Neatorama |
- Paper in the Sky
- 23 Bourbon-filled Desserts for Thanksgiving
- My Little Batman
- Holiday Ice Cream Sandwich Molds
- Geronimo, the P.O.W.
- Pumpkin Land
- Super Tiny Giraffe
- Old Card Catalog Cabinets Now Used for Sharing Gifts
- How to Draw a Dotted Line
- The Fairy Circles of Namibia
- The Smiths as Penguin Classics Book Cover
- These Two Are Looking to Get Revenge on the Burger King
- Vincent's Daydreams
- Fluttershy Bird Choir Music Box Automaton
- Naughty Nice Socks
- White Dragon Cake
- The Penn State Squirrel Whisperer
- DIY Camera Made Out of Cardboard, LEGO and Duct Tape
- Thanks to Daylight Savings Time, Man Gets Ticketed for Two DUIs at the Same Time
- Hey Boba Fett, You're Looking Good
- On Remembrance Day
- A Brief History of Movie Villains' Terrible Hair
- The Snowman's Journey
- God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut
- Fifty Shades of Chicken
| Posted: 12 Nov 2012 04:00 AM PST Dmytro and Iuliia, artists in Ukraine, are masters of the silhouette. Their amazingly detailed works are hand cut from single sheets of paper:
You can see more photos of their work at the link.  |
| 23 Bourbon-filled Desserts for Thanksgiving Posted: 12 Nov 2012 03:00 AM PST Bourbon goes with sweet, savory, hot, and cold foods, and it can really dress up a holiday recipe to make it something special. This list has links to recipes for pies, cakes, cookies, candy, and beverages. One even includes bacon! Shown here is Sweet Potato Pecan Pie with Bourbon, topped with maple pecan ice cream. Yum! Link |
| Posted: 12 Nov 2012 02:00 AM PST Ponyville's greatest masked superhero--no, not the Mysterious Mare Do Well--is the Pony Knight. What cutie mark did Amandkyo-Su give him? Well, none, obviously. That would reveal his secret identity. |
| Holiday Ice Cream Sandwich Molds Posted: 12 Nov 2012 01:00 AM PST Holiday Ice Cream Sandwich Molds - $12.95 Are you looking for a cool way to celebrate the holiday season? You need the Holiday Ice Cream Sandwich Molds from the NeatoShop. This delicously fun set includes 3 molds: snowflake, snowman, and gingerbread man. Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Christmas Entertaining ideas. |
| Posted: 12 Nov 2012 01:00 AM PST
In March 1905, Geronimo was invited to President Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade; he and five real Indian chiefs, who wore full headgear and painted faces, rode horses down Pennsylvania Avenue. The intent, one newspaper stated, was to show Americans “that they have buried the hatchet forever.” Read the entire story of Geronimo's punishment at Past Imperfect. Link |
| Posted: 12 Nov 2012 12:00 AM PST What would it be like to live in a world dominated by pumpkin-based lifeforms? You can visit the Dallas Arboretum to find out. There's currently an exhibit with thousands of examples and dozens of varities. A press release states:
Press Release and More Photos -via VA Viper |
| Posted: 11 Nov 2012 11:00 PM PST When Shaahin Amini analyzed nickel, aluminum and carbon mix using scanning electron microscopy, the UC Riverside graduate student was surprised to see a tiny giraffe staring back! The image was so good it won the Materials Research Society's 2012 Science as Art competition:
|
| Old Card Catalog Cabinets Now Used for Sharing Gifts Posted: 11 Nov 2012 10:00 PM PST A few months ago, a teenager approached the reference desk and asked me where the card catalog was. I was shocked. Oh, I've been asked that question before. But never by someone so young! Over the past two decades, many large libraries have disposed of their card catalog cabinets. Due to architectural problems, that was harder for the Doheny Library at the University of Southern California. But the librarians found a creative solution:
Link -via Super Punch | Photo: Ink & Vellum |
| Posted: 11 Nov 2012 09:00 PM PST Think you can draw dotted lines? See if you can do it the way Professor Walter Lewins of Massachusetts Institute of Technology does it! |
| Posted: 11 Nov 2012 08:00 PM PST    Some grasslands in Namibia are spotted with mysterious lifeless circles that appear, then disappear after a few decades. What are "fairy circles" and why do they form?
Article and More Photos -via Curious History Photos: Mike and Ann Scott/NamibRand Nature Preserve |
| The Smiths as Penguin Classics Book Cover Posted: 11 Nov 2012 07:00 PM PST     Chris Thornley of Raid71 took select lyrics from The Smiths and used them as inspiration for imagined Penguin Classic book covers. Love them? Please, please, please let you get what you want over at Hunting Bears. As Morrissey so eloquently said, you've got everything now: Link - via Creative Bloq and Flavorwire |
| These Two Are Looking to Get Revenge on the Burger King Posted: 11 Nov 2012 06:00 PM PST Too long has the smiling king been a shining beacon of hope to the people. These two are here to knock him down. Fortunately, they still haven't required Poison Wendy to join their team or the Dark King would certainly be done for. |
| Posted: 11 Nov 2012 05:00 PM PST
Adele Enersen of Mila's Daydreams is back at it! This time, she snapped pictures of her baby Vincent with her iPhone and sketched out his imaginary activities. Why not dressed him up like his big sister Mila? Vincent isn't as sound of a sleeper. Take a look: Link - via 22 Words | More at Adele's blog |
| Fluttershy Bird Choir Music Box Automaton Posted: 11 Nov 2012 04:00 PM PST Yeeehaw! Season 3 of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic premiered last night! I haven't seen it yet. Have you? Is it as awesome as we've been told? In the meantime, enjoy this perfectly crafted music box/automaton by renegadecow. His previous work showed Twilight Sparkle reading. This one far suprasses that marvel. It's a hand cranked music box. When activated, Fluttershy flaps her wings and turns her head. Her bird choir, featured in the show, plays the show's theme song. |
| Posted: 11 Nov 2012 03:00 PM PST
Santa's watching. Have you been naughty or nice this year? Go ahead and admit to being a little bit of both with the Naughty Nice socks from the NeatoShop. This festive pair of socks is a great way to embrace the holiday season. Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fantastic Footwear. |
| Posted: 11 Nov 2012 03:00 PM PST People love cake. It is a fact. They love making it into great things, they love blogging about it, and they love eating it. To everything above, me too. Anyone else think this looks a bit like Smaug? -Via The Monica Bird |
| The Penn State Squirrel Whisperer Posted: 11 Nov 2012 02:00 PM PST Mary Krupa is a freshman at Penn State who loves animals. She's made friends with the squirrels on campus. And what's more, she's even convinced the little critters to model the hats she makes for them!
Did they succeed? You betcha! See photographic evidence at Onward State. Link -via Breakfast Links |
| DIY Camera Made Out of Cardboard, LEGO and Duct Tape Posted: 11 Nov 2012 01:00 PM PST     Dominique Vankan wanted to replicate the Autochrome Lumière color photography process developed by the Lumière Brothers back in 1907, which uses dyed grains of potato starch as color filters. But first, Dominique needs a camera - so instead of buying one, he decided to build it out of cardboard, LEGO and duct tape! And as you can see from the last image above, the LEGO camera works just fine: Link - via Klocki and MAKE |
| Thanks to Daylight Savings Time, Man Gets Ticketed for Two DUIs at the Same Time Posted: 11 Nov 2012 12:00 PM PST
Link -via Jalopnik | Photo: davidonscott15 |
| Hey Boba Fett, You're Looking Good Posted: 11 Nov 2012 11:00 AM PST Ladies, does your man have an odd thing for Boba Fett? Then spice things up for him with a little sexy cosplay a la this amazing corset by Etsy seller damselinthisdress. Just try not to freeze his heart in carbonite. |
| Posted: 11 Nov 2012 10:00 AM PST The guns fell silent 94 years ago today. The long nightmare that was the First World War was over. Artist Rachel Holding marked the occasion by making this wreath out of toy soldiers and a single plastic poppy. Link -via Nag on the Lake |
| A Brief History of Movie Villains' Terrible Hair Posted: 11 Nov 2012 09:00 AM PST If you caught Skyfall this weekend (or if you've seen any previews), then you already know that this list begins with Javier Bardem and his bizarro platinum coif (and eyebrows!) as the latest Bond villain, Raoul Silva. The normally quite attractive Bardem looks strange and unhinged in the way only a movie villain can pull off. Don't believe me? Consider this:
But bad hair certainly isn't limited to those who would do 007 harm; The Awl has rounded up a visual history of fictional evildoers' bad hairdos, from Patrick Bateman to Ursula the Sea Witch. Link Publicity still via skyfall-movie.com |
| Posted: 11 Nov 2012 08:00 AM PST The new John Lewis ad illustrates what some will go through to show their love. If you can put the fact that it's a department store advertisement out of your mind for a minute, it's a nice story. The song is "The Power of Love" sung by Gabrielle Aplin. -via Daily PIcks and Flicks |
| Posted: 11 Nov 2012 07:00 AM PST Did you know today would have been Kurt Vonnegut’s 90th birthday? In memory of one of the greatest writers of the last century, here is a look back at the author’s incredible life. His Career Choice Was A Bit SurprisingBoth Kurt’s dad and his grandfather were successful architects who attended MIT, so he no doubt had considered following in their footsteps when he was young. Unfortunately, the Great Depression resulted in the family’s firm going bankrupt and his parents both started struggling with mental illness -which probably made him reconsider that option. When young Vonnegut went to Cornell University, he decided to major in chemistry, although he did work as the Assistant Managing Editor and Associate Editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. Then he enlisted in the Army while in school and they soon transferred him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology and then the University of Tennessee. The military also changed his course of study so he would major in mechanical engineering. The Saddest of Game Changers
First, his mother committed suicide with sleeping pills on Mother’s Day in 1944. He always had trouble with women after that point, once even commenting, “My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside.” Only a little while later, Vonnegut was sent to fight on the front lines of WWII. He was captured on December 19, during the Battle of the Bulge. He was chosen as a leader of the POWs because he spoke a little German, but the position was quickly taken away after the feisty youngster was beaten when he told the German soldiers what he wanted to do to them after the Russians came and freed the prisoners. Two months after the group was captured, they witnessed the U.S. bombing of Dresden, which served as the inspiration for his most famous work, Slaughterhouse-Five. Just like the character in his novel, Vonnegut survived the incident largely because his group was being detained in an underground meat locker the Germans called “Slaughterhouse Five.” The Americans were then put to work collecting bodies from the streets, basements and bomb shelters for a mass burial. Eventually, the Germans decided there were too many corpses for burial, so they sent troops in with flame throwers and reduced the remains to ash. A few months later, the POWs were released when the Russians reached Dresden. By that point though, the terrible cost of the war had already made its mark on the writer. After returning to America, Kurt was awarded a Purple Heart, for a small bit of frostbite that he considered a “ludicrously negligible wound.” Back On the Home FrontKurt soon returned to school, attending the University of Chicago as a graduate student of anthropology. He was a terrible anthropology student, but he also worked at the City News Bureau of Chicago at the same time, where he was able to hone his writing skills. Still, his first thesis was denied and the writer left school before obtaining his degree. Eventually, in 1971, the school awarded him a Master’s Degree, after they accepted Cat’s Cradle as his thesis. He decided to move to Schenectady, New York to work as a technical writer for General Electric, while writing and submitting short stories on the side. In 1951, he happily resigned to become a full-time writer. Life In The Industry
While he had a few novels published during this time, including Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan, none of them were doing all that well and he began considering that maybe he wasn’t meant to be a writer. Fortunately, just in a nick of time, he was offered a teaching position at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop and while working there, he released Cat’s Cradle, which quickly became a best-seller. After finally seeing the rewards of all his hard work, he started working on his most personal novel to date, the semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five. Around this time, Vonnegut, who was already a father of three, adopted his three nephews after his sister died from cancer. His brother-in-law was taking care of the boys while their mother was in the hospital, but only two days before she passed away, he died in a car crash, leaving Kurt to step in as their new father. Success Doesn’t Make For HappinessWhile Slaughterhouse-Five was a best-seller, Vonnegut felt, to some extent, that it was the big story he was meant to tell and that after it was published, he had nothing left to say. He entered a period of depression and even vowed to never write another novel. He continued teaching while finishing a play, Happy Birthday, Wanda June, which he began working on years earlier. Finally, after years of depression, he decided to get back to writing novels and Breakfast of Champions was released in 1973, again becoming an immediate best-seller. Around this time, he also left his first wife and childhood sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, and moved in with the woman who would eventually be his second wife. A year after Breakfast of Champions came out, one of the novel’s main characters, author Kilgore Trout, released a book of his own titled Venus on the Half Shell that seemed to match Vonnegut’s writing style. Many people really believed the novel was written by Kurt, but it was actually created by Philip Jose Farmer. Vonnegut was “not amused” by the tribute and even apparently called Farmer and angrily cursed him out over the phone. On a semi-related note, for those of you wondering where Vonnegut got the name of his famous fictional sci-fi writer, it’s worth knowing that Kilgore Trout was loosely based on the real-life sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon. All Good Things Must Come to An EndImage Via themarkpike [Flickr] While things started to look up for Vonnegut throughout the seventies and eighties, his mother’s suicide, the horrors of war and his sister’s death continued to haunt him and in 1984, he even attempted to commit suicide. Throughout in the roughest times though, Kurt still had a great sense of humor. Even those who never read a book in their lives could appreciate the scene in the 1986 film Back to School where Vonnegut writes a term paper on his own novels for the main character only to have the professor slam his work, stating, "Whoever did write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut." –Now that’s something I think anyone who has ever taken an English class can relate to. In 1997, after Timequake was published, Kurt announced his retirement –at least, from fiction writing. He continued to teach at Harvard and the City College of New York and he continued to write for the magazine In These Times. In retiring from fiction, he also gave up working on his one uncompleted novel, If God Were Alive Today. When asked about his decision to quit despite the requests from his dedicated fans, he replied, “The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people's discharges and stuff. And my feeling was, 'Please, I've done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?' That's what I feel right now. I've written books. Lots of them. Please, I've done everything I'm supposed to do. Can I go home now?" Of course, that didn’t mean that he wasn’t proud of his own writings. If you’ve ever wondered just how Vonnegut ranked his own work against one another, then you should check out his book Palm Sunday where he assigns each one a letter grade. He rates Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five the highest with an A-plus and Happy Birthday, Wanda June and Slapstick lowest with Ds. Of course, everything that came out after Palm Sunday remained unranked, including Galapagos, Hocus Pocus, and Timequake, so you'll have to draw your own conclusions on those titles. Throughout his life, Vonnegut smoked unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, which he called a “classy way to commit suicide.” But in the end, it wasn’t cigarettes or depression that did him in. The writer died on April 11, 2007, when he fell down a flight of stairs at home and suffered massive head trauma. So it goes. What do you guys think of the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.? Personally, he’s long been my favorite author and my favorite book is Cat’s Cradle, but even before I read any of his works, I absolutely loved his cameo in Back to School because it was something I could completely relate with. Sources: Wikipedia, American Humanist Association, Notable Biographies, Good Reads, New York Times |
| Posted: 11 Nov 2012 06:00 AM PST I can say wholeheartedly that I have no intention of reading Fifty Shades of Grey. Fifty Shades of Chicken though, that is something I can get into. The book is both a parody and a real cookbook. As a broke and frugal college student, I learned the cheapest way to get a meal was actually buying chicken from the grocery store and cooking it myself. I probably know 3 ways to do chicken - pan fry in olive oil and garlic, bread and bake, and grill 'till black. I would welcome the idea of knowing 47 more ways to prepare the bird. Check out this pretty funny book trailer as well. -Via Nerdalicious |
Goyahkla was an everyday Apache tribesman until the day he returned from a trading expedition in 1858 and found that Mexican soldiers had killed his mother, wife, and three children -as well as all the other women and children in his tribe. That's when he became Geronimo, the fearsome warrior who vowed to kill as many white men as he could. In 1886, outmanned and pursued mercilessly, Geronimo surrendered to the U.S. Army. It was a negotiated surrender in which he was told he would be held for two years. From that day until he died in 1909, Geronimo was in federal custody. That didn't mean he spent the rest of his life in prison, though -he was exhibited at the World's Fair and worked for a Wild West show, but was always under Army supervision. But all Geronimo wanted to do was go home to Arizona.
At 1:08 AM last Sunday, a man in Urbana, Ohio was cited for drunk driving. Then, precisely one hour later at 1:08 AM, he was cited for the same offense:
(
If suffering makes someone a better writer, then it’s no wonder Kurt Vonnegut is so incredible –and in Kurt’s case, the worst year of his life took place between May of 1944 and May of 1945.
Unfortunately, things didn’t go smoothly. One of his jobs during this period was at Sports Illustrated. Vonnegut was asked to write a story about a horse that jumped a fence and attempted to run away during a race. For hours, he stared at the blank piece of paper in front of him and then, he finally wrote “The horse jumped over the f*ing fence,” and walked out of the building, never to return.
| You are subscribed to email updates from Neatorama To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep a civil tongue.