If you work in a hi-rise building, you might expect to see window washers outside, but no one else. Last week, Dallas workers on the 17th floor were treated to an unusual sight- a woman dancing on a rope outside their windows! Now, this is what you call performance art.
"I work for a company called Oak Branch Advisors and we’re located in the KPMG building in Downtown Dallas. It was still fairly early in the morning and I was having a friendly chat with a co-worker and that's when I saw a lady drop down on a rope outside the window. The thing that amazed me the most was the fact that we’re 17 floors up. Well, I whipped out my phone and simply started recording."
There is a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, now named Sagittarius A* (pronounced “a-star”). We can't actually see it, but we are getting enough data to know what's happening over there. From that data, astronomers from the European Space Observatory have constructed an animated simulation of the stuff swirling around the black hole.
Astronomers collected the data for the visualization using an instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, located in the deserts of northern Chile. The instrument, appropriately named GRAVITY, detected flares of infrared radiation coming from the disk surrounding Sagittarius A*. The researchers believe the bursts originated very close to the black hole, in an incredibly tumultuous region known as the innermost stable orbit. Here, cosmic material is slung around violently, but it remains far away enough that it can circle the black hole safely without getting sucked into the darkness.
After the success of Snow White and Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney opened a new animation studio with all the modern work amenities that 1938 had to offer. The architect was Kem Weber, who designed everything from the building's orientation to the furniture with animators in mind. Dave Bossert was a Disney animator during this time, and now the author of the book Kem Weber: Mid-Century Furniture Designs for the Disney Studios. He talked about the Kem Weber Compact Animator’s Desk, which he used for 30 of his 32 years with Disney.
Some of the coolest features of the Animator’s Desks, though, had nothing to do with the artistry and craftsmanship of animation, at least not directly. Consider the stainless-steel “cigarette guard” that protected the edges of certain shelves from burn marks, caused when animators would lay down a cigarette and then forget about it while they got lost in the details of a particular drawing. According to Bossert’s book, cigarette burns had been a big problem on desks in Disney’s Hyperion Studios, so much so that Weber included a stainless-steel cigarette guard in his design for the desks at the new studio in Burbank. (In 1939, the radical idea of going outside to smoke apparently did not cross anyone’s mind.)
Other design touches performed dual roles. While the desk’s recessed drawer pulls represented a handsome touch of Streamline Moderne for which Weber was so well known, they also made handy bottle openers for a late-afternoon beer. “I opened many a bottle on my drawer pulls,” the author confesses. Similarly, it was also apparently no accident that one of the desk’s cabinets was just the right height for a bottle of Scotch.
The band Flasher couldn't decide what style to use for their video for the song "Material," so they used all of them. If you've used YouTube a lot, you'll recognize many of them. Honestly, this one fooled me in a few places. Contains a very little NSFW language. -via Metafilter
Every year, Starbucks debuts new holiday designs for their paper coffee cups, and every year, someone take offense. The designs were too plain, too festive, too religious, not religious enough, too multicultural... you get the idea. The pendulum swung back and forth, and it became apparent that the Starbucks holiday cups were never going to please everyone. This year, the four new cup designs look as if the utmost care went into making them as neutral as possible while still conveying the idea of a winter holiday season. You can't blame them; after all, Starbucks just wants you to stop by and get a nice hot drink during the cold season while you are Christmas shopping. That said, they are lovely cups. -via The Takeout
Do you remember the first time you heard the Chili's Baby Back Ribs jingle? It was probably in 1986, when the song, composed by adman Guy Bommarito, first hit TV. Bommarito was embarrassed about the assignment, because jingles were definitely out of style at the time, which might explain why this one stood out so well. Strangly, Bommarito was cut out of any royalties when his writer's credit was dropped. It was later used in the 1999 movie Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, which revived its popularity. Chili's brought the jingle out again a couple of years ago, this time recorded by the a cappella group Take 6. Enjoy this glimpse into the fun they had recording it. -via Boing Boing
For the annual Halloween Parade in Kawasaki, Japan, last weekend, students from The Amazing School of Special Effects dressed as famous works of art! Surely you recognize The Scream, Mona Lisa, and Vincent Van Gogh's Self Portrait, but art doesn't have to be great to be famous. Notice the restoration of Ecce Homo by Cecilia Gimenez, also known colloquially as "Beast Jesus." The students' makeup was done by their teacher, Amazing Jiro.
Parkinson's Disease affects the nervous system, but it's possible that it begins elsewhere. Scientists think that both genes and environment play a part in determining whether a person will develop Parkinson's, and it's possible that there are several different causes. A study of the medical records of 1.7 million people show a small but significant link between whether a person has an appendix and whether they develop Parkinson's. Undergoing an appendectomy lowers your odds of ever getting the disease by 16.9%.
The international team of scientists reviewed two datasets, including a large registry from Sweden, and found that removal of the appendix was associated with a decreased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. They also found that the human appendix contains clumps of a protein called alpha-synuclein in a form associated with the disease.
Alpha-synuclein is also found in Lewy bodies, which are brain clumps found in Parkinson's patients. That's no reason to go and have your appendix taken out, but the research may lead to further discoveries, and possibly treatments. Read more about this discovery at Gizmodo.
Every year, Josh Sundquist goes all out for Halloween with a costume that incorporates the fact that he only has one leg. We've posted many of them here.
Back in 1995, when Sundquist was battling the cancer that took his leg, he expressed a desire to meet Disney animator Broose Johnson, because he wanted to grow up to do that same job. The Make-A-Wish Foundation arranged for 9-year-old Josh to meet Johnson and take a tour of his studio. It turned out Johnson is a double amputee himself. Oh yeah, Johnson is the animator who brought the Genie to life in the movie Alladin.
For his 2018 Halloween costume, Sundquist collaborated with Johnson and a professional custom fabrication company to turn him into the Genie from Aladdin! Continue reading to see a video of how it was accomplished.
In the final months of World War II, Hitler and his generals threw everything but the kitchen sink at the Allied forces, no matter how nonsensical. That included werewolves. No wolves were involved, but the Nazis tried to instill fear in their enemies by infiltration, taking out soldiers one by one when they were alone, and most of all, instilling fear with propaganda that tied the attacks to the supernatural.
From the start of the war, Hitler pulled from Germanic folklore and occult legends to supplement Nazi pageantry. High-level Nazis researched everything from the Holy Grail to witchcraft, as historian Eric Kurlander describes in his book, Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. Among those mythological fascinations were werewolves. “According to some 19th and early 20th century German folklorists, werewolves represented flawed, but well-meaning characters who may be bestial but are tied to the woods, the blood, the soil,” Kurlander says. “They represented German strength and purity against interlopers.”
It was an image Hitler harnessed repeatedly, from the name of one of his Eastern front headquarters—the Wolf’s Lair—to the implementation of “Operation Werewolf,” an October 1944 plan for Nazi SS lieutenants Adolf Prützmann and Otto Skorzeny to infiltrate Allied camps and sabotage supply lines with a paramilitary group. Skorzeny had already proved the value of such a specialized strike in 1943, when he successfully led a small group of commandoes to rescue Benito Mussolini from a prison in Italy.
The plan started with an elite group of German soldiers, but did not go all that well. They had more luck by enlisting partisan civilians, who continued to attack Allies even after the war's end. Read about the werewolves of World War II at Smithsonian.
Remember last spring, when we posted so much about the TinyKittens webcam? Then you'll recall the kitten Aura, who was born with a severe cleft palate and had to be tube-fed until she learned to eat solid dry food. Aura and all the other kittens have been adopted into permanent homes, and Aura was taken by Shelly Roche, the kittens' main caretaker. The plan was to wait until Aura's permanent teeth came in, and then have her palate surgically repaired.
2 hour PDX river loop run between Sellwood and Broadway bridges today. 100s of paddle boarding witches in full view of the trail... pic.twitter.com/e8ZBXuX432
You may have heard that witches cannot cross water. Not so! Hundreds of witches took to the water on Saturday in Portland, Oregon, using their brooms to paddle down the Williamette River. The event was the Standup Paddleboard Witch Paddle.
The witch paddle on the Willamette River all started when event organizer Ginny Kauffman, of Portland, saw photos of a similar Halloween event in California two years ago. Since then, the paddle in Portland has grown from a few dozen participants to several hundred.
This year, participants donated new packaged underwear, shirts and socks to the nonprofit Our House of Portland, along with coats to Sunshine Division.
Cyriak Harris already makes the creepiest animated videos on the 'net, so when he makes skeletons dance and releases it the day before Halloween, you know you're in for a really weird treat! His latest animation is called RIP. -via Laughing Squid
Halloween has long been considered the time when the veil between the known world and the supernatural is the thinnest, and spirits can communicate with us. Once upon a time, young women celebrated Halloween by indulging in magical rituals that would reveal who they were to marry. One of these was the "dumb supper." The word "dumb" was used to convey that no words were spoken during the meal -or afterward, when the magic was to happen.
Young women typically held dumb suppers, but men sometimes attended as well. The setting was usually an isolated place free of disturbances, such as an abandoned or otherwise empty house. In Frazier’s account of a dumb supper, two teenage girls in turn-of-the-century Kentucky “prepared a supper backwards in every respect. The tables were set as wrongly as possible; the chairs were turned backwards; the meal was to be served dessert first.” If anyone spoke a word, the spell was broken. When everything was prepared exactly right, then, at midnight, the spirits of the husbands-to-be would walk through the door, or even arrive in person.
Most people have some weird story about something unexplained that happened in their lives. That kind of thing stays with you. Most are just odd coincidences, but some are nightmare-inducing.
If you only have one such story, you can consider yourself lucky. But even if weird things happen to you a lot, there can only be one that is the creepiest.
