ReWined

As an environmentalist, Adam Fetsch wanted to give new life to the wine bottles that were thrown away after his gatherings. He decided to make candles but not just any candles. They are contained in recycled wine bottle holders and have distinctive wine bouquets like Cabernet with a black cherry, currant, smoke, burnt toast scent and Pinot Grigio with a sandalwood, wet stone and light citrus bouquet.  Merlot, Champagne, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc scented candles are also available ($19.95 each).



Read more here 

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What did Palestine look like in 1896?

Film footage of Palestine shot by cameramen employed by the Lumiere brothers in 1896 was recently published online thanks to Lobster Films. It shows Palestinians of all faiths – Christians, Jews and Muslims – living side by side, and praying side by side.



More: Hummus For Thought

U.K. To Allow Driverless Cars on the Road Next Year

I'm not sure if this makes me more or less nervous about driving on large highways:

Starting next year, driverless cars will be allowed on roads in the United Kingdom. The government has just passed a law allowing the cars to begin real world testing, starting in January 2015. Government officials will also be reviewing existing road regulations, as they will need to be adjusted for driverless cars.
In the U.S., Google has already been testing cars in California and Japan began public road testing in 2013.

More:  The Wire

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Don’t Let a Tucker Pass You By!

You can own a rolling symbol of the American dream when this 1948 Tucker 48 goes on the auction block on Friday, August 15, 2014.

This baby is finished in an eye-catching metallic bronze maroon and the broadcloth interior shows only light wear and may be the original material from 1948! The car retains not only a proper Tucker Y-1 transmission—the gearbox that it was meant to have when new—but also the correct, proper late dashboard switchgear and Kaiser-sourced door handles. Only 1,914 miles are recorded.

But what I really like is the third headlight on the Tucker 48 that was dubbed the “Cyclops eye”.

More: RM AUCTIONS

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Ice Cube Celebrates the Eames

Before becoming a rap star, Ice Cube studied architectural drafting. Here he takes us on an architectural tour of LA.

Ice Cube Celebrates the Eames from Julie on Vimeo.

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Farmers Who Grow Cocoa Beans Taste Chocolate For The First Time

Ivory Coast, in Africa, is the world's leading producer of cocoa beans and farmers there have been harvesting the crop for decades. But they'd never had a taste of the finished product until Metropolis TV, visited and offered them a taste of their first chocolate bar.



Link
Thanks Bruce!

Hawaii's Haiku Stairs Illegal Hike

The Haiku Stairs is one of the most extreme and beautiful hikes in Hawaii. It's also illegal but people still make the trek up and down the steel steps that were once operated by the Coast Guard to catch a glimpse of the view at the top of Puu Keahi a Kahoe on the island of Oahu. The Honolulu Board of Water Supply has jurisdiction over the hike and requires that anyone who goes up it sign waivers and present a $1 million liability insurance policy. The photos show why this trail is also called "The Stairway To Heaven".

More: Business Insider

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Marilyn Myller: A Stop-Motion Animation

This film by Mikey Please and Dan Ojari tells a story of creation and destruction using sculpted styrofoam models and complex long-exposure lighting. It's pretty amazing.



More: Colossal

Patent Prints

I love these posters of famous patents. There are 360 items available but it would be hard to choose just a few because they're all pretty groovy. 

More at the  Patent Posters Etsy Shop

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The Miraculous Face Transplant of Richard Norris

Richard Norris had a face too hideous to show until a doctor gave him a miracle too fantastic to believe. Two years ago Norris received the "face of a recently deceased 21-year-old man," transplanted as "one solid flap, skin, muscle, bone, nerves, blood vessels, tongue—everything as one piece." Along with the new face Richard got a new life, and a new set of burdens too strange to predict. What's it like to live with a face that wasn't yours—and that may never quite be?

Link

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The Royal Greenhouses of Laeken

Built between 1874 and 1895, TheRoyal Greenhouses of Laeken are a vast (2.5 hectares) complex of monumental heated greenhouses commissioned by King Leopold II and designed by Alphonse Balat. They are located in the park of the Royal Palace of Laeken in the north of Brussels.

They are open to the public during a two-week period in April–May each year, when most flowers are in full bloom.

Winged Textile Art

North Carolina-based artist Yumi Okita makes lovely fibre art sculptures of moths and butterflies.

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Grade 12 student devises alarm to save kids left in cars

Every summer we hear tragic stories about small children forgotten in cars. Seventeen-year-old Alissa Chavez has designed "The Hot Seat" a car-seat device that alerts parents when they've left a child in the car. The system sounds an alarm on the car, on a key fob and on an app when the parent is 10 metres away from the car but there is still a child inside.
Alissa has an Indiegogo project and will use the funds raised there to build a prototype and hopefully start manufacturing the device soon.


More: CBC Radio

Update On hitchBOT,The Hitchhiking Robot

Last month I posted the story of hitchBOT, the Canadian robot aiming to hitchhike from Halifax to Victoria. So far he has made good progress and has already made it to the Quebec border in his first 24 hours.
The robot has a rudimentary ability to understand human speech and can interact with drivers.

When they ask the inevitable “where are you going?”, for instance, the robot’s electronic voice responds. “I’m headed to Victoria BC, as far west as I can manage. Going my way?”

Should the driver ask why it is doing this, the machine is a bit more vague.“Just because. My family wants to see if it’s possible. I do hope I give them a good result,” it replies. 

If asked “what is love?”, the robot artfully dodges the question by responding “tell me what love is.”

More: National Post

Inside Sun Noodle

Photo: Daniel Krieger

Over the last 33 years Sun Noodle, an Hawaiian company, has built three factories which produce 90,000 servings of ramen noodles per day. It supplies these noodles to ramenya across America, including nine of New York Times critic Pete Wells' picks for the top 10 ramen destinations in New York. But it wasn't always so.
When Hidehito Uki, founder Sun Noodle, came to Hawaii from Japan in 1981 there were few ramen shops.  Sun Noodle's commitment to the craft of noodle-making set it apart from the competition as ramen fever spread throughout America over the next three decades.



Read more: Eater National

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San Franciso's Fire Department, Where Ladders Are Still Made by Hand

The San Francisco Fire Department still makes its own wooden ladders by hand at a dedicated workshop. Some have been in rotation for nearly a century.

Wouldn't a wooden ladder burn? Yes. They go up in flames.

More: Gizmodo

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Jack Délano: The Man Who Coloured the Forties

Jack Délano was a photographer for the Farm Security Administration during the New Deal period and his pictures of American working people in the 1940s made him world famous.

Image Credit Flickr Library of Congress
Above: Commuters, who have just come off the train, waiting for the bus
to go home, Lowell, Mass in January 1941

Image Credit Flickr Library of Congress
Above: Farm workers chop cotton on rented land near White Plains,
Greene County, Georgia in June 1941.

Image Credit Flickr Library of Congress
Above: Taken in September 1941, this is the backstage area of the girlie show
at the Vermont State Fair.

This excellent post at Kuriositas tells his story.

Smoke Signals

Paris-based, French artist Leo Dorfner paints watercolors of famous album covers on the inside of empty Gitanes cigarette packs. The series is appropriately named "Smoke Signals".

FYI: "Fumer tue" translates to "smoking kills"



Via Junkculture

Hair Highway

This video explores the global hair industry in the Shandong province of China, following the journey of the material from the people who sell their hair through to the hair merchants, markets and factories.
Hair Highway from Studio Swine on Vimeo.
Via Curiosites de Titam

Literally Everything Else From Your Childhood: The Movie

The Wil Wheaton Project thinks it's finally time for the most pandering nostalgia film of all time.

Via Blog on a Toothpick

Thirsty Crow Begs for a Drink

An experiment devised by Dr Alex Taylor of The University of Auckland showed that crows have the same intelligence as a seven-year-old child so it should come as no surprise that this bird knows how to ask for a drink when it's thirsty.


Via Neatorama

The Master and Margarita, Animated in Two Minutes

Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita  about a visit paid to Soviet Russia by the devil himself was written between 1928 and 1940 but didn’t come out until 1967. This suggests that Bulgakov’s literary perspective may have touched a nerve with the authorities, but the artfulness with which he expressed it has since lifted him to the top of the twentieth-century Russian canon.



More: Open Culture

A Global Guide To The First World War

Ten historians from 10 countries use original news reports, interactive maps and rarely-seen footage to tell the story of WW1 through a global lens.

History buffs: if you have a half hour to spare watch this interactive documentary at theguardian.com

The Girl Without A Ring Finger

Read the story at Josef Lee's Bedtime Stories for Adults



Thanks Bruce!

Create a quick and easy duct tape double

Paloma Fautley's Make magazine article tells you how to create a quick and easy mannequin using cheap materials you can find around the house.



Via bookofjoe

Canadians Deliver Water To Detroit

Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians led a group of activists to Detroit to protest water shutoffs in Detroit, They brought 750 gallons of water to help those who have been cut off because of unpaid bills. The seven-vehicle convoy also delivered a message that the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department's policy of shutting off service to delinquent customers violates the United Nations' 2010 declaration that water is a human right.



More here 

Hamilton man takes parting shot at Maple Leafs in last line of obituary

Terry Siebert, a 58-year-old Hamilton, On. resident, died quietly at his Hamilton area home on Monday. In his obituary, which ran in the Hamilton Spectator on Thursday, Siebert took a parting shot at the hockey team that provided him nothing but frustration for the majority of his adult life.

It was Terry's last wish that his pallbearers be the Toronto Maple Leafs so they could let him down one last time.

Via theScore

How To Cool A Drink In Less Than 2 Minutes

YouTube user DaveHax shows viewers how to take an ordinary room temperature drink and chill it in 2 minutes or less. San Pellegrino Limonata is the drink used in the video but it works with beer too!



Link

When The Internet Hands You Spam Make Art!

Spanish photographer Christina De Middel found a creative way to deal with spam that arrived in her inbox. She carefully noted the details within, and created fictitious portraits of the imaginary senders.

Below is a message from spammer Sandrine Nzi:

Hello Dear,
My name is Sandrine Nzi. I will be 25 years old tomorrow. I am the unique daughter of the head (Late) Mr Joseph Nzi. My father was a gold miner of great reputation in the Ivory Coast during his days. It is sad to say that he passed away mysteriously during one of his trips of businesses nevertheless, its sudden death was tie or rather it suspects that it has been devised by my uncle who traveled there with him. But God knows the truth! My mother died when I was still a girl and, since then, my father took to me so special. Before its death, the speaker asked the secretary who accompanied him to the hospital and said to him that he had left in one of the main Bank the amount of US$10,500,000, in Abidján, Ivory Coast. He also said to him that the money was deposited in my name . I am only 20 years and I am a student at the university and really don´t know what to do. Now I want an account outside where it can transfer this money in, this must to that I have undergone a great amount of reverses as a result of the continuous political crisis here in the Ivory Coast and of the familiar problems that made me flee from house of my late father and hide in a local hotel for the security of my life of the evil hand of my uncle which killed my father and some other members of my familyDearest, I am in a sincere desire of its urgent attendance in this Respect. Your suggestions and ideas will be very necessary, please, allow me to say to you what I want you to do for me. 1. You will help me to negotiate lucrative and legal investment for the money when it is reversed wisely, as you know that I am only one girl and do not have investment knowledge. 2. You will help me to assure a permission permanent residence in your country, for me to come there and to continue my education, whereas you will be careful of the investment that will be created by you. Most important of all he is so that you are a good partner, when the money arrives at its country.
Thanks to be there for me.Kindly, Sandrine Nzi

Below is a photograph of the spammer as De Middel imagines her:

The project is named Poly-Spam.



More at  Petapixel and at the artist's site.

Machine Feeds Stray Dogs In Exchange For Recycled Bottles

The Turkish company Pugedon recently introduced a vending machine in Istanbul that releases food and water for the city's stray dogs in exchange for recycled plastic bottles. When bottles are deposited at the top, food is released at the bottom. The Pugedon Smart Recycling Boxes operate at no charge to the city, and the recycled bottles cover the cost of the food.



What a clever idea!
More here

A 1966 Camp Trailer Gets A Facelift

Alberta blogger and graphic designer Jen Eckert renovated a vintage 1966 camper that she purchased for $400. Isn't it adorable?

See the makeover at  Design*Sponge

Smallest Restaurants Around the World

Just because the square footage may be minimal, doesn’t mean a restaurant’s food can’t have big flavors. I prefer an intimate dining experience to eating in an arena type restaurant with the noise bouncing off the walls. Honest Cooking lists some dining establishments that prove you don't have to be big to be mighty.



Solo Per Due situated in the remains of a Roman villa in Vacone, Italy serves just two people at a time at their single table.

Kuappi in Iislami port, Finland is near the water and has only 25 square feet to its name. With a small terrace and full bar, the area can accommodate two individuals to dine along with a couple servers.

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Moto Major Motorcycle 1949

Torinese engineer Salvatore Majorca created the revolutionary Moto Major concept motorcycle in 1949.  It was a work of art, both stylistically and mechanically.

Modular Pie-Cosahedron

Learn how to construct a pecan pie with the topology of a sphere from 20 triangular sub-pie modules attached with magnets. The pie is the easy part.



More: Instructables 

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Impressions of Expo 67

This film by William Brind served as an invitation to the World's Fair that was held in Montreal in 1967. I lived in Montreal that summer and had the time of my life.

Impressions of Expo 67 by William Brind, National Film Board of Canada

Trompe L'oeil Murals Turn Streets Of Iran Into An Optical Illusion Gallery

Iranian designer and street artist Mehdi Ghadyanloo paints murals on two-dimensional blocks of concrete  in Tehran. Ghadyanloo uses methods from op art and 3D painting to deceive the viewer’s eye.

More: Beautiful/Decay 

Thanks Bruce!

An Elaborate Corkscrew

Rob Higgs has always had a fascination with electrical and mechanical components and as a boy played with gears and old mercury tilt switches that he found in his Grandfather’s workshop. Look at this incredible steampunky corkscrew/wine pourer contraption he created.



Thanks Bruce!

Should You Wear Your Child’s Clothing?

Is wearing your children's clothing a fashion trend?

Via Reductress

In Turkey

Turkey from Istanbul, to the Black Sea Coast,  Eastern Anatolia,  Cappadocia and the Turquoise Coast.

In Turkey - 2014 from Vincent Urban on Vimeo.

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The Only Fruit Tree You'll Ever Need

I'd love to have one of these in my garden!

Sam Van Aken, an art professor from Syracuse University, has developed the incredible Tree of 40 Fruit. In 2008, Van Aken learned that a very old orchard at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station was about to be shut down due to a lack of funding. Van Aken wanted to preserve the unique heirloom, antique, and native varieties of stone fruit so he bought the orchard and over the years grafted parts of the trees onto a single fruit tree. He has grown 16 of the trees so far.

More: Science Alert 

Lilica the Dog Travels Four Miles Every Night to Feed Her Animal Friends

Lilica was abandoned at a junkyard in San Carlos, Brazil, when she was just a puppy. The junkyard caretaker took her in and cared for her along with other animals in the junkyard. Eventually Lilica had pups and she travelled far afield, rooting through garbage cans to find food for them.
One night a dog lover named Lucia took pity on the dog and gave her a bag of food which Lilica took  back to her pups. Once the pups were adopted Lilica has continued to walk four miles each night to take the parcels of food prepared by Lucia back to her animal friends at the junkyard .



More: Collecting Oddities

Where Rickshaws Go To Die

Pedal-powered taxis, a fixture on the streets of Bangladesh for generations, are now threatened by Indian-built battery powered tuk-tuks and stricter safety regulations. Up to 15,000 unwanted rickshaws have been dumped on a patch of land in the Mirpur area of Dhaka.

Some of these vehicles were abandoned by their owners, while others were seized by police officers from drivers, some reportedly as young as 12, who failed to provide the proper operating permits.

More: Urban Ghosts

Eastern European Cities Plated

Buenos Aires based food stylist Anna Kevilla Joyce transforms food into a work of art.
These Eastern European cities on a plate are composed of ingredients that capture the essence of the respective place.

Via Foodiggity

Havana

I have always wanted to visit Havana but keep putting it off. Perhaps this will be the year.
This haunting video was shot over a few days in January 2013.

In Havana from Ezaram Vambe on Vimeo.
Photography, edit and color grading by Ezaram Vambe
Music is "Tarrega Minor" by Broque - Licensed from marmosetmusic.com

Via Curiosites de Titam

The Lucky Iron Fish Project

Half  of Cambodia's pregnant women and children suffer from iron deficiency which can lead to lethargy, impaired growth and cognitive development in children, and increased risks of premature delivery and maternal mortality. Cooking in iron pots transmits iron to food but are not affordable for those who could benefit most from extra iron in their diet.

Dr. Christopher Charles, a Canadian epidemiologist in Cambodia, distributed pieces of iron to local women to place in their aluminum pots to see if there would be a beneficial iron transfer but local women were reluctant to use the iron chunks in their cooking.
Then Charles learned of a fish known as try mantrap. This symbol was believed to bring luck, health, and happiness. He distributed iron replicas of this fish and women started cooking with them. Within 12 months, Charles reports, anemia in villages where the fish was distributed virtually disappeared.

Find out more about the impact of Lucky Iron Fish Project.

More: The Atlantic

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A Monty Python Fan's Dream Come True

Watch All of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python Animations in a Row


More: Open Culture

Alberta Artist Uses Unique Method To Protect His Land

Peter von Tiesenhausen is an Alberta artist whose multidisciplinary practice includes painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, installation, event, video and performance. The land where he lives constitutes his primary and ongoing artwork. When oil interests wanted to drill on his property in Demmit, Alberta he found a unique way to protect his land. By copyrighting his property as an artwork, he has prevented oil companies from drilling or running a pipeline through it. As an ongoing artwork, all 800 acres are protected; any change made to the land constitutes a copyright infringement.
The video below features a dance performance piece at the Leighton Arts Centre using one of von Tiesenhausen's sculptural pieces. The 1000 poles were harvested from his own woodlot.

Video: The Chapel

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