Artist Dan Cretu (previously at Neatorama) mixes classical artworks with modern pop culture in a series of mashups that make you say, "Yeah!" The show Friends ceased production 13 years ago, but you certainly recognize them in the image above, even though their faces were painted by Renaissance masters and other famous artists. That same crew could star in other memorable TV shows.
In the newest episode of Simon's Cat Logic, we get some insight into the language of cats. No, not LOLspeak, that's an internet language. This is about cat communication, especially what they're trying to tell us humans.
Cats don't normally meow in cat society, so their meows are an attempt to speak human language. It works for them most of the time, at least to get our attention. And as cat owners, we learn their body language. Hissing, growling, purring, chirping, and other sounds are used for both humans and other cats. Bonus: we get to see Simon Tofield recording cat meows for his cartoons. The new video is only about five minutes long. It's tagged with the Simon's Cat video Double Trouble. -via Tastefully Offensive
Thomas Morris is working on a book about the history of heart surgery, and keeps a blog of the most curious and hard-to-believe stories in medical literature that he has encountered in his research (motto: Making you grateful for modern medicine). It is not a site for the squeamish, but it doesn't rely on photographs. A gruesome case from 1874 Virginia may make you cringe, yet it has a happy ending. Dr. A.W. Fontaine wrote of the case,
J.T., a Welsh quarryman, aged about twenty-five years, of sound constitution, but somewhat “addicted to spirits,” whilst in a state of intoxication, fell from a four-horse slate wagon, in rapid motion, and loaded with five or six other persons. The vehicle thus loaded, ran over him and across the middle of his body; it broke the neck off a large glass bottle, the stump of which, it seems, penetrated his abdomen, emptying his bowels, which were crushed into the sand by the rolling wheels.
The good news was that the intestines that spilled out were bruised but not cut, and the puncture wound in his abdomen was small. The bad news was that there was plenty of broken glass and dirt on the entrails that needed to be removed before they were stuffed back in. Surprisingly to everyone involved, the patient survived. Read Dr. Fontaine's account of the procedure at Thomas Morris. -via Strange Company
Fumarase deficiency is a metabolic disorder that affects brain development and results in devastating disability. It is the result of recessive genes, and before 1990, only 13 cases were ever diagnosed. But then Dr. Theodore Tarby found eight cases among the children of Short Creek, where the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) settled two towns along the Utah-Arizona border.
In Short Creek, just two surnames dominate the local records – Jessop and Barlow. According to local historian Benjamin Bistline, who spoke to news agency Reuters back in 2007, 75 to 80% of people in Short Creek are blood relatives of the community’s founding patriarchs, Joseph Jessop and John Barlow.
This is all very well, but we now know that most people are walking around with at least one lethal recessive mutation (one that would kill us before we reach reproductive age) in their genome, around the same number as in fruit flies. Humans haven’t gone extinct because, being recessive, they’re only unmasked if we have children with someone who also just so happens to carry a copy of that exact same mutation too.
Star Trek: The Next Generation turns 30 this September. One of the most memorable locations on the Enterprise in that show was the holodeck, where any fantasy could be conjured up through 23rd-century virtual reality. That enabled quite a few plots that would be too improbable without it. LEGO artist Iain Heath (Ochre Jelly) built a diorama of the holodeck to celebrate the show's anniversary, and to illustrate what could possibly go wrong. He calls it Safety Protocols Disabled.
The grid pattern is not drawn or painted, it's actually a complex repeating pattern of LEGO bricks!
The minifigs are custom made ones that I found on sale at a LEGO convention.
The dinosaurs are taken from official LEGO dinosaur sets.
Look at this goat. Just look at it! Redditor arnathor met this goat and had to take a picture to share. According to commenters, the goat has the hair of Gandalf or Tom Petty (personally, I thought of Leon Russell), the smirk of McKayla Maroney or Natalie Dormer, and the general look of Owen Wilson, Jeff Bridges, or Ron Perlman. I can't see Ron Perlman, unless you are thinking of his character in Beauty and the Beast, but he is a ridiculously photogenic goat. -via reddit
When you have too many rules, people will spend their time trying to figure out a way around those rules. People who want a dog in their college dorm get one classified as a therapy animal. When your religion says you can't work on the Sabbath, you hire someone to do necessary tasks for you. And when your church forbids meat on certain days, you go to work redefining what meat is. First off, animal products were banned during medieval fast days, but fish were okay, because they lived in the water and did not have to be saved on Noah's ark. By that reasoning, there are plenty of fish in the sea.
All of these restrictions led to some flagrant misinterpretations of what was or was not a fish. The Benedictine abbey of Le Tréport, in northern France, came under fire from the local archbishop, in Rouen, when it was discovered they were regularly noshing on puffins. These, they argued, were mostly found in and around water and must therefore be fish.
Some of these justifications were very dubious. Dolphins, porpoises and other cetaceans were mammals, but acceptable to eat as mammals of the sea (the medieval German word for dolphin is “merswin,” or “pig of the ocean,” while “porpoise” comes from the Latin for pig fish: porcus piscis).
A cookbook from a 15th-century Austrian nunnery, as translated by Melitta Adamson, suggests: “From a dolphin, you can make good dishes. You can make good roasts from it … one also makes sausages and good venison.” (These mammals, known as “royal fish” in the United Kingdom, were forbidden from commoners’ tables from 1324—as they are still, bar some arcane exceptions about whales over a certain weight.)
The 1980s were a golden age for romantic comedies and teen movies, and the posters for many of them are recognizable decades later. Artist Andrew Tarasov took nine of those posters and improved them by casting comic book superheroes and villains in the starring roles.
I really love old movies, and I found out that they had a very funny posters sometime. Also I love superhero-movies, so.. I decided to mix these old movie posters with the characters everybody likes.
You can see all nine of them in this gallery. Yeah, a couple of these movies are from the '90s, but so what? -via Boing Boing
Good characters get killed off in movies for all kinds of reasons, but some of those reasons are better than others. Sure, we understand that an actor doesn't want to play that role anymore, but does that death do anything for the plot? Other times, a death seems like it's the only way the writers could inject some drama in the movie. Let's discuss some seemingly unnecessary movie deaths that we still can't get over, at TVOM.
These images illustrate women's fashions for every year from 1784 to 1970. Mefite Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane gives us a running commentary to go along with the pictures.
1784 - 1821: From kinda floofy to more streamlined. 1822 - 1850: Gettin' floofier. 1850 - 1866: BRACE FOR MAXIMUM FLOOF 1867 - 1874: Much less floofy, but with a shelf at the small of the back 1875 - 1882: OK, lose the shelf 1883 - 1887: What the hell, bring the shelf back 1888 - 1896: The Incredible Growing Shoulder Pads 1897 - 1910: Raise High The Waistline 1911 - 1929: How about we raise the hem slowly off the floor? 1930 - 1935: Nah, drop it again. 1936 - 1946: Wait bring it up again. 1947 - 1953: Add pleats, too. 1954 - 1957: You know what? Floof it again. 1958 - 1959: On second thought, no. 1960: Actually yes. 1961 - 1964: Yeah lose the floof. But bring the hem up. 1965 - 1969: Bring it up ever higher, until we have a tunic. 1970: BOOM, PANTS! There, we're done here.
No matter what era you lived in, the latest fashions tended to be set in motion by a class of celebrity trendsetters, notably royalty, later followed by wealthy high society, and eventually movie and TV stars. Women's fashions went through a paradigm shift in the early 20th century, when "freedom of movement" took hold and never again died out. Thanks goodness for that. -via Metafilter
This hamster trying to use a hamster wheel is a metaphor for the way life tends to throw a wrench in our plans. You're going along just fine, thinking you've finally figured something out, or have a skill down, and suddenly things go sideways and you don't even know how it happened.
The real kicker is that you get laughed at when you are in the most vulnerable position. But we can be like this little hamster, and just pick ourselves up and try again! -via Digg
Proving once again that humans will make a competition out of any activity at all, consider competitive table-setting. Known as tablescaping, it's a staple of many county fairs, and has been a annual event at the L.A. County Fair since the 1930s. Tables are judged for both precision and creativity, and can be amazingly elaborate. Bonnie Overman has been competing at the L.A. fair since 1997, and has won First Place and Best in Show several times.
There was the Gone With the Wind themed table for which she crafted a pair of faux-glass doors from two picture frames, through which you could see Scarlett racing across the grounds of Tara, and draped them in green velvet curtains. (That one scored Best in Show.) There was the Pirates of the Caribbean table for which she made three skeleton pirates, one of which was crawling through a porthole. There was the Wicked table for which she hacked together a Wicked Witch figurine from a Halloween skeleton, witch’s mask and costume wig, made bubbling green goo from felt, glued sequins onto a pair of tiny heels, and sewed taffeta flocking to the tablecloth in order to mimic costumes from the Broadway musical. The centerpiece was an aquarium castle painted to look like the Emerald City. (Overman has a penchant for filmic themes.) Tablescaping rules state that the milieu must also have a corresponding fictional menu; for Wicked, Overman dreamed up an all-green dinner that included pea soup and green apple pie.
To call a Super Soaker a water gun is akin to calling the Mona Lisa an art project. It's been a defining part of summertime fun for 27 years now. The Super Soaker was invented by Lonnie Johnson, an overachiever from Mobile, Alabama. Johnson's long list of accomplishments is impressive, but he is most famous for his souped-up water pistol.
He graduated with degrees in mechanical and nuclear engineering from Tuskegee University, joined the Air Force as the acting chief of the Space Nuclear Power Safety Section at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, then moved to NASA's Jet Propulsion lab in 1979 where he was working as a systems engineer for the Galileo mission to Jupiter. It was then, in 1982, already having several patents to his name, that he had his Eureka moment.
One of his pet projects was an environmentally friendly heat pump that used water instead of Freon. One day, tinkering as he often did, Johnson hooked up a nozzle to the bathroom faucet. When he turned on the water, it sprayed clear across the room. "The stream of water was so powerful that it set up air currents in the bathroom," he told CNBC. "I thought to myself, 'This would make a neat water gun.'" It doesn't take a rocket scientist to build a toy, but it certainly doesn't hurt, either.
However, the path from "Eureka!" to iconic toy is a story full of ups and downs. Read that story at Thrillist.-Thanks, Walter!
The annual Lambeth Country Show took place a couple of weeks ago in Brixton, UK. One of the events of the fair is the Vegetable Figures competition, in which people make art out of their garden produce. Many of the displays are puns, with British politics being the most popular topic. If you are familiar with the politicians involved, you'll get an extra laugh out of them.
Whoa, this is something I hadn't thought about. What if you were in an airplane and flew through the totality of the August 21st solar eclipse? It could happen. If you were on the right flight at the exact time and place. Come to think of it, the odds are pretty small. And your pilot would be aware of the eclipse anyway. This is the latest from Randall Munroe at xkcd. Go to the comic page to check out the hovertext punch line.