The MESSENGER spacecraft took this image on the surface of Mercury a couple of years ago. MESSENGER has already taken 150,000 pictures, and will continue snapping them until 2015. So it's no wonder that it took NASA this long to analyze enough data to determine that Han Solo has been photographed. Here's part of NASA's statement on the find:
If there are two things you should remember, it's not to cross a Hutt, and that Mercury's surface can throw up all kinds of surprises. In this image, a portion of the terrain surrounding the northern margin of the Caloris basin hosts an elevated block in the shape of a certain carbonite-encased smuggler who can make the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.
Want to eat like a pirate on Talk Like a Pirate Day? Marauding buccaneers didn't leave cookbooks behind, and we rarely run across a description of what pirates ate. The fact is that living at sea with no refrigeration made food storage a nasty business. One reason rum was so important is that it helped to make stagnant water and moldy food palatable. But they did have a recipe or two.
In the West Indies, a popular pirate dish among marauders was salmagundi, a stew of the odds-and-ends of meat and vegetables thrown into a communal pot and heavily seasoned. In his book Pirates and Piracy, author David Reinhardt provides a litany of ingredients one might find in the cauldron and the manner of preparation:
Included might be any of the following: turtle meat, fish, pork, chicken, corned beef, ham, duck and pigeon. The meats would be roasted, chopped into pieces and marinated in spied wine, then mixed with cabbage, anchovies, pickled herring, mangoes, hard-boiled eggs, palm hearts, onions, olives, grapes and any other pickled vegetable available. The entire concoction would then be highly seasoned with garlic, salt, pepper, and mustard seed and soaked with oil and vinegar.
Doesn't that sound wonderful for supper? Read more about the pirate diet at Smithsonian's Food and Think blog. Link
It's his favorite show. Waldorf is learning how to hunt impala with a pack. I just think it's delightful that someone named a cat Waldorf. (via Tastefully Offensive)
Here's a Bridezilla story told in a series of emails. First, the bride lays out a series of ten rules for her bridesmaids. She refers to herself as Queen Bee. But some bridesmaids had trouble toeing the line.
Hello my faithful bees,
Chloe has colored her hair. She has repented her sins to the QB and she has been forgiven for her minor lapse in forgetting the protocol.
Kudos to Chelsea for asking permission to cut her hair, unfortunately, her request is DENIED.
Onto to my next point. We will begin weekly weigh-ins on January 17th. I will be sending over the form for everyone to fill out and submit with a picture of the scale shortly.
Lastly, I am looking into bridesmaid rhinestone bikinis and I am open to color suggestions from everyone but Miss Holly because I have already chosen a customizable bikini for her, see below. If anyone could help me find bandeau rhinestone bikinis, I would greatly appreciate it. I would like it so say MAIDS in sparkle, rhinestones, or pearls. Not too much to ask, I know.
It sounds completely made up -I mean, no one really acts like that! Identifying information has been removed from the email messages, but a commenter says she knows the bride and gave further information on the wedding -which was lovely, but probably left scars in some friendships. Link -via Digg
Kids are exposed to violence. Where is all this violence coming from? At least the cartoon didn't end with, "It's coming from inside the house!" That's a real horror. Comic by Julia Lepetit and Andrew Bridgman at Dorkly. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
A 61-year-man in Texas went to a hospital complaining of dizziness. He was very drunk, but insisted he hadn't had a drink that day. His wife said he would become drunk at odd times. Hospital staff assumed he was lying about drinking, but gastroenterologist Dr. Justin McCarthy and Panola College dean of nursing Barbara Cordell wanted to get to the bottom of the case. They isolated the patient and monitored his blood-alcohol level for 24 hours, and found his alcohol level spontaneously went up after eating!
Eventually, McCarthy and Cordell pinpointed the culprit: an overabundance of brewer's yeast in his gut.
That's right, folks. According to Cordell and McCarthy, the man's intestinal tract was acting like his own internal brewery.
The patient had an infection with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Cordell says. So when he ate or drank a bunch of starch — a bagel, pasta or even a soda — the yeast fermented the sugars into ethanol, and he would get drunk. Essentially, he was brewing beer in his own gut. Cordell and McCarthy the case of "auto-brewery syndrome" a few months ago in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine.
The condition is quite rare, as brewer's yeast is usually not a problem for a healthy digestive system. Link -via Arbroath
Set during the Festival d'Opéra de Québec, TFO brought opera to the people by inviting the public to engage with a new interactive and never- seen-before instrument. The Living Piano is a 12-note, giant keyboard that you play with your feet, featuring opera singers who elegantly belt out their corresponding notes as the different keys are played. From children to seniors to the occasional dog, TFO allowed the public to play with and discover opera as they moved from note to note, making music every step of the way.
Arrr! The Unipiper is at it again! Excuse me, make that the Unipirate! I don't know if Brian Kidd talks like a pirate, but he's celebrating Talk Like a Pirate Day by playing the pipes on his unicycle dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow. -Thanks, Brian!
Hey look! It's time for our collaboration with the wonderful What Is It? Blog! Do you know what the object in this picture is? It doesn't really matter if you do, because we are looking for the funniest guesses. You can win a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! But first, read the rules:
Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners who submit funny and/or clever (albeit ultimately wrong) answers will each win a T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
If you guess the correct answer, you'll get a big pat on the back.
There are more pictures of this thing at the What Is It? Blog. Good luck!
Update: It's a fisherman's surf sinker, also called a breakaway sinker, spider weight, or grapnel sinker. Neatoramanauts had much better answers. Berhard said it was the "matrix bug" that crawled into Neo's belly (in the only Matrix movie). That's funny-and worth a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! Another t-shirt goes to DrWhat who said,
I'm just going to go ahead and state the obvious. It's an electric marshmallow roaster. You poke one marshmallow on each of the four wires and then connect the two leads to your power source. A few seconds later, toasted from the inside out all ready for s'mores.
Congratulations to both! See the answers to all this weeks mystery items at the What Is It? blog.
UPdate #2: Thanks to commenter Anthony Novak, the What Is it? blog has updated their answer for this item. This is a launched grapnel hook for firing into mine fields and dragging back to detonate trip wire mines, patent number 5,448,937.
Watch the otter on the left put on a show with his personal pebble. The little guy has talent! Spotted at Sea Life aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany. -via Tastefully Offensive
Visual Anatomy Limited offers medical illustrations and chocolate. While those two businesses don't appear to really mesh, the chocolates come in the shapes of bodily organs. You can get chocolates brains, hearts, livers, colons, ears, eyes, skulls, pelvis bones, pancreas, kidneys, or other organs, in small or large sizes, or in assorted gift boxes. Some are even available on a stick! Link -via Laughing Squid
When billionaire Howard Hughes died in 1976, he left no children, wife, or siblings behind. He also left no will. Sorting out who inherited what from his vast holdings turned out to be a real nightmare.
While the various parties were fighting it out, a couple of different wills surfaced, though eventually thrown out as fakes. A notable one was the three-page document that declared Melvin Dummar, a gas station attendant, was to inherit 1/16 of Hughes’ fortune. Supposedly, Dummar once picked Hughes up off the side of the road and gave him a ride to his hotel, and Hughes was so grateful that he left Dummar a huge chunk of money. In 1978, the will was thrown out as a forgery.
Next, “wives” started emerging from Hughes’ past, taking advantage of his reclusive reputation to explain why no one had heard of them before. Terry Moore, an actress, claimed to have married Hughes twice, but provided no documentation to support her assertions. She did, in fact, once live with Hughes in the 1940s, but her claim that they were not only married, but never divorced, was called into question given the fact that she married three times after her supposed marriage to Hughes. Nevertheless, she must have put forward a good argument, or at least pestered the estate managers so much that they decided to pay her just to get rid of her, because she was paid $400,000 by the estate. Later, Moore wrote a book titled Beauty and a Billionaire which made the bestseller list, likely lining her pockets a bit more.
In addition to supposed wives, an extraordinary number of Hughes’ supposed children decided to acknowledge their deceased father. One was said to be the lovechild of Hughes and Amelia Earhart—product of the Mile High Club?—even though Earhart never had any children. At least two were black, but their claims were thrown out as Hughes was known to be quite the racist.
Learn about the lengthy process of settling the estate and who finally gained in the end at Today I Found Out. Link -via mental_floss
One of the most popular articles of the day is a guide to using commas from Business Insider. The rules are pretty down-to-earth, and the mood is lightened by the duck in most of the examples. But there are always people who will disagree, or at least make a joke out of them. Some of the responses from Fark:
Thirteen rules for using commas without looking, like an idiot.
I'd like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God.
So, when you see a duck you are to use commas?
No, one should treat rule #9 as an absolute.
The actual rules are not quite as funny, but read them and you'll be thinking of duck all night. Link
Did you go see the Baz Luhrman movie The Great Gatsby? You probably didn't think a thing was wrong with the curvy women of the film, but Lisa Hix noticed. The real flappers of the 1920s didn't have what modern actresses have, meaning prominent breasts. In fact, the style of the time was anything but curvaceous.
Jonathan Walford, co-founder of the Fashion History Museum, says the Roaring Twenties party scene viewed the release of women’s bodies from constraining undergarments as wildly sexy.
“Dresses featured legs, arms, hips and faces, not cleavage,” Walford writes in an email. “It meant a woman was no longer bound by convention—she was liberated from the confines of traditional femininity because she could think for herself, dance and drink and smoke and swear, and that is sex appeal.”
So Hix called Catherine Martin, The Great Gatsby's producer, production designer, and costume designer.
For the body-hugging fit of the film’s clothes, Martin, who is also married to “Great Gatsby” director Baz Luhrmann, says she took inspiration from a recent exhibition of the clothes designed by 1920s innovator Jeanne Lanvin at the Museé des Arts Decoratifs in Paris.
“It was interesting to see clothes in person, styled on a mannequin, and then see a model of the period in the same clothing, in a black-and-white photo,” she says. “I noticed how ethereal and extraordinary the clothes seemed on these very neutral dummies and how incredibly frumpy the clothes looked on the person wearing them in the photograph.
“I think that what we understand as a ’20s silhouette is very much from the snapshot or from the social pages,” she continues. “But when you see the sketch of the creator, there is a big disconnect. What we chose to do, because we wanted to really capture the spirit of the ’20s, is really look at a lot of illustrations that people drew of the clothes.”
In other words, Martin’s movie is more about the fantasy world of the 1920s in the minds of forward-thinking designers, and not how it looked in real life. And she believes the ’20s ideas about sex appeal were much closer to 2013’s. But to Walford, it’s more like Martin imposed modern reality-TV standards of beauty onto “Gatsby,” which was set during a time when people admired an entirely different aesthetic.
Read about the fashion goals of the 1920s, and how they differ from our modern standards, at Collectors Weekly, plus a gorgeous gallery of flapper fashions. Link
