For the first time since 2019, Ottawa Comiccon returned this past weekend. More than 40,000 people headed to the EY Centre in Ottawa to celebrate the convention's return. Cosplayers, some who had been waiting three years to show off their stuff, were all over, and Geeks Are Sexy was there to document them. The participants were in a dancing mood, so here are some of them gettin' down to "Struttin'" by Thumpasaurus. This is just a tiny sample of the awesome costumes that were on display, so you'll want to check out the photo gallery from Ottawa Comiccon 2022 at Geeks Are Sexy. I hear there may also be other videos to come. A good time was had by all.

Saturday Night Live will kick off its 48th season on October first. When the show first began back in 1975, we got used to the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, who were a relatively stable group,* at least after Bill Murray replaced Chevy Chase. But then in the fifth season, they all disappeared and made way for a new group of up-and-coming comics. Since then, there have been cast members rotating in and out for various lengths of time. Who has stayed with Saturday Night Live the longest? That title goes to Keenan Thompson, who has been there for 19 of the 47 seasons so far, and will be there this fall as well. No one else comes close to that tenure, and only two other cast members have lasted more than a dozen years. In the early days of SNL, cast members would leave to pursue movie stardom, but now they know how risky that is and manage to squeeze those projects into the summer hiatus. Six cast members were there for nine seasons, but one is still on the show, so will move up on the list when the new season begins. Mental Floss has a list of the 15 cast members with the longest tenure on Saturday Night Live, with a video of their best work for each of them.

*Maybe not so stable as individuals.

"The official Palace beekeeper, John Chapple, 79, told MailOnline how he travelled to Buckingham Palace and Clarence House on Friday following news of The Queen’s death to carry out the superstitious ritual," telling the bees QE2 had died.https://t.co/7ZnRefH9NX

— Dirt Doctor (@HowardGarrett) September 10, 2022

There are many rituals and traditions surrounding the death of a monarch, and they are now being carried out in the UK following the death of Queen Elizabeth II on Thursday. That includes one that goes back hundreds of years, but is pretty obscure these days. On Friday, 79-year-old John Chapple, the royal beekeeper, went around to all the royal beehives and broke the news to the bees.

"Telling the Bees" is a custom explained in a previous post that was once both a common courtesy to household members who toiled to provide food for the family, and a superstition to keep bad things from happening. Chapple went to beehives at Buckingham Palace and at Clarence House, tied a black ribbon around each hive, and explained to the bees in each hive that the queen had passed on, and that their new master is King Charles III. He assured the bees that they will be treated well. Chapple hopes to be the one who continues to care for them. Read more about the royal beekeeper and his duties at The Daily Mail. -via Boing Boing 

I thought, from seeing the official trailer, that Thor: Love and Thunder would be a fun movie. It made a lot of money, but both critics and audiences were a bit meh about it. Now we have an Honest Trailer to explain to us what the movie is really like. Thor: Love and Thunder is apparently one joke after another, which took away from any serious aspect of the story. You really can't make a laugh-fest out of cancer. The funny bits made the previous movie Thor: Ragnarok special, so they put twice as many jokes into Thor: Love and Thunder. In filmmaking, that doesn't always work. Screen Junkies has some other criticisms of the movie, too. And if you just wanted to see Thor naked, well, you'll get most of that in this Honest Trailer.

The Bird Photographer of the Year is Norwegian photographer Erlend Haarberg, who won the top prize for the image above, titled Rock Ptarmigan Flight. It also won the Birds in the Environment category. Haarberg gets $5,000 in addition to the title. Of course, he's not the only photographer to take home honors in the Bird Photographer of the Year competition. Below is the winner of the Portraits category, a male sage grouse in full mating display captured by American Ly Dang. What female sage grouse wouldn't be impressed?   



Other categories are Best Portfolio, Attention to Detail, Bird Behaviour, Birds in Flight, Black and White, Urban Birds, and Creative Imagery. There were also awards for younger age groups, and a special Conservation Award. You can see the amazing winners and runners-up in each category at the competition gallery. The 2023 contest is already open, so get your binoculars and cameras ready. -via Digg

Artists from across the country moved to San Francisco in the 1960s to be part of the scene, but Mari Tepper was already part of the scene, having been born there. She was designing posters for rock concerts even before graduating from high school. Those concert posters are well-known among collectors, but Tepper had a wide repertoire that included newspaper illustrations, bread sculpture, comics, and social justice artworks.

In the spring of 1967, Tepper designed a black-and-white poster for a concert at California Hall, her figures rendered almost as silhouettes against a black background. That summer, she produced a poster for the Haight’s own Straight Theater, and in October she drew and lettered two posters for shows featuring Big Brother and the Holding Company and Quicksilver Messenger Service, one being a benefit for the newly formed Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, the second featuring a hippie’s Holy Grail lineup at Winterland—in addition to Big Brother and Quicksilver, the Grateful Dead played a set.

But Tepper’s most acclaimed poster of 1967 bore no legendary band names, focusing instead on a preoccupation of the times that was even more important than music—sex. Little wonder then that today Tepper is still best known for her “Hallelujah the Pill!!” mandala, which depicts a quintet of brilliantly hued couples demonstrating various sexual positions. Not surprisingly, this psychedelicized update of tantric sex sold tens of thousands of copies in headshops around the country. But as with her work as a high-school student for the Committee, and her later Haight-Ashbury postcards, Tepper saw nary a dime.

Read about Mari Tepper's unique life and career, including the uncomfortable story of designing the “Hallelujah the Pill!!” and of growing up too fast and too alone, at Collectors Weekly.

How much helium does it take to lift a person? About 70,000 liters. In case you wondered how much helium it took to lift the house in the movie Up, or Larry Walters' or Kent Couch's lawn chairs. But you, too, can float around with a helium balloon in a safe manner, thanks to a French company called Aéroplume. Their balloons are set up in an old blimp hangar so there's no chance of flying off into the wild blue yonder. The helium balloons make you relatively weightless, so you get to experience the feeling of  flying without a plane. How cool is that?

The comments under this video explore the difference between Tom getting the heebie-jeebies walking above the Royal Albert Hall with his apparent calm while strapped onto a balloon. The strapping itself may be reassuring, and the explanation of the worst that could happen probably makes a big difference.

J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the 1950s. But he spent the years from 1914 to his death in 1973 building and refining his fictional universe called Middle-Earth, including original languages and a history covering many thousands of years. He left behind reams of unpublished stories, along with research and notes on Middle-Earth. The story that became the new Amazon Prime TV series Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is part of that rich unpublished history. It takes place as the First Age moves to the Second Age and concerns an island called Númenor (The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place during the Third Age).

Tolkien's writings on Númenor will be published in November in a book titled The Fall of Númenor. The inspiration for it came to Tolkien suddenly in 1936. Smithsonian has a brief overview of the story of Númenor and how it fits into the mythology of Middle-Earth, and then takes a deep dive into the historical forces that inspired Tolkien's story.

It's autumn, the season in which the most prestigious films of the year are released to entertain holiday moviegoers and qualify for the Academy Awards. A very personal family film from Steven Spielberg will be hard to beat.

The new film The Fabelmans premiered yesterday at the Toronto International Film Festival and received a standing ovation. Today we have a trailer. The movie is directed, co-produced, and co-written (with Tony Kushner) by Spielberg. It is about a boy growing up in postwar America who wants to make movies. Yes, it is Spielberg's autobiography, even though the name of the family is Fabelman. He had been thinking about filming the story for twenty years, but only began serious work on it after his father died at age 103 in 2020 (Spielberg's mother died in 2017). Gabriel LaBelle plays the teenage Sammy Fabelman, and Michelle Williams and Paul Dano play his parents, with music by John Williams. Critics who have seen the movie love it. The rest of us will have to wait until November 11, when The Fabelmans hits theaters.

Chemotherapy often leaves young cancer patients with scalps that are too sensitive for scratchy traditional wigs, even if they could afford them. What they need are warm, soft head coverings. But even more, they need something to smile about. That's where the Magic Yarn Project comes in. Volunteer yarncrafters create beautiful and whimsical wigs, caps, and headdresses that make kids into princesses, superheroes, and other Disney characters. The yarn is soft, hypoallergenic, and machine washable, and best of all, the wigs are free to the kids who need them!



So far, 40,000 volunteers have created 30,000 wings for children in 52 countries. See a video of how the project came about here. If you are a knitter or crocheter and want to make one of these wigs, or you know a child or institution who could use them, or you want to donate, or if you just want to read about the work they do, check out the Magic Yarn Project. -via Metafilter

Queen Elizabeth II passed away Thursday at the age of 96. Have you noticed newscasters having trouble saying King Charles (instead of Prince Charles), or even the word king? It's very new and strange to them because Elizabeth was always the monarch of the British Empire. At least it seemed that way.

Elizabeth was born in 1926 and became queen of the United Kingdom in 1952, when she was only 25 years old. Holding one job for 70 years is hard to wrap our heads around, but Laurence Brown (previously at Neatorama) is here to help. He gives us some mind-bending statistics to emphasize how long 70 years really is, and how much the world has changed.

Europe is currently undergoing a drought that has left rivers running dry and reservoirs reduced to mud puddles. It's been said to be the worst drought in Europe in 500 years. So what happened 500 years ago?

The year 1540 began with Italy going almost 200 days without rain. The River Thames went so low that the sea flowed in and reversed its course. The Rhine, Elbe, and Seine also dried to the point where people could wade across. Without water, sewage could not be swept away and diseases broke out. Crops failed and wildfires thrived. Martin Luther thought it was a sign of the End Times. People all over looked for a scapegoat, such as witches and refugees. The upside to the drought was that vintage 1540 wine was strangely good, made from dried-up grapes with a high sugar content. That was a good thing, as what water they had to drink was pretty nasty. Read about the drought of 1540 and what makes the European drought of 2022 different at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting

Can you solve a logic puzzle that was featured in the the 2022 Brazilian Mathematical Olympiad of Public Schools? The information you are given is 1. Pinocchio always lies, and 2. Pinocchio says "All my hats are green." What can you deduce from that? Duh, it means Pinocchio has at least one hat that isn't green. Then they reveal that that this is a multiple choice question, and none of the answers are the one you thought! After I calmed down, I thought, well, one answer is pretty close to mine, although incomplete. But wait, maybe he has no hats! That's silly, we can see from the picture that he does. However, the picture isn't really necessary, and probably doesn't accompany every version of the puzzle. So then we get a lesson in a "vacuously true statement." By the time we get through the video, you realize you were correct all along. Using a confusing multiple choice answer format forces you to justify your choice. And then learn something. -via Nag on the Lake

Siena Awards has completed their competition for their Drone Photo Awards competition for 2022. The Photographer of the Year prize went to Armand Sarlangue for the image above. It's an overhead view of a new fissure in the Fagradalsfjall volcano in Iceland. There were prizes awarded in several categories, including urban, wildlife, sport, people, nature, abstract, wedding, and more. Below is "Water Lily Harvesting" by Shibasish Saha, which was the runner-up in the people category.



You can see all the winning images at the awards gallery, or see them in a ranked list on one page at Bored Panda.

 
During one of those huge patriotic displays that North Korea is known to stage, the Korean People's Army State Merited Chorus and Symphony Orchestra (the North Korean military's musical unit) performed a symphonic version of "Killing in the Name" by Rage Against the Machine. If you think that's highly unlikely, you'd be right. This is an edit, but a particularly masterful one from Lars Von Retriever in which you can listen and watch and start to question whether it might be real after all. Well, the video is real and the audio is real, but they didn't come from the same source. The audio is from a performance by Rockin' 1000 (NSFW lyrics). Someone in the comments mentioned that this video might cause an international incident, but YouTube is not accessible in North Korea except to government elites, and they wouldn't want to draw attention to it. -via Laughing Squid