Neatorama

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• Salvador Dali’s Christmas Cards
• Deck the Halls but it’s War Pigs
• A Hockey Training Treadmill
• Time-lapse Music Video of Beard Growth
• Very Finnish Problems
• United State of Pop 2020 (Something to Believe In)
• Selling New Zealand: The Railroad Posters That Made a Nation Want To See Their World
• A Baby Photoshoot with a Newborn Dissertation

Salvador Dali’s Christmas Cards Posted: 18 Dec 2020 03:32 AM PST Beginning in the 1940s, Hallmark commissioned renowned artists to create Christmas cards for the company. One of those artists was Salvador Dali. It was a bold move for Hallmark. Dali made modern art popular and accessible. He'd painted the Christmas-themed interactive 'Double Dalí' cover for Vogue magazine's December 1946 issue. So Hallmark contracted him to create cards in 1948. His images of a headless angel, a glowing but featureless baby Jesus, and three wise men atop snarling camels did not sell. In 1959 they hired him for a second time, a commission for which Dali requested "$15,000 in cash in advance for 10 greeting card designs, with no suggestions from Hallmark for the subject or medium, no deadline and no royalties." The results (half of which he dashed off in the bathroom of his New York hotel room within an hour of signing the contract) were too racy, avant garde and perverted for Hallmark. They produced just two of the Dalí cards, a nativity scene and a depiction of the Madonna and Child – neither of which sold well. Hallmark swiftly dropped Dalí's cards from their product line. Dali had better luck with the pharmaceutical laboratory Hoechst Ibérica in Barcelona, who produced Dali -designed Christmas cards to send to their clients for several years. See Dali's Christmas cards for both companies at Flashbak. -via Nag on the Lake

Deck the Halls but it’s War Pigs Posted: 18 Dec 2020 03:32 AM PST Aaron Gage noticed how the lyrics to "Deck the Halls" would fit into Black Sabbath's "War Pigs." Viewers at reddit clamored for the whole song, but he said he didn't want to wear out the welcome, and the rest of the song didn't fit quite a well as this part. I have to say that I agree- once you've heard the joke, there's no reason to drag it out to feature-length. But it's a good joke.

A Hockey Training Treadmill Posted: 18 Dec 2020 03:32 AM PST   Dodging my responsibilities like....#hockey 🪑 pic.twitter.com/Itk1NuqmaN — Pavel Barber (@HeyBarber) December 17, 2020 Pavel Barber is a Canadian hockey coach who describes himself as "a stickhandling specialist." That means he's an expert in the precise and consistent use of the hockey stick. In this video, he's at The Skating Lab, a hockey training facility in Toronto. That facility's website is fascinating to browse, as it's filled with photos of many specialized machines designed to optimize hockey performance. In this video, he's using a treadmill to maintain control of a puck while maneuvering it around increasingly difficult obstacles. -via The Awesomer

Time-lapse Music Video of Beard Growth Posted: 17 Dec 2020 03:43 PM PST Joaquin Baldwin (previously) spent 101 days making this video as his quarantine beard grew out. You see the beard wax and wane as he sings "Better Days" by Radical Face. There's a video explaining how he made this, which is kind of long. The short explanation is that he shot a reference video, sorted the frames by computer to know where his face should be each day, meticulously lined up each shot, and then edited 2,117 still photographs together. It was way more work than he had anticipated. -via Geekologie

Very Finnish Problems Posted: 17 Dec 2020 03:43 PM PST Finland is a wonderful country where the sun shines for a few minutes each year and the language is impossible to learn. Finns avoid social interaction whenever possible, rarely smile, drink boatloads of coffee, and aren't at all afraid of the Russians, yet they have been ranked the happiest people in the world for years. We already know that Finns have a great sense of humor about themselves. British author Joel Willans lives in Helsinki and created Very Finnish Problems, a network of websites that pokes gentle fun at the things that make Finland unique. You can find lots more at the Instagram account for Very Finnish Problems. Also see a ranked list of their best memes at Bored Panda.

United State of Pop 2020 (Something to Believe In) Posted: 17 Dec 2020 10:02 AM PST In a year when there were almost no concerts, no music festivals, and hardly any live music even in small venues like bars, some songs managed to catch our ears. DJ Earworm is back with his annual remix of the biggest 25 songs of the year (in the USA). He calls it Something to Believe In. You'll find a list of the songs at YouTube. -via Metafilter  Check out our collection DJ Earworm's end-of-the-year remixes here.

Selling New Zealand: The Railroad Posters That Made a Nation Want To See Their World Posted: 17 Dec 2020 09:24 AM PST Between the 1860s and World War I, railroads were built to tie the various communities of New Zealand together. They were heavily advertised with beautiful posters under the auspices of Railways Studios, the creative department of New Zealand Railways' advertising branch. The studio also produced propaganda posters and ads for other products, but the railway posters are their legacy. These travel posters, described as "more beautiful than they needed to be," are the subject of Peter Alsop's new book Railways Studios: How a Government Design Studio Helped Build New Zealand. Alsop and company's book is filled with many examples of graphic art that flirts with the finer stuff, although the vast majority of its gems lack attribution since most New Zealand Railways posters were signed "Railways Studios," if they were signed at all. Take the circa 1929 poster created by an anonymous artist, whose assignment was to promote the Night Express, a roughly 24-hour run on South Island connecting Christchurch and Ivercargill. In that poster, above blocks of text detailing the train's "Southbound" and "Northbound" timetables, we are confronted by a moody, cloud-filled sky rendered in various shades of blue. Beneath this depiction of heaven hovering over earth, a trio of sheep graze in a pasture. Two appear to be in mid-bolt or about to, but one of the animals stands still, facing the other direction. Only by following the creature's gaze do we see a pair of train tracks, and only then do we notice the tracks are partly illuminated in yellow, presumably by the headlamp of the Night Express, which the artist has cleverly left out of our field of vision. This is a great painting, no matter what it was selling. Read about Railways Studios' work and see some fine examples at Collectors Weekly.

A Baby Photoshoot with a Newborn Dissertation Posted: 17 Dec 2020 08:33 AM PST A friend of redditor appuhlatchuhn recently brought an adorable dissertation into the world. She got this beautiful maternity photo taken with it. Mama looks so proud. I hope the little tyke grows up and gets published as a monograph some day.

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