Legoland Windsor has a display portraying the wedding of Prince Harry and American actress Meghan Markle, which will take place in real life this coming Friday. The entire display took more than 39,000 LEGO bricks! There's the bride and groom, of course, and recognizable figures of their families -with the exception of newborn Prince Louis.
It took 11 model makers a whopping 592 hours to build the replica of Windsor Castle, which happens to be just down the road from Legoland Windsor. The spectacle also features a teeny Ascot Landau carriage, made using 1,500 bricks. The carriage can be seen making its way down the mini Long Walk, which features two horses made from 200 bricks.
Beyond the bridal party, there's along a crowd of 500 Lego people, made from an impressive 17,000 bricks, which aim to reflect the spectators who'll be showing up on the day to watch from a distance.
The biggest part of the display is Windsor Castle, which you can see in its entirety in a pictorial at Mashable.
Being a Mom isn't a real job because you couldn't pay someone to do all the things mothers do. Moms go out and get real jobs to relax and enjoy a normal schedule -until they get home and start their more difficult, unpaid tasks. Happy Mothers Day! -via Laughing Squid
— The Lonely Island (@thelonelyisland) May 6, 2018
Thursday, Fox announced that they will cancel the TV showsBrooklyn Nine-Nine, The Last Man On Earth, and The Mick. Viewers reacted immediately, mourning the loss of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Andy Samberg's police comedy that had been on TV for five seasons. The final two episodes of season five will air on May 13 and 20.
Our hero finds himself surrounded. He must run the gantlet of enemies, using his cat-like (duh) skills! This unique footage is only enhanced with the addition of the song "Run" by AWOLNATION. The song has become a meme, accompanying quite a few familiar running sequences you can see in a compilation video at Tastefully Offensive.
Parents who are considering the naming of a new person this year might take inspiration from the list of the most popular baby names from last year. Or they might try their best to avoid them. After all, you don't want your daughter to be one of six girls with the same name in her class, do you? Or maybe you do. The Social Security Administration has released the statistics for baby names from 2017.
On the same page, you can look up historical rankings of baby names, or enter a name and track its popularity over time. The names on the top ten didn't change all that much from last year; for girls, Emma has been #1 and Olivia #2 for four years now, and Liam was #2 in 2016. The names that show the most popularity increase are still fairly obscure (although Oaklynn might be pretty popular if you combine the different spellings). -via Mental Floss
The footage in this video looks like a tour through the set of the new film Solo. But this Millennium Falcon is completely homemade! Greg Dietrich, Jake Polatty, and their friends in Huntsville, Alabama, have spent six years making their own actual size Millennium Falcon cockpit in insanely accurate detail. Watch how they did it, and more importantly, learn why. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Mothers lie to their children for a variety of reasons. Sometimes a wild story is easier than explaining something truthfully, because the truth is either unpleasant, complicated, or something the child doesn't care about. Sometimes the lies are simply a way to get children to behave. Sometime moms pass along old wive's tales they've heard. And sometimes they are just messing with their kids because it's fun. Atlas Obscura solicited maternal lies from their readers to share with us for Mothers Day. Here's a sampling.
“If you lie to me, I will know because when I ask you to look into a bowl of water, I will be able to see your reflection.” —Patricia Petersen, Vancouver, British Columbia
“If I touched the basement freezer, I would be sucked inside and no one would be able to hear me scream.” —Niki Cotton, Virginia
“Going out with wet hair, wearing fashionable cropped clothing that didn’t come right down to your bum and sitting down on cold concrete all cause a mysterious illness known as ‘a chill on your kidneys.’ When questioned on the symptoms when I was an adult, mum still said ‘well you’ll know all about it when you catch one.’ It seems to also be caused by inadequate vegetable consumption and staying out late without your good coat.” —Sarah, Manchester, United Kingdom
“To deter my brother and me from eating my mom’s delicious homemade chocolate chip cookies she told us the extra crunch to them were frog legs. Really they were walnuts.” —Jen, California
“For our first pet, my mom agreed to let my brother and I get a parakeet. Though I have no recollection of it, we picked out a green-and-yellow one. The next morning, my mom found the bird lying dead on the bottom of the cage, so she brought it back to the store to get another one. But there were no more green-and-yellow birds left—only blue ones. My mom begrudgingly exchanged our now-deceased choice for a light blue bird, and when she got home, she told her three- and five-year-olds that the parakeet had simply taken a bath. We must have accepted it right away, because I can’t ever remember a time when our parakeet was yellow and green.” —Madeline Bilis, Boston, Massachusetts
“Sometimes when our house settled it would make little creaking noises that seemed to come from under our home, only accessible by a hatch into the crawl space. When my brother and I asked her what was making the noises under the house she told us that’s where our misbehaving siblings lived and if we didn’t behave that’s where he and I would end up.” — Jen, California
Here's one that's not really a lie, just an oversimplification.
“My mom told me that sugary foods had little bugs on them, and the bugs liked to eat teeth, but if I brushed, then it would take them off.” —Adam Drew, Calgary, Canada
Where are all my coloured liquids?! Unfortunately, science is usually colourless and very rarely calls for dramatic staring. Also, I usually like to label my tubes... #BadStockPhotosOfMyJobpic.twitter.com/aofNoQk9si
Looking for a generic image of a scientist at work is like stepping into fantasy land. Stock images show the stereotype, which is a white person in a lab coat starring at something, most often a test tube containing blue liquid. Scientists on Twitter are having a laugh poking fun at not only the stereotype, but the inaccuracies within the unlikely scenes.
The whole thing started when Nicole Paulk, a biochemistry and biophysics professor at the University of California, San Francisco, was working on a presentation. “I was trying to find stock images that aren’t too stuffy and more realistic, that don’t show us with tweed jackets and elbow patches,” she says.
Instead, she found a scientist peering deeply at a chunk of dry ice. “No one on the planet, even a dry ice scientist, would ever do this,” she says — so she tweeted it. Turns out, there are a lot more photos where this came from. So science blogger and former chemist Yvette d’Entremont came up with the hashtag, #BadStockPhotosOfMyJob.
Check out the hashtag #BadStockPhotosOfMyJob. So far, it is still mostly scientists, but other people are contributing examples from their professions, too. -via Metafilter
The few English words in this video are NSFW. I would assume that's the case if you understand Dutch, too. Cars are driving through Safari Park Beekse Bergen in the Netherlands. A French family opens their doors and gets out near a group of cheetahs, despite posted warnings in many languages that you don't do that. In the first part of the video, it appears that another car pulls up to warn them, but that doesn't stop them from getting out of the car again later, with terrify results.
As others have pointed out, they were really lucky these were cheetahs. If they had done this near lions or tigers, it could have turned out much worse. -via reddit
Burton Silverman is an acclaimed painter known for his portraits of working class people. At age 89, he has many years of teaching art and quite a few exhibits on this resume.
And yet, for all the artwork he’s created, the accolades and awards, it bothers him, in a way he can’t really express and may not want to recognize, that one of the first lines in his obituary will mention a “throwaway gig,” from the winter of 1970: the artwork for Jethro Tull’s best-known and best-selling album, Aqualung.
Seven million copies of Aqualung have been sold over the last five-odd decades and the cover has become one of the most recognizable in rock and roll history, migrating from vinyl albums to cassettes, CDs, and iTunes art, plus an unending supply of Aqualung-embossed merchandise. But dad’s earnings had a hard cap. In 1971, Terry Ellis, the co-founder of Chrysalis Records, paid him a flat $1,500 fee for the three paintings which would comprise the album’s artwork, consummating the deal with nothing more than a handshake. No written contractual agreement was drawn up, and, much to his eventual dismay, nor was any determination made about future use.
The art merchandizing business has changed since 1970, and Silverman's lack of control over the images bothers him when he sees it emblazoned on coffee cups, calendars, and posters. Read the story of how the Aqualung artwork was created, who it portrays, and what happed in the 48 years since then in an article written by the artist's son Robert Silverman. -via Digg
Will Smith became a rap star at a young age, and like many inexperienced people, blew through his money in no time. Getting in trouble with the IRS impelled him to do something, anything, to get out of the hole. Quincy Jones is the star of this story. It's a good story. -via Boing Boing
Way off the beaten path, Cold Spring Tavern outside of Santa Barbara, California, is a lasting remnant of the stagecoach days. It began as a bunkhouse for immigrant road builders in 1868, then became a ballet school, then a money-laundering restaurant, and has been a pit stop for travelers ever since. The tavern has been operated by the Ovington family since Audrey Ovington bought it in 1941.
She came from eccentric stock, with a father who pioneered the skies as the first ever commercial pilot in the United States (and was an assistant to Thomas Edison), and an opera singing mother. With the passing of her husband in 1941, the Widow Ovington took on Cold Spring as a new adventure, and later passed it on to Audrey. It became home to an increasingly festive crowd, including her pet leopard, Ricardo (or “ricky”), who lived off of canned sardines and horse meat. Everyone else stuck to buffalo burgers, and a new, local sauce called “Hidden Valley Ranch” (yup, Audrey was the first to serve it).
Audrey Ovington bought up buildings from a ghost town and brought them to Cold Spring, making the business more than just a restaurant. Read about the last stagecoach tavern at Messy Nessy Chic.
The children's book Masquerade was illustrated by Kit Williams, who had, unknown to the publisher, made puzzles out of his illustrations that gave clues to a buried treasure. That was in 1979. People went nuts trying to figure it out, but the story of the golden rabbit is crazier than any of those facts indicate. -via Kottke
If your workplace provides coffee, tea, or other beverages, you might notice that the spoons are the first thing to go. Plastic spoons are easily replaceable, but they are not environmentally sustainable and haven't always been available. Scientists at an Australian research institute used metal flatware teaspoons, which tended to disappear. So in 2005, they set about doing on study on the phenomena.
In January 2004 the authors found their tearoom bereft of teaspoons. Although a flunky (MSCL) was rapidly dispatched to purchase a new batch, these replacements in turn disappeared within a few months. Exasperated by our consequent inability to stir in our sugar and to accurately dispense instant coffee, we decided to respond in time honoured epidemiologists' fashion and measure the phenomenon.
A search of the medical and other scientific literature through Google, Google Scholar, and Medline using the keywords “teaspoon”, “spoon”, “workplace”, “loss” and “attrition” revealed nothing about the phenomenon of teaspoon loss. Lacking any guidance from previous researchers, we set out to answer the age old question “Where have all the bloody teaspoons gone?” We aimed to determine the overall rate of loss of teaspoons and the half life of teaspoons in our institute, whether teaspoons placed in communal tearooms were lost at a different rate from teaspoons placed in individual tearooms, and whether better quality teaspoons would be more attractive to spoon shifters or be more highly valued and respected and therefore move and disappear more slowly.
They worked out their methods and set up a pilot study. They marked 70 teaspoons with numbers to track them. They found that 80% of the teaspoons disappeared during the study, and the half-life of a teaspoon was 81 days. At that rate, they predicted that 250 new spoons would have to be purchased each year to maintain an adequate supply. Extrapolating to the other workplaces of Melbourne, they estimated that 18 million teaspoons could go missing each year. The entire study is worth a read, because of gems like this found in the conclusion section.
Teaspoon displacement and loss leads to the use of forks, knives, and staplers to measure out coffee and sugar, inevitably causing a reduction in employee satisfaction; in addition, large amounts of time may be wasted searching for teaspoons, both factors leading to decreased employee efficiency.
The study was published in the British Medical Journal, and you can read it here. -via Metafilter, where there are more tales of missing spoons, forks, pens, socks, and screwdrivers.
After Mark Rober (previously at Neatorama) lost his wallet and never got it back. The experience inspired him to try an experiment: he dropped 200 wallets in different cities to see how many were returned, and which city had the highest ratio of returned wallets. People turned out to be more honest and helpful than he expected. -via Tastefully Offensive
