We saw cosplayer Alyson Tabbitha just a few days ago in this post, portraying Captain Jack Sparrow in uncanny fashion. Now take a look at what she looks like without a costume, and as Wonder Woman! Yes, both pictures are Tabbitha. On the left, pretty woman you've never met, on the right, Gal Gadot. It's the power of the makeup she does herself, and the costume is spot on. See more of Tabbitha's cosplay at Instagram. Also check out her makeup tutorials at YouTube. -via reddit
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Those awful Jell-O/mayonnaise/Spam-type recipes from the 1940s, '50s, and '60s may have been completely inedible by modern standards, but they sure are fun to mock. To that end, the Mid-Century Supper Club was formed in 2007. The group holds potlucks where members bring food made from retro recipes, the more outlandish, the better. Rusty Blazenhoff (far right in the picture) began attending these dinners dressed in full retro style. In 2011, she even won a competition with her Christmas tree made of Fluffernutter and peanut butter fudge! Read about the Mid-Century Supper Club and their upcoming Halloween potluck at Boing Boing.
(Image credit: Rusty Blazenhoff)
The 1984 film Beverly Hills Cop wasn't Eddie Murphy's first movie, but it was his first as a solo lead and it made him a superstar of the big screen as well as the small screen. What you might not know is that the movie was in development a long time before Murphy got involved, even though the finished product seemed to be tailor-made for him. Without Murphy, it would have been quite a different film.
8. Mickey Rourke was almost Axel Foley.
He was paid around $400,000 to play the part of Foley but then had to walk when too much back and forth caused his contract to expire.
7. Sylvester Stallone was almost Axel Foley.
This would have been a pure action flick with just barely a hint of comedy, which would have played to Stallone’s strengths at the time. Thankfully it didn’t go through.
Can you imagine? Read the rest of the trivia list about Beverly Hills Cop at TVOM.
What? You mean we owe our entire continued existence to procrastination? I guess that's an idea I can get behind. At least it explains the Fermi paradox. This is the latest comic from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
In 1998, McDonald's offered Szechuan sauce to accompany chicken nuggets. It was a limited-time offer to promote the movie Mulan. In April, the bygone sauce was the subject of a joke on the show Rick and Marty. Since then, the internet became obsessed with Szechuan sauce. To capitalize on the meme, McDonald's made the sauce available for one day only on Saturday. They tragically underestimated the demand, and saw lines forming for the sauce. Some outlets only had a dozen or so packets to give out. And some had none at all.
And while some got their sauce—our very own Charles Pulliam-Moore called it “okay”—plus a cute poster to commemorate the occasion, reports are that many McDonald’s locations did not have the sauce packets in quantities anywhere near sufficient to meet demand. Many took to Twitter to document the pandemonium that their local burgery had become, descended upon by a mob of condiment-lacking customers from the saddest of timelines: ours.
Common theme, I tried two in Delaware that @McDonalds website said had it, and they say they never got it. Seems like a bait and switch.
— Kyle Grantham (@kylegrantham) October 7, 2017
But don't give up just yet. The company has hinted that it will do this again.
You spoke. We’ve listened. Lots more #SzechuanSauce and locations. Details soon. And that’s the wayyy the news goes! pic.twitter.com/ooIrbZBsOw
— McDonald's (@McDonalds) October 8, 2017
No date for the return of the sauce has been set. -via the A.V. Club
(Image credit: McDonald's Wikia)
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!
by Jeremy Gorman
Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada
One day when I was wondering just what was wrong with me,
I thought to ask some experts in what’s called psychology.
Beginning with the founders of the psychologic arts,
I went to Wundt and Titchener, who broke me into parts.
John Dewey proved more functional, and Peirce was quite pragmatic,
but Ebbinghaus’s learning curve was steep as stairs-to-attic.
I asked Will James, “How much to tell me what is best for me?”
He told me, “You must give yourself.” Wow. Quite the session fee.
John Watson soon got wind of this, and, not to be outdone,
said “Give to me a dozen kids.” I had not even one!
And so I went to Festinger, who told me my cognition
was dissonant, though Erikson did not take that position.
A crisis of identity was what he said I had.
And so I asked, “What therapy will make my mind less mad?”
Sometimes you feel the need to revert back to your childhood, even if just for a few minutes. Neil deGrasse Tyson got that yearning, but when you're Neil deGrasse Tyson, your wish may be fulfilled. In this video, he gets his bedtime story read to him by LeVar Burton. So it's a flashback to Tyson being read to as a child, and a flashback to Reading Rainbow as well. But that doesn't make sense, because Tyson was an adult when Reading Rainbow premiered. Oh well, it's a peaceful little interlude for the astrophysicist.
He couldn't resist explaining something from the book, though.
FYI: A Cow can jump over the Moon if she aims where the Moon will be in three days, then leaps at about 25,000 miles per hour— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 8, 2017
-via reddit
We've seen sexy vegetables, sexy Gandalf, and sexy fake news Halloween costumes. Since it's obvious that you can make a "sexy" Halloween costume out of anything, why not make a costume out of the costume itself? That is, the Halloween costume kits as they appear hanging on the store shelves this time of year. That's what Jamie Kruger did. You can see more photos at the link. The biggest problem I can see is lack of hands, because you must have a way to break a fall if you're going to wear those heels, or at least hold a cocktail. Is this overly meta, or just stupidly clever? -via Boing Boing
On October 8, 1997, Cornell University students noticed a pumpkin impaled on top of the McGraw Tower spire. That's 173 feet up! How did it get up there? They couldn't get it down, so the pumpkin stayed there for 158 days. The stunt made national news, and its continued existence was watched by everyone on campus.
The campus went playfully out of its gourd. The Cornell Chorus and the Cornell Glee Club created pumpkin lyrics for the alma mater. A webcam provided 24-hour live images – a novelty at the time – from Olin Library.
In January 1998, the university built scaffolding around McGraw Tower to repoint century-old mortar. The somewhat decayed pumpkin held fast.
A class sent a remote-control balloon up to study the pumpkin. The next spring, a crane was used to finally remove it. But no one ever found out who put it up there or how. Read the story of the great pumpkin caper at the Cornell Chronicle. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Cornell University)
Brazilian artist Juliana LePine (who lives in Canada) made a small sculpture of Freddie Mercury the way nature does it -by starting with the bones inside. As she adds layers, every detail is examined and adjusted to be correct. The process is mesmerizing.
In just two minutes we see what it must have taken weeks to accomplish. Or maybe she's faster than we can relate to. Anyway, the finished product is an amazing recreation of Mercury performing at Live Aid in 1985. LePine offers instructional videos (in English) in case you want to learn how she does it. -via Laughing Squid
Redditor tas253 has a daughter who's a huge Batman fan. A friend made a doll that looks just like her wearing a Batman costume! The first pun on the picture was "The Dark Knit," but since the doll is crocheted, it came to be called "The Crocheted Crusader." The doll's proud owner does not mind that it's wearing an Adam West costume.
The friend who made it does this kind of thing for extra money, but does not have an Etsy outlet yet. She is planning to make some dolls for her local children's hospital. -via reddit
The world's longest mosaic wall runs for 6.5 kilometers in Hanoi, Vietnam. The the Hanoi Mosaic Road is an artistic enhancement to the city's flood wall in which artists, government bodies from around the world, and corporations sponsored sections of art made from ceramic tiles. The mosaic was finished in 2010, and was certified as a record-holder by the Guinness Book.
Jürgen Horn and Mike Powell, who moved from Saigon to Hanoi, documented the different styles of mosaic art, which you can see at Hanoi for 91 Days.
After eight years in the NFL, Richie Owens retired and became a graphic designer and web developer. He also started a webcomic called Ow! My Knees! about his life in transition from athletics to information technology, and sometimes about his home life. There are only 13 comics so far, and I would recommend reading all of them. Each comic is accompanied by a blog post that may or may not have anything to do with the comic. The comic above is the only one so far that actually references the title of the webcomic. -via Don't Hit Save
This video shows an escape system to evacuate people in a hurry from the upper floors of a high-rise building. It actually looks like it could be pretty fun as a carnival ride. The idea is to slide down a fabric chute that slows your descent just enough to keep you from splatting against the ground. What could possibly go wrong?
The first thing everyone thinks of is the wide range of people who would be using it. Would an obese person slide down at the same rate as a skinny person? Or would they tear the fabric? Or get stuck? Would people in a panic tumble down too close together? What of someone had a sharp object attached to them? You know there would be at least one fool who would try it head first. What I see as most likely is that people at the bottom would fall on their butts, or sides, and take too long to get up and move out of the way. There would be a pile of people to land on! -via Digg
This was the very first x-ray ever taken, in 1895. It shows the hand of Bertha Roentgen, the wife of Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, inventor of the x-ray. The image helped him win a Nobel Prize in 1901. It had to have been very weird to see the inside of her hand, the long, thin, bones, the skin barely visible, and her wedding ring. The x-ray was a side effect of research Roentgen had been doing with Crookes tubes, which later evolved into cathode ray tubes. He had tried diverting the electrons with aluminim foil.
In early November, he repeated the experiment in the dark in his lab at the University of Würzburg in Germany. But then he noticed something happening far away from the Crookes tube. A screen coated in barium platinocyanide, the fluorescent material that was used on photographic plates, was sitting on a chair near the experiment, and every time Wilhelm turned on the electricity, the screen glowed. Not quite believing what he was seeing, he dedicated his time to rigorously testing and documenting the strange rays, which he called “X.” He put objects made from different materials on photographic plates and exposed them to X-rays, and found that the mysterious rays passed through some but not others. Eventually, a few days before Christmas, he asked his wife to help him in the lab. Anna held her left hand on a photographic plate for 15 minutes while Wilhelm beamed X-rays at it. According to legend, she said, “I have seen my death!” and never set foot in his lab again.
Read more about the development of x-rays and how it became quite the rage at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Wellcome Library, London)
Email This Post to a Friend