History in Miniature
Joseph Neumeyer’s Dynamic Dioramas has tons of cool photos of dioramas with miniature soldiers and ships from many different historical eras.
Gummi Art
Artist Ya Ya Chou works in several materials, the most interesting being gummi bears. The Mommy, The Candelabras, and sculptures are nice, but the Bear Rug is not to be missed. The best piece is the Chandelier, which apparently is perfectly fine after two years.
The Mile High Collection
“I’ve often been asked what when through my mind when I first realized that I had stumbled across the greatest accumulation of Golden Age comics ever discovered. Frankly, even after 25 years have gone by, it still gives me chills to think about staring at that huge closet stacked to the rafters with mint Golden Age comics. " In 1977, a 21 year old comic book dealer in Colorado named Chuck Rozanski got a phone call from a realtor who wanted to dispose of a "large" number of comic books in the basement of a house that was about to be sold. The owners of the house were eager to get rid of them, and Rozanski purchased the "greatest comic collection ever found" , consisting of over 18,000 mint condition Golden Age comic books collected by artist Edgar Church, for a bargain price (rumored to be as low as $1,800). Recently, just one comic book from the collection sold for $273,125. Rozanski used the proceeds to build Mile High Comics, now the largest comic book retailer in the industry. Amazing as the Mile High discovery was, Rozanski still believes that his "Mile High II" find was his best.
You don’t know You Don’t Know Jack
You Don’t Know Jack playable online. "If 50 Cent was actually worth 50 cents when he was born in 1975, adjusting for inflation, what would his name be today?" Plus, see the topical daily DisOrDat, including: Is this quote from the Bible or Deathstalker III? Crayola color or award-nominated porn movie? Brand of computer software or member of the Justice League? (NSFW for insulting commentator and suggestive references)
Music of golden proportions
Zelda and the Golden Ratio. A fascinating examination of the music from Nintendo’s Zelda games, and the recurring appearances of 0.618, the bisection point on a line at which the relationship of the shorter segment to the longer one is the same as that of the longer section to the whole line.
I, personally, don’t laugh at this sort of thing.
Barfield is Garfield with banality largely replaced by puerility. As such, it’s a tad NSFW.
Saving the world one panty at a time.
Panties for peace Buy a panty, save the world.
P-p-p-p-p-please!
Who Delayed Roger Rabbit? Rich Drees lays bare the backroom bickering and production studio drama behind one of the 1980s’ most successful comedies. For an encore, Drees reviews the unproduced script of Roger Rabbit II: Toon Platoon. Weep for what might have been.
There we go
Was working on some issues related to long rebuild times today, stupid unicode.
Impacts of Climate Change
Impacts of Climate Change, the Potential Impacts to 2050 of a Mid-Upper Greenhouse Gas Emissions Scenario. From Global Business Network.
Because Britney’s lack of hair is more important.
You would think that with 4,000 women and 200 girls together, along with hundreds of NGOs and representatives of 45 governments the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women would be well covered by the media. Sadly, it is not: this year only 10 journalists demanded media accreditation to cover the international meeting, while pro-life groups are more than happy to send delegates arguing that "governments should protect girls from the moment of conception."
The Commission however is no small event: it provided a legal frame protecting the rights of women and girls worldwide (those rights were officially adopted in the early 90s [!]). It also provides standards to which participant countries must try live up to. This blog takes us backstage, behind the CSW’s scene.
Carved Eggshell Art
Christel Assante carves eggshells into extraordinary pieces of art. SculptorRon Cheruka , who goes by the nickname "the egg man," also works in the medium of eggshell, but he is not quite as talented in my opinion, a Salieri to Assante’s Mozart.
Immigration limbo
“Dear Mr. Prime minister haper, I don�t like to stay in this jail. I�m only nine years old. I want to go to my school in Canada. I�m sleeping beside the wall. Please Mr. Priminister haper give visa for my family. This place is not good for me."
Two Iranian parents and their Canadian-born son Kevin have been detained in a Texas detention centre after trying to escape their torturous and dangerous situation in Iran.
Hear the interviews.
The ozone layer was just jealous.
There are holes in the earth’s crust! It turns out that the ozone layer was just keeping up with the Jones’s; in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, there is a patch of several thousand square kilometers where the mantle is exposed. ‘The team of scientists from Cardiff University stress there is no need for the public to panic about the giant hole even though they describe it as "a gaping open wound in the Earth’s skin".’
The scientific team departs today to investigate the hole. They will be detailing their progress on a blog. And you can ask them questions about their project, which they may answer online.
Creepy automated photo retouching software
PortraitProfessional is a software package that claims to automate the process of retouching portraits. In part it does so by perfecting skin tone and texture, much like Kodak’s excellent Digital GEM Airbrush plugin, but it also does something it calls ‘face sculpting,’ presumably reproportioning facial elements into some sort of ideal relationship. The effect in many cases is to give the subject a creepy, bug-eyed look that seems equal parts anime, Whitley Strieber alien, and those funny warped headshots made famous by (and with) Kai’s PowerTools. The reworked photo on the home page isn’t too extreme, but some of the ones in the sample gallery are downright disturbing. (And I can’t imagine how you’d ever explain to a subject why you rebuilt his or her face as if you were a plastic surgeon in some military hospital.)
Chad Vader
Chad Vader – Day Shift Manager. Life is hard for Chad Vader, the younger, less charismatic brother of Darth Vader, who is the day shift manager of a grocery store.
Music Porn
Music Porn – Synthesizer sex.
Best Buy admits to keeping fake rip-off site
Best Buy has admitted to maintaining a fake version of its website for internal use at its stores. This is part of a scam where Best Buy lists cheap prices online and invites customers to come to the store to take advantage of them. When the customer gets there, a dirtbag salesman loads up the fake website and shows them that the price has “gone up” while the customer was driving over to the store and offers to sell the item for the new price.
State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal ordered the investigation into Best Buy’s practices on Feb. 9 after my column disclosed the website and showed how employees at two Connecticut stores used it to deny customers a $150 discount on a computer advertised on BestBuy.com.
Blumenthal said Wednesday that Best Buy has also confirmed to his office the existence of the intranet site, but has so far failed to give clear answers about its purpose and use.
Mac VS PC
Mac VS PC And this time PC is the cool guy and Mac is the stooge! Gems like "Mac works for PC", "PC gets the girl." and "Mac may be cool but PC has the money."
Oh my God
Darwin’s God. "A scientific exploration of how we have come to believe in God."
This article tracks the possibility that belief in a higher power is the product of evolution.
The Beatles: Bigger than Jesus 41 years running
The Beatles are Bigger than Jesus. It was 41 years ago today, that the Evening Standard published a Maureen Cleave interview with John Lennon, in which he declared the Beatles “more popular than Jesus”. Later in July, DATEbook, an American teen mag, printed only the Jesus statement and nothing else from the interview. The firestorm of reaction in the US was immediate. Radio stations nationwide, but particularly in the South and in the Midwest, banned the playing of Beatles records [Real Audio]. Death threats against all of the Fab Four poured in. In Cleveland, a preacher threatened to excommunicate any member of his congregation who listened to the Beatles, and in the South, the Ku Klux Klan burned the Beatles in effigy and nailed Beatles albums to burning crosses. On August 11, Lennon held a press conference in Chicago, where he apologized, sort of. The press conference was on the eve of the Beatles’ last tour of their career. Many say this epsiode, as well as the riots that accompanied their tour of the Philippines (also in July), as well as the accumulated stress of being on top of the world for nearly four years at that point, precipitated the beginning of the end of the Beatles.
Is it true though? Are the Beatles bigger than Jesus? Though this was unanswerable in 1966, thanks to the magic of the web, we do know the answer today: according to Google, the answer is no. Still, other views persist.
It will never replace a hardcover book – it makes a very poor doorstop.
Huck Finn, Heart of Darkness, A Tale of Two Cities, and others – free audio books. Text and audio on the web, or downloadable mp3s with embedded text.
Grenade found in bag of potatoes
Olga Mauriello, 74, of Naples, Italy, washed off a potato from a sack she’d just purchased and discovered that the spud was actually an active hand grenade. A bomb squad was called in and the grenade safely detonated. From Reuters:
Police said the pine cone-shaped grenade, which had no pin and was still active, was the same type used by U.S. soldiers in Europe in World War Two. Authorities believe the mix-up happened at a farm in France, where the grenade was plucked from the ground along with potatoes…
“If I hadn’t felt its weight, I wouldn’t even have realised that it was a bomb,” she said.







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