Henry Lipkis
Cats are inspirational- they've inspired many murals of all styles, sizes, and colors from diverse artists who have one thing in common: they know people love to see cats. Cats are showing up in public street art all over the world.
David Zinn
From adorable photorealistic cats to towering abstract impressions, see a collection of 31 street artworks featuring cats at Street Art 360.
-via @madamjujujive
Belgian illustrator Adrien Noterdaem (ADN) takes pop culture characters from TV and movies and converts them into the cartoon style of the TV series The Simpsons. No fictional world is off limits.
See a collection of his cast drawings from the movies Rogue One, The Force Awakens, Pulp Fiction, Alien, Fury Road, Ghostbusters, Jurassic World, and the TV shows Orange is the New Black, Downton Abbey, Suits, and more in a gallery at TVOM.
This Presidents Day article is from the book Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Presidency.
You probably wouldn’t let the unconscious, anesthetized, or generally incapacitated mind the store, but would you let them mind the country?
It seems like a necessary and not terribly difficult thing to do—make sure someone is always running the country. But it took U.S. lawmakers nearly 200 years to get most of the kinks out of the presidential succession process. Not until the 25th Amendment to the Constitution was passed in 1967 was the procedure for replacing an incapacitated president clarified. So what happened before that? Well, the government sort of made things up as it went along.
THAT DEPENDS ON WHAT THE MEANING OF "PRESIDENT" IS
The first real test of the succession process came when William Henry Harrison died after only a month in office. After delivering his inauguration speech in cold, windy weather without an over-coat, Harrison caught a cold that quickly turned into pneumonia. Within a month he was dead.
The Constitution said that given the president's death, his powers and duties should go to the vice president, who at that time was John Tyler. But not everyone was sure that Tyler actually became president. While he might have the president’s powers and duties, was it really the same thing as being president? Wasn’t he only acting, so to speak? Tyler didn’t think so. He quickly had himself sworn in as president and even gave an inauguration speech at the ceremony.
Today is the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, issued on February 19, 1942, which allowed the U.S. government to inter Japanese-Americans, German-Americans and Italian-Americans in camps for the duration of the war. Around 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry were removed from their West Coast homes and taken to internment camps.
The above government newsreel was made in 1943. At the National Archives' Unwritten Record Blog, you can read about the internment project and see an 18-minute 1944 color documentary.
At The New Yorker, you can see Bill Manbo's rare color photographs of his internment camp.
At NPR's Code Switch, you can see photographs of the internment from three different photographers which very different agendas: Dorothea Lange, who wanted to convey the unfairness of the order; Ansel Adams, who depicted the internees as patriotic and cooperative volunteers; and Toyo Miyatake, who was himself an internee. -via Metafilter
If you need a smile, take a look at what some kids are doing with their spare time. Desire, hard work, and persistence come together to give us some awesome performances, even in children that look too young to be doing these things.
This compilation is brought to you by People Are Awesome to show us that kids are awesome, too! -via Tastefully Offensive
(Image source: imgur)
You've been told for years to stop and think twice before hitting "send." That goes double and triple if you are testing graphics to be used only in an emergency. An incident Tuesday most likely caused a few hearts to skip a beat among U.S. Air Force personnel.
The message read “MISSILE INBOUND. SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY!” as it took over the screens of Air Force personnel working at the 52nd Fighter Wing at Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany, earlier this week.
It was accidentally sent out to all terminals through the bases AtHoc emergency alert system that is typically used for weather updates. Spokesman Maj. Bryon McGarry told Stars and Stripes, “One of the command post controllers was building a template for this specific thing that was posted.” The message was intended to only go to one person but he “inadvertently sent it to everybody.” Eight minutes after the message announcing impending doom popped up, a soothing blue screen went out across the base’s terminals telling everyone to chill out.
But the original image was saved and shared. Someone added an embarrassed face to the original message and posted it to Air Force amn/nco/snco at Facebook. Read the entire story at Gizmodo.
An unnamed man in Bolsover, Ontario, received an inheritance back in the 1980s. He hid $100,000 of it, in $50 bills, inside a television set. Then he forgot where he put it. Some time over the next 30 years, he gave the TV set to a friend, who used it until about a year ago, when it was sent to Global Electric Electronic Processing (GEEP) in Barrie, Ontario, for recycling. There the TV sat until last month, when it was taken apart. Employees were surprised to find a box full of cash.
Barrie police reunited a 68-year-old man from Bolsover, Ont., a village of about 400 people in the Kawartha Lakes region, with the cash, using banking records from 1985 to trace the owner. Police did not release his name because of privacy concerns.
“This is a unique situation where this large quantity of money was missing without anyone knowing it was missing,” Const. Nicole Rodgers said. “He hadn’t even realized with the police officers sitting in his house that they were speaking of the cash box with his money in it.
“In his mind, he thought it was still somewhere else in his house.”
There must be a safer place to keep one's savings, like maybe a mattress. Read more on the story at the Calgary Herald. -via Dave Barry
(Image credit: Flickr user Chris Butterworth)
When Star Trek went to the big screen in 1979, audiences were excited, but Star Trek: The Motion Picture was too long and slowly-paced to stand the test of time. It was also extremely expensive, causing Paramount to rethink making a sequel. So changes were made: Gene Roddenberry was fired, a budget-conscious director was brought in, and the script for The Wrath of Khan was written by a writer who'd never seen a Star Trek episode. The production staff not only learned from the mistakes of the first movie, but used the existing sets and unused footage to save money. The changes had repercussions beyond Star Trek.
The cumbersome large model on wires approach was shelved for Star Trek’s motion control, and new models were built with usability and cost in mind, rather than screen presence. The only thing not cut back on was the aforementioned CGI. The large terraforming sequence could only be done in animation, and much like the sequence in the finished film it was presented as an advert for the skills of Lucasfilm Computer Imaging. And like in the film, the CGI video succeeded in its marketing purpose. The clip impressed a young Steve Jobs enough to part with $5 million to buy out the division, which renamed itself Pixar.
But what really made the The Wrath of Khan a hit was a plot that focused on the original cast and a villain that harked back to the TV series (to be fair, V'ger did, too, but not as charismatically as Khan). Read about the process of bringing The Wrath of Khan to theaters at Den of Geek.
I used an app that did this a long time ago at a previous job. We were encouraged to explore the internet at first, but over time, we ended up restricted to only looking up the weather forecast, so a loading screen was quite useful when the boss walked in while I was checking email or playing solitaire. Jeff Lofvers of Don't Hit Save has a more dedicated reason for using his: to hide the fact that he's been at home playing video games all day instead of producing something useful.
Bruce Springsteen played in Brisbane Thursday night. A teenager held up a sign that said he was missing school for the concert, and could he play "Growin' Up"? Springsteen called him up on stage to play. Fifteen-year-old Nathan Testa knew the song, and well. In the middle of the song, Springsteen gives him some advice about looking good on stage.
What's really strange is that this isn't the first time Testa has played with the Boss. His family are all avid Springsteen fans, and attended a Brisbane concert in 2013, when Testa, then 11, was pulled on stage to play "Waitin' on a Sunny Day." -via Metafilter
#StarWars : #LesDerniersJedi, décembre 2017 au cinéma. pic.twitter.com/Qzgoy5Aq5e
— Star Wars France (@StarWarsFR) February 17, 2017
When the name of the new Star Wars film was announced in January as The Last Jedi, we all wondered what that meant. As the story stands, Luke Skywalker is the last Jedi. But will he remain the last Jedi? Will he be killed off? Will someone else become the last Jedi? Then we realized that the word "Jedi" is both singular and plural. Which does the title mean? We were resigned to wait until the movie is released in December to find out. But the title is more complicated in other languages, where a definite article indicates a singular or plural. As the movie gets it title translated around the world, we have the answer, courtesy of Star Wars France. It's plural, as in more than one Jedi. Other European countries with languages that indicate plurality have announced the movie title using the plural form, as you can see at Slate.
Ice dragon boating is when you put your dragon boat on skates and propel it across a frozen surface. And, of course, there is ice dragon boat racing. Ice dragon boat racers even have an international federation.
And this weekend, the first Ice Dragon Boat Festival is happening in Ottawa. If you can't make it to Ottawa, there's the Manitoba Ice Dragon Boat Festival coming up on February 25. You'll find more links about ice dragon boat racing at Metafilter.
We came up with this ridiculous plan to get this rat out of our house and IT ACTUALLY WORKED!!!! BYE BITCH pic.twitter.com/c5qW76mzP8
— Jody Mackin (@jodeball4REALZ) February 17, 2017
Jodie, Logan, Briana, and Meg share an apartment in Pittsburgh. A rat got into their apartment earlier this week, so they put their heads together to figure out how to evict it. They cornered the rat in the shower, then set up a complicated course to shoo it downstairs and out the door. What are the odds of this working? The four women and Logan's boyfriend Bo were all ready when Logan forced the rat out of the tub, and surprise! Their scheme worked like a charm, and even better, they got video evidence. Read more about the adventure at Buzzfeed.
What happens to a helicopter when it crashes, wears out, or becomes obsolete? Many times, it just sits there. Oh yeah, it might be taken to a junkyard, and of course, some are stripped and recycled, but the world is full of abandoned choppers of all kinds that are still awaiting their final disposition years, even decades after their last flight.
(Image credit: Flickr user Alan Wilson)
You can take a tour of the world's abandoned helicopters in their aviation graveyards from Russia to Japan to the U.S. (among other places) in a post with 70 pictures at Urban Ghosts.
You could spend a lifetime watching TV sitcoms and not realize that the same weird things keep happening from show to show over time. Maybe that's because we don't watch that many sitcoms at a time, or we don't compare our favorites from the 1970s to our favorites from the '10s. Did you ever notice how new infants in a sitcom family suddenly become old enough to deliver lines (or at least look cute) the next season? In Full House, Uncle Jesse's twins grew quickly, while their cousin Michelle did not.
Modern Family provides more evidence of a vast baby-swapping conspiracy when Cam and Mitchell celebrate their daughter's second birthday ... only to mention that she's three a few months later. Clearly, they're speeding up the rate of her birthdays so as to avoid arousing suspicions when they inevitably switch her (which they did).
On the other hand, the baby swaps in Growing Pains and Family Ties are so laughably obvious that they seem to imply this business isn't even underground. Chrissy Seaver blossoms from basically a newborn child to a 5-year-old girl in the space of one season ...
That's just one weird thing about sitcoms that happens over and over. You might notice one thing when it happens in your favorite show, but you probably never realized that it's a TV thing in show after show, over decades. Read the rest of the list of weirdness in TV sitcoms at Cracked.
