Henry Hargreaves made a font out of bacon! No, it's not just a bacon font, each letter was constructed from real bacon, as you can see:



It was a joint effort: Photography and direction by Henry Hargreaves, styling by Sarah Guido. See closeups of each letter at his website. Link

The title of this picture from redditor theroboticdan is "My cousin's entire Bridal Party sank into a lake this weekend. Awesome picture.... " but the top-voted comment gave it the above title. There are plenty more puns in the comments. Link

(Image credit: Jeff Hayford)

Meaghan Mountford shows you step-by-step how to make your own frightening Frankenstein Marshmallow Pops for a ghoulishly glorious Halloween treat! Any recipe that calls for "candy eyes" is alright by me. Can you get those at the corner market? Link -via Laughing Squid

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Boston Dynamics made a music video featuring their BigDog Robotic Mule. You'll see clips of various stages of the robot's development and testing set to the tune of "Let the Big Dog Eat" performed by Alex Taylor. -via Geeks Are Sexy Previously at Neatorama: BigDog in 2006. Still funnier: The BigDog beta version.

Gabor used a nonfunctional laptop to prop up a working laptop with broken hinges! Link

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American daredevil Jeb Corliss became the first man in a wingsuit to fly in China, and flew right through a natural arch at Tianenman mountain in Hunan Province. The action starts about one minute into the video. Link -via Arbroath

This Twaggie was illustrated by Jeff Maksuta from a Tweet by @0ddfellow. How long has it been since you've used a phone book for anything other than boosting a seat? You can't go by my experience, since I only talk to family members and people on the internet. Link

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When you drop a slinky, which part of it moves faster? When you get a good look at it in slow-motion, it only raises more questions, which physics professor Rod Cross explains. See the rest of the experiment at The Daily What Geek. http://geeks.thedailywh.at/2011/09/25/slow-motion-slinky-drop-of-the-day/ -via mental_floss

What you see here is an x-ray of a dog that had eaten nine handballs. Veterinarian Vanessa Hawkins of Bayshore Animal Hospital in Warrenton, Oregon removed the balls and then won the annual x-ray competition from the trade publication Veterinary Practice News. The dog had come in for a leg problem, and the handballs were found incidentally! The competition runners-up have some strange stories, too.

A 6-month-old bulldog, Tinkerbell, ate a training collar off another bulldog in their house.  The owners had no idea until she ate a second metal slip collar and then proceeded to become seriously ill.  Doctors were surprised to find two slip collars in her stomach.

Penelope, a 2-year-old duck, presented for left leg lameness and was uncomfortable upon abominal palpation. Radiographs showed a nail and stones in her gizzard. Surgery was performed and Penelope went home. She was back a month later. Radiographs revealed another nail and a second surgery was performed.

A 1 1?2-year-old male Chi-weenie had chewed on a bottle of Gorilla Glue. The glue expanded in his stomach and molded to it perfectly. He had a complete recovery after the surgery.

There's more, all with x-rays, in the contest announcement. Link -via Metafilter

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Everything is big when you're little! This puppy tackles what seems to be an insurmountable threshold with gusto and determination. -via Buzzfeed

by Michael Reidy Tunbridge Wells, Kent, United Kingdom

America’s taste for bean soup appears to be unrelenting, and the World Wide Web offers more than a quarter of a million references to the subject. Multiple-bean soups are particularly in vogue. A methodical check on a leading search engine produced the following results which I record here for future historians of early twenty-first century food. Unexpectedly, this research also thrown up food for thought for mathematicians.

The methodology for researching multiple-bean soup was thus: The phrase “2 bean soup” was entered into the search engine, and the result recorded. Next, the phase “two bean soup” was entered. The search term producing the largest number was recorded as the most accurate number. This method was repeated until the number of beans in soup failed to produce relevant returns, thus, “Page 34, beans are the flavor of the month for soup...” was not considered a valid return for ‘34 bean soup.’

The chart (see Figure 2) plots the number of pages returned for each number of varieties of bean in soups for bean quantities ranging from 2 to 23. No soups were found using in excess of 23 varieties of bean. Figure 2. A graph of the data. This depicts the number of World Wide Web pages the author found that pertain to each number of varieties of bean in soups for bean quantities ranging from 2 to 23.

Figure 2. A graph of the data. This depicts the number of World Wide Web pages the author found that pertain to each number of varieties of bean in soups for bean quantities ranging from 2 to 23.

Taking the pulse of bean soup is less straight forward than originally supposed. I had reckoned to encounter a normal bell curve with a peak around 16 beans, as the diversity of recipes for bean soup would at first sight seem to be a random event.

NASA has released some cool audio files free to the public!

Here's a collection of NASA sounds from historic spaceflights and current missions. You can hear the roar of a space shuttle launch or Neil Armstrong's "One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind" every time you get a phone call. Or, you can hear the memorable words "Houston, we've had a problem," every time you make an error on your computer. We have included both MP3 and M4R (iPhone) sound files to download.

Now, if I only had a smart phone. Link -via mental_floss

The Eh`häusl in Amberg, Germany bills itself as the smallest hotel in the world. It is only eight feet wide! The structure was built on a property of only 20 square meters, between two other houses. The history of the hotel is interesting, as told by Metafilter member woodblock100:

So here's the story: it's 1728 and you live in Amberg, a little Bavarian town somewhere north of Munich. You and your lady friend really, really want to get married, but there is a little snag; the council laws permit only homeowners to marry, and you're still stuck renting a place. But all is not lost! You pick up a little strip of empty land between two other buildings - just 2.5 meters wide. You run up a quick wall on the front, another on the back, slap a roof on top, and presto - you're a homeowner. The council falls for it, and allows you to get married.

But now what? Well, it's not liveable, so you head back to the rental place to live, but you recoup your investment by selling the Eh'häusl (Little Wedding House) to the next couple with the same problem.

Link to story. http://www.ehehaeusl.de/index3.html to hotel site.

(Image: Google Street View)

The following is an article from Uncle John's Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader.

Have you ever participated in a séance or tried to contact the "spirits" using a Ouija board? You probably don't realize it, but the modern conception of communicating with the dead only dates back to the late 1840s. Here's the story of the hoax that started spirit-mania.

BUMP IN THE NIGHT

In 1848 a devout Methodist farmer named John Fox and his family began to hear strange noises in their Hydesville, New York, farmhouse. The noises continued for weeks on end, until finally on one particularly noisy evening, Mrs. Fox ordered the two children, 13-year-old Margaret and 12-year-old Kate, to stay perfectly quiet in bed while Mr. Fox searched the house from top to bottom. His search shed no light on the mystery, but afterward, Margaret sat up in bed and snapped her fingers, exclaiming, "Here, Mr. Split-foot, do as I do!"

"The reply was immediate," Earl Fornell writes in The Unhappy Medium: Spiritualism and the Life of Margaret Fox. "The invisible rapper responded by imitating the number of the girl's staccato responses."

Mrs. Fox began to make sense of what she was hearing. "Count ten," she told the spirit. It responded with ten raps. So she asked several questions; each time the spirit answered correctly. Next, Mrs. Fox asked the spirit if it would rap if a neighbor was present; the spirit said yes. So Mr. Fox ran and got a neighbor, the first of more than 500 neighbors and townspeople who visited over the next few weeks to watch Margaret and Kate interact with the spirit. As long as either Margaret or Kate was present, the spirit was willing to communicate.



MURDER MYSTERY

Using an alphabetic code that Margaret and Kate devised, "Mr. Split-foot" explained that in his Earthly life he'd been a peddler, murdered by the person who lived in the farmhouse. The spirit identified the killer as "C. R." Some citizens tracked down a man named Charles Rosana, who'd lived in the house years earlier, but with no body and no evidence other than the testimony of a ghost, he was never charged.

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Who needs a computerized fountain when you've got a dozen teenagers with Super Soakers? This ad for a pool chemical company is much more fun than their regular videos about how to take care of your pool. -via Buzzfeed