We all know that Briar Rose, or Aurora, was a real beauty while sleeping. Real life isn't like that. We snore, develop bedhead, drool, and get pillow marks on our faces.



Andhika Muksin created a series of images that put Disney princesses into situations where they cannot look so perfect, like Facetiming or biting into something distasteful, and made them much more realistic.    



See a ranked list of the best of these images at Bored Panda, and more of Muksin's art at Instagram.

To mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo Da Vinci's death on May 2, 1519, the British restaurant chain Bella Italia commissioned food artist Carl Warner to recreate the above portrait of Leonardo with Italian foods, heavy on the pasta. It's a pretty good likeness!



In case you don't recognize the olive eyes, here's an explanation of the materials used.  

You can see the full ad at vimeo.  -via Laughing Squid

The video above is not so much spectacular for what it shows, but for what it is: the oldest motion picture of a solar eclipse, recorded in North Carolina in 1900. Nevil Maskelyne was a professional magician, but he was also obsessed with astronomy and loved the new technology of motion picture film. He actually filmed a total solar eclipse in India in 1898, but the film was stolen. Might it turn up someday? Who knows?

Undeterred, in 1900 Maskelyne journeyed to North Carolina, funded by the British Astronomical Association, to capture the eclipse of May 28. He successfully completed his observation and got the film home safely. Maskelyne likely showed the footage at his theater, and a one-minute fragment of the event ended up in the archives of the Royal Astronomical Society, which began collecting astrophotography images in the 1870s.

“Maskelyne wanted a novelty to show at his magic theatre, what better than the most impressive natural phenomenon of them all,” Bryony Dixon, a silent film curator at the British Film Institute (BFI), says in the press release.

The film is the earliest known movie of an astronomical event and the only surviving film by Maskelyne. The Royal Astronomical Society partnered with the BFI to restore each frame of the film and scanned it at 4K resolution, creating the digital version released online.

Read the story of Maskelyne and the eclipse at Smithsonian.  -via Mental Floss

The Guinness World Record for the steepest street in the world is Baldwin Street in Dunedin, New Zealand. And ever since the designation was bestowed, the residents have had to put up with tourists. Living in a town that is draped over the Appalachian foothills, Baldwin Street doesn't seem all that steep to me, but Guinness has its standards for such things. Anyway, if another place wanted to challenge the record, Dunedin probably wouldn't put up much of a fight. Tom Scott visits Baldwin Street and gives us the story. -via Digg

The cats at Austin Pets Alive have some imaginative names, but they have nothing on cats with AI-generated names! Janelle Shane (previously at Neatorama) has trained a neural network to name cats. This is her second attempt, using an algorithm that is familiar with English as used on the internet. The results were so good that the Morris Animal Refuge in Philadelphia is using the generated list to name their kittens. Pompompur is one of the "fancy" names generated. Then they get weird. Shane sorted the names into lists of the fancy, then the "opposite of fancy," such as Gangrene and Dr Fart, and "tough to downright sinister," including Warning Signs, Serendipitous Kill, and Mr. Sinister. But the best category is what Shane considers "very weird cats names."     

Whiskeridoo
This Guy
Various Authors
Chicken Whiskey
Fish Especially
Thelonious Monsieur
Accepted A Tribute

But those are just a sampling of the many names listed at Shane's post. Whether you are looking for a cat name or not, you'll want to see them. But keep in mind before you select one for your cat, that sooner or later you'll be yelling the cat's name from your front porch for the entire neighborhood to hear. -via Metafilter

(Image: Morris Animal Refuge)

Screen Junkies continues their summer blockbuster series with an Honest Trailer for Con Air, the 1997 Nicolas Cage prison break film. It was totally implausible, but boy, did it have a lot of action! And explosions! And tension! Not to mention a lot of big names in the cast. In the end, no one cared that Con Air was totally over-the-top, because it was totally over-the-top.   

Hayley Zablotsky spent her senior year of high school working as a party princess at a business that hosts children's events. She enjoyed looking the part, with a sequined gown, auburn wig, and petticoats, but she also considered what the princess fantasy meant for her, for the little girls who attended the parties, and for other people around her.

Sometimes I worried about what kind of role model I was for the girls. I was a beautiful accessory, a gracious flower. In real life, I was having increasingly ungracious thoughts. I had ambitions and opinions. I had a full-ride scholarship to college. I had skills. I had a wildly creative brain. But the little girls didn’t see this in me, and I worried that they didn’t see it in themselves. Or didn’t want it for themselves. At least not as much as they wanted a tiara. Or a prince.

I wanted them to realize what is real — everything. The curtseys, the sparkles, the princes (still hoping), the joy — yes. But also the dark edges. The floors are still cold under the plush pink rugs.

A little part of me felt betrayed by the illusion of it all, but that part of me also finally felt brave enough to function in the less-welcoming world of adulthood.

Read or listen to Zablotsky's story at Medium. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image courtesy of Hayley Zablotsky)  

The Alamo Draft House is serious about providing a pleasant moviegoing experience. Cressa Beer and Phoebe Jane Hart created a special short the theater is showing before screenings of Godzilla: King of the Monsters to warn audience members of what can happen when they talk or use their phones during the movie. Spoiler: Godzilla gets angry. -via Laughing Squid

Thursday marks the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Europe that turned World War II around. It may be the last major anniversary in which veterans who participated will be present. Ray Lambert was a 23-year-old US Army medic who served in the First Division, known as the Big Red One.

In the opening minutes of battle, by one estimate, 90 percent of the frontline GIs in some companies were killed or wounded. Within hours, casualties mounted into the thousands. Lambert was wounded twice that morning but was able to save well more than a dozen lives thanks to his bravery, skill and presence of mind. Impelled by instinct, training and a profound sense of responsibility for his men, he rescued many from drowning, bandaged many others, shielded wounded men behind the nearest steel barrier or lifeless body, and administered morphine shots—including one for himself to mask the pain of his own wounds. Lambert’s heroics only ended when a landing craft ramp weighing hundreds of pounds crashed down on him as he attempted to help a wounded soldier emerge from the surf. Unconscious, his back broken, Lambert was tended to by medics and soon found himself on a vessel heading back to England. But his ordeal was far from over. “When I came out of the army I weighed 130 pounds,” Lambert says. “I'd been in hospital for almost a year after D-Day, in England, then back in the States, before I was able to walk and really get around too good.”

Now 98, Lambert will be in Normandy for the D-Day commemorations. Read his story at Smithsonian.

If you pose the question "What is the hottest object in the universe?" to a group of scientists, you are going to get a lesson. One says it depends on what you mean by "hot." The next says it depends on what you mean by "object." And another will say it depends on what you mean by "universe." Then each will pick a definition and give an explanation of what they think. The most common answer among them is that the hottest object ever was the Big Bang, which mean they are defining "universe" as including all time. You can get pretty deep in a question like this! But that wasn't the only answer, and you'll learn something about all those terms in a roundup at Gizmodo. 

(Image credit: Benjamin Currie/Gizmo

The history of liquor laws has taught us that people will find a way around them every time. Before the US experimented with nationwide Prohibition in the 1920s, states and municipalities tried every which way to stem the flow of alcohol, if ever so slightly. New York state enacted the Raines law in 1896, which explicitly forbade liquor sales on Sunday, raised the price of a liquor license, barred sales within 200 feet of a church or school, and banned free lunches.

Behind this lifestyle tug-of-war lay a cultural conflict of national proportions. Those in favor of the Sunday ban, generally middle-class and Protestant, saw it as a cornerstone of social improvement. For those against, including the city’s tide of German and Irish immigrants, it was an act of repression—an especially spiteful one because it limited how the average laborer could enjoy himself on his one day off. The Sunday ban was not popular, to say the least, among the city’s Jews, who’d already observed their Sabbath the day before.

Opponents pointed out that existing Sabbath drinking laws were hypocritical anyway. An explicit loophole had been written into the law itself: it allowed lodging houses with ten rooms or more to serve guests drinks with meals seven days a week. Not incidentally, wealthy New Yorkers tended to dine out at the city’s ritzy hotel restaurants on Sundays, the usual day off for live-in servants.

You can see how people took advantage of a loophole, but what does all this have to do with the world's worst sandwich? The "Raines sandwich" was part of the loophole, and it was so thoroughly inedible that the same sandwich would be used for multiple customers. Read that story at Atlas Obscura.

It's been years since we brought you the terrifying tale of the Demon Core. In case you missed it, or don't recall all the details, it's an important story about the steep learning curve involved in early nuclear research. Scientists associated with the Manhattan Project knew there was danger in the radioactive materials they were working with, but had yet to codify safety standards into failsafe procedures, which spelled tragedy for two young physicists. Plainly Difficult brings us a video version of the story. This video contains a couple of images that may be disturbing.

Sergei Krikalev was a cosmonaut who made six space flights and spent a total of 803 days in space. It wasn't supposed to be that way. Krikalev was the flight engineer on Soyuz TM-12, launched on May 19, 1991, that docked with the MIR space station. He was to spend five months orbiting the earth with MIR. That's what Krikalev was doing when the Soviet Union collapsed on December 26, 1991. His nation no longer existed, and mission control at the Cosmodrome was now in Kazakhstan. His superiors told him he would have to stay in space longer because there was no money to bring him home.

In Krikalev’s case, the mission lasted twice as long as originally planned. He spent 311 days, or 10 months, in space, unwittingly setting a world record in the process. Over this time, four scheduled missions were cut to two, and neither of them had space for another flight engineer.

Russia, which at that time had major money problems due to hyperinflation, was selling other countries seats to the space station on the Soyuz rocket. For example, Austria bought a seat for $7 million, while Japan purchased one for $12 million to send a TV reporter there. There was even talk of urgently selling off the Mir while it was still in working order. All of this mean that other crew members returned to Earth, while Krikalev, the only flight engineer, could not. Locked up there in space, far from home, he asked them to bring him honey in order to raise his spirits. But there was no honey, and instead they sent him lemon and horseradish.

Krikalev eventually made it back to earth, and you can read the story of his unique time in space at Russia Beyond. -via Damn Interesting

The European Society of Anesthesiology held their annual conference this weekend, called the Euroanaesthesia Congress. Representatives from Australia presented a case in which a 60-year-old man was sent to surgery to repair an ascending aortic dissection. During the surgery, doctors had to extinguish a fire that ignited in his chest. The patient suffered from COPD, and a complication meant they ventilated him with 100% oxygen. They also used an instrument called an electrocautery, which ignited the oxygen threw a spark. Strangely, this seems to happen relatively often.   

Incredibly, the doctors were able to quickly extinguish the fire, with no damage to the patient. They then proceeded to finish up the surgery “uneventfully” and successfully repaired the man’s artery.

The unusual turn of events later inspired the doctors to look for similar cases. They managed to find six other documented cases of chest cavity fires during surgery, all of which involved dry surgical packs, increased oxygen concentration, the electrocautery device, and a patient with COPD or another lung disease. These cases also, fortunately, ended with no injuries. Though their case is the first, according to their account, to involve this particular kind of surgery.

They didn't mention how the fire was extinguished. A bucket of water? A fire extinguisher? You can read the particulars of this distressing event at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Flickr user dschmieding)

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had a BBC TV show called Not Only... But Also in 1965 and '66. In this sketch, they parody the flood of Supermarionation TV shows of the 1960s. As you watch this, you might just forget that these are real men and not puppets. -via Weird Universe