The Coptic Monastery of Saint Simon on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt, is not all that ancient, but it is magnificent. Built in 1976, it holds 20,000 people! The church serves the Zabbaleen, a group of former farmers who migrated to Cairo in the 1940s and became garbage workers. They settled near the cliffs of the Mokattam quarries and a eventually built the church right into the cliffside. See more pictures at Amusing Planet. Link -via mental_floss
(Image credit: Flickr user vagabondblogger)
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Through the month of October, Neatorama will feature our readers' Halloween costumes of the past. The very first costume picture sent in was this tasty taco! Emily Towers' grandmother made this costume for her.
My grandmother made all my Halloween costumes growing up. She was a very talented seamstress. For the 4th grade I told her I wanted to be a taco, my favorite food. She was from Hungary, and didn't know what a taco was. But she bought some magazines and did her best down to the sliced tomato pillows. I got to lead the parade at school!
That looks spicy -and adorable. Thanks, Emily!
Send us a picture of your most memorable Halloween costume! Email it to tips@neatorama.com and then look for it on the Halloween Blog during October. The best costumes will win a t-shirt from the NeatoShop!
What did you want to be for Halloween when you were a kid? As you see here, redditor Lillibeth wanted to be a table. Did you ever go trick-or-treating in anything so strange? Or maybe you were kid who constructed your own costume -or maybe you had the mom who went all out for Halloween.
We would love to see pictures of your Halloween costumes. Whether you were a kid or an adult, whether they are awesome, odd, funny, or horribly embarrassing, find those pictures of Halloweens past and send them in! Tell us the story behind the costume, if you've got one. We will post as many of them as we possibly can on the Halloween blog in October.
And when Halloween draws near, we will select the top costume pictures and reward the senders with t-shirts from the NeatoShop!
Send your Halloween costume pictures to tips@neatorama.com and check the Halloween blog for the pictures to start popping up. You could be a winner this Halloween!
The video is five minutes long, but if you skip around, you'll miss the amazing effect, the point of it all. Anthony Cerniello wanted to show the aging process in a way that hadn't been done before. He used Danielle, but Danielle is more than one person.
Last Thanksgiving, Cerniello traveled to his friend Danielle’s family reunion and with still photographer Keith Sirchio shot portraits of her youngest cousins through to her oldest relatives with a Hasselblad medium format camera. Then began the process of scanning each photo with a drum scanner at the U.N. in New York, at which point he carefully edited the photos to select the family members that had the most similar bone structure. Next he brought on animators Nathan Meier and Edmund Earle who worked in After Effects and 3D Studio Max to morph and animate the still photos to make them lifelike as possible. Finally, Nuke (a kind of 3D visual effects software) artist George Cuddy was brought on to smooth out some small details like the eyes and hair.
After all, it would be hard to get anyone to stand still long enough for a video to show them growing older. Link -via Metafilter
Wooly Willie comes alive in a stop-motion animation by Peter Simon. As you can guess, the behind-the-scenes video shows a very hairy Tom Offer-Westort taking all day to get a haircut and shave, considering they stopped between every phase to take a set of portraits. -via Tastefully Offensive
This is not the first time that Simon has documented his friend Tom's rare haircut. It happened two years ago as well.
A pair of superheroes responded to a house fire in Milton, West Virginia, even before the firefighters arrived.
Batman and Captain America, or John Buckland and Troy Marcum -- were both in costume at an event at the nearby American Legion Post. They were teaching positive lessons to children, but the lesson became real life. When they saw smoke, the two super heroes sprang into action, rushing towards the flames to see if anyone was inside.
***
"He (Captain America) breaks out the window," Buckland said. "The smokes lets out and as I can start to see I reach down and grab something furry!"
While the home owners were out of town, their cat couldn't get out and had to be resuscitated by Batman.
Buckland was a firefighter before his career as the Caped Crusader. The cat was not initially happy about being rescued, and even hissed at Batman. But bystanders were impressed. Link -via Daily of the Day
(Image source: WBLX)
Last week, the video labeled Worst Twerk Fail Ever took the internet by storm. It showed a girl start out dancing and end up on fire. No one at Neatorama posted it, because
1. Twerking videos are not particularly neat.
2. It was either fake or she was hurt.
3. It smelled like viral video advertising.
Then last night it was revealed that the whole thing was a prank by the show Jimmy Kimmel Live. Now that a layer of comedy has been added to the story, it's well worth sharing with you. The funniest part is how many TV news outlets ran the video without checking out the circumstances behind it. Link
This looping gif may be a goldfish lover's dream, but the actual video of the guy is a bit messier. See the original stunt at Vine. Link -via The Daily Dot
Zach Anner has a new video series called Workout Wednesday, in which he shows you how to get in shape. While trying a new exercise, he also gives out weird and wonderful motivational tidbits. This is episode three, where we see Zach bench-pressing and giving advice to returning students. The other episodes are just as funny, especially #2 where he answers a challenge to work out on a treadmill. -via Metafilter
Previously: More from Zach Anner.
How can a Raggedy Ann doll be haunted? This one, named Annabelle, is thought by some to be possessed by a demon, which is why it is sealed under glass.
In 1970, a woman shopping in a thrift store bought a Raggedy-Ann style doll for her daughter, who was in college. Her daughter liked it and put it in her apartment, but soon she and her roommate both noticed odd things happening involving the doll. It would move by itself, often being found in another room even though no one had touched it. They found small scraps of parchment paper, which they didn't even own, with childish handwriting scrawled on them. They even found the doll standing impossibly on its rag doll legs one day.
The doll even attacked one of the girl's boyfriend once! Read about this doll, and other haunted objects like it (or even worse) at Oddee. Link -via mental_floss
What will they think of next? Aluminum bubble wrap! Molecular superglue! And how about that titanium foam? It's as simple as coating a piece of polyurethane foam with titanium, and then getting rid of the foam. Neat, but this next part is even better:
The exact properties depend on the porosity of the foam, but the results are strong and—most importantly—incredibly light. In fact, the material is just perfect for replacing bone: it has incredibly similar mechanical properties and, because it's porous, new bone can grow and around its structure, truly integrating the implant within the skeleton. Anything that gets us that much closer to a real-life Wolverine is okay in our book.
Read about five such brave new materials and what they may be good for at Gizmodo. Link
Cal Worthington was a car dealer in California who became a television icon with his quirky TV ads featuring his dog, Spot. The kicker was that "Spot" was never a dog, but a different animal for each ad. Worthington played himself in various movies and TV shows, gaining nationwide fame. Worthington died at his home Sunday. He was 92. Link
See more Cal Worthington ads at the website My Dog Spot. Link
-via Metafiler
Daniel Loxton is a writer at Skeptic magazine. Donald R. Prothero is a paleontologist. They got together and wrote the new book Abominable Science! Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids, which may be a disappointment for people who buy it for the title alone. National Geographic News has an interview with both authors. A sample:
All the cryptids that you discuss in the book – Bigfoot, the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, Mokele Mbembe – are very similar to things that exist or existed in the past: bears, primates, plesiosaurs, sauropods. Why the similarity?
DL: In some cases I think it's because they are the same. Bears are often associated with ogres or wildmen in folklore because they're pretty humanlike. Once that folklore is underway, you have the opportunity for people to make these misidentification errors where they see a bear and think it might be a bigfoot.
DP: These animals look like something familiar to us because the myths grow around whatever we've already just seen. Daniel pointed out in the book that the Mokele Mbembe myth emerged right about the time that large sauropod skeletons were first mounted in New York City and illustrated by people like Charles R. Knight. Then lo and behold, someone starts reporting one in the Congo, where it doesn't have any history prior to that.
The authors also discuss the phrase "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" at NatGeo News. Link
(Image credit: AP)
PBS Digital Studios shows us how stop-motion animation is done. It's a lot of work taking 24 photographs for every second of video! Animators also talk about the philosophy and history of stop-motion animation, and along the way you'll see plenty of clips from videos you've seen and loved. -via mental_floss
Email This Post to a Friend