Photographer Khánh Hmoong took historical pictures of Vietnam in the 20th-century and matched themup with the same locations in the 21st century. In many photos, the landscape remains the same, although the world is quite different. In others, the landscape itself has changed. The picture shown here is the former Presidential Palace, with a photo of the fall of Saigon (known as the Liberation of Saigon in Vietnam) on April 30, 1975, on top. Very few of the pictures in the set have anything to do with the American involvement. Link -via Laughing Squid
(Image credit: Flickr user Khánh Hmoong)
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
President Abraham Lincoln will always be a popular character in movies: historically significant, larger than life, and the kind of man others aspire to be. He rose from poverty to become president, and his life story has a dreadfully dramatic ending. And Hollywood knows a good story when it sees one.
IMDB lists at least 327 movies with Abraham Lincoln as a character, the earliest is 1911, though there were certainly more, and I’d have to do actual research to dig those up, so let’s just pretend for today it started in 1911. The one that caught my eye is saucily titled “Lincoln, the Lover” (1914), starring the first standout Lincoln, Ralph Ince. Ince directed over 171 films in the very earliest days of cinema, and gained notoriety as Lincoln from about 1906 to his last appearance in “The Highest Law” (1921).
Others who've played Lincoln include Gregory Peck, Jason Robards, Sam Waterson, Walter Huston, Kris Kristofferson, and Daniel Day-Lewis. Read about them and see more pictures at Pajiba. Link -via Unreality
This is what happens when you neglect to bring in the garden hose, or at least drain it, before a freezing cold night. I know a couple of fast-food outlets that serve ice shaped just like this. I wonder if they make them with a garden hose! (via reddit)
Being 45 is so much better than being 15! Here's the soon-to-be-hit song from the group Pushing 40, featured in the web series My Dad Is In A Boy Band. -via Daily of the Day
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable research.
Eric Schulman
National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Charlottesville, Virginia
Abstract
Why do so many Hollywood movies fail? The fault lies not in their stars, but in the professions of the characters. In its search for success, the movie industry has under-utilized a proven winner: a movie is most likely to succeed when it has astronomer characters.
1. Introduction
The holy grail (Nadis 1996) of Hollywood is a formula to predict the popularity of a movie before it's made. Here we present just such an algorithm, which predicts a linear relationship between the perceived quality of a movie and the number of characters who are astronomers or astrophysicists. That this correlation hasn't been discovered before is not surprising because of the small number of astronomers in "the industry."
2. Methods
We used the Internet Movie Database (IMDb; Bernhardt et al. 1997) to search for movies with astronomer or astrophysicist characters that had been evaluated by at least ten IMDb users. Seventeen such movies were found by searching for "astronomer" and "astrophysicist" in the character name and plot summary fields and for "astronomy" in the genre field.
The number of astronomer (or astrophysicist; the terms will be used interchangeably hereafter) characters was estimated from the IMDb character lists, IMDb plot summaries, and the memory of the senior author for films (or movies; the terms will be used interchangeably hereafter) that had been previously viewed by this researcher.
The referee suggested that we view each of the movies in our sample to more precisely determine the number of astronomer characters, but we decided that this would strain our research budget.
3. Results
The number of astronomer characters and the IMDb rating [on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being worst and 10 being best; the lowest-rated movie we could find was Manos, the Hands of Fate (1966), with a rating of 2.3, and the top film we found was Star Wars (1977), with a rating of 8.9 (the referee pointed out that one of the films listed in Table 1 below has a rating of 9.2, but this film only had ten votes and we restricted the search we just described to films with at least fifty votes, on the grounds that this information was easily found in the IMDb)] are plotted in Figure 1 for each of the seventeen movies.
Oblivious Films gives us a music video for Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" featuring video clips from the Zelda game The Wind Waker. Bonus: the song is the live version from Wembley '86. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Owen Sherman of Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, just turned seven years old. He asked his friends and family to skip getting him a birthday gift, but instead he requested donations for an animal shelter where he found his best friend, Eli.
Owen, a first-grader at SeDoMoCha Elementary School in Dover-Foxcroft, has bilateral fibular hemimelia — a congenital absence of the fibula bones in both legs. His legs were amputated below the knees when he was 8 months old. He now wears prosthetic legs, which he was walking on as early as 13 months old, according to his mother Barbara Estabrook Sherman.
After the family dog, Sparky, died last year, Owen and his father, Shane Sherman, went looking for a new dog.
“My husband and he went behind my back and searched over the Internet and found Eli,” said Sherman. “[Owen] fell in love with Eli sight unseen.”
Sherman said Eli, a boxer-lab mix, had to have one of its hind legs amputated.
“We believe he had been abused and somehow an infection set in,” she said. “He was given up and he had to have that leg amputated.”
Owen and Eli are inseparable. The Underhound Railroad Rescue now has at least $120 coming that would have been spent on Owen's birthday gifts. Link -via Fark
(Image credit: Barbara Estabrook Sherman)
The Buddhist monastery known as Phugtal Gompa was built around a cave system on the sheer cliff of a Himalayan mountain in northern India. The monastery was founded around 1100 CE, although the structure itself took an awful long time to build. Now it is a tourist attraction, 3800 feet up the cliff, and still houses around 70 monks. Read about it and see more pictures at Urban Ghosts. Link
(Image credit: Wikimedia contributor Shakti)
Crummy Gummy sent a picture of his latest work, which is totally sweet if you're an Alien fan or totally disturbing if you're a Gummi Bear fan. He titled it "It's A Boy!" Link
I'm in a position as far as cooking goes -I've done it for almost 50 years, and I've forgotten so many of the silly things that can go wrong. At the same time, my kids are learning to cook, and there are a lot of commonsense rules they just don't know yet, like stir your pasta, don't leave plastic on a hot stove, and you need a muffin pan to make cupcakes. Luckily, in the internet age there are plenty of people willing to share their funniest failures to remind us of what we shouldn't do! Besides, even if you are a lousy cook, these pictures will make you feel like some kind of master chef. Link
KRTV in Great Falls, Montana, was the victim of a prank in which someone announced over the Emergency Alert System (EAS) that “The bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and are attacking the living.” The station quickly posted a message on their website that the emergency was bogus. The TV station is investigating the source of the prank, and so far say that the message did not originate at KRTV. -via Metafilter
Kaycie D. graduated from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. Her senior thesis was a collection of the elements of the periodic table illustrated as characters. Some are designed around their properties, some around who they are named for, and all contain some information about the element. There are even a few puns included! The project was exhibited at the Discovery World museum in Milwaukee, and now has its own website. Kaycie D. is working on making them into a series of flashcards. Continue reading for more of them.
Cabel writes about a phenomena that you've probably noticed at one time or another. See, if trash doesn't hit the ground, it's not littering …at least in some people's minds. So the discarded paper cup or wrapper or bottle gets stuck in some space above ground or in receptacles that aren't trash cans.
Now, I can understand how generalized holes — containers, street light bases, flower pots — become makeshift trashcans. Even if they’re obviously in no way trashcans, and likely will never be emptied or cleaned by any human being on earth, and in most cases there’s a real trashcan mere feet away, they at least share a vague similarity to the raw concept of a trashcan.
He calls these workarounds "litter plugs," and you can see a photographic collection of trashy yet oddly ingenious litterplugs at his blog. Link -via Boing Boing
Being in love is a wonderful experience! It makes us produce all kinds of nice chemicals that make the world better. Or at least look better! Now if we could just bottle up those chemicals, we've have an instant crime wave when people sneak them into each other's drinks. -via Daily of the Day
Artist Olly Moss has created the official 85 Years of Oscars poster. The work contains statuettes that honor each of the movies that have won an Academy Award for Best Picture. You'll need to enlarge it at the link in order to see them all -how many do you recognize? Link -via Metafilter
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