


Photographer Tom Robinson snapped pics of friends and family as he broke the news that he and his wife Verity are going to be parents. Some of the reactions are amusing. Go to the link to see and read more.
Link Via My Modern Metropolis
It occurred to me that given the dearth of good roles for women, it was a good opportunity to consider how many roles written for men would have been, if tweaked appropriately (including, in some cases, the use of a time machine), perfect Helen Mirren vehicles.Which ones did she choose? Find out at NPR
She was so old. And he was so young! Paul Anka, an unassuming 16 year old singer from Ottawa, reaches the top of the UK charts with his hit single Diana. The song about a May-December romance has catapulted both Anka and his former babysitter and inspiration, Diana Ayoub, to fame. Ayoub talks to CBC Radio about what it's like to be a muse, their friendship and the whirlwind attention she's received since the song hit the airwaves.
The board was printed on a 50 x 50 cm PVC plate. Every street is a location from the Fallout game. “GO” is now “G.O.A.T.” and “free parking” is the “please stand by” screen. Every card has one of the Fallout3 or Fallout New Vegas perks on it and has a really cool old playingcard image on the back.
The year is 1985. the place is the Mining town of Rotherham in the UK. Ron and May Hall had been the victims of a devastating house fire, the result of an unattended chip-pan, which reduced the lower story of their terraced house to ashes.
Although the ground floor was ravaged and reduced to little more than charcoal and cinders, there in the middle of all the devastation remained one solitary item, completely untouched by the inferno that had raged about it - A cheap framed print of a crying child.
Ron Hall's brother was a Rotherham-based firefighter. and he told Ron that his station manager had told him that he knew of a number of other incidents where the same print - The Crying Boy" had remained unscathed after infernos had reduced the rest of the building to ashes.
Sarah Blackall, a Brooklyn-based artist recently completed a project illustrating a collection of Craigslist Missed Connections postings, ranging from the painfully sweet to the delightfully strange.
Edited to music by Videodrums 2009. Super 8 footage shot by Robert Frank of The Rolling Stones in LA and NY, 1971. Rephotographed by Frank for the cover of 'Exile On Main Street.
McClintock believed that Indian communities were undergoing swift, dramatic transformations that might obliterate their traditional culture. He sought to create a record of a life-way that might disappear. He wrote books, mounted photographic exhibitions, and delivered numerous public lectures about the Blackfoot.’
Last week a friend of mine was at the middle school with her daughter Megan for student orientation. After getting her class schedule from the front office, the two of them went to find Megan’s locker and were shocked to see a group of moms busy decorating their daughters’ grey metal lockers with (wait for it) this:
Does this happen in the real world? I wouldn't know because I live in a bubble and have my own warped reality which includes neither daughters nor Barbie dolls. Do my sons feel deprived because I neglected to decorate their lockers with soccer ball or marijuana leaf patterned wallpaper when they were in high school? If so they'll get no sympathy from me. When I was a kid a photo of the Monkees torn out of the latest issue of Tiger Beat was good enough for me.
Attention hipsters and other people seeking hipness: there’s a new fad catching on in Western Australia's Shark Bay, and you won’t want to be the last to to post pictures of yourself imitating it to your Tumblr feed. “Conching” is a method by which Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins are trapping small fish in conch shells, bringing the shells to the surface, and then shaking them with their rostrums to clear out the water and dump the fish into their mouths. More remarkably, the trend appears to be spreading throughout an entire population of dolphins, and fast.
“If I had a chance to ask God just one question, it would be, ‘What really happened to my friends that night?’” Yury Yudin, expedition survivor.You may think horror films are creepy, but sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. In 1959, ten normal, healthy cross-country skiers set off on a camping trip in Russia’s Ural Mountains. Nine never returned. When their bodies were finally found, many elements of eerie mystery hung heavily in the air. Three of the individuals had fallen victim to inexplicable crushing injuries. The tongue of one of the others was missing.
“We regret that a Google driver recently caused a minor accident,” the company said in a statement. “One of our goals is to prevent fender-benders like this one, which occurred while a person was manually driving the car.”
The car is part of Google’s prototype fleet of driverless vehicles, technology designed with the idea of eradicating the human error responsible for so many highway accidents and traffic jams.
On the way out, he gives me a tea towel with his picture printed on it, riding information, all that. I'm a bit baffled, and he says "I was thinking before the election of how wasteful all those posters are, and thought it might be a good idea if I gave people something useful for a change."
I ask him if he's aware -- this I do remember -- that people all over the riding are going to be wiping dishes with his face. He laughs and says that's a risk he's willing to take.
I voted for Jack. I've been voting NDP ever since that day.
More here.
You may not think that there is much to know about the sunflower. After all, the plant is virtually everywhere. Yet it has a something more than a simple, straightforward history and is more of a globe trotter than you may imagine. Its story has the historical and continental sweep of a Hollywood epic, from the pre-European Americas to Tsarist Russia and back again.
Named E. woodii, in Dr. Wood's honor, it is a cycad. Cycads are a very old order of tree and it turns out this one, which is still there in London, may be the very last tree of its kind on our planet, the last one to grow up in the wild.
***UPDATE: Commenter Kathleen has pointed me to this Wikipedia article. You can dry your tears now! It appears that this plant is not as lonely as I thought but was merely pretending to be lonely in order to get sympathy.
The Postmaster General at the time gave Owney a harness on which to display his tag collection. Like many of us the dog grew a little ornery as he grew older and died of a bullet wound in Toledo in 1897. He was stuffed and put on display at the Smithsonian Museum where he remains to this day.
Railway mail clerks considered the dog a good luck charm and adopted Owney as their unofficial mascot, marking his travels by placing medals and tags on his collar. Each time Owney returned home to Albany, the clerks there saved the tags.
On August 14, 2011, Kim Cartmell & Kathy White from Elope Niagara joined 23 other brides to chase after one groom. The day started with a gathering of the brides and then made a trip to the majestic Niagara Falls and then ended the day with a splash in the water at Sherkston Shores Resort.
There’s a good chance the first interior decorator was a guy, scratching pictures of a glorious hunt on the wall of his cave, trying to show off for his friends. This was the first man cave, if you will. Unfortunately, the modern man tends to be as afraid of “decorating” as the stag is of the spear. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
A demonstration of a prototype "tar and feather gun" built at the Instructables Lab. This toy gun fires any sort of gunk, slime or foam that you want. What's more, it's easy and cheap to make.
"Time has certainly been kinder to 'Eraserhead.' Over the years, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, and John Waters have counted themselves as major fans of the film. Charles Bukowski claimed that his love affair with cable television started when he first tuned in and started watching 'Eraserhead.' Rock bands have named themselves after the film. And now the latest honor: Lee Hardcastle has remade the film in claymation, and the plot unfolds in pretty much 60 seconds flat."