With Prometheus landing in practically every cinema this weekend and all the renewed interest in the franchise, it’s not surprising that THIS thing popped up.
Gig Goldstein, the artist behind this piece of work, took up carving about 12 years ago. Recently a friend asked him to create an H.R. Giger-inspired piece based on the Alien films…the photos show the result of the 40-50 hours worth of work it took to create it.
[Walyou]
How many times when you were a kid did you have to listen to some grown-up telling you, “You better put on sunscreen or you’re gonna get burned out there.”
Now you have some ammunition explaining why you shouldn’t be smothering your body with that greasy slop.
Brett Sigworth of Boston had applied an aerosol sunscreen to his body while grilling. Two minutes later, after he thought that was enough time for the sunscreen to be have dried, he found himself on fire.
While the labeling on the can does day “flammable, don’t use near heat, flame or while burning”, Brett didn’t think that should matter once the sunscreen was applied. The flame from the grill proceeded to follow the sunscreen across his body like that line of alcohol from the bar fight in Raiders of the Lost Ark. His girlfriend and another friend helped put out the blazing chef and get him to the hospital where he was treated for second-degree burns.
Brett’s not seeking any money from Banana Boat, who produces the product, but has attorney and simply wants to include more warning labels and would like more testing done to see why something like this happened in hopes it won’t happen again to someone else.
Spiro and The Fudge are back on the case! This time they have to solve a mystery involving a dead murderer who might have been killed by a vigilante. Will they be able to crack the grisly case? Or will Spiro be too busy full body tanning to find to the clues? Andrew proposes the merits of being swarmed by scorpions instead of spiders. Also, Armageddon is yelled about, the Department of Defense reveals they have two telescopes more powerful than the Hubble just lying around a warehouse somewhere and Game of Thrones has praise lavished upon it.
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How do you stop a dead man from becoming a vampire? Well, if you lived in Bulgaria during the Middle Ages the easy way to prevent it is to hammer an iron rod through the heart of every corpse before you lay them to their final rest.
Two such skeletons with such percautions taken were recovered near the Black Sea town of Sozopol last weekend.
And yet, the head of the Natural History Museum in Sofia doesn’t quite see why everyone is interested in the findings…
According to Dimitrov, over 100 corpses stabbed to prevent them from becoming vampires have been discovered across Bulgaria over the years.
“I do not know why an ordinary discovery like that [has] became so popular. Perhaps because of the mysteriousness of the word “vampire,” he said.
Also, the idea that corpses regularly got stabbed in the heart with an iron rod to prevent them from during into undead reavers. So yeah… between that and the word “vampire” I’d say that explains the interest.
[Fox News]
Automata have been around for a couple of centuries now. Most of the time they’re enjoyably amazing pieces of craftsmanship that cause people to smile.
There’s been a chess-playing automata, an acrobatic automata that does a trapeze act and even animals have been featured as these intricate works of what seems like robotic art.
Then there’s this.
A coin operated bank automata that features a scene guaranteed to wipe whatever smile you had after watching that whimsical tail-wagging, ball-carrying puppy right off your face.
The auction site has the following description for this fun piece of whimsy:
Expected to sell for between $4.000-$6,000, this uniquely strange piece of work blew the lid off that price and ended up as a fun conversation piece for the sum of $13,035!
Cats. They power the internet. They’re always chasing birds and most of the time they fail at it.
Birds. They make a lot of noise and mimic/mock everybody including cats that chase them. They have the advantage of flight.
That’s all about to change…behold Orville! The CopterCat!
[YouTube]
On July 2, 1937 Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan set out in Earhart’s plane, the Electra, to circumnavigate the world at the equator…and vanished.
Their disappearance has been mentioned in everything from historical documentaries on plane crashes to shows about the paranormal where conspiracies abound about shadowy government projects and even alien abduction.
While most people agree that the Electra simply ran out of fuel, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has spent the last twenty-four years and nine expeditions to Earhart and Noonan’s last known location in an attempt to find out exactly what happened on that historic journey around the world.
In 1940 artifacts surfaced, renewed interest in the search and were then subsequently lost leading to rumors of a government cover-up and a slew of conspiracy theories.
Recently, pieces of a significant artifact, an anti-freckle cream jar (Earhart had freckles and it was well known that she wasn’t happy about it) turned up. Now, armed with new technologiy, preparations are underway and another expedition is about to commence. TIGHAR is hoping that this search will reveal all of the missing pieces to this seventy-five-year-old mystery.
As of this writing, TIGHAR is in the midst of a three day symposium discussing the flight, its disappearance and what may have actually happened in the final days of a trip that’s still yet to reach its conclusion.
During an early WeirdThings podcast, Brian and Justin were put into one of Andrew’s scenarios involving ‘flying’ snakes in Russia. Neither of them were happy with the idea of snakes launching themselves from trees onto their prey.
Here’s another frightening evolutionary mash-up that was probably fun in a comic book or horror story. In real life? Total fun-suck.
Meet Mecoptera, a tiny nightmare combination of a wasp-like fly with the tail of a scorpion.
Commonly referred to as a ‘scorpionfly’, Mecoptera isn’t a threat…yet. The male’s tale resembles a scorpion’s stinger but is only used for mating purposes…for right now. If you had seen one in the wild and had no idea what the thing was? You’d probably just assume that it was what it looked like, steer clear of the thing and walk briskly away knowing that nature’s working on a game plan to take back the planet.
While Mecoptera looks menacing, it’s not harmful to us squishy humans.
Let’s just hope that nature decides to keep it that way.
[TYWKIWDBI]
Rainbow? Lame. Double Rainbow? It had its time and people sang its praises.
Fire Rainbow? You have our attention.
A naturally occuring optical phenomenon, the ‘fire rainbow’ or what’s called a circumhorizontal arc is something that requires being in the right place at the right time to witness.
A lot of conditions have to be in place in order for you to witness what happens when the leprechauns decide to pull a Bridge on the River Kwai maneuver in a panic.
Fire Rainbows (we just made it a thing…circumhorizontal arc is never going to trend) take place only in a cirrus cloud which contains very little moisture. Inside the cloud, the ice crystals have to align horizontally just right in order to refract the light perfectly because of the angle of the sun on the horizon. On top of all that, you have to be in the right place on the earth or your angle will be off and your little peepers won’t get to witness the power of the Fire Rainbow!
Along with the jet packs we were supposed to be sporting by now and the hover cars easing our commute was the military’s Flying Platform.
In 1955 a film was shot showing one of the airborne Seqway-like contraptions in operation. Originally developed by the Navy, the US Army deemed them impractical and development halted.
Looking at this now, after six decades have gone by? All we’d need is some PVC, a lawn mower engine, an arduino controller and one of those mini-trampolines.
And maybe a Kickstarter account.
[YouTube]
In an amazing scientific feat, a paralyzed rat was taught to walk again.
First, Courtine and colleagues injected the rats with a chemical cocktail that binds to dopamine, adrenaline and serotonin receptors on the spinal cord’s neurons. This replaced the neurotransmitters that would normally be released in healthy spinal pathways. A few minutes after priming the neurons, the team stimulated the rats’ spinal cords through electrodes implanted into the spinal canal. This sent electrical signals to the roused neurons. Then the rats needed to be trained to use their limbs again. Within a week of their injuries, the rats were on treadmills, forging new neural connections.
Although a human application for this solution is a long way away, clinical trials are on the horizon.
[Pop Sci]
Over the last several decades, small pockets of people have begun taking up residence on the fringes of society.
Almost three generations of ‘mole people’ live beneath the city of New York. A floating island of lashed together debris is home
to a small village of people in Mexico. In Vegas, individuals and even entire families have started living in the aqueducts and waterways criss-crossing the neon desert oasis.
While most of the fringe populations have made a choice to move into these environment because of poverty and drug addiction, for
almost 30 years the sewers below Bogota, Colombia have been a hellish sanctuary of sorts for these same types of people. In Colombia,
death squads are sent out to perform ‘social cleansing’ of people deemed ‘undesirables’ by the wealthier classes.
Denizens of the Colombian sewer system have been subjected to being burned alive, opened fire on and generally harassed and beaten.
Vice’s Thomas Morton takes you into the dark, horrific and life-threatening conditions that people endure beneath the city of Bogota.
[CNN WORLD]
In my country there is problem. And that problem is dead antelope.
Three major die-offs of the antelope population have occurred in the past three years due to mysterious causes. In fact, each death boom happened almost exactly one year apart from the previous one. Some suspect overuse of fertilizer, others believe they ate too much “wet” vegetation.
But reasonable minds agree: it’s probably a space disease brought down by the Soyuz capsule.
But some ecologists in Kazakhstan and Russia are instead blaming the fatalities on the April landing of a Soyuz capsule from the International Space Station. At least 120 dead saigas were found near the village of Sorsha, where the Soyuz landed last month. Others see a possible link to the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch site in central Kazakhstan. “It could be from chemical elements left from space rockets that fly over this place,” ecologist Musagali Duambekov, leader of the For a Green Planet political movement, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL).
Throw the space disease down the well! So my country can be free!
Remember how we were all joking a couple of days about that crazy incident that resembled a zombie attack in Miami?
Remember all the fun conversations about prepping your boomsticks and role-playing what you’d do if the zombie apocalypse actually took
place?
You may want to take some time to stop laughing and head to the garage for that boomstick.
It seems that even more news regarding a change in humanity’s diet is surfacing.
First up? Twenty-one-year-old Alexander Kinyua, who is currently in jail without bond, admitted to detectives that not only did he kill his roommate, but cut up his body with a knife and ingested the victim’s heart and part of his brain.
Yup…part of his brain. Ring any bells?
This comes on top of a report of man in New Jersey, who, upon being cornered by police after neighbors called saying that he was threatening to harm himself with a knife, disemboweled himself in front of officers and begin throwing pieces of intestines and bits of skin at them.
Depending on how far you want to post-date this trend in California, cage fighter Jarrod Wyatt was convicted for the murder of his training partner. After consuming hallucinogenic tea, Wyatt ripped his training partner’s heart and tongue out before tearing off a substantial amount of his face. A friend found him sitting in his apartment covered in blood with body parts scattered around the room.
On the other side of the globe, a man in Sweden catches his wife cheating on him and cuts off her lips…and then eats them.
Is the human race is suddenly developing a taste for its own or is it just our brains out looking for connections?
It’s like if someone mentioned that there sure were a lot of red cars on the road today… you’d look around for red cars and would tend to agree.