Now here's a fresh, vibrant look for a kitchen! And the dining area offers a great view for a breakfast.
It was a hundred-year old church in the Little Italy neighborhood of Chicago. But Linc Thelen Design and Scarfano Architects turned it into a modern house. They used the cavernous interior to create a spacious residence for a family.
As you roll your shopping cart through the grocery store, you glance at your shopping list. The next item is pasta. But which among the many brands will catch your eye first?
Nikita, a designer in Moscow, makes this suggestion. He's developed a line of packaging concepts that make boxed pasta look like hair. The noodles become luxurious, fashionable hair in addition to food. You can see more digital renderings of the boxes here.
The Predator forgot the dental module of his med-kit while packing for his hunting trip on Earth. Now he's having a rough time at the dentist's office.
Dying eggs for Easter is just plain fun, but if you're looking to geek up your eggs this year, you should do more than just dye them. While you can always paint them to look like specific characters, you don't need to have crazy art skills to make something different.
In 1861, at the outbreak of the American Civil War, Maryland was a slave state. There were many Confederate sympathizers in the state. There was a small chance that, left to its own devices, Maryland might have secede from the Union.
But the capital of the United States government lay on the southern edge of Maryland, so President Lincoln took no chances. For much of the war, Maryland would be occupied by Federal forces deployed to fight the Confederacy in Virginia.
It would be an ugly war, as Maryland would discover early on. One of the first outbreaks of violence was a riot in Baltimore on April 19, 1861--just a week after the Battle of Fort Sumter. Federal troops and pro-Confederate Marylanders brawled. Several of those Marylanders were killed.
Among the fatalities was a friend of James Ryder Randall, a journalist who would later join the Confederate Navy. In grief and anger over his loss, Randall wrote the song "Maryland, My Maryland." It includes this passage:
Maryland! The Old Line's bugle, fife, and drum, Maryland! She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb- Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum! She breathes! she burns! she'll come! she'll come! Maryland! My Maryland!
"Maryland, My Maryland" became a Confederate war song and, eventually, the state song of Maryland. But now legislators want to remove the secessionist elements of the song. The Post-Star reports:
Sen. Robert Cassilly, a Republican, said it was wrong to try to eliminate parts of the state's history.
"Our song doesn't belong to the Confederacy. It belongs to us," he said.
Cassilly said the song celebrates the courage of people who are willing to stand up and fight for what they believe in, even if they turn out to be on the wrong side of history.
"It is what it is, but we learn from history, we learn from each other and we build upon it, so the idea that we're trying to excise our history is just, I don't think that's America," Cassilly said. "That's not what we're about." […]
The song calls for Maryland to secede from the Union — at a time when Maryland residents sympathized with the Confederacy. The song begins with a hostile reference to Lincoln, who brought troops through Baltimore to protect Washington: "The despot's heel is on thy shore, Maryland! His torch is at thy temple door, Maryland!"
Lilica is simply glowing with joy. It's no wonder! She's a new mommy. That's why her human's friend, Ana Paula Grillo, gave her a professional-grade photo shoot. Grillo tells The Dodo that Lilica was smiling and enjoying the entire experience.
Since the photo shoot, Lilica has gone on to give birth to five puppies, each of whom has been adopted by members of Lilica's extended human family.
The interwebs are all abuzz about a Danish woman who seems to disappear right before our viewing eyes during a live news broadcast, and people are understandably concerned.
Where did the woman disappear to, and does it have anything to do with the return of the X-Files?
Was it all a hoax or a trick done with some sort of real time video editing software? And why does no one seem to care that she's vanished into thin air?
There's bound to be a reasonable explanation for this "sudden disappearance", but don't spoil the fun with truth bombs just yet because the solutions people have thought up are starting to get good...
When you go to a Bruce Springsteen concert you stay until the Boss is done doing his thing, and these days that can last three or four hours easy, which could spell trouble for any elementary school students in the audience.
A young man named Xabi attended a Springsteen concert with his superfan dad Scott Glovsky at L.A. Memorial Sports Arena on a Tuesday night, and when the concert didn't end until 11:40 Xabi thought he might be in trouble.
Luckily he'd held up a sign during the concert that said “Bruce, I will be late to school tomorrow, please sign my note”, and the Boss proved he's still the Boss by actually writing the kid a note.
Bruce invited Xabi and his dad backstage and wrote him a note that read ““Dear Ms. Jackson, Xabi has been out very late rocking + rolling. Please excuse him if he is tardy!”
And that's how a new generation of Bruce Springsteen fans are born.
Domino's Pizza hopes to offer an alternative to human delivery of its pizza. It recently unveiled its new autonomous delivery robot in Australia. It's called the DRU: Domino's Robotic Unit. It's a 450-pound machine that travels up to 12.4 miles per hour and contains chilled and heated compartments for food.
The DRU uses GPS navigation system to find its way to the delivery destination. Autonomous programming permits it to maneuver around obstacles. When it arrives, customers type in a code to access their food. Forbes reports:
DRU is reportedly fully autonomous, and sports a water-tight, weather-proof acrylic plastic exterior and aluminum and mild steel interior for keeping orders at their best. Like today’s self-driving cars, it uses LIDAR laser-light sensory technology to detect and navigate around obstacles along its journey, and also has a back-up system of traditional sensors (such as you’d find on home cleaning-bots) to ensure it reaches its destination safely.
In Soviet era Russia crimes were punished far more severely than they are today, and soldiers who questioned authority could be shot or sent to work in a Gulag camp for their insubordination.
But Russian soldiers no longer have to fear their lives will be taken by a cruel government, because today's Russian military punishes you with comedy.
Punished soldiers are forced to carry large wooden props shaped like their crimes- rifles for those who show up without their weapons and iPhones complete with an “official” Apple logo for those caught on their phone.
These comic props make the punished an object of ridicule and add weight to the soldier's load, forcing them to sweat for their sins. Yakov Smirnoff would have been proud.
BB-8, the adorable droid star of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens has rolled into our hearts. He's smart, handy, and, above all, cute. So he's naturally inspired many Star Wars fans to create costumes of him. Here are some of the best, including this elegant corset-centered outfit which includes a motorized hat by Lady Death Star.
I used to think the gritty and grimy depiction of New York in the 1970s and 80s seen in movies like The Warriors and Maniac, and TV shows like Night Court and The Equalizer was an exaggeration, but it turns out they weren't that far off.
The city streets were crackling with an electric energy during those dark days, and overall New York City was a much more dangerous place, but artists also took license with the city's dark side for dramatic effect.
However, photographer Steven Siegel didn't need to exaggerate or manipulate the truth to make the NYC streets he shot during the 80s look like an apocalyptic wasteland, he just removed the lens cap and documented what he saw.
Steven spoke to Gothamist about the difference between NYC then and now:
New York in the 1980s differed in two fundamental ways from the New York of today. First, 1980s-era New York was an edgier, riskier, dirtier, tenser, more dangerous and chaotic place. I think that fairly comes through in my images. Second, 1980s-era New York had a sense of wide-openness and freedom that was lost following 9/11... and likely never will be regained.
Notice how these two fundamental changes overlap in a number of important ways. A safer city, to some extent, comes at the price of a loss of freedom and openness. Conversely, the edginess and riskiness of the 1980s came at an appalling human and social cost. My photos of South Bronx and Bushwick are—if I might say so—a testament to that. Those who might be nostalgic for the edginess and riskiness of the 1980s were surely not the people who were growing up in the South Bronx and Bushwick in the era.
The trade-off between openness and security is reflected in a very literal way in some of my 1980s photos.
Professional cosplay photographer David Ngo snapped these two gentlemen at C2E2, an entertainment convention in Chicago. They're taking the title of the movie Captain America: Civil War very literally by portraying Captain America as a US Army officer and Iron Man as a Confederate Army officer.
The baby elephant at Kruger National Park in South Africa has discovered something important: he has a long dangly thing hanging on his face. It appears to be flexible, although he needs to practice controlling it. The dangly thing flops around in every direction except the one he wants. Perhaps he should consult the owner's manual.
YouTube user rgraves62002 owns Stella the dog. Stella loves to run around and play. To keep her in the yard, he built a sturdy wooden fence to pen her in. Immediately after finishing the project, he proudly recorded his handiwork. And Stella expressed her opinion of the fence.
