage. Dobson and Campbell did their own research into the matter.
For their study, The Flatness of U.S. States, the pair developed a measure of human-scale perception of flatness by creating an algorithm that approximated what a person of average height would see if they were standing in a given spot and turning around in a circle, taking in 16 different views in a revolution. Then they took elevation data for the country from NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, divided the contiguous U.S. (sorry, Alaska and Hawaii, but they already figured you wouldn’t be the flattest) into 90-meter cells and ran the algorithm to get a flatness score for each cell (calculated by the number of views in the cell that appeared flat: 0-4 flat views was considered “not flat”; 5-8 flat views, flat; 9-12, flatter and 13-16, flattest). Each state was then measured in terms of percentage of land that was not flat, flat, flatter and flattest, and then ranked.
It turned out that Kansas is not even in the top five the flattest states in the States! Kansas actually came in seventh. Try to guess which state is actually the flattest in the union before you learn the answer at mental_floss.
(Image credit: Flickr user Patrick Emerson)
Caspar Babypants makes music for children. “Pretty Crabby” is the first song from the new album Rise and Shine. The video is a wonderful stop-motion animation featuring yarn crafts, by Charlotte Blacker and Mark Taylor. About the song:
This one started out as a really abstract song called PRETTY SPARKLE and I was trying to capture the wonder of being alive in a song. It turned out to be too abstract so I gutted it and made it about this wee crab that I met on the beach on an island a little while ago. It seemed like it was having a bad day and wanted to get me but it was also an amazing creature with its intricate shell. In the end you can listen to this song if you are feeling crabby and maybe it will cheer you up!
Well, it worked for me! -via Tastefully Offensive
Post-game interviews with football players mean nothing to non-football fans, because we don’t know the game well enough to follow their technical explanations of what happened. Now, if you take it down to the high school level, you run into players who are camera shy and suddenly don’t know what to say. Neither is the case with Apollos Hester, wide receiver for the East View Patriots of Georgetown, Texas. You’ll see why the Austin TV station didn’t go to the quarterback for a post-game interview. Hester might become a professional football player when he grows up, but if he doesn’t, he could be …anything he wants to be. His attitude, enthusiasm, and presence will open doors. -via Viral Viral Videos
This Russian security video in Lyubertsy, a suburb of Moscow, shows what appears to be a horrific accident in an intersection, but surprisingly, no one was injured. Oh, you think the guy on the bicycle bought the farm, but he eventually comes to his senses and gets up and walks out of the road. We don’t have a view of the lights, so we don’t know who had the right of way here, but did anyone get the plate number on that red car that blew through? -via Daily Picks and Flicks
The following is an article from Uncle John's Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader.
You know what would be a great trip? A trip where you went to all these places. (With a boat full of money. So you could buy stuff -and have a place to put it all!)
DJEMA el-FNA (Marrakech)
(Image credit: Flickr user Philippe Mériot)
Djema el-Fna is the name of the square at the center of the old, walled section of this ancient Moroccan desert city- and it’s been the home of an outdoor market off and on for more than 1,000 years. Today it’s actually a collection of several souks -Arabic for “market”- overlapping in the quire and extending into the maze like alleyways around it. Fresh-squeezed orange juice stands and food stands are everywhere, intermixed with jugglers, musicians, storytellers, and merchants selling rugs, spices, brass work and a lot more. (The origin of “Djema el-Fna” is unknown; it means, roughly, “The Mosque at the End of the World.”)
(Image credit: David Samuel Santos)
Highlight: The snake charmers. Every morning there are dozens of snake charmers with live cobras at Djema el-Fna.
PLAKA MARKET (Athens)
(Image credit: Flickr user Robert Wallace)
Plaka is a neighborhood in Athens, Greece, located in the shadow of the city’s famed Acropolis. In the 1970s the nightclubs the neighborhood was known for began to close, and merchants moved in. Today it is a jammed-packed madness of thousands of shops and street side stalls selling too much to list. The market is especially known for its embroidered fabrics, amber jewelry, and musical instruments. There are also a lot of cafes, restaurants, and world class museums. Bonus: No cars allowed. It’s all foot traffic.
(Image credit: Badseed)
Highlight: Every Sunday (for the last 110 years), the Monastiraki Flea Market takes place just a few streets from Plaka. Great place to get Greek antiques, backgammon sets, religious icons, etc.
MARCHÉ BASTILLE (Paris)
The tarantula hawk is neither a tarantula nor a hawk. It’s a really scary Pepsis wasp. It can grow really large and has an extremely painful sting. From Wikipedia:
Commenting on his own experience, Justin O. Schmidt, entomologist and creator of the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, described the pain as "…immediate, excruciating pain that simply shuts down one's ability to do anything, except, perhaps, scream. Mental discipline simply does not work in these situations."[2] In terms of scale, the wasp's sting is rated near the top of the Schmidt sting pain index, second only to that of the bullet ant, and is described by Schmidt as "blinding, fierce [and] shockingly electric".[5]
The tarantula hawk is the official state insect of New Mexico. But they range all over, with around 250 species in South America alone. Redditor Gonolek found this wasp dead in the hotel he worked at in Brazil. You can put your hand up your screen with his to picture how big it is. I would hate to encounter a wasp that size alive.
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