Every year, Josh Sundquist (previously at Neatorama) comes up with a delightfully clever Halloween costume that incorporates the fact that he has one leg. For Halloween 2017, he returned to his early love of trampolines by becoming the bouncy Tigger!
Here’s my Halloween costume! pic.twitter.com/KhgcfP1exO
— Josh Sundquist (@JoshSundquist) October 27, 2017
See Sundquist's costumes from previous years.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a short story, first published in 1894, about a country doctor named Ripley who found that a second doctor had set up shop in the village of Hoyland. He goes to the new office, wanting to meet and greet his competition. Dr. Ripley is shocked to find that Dr. Smith is a woman, so shocked that he dropped his hat. She questions his attitude toward her choice of profession.
"Ladies are in danger of losing their privileges when they usurp the place of the other sex. They cannot claim both."
''Why should a woman not earn her bread by her brains?''
Dr. Ripley felt irritated by the quiet manner in which the lady crossquestioned him.
''I should much prefer not to be led into a discussion, Miss Smith."
''Dr. Smith," she interrupted.
"Well, Dr. Smith! But if you insist upon an answer, I must say that I do not think medicine a suitable profession for women and that I have a personal objection to masculine ladies."
It was an exceedingly rude speech, and he was ashamed of it the instant after he had made it. The lady, however, simply raised her eyebrows and smiled."It seems to me that you are begging the question," said she. "Of course, if it makes women masculine that would be a considerable deterioration. "
Ripley grew to greatly resent Dr. Smith and her work. The story echoes attitudes that are still around 123 years later, although half of the students who entered medical school in 2016 are women. You can read the entire story of Dr. Ripley and Dr. Smith at Stanford University. -via Metafilter
Tom BetGeorge always goes all out for his Christmas light shows. This year, the neighbors are being treated to the same attention to detail in a Halloween light show! This house in Tracey, California, tells the story of The Nightmare Before Christmas, starting with the song "This is Halloween."
With tons of LED lights, projections, computer-controlled sequences, music, and a drone to record it, this is a step beyond in Halloween decorating. I have two ceramic pumpkins with a string of orange lights stuck inside each. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Elephants and giant pumpkins come together in an orgy of destruction during the Oregon Zoo's annual Squishing of the Squash! The crowd was impressed by both the huge elephants and the huge pumpkins. The elephants like the pumpkins as both playthings and a snack. And they know smashing pumpkins is a crowd-pleaser.
The Squishing of the Squash kicks off a series of 'Howloween' events at the Oregon Zoo. -via Tastefully Offensive
This Norman Rockwell painting graced the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in May, 1920. The Ouija board session reminds us of the parlor games that young people used to play to get close to each other in a socially acceptable way, like the apple-on-a-string game in this post. Really, look at this couple: their knees are touching, their fingers are touching, and they are both blushing. You can imagine the questions they asked the Ouija board, and the effort they put into produce the answer they wanted. Read the story of how real-life couples inspired Rockwell's painting. Found at Weird Vintage.
No one would serve a cake with glass shards in it -at least no one you'd want to know- but these just look like glass. Food artist Hellen Die (the alter ego of TV writer Tye Lombardi) shows us how to make this gruesome cake that should only be served at adults-only gatherings.
This cake is dangerously delicious. A deep dark buttermilk chocolate cake wrapped in thick white marshmallow fondant stabbed with shards of sweet sugar glass, topped with a white chocolate skull, and drizzled in sweet raspberry blood is a showstopping way to say Happy Halloween!
Learn to make all the components of this Halloween dessert at the Necro-nom-nom-nomicon.
Mark Hamill is almost as famous for being the voice of The Joker as he is for playing Luke Skywalker. In this Justice League Action short from Cartoon Network, Hamill does all the voices: the Joker, Trickster, and "famous actor Mark Hamill," which is a younger and somewhat steroid-enhanced version of Hamill -as you would expect in a comic book character.
The plot proves to be weirdly meta when "famous actor Mark Hamill" saves the day by using his unique superpower- his voice acting skills! -via Laughing Squid
A bassoon is a woodwind instrument that plays in the lower range. A contrabassoon plays even lower notes. A subcontrabassoon… well, it doesn't exist. But professional contrabassoonist Richard Bobo wants to change that, by building the first subcontrabassoon. Bobo explains more about the project in this interview. The finished instrument will be 6'4" tall and weigh 35 pounds. However, that is substantially smaller than a pipe organ, which is the only other instrument that currently plays the lowest notes.
Despite its larger size, the ergonomics of the subcontrabassoon have been designed to be as similar to the contrabassoon as possible. The bocal angle, bocal height, bocal projection, end pin adjustment, and vertical hand playing positions will all be identical to a standard contrabassoon. However, unlike the contrabassoon and bassoon, the subcontrabassoon’s left-hand keywork will be contained on a single joint and a second handrest will therefore be provided for comfort.
In short, if you can play the contrabassoon, you will be able to play the subcontrabassoon.
You can follow Bobo's design and building progress at Facebook. -via Metafilter
This fable is a bit of a twist on the water displacement fable we talked about last weekend. The lesson here is just keep on keeping on, and maybe something unexpected will happen. Dami Lee, on the other hand, is expecting butter, and that means something delicious to eat. Check out her other comics at As Per Usual.
Jeff Wysaski, under the name Obvious Plant, creates silly signs and plants them in businesses and other places where someone will get pranked by reading them. But now, he's produced a 28-page magazine called, of course, Obvious Plant. Fake articles in a fake magazine. So then he leaves it in a bookstore. You have to wonder if any customers purchased the magazine, and whether the clerk who does it had any inkling this is not a magazine they stock. Take a look inside and see eight pages of Obvious Plant magazine at imgur. You can buy Obvious Plant magazine here.
-via reddit
People have been building monsters for the silver screen ever since movies were invented. In every era of filmmaking, artists have used whatever they had and whatever would work to bring a vision to life …as long as they stayed within budget. Mental Floss spoke with some of today's leading monster designers and animators to get a glimpse into the world of movie monsters.
1. CREATURE EFFECTS HAVE COME A LONG WAY SINCE GUYS IN RUBBER SUITS.
The earliest creature features typically involved a guy in a rubber suit terrorizing Tokyo or carrying off a damsel in distress. Today’s creatures are much more complex and believable, thanks to new varieties of silicone rubber, upgrades in animatronics, new forms of design software, and the development of CGI.
“Special Effects as an industry is always evolving, and products and materials are expanding and becoming more readily available than ever before,” says Stuart Rowsell, a creature technician and founder of Bloodhound FX in Australia who has worked on films including Star Wars: Episode II (2002) and III (2005), Superman Returns (2006), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), and Alien: Covenant (2017).
3D printing is also shaking up the industry. Lino Stavole, a creature engineer at Spectral Motion based in Los Angeles, founded 3D scanning, printing, and engineering company Behold 3D to cater to the needs of the entertainment industry. Stavole tells Mental Floss that his company used 3D printing in silicone to create an alien creature for the movie V/H/S in just two days, a process that once required several more. “That really opened my eyes to the potential of what technology can do,” he says. 3D printing is also pushing boundaries in terms of design intricacy—Stavole says a creature he helped create for Netflix’s planned reboot of Lost in Space incorporates about 400 different 3D-printed parts.
Read more about how movie monsters are made at Mental Floss.
(Image credit: Stuart Rowsell)
This is just what it says on the tin, but it's always cute when a cat enjoys corn on the cob this much. I would bet there's butter on that corn. The little girl is enjoying it, too. The cats in the background wish they had some, too.
This video is from Orehovo-Zuevo, Russia. -via Tastefully Offensive
Halloween is the first candy holiday of the dark days of winter. The temptation can be too much for some of us. But once we get through Christmas, Valentine's Day, and Easter, we'll be ready to go without for a while. Meanwhile, you have to forgive us adults who haven't quite grown up yet. This is the latest comic from Alex Culang and Raynato Castro at Buttersafe.
Time travel is fiction, unless you are referring to traveling ahead in time at the rate one one minute per minute. As fiction, you can do pretty much what you want with temporal displacement, so science fiction stories treat that ability in many different ways.
What causes a paradox doesn't necessarily cause a paradox in a different story. Our friends at Minute Physics gives us an overview of how time travel varies between stories. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The 1981 film Nighthawks pitted cops Sylvester Stallone and Billie Dee Williams against terrorist Rutger Hauer. Typecasting, right? While the movie was a hit, it was a long and troubled road getting it to theaters. For example,
7. Hauer was injured twice while filming his death scene.
The squib that was meant to simulate a gunshot burned him when it exploded on the wrong side and the cable used to pull him back when he was ‘shot’ strained his back. Unfortunately this was done on Stallone’s order.
4. The movie was originally supposed to be the French Connection III.
After seeing the original script Gene Hackman backed out of the production and it was then reworked into what became Nighthawks.
Read more trivia about Nighthawks at TVOM.
