Photographer Masashi Mitsui captured the serenity of a sleeping baby as it is being carried in a basket by a boy (brother?) in Nepal. Do you think your baby can sleep as soundly in a basket like that? Link

(YouTube link)

To get you in the mood for for Easter, here's a supercut of bunny rabbits in cinema. Which is your favorite movie rabbit? John Farrier would no doubt select Watership Down and Alex would go for Monty Python's killer bunny. I am torn between Harvey and Night of the Lepus. -via The Daily Dot

We've featured Estonian artist Eiko Ojala before on Neatorama, but the man has got a new papercut artwork that you've simply got to see: Link. Gorgeous!

Lesley A. Jensen, an artist and "fangirl for life," makes marvelous Easter eggs inspired by movies, cartoons and video games. Over several years, she's perfected her craft, creating a large portfolio of edible art.

Link -via Between the Pages

Photo: Lisi Niesner

A lot of men think of themselves as alpha males, but Werner Freund, 79, has got them beat: he's an alpha male amongst wolves. Reuters photographer Lisi Niesner documented Werner's life amongst packs of wolves that he reared by hand in a wolf sanctuary in Western Germany. Check out the gallery over at The Atlantic: Link

Matthew Inman at The Oatmeal tells a story about a fart. If it causes one person to act more human and less judgmental, that's all fine and dandy. It's well worth reading just for the humor, even if it does have a message. Link

Are you seeing 20/20 when it comes to social media? I know I don't - I would've flunked this Social Media Eye Chart from Bizarro Comics by Dan Piraro.

Keep Calm and Dig On Garden Flag

Spring is here and there is work to be done. The battle against weeds and debris has just begun.

Are you looking for a way to keep your troops morale high as they march off into the garden? Enlist the Keep Calm and Dig On Garden Flag from the NeatoShop. This delightful flag is a wonderful way to remind everyone of their duty to maintain a steady course and dig on.   

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Home & Garden items. 

Link

Learn how to draw this simple cartoon baby chick, and you'll be ready to draw one in wax on your Easter eggs, and it's also good for for decorating notes and correspondence between now and Easter! Get the step-step-instruction from Mark Anderson at Andertoons. Link

If you see a woman standing by the runway sticking out her thumb, you're probably looking at Amber Nolan. She's a travel writer who wants to visit all 50 states in the United States. That isn't unusual, but her mode of transportation is. Nolan is "jethiking"--hitching rides on private planes. So far, she's flown on 25 aircraft on her journey. She writes:

As far as schedule and planning, I more or less going where the pilots go. I try to have a general direction that makes sense based on weather and where I’ve already been. “Anyone going southeast? Anyone going to Idaho?” But it doesn’t always work that way. I was trying to go to California once and wound up in Montana. The few times I’ve tried to plan to get to a specific place at a certain time, it’s been difficult. When I’m completely flexible and open to wherever, things are much easier. Sometimes the pilots give me options like, “I can drop you at one of these fuel stops,” so that I can choose a little based on what I want to see, or if I have a place to stay. But, a big part of the fun is the randomness of it: landing in small towns that I would never have otherwise thought to visit.

Link -via Marginal Revolution

(Photo: Amber Nolan)

It's not the journalist who's jerking you around here, it's the folks who originally named these streets. A commenter saw this and recognized it as Lake Jackson, Texas. I looked it up and found the revitalization project that confirms the plans for This Way and That Way in all the right ways. Link

It's not like stuffing a turkey* because peeps don't have a roomy interior once you've gutted them. But Becky McKay used melted Cadbury creme eggs to help seal the jelly beans in. You can find her recipe at the link.

Link | Baker's Website

*Note to self: next Thanksgiving, make a peep-stuffed turkey.

Nadtacular cut open a bag of mulch and found this. Alive. He decided to raise it as a pet. The animal survived, and you can see the rest of the pictures in an album following the critter's first five weeks. In case you don't know what kind of animal it is …I don't want to spoil the surprise. Link  -via reddit

(Video Link)

Nando Te Riele can demonstrate his master piloting skills without even leaving the ground. Watch this Dutch RC airplane pilot move, nay, dance his plane through a gymnasium at this year's Electric Indoor Masters competition.

Link -via Technabob

The combination of quadrotors, LEDs, and GPS can make for an impressive light show! That was the case for the Starfleet logo from the Star Trek universe, which showed up over the Tower Bridge in London as a promotion for the new movie Star Trek: Into Darkness.

Ars Electronica Futurelab, the same outfit that illuminated the skies over Linz, Austria, last year, launched 30 quadrotors near London's Tower Bridge and flew in a formation that any Trekkie would salute.

The 30 LED-equipped AscTec Hummingbird quadcopters from Munich's Ascending Technologies hovered about 118 feet to 426 feet above Potters Fields Park and formed a Star Trek insignia to coincide with Earth Hour.

The batteries that powered the micro UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) were charged on the Austrian renewable energy grid, according to event sponsor Paramount Pictures.

See a video of the preparations and the performance at CNET. Link -via Digg

(Image credit: Ars Electronica Futurelab)

British race car driver Lewis Hamilton worked for the McLaren team for several years, but he recently joined the Mercedes team. In the rush of the recent Malaysian Grand Prix, without thinking, he pulled into the pit box run by his former teammates:

"I don't know how that happened. The teams look so similar. I have been stopping in that pit box for years.

"[It's] an easy mistake and hopefully one I won't make again."

Hamilton soon realised his mistake and drove further along to his new Mercedes team pit box.

You can watch a video of the incident at the link below.

Link and Video -via Blame It on the Voices

(Photo: BBC)

Chocolate Easter bunnies aren't just for children! Sugar Plum Chocolates is offering an 8-ounce solid dark chocolate rabbit infused with the taste of Sriracha Sauce. For discriminating adult tastes! Link -via Laughing Squid

Last week, Texas Monthly, a magazine about life in paradise, hired Daniel Vaughn for a newly-created position. Vaughn quit his job as an architect to become the only full-time critic of barbecue for any magazine or newspaper in America:

Mr. Vaughn’s last day as an associate at Good Fulton & Farrell is Tuesday, and he starts his new job in April, a few weeks before the release of his book, “The Prophets of Smoked Meat: A Journey Through Texas Barbecue.” He spent six months exploring the state’s barbecue spots and collecting pitmasters’ recipes, eating at up to 10 restaurants a day and logging 10,000 miles.

Standing at a table at Lockhart, with his dinner scattered about the oily butcher paper and not a plate in sight, he pulled apart the brisket, which had been smoked for 14 to 16 hours. Lockhart opened in 2010 seeking to replicate Central Texas barbecue, using the same techniques, wood — post oak — and down-home style that is both anti-fork and anti-sauce.

“They leave some fat on,” Mr. Vaughn said, brisket in hand. “If you go to East Texas, you’re going to get basically just gray slices of brisket. The saddest thing you can see is for them to pull out a fresh new brisket, slap it down and it’s got this nice jiggle to it. Then they’ll take the back of the knife and scrape the fat off in one fell swoop and throw it away. They love the fat in Central Texas.”

Link -via Glenn Reynolds

(Photo: Texas Monthly)

T-Bone Steak Noteblock

Are you having a tough time finding the perfect notepad to jot down all your juicy culinary ideas? You need the T-Bone Steak Noteblock from the NeatoShop. This deliciously fun pad is shaped like a T-Bone Steak and includes 240 sheets for your writing pleasure. 

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Stationery items. 

Link

(YouTube link)

YouTube channel Smarter Every Day examines a Prince Rupert's Drop, which is a quickly-cooled glob of glass, and the strange physical properties of them. Slow-motion video shows us how really strange and cool this glass is! Of course, there's a perfectly logical explanation that's just as neat as the demonstrations. You don't want to try this at home. -via Metafilter

The best street artists need only add a few touches to the pre-existing environment to bring out striking images. These three pieces by Russian artist Alexey Menschikov are good demonstrations of this ability.

Menschikov's LiveJournal Page -via Twisted Sifter

Hulu is offering every episode of every Star Trek series free for the rest of the month -with the caveats that it's only available in the U.S. and you have to sit through unstoppable ads breaks. But the promotion for this event should be easier to use. The Star Trek Madness 2013 tournament brackets pit Star Trek characters against each other, with the champion to be decided by internet votes. There are a couple of drawbacks here, too. The field has only 16 characters, so some favorites like Sulu and Beverly Crusher are left out. And there are no tags, so you have to check the Hulu Tumblr blog to find daily matchups. Kirk has beaten Riker in the first round, no surprise there, but believe it or not, Jean-Luc Picard has already been eliminated by Benjamin Sisko. Voting is still open for Captain Janeway vs. Quark and Scotty vs. Geordi LaForge (until noon today; not sure what time zone). Link

Robert and Galina Wynn were driving through Glendale, California when they lost control of their car and crashed not through, but on top of a neighbor's home:

"As soon as we hit the corner, the airbags deployed and I didn't even see where we were going from there because the view was obscured," Wynn said.

Neighbors rushed to the scene. One grabbed a ladder and helped the couple off the roof.

An 80-year-old person inside the house was startled but unhurt. [...]

The fire department brought in a large crane to delicately lift the car off the house.

It had major damage. The roof, on the other hand, needs only minor repairs.

Link -via Dave Barry

(Photo: WPTV)

(YouTube link)

Dafna Kopelis told her cat to take the dog the rest of the way home. And that's exactly what happened! Well, it's not difficult to convince a cat that he's the boss, but it takes some talent to teach one to use a leash properly. Don't let the static screen fool you- this video is actually easy to watch. -via Daily of the Day

Psycho Donuts warns:

Before eating the eggs below, make sure to eat the Peep on top first - these peeps are known to protect their nest eggs at any cost! 

That's good advice for eating this Easter treat made with Cadbury Easter eggs and what appears to be coconut shavings.

Link

The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges into Music.  (Image credit: Flickr user Alec McNayr)

After Uncle John saw Star Wars (12 times), he though he knew all the characters. But BRI stalwart Jay Newman pointed out that there was one important character that wasn't listed in the cast: the music.

PRODIGY

He's won 5 Oscars and 18 Grammys, and he may be the most widely heard composer of all time. Who is he? John Williams, composer of the film soundtracks for blockbusters like Star Wars, Jaws, Jurassic Park, and the Harry Potter movies -and the television themes for The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, and many of the "fanfares" heard during the broadcasts of the Olympics since 1984.

By the time Williams achieved music superstardom in the mid-1970s, he was already a 20-year veteran of the TV and film scoring business. In fact, Williams had been immersed in music almost from the day he was born, on February 8, 1932, in New York City. His father, an accomplished jazz drummer and percussionist for the CBS Radio Orchestra, got his son started on piano lessons at six years old. The youngster soon added trombone, trumpet, and clarinet to his repertoire. Then, when he was 16, his father landed a job with the CBS Television Orchestra, and the Williams family moved to Hollywood.

HE SCORES!

Music was the only career that Williams ever pursued. He studied at UCLA in 1950, and progressed so quickly that when he was drafted into the military in 1952, the 21-year-old found himself conducting the Air Force Band. In another two years, he landed at the Julliard School, where he studied under the world's greatest composers by day while playing in New York jazz clubs at night.

After Julliard, Williams's show-biz roots brought him back to Hollywood, where he first worked as an orchestra pianist, but it was his skill as an orchestrator that garnered the attention of such film music legends as Bernard Hermann (who composed the scores for Citizen Kane, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and many Hitchcock movies), Alfred Newman (All About Eve, How Green Was My Valley), and Franz Waxman (Sunset Boulevard, The Philadelphia Story). They utilized the young composer's skills to orchestrate musical cues for their film scores. After that, Johnny Williams (as he was credited) didn't have to look for work -it came looking for him.

Williams played on dozens of TV scores per year in the 1950s and started writing them in the 1960s, including Checkmate (1960), Gilligan's Island (1964), Lost in Space (1965), and Land of the Giants (1968). Writing music for the movies came next. Starting in 1959, Williams turned out at least one score per year, at first for forgettable, lighthearted comedies such as Gidget Goes to Rome (1963) and Not With My Wife, You Don't! (1966).

In 1967 Williams earned his first Academy Award nomination for the score of The Valley of the Dolls…and never slowed down. So far, Williams had composed the music to more than 75 films. He's amassed 45 Oscar nominations (second behind Walt Disney for the most ever) and has won five of them. Director Alan Parker (Angela's Ashes) said in 2000 that, for a filmmaker, getting John Williams to score your movie is akin to "winning the lottery."

BLOCKBUSTER

So what is it about Williams's scores that has connected with so many filmmakers and moviegoers over the years? Of course, being in the right place at the right time has a lot to do with it -he scored the music to seven of the ten top-grossing films from 1976 to 1983. But it's fair to say that these films became so successful at least in part because of Williams's themes. Steven Spielberg calls him "the greatest musical storyteller of our time."

The Williams/Spielberg collaboration started in 1973 when the composer was 40 and the director only 23. Williams was at the height of his disaster-score days (The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, and The Towering Inferno) and Spielberg wanted that bombastic appeal for his first feature film, The Sugarland Express. The movie wasn't very successful, but the two men got along so well that Spielberg tapped Williams to come up with a really scary theme for his upcoming shark thriller, Jaws.

PRESENT TENSE

Jaws (1975) is a prime example of just how effective Williams can be at translating human emotions into musical notes: Instead of a sweeping melody (which Spielberg expected), Williams played two low half-notes on the piano, back and forth, "Da…Duh," show at first but then a little faster, "Da…Duh," the tension keeps building, "Da…Duh," and then when the tension is highest the crescendo hits, "DaDuhDaDuhDaDuh," and the viewer knows something really bad is about to happen to that poor woman swimming in the water.

(YouTube link)

Spielberg was amazed, and to this day credits Williams's primal score as a big reason Jaws turned out to be such a phenomenal hit, and the first of the summer blockbusters that have come to define Hollywood (at the time, it was the highest-grossing movie ever). The two men have worked on more than 20 films together. Yet no score that Williams has done -before or since- has had as much impact on people all over the world as the music he composed for George Lucas's "space movie."

A NEW HOPE

It was Spielberg who told Lucas to seek out Williams for the Star Wars score. Lucas wanted the movie to buck the trend of 1970s science fiction films, which had been using "modern" sounds such as synthesizers and early drum machines, and return to Hollywood's golden age sound of a full orchestra. Lucas asked Williams to make the music the "emotional grounding point" of the film to offset the otherworldly characters and settings.

Williams understood Lucas's vision -and everything just seemed to click while he was writing the music. The composer recently tried to explain the experience of composing Star Wars:

There's something sort of eerie about the way our hands are occasionally guided in some of the things that we do. It can happen in any aspect, any phase of human endeavor where we come to the right solutions almost in spite of ourselves. And you look back and you say that almost seems to have a kind of -you want to use the word divine guidance- behind it. The Force was definitely with me.

UNCHAINED MELODIES

The movie, of course, was a runaway success, and so, too, was the soundtrack. It was (and still is) the top-selling score-only movie soundtrack ever released. Even a disco version of the main theme (by Meco) made it to #1 on the pop chart. To understand just how integral Williams's music is to the movie, check out the original theatrical trailer -the one released in December 1976 before the score was completed. The visual images are there, with without Williams's melodies, the magic is definitely missing.

(YouTube link)

NEVER FORCE A THEME

While Williams may have benefitted from a "guiding hand" in composing the music, he also utilized a time-tested technique: the leitmotif. Popularized in Richard Wagner's "Ring Cycle" in the 19th century, a leitmotif is a recurring theme assigned to a specific character, used intermittently throughout the work. Interestingly, very few Hollywood films used the leitmotif to its full potential up to that point (with a few notable exceptions, such as Max Steiner's Gone With The Wind). In Star Wars, however, Williams took the leitmotif to the next level, assigning themes not only to individual characters, such as Luke Skywalker (that one is also the main theme), but for abstract concepts such as the Force.

At its core, the "Force Theme" is a basic melody in a minor key, utilizing very few notes. The theme is heard not only whenever the Force is mentioned, but during the most intense emotional scenes: As Luke stares at the "Binary Sunset" early in the movie, the theme is introduced with a single French horn, invoking longing, and them crescendos with a full string treatment, invoking hope. The theme returns when the Rebel ships attack the Death Star and Luke uses the Force, and finally, when the heroes receive their medals, the same set of notes is heard in the "Throne Room" march that concludes the movie.

(YouTube link)

The "Force Theme" would go on to become an important part of the two following sequels and then the three prequels, helping to tie the saga together. Just think of Luke at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back, hanging by his feet in the ice cave and trying to reach his lightsaber. He shuts his eyes, extends his hand -and there's that theme, so familiar that the audience may wonder if Luke could use the Force without it. That's the power of Williams's "musical storytelling."

(YouTube link)

LEADER OF THE PACK

Even if he had retired after Star Wars, John Williams would still be considered one of Hollywood's all-time greatest composers. But he kept going, scoring phenomenal success with silks such as Superman (1978), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T. the Extra-terrestrial (1982, for which Williams won an Oscar), Home Alone (1990), Jurassic Park (1993), Schindler's List (1993 -another Oscar), and the first three Harry Potter movies. All those films  carry on the leitmotif tradition that Williams perfected in Star Wars. (Just think of the Raiders theme when Indiana Jones is riding his horse and chasing the nazis, or the famous music that accompanies Eliot and E.T.  when they fly in front of the full moon.)

Williams also remains active composing for television (the Olympic fanfare and "The Mission," the NBS News theme) and heading up the Boston pops from 1980 to 1993. Along the way, he's picked up 18 Grammys, 17 honorary degrees, 4 Golden Globes, and 5 Oscars.

ONE LITTLE COMPLAINT

There are a few knocks against Williams, at least among film music aficionados, the biggest being that he taps into that "universal melody" a bout too often. This is evidenced by very similar melodies and phrasings that show up in completely different movies that Williams has scored, especially when they're released within a year of each other. (Detractors point to similar moments in the scores to 1978's Superman and 1980's The Empire Strikes Back, as well as 2004's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and 2005's Star Wars Episode II: Revenge of the Sith.)

(YouTube link)

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The article above was reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into Music.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!