To welcome the Lantern Festival that marks the end of the Chinese Lunar Year festivities, authorities have covered an entire building in brightly colored paper lanterns. Around 2,000 traditional lanterns were used to cover the facade.
The Lantern Festival is one of China’s most important celebrations, and this year it will be celebrated on February 28.
via ImagineChina
Hello Clarice…Actually it’s ‘Good evening, Clarice’, but heck, most people are familiar with just the first one. Anyway, here’s a very cool Silence of the Lambs themed cake.
Created by Celebration Generaton Cakes, for the Czar of Cakes Challenge at the Minnesota Monthly Food & Wine Experience, the Victim of Hannibal Lecter Cake is one of the most original I’ve seen. And as you may know, I’ve recently posted quite a number of cool cakes, lately.
Made with fondant, sugarpaste, gumpaste, cocoa and other sweet ingredients, the Silence of the Lambs theme was chosen because there was no way someone else ‘would think of, much less actually use it’.
via SuperPunch
I don’t know what it is about Formula 1 cars that makes people want to replicate them using the most unusual materials.
This time it’s Puma’s turn to make a life-size Formula 1 car out of cut-out shoe boxes. The cardboard model was created in collaboration with UK-based Ben Wilson Design, and is meant to represent Puma’s ongoing relationship with motorsports.
The cardboard car was obviously very difficult to make. According to Ben Wilson himself, many Puma shoe boxes were used, especially in the development stage. First a real Formula 1 vehicle was scanned, then ‘ripped’ to pieces on the computer, and put together out of shoe box pieces, cut with an oscillating cutter.
The shoe box Formula 1 car is now on display at a Puma store in Chicago.
via PSFK
Looks like a real nice late 19th century painting, doesn’t it? But in reality, it’s a real girl wearing body-paint, and standing against a painted background.
‘Makeup Girl‘ is a very clever advertisement spotted, and photographed by Peter Kun Frary, in front of a MAC cosmetics shop, in Hawaii. The girl is a really well painted model, posing against a painted background. Now, you might think she’s naked, but she is wearing strips of cloth in all the right places.
I must say the artist did a banged-up job on this one, and credit goes to the real-life ‘Makeup Girl‘ who kept a still pose and hardly ever blinked.
What started out as a steampunk dreadnought/battleship evolved into a self-sustainable crawler town that roams the wastes in search of valuable resources.
It sounds like the rough plot of a post-apocalyptic flick, but it’s actually the result of Dave DeGobbi’s rich imagination. He pictured his LEGO Crawler Town as a mobile settlement roaming the barren wastelands, in a steampunk universe devastated by excessive coal use.
The Crawler Town is the best of several moving cities, a place where people can enjoy luxuries like pizza and beer. Thanks to its powerful crawlers, the town constantly searches for invaluable minerals and aquifers, and stay away from powerful sandstorms.
Dave DeGobbi’s Crawler Town got the name ‘Eco-punk’, due to its steampunk influences, and features functional powered treads, working suspension, front and rear steering, and lift from lower to upper levels.
Check Dave DeGobbi’s Flickr set for more photos of the Crawler Town
Apparently, this video has been on the internet since late last year, but for some reason I’ve never heard about it. Better late than never, I guess.
Colorado Springs-based artist Jaon Baalman used over 50 bags of Cheetos to create an ultra-realistic portrait of popular TV-show host Conan O’Brien. Young Jason used Regular, Flamin’ Hot and Natural Cheetos to complete his work, and in some places used two, three layers, to give it the needed depth.
The edible portrait, made out of over 2000 individual Cheetos was supposed to be presented to Conan O’Brien himself, in December of last year, but the artist and his work fell victim to the whole Late Night Show circus, at NBC.
Well, I know it’s not the same, but Jason Baalman gets two thumbs up from me. Make sure you watch the making-of video, at the bottom.
Finally a chocolate bar big enough not to make you crave more. This is definitely what the standard chocolate bar size would be, if I ruled the world.
I’m sure you’ve seen bigger-than-usual chocolate bars before, but this is truly gigantic. A dude named Brian created the giant Kit Kat bar for Christmas. He started by going to the local hardware store and buying one of those big flower boxes. Then he filled it with molten chocolate and six packs of Loacker Quadratini cookies (for the crunchy interior).
When it was finished, the giant Kit Kat chocolate bar was 28 inches long and weighed over 13.5 kilograms. Named Mega Giganta Kat, by its creator, this calorie bomb has over 72,000 calories. Considering a person’s daily calorie intake is around 1,800-2,200, that’s pretty scary.
One thing I wasn’t able to find out is how he made the Kit Kat logo, but I think it was carved or something.
via Supersized Meals
Hidden deep in an Australian rainforest, the clay sculptures of William Ricketts express the Aborigines’ deep connection with Mother Nature.
Born in 1898, William Ricketts was an Australian sculptor and potter who developed a spiritual bond with the Aboriginal people of Central Australia. The time he spent with them, between 1949 and 1960 inspired his works in Potter’s Sanctuary (now known as William Ricketts Sanctuary).
The 92 intricate ceramic sculptures placed along the passageways seem as they are merging with the surrounding plant-life, thus expressing the strong bond Aborigines have always had with nature. Designed as a place where man’s spirit becomes one with nature, William Ricketts Sanctuary inspires us all to protect Mother Nature instead of constantly exploiting her.
William Ricketts spent most of his life in this sanctuary, located on Mount Dandenong, near Olinda, and died here, in 1993, at the age of 94.
Produced by Japanese company Megahouse, the GUMMIX kit allows kids and grown-ups to make their own jelly insects, as pranks or food decorations.
GUMMIX is part of the Megahouse 2010 Shokking lineup, and consists of special gelatin powder and insect molds. It’s as simple as it is fun. Just mix the gelatin with fruit syrup, ketchup or soy sauce, depending on what you’re trying to achieve, and pour the mixture into the molds. When the jelly starts to harden, attach the limbs with the included tweezers, and there you have it, an edible bug.
The GUMMIX insect kit comes with a mixing cup, recipe cards, and 4 moulds of a beetle, a crawfish, a stag beetle and a sow bug. It costs 3675 yen ($40) and you can purchase 3 extra moulds, for 1570 yen each ($17).
via Gigazine
After the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Indians realized exclusive golf clubs are on the list of potential targets, and came up with an electric armored golf cart.
The Metaltech Anti-Terrorist Assault Cart, or A-TAC, was designed to assist Indian armed forces in dealing with terrorists, and can easily fit into lifts and narrow corridors, thanks to its cart-like shape. The A-TAC might look like a wacky golf-cart but it will protect you even against explosions, not to mention gunshots.
Weighing around a half-a-ton, the Meltatech Anti-Terrorist Assault Cart is powered by an electric battery and runs for six hours, on a single charge. As you’d expect, it doesn’t reach impressive speeds, but 25km/h is not bad for an armored golf-cart.
If you’re looking for protection on the golf course, you’ll have to fork out $45,000 for Metaltech’s Anti-Terrorist Assault Cart.
A cement quarry near Sucre is home the world’s largest site of dinosaur tracks, known by the locals as Cal Orko.
More than 68 million years ago, thousands of dinosaurs flocked at Cal Orko (a lakeside in those times) in search of food and water. This explains the over 5,000 dinosaur tracks, laid in around 350 criss-cross trackways, on a crumbling wall. The most amazing thing about Cal Orko is it features footprints from 330 dinosaur species, from the Cretaceous, just before they went extinct.
The fascinating 70-degree rockface is a rather new discovery, found by Bolivian workers, in 1994. It stretches 1.5 kilometers in length and it’s 150 meters tall. Compared to other dinosaur track sites, on any other continent, Cal Orko is by far the biggest and most important.
Unfortunately, Cal Orko is in constant danger of crumbling and Bolivian authorities spend $30 million every year, to keep it in place. With all their efforts, part of the Dinosaur Wall has crumbled at the beginning of February, and with it about 300 footprints have been lost.
Photos via Fogonazos
Known as ‘The River of Five Colors” or “The Rainbow River”, Cano Cristales is one of the most amazing rivers of our world.
For the most part of a year, Cano Cristales river, in Colombia, is just an ordinary as any other flowing waters you might have seen. But for a brief period of time, it becomes the scene of a natural festival of colors. The special algae living on the river’s bed of rocks is behind this incredible natural phenomenon.
The river’s flow of water regulates the amount of sunlight reaching the algae, and during the rainy season, it keeps the sun’s rays from reaching the bottom. During the dry season, the water is too shallow to sustain river life, but between these two seasons, conditions are just right for the colors of Cano Cristales to come to life.
Lolo, a black jaguar, originally from South America, enjoys her first press conference together with her adorable spotted cub. Looking at the first photo, you can see she’s just as surprised as you are.
She’s the mother, so we can’t really pin this abnormality on her being unfaithful. Believe it or not, it’s not the babies spots that are odd, it’s his mother’s pitch-black fur. Most jaguars have brown spots that help them blend better in their environment, but about 6% of them suffer from a genetic condition known as melanism, which causes them to be entirely black.
Lolo and her two-year-old cub live at the Yaduda zoo, in Jordan. The youngster’s father, Falah, was separated, so he wouldn’t hurt the cub. It’s pretty selfish of us humans to keep such extraordinary creatures in depressing conditions, simply for our entertainment.That little beast is adorable, but just thinking about the rest of his life in a zoo, instead of in the jungle, where he belongs, makes me feel depressed.
Photos by REUTERS via Daylife
Every year, the people of Suzdal, a small Russian town north-east of Moscow, gather at the the Museum of Wooden Architecture, for the traditional goose fight.
Locals form a circle that acts as the circle of the fighting ring, and the geese are simply unleashed. Apparently, the colder the winter, the more aggressive the birds. This year the temperatures were way below zero, so the geese started fighting almost instantly.
Two families are released into the ring, but only two geese take part in the actual confrontation, withe the rest of the parties doing all the cheering. But this isn’t as violent as it my look. Unlike cock fights or ouzel fights, goose fighting is a lot more gentle, resulting in only a few plucked feathers.
via toprn
I’ve seen my share of Jabba the Hutt birthday cakes on the web, but this is by far the best ever.
Edible Jabba was made for the birthday of a four-year-old fan of the famous Star-Wars character, who specifically requested that Rotta (Jabba’s son) also be included in the sweet work of art. It was made by an unnamed ‘friend of the family’, out of chocolate cake, chocolate fudge and fondant. As delicious as that sounds I couldn’t take one bite out of this Jabba the Hutt cake, it’s just too perfect.
Congratulations to the artist for a job well done! Photos via icruise_flickr, parent of a very lucky 4-year-old.
