Dutch artist Rosa Verloop creates sculptures out of nylon stockings. She writes that she likes this material because it is "soft, cuddly, and easy to shape." Though when I look at her sculptures, 'cuddly' isn't the first word that comes to mind.
Posted By: Alex | Date: Sat Mar 08, 2014 |
Comments (3)
Category: Art
On a day when the temperature was 5 below zero with a windchill of -25 a high school in Minnesota showed unbelievably poor judgement during a fire alarm. Smoke from a science project had set off the fire alarm so the school was evacuated as per procedure. Unfortunately one freshman girl was in the pool and was rushed out without being allowed to grab her clothes or shoes from the locker room. Once outside in a wet bathing suit, towel, and bare feet she was not even allowed to sit in a faculty member's car due to school rules. While she stood for 10 minutes in the bitter cold a teacher gave her a jacket and a friend gave her a sweatshirt to wrap her feet in. Finally someone got permission for her to sit in a teacher's car till everyone was allowed back inside the school. The young lady suffered frostbite on her feet and her mother is asking for an apology. Of course the school bureaucrats are making noises about changing some rules in conjunction with the Fire Marshall. So sad, the death of common sense.
Picture from Yahoo images.
Posted By: patty | Date: Sat Mar 08, 2014 |
Comments (11)
Category: Stupidity
Last year, gdanea reported on WU that Oscar Mayer was offering bacon gifts for father's day. Now Oscar Mayer is back in the news with an iPhone attachment that functions as an alarm clock by waking you with the smell of bacon. Details at wakeupandsmellthebacon.com. They've created a slightly surreal video to promote the gadget.
A clock that wakes you with the smell of bacon isn't an entirely original idea. Back in 2009, Matty Sallin designed a clock that would wake you by actually cooking bacon.
Posted By: Alex | Date: Fri Mar 07, 2014 |
Comments (4)
Category: Bacon
Period rock, the lovely nickname for a creature found on Chilean beaches that bleeds when cut open. In fact locals eat it with salad and rice. (and a nice Chianti, just kidding!) There is a disturbing video at the link showing one of the living rocks being dissected by a tourist.
San Francisco has a serious public urination problem. That is, too many people using doorways and the sides of buildings as urinals. One solution now being tried is the PPlanter. The basic idea is that it's a urinal that channels all the waste liquid directly into an adjacent planter full of bamboo, and the bamboo filters and purifies it.
An ADA-compliant sink is supplied with a human powered foot or hand pump connected to a freshwater supply tank. The greywater from the sink, along with soap residue, flushes and cleans the urinal, keeping odor to a minimum.
The greywater, soap and urine (blackwater) from the ADA-compliant urinal are funneled to a sealed storage tank. The combined water is then pumped into an adjacent planter that houses bamboo plants set in a lightweight mixture of soil and recycled styrofoam coated in pectin. The water from the urinal and sink is evapotranspired by the bamboo and released into the air as distilled, purified water. The bamboo harnesses the incredible amount of nitrogen and phosphorus found in the urine and uses it to produce more bamboo. With high traffic urinals additional planters can be added to the system.
The lack of privacy is intentional. But if you have to do a #2, I think you're still out of luck.
Maybe I tend to overthink things. But I confess I am baffled by the situation depicted in this ad.
1) Assume the girl in blue is a child, not an adult. Let's call her 8-10 years old.
2) The thing in her lap could be a doll.
a) But if it is a doll, its eyes are directed at the cookie, and it's reaching for it. It is not drawn to resemble an artificial thing. It is drawn as real as the girl.
3) The thing in her lap could be another living child.
a) But the only living child bearing that proportion to a ten-year-old would be, oh, what, a six-month-old baby? And what six-month-old baby ever looked like that?
Alternate explanation.
The girl in blue is an adult woman, the creature in her lap is a midget, and the whole thing is a fetish setup.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.
Chuck Shepherd
Chuck is the purveyor of News of the Weird, the syndicated column which for decades has set the gold-standard for reporting on oddities and the bizarre.
Our banner was drawn by the legendary underground cartoonist Rick Altergott.
Category: Art