Shoot Stunning Night Photos Like a Pro

"When the sun goes down, Scott Martin’s job begins. He’s a night photographer and instructor in San Antonio, leading workshops to teach curious photogs the nuances of shooting in the dark."
via Wired.com / more

Homemade Pasta Recipe

Author Unknown

  Ingredients
 500g 00 plain flour (see note) 5 large eggs 2 tbs extra virgin olive oil 1 tsp salt
Method 
Place the flour on a clean work surface and make a well in the centre. Crack the eggs into the well and add the oil and salt. Use your fingers to whisk the eggs and gradually bring in the flour from the sides. Continue stirring and kneading until flour is incorporated. Knead on a lightly floured surface for 10 minutes or until dough is smooth and elastic. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside for 30 minutes to rest. Taste.com

The girl that ruined The Tooth Fairy

Wulffmorgenthaler.com

Pets in Space? It's Possible

 "Twelve consecutive generations of worms have been successfully raised aboard the International Space Station, according to a new study that is the first to show that relatively long-term space travel in low Earth orbit does not harm the production of progeny and other basic life activities -- at least for the worm Caenorhabditis elegans."
via Discovery News /more

UK public workers in huge strike

Public sector workers around the UK are staging a strike over pensions in what unions say could be the biggest walkout for a generation.

 

Gabriel García Márquez wins 17-year legal fight over murder classic

"On the day they were going to kill him, Cayetano Gentile Chimento got up oblivious to his impending murder. Within hours the dashing Colombian medical student was dead, repeatedly stabbed for allegedly deflowering another man's bride. Few would today remember the 1951 murder, but for the intervention of one of Latin America's best-loved authors. The killing served as the inspiration for Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold – a 1981 classic that cemented the author's reputation as a literary master. But Márquez's blend of fact and fiction also led to accusations that he had unlawfully misappropriated the life-story of another man and prompted a lawsuit by Miguel Reyes Palencia, who claimed that Márquez had based the novel's main character, Bayardo San Román, on his life. This week those accusations were finally dismissed as a supreme court in the Colombian city of Barranquilla ruled that Palencia had no right to compensation. The case against Márquez was first brought in 1994, when Palencia claimed that the 1982 Nobel literature laureate had unlawfully used his life story as the basis for Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Palencia demanded 50% of the book's royalties as well as a co-author credit."
  via The Guardian/more

Look what I can do mum!

The mischievous monkey was playing around in the treetops of Ubud's famed Monkey Forest, on the island of Bali, when professional photographer Zak Noyle just happened to be passing by with his camera.

 

Get your holiday picture with Santa & his machine guns!

A gun club in Arizona is cashing in on its members' fondness for their weaponry by offering them the chance to be photographed holding their armaments and their loved ones. Visitors to the Scottsdale Gun Club can pay $5 - $10 for non-members - to be pictured with a pair of heavy weapons and a slightly nervous looking Santa Claus.

“Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.” Joseph Wood

imgur

Mark Twain quotations - Life

Albert Levering's illustration of Mark Twain

for LIFE magazine 1905.

From the Dave Thomson collection.

"It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory--and sometimes not even that. I suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making."
  Mark Twain quotations

Life's too short. I have to live it to the fullest!

via

To self-diagnose, spit on an iPhone

"Many believe that in the future collecting samples of saliva, urine or blood could be performed using a cheap, USB-stick-sized throwaway device called a lab-on-a-chip. The user would inject a droplet of the fluid in the chip, and micropumps inside it would send the fluid to internal vessels containing reagents that extract target disease biomarker molecules. The whole device would then be sent to a lab for analysis. But Hyun Gyu Park and Byoung Yeon Won at the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology in Daejeon think touchscreens could improve the process by letting your phone replace the lab work. Park suggests the lab-on-a-chip could present a tiny droplet of the sample to be pressed against a phone's touchscreen for analysis, where an app would work out whether you have food poisoning, strep throat or flu, for example. The idea depends on a method the pair have devised to harness the way a touchscreen senses a fingertip's ability to store electric charge - known as its capacitance. The capacitive sensitivity of touchscreens is far higher than what is needed to sense our fingers as we play games or tap out tweets. "Since these touchscreens can detect very small capacitance changes we thought they could serve as highly sensitive detection platforms for disease biomarkers," says Park."
via New Scientist/more

Looking at Dogs and Cars

"Often when I’m out and about I’m looking at cars, and when I’m not looking at cars, I’m looking at dogs. Recently I realized that these apparently different activities are linked by the emotions provoked by the two objects of my gaze. First the dogs. When I drive from Andes, N.Y., to Delhi, N.Y., on Route 28, I end up at the Heart of the Catskills Humane Society, where I walk the perimeter looking at the dogs as they sit or move around in their outdoor pen. The moment my car door closes the dogs are alert and begin barking. As I approach the fence they present themselves in a variety of postures that express their personalities. A few won’t rise to the bait. Affecting diffidence, they hang back and don’t look my way. Others station themselves midway between the fence and the back of the pen; they might sit down, as if to say, I’m not going to beg; or they might walk back and forth, keeping their distance and declining to make eye contact. A forward few crowd the fence, tails wagging furiously; they are saying, Take me, I’ll be good, I’ll be fun, I’ll be loyal. Some older dogs who have given up lie down at the back of the enclosure. You’re not going to pick me, they are saying. I want to pick them all, but for all kinds of reasons, it really isn’t time. I have been tantalizing myself and at the same time — and this may be unforgivable — tantalizing them. On the way to Delhi and on the way back I see the cars. They are parked in driveways and on lawns and they are for sale. Like the dogs, they are positioned in ways that speak to me. I spot a sleek silver coupe practically hanging out of the driveway, one tire already on the road, raring to go. Drive me away from all this, it says. But when I stop and get out and read the sign taped to the driver’s seat window, it turns out to be a premature invitation; a key part is missing. I first stopped in July; it’s November and it’s still there, no longer hopeful. Other cars are positioned less aggressively. They aren’t in the driveway and don’t face the road. Instead they sit almost parallel to the house that is ready to bid them goodbye. They are not ready to leave; they wonder if it is something they did; they hope for a second chance; they hope their price is too high. Then there are the cars that are not positioned at all. They are strewn about, the “for sale” sign crudely lettered and as tired as they seem to be; they don’t believe that anyone would want them; they don’t want themselves; they wear the same vacant look as the houses behind them. I don’t want them either. I’m just drawn to their situations and the stories I think they tell. But I do want someone to buy them, if only because that would be some form of renewal. I don’t want them to be sent to the salvage yard just as I don’t want to think of the dogs being put down. Now that I think of it, I feel the same way about houses, especially a house with unkempt lawns, scaling paint and sagging porches. Once it was new and anticipating a glorious future. Now it knows better and wonders when the wrecking ball will be coming. I think I should buy it, fix it up, give it a new lease on life. I want it to be happy, just as I want the cars to be prized and the dogs to be chosen. And most of all I don’t want to feel guilty for not having done enough."

 By Stanley Fish

 

Cyanide & Happiness

Explosm.net

Stolen dog catches bus home

"Mrs Oates and her three children had all but given up any hope of ever seeing their red Staffordshire bull terrier, T-Bone, after he was taken from their drive in September 2006 during a powercut. They feared he had been stolen to order by gangs looking to use the good-natured dog as a weapon. But after the 12-year-old dog was dumped after he developed a cyst, he got onto the No. 37 bus undetected. It was only when the bus driver spotted him in his rear view mirror that he was taken to a bus depot, before being checked over by a local vet.After his micro-chip was scanned, staff were able to reunite T-Bone with his owners."
  Telegraph

Amazing bugs, reptiles and amphibians photographed by Igor Siwanowicz

A Kyongia Fischeri (Fisher's chameleon) 

"Photographer Igor Siwanowicz uses a macro lens to get up-close and personal with a host of weird and wonderful-looking wildlife in his latest work. He says he is on a mission to make people fall in love with these striking creatures, some of which he keeps as pets."
via Telegraph /more

Older Workers Pay Dearly for Balkan Privatisation

"Thousands of older Balkan workers are trapped in poverty as they struggle to find work but cannot retire - a fate they share with their western European counterparts. In Macedonia, dozens of desperate over 50s have been driven to commit suicide. There is an army of unemployed over 50s across the Balkans, an entire generation who suffered the economic fall-out of war, the collapse of the former Yugoslavia and the brunt of their countries’ transition from socialist economies to capitalism. In Croatia, a report published by the ombudsman described older workers as ‘an endangered species’ as a massive 40 per cent of long-term unemployed Croats are aged 50 and above. The already considerable ranks of jobless over 50s have been further swollen by those who lost their jobs in the global recession, not just in the Balkans but across Europe."
  Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence /By Ruzica Matic/more

Short Condensations of Classic Books

more here

Dog Kisses Laughing Baby

Pizza As a Vegetable

Funny Cartoon

Jabba the Cupcake

Boing Boing

There are two kinds of viewer in the world: right and wrong. Which are you?

 "There are only two kinds of people in this world: those who don't have any problem with watching things that are randomly stretched or squashed, and decent human beings who still have standards. Seriously, anyone who wilfully spends hours basking in front of a TV upon which every scene, every object, every face is monstrously distorted clearly has such a slovenly lack of self-respect, I'd be surprised if they bother to wipe after going to the toilet – assuming they still use a toilet, that is. To be honest, they probably just go right there on the sofa. What's wrong with you people? Why have you given up?

You may say I'm a pedant – but I'm not the only one.
I hope some day you'll join us, and the world will live as one."
Charlie Brooker/ The Guardian / more

Lost Disney cartoon shows how Mickey Mouse was originally Oswald the Lucky Rabbit

"The cartoon, called Hungry Hobos, was made in 1928 but the original film of it has been missing since before the Second World War. The black and white film starred Oswald the Lucky Rabbit who was the prototype of Mickey Mouse. Walt Disney made 26 films with Oswald in before he started his own company and changed the character into a rodent. The features and behaviour of Oswald are clearly those of Mickey Mouse - a character that has endured ever since. The whereabouts of the five minute silent cartoon has baffled experts who believed it would never be seen again. But, incredibly, it has turned up in the collection of the Huntley Film Archives in Herefordshire where it had been sat for decades."
  via Telegraph/more

Advent in Zagreb

"The manifestation 'Advent in Zagreb' begins with the traditional lighting of the first advent candle at the Ban Jelacic Square, 26th November at 17:00. Zagreb Tourist Board has further enriched the program, so this year, there is a new project 'Advent on Zrinjevac' and on 2nd December, Multimedia 3D Mapping projection takes place in front of the Mimara Museum. 3D Mapping projection program begins at 19:00, when visitors will experience the ultimate virtual show with the musical entertainment and refreshment at occasional bar.. Grand opening of the Advent in Zrinjevac is scheduled for 3rd December at 18:00 and includes various musical events on the stage of the old city pavilion. There will be concerts every day, waltzes, and carefully selected music programs..all visitors to these musical events will be able to enjoy the forgotten Zagreb specialties: flakes with cabbage, homemade soup or baked strukli, warm up with hot chocolate or mulled wine and buy unique souvenirs and Christmas ornaments. Except in Zrinjevac, festive atmosphere will rule on many other locations in Zagreb,
so come and explore."

  

Happy Snowman

 Fishki.net

A sudden realization

via

Bacon And Egg Breakfast Cups

Prep Time: 5 mins
Cook Time: 8 mins
Ingredients:
4 eggs
4 slices of precooked bacon (if you are using raw bacon, make sure to heat it up so it is cooked about 50% before placing it into the molds)
Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 400F. Spray muffin tin with pam spray.
2. Line muffin pans with bacon so that it circles each mold.
3. Break an egg into the center of each mold. Bake for about 8 minutes or until egg is cooked to the doneness of your liking. Serve while warm.
via