More Failure...

Um... Oops?!

Dude?! Holy crap! You ok?! Oh, good, good... so, uh, yeah... whenever you are ready, we should talk about how that'll be coming out of your paycheck...

Pretty Amazing Harmonica-ing

Russian Flying Fortress

Unfortunately these are only renderings, but the plans were real, and from the Soviet era.









Via EnglishRussia.com

Snowmobile Double Backflip

Doesn't count. But DAMN....

No Bed? No problem!

This is pretty pro.

Now that's a real wrestling move!

Snicker...

Awesome Pic 2

I gotta say these folks from the Dark Side do drive some awesome cars!

No, no, that's not how it happened!

For those of you who feel that Star Wars was ruined by the three prequels, at least the original three weren't redone by this sweet young thing...

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

Best Products Building

From Tom Spaulding's photostream:

A 1977 project in Sacramento, California, called the Notch showroom, continued SITE's use of fragmentation and subtraction.The 'Notch' showroom uses reductions as additions. In this case the building is penetrated by a 14' high raw-edged notch which serves as a main entrance. The 45-ton wedge extracted from this gap is mounted on a rail system incised into the paving and mechanized to move a distance of 40' to open and close the showroom. Understandably, crowds of spectators assemble to watch the morning opening and evening closing.

Here is a panoramic shot of the Indeterminate Facade Building, another famous Best Products building, which looks like it is falling into rubble, the same way it did when it first opened. The building was demolished in April of 2003.

You can learn more about other interesting Best Product buildings at SITE's website and here in an article from MetropolisMag.com.

Abandoned Russian Polar Nuclear Lighthouses

The Soviet Union built a chain of autonomous lighthouses to guide ships finding their way in the dark polar night across uninhabited shores, hundreds and hundreds miles away from any populated areas. They were powered by small lightweight atomic reactors. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unattended automatic lighthouses continued to work for some time, but soon they started to disintegrate, mostly from copper and other metal looting. The looters either didn’t care or didn’t know the meaning of the “Radioactive Danger” sign and ignored them, breaking in and destroying the equipment. They even broke into the reactors, causing the lighthouses to become radioactively polluted.

Nice recovery!

Hi Voltage Electricity Repair

From a helicopter. With thousands of volts surrounding you. At great heights. As the band Alabama once sung: Hats off to hard workin' cowboys...

High Voltage Cable Inspection
by monnotman

I particularly like the man's voice. It is so calm and collected, and at peace with himself -- "There’s only three things I’ve ever been afraid of: electricity, heights, and women. And I'm married too."

Now that is an awesome pic!

Your House Just Got Pimped!

Crow 2.0

They are getting smarter... next thing you know, it will be like Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds with an intelligent hive-mind twist...

Who Says Lego Can't be Sexy?

From Gizmodo:










All from photographer Jean-Yves Lemoigne's series Sex Pixels.

Air Bear Part II

Follow up to my post about Air Bear:

Matchstick Galleon

Argentinean artist Bernardo Casasola took seven and a half years, and thousands of matchsticks to finish his latest creation, a multi-decked galleon spanning 10' 6" long. You can see the detail in the clip below along with some other works of his.

Christmas Song

A little late but still nifty!

101 Faces

Call Before You Dig

This is not a Martian landscape, and no there aren't people on Mars already. This is what happens when you don't call before you dig:





From the Landscape and Urbanism blog; more pics in the first link. Call before you dig, even if it is "in the middle of nowhere"!!

Geronimo!!

The name says it all:

Someone REALLY wants to go play with his friend. This also reminds me of my late cousin Alex who decided once that he really wanted to stay at a party, and jumped out of a moving car to do it.

Impossible Objects

Most of us have seen the drawing of M.C. Escher and his various optical illusions. But you don't always see physical manifestations of such illusions. These are unretouched pics of some pretty nifty constructions.

More here as well.

The Icon A5

A recreational plane that requires minimal training to use and is both portable and versatile.

The Audi Calamaro Concept

From Jalopnik:

This futuristic take on a flying car was designed by Hungarian design
student Tibor for a design contest run by his native Porsche
distributor. Inspired by the “bone of a cuttlefish,” the
Audi Calamaro does a good job of looking kind of like its name suggests
while still adapting current Audi design themes — check out the
‘beard’ air intake.






next »

Discovery of three fish inside a sealed egg

Biologists at the University of Manchester found a duck egg in a small pond on a field trip to the French Alps and noticed something moving inside it. When they cracked open the shell, three live minnows were inside.

From my old draft posts file... I wonder if anyone ever solved the mystery or if it was a hoax.

Origin of the comic strip speech ballon

From Wikipedia:

One of the earliest antecedents to the modern speech bubble were the “speech scrolls”, wispy lines that connected first person speech to the mouths of the speakers in Mesoamerican art.

In Western graphic art, labels that reveal what a pictured figure is saying have appeared since at least the 13th century.



The Yellow Kid
is generally credited as the first true comic strip character. His
words initially appeared on his yellow shirt but word balloons very
much like those in use today were added almost immediately, as early as
1896.

Frosty gets caught

Spider Flash

A pretty realistic looking and reacting spider, done in flash by a guy named Tomas in Gothenburg/Sweden.

Flying

I wish I wasn't acrophobic and had a greater sense of adventure.

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

Uncle Jay Explains 2008

Complete with a Rick Roll! LOL

Thanks to P Reid for the heads up!

Faberge Eggs

A post from Dark Roasted Blend on Faberge Eggs:

Fruit Fly Death Trap

Exactly what the title says.

Cutting Edge Fashion

The opening scene of Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? a film by Willian Klien that was released in 1966 as a satire of the fashion industry.

Polly Maggoo is a 20-year-old Brooklyn-born fashion model in Paris, on the runway at the big shows where magazine editor Ms. Maxwell is the reigning opinion maker. The ridiculous passes for sublime.

Some cool origami

Some awesome origami from Flickr user inq314:

Samrost

A pretty fun puzzle game done in flash called Samrost.



There is also a sequel called, appropriately enough, Samrost 2.

The Mantis and the Spider

This is a cool set of pictures on Flickr by boiani about a Mantis fighting with a spider.



What the photographer doesn't tell you is that the mantis is a droid sent by the evil overlords to take over the world:



Sure, they are testing with spiders, and using other insects as cover, but one day it will be us being rendered limb from limb... or so the voices in my head tell me... LOL



If you like this kind of mixed taxidermy, you should check out my older post on animal amalgams.

More Stacking

After blogging about the kid who stacks dice, I was reminded about a guy who stacks cards:

Babies

In recognition of my friends Greg and Trish who have a newborn, Amanda, here is a post on babies...



Camille Allen makes baby sculptures.



Pretty realistic! Apparently she isn't the only one that is inspired by babies (I mean other than Anne Geddes). Ceramacist Shigeki Hayashi has this contribution:



And of course there is the baby suit, which makes me think of my friend Greg, who I know feels up to his neck in babies right now...