October 31, 2012
Custom Culture
"swiss cheese dirt moto3 bruce brown snowflakes digger zebra candy flake dust speed master rigid k180 smiley firestone barn find swap meet junk tempter ape 2 stroke soup magneto sumo triple dubble white wall twin garage build amal webco roses beehive bates sissy air head bahnburner bacon slicer baloney bob bone shaker bonnie continental circus cowhorn dog bone hole shot mouse trap new york steak pancake rice rocket sharkfin trumpet" [more inside]
Halloween Lobster
The New England Aquarium welcomes an unusual new guest, just in time for Halloween. Last week in Massachusetts, lobster fisher Dana Duhaine caught the lobster, which is perfectly "split" down the middle in two colours: black and orange. Scientists attribute this type of colouring to a complete cellular split that happens upon fertilization of the lobster egg. Split lobsters are relatively rare; they are estimated to make up only one per every 50 to 100 million lobsters. Recently, American and Canadian lobster fishers have been reporting more of the unusually coloured creatures in their catches, including blue lobsters, calico lobsters, and splits. National Geographic article about different colouration in lobsters.
Flying on a bus
Why an airline that travelers love is failing. Virgin America, named the "top overall airline in the U.S." with a huge wow factor is having financial problems and experiencing cutbacks. Meanwhile, deep discounter Spirit Air is imposing $100 checked-bag fees, is wildly profitable, and has high bookings. [more inside]
The Story Of The Haunted Mansion
It's not too late for one more Halloween spook -- Thurl Ravenscroft narrates as Ron "Ritchie Cunningham" Howard and Robie Lester (Mrs. Kris Kringle, Disney Storybook narrator ["when Tinkerbells rings her little bells... turn the page"] encounter Pete Renoudet as the Ghost Host in Disney's 1969 adventure, The Story Of The Haunted Mansion. [25m] [more inside]
Fingertips, using clips from Star Wars
Big Damn Heroes
Browncoats: Redemption was an unofficial and independent, not-for-profit film based in the Firefly/Serenity universe. The movie, which was filmed, funded and produced entirely by volunteers, followed a new ship and crew three months after the events of the movie Serenity. It also featured cameos from Adam Baldwin and Michael Fairman. [more inside]
Hobbit Aboard
Air New Zealand's latest safety video has a Lord Of The Rings theme. (SLYT) Previously and previously.
Happy Halloween, Metafilter
You may have read np312's wonderful Reverse Trick-Or-Treating story in Ask Metafilter.
You may have seen Doctor Popular's comic based on the same.
This year however, you can now enjoy a video of the same concept. [via]
it's a major award!
Josh Sundquist in costume as the leg lamp from the 1983 movie A Christmas Story this Halloween. [more inside]
"The purpose is not to substantiate but to enchant."
"Some remarkable Books, Antiquities, Pictures and Rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living."
Musæum Clausum is a catalog of invented books, pictures and antiquities written by 17th Century Englishman Sir Thomas Browne. It is a fantastical and witty meditation on the ravages of time on literature and other works of man. The Musæum Clausum is perhaps the finest example of the invented, or invisible, library, a genre which seems to have originated with Rabelais. The genre has been of special interest to Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog (older posts), where he has written about the invisible libraries of writers such as Charles Dickens, Neil Gaiman, H. P. Lovecraft and invisible libraries in video games. The natural medium for invisible libraries might be pictures, and Musæum Clausum inspired a suite of etchings by Erik Desmazieres.
They do it because they can.
Trees are Freaking Awesome! (SLYT)
Rumsfeld to Schlesinger: Drop Dead
Gerald Ford's administration was in trouble. Tension within the party and turf battles in the Cabinet were tearing it apart. Something had to be done to get things back on course in time to fend off Ronald Reagan's primary challenge. And Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were just the men to do it.
Why Must I Be A Roman Tribute In Love?
No more monkeys jumping on the bed! (unless they're professionally trained and have years of experience)
Reuben Reynoso gets paid to jump on mattresses, day after day, mattress after mattress. The McRoskey Mattress Company in San Francisco has been making mattresses — and having people jump on them — for 112 years, since before the 1906 quake. [more inside]
"I am Jacob." "Und I am Wilhelm." "Und ve just vant to pump... (clap) ...YOU UP!"
Some are strong, and some are weak. The weak, as is well known, are easily mastered—completely regular and, frankly, pathetic. But it doesn't have to be that way! The Society for the Strengthening of Verbs labors at its noble cause of strengthening verbs and nouns (in English too, though with less Sprachgefühl), increasing the stock of causatives, and generally messing around with German (excuse me, with Neutsch).
Rijksmuseum remix
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, home to Rembrandt's The Night Watch and Vermeer's The Milkmaid, among many other masterpieces, today unveiled the Rijksstudio, 125,000 digitized images of its collections, available in a zoomable interface online or as high-resolution public-domain downloads (account creation required for the latter).
Skeletal remains found in upended tree
Not-Hurricane Sandy turned over a hundred-year-old tree — that had grown through a body buried a hundred years before THAT. " A homeless woman made a spooky Halloween’s eve discovery on the Upper Green: bones from a centuries-old human body unearthed by a giant oak tree toppled by Superstorm Sandy."
The one with the hitchhiker in the yellow coat
Hammer House of Horror was a 1980 British anthology television series produced by the eponymous film studio. It was followed by Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense and there were a couple of other notable, similar themed, series around at the time, Beasts and West Country Tales. They might now seem a little crude and simplistic, but they employed an interesting array of writers, directors and actors and the best can still raise a definite chill [more inside]
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows
Hurricane Sandy's proximity to Election Day means that the response to it is highly politicized. [more inside]
TEA NOW
"Even if your alarm clock is one of those Zen alarm clocks with melodious metal chimes, or it's your phone playing New Age music at gradually increasing volume, an alarm clock is still not offering you anything." MeFi's own dansdata wakes up to a proper cuppa.
La Duce Vita
An interactive web documentary (mostly in Italian with French subtitles) takes a look into Predappio - the city where Mussolini was born and where neofascists assemble yearly to commemorate the anniversary of the March on Rome and to pray over the Duce's tomb. Ironically, the town has been left wing ever since the end of the war and the current mayor, Giorgio Frassinetti, is exasperated :"We have to work on the image of the town, on the prejudices against it... but these marching imbeciles are not helping!". Frassinetti participated in the Difficult Heritage conference, part of Contemporary History Days in Braunau am Inn, Hitler's birthplace, and reflected on how easier it is to attempt to recover a town's honor when there is no dead body to be worshipped but his performance and town strategy is still being criticized.
12 Amazing Things About Bats
The Chem Coach Carnival
What do chemists do in a "work day"? What kind of schooling do they have? How does chemistry inform their work? Do chemists have any funny stories to tell? [more inside]
Google doodles Halloween
A Halloween doodle from Google. Be sure to click around, and save the kitty for last.
How My Danish Friend Paid Off His Debt By Becoming A Gay Prostitute
The BICE Study
Our study, “Bicyclists’ Injuries and the Cycling Environment” (the BICE Study), examined which route types are associated with higher and lower cycling injury risk. It examined the association between bicyclists’ injuries and the cycling environment (e.g., route types, intersection types). Taking place in Toronto and Vancouver between May 2008 and November 2009, the participants were adults who were injured while bicycling and who attended hospital emergency departments for treatment. Five hospitals recruited participants, 690 in total. [more inside]
The 80s called, they want their Star Wars and Disney back.
Around this time in 1982, "The Wonderful World of Disney" on CBS aired Disney's Halloween Treat.
In February of '83, a pre-special-edition Star Wars debuted on HBO.
Later that year, what used to be known as the Disney Channel went on the air.
Then in '84, Star Wars made its network debut on CBS, which included a short introduction ("We've seen Star Wars 324 times!"). [more inside]
"I close my eyes and dream about a sunny holiday ... "
Caro Emerald is a Dutch jazz singer. Her debut album "Deleted Scenes From The Cutting Room Floor" went sextuple-platinum in The Netherlands, and has the longest run at #1 on the Dutch charts. BBC Music reviews. [more inside]
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