You've read about the toilet-themed restaurant in Taiwan. I know we've blogged about it. Now, the Magic Restroom Cafe is open in Los Angeles. Diners sit on toilet seats, eat out of toilet-shaped bowls, and select foods with awful names. The walls are decorated with shower heads!
Sadly, not all chairs are toilet seats, and none of the toilets have water tanks attached. Thankfully, seat covers are employed, and no one's actually forced to cop a squat while downing dishes so lovingly named: "black poop" (chocolate sundae), "smells-like-poop" (braised pork over rice), "constipation" (zha jiang mian), "bloody number two" (vanilla-strawberry sundae). For an Alinea-esque multi-sensory dining experience, it's best to order the stinky tofu for the pleasant malodor.
Only time will tell whether Americans flock to a toilet restaurant the way people in Taiwan do. Read mofre about it at Eater L.A. -via Laughing Squid
Branka Delic of Sydney, Australia, has been a Bon Jovi fan most of her life. When she and Gonza became engaged in August, she launched a website called Bon Jovi – Please Walk Me Down The Aisle? They arranged the wedding for October 12th at the Graceland Chapel in Las Vegas, which is where Jon Bon Jovi got married in 1989. As it so happened, Jon Bon Jovi was in Las Vegas that day, playing a show at the MGM Grand as part of his "Because We Can" tour.
Still, Delic had no idea he was going to show up to fulfill her dream on the day of the wedding; Bon Jovi surprised her with his appearance. He posed for some pictures with the grinning bride, then did what he had been asked to do.
The live show called Saturday Night (later known as Saturday Night Live) premiered on October 11th, 1975. A few days before that, Lorne Michaels took all seven Not Ready for Primetime Players to the Tomarrow with Tom Snyder to introduce them. For the vantage point of 38 years later, it's hard to imagine that no one had ever heard of these seven people.
Snyder: "What should we look for in your show?"
Michaels: "Anxiety."
Ah, memories. Even when I didn't make it home by 11:30 on a Saturday night, I managed to watch the show wherever I was at the time. But that one time we kept Neilsen diaries, I made sure to watch at home and log it. Open Culture tells us about the beginning of the show, complete with audition on video and a classic sketch by Gilda Radner. -via mental_floss
"Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty …Hobbit!" Here's a mashup I'd have never thought of -Gandalf and Frodo as inhabitants of The Planet of the Apes! That makeup must have taken some time. These two are just a couple of the hundreds of cosplayers that descended on New York Comic Con 2013. In case you can't get enough cosplay, or you're looking for inspiration for a Halloween costume, check out a gallery of the best of the con at Geeks Are Sexy.
Four-year-old Tristan captured the hearts of the audience and judges on Belgium's Got Talent last week. He'd be a star just standing there, as cute as he is! Then he dances and the crowd eats it up. You have to consider that the song has been out for a big part of this child's life; he probably doesn't remember a world without Gangnam Style. The only part of this video that's in English is one judge, who Tristan obviously cannot understand, but then again, you can pretty much figure out what everyone is saying. -via Viral Viral Videos
If you were a Disney cast member in 1976 and got the opportunity to play a character in one of the theme parks, this video helped you learn the rules. Thanks to Everything is Terrible, we get a glimpse into the not-so-glamorous world of catering to children the Disney way. -via Metafilter
If you want to know what it's really like to be a costumed character at a Disney park, you can read the experiences of people who've done it.
Crystal Nettles played head characters such as Pluto and Eeyore.
The great Eugen Sandow was not the first bodybuilder, but he was the first to bring the sport to the masses. Sandow was the one who made it somehow alright to set a framed picture of a naked man on your parlor piano. After all, he was a Vaudeville star! Collectors Weekly talked to David L. Chapman, who wrote several books on the history of bodybuilding and male physique photography about Eugen Sandow and his legacy.
Collectors Weekly: Do you think the risqué quality drew people to his shows?
Chapman: I think you can be absolutely sure that was the main reason people went to see him. He was a good-looking guy, and he had the total package: He had a great face and skin and muscles. And people had never quite seen anything like it, so they were amazed.
As far as the nudity is concerned, he was never fully naked onstage, but in photographs he certainly was. Sandow established the vocabulary of physique photography that was carried on until the ’50s and ’60s. As long as the hunk was posed like a statue, you could get away with it. If he was posed in a more provocative style, then it was considered pornography. You had to be careful. There was a thin line you had to tread.
Sandow's career gave rise to fitness publications, a phenomenon that catered to both aspiring athletes and bodybuilders and to gay porn aficionados. Read the rest of the interview with Chapman at Collectors Weekly.
Montreal comedians Bowser & Blue perform a song about a much misunderstood profession, that of the colorectal surgeon. Like a funeral director, you can only appreciate their dedication when you need one. Some careers are thankless, others are thankless and require that you have a sense of humor. -via a comment at Daily of the Day
Watch the little blue car on the right. Getting out of this parking lot should be a simple matter of backing up, swinging around, and leaving. But somehow, the driver manages to always turn exactly the wrong way, the wrong amount, and go in exactly the wrong direction, until it become painful to watch. How can this person possibly negotiate a regular street with traffic? And it's a little tiny car! Honestly, my 15-year-old drives better than this. I felt particularly sorry for the station wagon driver who decided to wait for the blue car to leave. -via reddit
Can you think of anyone who's been in as many hit movies as Tom Hanks? Over four decades, he's had a lot of different looks in those different characters. Vulture presents a quiz in which you are challenged to identify a movie from Tom Hanks' character's hair only. Strangely, it's not as hard as you think -you did enjoy those movies quite a bit, didn't you? Besides, it's a multiple choice quiz. And it also gives you a little taste of how many movies he's done -nowhere near all of them are represented. I scored nine out of 13, mainly because there were a few with haircuts and more than one choice that I haven't seen. -via Everlasting Blort
Who will you encounter after you kick the bucket? The Grim Reaper? Or maybe an entirely different specter? It might depend on where you live, since none of the world's religions seems to agree on who -or what- will be waiting on the other side. Here are some of Death's strangest personifications.
Name: Yamaraj
Origin: Hindu culture
Details: Also known as Dharmaraj, or Yama, for short, his name literally means "the Lord of Death." In artistic depictions, he's a portly man with a mustache and, legend says, skin that's "the color of a rain cloud." He rides the plains of existence on a water buffalo, and upon a person's death, ropes the departed soul with a lasso and carries it to Yamalok, the Hindu underworld. His assistant, Chitragupta, keeps track of all the good and bad deeds of every human on the planet, and after checking the records, Yama determines how each should will be reincarnated. If the person was good, he might return as a tiger. If not: a mosquito.
(Image credit: Papa Ghede by DeviantART member snapesgirl34)
Name: Papa Ghede
Origin: Haiti
Details: Voodoo practitioners believe that a short, cigar-chomping man in a top hat is waiting of rhtem at the crossroads of Earth and the afterlife. That man is Papa Ghede, who legend says is the living corpse of the first man who ever died. He's aided by four other spirits who handle everything from guarding graveyards to giving voices to the dead during seances. Ghede loves rum and is known for his crass sense of humor and great wisdom, which includes an extensive knowledge of everything that happens in the worlds of the living and the dead. He also reads minds and sometime inhabits humans, inspiring them to make love. If that isn't enough, Ghede is also the patron saint of those who die young. Worshipers offer him rum, cigars, or sacrificed cows to prevent him from taking sick children to the underworld.
Today's featured costume comes from T.J. Griffin. It's a real groaner!
I usually try to have a Halloween costume that is topical, current and funny.
In 2005, the movie Legend of Zorro came out, starring Antonio Banderas.
I already had a cape and hat and mask, but it didn't seen funny. Living in Buffalo NY, we are a five minute drive from the Peace Bridge to the province of Ontario in Canada. Canadian flags and license plates are a common sight in town. I kept running the movie title through my head, then inspiration struck.
I went to the duty free shop, bought a small patch featuring the Canadian flag,sewed it to a black handkerchief and added it to my costume.
I had business cards printed up and when people would ask me what I was, I would hand them a card which read:
Zorro, featuring Ontario Bandanas
Ha! I love a good costume pun. Thanks, T.J!
Have you been keeping up with the featured coatume every day at the Halloween blog? Neatoramanauts have some great pictures of memorable Halloweens of the past! You can be a part of it, too -go find a picture of Halloween costume you've worn or made for your kids and send it to us tips@neatorama,com and then look for it on the Halloween blog! Whether it's awesome, funny, embarrassing, or just has a good story behind it, we want to see it. When it gets close to Halloween, we will award Neatorama t-shirts to the best pictures -you can't beat a deal like that!
A webcomic by frenums has turned to Halloween humor with skeletons. The jokes are so old they are desiccated, the puns could use some fleshing out, and the art is bare boned, but when you put them all together, it will tickle your funny bone. The skeleton gets humerus at the expense of vampires, ghosts, and other skeletons. See more of them at frenum's Tumbler blog. -via Metafilter
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
by Wadim Strielkowski (Charles University, Prague), Evgeny Lisin (MPEI, Moscow), and Emily Welkins (University of Strasbourg)
Our paper describes intertemporal interactions between vampires and humans based on several types of vampire behavior described in popular fiction, films, and television series. Our main research question is: If vampires were real and lived among us, would their existence be possible? We draw several scenarios of vampire–human equilibria and use models with differential equations to test under what provisions vampires could have existed amongst humans. Mathematical modeling reveals that several popular culture sources outline the models describing plausible and peaceful coexistence.
Recent Research About Vampires
Since the 1980s, such topics as behavior of vampires, economic significance of vampirism, and optimal bloodsucking strategies (e.g. preventing the depletion of renewable human resources) have found their way into the research literature, becoming an inspiration for several academic papers (Hart and Mehlmann, 1982, 1983; Hartl, Mehlmann and Novak, 1992; Neocleus, 2003; Efthimiou and Gandhi, 2007).
Vampires are often described in legends and folklore. The word "vampire" comes from the Hungarian language. The first myths and legends about vampires can be found in Mesopotamian texts dating back to 4000 B.C.E. (Campbell Thompson, 1904).
Consider introducing vampires into the model of population growth denoted by dx/dt = kx. The vampire population is denoted by the function y(t), y0=1. Vampires act as natural predators for humans. The human population dynamics can therefore be presented as the following function: dx/dt = kx-v(x)y, where v(x) is the rate at which humans are killed by vampires.
Assume that the number of any vampire's victims is growing proportionally. Thence, the function v(x) can be presented as the following: v(x)=ax, where a > 0 is the coefficient of the human's lethal interaction with a vampire (a human is either killed by a vampire or is turned into a vampire). As a result, the differential equation describing the growth rate of human population can be formulated as the following: dx/dt = x(k-ay). Assume the dynamics of vampire's population change to be y(t). The growth of vampire population will be determined by the quality and quantity of interactions with humans.
After selecting its victim, any vampire can kill it by draining its blood, turn it into a new vampire, or feed on it but leave it to live.
Let us also introduce vampire slayers into the model. The slayers regulate the population of vampires by periodically killing vampires. The equation will then be modified to be dy/dt = baxy-cy, where 0 < b ≤ 1 is the coefficient reflecting the rate with which humans are turned into vampires and c ≥ 0 is the coefficient of lethal outcome of the interaction between a vampire and vampire slayer.
In order to solve this, we need to consider a Lotka-Volterra system, or a "predator–prey" type model (Volterra, 1931). The system allows for the stationary solution, meaning that there is a pair of solutions for the system that creates a state when human and vampire populations can coexist in time without any change in numbers. The size of human population is determined by the effectiveness of slaying vampires by vampire hunters c and the number of cases when the humans are turned into vampires ba. The size of vampire population depends on the growth rate of human population k and vampires' thirst for human blood a. The stationary solution shows that when vampires are capable of restraining their blood thirst, the size of both populations can be rather high in mutual co-existence. The system is held in balance by the existence of vampire slayers.
Of course, it's a fake trailer. No movie studio thinks Aquaman would be worth the trouble of a feature film! Aquaman gets no respect, even though he puts up with more difficulty than other super heroes. And that's the entire gist of this trailer that traces the origin story of the super hero plus his first big adventure helping a sea creature we all know and love. But then again, this video by Ryan Higa may give Hollywood an idea or two! -via Viral Viral Videos
