I know how she feels -I have four of them. This Twaggie was illustrated by Charles C. Somerville from a Tweet by Bambam Victoria. See the funniest illustrated Tweets every day at Twaggies! Link
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Nina Levy is a photographer and sculptor, but she draws some awesome things, too -on napkins for her sons' lunches! I would think the boys would use school napkins to actually clean up any mess, because the ones Mom puts in their lunch boxes are works of art.
Suits designed for deep sea divers have gone through a lot of designs, and the modern ones look as strange at the first ones. Dark Roasted Blend has illustrations and photographs from the entire history of deep sea diving. Shown is a French diving suit from the 19th century, although it might easily be mistaken for an alien from outer space. Link
The Tampa Woman's Club held a fundraising event in which 400 flutes of champagne each held a gem. All but one were cubic zirconiums, and one lucky participant was to get a $5,000 diamond. However, when the champagne was gone, the real diamond could not be found.
Then, an elderly woman came forward and said she accidentally swallowed what was in her flute.
"I thought someone will win this and I won't have to tell them," Miriam explained.
Miriam immediately went to an area hospital for an x-ray only to find out diamonds don't show up on x-ray.
The very next day, Miriam went in for a routine colonoscopy. When she arrived at the doctor's office she gave him some special instructions.
"Be on the lookout for it in case," she recalled telling her doctor.
Her doctor ended up finding the elusive diamond.
An appraisal determined that it was indeed, a real diamond. The jeweler she took it to would have preferred that she cleaned it first. Link -via Fark
(Image credit: Flickr user Ryan Hyde)
A simple pun led to an interactive web toy called KaleidoPope. And it's just what it says: a kaleidoscope consisting of images of various popes through history. Link -via Laughing Squid
You might not recognize this cowboy, but you know who he is. This is John B. Stetson, who went out West and dreamed up a wide-brimmed felt hat in 1865 to improve upon coonskin caps. The hat that later became known as the Stetson hat protected a man's eyes and face from the sun, and also channeled rainwater away. Read about Stetson and nine other men whose names live on in an article of clothing. Link -via the Presurfer
The neighbor's house was locked, but a troop of baboons didn't care because they just went in through the upstairs windows. Howard Fyvie and his friends in Betty's Bay, South Africa, called police and got access to the house when the owner could not be reached. It doesn't take long for this many baboons to do a lot of damage! -via Arbroath
The realism of special effects in modern movies is unprecedented. With computer imagery and multimillion dollar budgets, they should be! But B-movie buffs appreciate the genius required in creating monsters, spaceships, and giants on a shoestring budget. It takes real imagination and creativity to film a movie in ten days for $500, even back in the days when $500 was real money. For example, Stephen King describes how the spider was done in the movie The Giant Spider Invasion.
“In spite of the title, there is really only one giant spider,” King writes, “but we don’t feel cheated because it’s a dilly. It appears to be a Volkswagen covered with half a dozen bearskin rugs. Four spider legs, operated by people inside this VW spider, one assumes, have been attached to each side. It is impossible to see such a budget-conscious special effect without feeling a wave of admiration.”
As it turns out, King guessed right. The spider was indeed mounted on a Volkswagen with eight people moving the legs inside the car. Richard Albain, who went on to create the FX in John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog, was the man who built the VW spider.
“We had to physically make this thing move, so the quickest, cheapest way is to buy a Volkswagen bug,” he says. “It’s low to the ground, the engine’s in the back, and we can put everything on the frame on the front. We built off it, we welded everything to the body. We used it as a mode of transport, of making it move, and it was low enough to the ground where we could hide it. That way we could drive it up over the hill, and into the city. And the same time we’re rowing the legs, and trying to keep everybody in synch!”
Ed Wood might be known as the worst director in history, but he actually cranked out movies that were shown in theaters. Godzilla is a guy in a suit, but that's the way we know Godzilla. And even though Jaws had a decent budget, it wouldn't have been so suspenseful if Spielberg weren't forced to work around the fact that the shark didn't work. Read about the creativity of limitations at Jamie & Adam Tested. Link -via Digg
In Alex Law's latest project, she takes pictures of little girls in superhero costumes and makes comic book character designs from them, which is a turnabout of the way adults do it: cosplayers recreating comic books as accurately as possible. The kids have no problem with improving upon accuracy by adding what they have available and what they just plain like. After all, there's no real reason the Hulk can't wear a tutu! Link -via Flavorwire
(Illustration credit: Alex Law)
You might recall Isaac Lamb from the video in which he proposed to Amy with a lip dub last year. In this video, he pays tribute to his family to the tune of "Yes to Love" by Stephano Langone. You might want to grab a hanky. -via Metafilter
This man's eyes are closed in this picture. His eyelids are tattooed with images of eyes. Since he had it done, he's never lost a staring contest. He could sleep through a sermon or lecture and no one would ever know, but waking up next to him might be startling. Can you imagine his open casket funeral? There's got to be other parts of life that would be totally different for someone with this particular body art. Link
Before you pay a pretty penny for an antique Windsor chair, hear what Maureen Stanton, the author of the book Killer Stuff and Tons of Money, has to say. She told Lisa Hix about a carpenter named Wesley Swanson, who is a master at building "antiques."
When he’s building a chair, he takes a long time and does everything very carefully. He takes perfectly green wood, and he has a way of aging it so that it’s out-of-round as if it’s aged a hundred years. He has a way of rusting up hardware. He’ll buy scraps and parts from people, or he’ll find an old piece of furniture, like another chair. And he can use the wood, nails, or hardware in the new piece that he’s making to make it look real.
But he has made an old-looking Windsor chair of 100 percent new wood. He’s developed techniques for aging paints with blow dryers and things that. It’s hard to spot the fake aging process in wood unless you X-ray it. It’s hard to tell it’s been done to the paint unless you put the chair through chemical analysis.
Read more about fake antiques in an interview with Stanton at Collector's Weekly. Link
Kristen Kinsey made these amigurumi dolls in the likeness of Dexter Morgan (left) from the TV series Dexter, and Connor from the video game Assassin's Creed 3. See other delightful crocheted amigurumi dolls for sale at her Etsy store LilKillerCities. Link
Back in 1939, when The Wizard of Oz hit theaters, people were amazed at the color and the special effects. Little did the producers know that many years later, we would have home video, so we could watch the movie as many times as we wanted. Then with computers, everyone gained the ability to manipulate movies. Now with animated gifs, we can get a very close look at each individual shot and see things the audience was never intended to see. Those make up a lot of the 17 Things You Probably Didn't Know About The Wizard Of Oz at Buzzfeed. Link
You know, it never occurred to me that Maneki Neko makes a perfect C2PO. But it has occurred to me that cats in Star Wars would have a perfect method for distracting the enemy. -via Tastefully Offensive
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