This looks cool, but keep it away from decorations, hay, and trick-or-treaters. And be aware that it will smell like flaming pumpkin. -Thanks, Dave!
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Those of you who have been around the blogosphere for quite some time will remember the blog Grow-a-Brain, because we linked to it often. Hanan Levin stopped blogging to begin a family a few years ago. Now little Adora is three, and Hanan has been documenting her childhood on another blog. And as sometimes happens when both your parents know a lot of artists, those artists have been drawing, painting, and photographing Adora. In fact, 500 artists are contributing pictures of Adora, and they are being posted one every few days. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Beth Duri)
Now we know where Daleks get their extermination techniques. Blame the Bad Astronomer! Link -via Phil Plait
Have you ever wanted to be a pizza? Or maybe a milkshake or some fries? I became a pizza with Foodagram, a generator that lets you record messages as a food puppet! This toy just went live today, from Food My Way, an organization dedicated to improving nutrition education in Toronto schools. See my Foodagram here. Then make your own! Link -Thanks, Steve!
Oh no, not a Star Wars/Gangnam Style parody! That's what it is -for about a minute, then it turns into a statement about …well, you just watch this while I go curl up in a corner somewhere and contemplate my life and unfulfilled dreams. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The White House has plenty of history, and plenty of former residents. Some are said to still be there, despite having died long ago.
After moving into the White House in 1945, Harry Truman wrote to his wife Bess about their spooky new abode: “I sit here in this old house … all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway and even right in here in the study. The floors pop and the drapes move back and forth—I can just imagine old Andy [Jackson] and Teddy [Roosevelt] having an argument over Franklin [Roosevelt].”
Some White House ghosts stand head and shoulders above others. Read the reports of the most common specters haunting the president's home at mental_floss. Link
Sometimes old objects come with an extensive history. Could they be haunted? Maybe only if you believe so. And, of course, different paranormal investigators have different ways to explain that chill up your spine when you're in a certain place, or around a certain object. Some antiques have a profound effect on whoever may own them, whether they know the story behind them or not. Such was the case with the Dibbuk Box, a wine cabinet containing some personal items and a Jewish prayer carved on the back. It had belonged to a Holocaust survivor, now deceased, and everyone who came into contact with the box experienced strange dreams, bad luck, and illness. Local museum director Jason Haxton heard about the mysterious events and started researching the box.
Thankfully, Haxton heard from experts of all sorts—from rabbis and Kabbalah students to scientists, Wiccans, and demonologists—offering to help him solve the mystery of the box. In fact, so many people were calling and emailing him to ask him about the Dibbuk Box, Haxton posted a web site to address questions about it. He also had Hollywood calling, because horror director Sam Raimi had caught wind of the Dibbuk Box, and wanted to make a film about it. The eventual film, the box-office hit “The Possession,” released in August of last year, took pieces of every owner’s experience of the cabinet and created a new story about a little girl who gets obsessed with the box and possessed by the dibbuk.
The items in the box, the pennies, the hair, the candle, the wine cup, etc., are all items that are traditionally used to open a connection to God. Haxton believes the Dibbuk Box was actually used by its original owner as a box to pray to and get an answer to her life’s question: What caused the Holocaust that killed her parents, her siblings, her first husband, and their children?
After establishing a new life in the United States postwar, the woman had instructed her own children and grandchildren to never open the box, and requested that the box be buried with her. Haxton doesn’t believe the energy attached to the box is evil, but because its owner’s wish was not honored, the box made trouble for anyone who got in the way of its goal to answer this question.
Haxton eventually found what he thinks is the reason for the odd occurrences surrounding the Dibbuk Box, and for the cabinet's roundabout journey to Kirksville, Missouri. Read the entire story at Collector's Weekly -but be warned, it is a strange story. Link
Merry and Pippin learn the hard way that Halloween pranks can backfire! Enjoy this stop-motion LEGO animation by the Brotherhood Workshop. -via Daily of the Day
You don't see an echidna at this age as a rule -it's supposed to be still its mother's pouch. This one now belongs to the Taronga Zoo in Sydney. Read more about him at the zoo's website. Link -via Daily of the Day
Hurricane Sandy is roaring through the Caribbean and is expected to inch up the East Coast of the US, landing in New York City early next week. A winter storm is brewing in the west, and is expected to reach New York City early next week. A mass of Arctic air is rushing down from the north, and is expected to reach New York City early next week. What happens when these weather events collide? The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dubbed it "Frankenstorm." And according to NOAA forecaster Jim Cisco, it won't be just New York that will be affected: the storm may cover a large part of the East Coast and reach inland as far as Ohio.
Coastal areas from Florida to Maine will feel some effects, mostly from the hurricane part, he said, and the other parts of the storm will reach inland from North Carolina northward.
"It will get broader. It won't be as intense, but its effects will be spread over a very large area," the hurricane center's chief hurricane specialist, James Franklin, said Thursday.
One of the more messy aspects of the expected storm is that it just won't leave. The worst of it should peak early Tuesday, but it will stretch into midweek, forecasters say. Weather may start clearing in the mid-Atlantic Nov. 1 and Nov. 2 in the Northeast, Cisco said.
"It's almost a weeklong, five-day, six-day event," Cisco said Thursday from NOAA's northern storm forecast center in near Washington. "It's going to be a widespread serious storm."
Read more about Frankenstorm. Link
Already, like any major event that most of us can't do a thing about, Frankenstorm has already spawned a series of memes, Twitter feeds, and jokes. Read up on those at Buzzfeed. Link
We're afraid this is how some classic beasts came to be.
Frankenstein's Monster
Let's clear this up from the start: Frankenstein is the mad scientist, the monster has no name, and both were created by a teenage radical named Mary Shelley. (Also, just for the record, it's pronounced Fronk-un-steen.) The daughter of progressive parents (one was an anarchist/atheist/free-love promoter and the other the 18th century's most famous feminist), the young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin eloped with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814. Already a prolific poet, Mary had no trouble rising to the occasion in 1816 when, during a summer vacation in Switzerland, her husband and friends decided to hold a scary story-writing contest. Although not the way you'd expect a bunch of casual sex proponents to spend a summer at a beach house, the contest made sense in the context of the weather.
It was, as they say, a dark and stormy night -and had been for several months. Earlier that spring, Indonesia's Mount Tambora had experienced a massive eruption that launched tons of particulate matter into the atmosphere, blocking out the sun, and launching what came to be known as "the Year Without a Summer." For poorer people, this meant starvation after summer snowfalls killed the harvest, but for the Shelleys, it simply meant a dreary vacation that needed livening up. And liven it up, Mary did. Inspired by a dream, she wrote the classic story of a mad scientist who tries to create life and ends up giving birth to a monster he can't control. She was 19. When her story was published as a book two years later, it was an instant best seller.
Dracula
Whatever you do, don't bring up the world's most famous Count in a conversation with a Romanian. Dracula is a bit of a touchy subject there, where the citizens remember the inspiration behind the myth, Prince Vlad Tepes, as a national liberator and the man who saved Romania from the Turks.
Electronic magic toys brings us the weirdest halloween costume ever! Phil Burgess of Adafruit mounted LED matrices on a mask, and hooked up a voice changer to use as a stimulus for the animation. The tutorials on the various parts of the project are available at Adafruit. Link -Thanks, Becky!
More horror films than you know were based on, or inspired by, real life events. Wes Craven himself told the story of what inspired Nightmare on Elm Street: a series of Southeast Asian men who died while having nightmares. One of them was a 21-year-old who refused to sleep.
Everybody in his family said almost exactly these lines: ‘You must sleep.’ He said, ‘No, you don’t understand; I’ve had nightmares before — this is different.’ He was given sleeping pills and told to take them and supposedly did, but he stayed up. I forget what the total days he stayed up was, but it was a phenomenal amount — something like six, seven days. Finally, he was watching television with the family, fell asleep on the couch, and everybody said, ‘Thank god.’ They literally carried him upstairs to bed; he was completely exhausted. Everybody went to bed, thinking it was all over. In the middle of the night, they heard screams and crashing. They ran into the room, and by the time they got to him he was dead. They had an autopsy performed, and there was no heart attack; he just had died for unexplained reasons.
But that's just one of ten horror stories behind the movies you'll find at Flavorwire. Link
Vi Hart is not only great at explaining mathematics and making it fun, she can also cook and poke fun at herself. In this video, she uses her previously-explained hexaflexagons to make a tasty tortilla treat! -via Viral Viral Videos
The spiritualist movement rose at about the same time photography was invented. Therefore, it was no wonder that the earliest use of trick photography was to show evidence of spirits that one could communicate with -for a small fee. Buzzfeed has a collection of quite a few of these "spirit" pictures. Link
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