No one would serve a cake with glass shards in it -at least no one you'd want to know- but these just look like glass. Food artist Hellen Die (the alter ego of TV writer Tye Lombardi) shows us how to make this gruesome cake that should only be served at adults-only gatherings.
This cake is dangerously delicious. A deep dark buttermilk chocolate cake wrapped in thick white marshmallow fondant stabbed with shards of sweet sugar glass, topped with a white chocolate skull, and drizzled in sweet raspberry blood is a showstopping way to say Happy Halloween!
Mark Hamill is almost as famous for being the voice of The Joker as he is for playing Luke Skywalker. In this Justice League Action short from Cartoon Network, Hamill does all the voices: the Joker, Trickster, and "famous actor Mark Hamill," which is a younger and somewhat steroid-enhanced version of Hamill -as you would expect in a comic book character.
The plot proves to be weirdly meta when "famous actor Mark Hamill" saves the day by using his unique superpower- his voice acting skills! -via Laughing Squid
A bassoon is a woodwind instrument that plays in the lower range. A contrabassoon plays even lower notes. A subcontrabassoon… well, it doesn't exist. But professional contrabassoonist Richard Bobo wants to change that, by building the first subcontrabassoon. Bobo explains more about the project in this interview. The finished instrument will be 6'4" tall and weigh 35 pounds. However, that is substantially smaller than a pipe organ, which is the only other instrument that currently plays the lowest notes.
Despite its larger size, the ergonomics of the subcontrabassoon have been designed to be as similar to the contrabassoon as possible. The bocal angle, bocal height, bocal projection, end pin adjustment, and vertical hand playing positions will all be identical to a standard contrabassoon. However, unlike the contrabassoon and bassoon, the subcontrabassoon’s left-hand keywork will be contained on a single joint and a second handrest will therefore be provided for comfort.
In short, if you can play the contrabassoon, you will be able to play the subcontrabassoon.
Jeff Wysaski, under the name Obvious Plant, creates silly signs and plants them in businesses and other places where someone will get pranked by reading them. But now, he's produced a 28-page magazine called, of course, Obvious Plant. Fake articles in a fake magazine. So then he leaves it in a bookstore. You have to wonder if any customers purchased the magazine, and whether the clerk who does it had any inkling this is not a magazine they stock. Take a look inside and see eight pages of Obvious Plant magazine at imgur. You can buy Obvious Plant magazine here. -via reddit
People have been building monsters for the silver screen ever since movies were invented. In every era of filmmaking, artists have used whatever they had and whatever would work to bring a vision to life …as long as they stayed within budget. Mental Floss spoke with some of today's leading monster designers and animators to get a glimpse into the world of movie monsters.
1. CREATURE EFFECTS HAVE COME A LONG WAY SINCE GUYS IN RUBBER SUITS.
The earliest creature features typically involved a guy in a rubber suit terrorizing Tokyo or carrying off a damsel in distress. Today’s creatures are much more complex and believable, thanks to new varieties of silicone rubber, upgrades in animatronics, new forms of design software, and the development of CGI.
“Special Effects as an industry is always evolving, and products and materials are expanding and becoming more readily available than ever before,” says Stuart Rowsell, a creature technician and founder of Bloodhound FX in Australia who has worked on films including Star Wars: Episode II (2002) and III (2005), Superman Returns (2006), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), and Alien: Covenant (2017).
3D printing is also shaking up the industry. Lino Stavole, a creature engineer at Spectral Motion based in Los Angeles, founded 3D scanning, printing, and engineering company Behold 3D to cater to the needs of the entertainment industry. Stavole tells Mental Floss that his company used 3D printing in silicone to create an alien creature for the movie V/H/S in just two days, a process that once required several more. “That really opened my eyes to the potential of what technology can do,” he says. 3D printing is also pushing boundaries in terms of design intricacy—Stavole says a creature he helped create for Netflix’s planned reboot of Lost in Space incorporates about 400 different 3D-printed parts.
This is just what it says on the tin, but it's always cute when a cat enjoys corn on the cob this much. I would bet there's butter on that corn. The little girl is enjoying it, too. The cats in the background wish they had some, too.
Halloween is the first candy holiday of the dark days of winter. The temptation can be too much for some of us. But once we get through Christmas, Valentine's Day, and Easter, we'll be ready to go without for a while. Meanwhile, you have to forgive us adults who haven't quite grown up yet. This is the latest comic from Alex Culang and Raynato Castro at Buttersafe.
Time travel is fiction, unless you are referring to traveling ahead in time at the rate one one minute per minute. As fiction, you can do pretty much what you want with temporal displacement, so science fiction stories treat that ability in many different ways.
What causes a paradox doesn't necessarily cause a paradox in a different story. Our friends at Minute Physics gives us an overview of how time travel varies between stories. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The 1981 film Nighthawks pitted cops Sylvester Stallone and Billie Dee Williams against terrorist Rutger Hauer. Typecasting, right? While the movie was a hit, it was a long and troubled road getting it to theaters. For example,
7. Hauer was injured twice while filming his death scene.
The squib that was meant to simulate a gunshot burned him when it exploded on the wrong side and the cable used to pull him back when he was ‘shot’ strained his back. Unfortunately this was done on Stallone’s order.
4. The movie was originally supposed to be the French Connection III.
After seeing the original script Gene Hackman backed out of the production and it was then reworked into what became Nighthawks.
According to tradition, it was on October 31st, 1517, that a priest named Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany, and began the Protestant Reformation. The movement gave Europe Christian sects outside the supervision of the Pope, a doctrine of salvation by faith alone, and Bibles in common languages. In short, the idea of religious freedom was born out of the Reformation. But as the 500th anniversary of his protest approaches, you might be surprised to learn that there is no evidence that Luther ever nailed his theses to the church door. He merely sent them to the archbishop.
If the Ninety-five Theses sprouted a myth, that is no surprise. Luther was one of those figures who touched off something much larger than himself; namely, the Reformation—the sundering of the Church and a fundamental revision of its theology. Once he had divided the Church, it could not be healed. His reforms survived to breed other reforms, many of which he disapproved of. His church splintered and splintered. To tote up the Protestant denominations discussed in Alec Ryrie’s new book, “Protestants” (Viking), is almost comical, there are so many of them. That means a lot of people, though. An eighth of the human race is now Protestant.
The Reformation, in turn, reshaped Europe. As German-speaking lands asserted their independence from Rome, other forces were unleashed. In the Knights’ Revolt of 1522, and the Peasants’ War, a couple of years later, minor gentry and impoverished agricultural workers saw Protestantism as a way of redressing social grievances. (More than eighty thousand poorly armed peasants were slaughtered when the latter rebellion failed.) Indeed, the horrific Thirty Years’ War, in which, basically, Europe’s Roman Catholics killed all the Protestants they could, and vice versa, can in some measure be laid at Luther’s door. Although it did not begin until decades after his death, it arose in part because he had created no institutional structure to replace the one he walked away from.
In honor of the anniversary, the New Yorker has a relatively short biography of Martin Luther, warts and all, and a simple explanation of the beliefs that led him to revolt against the Catholic Church. -via Digg
Jack Williams of WBZ in Boston had a news story with a ridiculous punch line back in the 1970s. It took him a split second to picture what he was reading, and then he cracked up and could not stop laughing. Eventually, he was laughing at his own laughing on air. It wasn't that funny! But it is a classic. -via Boing Boing
Look at this little darlin' in her first Halloween costume! Three-month-old Macie is Rapunzel, and her dad is her tower. Macie's mother Megan made the costume, and tells us about it here. The there's amberilyn, who played Secret Service agent to her son's POTUS last year.
Young people used parlor games for fortune-telling at every holiday, but Halloween is when the spirits are closest to the material world. In centuries past, many games and rituals surrounding Halloween were used to determine who one would marry, or whether one would marry at all. Evidence of these rituals survives in postcards, and many of them had to do with apples. We bob for apples for fun, and for the enjoyment of seeing others completely soaked, but at one time, apples could tell your fortune. Peel one and toss it; the shape it falls into will be the first initial of your true love. Mark apples before bobbing for them; which one you retrieve will tell you your future. And trying to bite swinging apple on a string could seriously lead to a kiss when you're competing with the opposite sex. Even stranger was the use of the produce most often associated with Halloween: cabbages. Read about the bygone fortune-telling rituals of Halloween at Messy Messy Chic, and see of collection of vintage Halloween greeting cards that tell the stories.
The flu pandemic of 1918 killed between 50 million and 100 million people across the globe -more than died in World War I combat. But no one took it seriously at the beginning, because it was just flu, and few of the people who contracted it died. That's why it was able to spread so fast and so far. It was called Spanish flu, but it probably originated in the United States. After the fact, the outbreak was traced to Haskell County, Kansas, where many people became sick in January of 1918. The local doctor reported the outbreak, which meant it particularly worried him, since influenza was not a reportable disease.
Several Haskell men who had been exposed to influenza went to Camp Funston, in central Kansas. Days later, on March 4, the first soldier known to have influenza reported ill. The huge Army base was training men for combat in World War I, and within two weeks 1,100 soldiers were admitted to the hospital, with thousands more sick in barracks. Thirty-eight died. Then, infected soldiers likely carried influenza from Funston to other Army camps in the States—24 of 36 large camps had outbreaks—sickening tens of thousands, before carrying the disease overseas. Meanwhile, the disease spread into U.S. civilian communities.
The influenza virus mutates rapidly, changing enough that the human immune system has difficulty recognizing and attacking it even from one season to the next. A pandemic occurs when an entirely new and virulent influenza virus, which the immune system has not previously seen, enters the population and spreads worldwide. Ordinary seasonal influenza viruses normally bind only to cells in the upper respiratory tract—the nose and throat—which is why they transmit easily. The 1918 pandemic virus infected cells in the upper respiratory tract, transmitting easily, but also deep in the lungs, damaging tissue and often leading to viral as well as bacterial pneumonias.
The flu ravaged Europe, then abated in July, leading to a false sense that it was over. When it roared back, it was deadlier than ever. The disease was exacerbated in the US, where government officials refused to acknowledge it, fearing it would hinder the war effort. The lack of information only fueled panic. Smithsonian magazine tells us about the spread of the 1918 flu pandemic.
