Our long nightmare is over -one of the worst tattoos that ever went viral has now been fixed. The unnamed owner of the poorly-done tattoo of his late wife's face did his research and approached master artist Scott Versago of Empire Ink in Akron, Ohio, to help him. Versago told the story:
"I got to tackle the official "#1 worst portrait tattoo in the world" today. I'm sure you've all seen it a million times online, as had I. I couldn't believe my eyes when this guy walked in and showed me this project. I think my jaw literally hit the floor. He went on to tell me the story behind the portrait; He had just married his beautiful wife and not even a month afterwards she was killed in a horrible house fire accident leaving him to raise their child alone. Shortly after he went to a local tattoo studio to memorialize his wife and was left with this abomination. He later returned to that studio for one more session, thinking that perhaps "he had done something wrong in the healing of the tattoo" and they butchered it even more the second time. Finally, he drove all the way to my studio, Empire Ink, just to meet me and to see what his options were. Touched by his story, I gifted the entire project to him for free. Now he has closure and I have an amazing story to add to my portfolio!"
Thirteen-year-old Tori Locklear was making a tutorial about curling hair last October when things went really wrong. A few months later, she got up the nerve to put the results on YouTube. This is so perfect I'm not totally convinced it isn't viral advertising, but it is funny! -via reddit
Update: Tori Locklear has been awarded a Golden Plunger Award for an outstanding performance in a bathroom from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
This solar flare was recorded on July 19, 2012. The color has been added because otherwise we could look at it -you know what they say about looking at the sun. Dr. Phil Plait tells us what's going on here.
What you’re seeing is the profound impact of magnetism on the material in the Sun. I’ve described this effect before (with lots of juicy details here), but in a nutshell: The gas inside the Sun is so hot it’s ionized, stripped of electrons. When that happens it’s more beholden to magnetism than gravity, and when the magnetic field lines pierce the Sun’s surface they form loops along which the ionized gas (called plasma) flows along them.
The total time represented by the video is 21 hours. The flare, though small against surface of the sun, is many times bigger than the earth. Read more about it at Bad Astronomy. Link
Collectors Weekly has a pretty comprehensive article on the evolution of black dolls, from homemade dolls to racist caricatures to darker versions of white doll molds to specialty doll companies to what's available today. Because children should have dolls that reflect who they are -and that reflect the people around them. One of the people who contributed to the article is Debbie Behan Garrett, author of the book Black Dolls: A Comprehensive Guide to Celebrating, Collecting, and Experiencing the Passion.
"Because of the false belief that anything white was better than anything black, some early dolls that black parents and children made from household items were often in the image of white people,” Garrett says. “I didn’t personally make any dolls as a child, but I have heard of those who used a Coke bottle as the doll’s body and undyed rope as hair. The undyed rope represented blonde hair.
“In the early movies and television, there were not very many positive images of black people,” she continues. “White characters always had positive roles: There was Shirley Temple, ‘Leave It to Beaver,’ and Opie on ‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ to name a few. Black people had Buckwheat in ‘The Little Rascals’ and other characters that were not positive images for young children. The negative characterization of black people not only affected black children. It was a way to embed in the minds of young white children that all black people were like the ones seen in the media.”
The end of World War II in 1945 brought about a boom in U.S. manufacturing featuring new plastics developed during the war. Suddenly, vinyl and hard plastic dolls were cheap and easy to churn out of the factory. These manufactured dolls were so affordable that middle and lower class people didn’t have to hand-make their dolls anymore.
The mass-production of plastic dolls was so streamlined that, for manufacturers, making special molds of dolls with African American features seemed like an unnecessary cost. That’s why most of the vinyl and hard plastic dolls were white. The black dolls that were sold by companies like Horsman or Terri Lee were most often white dolls painted brown or dipped in brown dye, Garrett explains. “You couldn’t look at the doll and classify it as a true representation of a black person,” she says. “Because it was just a brown counterpart of the white doll.”
You'll also read about Samantha Knowles and her new documentary Why Do You Have Black Dolls? and the many companies that sprung up over the years to fill the need for authentic black dolls. Link
No, we don't miss them, but it's fun to read about these failed food products. What were they thinking?
1. The Chicken Dinner Candy Bar
Fortunately for gastrointestinal tracts worldwide, this candy bar didn't actually include chicken in its list of ingredients. And equally lucky for Sperry Candy Co., which introduced the "treat" in the 1920s, consumers actually figured this one out on their own. The company introduced the chocolate-and-peanut butter bar right before the onset of the Depression, hoping the name would give consumers the feeling they were about to have a big home-cooked meal at Grandma's house—hence the juicy roast chicken on the advertisements. Strangely, the gimmick worked, even well after the economy recovered, and Chicken Dinner candy bars were available until the 1960s. Does this mean it qualifies as a true marketplace "flop"? No. Did we put it on the list anyway because it sounds like it really should have been? Absolutely.
2. Cereal Mates
Sometimes, new products fail because they're simply bad ideas (ahem, New Coke). Other times, it's because they're just impossible to market. Such was the case for Cereal Mates. Beating the dead horse of über-convenient breakfast foods, Kellogg's introduced Cereal Mates in 1997. The idea was simple: a small box of cereal, a container of specially packaged milk (no refrigeration required!), and a plastic spoon. It was the perfect A.M. answer for the person on the go ...who enjoys warm milk on cereal. Trying to patch up one mistake with another, Kellogg's then moved the product to the dairy section, where no sane person looks for cereal. On top of all that was the price. At about $1.50 for only four ounces of the stuff, Cereal Mates was deemed too expensive for most consumers. After two years, Kellogg's pulled it from the shelves.
3. Flower-Flavored PEZ®
No, that's not a typo. Although it would be equally disgusting, we're talking about flower, not flour. Introduced in the late 1960s, flower-flavored PEZ was designed to appeal to the hippie generation—complete with a groovy, psychedelic dispenser. But even in the decade of free love, no love could be found for the flavor power of flower. Floral scents make for great perfume, but nobody eats perfume, and apparently, there's a reason why. The flower version flopped, and became the next addition to PEZ's long and disturbing list of flavor failures. Since its introduction in 1927, the company has also sold coffee, licorice, eucalyptus, menthol, and cinnamon flavors.
4. "I Hate Peas!"
For as long as children have been shoving Brussels sprouts under mashed potatoes and slipping green beans to the dog, parents have been hunting desperately for a way to end the vegetable discrimination. Finally, in the 1970s, American Kitchen Foods, Inc. came to the rescue (or at least tried) with the release of "I Hate Peas!" Since kids love French fries so much, the company decided that disguising peas in a fry-shaped form was a sure-fire way to trick tots into getting their vitamins. Not a chance. Children all over America saw through the ruse. After all, a pea is a pea is a pea, and the name of the product was more than apropos, no matter what it looked like. There were other thinly disguised vegetables in the company's "I Hate" line, but kids hated those, too.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominates people for their specific contributions to specific films in a number of disciplines and crafts. Those people are in the credits of the films -except when they aren't. Sometimes the names the Academy has available really had nothing to do with the motion picture, or they aren't even real people. That doesn't stop them from getting nominated.
Roderick Jaynes is a pretty talented guy for not being a real person. Jaynes has edited all of the Coen Brothers movies and was even nominated as one of Entertainment Weekly’s Smartest People in Hollywood in 2007. Joel Coen explained that Jaynes probably wouldn't be making an appearance at the 2008 Oscars, despite the nomination. “He’s very old—late 80s, early 90s—so I don’t know if he’d make the trip." In actuality, the Coen Brothers edit all of their own movies and use the elderly Brit as a front. Jaynes didn't win for No Country, and when asked how the awardless editor was dealing with the loss, Ethan Coen replied, "We know he's elderly and unhappy, so probably not well."
Some of the other non-existent people in this list have sadder stories, and there's one that exists, but is a dog. Real all those stories at mental_floss. Link
In 1912, Douglas Mawson and 31 other men set out to explore the uncharted territory of Antarctica in the Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE). They traveled in teams of three men each, with sleds, sled dogs, and supplies. But Antarctica, unmapped and with no wireless communication, was a treacherous place to explore. Mawson's team suffered from weather and calamities, until Mawson was alone, trying desperately to get back to the staging area before the annual supply ship left. But then he fell into a crevasse.
Miraculously, the sledge stuck fast in the deep snow, anchoring him. But as his eyes adjusted to the semidarkness, Mawson saw how hopeless his predicament was. He dangled free in space, the crevasse walls too far away to reach even with the wild swing of a boot. His first thought came as a searing regret that he had not had the chance to eat the last ounces of his food before he died.
His only chance to escape was to pull himself hand over hand up the harness rope. Providentially, he had tied knots in the rope at regular intervals. He seized the first knot and pulled himself upward, then lunged for the next. Even for a fit, healthy man, such a feat would have been barely possible; yet Mawson pulled, rested, and lunged again. He reached the lip of the crevasse and tried to roll onto the surface above.
That effort broke loose the overhanging lip. Mawson fell all the way to the end of his harness rope. Despair overwhelmed him. He pondered slipping out of the harness to plunge to the bottom of the crevasse, ending things at once rather than by strangling or slowly freezing. At that moment, a verse from his favorite poet, Robert Service, flashed through his mind: “Just have one more try—it’s dead easy to die, / It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard.”
Read the story of Mawson's first Antarctic expedition at National Geographic magazine. Link
I wonder what he'd do if he ever really found a robot that way. This Twaggie was illustrated by Kevin Coffee from a Tweet by Matt Roller. See more new illustrated Tweets at Twaggies! Link
Astronaut Chris Hadfield, the International Space Station's ambassador to the internet, shows us how to make a sandwich without the aid of gravity. The Canadian Space Agency has more about eating in space at their website. Link -via Viral Viral Videos
Sunny Chanel's 7-year-old daughter is too young to see any of the nine films up for a Best Picture Oscar. But she took a look at the posters for each film and gave her assessment of what the movie is about from that. This is what she said about Django Unchained:
"It's a wild west movie! But I don't know why there is a 'D' in the name. It should be just Jango, just with a 'J' not a 'D'. That's weird. The guy in the middle is a good guy and the other guys are bad guys. The guy on the left always plays bad guys. In the movie they dance a lot and then they kill bad people and the bad people kill the good people because they are mean. Really mean."
Leonardo DiCaprio would get a kick out of her assessment of his roles. After judging all nine movies, the youngster says that Lincoln will win the Academy Award. Link -via Laughing Squid
Jesse Teeters and his two-year-old daughter unveil their first duet for the public. He calls it "The culmination of 2.5 years of parenting." Adorable! On the off chance you're not familiar with the song, see the most popular performance here. -via reddit
Purim, coming up this weekend, is a Jewish holiday celebrating how Esther averted the slaughter of her people at the hands of Haman. His name survives in the triangular treat called Hamantasch (Hamantaschen is the plural), which means "Haman's pockets." Buzzfeed has links to 32 different recipes, with Hamantaschen made of fruit, meat, vegetables, candy, nuts, chocolate, cheese, and pretty much anything you might want to put in them! Link
The still-unnamed star of the hit video known as Technoviking is suing Matthias Fritsch, the filmmaker who recorded him dancing in 2000. The lawyers involved and the court in Germany are not very forthcoming with the facts of the case, but Technoviking wants all videos and images bearing his likeness stripped from the web. If not, he wants Fritsch to pay up and spend time in jail. Judges in the case proposed a compromise, which Technoviking has rejected. A German blogger doesn't think Technoviking can win.
Under the common law... the Technoviking video can be legally shared. Technoviking went out into a public festival, where certainly knew he might be filmed, and started dancing. He was sharing his image with thousands of strangers, and obviously enjoyed himself doing so. The artist was not using the Technoviking's image to sell a product, and the money he earned from it was merely incidental to its unexpected success. And it was, of course, money for something he created—the video of an interesting person dancing on the street.
But if the courts side with the plaintiff, the repercussions could affect artists, photographers, and videographers in profound ways. Link
At the 1989 Academy Awards ceremony, the show opened with a 15-minute production featuring Snow White, Rob Lowe, and Merv Griffin singing and dancing along with disembodied stars and tables. It was such a disaster that its producer, Allan Carr, never worked in Hollywood again, and Disney sued the Academy. Twenty-four years later, actress Eileen Bowman talks about what should have been her big break, but instead became a Hollywood joke.
As a costume-clad Bowman made her way through the Shrine Auditorium, chirping a high-pitched take on "I Only Have Eyes for You" and greeting such mortified stars in the audience as Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman, Michelle Pfeiffer and Sigourney Weaver, it quickly became obvious that Carr had laid a dinosaur-size egg.
"She had a look on her face, if I remember correctly, of pain," Martin Landau tells THR. Nominated that year for best supporting actor for Tucker: The Man and His Dream, Landau, now 84, was one of the few who gave Bowman a warm reception. "It wasn't her fault," recalls Landau. "I empathized with her. Poor Snow White. She didn't have the dwarves to support her."
There's also a mercifully short video of the act's highlights. Link -via FilmDrunk
