Friday, September 25, 2009

They were prettier when they were candles






15 Crappy Celebrity Wax Figures


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This truly is a golden age we live in


Actually having to wipe by using toilet paper held in your hand? Disgusting and archaic! Putting it on the end of a stick and then having to clean stray poo off the stick from time to time? Fun and futuristic! Thanks, Comfort Wipe! (via Glyph Jockey)

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Poor #101



Rotten Tomatoes has come out with their list of the 100 Worst Movies of the Aughties. Due to my superior taste (or maybe the fact that I don't get out much), I managed to avoid seeing all 100 of these cinematic stinkbombs in the theater, and 99 of them altogether. For some reason, both of my young kids (ages 8 and 6) liked the laugh-free "Zoom" and it wound up making a semi-regular appearance on the DVR.

I feel kind of bad for the people who worked so hard on some of these movies, only to end up on this list. Then again, I think I feel worse for the 101st Worst Movie, whatever it may be. They didn't even get to make it on the list.


Surprisingly, not even in the Top (or Bottom, as it were) 25...

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Art, blown up real good


NYC artist Joshua Allen Harris works with garbage bags and other inexpensive "trash" to create kinetic sculptures. Installed over subway grates, they momentarily inflate with the breeze generated whenever a train passes by. (via Dornob)



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Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Turning the world of architecture on its head



Crazy upside-down house in Germany. If you're going to use the toilet, please let us clear out of the building first.

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Thursday, September 17, 2009

Seven Tiles


Scrabble Lit: Notable references to Scrabble in books and film over the past 50 years.



Mehal Shah explains how anyone can win at Scrabble with a bit of cunning, planning and just a dash of cheating. (via kottke)




I've posted this somewhere a while back, but it's worth a re-read. 830! How a Massachusetts carpenter got the highest Scrabble score ever.




Scrabble Rematch from the sticky-note-based cartoon series Savage Chickens.




Homemade Scrabble Keyboard: Double Nerd Score

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Saturday, September 12, 2009

It's cranes all the way down

From Stephen Hawking's 1988 book A Brief History of Time:
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever", said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"


So have you ever gone past a construction site and wondered how those giant cranes towering far above the site get there? The answer is, of course, another crane, which puts us in a sort of chicken and egg situation.

Actually, the smaller crane builds the base, and then through a clever assembly, the new crane is actually able to add vertical sections to itself as in place as needed, growing along with the building.

Warning: The music underneath is pretty obnoxious, so you may want to kill the volume. (via Wired.com's Gadget Lab)




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Friday, September 11, 2009

How did he do that?


English illusionist/ magician/ mentalist Derren Brown correctly "predicts" winning lottery numbers live on BBC. (via Cynical-C) Of course it's a trick, but it is a really well-executed one, and he has a lot of people speculating on how he pulled it off.

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Thursday, September 10, 2009

Not Photoshopped: Forced Perspective Photography


An amusing forced perspective picture (click to embiggen)




More of the same kind of silliness in this collection called Not Photoshopped.




A pretty good Forced Perspective Pool over at Flickr.

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Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Sunday, September 06, 2009

Saturday, September 05, 2009

If PETA says, "Don't eat anything that has a face", it looks like I'm going to have to give up Honeycombs


Spookycomb, a piece of Honeycombs cereal bearing a distinct resemblance to Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream". From my new favorite way to lose two hours, the Museum of Food Anomalies.





The fruits and veggies of The Mutato Collection. If foods could go on blind dates, these would be the ones that have "a great personality".




A plastic mold for growing Buddha-shaped pears. (via Boing Boing)




Even more pear deformation: How To Grow A Pear In A Bottle




9 Simple Steps To Growing Your Own Square Watermelons


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