Henri 4, L'Haunting

Henri, le chat noir, doesn't care much for Halloween but he never likes anything.

British Library offers over 1 million free vintage images for download

Check out the British Library's collection of over a million copyright-free images that you can use as you like.

The images on Flickr are taken from books the Library has in its collection from the 17th, 18th and 19th Century and are arranged by theme.



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Nikola Tesla Coloring Book

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania artist Niffer Desmond is raising funds through Kickstarter to bring her “Nikola Tesla Coloring Book“ to market. The project is a tribute  to the brilliant engineer and visionary who discovered the alternating current electrical system and worked to make it an important part of modern life.

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'Photo' of General Grant Is An Early Example of Compositing

This circa 1902 photo by photographer Levin Corbin Handy, titled “General Grant at City Point,”  purports to show General Ulysses S. Grant posing on a horse with a large number of soldiers in the background, but it’s actually a combination of three different photos.



Grant's head is from an 1864 portrait of Grant by photographer Edgar Guy Fowx:

The horse and rider’s body is from an 1864 portrait of Major Gen. Alexander M. McCook:

The background is an 1864 photo of Confederate prisoners captured at the battle of Fisher’s Hill, Virginia:

More: PetaPixel

Jan Fabre's Marble Brain Sculptures

“Do we feel with our brains and think with our heart?” Belgian visual artist Jan Fabre wonders about the brain’s role in the experience of emotion and empathy. His Carrara marble brain sculptures stand as white monuments not only to our mortality, but to our statuses as both individuals and interconnected human beings.

  Via Beautiful/Decay
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Condiments From Scratch

Make your own mustard, ketchup and mayonnaise.



Related: A few days ago I read an article on aquafaba (the liquid from canned beans) used as an egg  substitute and decided to try it. I made mayo in 30 seconds and it was really good. I'm looking at making a chocolate mousse with it next.

Via Holy Kaw!

The Scariest Jack-o-Lanterns Of All

 Donald 'Trumpkins' will make Halloween even spookier

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Momentary Ink

Send Momentary Ink an image of your tattoo design and they’ll send back a temporary tattoo kit. Don't worry if it doesn't look as wonderful as you thought it would. It lasts up to a week and can also be rubbed off with oil.

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70-some Years

Two years ago Henry Bendinelli emailed Vimeo support asking for help with deleting videos. Riley Hooper assisted him and in the process learned that Henry was an 89 year-old skiing, dancing, video-shooting Portland native. She ended up skiing with him and made this film about him as well.

70-some Years from Riley Hooper on Vimeo.

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Inheritance

Twenty-seven years after the Lockerbie plane crash, a man looks back on the items he inherited as a boy from his brother, David, a victim. Ken Dornstein inherited only fragments of David’s life, along with a lasting sense of responsibility to preserve what was left, gather up what was missing, and work to make sense of it all. Inheritance tells Ken's stories about the collection of items he’s kept, recalling the significance of each piece. It's worth checking out.


Via The Morning News

Why Are Black Cats Considered Bad Luck?

Do black cats bring bad luck? No, it's a silly superstition. Black cats are pawsome!



Via The Presurfer

The Palmer Hotel

The Palmer Hotel is a horror short story anthology with various contributors. Every window tells a story. It is edited by Rick Paulas and it's creepy as hell!

Click on the image to read stories

If you’d like to submit a story send a message to ThePalmerHotel@gmail.com.

Homemade Movie Props of The Wolfpack Brothers

In 2010, New York-based photographer Dan Martensen was introduced to the Angulo brothers by filmmaker Crystal Moselle, who was working on "The Wolfpack", a documentary about 7 children whose paranoid father isolated them from the outside world in an apartment on New York's Lower East Side. They learned about the larger world through movies. Over the years they watched about 5000 films and amused themselves by creating elaborate reenactments of favourite movies using homemade props. Photographing the boys over the course of the past five years, Martensen documented the movie props, costumes, and masks that they created from the confines of their apartment and launched a photo series and book titled "Wolves Like Us: Portraits of the Angulo Brothers."

More: Junkculture

Remembering Christopher Chapman

Forty miles of film, shot all over the province of Ontario. Three-hundred-and-fifty pages of notes. All woven by Christopher Chapman into one short movie called A Place to Stand - the cinematic centrepiece of Expo 67.

It looks kind of old fashioned today but the process he invented called "multiple dynamic images" was groundbreaking. He filled the big screen with various smaller screens, each showing something slightly different.

The film won Chapman an Academy Award - which, with characteristic humility, he subsequently used as a doorstop.  He died this past weekend in Uxbridge, Ont. at the age of 88.

More: CBC Radio

Shaken, Not Stirred: James Bond Martini at The Stafford London Hotel

The Stafford Hotel in London is celebrating the return of James Bond in Spectre with the Belvedere Spectre 007 Martini at its American Bar.

The martini, shaken, not stirred, is available at the hotel until early 2016. Each martini goes for $36 CDN. At that price you might prefer to DIY:

Link

Emotions Visualized As A Rainbow Of Feelings

Portuguese designer Giestas was looking for a way to deal with his own anxiety. He created a series of books that visualize a year of his emotions as rainbows of feelings. Over the course of 300 days he recorded his emotions on the hour and documented them in a series of three, color-coded diaries called Soft Cover Emotions.  

More: Design Milk

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Before and After Photos Reveal How Climate Change Has Affected Glaciers

Glacier National Park is losing its iconic glaciers to a changing climate. In the mid-1800s, this Montana landscape was covered by 150 glaciers—today only 25 remain.

Since 1997, the U.S. Geological Survey has been shooting the Repeat Photography Project, with a systematic search of the archives at Glacier National Park in Montana and Alaska. They use images from the late 1800s and early 1900s as references and rephotograph the same glacial scenes to show just how much these places have changed.



More: My Modern Met

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The Sign Post Forest of Watson Lake, Canada

Image credit

In the 1940s when the Alaska Highway was being built it was common practice for the US Army of Engineers to put up a directional post at their camps giving directions and mileage to places both nearby and faraway. When Private Carl K. Lindley was recuperating at the Army Aid Station he was given the task of repairing and repainting the directional post. Being homesick he decided to add a sign pointing towards his home town, Danville, Illinois. Others added signs pointing to other places and a tradition developed. Since then the single signpost has grown to a forest a couple of acres in size with signs added by people from all over the world.

Image credit

Link

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Props Matter

In this video essay Rich Kaneria shows the hidden power of film props. Excellent!

Why Props Matter from Rishi Kaneria on Vimeo.
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Digitized ‘Phenakistoscope’ Animations

Phenakistoscopes were early animation devices that created an illusion of motion similar to today's GIFs.

They relied on a disc with sequential illustrations to create looping animations when viewed through small slits in a mirror. They were produced in great volumes across Europe in the early to mid 19th century.

Richard Balzer has a large collection of phenakistoscopes that he and his assistant Brian Duffy have been digitizing, animating and sharing the results on Tumblr since 2012.

Via Colossal

Dresses That Are Good Enough To Eat

The Salon du Chocolat in Paris has 220 chocolatiers, pastry makers and confectioners, along with the greatest chefs, pastry chefs and cocoa experts who will treat visitors with chocolate recipes and activities. It opened with its traditional chocolate fashion catwalk show, featuring designs by some of France’s best chocolatiers.

More: The Guardian

So Long To The Most Weird And Wonderful Office In Parliament

Many New Democrat MPs lost their seats in the recent federal election but no one expected Peter Stoffer, beloved MP for Sackville-Eastern Shore in Nova Scotia, to lose his. After eighteen years he will be clearing out his Parliament Hill office that is more of a Canuck man-cave than a parliamentarian's workplace. A visit to his office typically began with three shots at his dart board, perhaps a game of pool amid the floor to ceiling hats, pins and buttons and, of course, a bevvy or two.

Many people of all political stripes have enjoyed his hospitality over the years. In typical generous Stoffer fashion he is now selling off the paraphernalia and donating the proceeds to charity:

• The proceeds from the hat sales will go to the Kinsmen Club of Nova Scotia. 
• The proceeds from the pins go to the Lions Club of Nova Scotia. 
• The proceeds from the buttons go to the Buffalo Club of Nova Scotia. 
• The proceeds from some larger items — including his pool table and a bottle of Calvados brandy signed by 150 Second World War veterans — will go to veterans charities.

It's a great place and I'm glad I got to to see it when I did.



More:  BuzzFeed News

Spooky Bat DIY

Feeling crafty? Textile artist Mister Finch has created this easy DIY bat to help you create your very own creepy creature in a few simple steps.

What you’ll need:

• A print out of Mister Finch’s bat template
• Thin card (cereal box works perfectly)
• Aluminium foil
• Scissors
• Kitchen towel
• PVA glue and/or hot glue
• Paint (we used a ghostly white)
• A sharp pencil
• Two small black beads (for the eyes)

Complete instructions here 

Movie Posters And The Scenes That Inspired Them

"My Life In 1.000.000 Frames" is a visual project by Candice Drouet. She collected images of movie posters and shows them alongside the scenes that inspired them.

1.000.000 Frames XII / Movie Posters / Candice Drouet from Really Dim on Vimeo.

Via Kottke 

Cracker From the Titanic Fetches Huge Price at Auction

A cracker that survived the sinking of the Titanic was sold to a collector in Greece for $22,968 by British auction house Henry Aldridge and Sons. Clearly the saying "A fool and his money are soon parted" applies here.

The biscuit was preserved in an envelope with the words “Pilot biscuit from Titanic lifeboat April 1912,“ by James Fenwick, a passenger aboard the Carpathia, a ship that went to help pick up survivors.

Apparently cracker collecting is a thing. A cracker from the Ernest Shackleton polar expedition fetched $4,600 a few years ago. And a museum in Ireland has a cracker from the Lusitania, a passenger ship that was torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1915, with an estimated worth of between $12,290 and $15,364.
Link
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The Makers of London's Iconic Blue Plaques

Anyone who has spent times in London is familiar with the iconic Blue Plaques that mark where the famous lived and/or worked across the capital. In 1866 the Society of Arts (which later became the Royal Society of Arts) founded what is now known as the Blue Plaques scheme.
Frank and Sue Ashworth of London Plaques in Cornwall, South East England have been creating them for the charity since 1984. This video shows us what goes into creating each of the ceramics.



Via: HUH.

A Collection of Tiny Folk-Art Structures

Steven Burke and Randy Campbell’s collection of American folk art buildings started innocently enough almost three decades ago, when Mr. Burke spotted his first folk art house. Since then it has grown to 1200 little structures including churches with soaring steeples, quaint storefronts, bowling alleys, Art Deco theaters, Ferris wheels and farmhouses, all of them handmade and many dating to the late 19th century.

I'm a bit of a collector as well: Staffordshire dogs, Blue Willow china, Depression glass, small watercolours, old photographs of dogs, well-worn teddy bears, Inuit carvings etc. I am in awe of this collection and admit to coveting it.



More: The New York Times

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Montreal Condo Project Built From The Roof Down

A Montreal construction company is building a 10-storey condo building from the top down. The builders first assembled a first floor and a roof. The roof was then lifted and each floor built below it.



There are many advantages to this kind of construction:

• No scaffolding or crane is required 
• The construction site does not spill into the street.
• Developers can adjust the height of their project during construction.
• Construction workers are protected from the elements.

More: CBC

The Romance of the Far Fur Country

The Romance of the Far Fur Country is a historical documentary film portraying Arctic fur trappers in 1919 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Hudson Bay Company in 1920. It is one of the earliest documentaries depicting the lives of the Arctic fur trappers.



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Octopus Chandeliers

Because who wouldn't want a chandelier with a bulbous head and sucker-studded tentacles hanging over their bed? Oregon-based artist Mason Parker makes amazing octopus chandeliers.

More: masons creations

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Road Trip For Perfect Weather

When the weather is 70°F I am content, not too hot, not too cold, just right. Brian Brettschneider is a Climatologist with a PhD and a sense of humor, or adventure. He  sorted through 8,000 weather stations across the US, looking for the 30 year average high temperature each day of the year and devised a 9,125 mile cross-country trip following optimal temperature. Then he added Canada to his calculation. He came up with this 13,325 mile road trip through North America to follow 70°F normal high temperature.

More here

Thanks Bruce!

Two Cartoonists Wage A War Of Notes

Two NYC tenants engage in a cartoon war until they discover what they have in common.

See the rest of the story at theCHIVE

A Cardboard and Bamboo Loom

Hey makers! Have you ever wanted to build a cardboard and bamboo 4-shaft weaving loom?

Full instructions at susaweaving

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Elderly Cat

Elderly Cat is a comic strip by Alison Wilgus about her 22 year old cat, Julien Bashir. Cat people will think it's hilarious.

Read more

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Skulls and Bones

Embossing rolling pin engraved with skulls and bones - perfect Halloween idea.

Buy it here $43.86 CAD

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Skydivers In Wingsuits Break Record

Sixty-one wingsuit skydiving athletes set a new world record for the largest aerial formation at Skydive Perris on Saturday, October 17, 2015 and it's pretty damn amazing!



Via The Presurfer

The Golden Years of the London Tube

The London Transport Museum in Covent Garden has a collection of beautiful  tube posters. 

This Is All In The Air, Montague B Black, 1926.

Out and about; winter London, Molly Moss, 1950

Light, power & speed, Charles Sharland, 1910

To the shows by Underground, Harold Sandys Williamson, 1939

(All Photos: Courtesy London Transport Museum)

See More: Atlas Obscura

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