Just look at this little construction worker all ready for trick-or-treat, complete with heavy equipment! This backhoe was lovingly built around the child's wheelchair. See lots of great wheelchair costume ideas that people have pulled off in spectacular fashion at Buzzfeed. Link
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Jürgen Horn and and Mike Powell are continuing their 91 Days lifestyle experiment, in which they live in a different place for 91 days at a time. They are in Idaho now, and tell us about Hoot's Cafe, run by a lady named Hootie.
No, that’s not a nickname — when she was born, her parents considered her big, protruding eyes and agreed: “She looks like a Hootie”. Hootie has run Hoot’s Cafe for fifty years, and worked at its previous location for eleven years before that. When we expressed our amazement, she looked at us dryly; as though working in the same tiny restaurant for over 60 years was just the most obvious thing in the world, and what’s to be amazed about?
Hootie introduced us to her astounding collection of owls. Wooden owls, decorative owls, stuffed owls, plastic owls, ceramic owls and more. Over 1200 of them line the shelves, corners and tables of Hoot’s. Remarkably, Hootie didn’t buy a single one — they’re all gifts. Friends or returning customers have made it a tradition to bring her another owl for the collection. I was mad that we didn’t have any owl paraphernalia in the car that we could give her. We should always carry owl paraphernalia with us. You never know!
See pictures of quite a few of Hootie's owls at For 91 Days. Link
Previously: Other locations For 91 Days
Honestly, world, despite what your hear in the news, the United States is not that dangerous. This Twaggie was rendered from a Tweet by Berlin resident Julian Gough and drawn by artist David Barneda. See a new illustrated Tweet every day at Twaggies. Link
These hexaflexagons are going to keep my kids busy all night, you can bet on it. Vi Hart's latest video introduces you to the fun of six-sided mathematical origami. "Explore the mysteries of flexigation!"
Previously: More from Vi Hart
The Three Stooges wore a lot of hats in their many short films, including athletes of various sports. Each one was an opportunity for chaos! With Leather recommends the greatest scenes of Moe, Larry, and Curly (or Shemp) in football, golf, boxing, horse racing, bull fighting, wrestling, and more. Easily the most entertaining entry in their Sports On TV series yet. Link -via Unreality magazine
The Topsfield Fair, near Boston, Massachusetts, has an annual giant pumpkin weigh-off and has for years offered a $10,000 bonus for the first one-ton pumpkin. Ron Wallace of Greene, Rhode Island, has delivered that pumpkin. His entry weighed 2,009 pounds!
A throng of press and spectators gathered around as Wallace celebrated at the end of Friday night’s weigh-off. All night, people posed with the behemoth that sat at the far end of the fairground’s arena, with members of the New England Pumpkin Growers Association and others saying measurements were off the charts and foretold this could be the big one.
“It’s a great world record,” said the general manager of America’s oldest agricultural fair, James O’Brien. “Topsfield has had a lot of world records, but this one is special. This is absolutely one of the top sites in the country where you can come and weigh-off a pumpkin.” There have been seven world record giant pumpkins weighed at Topsfield in the last 15 years, O’Brien said.
The previous world record pumpkin was 1,843.5 pounds, set just a day before Wallace's weigh-in. Wallace won $5,500 for this year's competition and the $10,000 bonus, too. Link -Thanks, Sid Raisch!
(Image credit: Paul Bilodeau/Salem News)
If this doesn't bother your sense of order, or the way things should be (I'm not going to go as far as mentioning OCD, but you might), you'll find something else that will in an imgur album full of photos with something wrong. Taken as a group, they're pretty funny -up to the point where you run into the one that trips your sore spot. Link -via Metafilter
Believe it or not, powdered ancient dead guys were prescribed to cure what ails you. With all the moisture gone and other things mixed in, doctors could tell themselves this wasn't exactly cannibalism.
Physicians pre-scribed powdered mummy for diverse ailments. An English pharmacopeia published in 1721 specifies two ounces of mummy as the proper amount to make a “plaster against ruptures.” Ambroise Paré, royal surgeon to sixteenth century French kings, proclaimed mummy to be “the very first and last medicine of almost all our practitioners” against bruising.
Read more about this gruesome (to our sensibilities) practice at the Neatorama Halloween blog. Link
Cory McLeod's parents took his picture every day since the day he was born through his 21st birthday. Well, almost every day. The few days that were missed have been replaced with drawings in this hypnotic montage of all those pictures. It goes pretty fast, and may not be suitable for those with epilepsy. -via Laughing Squid
A new song by The Fountainheads of Ein Prat Academy. "Livin' in a Booth" is about Sukkot, or the Feast of Tabernacles, which began at sundown last night. I think you'll recognize the tune as "Marry You" by Bruno Mars.
Previously by the Fountainheads: Dip Your Apple
This tattoo is not Photoshopped -it IS Photoshop! Megan Orsi is "the girl with the Photoshop tattoo." The web designer started using Photoshop in middle school, and just recently got the toolbar inked on her arm. Read an interview with Orsi on the Photoshop blog. Link -via Buzzfeed
The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.
(Image credit: Flickr user John Spooner)
Or... who ate the cedars of Lebanon?
In the vast Sahara, seas of sand ripple for miles. They rise up in wavelike dunes that can crest at over 1,000 feet. With temperatures that have been known to reach 136°F (58°C), the desolate Sahara covers most of North Africa and over a third of the African continent. It's the world's largest desert, home to over three million square miles of dust, stone, and sand.
PARADISE LOST
(Image credit: Ferdinand Reus)
In the sweltering Sahara, a cool vision of waving grass and shining lakes can seem like a mirage (or the first signs of heat exhaustion), but it's a glimpse into the Earth's astounding past. Hard to believe, but this hostile ocean of sand was once an earthly Eden. Fish swam in ancient lakes; giraffes, elephants, and gazelles roamed grassy savannahs; and hippos wallowed in ponds and mud.
And people had a great time, too. Prehistoric rock painting show ancient Saharans feasting and drinking and -it's true!- swimming. They had steady jobs, first as fishermen and hunters, later as shepherd, cattlemen, and farmers. But that was in the old days, around 5,500 years ago. But 2,000 or so years later (just a wink of the geological eye), the lakes had dried up, the vegetation and animals were gone, and farmers were forced to leave a land where nothing could grow. So what happened?
TRUE GRIT
Photographic evidence has been an act of faith since the 1830s! The first photo hoax was perpetrated by a competitor of Louis Daguerre, whom daguerrotype was named for. Then there was William Mumler, who made a living taking "spirit photographs," like the image here of Mary Todd Lincoln with her late husband's ghostly arms around her. See ten such photo hoaxes at Flavorwire. Link
They fell, alright, like dominoes! Oh yeah, these dinosaurs ARE dominoes, stacked with care by Flippycat. Two weeks to stack, mere seconds to see them come tumbling down. -via The Daily What
Previously: More domino works from Flippycat
In 1947, the British South American Airways plane Star Dust took off from Buenos Aires, Argentina, with eleven people aboard, destined for Santiago, Chile. But it never arrived.
The passenger list certainly does its part to set the stage for conspiracy theories: A Palestinian returning to Chile from visiting a dying relative, two British businessmen, a high-ranking associate from the Dunlop tire company, a British civil servant delivering important documents to an embassy, and a German-born Chilean resident who had been stranded in Germany during the war.
The flight departed Buenos Aires at 1:46 p.m. on August 2nd, headed over the Andes mountains. Before the airliner’s disappearance, the flight was uneventful. The final transmission from the Star Dust to Santiago’s airport was a Morse code transcription, S-T-E-N-D-E-C, the meaning of which has been debated by experts since 1947. Santiago’s Morse operator asked for clarification, and twice more S-T-E-N-D-E-C came through the wire.
There are many interpretations of the meaning; one hypothesis is that STENDEC was an acronym (Starting En-Route Descent or Severe Turbulence Encountered Now Descending Emergency Crash-landing). Others suggest perhaps the Santiago Morse operator misheard and thus mis-transcribed the code. Still others point out that STENDEC is an anagram of DESCENT. To this day, no one can definitively say what the Star Dust’s Morse operator was intending to say. What is known, is that the Star Dust would not be heard from again.
A search turned up no clue as to what happened to the Star Dust. In fact, it was a half-century before any wreckage was found at all. Read the story of the the Star Dust and how the mystery was solved fifty years later, at Sometimes Interesting. Link
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