Remove one of the Hippos from the tabletop game Hungry Hungry Hippos and let a dog step up to the table. Pour in the kibble and he'll out-eat any hippo in the jungle. For some dogs I've known, it might have worked just as well with the original plastic beads.
-via Five
Johannes Vermeer's 1665 painting Girl with a Pearl Earring metamorphoses into an onion in this piece by Russian photographer Olga Pavolga. Perhaps, as one commenter suggests, the painting should be remade into Girl with an Onion Ring.
-via I Need a Guide
In 1925, the Green Giant brand of preserved vegetables began promoting its huge peas with a giant figure offering his fare to the world. There's a 55-foot tall statue of the company's mascot in Le Sueur, Minnesota.
In brightest day and darkest night, no hunger shall escape this giant's sight when cosplayer Gordon Buri is on the job with his Green Giant and Green Lantern mashup costume.
“Can be single, double, triple or more.” pic.twitter.com/edKh5on46Z
— TM (@tempdownatkzug) June 8, 2020
One reason restaurant chains are so successful is that they are consistent at every location, so fans and travelers know what to expect. There's a reason all Cracker Barrels face the interstate, even when that puts them at an odd angle to the road they are actually on. When one fast food outlet goes rogue, everyone notices. That was the case in 2014 at the South Side Burger King in Pittsburgh.
The epic saga began when customers noticed that their food didn't seem to taste like Burger King. That's usually a compliment, but if you specifically choose to go to Burger King, it's because you want that special experience of having your tastebuds beaten with a used sock full of nickels. The situation deteriorated as food began to be served in plain brown paper bags, without the famous BK logo. Fries came in dixie cups, drinks were in plain styrofoam cups, the burgers were wrapped in tin foil or sandwich paper. Some expert soda connoisseurs claimed that the Coke machine appeared to be dispensing Pepsi. Rumors spread that employees had been sighted loading up on burger buns in a nearby Giant Eagle supermarket.
The shenanigans at the particular outlet got much weirder before the media noticed and began investigating (after social media, of course). Read the true tale of the fake Burger King at Cracked.
As was done with Star Wars, Shrek, and Back to the Future 2, the classic summer blockbuster Jaws has been remade by more than 100 dedicated fans. The feature-length remake is called Jaws WeMake, a tribute for the film's 45th anniversary, produced by The Daily Jaws. The participants contributed their talents in acting, animation, stop-motion, toys, lip-synching, and a wide-ranging bunch of costumes, props, and effects to create a glorious new Jaws. Some of the actors have an eerie resemblance to Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw. After you've seen the trailer above, continue reading to see the entire film.
Daven Hiskey looked at a couple of the highest honors that the UK and the US can bestow to compare and contrast them, namely, a British knighthood and the American military's Medal of Honor. This may seen silly because the two are very different and really have nothing in common besides being a high honor, but we can learn something new about each of them.
As we’ve covered before in great detail, it turns out getting knighted entitles you to just about nothing, other than getting to attend a special ceremony where you’re knighted and then afterwards you can adopt a title, such as “Sir”. That said, there are more intangible perks, such as a slightly higher profile, more impressive looking resume, potential invites to parties one would otherwise not have been, quicker seating at some exclusive restaurants, etc. But, on the whole, you officially get basically nothing.
This lack of official perks is in keeping with historical precedent, with the title of Knight throughout history being largely ceremonial in nature, especially in the United Kingdom. For example, as noted by the Royal Collection Trust, the title in ancient times didn’t confer any monetary benefit upon a person since anyone granted the title of Knight would, to quote them, “Be expected to have the financial ability to support the honour of knighthood, so that he could provide himself with arms, armour, horses and the required number of armed followers to render military service to his Sovereign for a minimum period each year.”
Knighthood can be given for pretty much any reason, as long as the recipient is a citizen of the United Kingdom. The Medal of Honor is a completely different story. They are not easy to achieve, being given to members of the military who have distinguished themselves through acts of valor above and beyond the call of duty. Beginning with World War II, nearly half of the medals have been awarded posthumously. But for recipients who survived their acts of valor, the rewards are pretty sweet, which you can read about at Today I Found Out.
(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
Japanese social media went into a frenzy deciphering a mysterious object that appeared in the sky over northern Japan. The odd white object gave birth to different speculations, from UFOs to weather balloons to North Korean propaganda. Footage taken in Sendai showed a balloon-like object above a cross, as Reuters detailed:
Television footage taken in the northeastern city of Sendai showed a balloon-like object above a cross, on which propellers seemed to be turning. Officials in the Sendai Weather Bureau said it had appeared near dawn and hung in the sky for hours, largely unmoving, until obscured by clouds.
By afternoon it was the third-most trending topic on Japanese Twitter, with theories including UFOs and North Korean balloons used to drop leaflets. One user said it could be spreading novel coronavirus, adding, “This gives me a very bad feeling, as if Godzilla might suddenly appear.”
Police could not be immediately reached for comment and a Sendai government official said inquiries were still proceeding, with both the size of the object and its origin, as well as its function, undetermined. No move had been made to retrieve it as of late afternoon.
“We have absolutely no idea what it is,” said a weather bureau spokesman, declining to give his name. “It may be some kind of weather monitoring equipment, but it definitely isn’t ours.”
image screenshot via Reuters
While many film buffs have long held that Florence Turner was the first movie star, there is evidence that Maurice Costello should have that designation. Of course, "movie star" is hard to define, especially in the silent film era when the term wasn't widely used, but Costello took first place in a 1912 poll in Motion Picture Story Magazine, garnering more votes than Florence Lawrence and Florence Turner combined.
Shulman argues that “what D. W. Griffith did for film direction […], Maurice did for screen acting: that is, he raised the bar to a higher standard that quickly became the norm. And he did it a year before Griffith, who didn’t come work for Biograph until 1908.” Maurice transformed how players acted in front of the camera. Because cranking speeds varied by cameraperson, just as projection speeds varied by cinema, there was a wide range of movement on the silent screen. Some exhibitors even sped up their prints so as to fit more screenings into a day. As Shulman shows, Maurice was hailed — locally in the Pittsburgh Gazette and nationally in Photoplay — as the star who implemented a slower style of acting that played back onscreen more realistically. By 1910, Vitagraph was billing Maurice as the star of the program, with promotional blurbs such as, “A Vitagraph Night with Maurice Costello.” Helene and Dolores were also getting screen time as extras whenever children were needed.
Helene and Dolores were Maurice Costello's daughters, who went on to be movie stars in their own right. Dolores married John Barrymore and Helene starred in the first all-taking feature film, but they had plenty of other accomplishments and scandals, as did Maurice. Read more about the Costello film family in a synopsis of the book Film’s First Family: The Untold Story of the Costellos by Terry Shulman at the Los Angeles Review of Books. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Cinema News)
Tonya Ruiz is known for her realistic versions of Barbie dolls. During the pandemic, she began a “quarantine Barbie starter pack” project that everyone could relate to while at home. The dolls are accompanied by different miniature objects that reinforce the personality of the Barbie doll, as Designboom details:
for example, the quarantine break baking barbie includes a mixer, flour, sourdough starter, eggs, bananas, butter, and milk; and a doll that is probably making a flour disaster around the kitchen. or the zoom ken that’s dressed from the waist up while wearing only red-hearted boxer shorts.
I had always wanted to make spoof barbies like I had seen on the ellen show,’ comments tonya ruiz on a youtube post where she shares behind-the-scenes footage of the project. ‘when the quarantine started and I saw a couple of funny pandemic barbies – I thought that I should make a barbie that everyone could relate to. I created the quarantine starter pack – curvy doll in stretchy pants. she was so well liked that I continued creating spoof / parody barbies.’
image via Designboom
Here's a very interesting post about Peter Norman, the white guy in the famous raised black gloved fists picture on the 1968 Olympic podium. We all know that picture and its historical ripples, but do you know Peter Norman's place in it?
You learn also how to use the Olympic Black Power statue on the San Jose State University campus.
For us, meat is just the juicy, tasty slab of tissue from animals. But some people think it’s more than that simple definition. People who are developing cell-cultured meat believe that meat can be the product of cultural consensus, not of killing animals. If people accept meat in various shapes and forms, then they can accept that meat can come from different methods. Cell-cultured meat is one of the methods that big food companies are looking at for the future, as NPR details:
At the center of Chase Purdy's briskly paced and quietly bold Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food is Josh Tetrick, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur and CEO of Just Inc. Tetrick's company and a handful of others like it are growing cell-cultured meat that tastes, feels and looks like the livestock-harvested meat that people are used to — except without the farms and killing of animals. And before anyone raises a skeptical brow: Yes, it's actually meat. Technically, at least. The struggle for mainstream acceptance of cell-cultured meat is real. Convincing the American public that cells grown in "serum" in a big vat is meat will be challenging, but it could happen — and sooner than you might think.
Meat, it seems, is all about what consumers are used to. For the sake of the planet and the future of food sustainability, it might be time to reconsider meat harvested from dead animals. If we're going to eat meat at all, eliminating the need to kill an animal that consumes food resources humans could otherwise be using — and that's also captive to an industry that pollutes the air and soil and deforests broad swaths of the planet — might be a good start.
image via NPR
Police in Lincoln, Nebraska, are looking for a suspect in a very specific costume. A man dressed in a ‘very cheap’ Deadpool costume was seen smashing windows and causing damage to a business at the Lincoln Mall. The man managed to break out over 20 windows. Hopefully the police find the suspect!
image via abc8
We’ve seen different kinds of anime over the years, but this Condom Battler Goro surprised me because of what it's based upon. It’s an anime promoting safe sex, and also a marketing ploy by Japan’s leading condom manufacturer, Okamoto Industries. The superhero anime is a 56-part series, but only episodes 1, 19, 45, and 56 will be released for now. It’s still not known if the missing episodes will be released in the future.
image via SoraNews24
It seems that we’d have to wait a little longer before we can burn a city with Keanu Reeves, as the game Cyberpunk 2077 will be delayed to November 19, 2020. While the game may be finished “both content and gameplay-wise,” head of studio Adam Badowski and co-founder Marcin Iwinski states via Twitter that they’d spend the additional time ironing things out in the world of Cyberpunk 2077, to ensure that the game will stay with the players for the years to come.
The studio has also tipped its hat about a wave of hands-on preview articles from members of the press, and these will apparently be timed to the studio's "Night City Wire" live-streamed event coming on Thursday, June 25.
[...]
While game release delays like these can sometime spark outsized levels of online anger, it's always good to remember the words attributed to legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto: "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."
Are you looking forward to the game’s release?
(Image Credit: Cyberpunk 2077/ YouTube)
Marta Grossi lives in Milan, Italy--the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in her country. Locked down since March 8, she's needed space to be creative. She found it in her own bathroom sink, which she paints and repaints with colorful images of less confined life.
Grossi calls her series Wash Your Hands and Keep Creative. She explains that:
Few weeks ago I thought about the perception of things, about how many times we are reminded to wash our hands since we met the corona virus. The sinks of all the world are now becoming silent companions, we look out every day - and under this tragic circumstances - a simple piece of furniture is changing in front of our eyes.
