Look out for that big patch of Poison Ivy! Photographer Bill Watters is at Dragon*Con in Atlanta, bringing back images of the best cosplayers showing their stuff. Geeks Are Sexy has two galleries up already, with photographs from day three to be posted sometime today.
Link to gallery one.
Link to gallery two.
(Image credit: Bill Watters)
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
What better way to celebrate the holiday of the working person than to watch a movie about "the basic labor relations between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie"? There are 23 of them in this list: dramas, biopics, documentaries, and comedies that address labor in an entertaining way -and an educational way for young folks who don't learn these things in history class. Number three is about my birthplace:
It’s been over 35 years since Harlan County U.S.A., Barbara Kopple’s Oscar-winning documentary about a miners’ strike in Kentucky coal country, was first released, but the persistence of cave-ins, health concerns, and deplorable working conditions has kept it in the public conscience. Kopple and her crew arrived in the area in 1972, intending to cover the contentious election of a new union president, but they stumbled onto the site of the one of the bloodiest union-busting operations in American history and discovered that little had changed. As the miners’ strike against the Duke Power Company drags on, Kopple’s cameras are there to catch some hired gun thugs sent to intimidate the workers (and Kopple’s crew) and the tensions that develop within the ranks as the weeks and months drag on.
The generation gap turns into war as old school video game characters invade the real world! It's up to modern characters to save the day in the latest fantasy from Freddie Wong. -via The Daily What Geek
Builders renovating an office at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, England, were surprised to find a fox head jutting through a hole in the floor. The fox had apparently tried to wiggle into the room from below and became stuck.
RSPCA animal welfare officer Kate Wright, who freed the animal, said: "I just had these big eyes staring at me."
She added: "Here was this fox's head poking out of a floor and he was so jammed he couldn't move.
"I actually think he had quite an embarrassed expression on his face."
After the RSPCA arrived, the builders pried up a section of the floor and freed the fox, which was caged, taken away, and released. Link -via Arbroath
(Image credit: RSPCA)
Austin Chapman is profoundly deaf, but with new hi-tech hearing aids he recently received, he was able to hear music for the first time in his 23-year life.
That night, a group of close friends jump-started my musical education by playing Mozart, Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Sigur Ros, Radiohead, Elvis, and several other popular legends of music.
Being able to hear the music for the first time ever was unreal.
When Mozart's Lacrimosa came on, I was blown away by the beauty of it. At one point of the song, it sounded like angels singing and I suddenly realized that this was the first time I was able to appreciate music. Tears rolled down my face and I tried to hide it. But when I looked over I saw that there wasn't a dry eye in the car.
Chapman asked redditors to recommend music he should listen to, and got 14,000+ responses. Read his account of the experience at Art of the Story. Link
Rebecca Rosen at The Atlantic wanted to find out how Chapman's musical journey is coming along.
I exchanged emails with Chapman to get more of a sense of what music he is enjoying and what he hasn't quite warmed to. The first and clearest thing that comes across: Taste does not take long to develop. Right from the get-go Chapman had a very strong (and, in my personal estimation, very good) sense of what he liked and did not. Top of the like list? Classical music, which he said was "the most beautiful genre to listen to." Country was, so far, his least favorite. "It's very heavy on vocals and since I can't clearly understand the words, the story is lost on me. Instead it just sounds like a man or woman crying for a couple minutes."
Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science
(Image credit: Austin Chapman)
Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, Canada, isn't the northernmost place mapped by Google Street View, but it is one of the most inaccessible. There are no cars there, just a few trucks. The citizens get around on snowmobiles, and traffic in and out of the community of 1,477 people is by plane. Everyone there know how to find their way around. But an Inuit geographical-information-systems coordinator invited Street View to come map the area anyway.
The Inuit man, Chris Kalluk, said he approached Google with the idea of bringing Street View to the Arctic last year as a way to educate the rest of the world about the region. "People that have never been in the North, past trees, in communities you can only get to by airplanes; they just don't know," Kalluk said by telephone from Cambridge Bay, where he has lived most of his life.
"They wonder if we live in igloos and travel by dog team. I spoke with an elder the other day who said that the land belongs to all the people, so everyone should be able to see it."
Fishing and hunting trips, often covering long distances, remain an important part of life for the Inuit in Cambridge Bay, or Ikaluktutiak as it's known in the native Inuinnaqtun language. But because magnetic compasses do not work in the far north, paper maps were rarely used for navigation in the past.
So Street View went to Cambridge Bay, and Google geostrategist Karin Tuxen-Bettman photographed the area with cameras mounted on a human-powered tricycle. Local kids followed on their own bikes. In just a few months, we will all be able to see the village up close. Link -via mental_floss
(Image credit: Google/NYT)
George Takei posted this at his Facebook page, with the line, "I'm sure parents everywhere are on borg with this." Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
Europe is full of beautiful castles that have been there for possibly hundreds of years, but never get the press that others receive -like those that Disney uses for reference. The World Geography looks at some gorgeous castles that are surrounded by water. What was once a defense tactic is now a pleasant feature that makes the structures even more beautiful. Shown is Muiderslot castle in the Netherlands. Link -Thanks, Bosko!
The following is an article from Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader.
In the late 1870s, a short, skinny kid started taking jujitsu classes in Tokyo. Martial arts would never be the same. (Right down to their fancy, colored belts.)
NINETY-POUND WEAKLING
In 1878 Jigoro Kano, the 17-year-old son of a saki maker, moved from the island of Honshu to Tokyo to attend Tokyo Imperial University. Shortly after arriving he started taking lessons in the Japanese martial art jujitsu. Kano was small, just over five feet tall, and weighed only about 90 pounds, but he was incredibly focused, and in just a few years became a master in the Tenjin-Shinyo-Ryu, or "Divine True Willow," school of jujitsu. Then he started studying other techniques -including western wrestling styles- and began developing his own moves, primarily takedowns. In 1882 Kano opened his own school, beginning with just 12 students. At the time he felt he was still teaching a form of jujitsu, but in 1884, at the age of just 24, he founded a new school of martial arts- judo, meaning "the gentle way."
JU-JISTORY
Jujitsu had been the dominant martial art in Japan for centuries. The name, which means "the art of softness," was first used in the 1500s, and referred to a wide variety of combat techniques which had been developed by Japan's warrior class, the samurai, since at least the 12th century.
During its formative years jujitsu involved the use of weapons, such as swords and spears, and was used on battlefields by heavily armored samurai. In the 1600s, all that changed when the Tokugawa Shogunate conquered the entire country. Over the following 250 relatively peaceful years, jujitsu naturally evolved, reflecting those more peaceful times. Rather than fighting with weapons in full armor, combatants studied and developed unarmed fighting techniques in schools. This is known as the "Golden Age" of jujitsu, when literally thousands of different schools and styles flourished.
Then in the mid 1800s, everything changed again: The Tokugawas lost power and the country emerged from its primitive, feudal framework, ended its policy of complete isolation, and embraced the West and the modern industrialized world. As a result, old Japanese traditions became very unpopular -and that included jujitsu. The storied martial art was in danger of dying out completely... but then Kano showed up.
What a pleasant idea -if you like tacos as much as the next person. This is the latest tune from Parry Gripp with animation by BooneBum. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Previously: More from Parry Gripp
Her name is Betty, but she really reminds me of Timon from The Lion King, the way she laughs while being tickled! -via Tastefully Offensive
The first ever Cat Video Festival was held Thursday in Minneapolis. A good time was had by all. From thousands of submissions, the festival selected the 76 best cat videos, and Buzzfeed has them all for those who could not attend. Most have been posted here at Neatorama over the years, but you might want to check them out to see your favorites: Maru, Winston, Nora, Henri, Simon's Cat, Shironeko, and lots of nameless kittens that have entertained you over the years, and some that may be new to you. This many videos may take a little while to load (and certainly longer to watch them all). Link
This is for all those folks who says they would have learned to play music if they could afford an instrument. All you need is someone's recycling bin and a little water. And may a couple of spoons. This busker was recorded playing Mozart on the streets of Copenhagen. -via Say OMG
DevantART member biotwist took a simple visual pun and made it really interesting. Can you name all the superheroes represented here? Big bonus points if you can identify all the guitars by their shapes, too! Link -via Tastefully Offensive
Happy Labor Day weekend! For those of you outside the U.S., this is a three-day weekend in honor of American workers and the American labor movement. A lot of nations have some kind of workers holiday, and since ours falls on the first Monday in September, it is celebrated with picnics, cookouts, harvest festivals, and preparations to send kids back to school if they haven't started already.
Here at Neatorama we are continuing to roll out new features one at a time. We introduced our new baby, the Batty for Halloween Blog! You can bookmark it if you like, or you can get there from Neatorama real easy by clicking that little jack-o-lantern up at the top of the page. The Halloween blog already has costumes, recipes, decorations, videos, history, and stories you'll enjoy -with a lot more to come!
Another new feature you'll want to try out is My Discussion. Click around and find out how easy it is to keep up with multiple discussion threads on the various posts here at Neatorama!
I've been quite busy, but I am gradually trying out all the new stuff here, too. I went to my Profile Page to write something about myself, but I never got around to it because I was distracted by the statistics. I was surprised to see I had written 11,101 posts! So of course I planned to take a screenshot when it reached 11,111. Alas, that milestone was missed because I was busy. But I also need to take some time and click the little heart at the top of more posts, because there are many, old and new, that particularly deserve a "♥" (too bad I cannot "♥" my own posts). You can go to your own profile page and see how many comments you've left, how many "♥s" they've drawn, and stuff like that.
And even though you can access our recent past features and open contests through the new leaderboard at the top of the page, I will still tell you about our exclusive features for this past week.
Jill Harness gave us 9 Pet Races You Might Want to Host Yourself, with plenty of video evidence.
Alex wrote about the new book Photobombed! Making Bad Pictures Great and Good Pictures Awesomely Bad and gave us plenty of funny examples.
From Eddie Deezen, we learned of 15 Really Strange Movie Credits, and then we got to read about (and watch) Woman Haters: the First Three Stooges Short.
Khakis: A Heat Stroke of Genius made the history of a fabric more interesting then you'd expect, thanks to Uncle John's Bathroom reader.
The Annals of Improbable Research brought us LIBRETTO: Chemist in a Coffee Shop.
Everything You Wanted to Know About Andy Warhol's Soup came from mental_floss magazine.
This was a week of winners, because we presented and wrapped up several giveaways. Our first giveaway on Pinterest, the Neatorama "Pin to Win" contest, was quite a success! Congratulations to the winners posted here. We may do this again real soon!
The Neatorama Caption Contest featuring a Bear in the Woods had a lot of great captions you should go read. Congratulations to the winners!
In the What Is It? game this week, the strange item shown is a salesman's sample of a Heatilator fireplace insert, although you have to admit that the picture you were given looks a lot like a sci-fi character's mask. There are more pictures at the What Is It? blog that showed how it looked completely folded and unfolded. Anker was the first one who knew what it is, and wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! Lord_Dissident gave us the funniest answer of the week: "It's a large hunk of metal that was only placed there to trip us up!" That's good for a t-shirt as well! Find the answers to all this week's mystery items at the What Is It? blog.
The post with the most comments this week was Should Polygamy Be Legal? followed by How Old is Too Old to Drive? and Restaurants Add Mandatory Tipping for French Canadian Customers. What all three of these have in common is that they all have polls attached in which you can register your opinion -and plenty of people did. However, most opinions are more nuanced than just "yes" or "no," so that's what the comment discussions are for. You are welcome to leave yours!
When you've caught up on everything else, be sure to check our Facebook page and our Google+ page every day for extra content, contests, discussions, videos, and links you won't find on our main page. Also, our Twitter feed will keep you updated on what's going around the web in real time. And remember, we always welcome your comments, feedback, and suggestions for making Neatorama ever better. Happy Labor Day!
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