Look at these colorful skull cupcakes! They were designed for the Day of the Dead (November 1st and 2nd), and will surely provoke smiles at your Halloween party. Melissa has a tutorial at My Cake School that takes you through the steps of making the skulls and decorating the cupcakes. Link -Thanks, April!
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
There's always someone who will find a creative way to make money off new technology. Airplanes proved to be wonderful for transportation and for waging war, but barnstormers saw their entertainment value, too. Performers walked around outside their planes, jumped from plane to plane, and came up with new stunts to please crowds. But wing-walking is one place you don't learn from your mistakes, because you often don't survive them. So many of these performers died that federal safety restrictions were put into place, and the shows all but died out. All that is left of that era are the photographs, many of which are in the post at Environmental Graffiti. Link
(Image source: San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives)
Last week's presidential debate gets the bad lip-reading treatment. This ensures that all parties involved appear equally ridiculous. -via Pundit Kitchen
Neil Fraser made this Portal Pumpkin to guard his home for Halloween 2010. You can peek inside at the mechanism that made it move and scare the living daylights out of trick-or-treaters.
Perched precariously on its three legs, the turret automatically pans left and right and pitches up and down searching for targets. Inside is a small motor and a system of gears and cams to drive the gun mounts.
He said it was like building a ship in a bottle- "A wet, slimy bottle." Link -via reddit
This past Saturday, the University of South Carolina beat Georgia, but the football game will be remembered for something completely different. A message from Sergeant First Class Scott Faile, stationed in South Korea, was relayed to his South Carolina wife and kids via the stadium's giant video screen. The sound on the video is not great, but I'm sure you can follow what happens. You might want to grab a hankie. -via Blame It On The Voices
Now isn't this a lovely family? The photograph is fascinating to look at, but you might not want these folks at your holiday dinners. Someone traced the photograph to this blog post, which hints that the picture may be from England in the 1860s. There was speculation at reddit that it could be an example of post-mortem photography, but I don't see anyone who looks more dead than the others. Link
The TV show Mythbusters tested James Cameron's version of Titanic. Never mind that the movie was a work of fiction, this is important stuff! The issue came up when, 15 years after the movie was released, the internet questioned why Jack died instead of climbing onto the floating piece of wood with Rose, which appeared to be large enough for both of them. Cameron explained it was a matter of buoyancy rather than room. Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman put that assertion to the test. The result? They could have both survived -under very specific circumstances you'll have to read about to follow.
Cameron’s good-humored response: “I think you guys are missing the point here. The script says Jack died. He has to die. So maybe we screwed up and the board should have been a little tiny bit smaller, but the dude’s goin’ down.”
Because that's how fiction works. Link
(Image credit: Don Feria/Discovery Channel)
We were introduced to the adorable lemon beagle Maymo a few months ago. But it's not all hearts and flowers when you're raising a rambunctious puppy! -thanks, J!
Previously: More from Maymo
When you ponder how you're going to spend your time on earth, it's useful to at least temporarily ignore the fact that money runs -and ruins- everything. Oh, it's a lovely fantasy, but also useful in helping you to figure out what's most important. This wisdom comes from the late British professor Alan Watts. -via The Daily What
You can argue all night about who deserved and didn't deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for just about any year. But if you restrict the debate to science prizes, you'll find research that turned out to do more harm than good, experiments and conclusions that were just plain wrong, and scientists who turned out to be bad news all around. Take the case of Johannes Andreas Grib Fibiger, who won the 1926 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
In 1907, this Danish scientist found that he could induce abnormal cell growth in rats by feeding them cockroaches that were infected with a species of worm he called Spiroptera neoplastica. Fibiger concluded that the worms caused cancer. To appreciate how significant the discovery seemed at the time, it’s important to understand that many doctors were furiously hunting a single cause of cancer. Some thought the disease was programmed into the body in embryonic cells. Others believed inanimate external factors triggered uncontrolled cell division. (English physician Percivall Pott observed in the 18th century that chimney sweeps were shockingly likely to suffer scrotal cancer.) The infectious theory was also quite popular, and its adherents pushed hard for recognition of Fibiger’s breakthrough. He received 16 Nobel Prize nominations beginning in 1922.
Did he deserve the Nobel? Well, hey, did you ever hear that worms cause cancer? Read his story and those of several other prize winners at Slate. Link
(Image source: Nobelprize)
Among the legends of ancient Rome is that of a sibyl who lived in a cave that was the portal to the underworld. In 1958, a cave was discovered on the north shore of the Bay of Naples among the ruins of Baiæ that may have given rise to this legend. It opens to a passageway that is heated by an active volcano. Robert Paget and Keith Jones spent years removing rubble, exploring the cave's layout, mapping, and speculating on its purpose.
But only when the men went deeper into the hillside did the greatest mystery of the tunnels revealed itself. There, hidden at the bottom of a much steeper passage, and behind a second S-bend that prevented anyone approaching from seeing it until the final moment, ran an underground stream. A small “landing stage” projected out into the sulfurous waters, which ran from left to right across the tunnel and disappeared into the darkness. And the river itself was hot to the touch–in places it approached boiling point.
Conditions at this low point in the tunnel complex certainly were stygian. The temperature had risen to 120 degrees Fahrenheit; the air stank of sulfur. It was a relief to force a way across the stream and up a steep ascending passage on the other side, which eventually opened into an antechamber, oriented this time to the helical sunset, that Paget dubbed the “hidden sanctuary.” From there, more hidden staircases ascended to the surface to emerge behind the ruins of water tanks that had fed the spas at the ancient temple complex.
Could anyone be blamed for believing this underground complex to be the gates of hell? Read more about it at Past Imperfect. Link -via Metafilter
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Ask most movie fans. "What was the first 'talkie'?" and the most frequent reply has always been The Jazz Singer (1927) starring Al Jolson. This is a "sort of" correct answer, but not really.
The earliest sound movies were made by synchronizing motion pictures to phonograph records. In 1926 (a year before The Jazz Singer), Warner Brother re-released the previous silent film Don Juan. Don Juan was shown with a soundtrack recording done by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
Warner Brothers also released the first actual all-talking, feature-length motion picture in 1928. It was called Lights of New York. The following year, Twentieth-Century Fox released In Old Arizona, the first all-talkie feature with sound recorded directly on the film
The Jazz Singer was actually a silent movie with poorly synchronized musical numbers and a few sentences of spoken words. One of the main reasons The Jazz Singer is such a legendary film is because of its star: the immortal Al Jolson. Jolson was, by all accounts, the Elvis Presley of his time. At the time of The Jazz Singer's release, Jolson was one of the biggest stars in show business. (As a sidebar, Jolson did make several films after The Jazz Singer, but none came close to it in popularity or historical significance.)
Many current movie fans are familiar, at least somewhat, with Jolson and his show business legacy, but he had few current-day fans. This is mainly because Jolson's schtick was the "blackface" act, which is, to contemporary movie fans, silly and disgusting. "Blackface," which is captured for posterity in many films of the first half of the 20th century, is a sad reminder to most people of the ridicule and mistreatment of African-Americans. Such a thing would be unimaginable today.
Jolson didn't always use blackface in his act, but because most people of today only know him by The Jazz Singer, his reputation today is that of, while maybe not racist, still, a symbol of a very backward time. Also, Jolson's singing style, unlike that of Elvis, Frank Sinatra, or Dean Martin, does not hold up well. His songs seem rather hockey and schmaltzy. His singing style is clipped and choppy, not melodic. His dance moves also look rather silly and dated -as you see here:
The new season of The Walking Dead starts this coming Sunday, and Halloween is creeping up on us, too! Time to make your mark by leaving little cartoon zombies on your notes, correspondence, and desk blotter. Mark Anderson of Andertoons makes it easy for you with a tutorial on drawing a cartoon zombie. He's kinda cute! Link
Lucasfilm collaborated with its publishing partners to present Star Wars Reads Day this past Saturday, to promote reading in children. Events were held at bookstores all over. Geeks Are Sexy covered the event at Little Shop of Stories in Decatur, Georgia. Those who attended included members of the 501st and Rebel Legions, fans in costume (both children and adults), and celebrity Ashley Eckstein, who is the voice of Ahsoka in Star Wars: The Clone Wars and also designs Star Wars clothing for Her Universe. Link to story. Link to interview.
To mark the occasion of Thanksgiving, as it is celebrated in Canada today, Cake Wrecks takes a critical look at the difference between Canadian turkeys and U.S. turkeys. Of course, the comparison is done with cakes.
First and foremost, Canadian turkeys carry all their tail feathers on their heads.
With plenty of photographic evidence. Link
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