Japanese latte artist Nowtoo Sugi uses syrup to add vibrant colors to his lattes pictures. I'm especially impressed by the detail in his depiction of Iron Man.

At the link, you can see more photos of his lattes as well as two videos showing Mr. Sugi at work.

Link

Superman

French animation designer Andry imagined comic book superheroes in the act of walking their sidekicks to school. Aren't they adorable? Link -via The Mary Sue

©Michael Abrahamson

Michael Abrahamson makes amazing balloon sculptures. Browse his gallery to see startlingly realistic motorcycles, cartoon characters and even a full-sized couch that can support the weight of three adults. My favorite, though, is this xenomorph chilling at a pub.

Link

(YouTube link)

The annual Dance Off with the Star Wars Stars is back as Disney's Hollywood Studios launch their Star Wars Weekends. This year's dances include "Bad," "Fight for Your Right to Party," "Hey Ya," and since this is the first Dance-off since Disney bought Lucasfilm, a special appearance by Jedi Mickey. You can see all the numbers on video at Inside the Magic. Link

Don't Make Me Release The Flying Monkeys Bangle

Face it, some days you feel like a kind and gentle Dorothy and some days you feel like the mean wicked witch. Now you can have an accessory that quietly expresses the darker side of your split personality with the Don't Make Me Release the Flying Monkeys Bangle from the NeatoShop. This beautiful bracelet is hand carved, inked, and polished. It is inscribed with the text "Don't make me release the flying monkeys." The bangle comes with a handsome embroidered gift pouch. 

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Jewelry and fantastic Wizard Of Oz items. 

Link

Faced with the daunting prospect of having to sit through hours of commencement speeches, Dominique Zamora of Foodbeast came up with the perfect solution: she put a flask in her graduation cap.

Luckily, the process for making this thing is painless enough. Just pop off the top button with a pair of pliers, Velcro in the bladder (I took mine out of the Wine Rack Bra, secure the whole mess with bobby pins and drink up.

Head on over to Foodbeast to see how you can make your own (we're not responsible if you get thrown out of your graduation ceremony, mmkay?): Link

Oh, alcohol. The cause of and solution to all of life's problems.

We already know that cats will steal anything that's not tied down. But what about the rest of the animal kingdom? The tendency to steal food is a beneficial adaptation for a species, and taking what another critter has is not really rare. For example: Flowers produce nectar to attract bees for pollination purposes, but bumblebees take nectar from flowers without pollinating the plants in exchange.

Bees who’ve evolved with short tongues and thus can’t reach for the sweet nectar have learned to carve holes into the side of a flower in order to reach their reward. This phenomenon, first observed by Charles Darwin, gets a bee nectar without the bee pollinating the plant. More cannily, there’s evidence suggesting that bees aren’t born behaving this way—they learn how to thieve from other bees, a sad sign that bee society is being overrun by hoodlums.

Read about seven thieving species at mental_floss. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Joe Penniston)

It's never occurred to me that tea could be a pie flavor, but it has to Sarah Baird, a writer and cook in New Orleans. Her pie filling recipe includes ground cloves, cardamom, ginger, cinnamon and the contents of chai tea bags.

Link

(Photo: Sarah Baird)

Image: Igor Kolos/Shutterstock

For the fourteenth year in a row, Jacob is America's most popular baby boy name - but there are new entries in the list as compiled by the U.S. Social Security Administration. Here are the most popular baby names in 2012:

As we mentioned above, Jacob has been champ for 14 years since 1999 ("Michael" held that title from 1959 to 1998). This is the second year Sophia came at number one for girl names. Liam cracked the top 10 for the first time, perhaps because of recent movies starring Liam Neeson.

The US Social Security Administration also released the names that underwent the greatest change in popularity from 2011 to 2012:

From Social Security's press release:

Many pop-culture naming trends appear in a popular feature of Social Security’s baby names website--the “change in popularity” page.  This year’s winners for biggest jump in popularity in the Top 500 are Major and Arya.

The fastest riser on the girls’ list may have been influenced by the popular cable TV series “Game of Thrones.”  Arya is the daughter of a leader of one of the Seven Kingdoms.  She also is an expert sword fighter, so doubt her influence on the popular names list at your own risk.   

For the boys, parents may associate Major with the military title.  Acting Commissioner Colvin added “I have no doubt Major’s rising popularity as a boy’s name is in tribute to the brave members of the U.S. military, and maybe we’ll see more boys named General in the future.”  You also might trace Major’s increase in popularity to a cable TV show.  “Home by Novogratz” is a popular home design show featuring Major Novogratz, the youngest son of designers Robert and Cortney.

The second fastest riser for boys was Gael, and for girls, Perla.  Both names most likely are on the rise due to the increase in the Spanish-speaking population in the United States.  Perla is the Latinized version of Pearl and is popular among Hispanic-Americans.  Gael’s popularity could be tied to Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal.

(YouTube link)

One Minute Galactica made this using the audio from the 1949 educational film You're Driving 90 Horses and creatively-edited video from the 1971 made-for-TV movie Duel, starring Dennis Weaver and directed by 24-year-old Steven Spielberg. -Thanks, Nick!

Got a beard? Then you've got potential ad space to rent! Cornett-IMS, an ad agency in Kentucky, came up the idea. It has already leased billboard space to the restaurant company A&W:

At least, that’s what A&W was thinking when they signed up with a Kentucky-based agency to create “beardboards.” According to Biz Insider, the “half-joke, half genius” scheme involves paying men with beards $5 a day to walk around with a mini ad clipped to their facial hair.

“We’re getting a ton of emails from guys with epic beards that want to host beardboards and we’re actually in talks with some brands that want to be Beardvertisers. I think we’ll probably be seeing some beardboards in the wild before too long,” said agency Cornett-IMS’s Whit Hiler.

Link and Official Website -via Foodbeast

When aspiring rapper Baba Brinkman went to Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, he decided to mix a little rap into his studies in Medieval and Renaissance English Lit. In fact, he recreated Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in rap for his Master's thesis, thus making him the only peer-reviewed rapper in the world.

After graduating in 2003, Brinkman began his career as a rap troubadour and achieved great success with this clip above, The Rap Guide to Evolution.

View more of Brinkman's work over at this neat post by 'xim Sauriol over at Geeks Are Sexy: Link

Luo Gang was five years old when he was kidnapped from his home in Sichuan province, China, and taken to Fujian province. He was adopted by a family 1500 miles away.

“Everyday before I went to bed, I forced myself to re-live the life spent in my old home,” he said. “So I wouldn’t forget.”

But the only memory Luo had of his hometown was of two bridges.

He drew a rough map of his hometown from memory, before posting it on “Bring Lost Babies Home”, a Chinese website devoted to locating missing children through the help of volunteers.

Soon afterwards, a volunteer wrote back with valuable information - a couple from a small town in Sichuan’s Guangan city had lost a son 23 years ago. The time matched Luo’s abduction perfectly.

Luo searched for pictures of the Sichuan town and found they looked familiar to him. To confirm his suspicions, he turned to the satellite version Google Maps. The minute he zoomed in on an area called “Yaojiaba” near the Sichuan town, Luo recognised the two bridges.

“That’s it! That’s my home,” shouted Luo, in tears.

Luo was reunited with his parents soon after. Link -via Fark

Previously:Lost Boy Used Google Earth to Find His Mother

Many tunnels in Sydney, Australia aren't tall enough to permit tractor trailers to move through safely. This animated gif shows a warning system that informs truck drivers when they're about to crash into a tunnel entrance. When sensors detect a vehicle that is too tall, the system pours water across the entrance to the tunnel and projects a stop sign onto that water curtain.

Link

There's no KFC in the Gaza strip, a 140-square mile coastal strip 1.7 million Palestinians call home, but that doesn't mean that you can't get the Colonel's finger lickin' good chicken there.

Where there's a will, there's a way - and by way, we mean smuggling tunnels:

... after Mr. Efrangi brought some KFC back from El Arish for friends last month, he was flooded with requests. A new business was born. [...]

... whenever there is a critical mass of orders — usually 30 — he starts a complicated process of telephone calls, wire transfers and coordination with the Hamas government to get the chicken from there to here.

The other day, after Mr. Efrangi called in 15 orders and wired the payment to the restaurant in El Arish, an Egyptian taxi driver picked up the food. On the other side of the border, meanwhile, Ramzi al-Nabih, a Palestinian cabdriver, arrived at the Hamas checkpoint in Rafah, where the guards recognized him as “the Kentucky guy.”

From the checkpoint, Mr. Nabih, 26, called his Egyptian counterpart and told him which of the scores of tunnels the Hamas official had cleared for the food delivery. He first waited near the shaft of the tunnel, but after a while he was lowered on a lift about 30 feet underground and walked halfway down the 650-foot path to meet two Egyptian boys who were pushing the boxes and buckets of food, wrapped in plastic, on a cart.

Mr. Nabih gave the boys about $16.50, and argued with them for a few minutes over a tip. A half-hour later, the food was loaded into the trunk and on the back seat of his Hyundai taxi, bound for Gaza City.

Fares Akram explains how one smuggles KFC from Egypt into Gaza in this story over at The New York Times: Link (Image: Wissam Nassar for the NY Times)

Sombrero Booze Hat Bottle Stopper

Cinco de mayo may be over, but that doesn't mean the sombrero fun has to end. Now you can dress up your favorite liquid refreshment whenever you want with the Sombrero Booze Hat Bottler Stopper from the NeatoShop. This fantastic bottle stopper is reusable and dishwasher safe.    

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Bottle Stoppers. 

Link

(YouTube link)

Australian magician and comedian Nicholas Johnson invites you to a games party in which he cheats his way through every game. It won't take you long to figure out how it's done, but even afterward there's some weird stuff that will make you scratch your head. Not that scratching your head helps you think better. The title of this video is Can you name all the games and beat the cheat? but I think that is to distract you from the shenanigans going on. The Tetris song is by the group Flap! -via the Presurfer

Teens can sleep through anything. Well, almost anything. While a sleepy Napa, California teen was reaching for her alarm clock she was bitten on the hand by a large boa constrictor. The really strange part, neither she, nor her family, own a boa constrictor.

The teen had crossed paths with a cold-blooded killer: a three-foot long boa constrictor. Somehow the reptile slithered into the Ojeda’s apartment on the 300 block of Collier Boulevard and made itself at home. It was a specimen so large, Ojeda said that Napa County Animal Control was shocked.

“When they saw it, they were like ‘Oh crap it’s big,’ so they went and got a cage for it,” Ojeda said.

Emelyn Ojeda did have to seek medical treatment for the bite, but the incident isn't causing her to lose any sleep. Apparently she is still sleeping just fine. 

KPIX5 has more: Link

When we last saw master bladesmith Tony Swatton, he made a fully functional axe modeled after Gimli's from The Lord of the Rings. Most recently, he created a battle-ready version of the bat'leth, a sword from Star Trek. Qapla'! His tempered steel sword is ready to sever Jem'Hadar heads.

At the link, you can watch a video of Mr. Swatton making the sword. Be sure to watch until the end, which shows his assistants attacking targets with the bat'leth.

Link -via Technabob

An unnamed man in Cork, Ireland, stopped by a McDonalds outlet early Tuesday morning. For some reason, he sat in a high chair designed for infants and toddlers. When he couldn't get out, police were called. They managed to free the man from the high chair, and no charges were filed. However, witnesses, who say alcohol was involved, managed to snap a picture that went viral. A spokesman for McDonalds remarked that anyone using a high chair in their shops should always have adult supervision. Link -via Gawker

(Image credit: Maverickkat)

No, Doctor, I'm not going to lecture you on where to park your TARDIS. You can disregard my advice. But let's make sure that we lock the door when we leave.

-via Nerd Approved

(Photo: unknown)

(YouTube link)

Star Wars: Episiode VII is too important to mess up. J.J. Abrams went on Jimmy Kimmel Live and took suggestions from the audience. Which he would do well to ignore. -via Tastefully Offensive

The Chesapeake blue crab is a symbol of Maryland, so in 1984, Baltimore artist Jackie Leatherbury Douglass made this enormous sculpture of that creature. A Baltimore Sun article from 2000 describes it:

The county, wanting an eye-catching tourism display, commissioned the crab's creation more than 15 years ago, from Shadyside artist Jackie Leatherbury Douglass and her husband, John.

Originally, Jackie Douglass recalls, "they wanted a 30-foot crab, which was just impossible." The three-dimensional, 10-by-7-by-5 1/2 - foot blue crab they settled on took the Douglasses more than 5,500 hours to assemble, with John welding the steel frame and Jackie performing the stained-glass work.

The result was more than just a fitting icon for Anne Arundel County, with 550 miles of heavily crabbed waterfront, and a capital city known as Crabtowne, and a newspaper nicknamed the Crab- wrapper.

Link -via Twisted Sifter

(Photos: Elvert Barnes)

(Photo credit: Wolfgang Sauber)

1. Diego Rivera’s “Man at the Crossroads”

The Moral: Never hire a communist to do a capitalist’s job.

During the Great Depression, Mexican artist Diego Rivera was on a roll. In 1931, he painted a massive mural for San Francisco’s Pacific Stock Exchange. And by 1933, he’d completed two more enormous murals of Ford’s assembly line for the Detroit Institute of Arts. But there was a disconnect in Rivera’s work. Although the artist was a vocal and committed communist, his art was decidedly capitalist. After a few friends pointed out the hypocrisy, Rivera decided to put his paintbrush where his mouth was.

Opportunity knocked in 1932, when the Rockefeller family hired Rivera to create one of his signature paintings in the lobby of the new RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. Their suggested theme for the work was “Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future”—an allusion to the crossroads between industry and technology. Rivera’s final product depicted a crossroads, but hardly in the way the Rockefellers had intended. Instead, the sprawling 63-foot masterpiece illustrated two alternate futures: a communist heaven and a capitalist hell.

Rivera might have gotten away with his political statement if it hadn’t been for one detail—he painted his personal hero, Vladimir Lenin, into the piece. When building managers realized Rivera was filling their lobby with Red propaganda, they ordered him to cease and desist. To preserve the art, the Rockefellers asked Rivera to morph Lenin’s portrait into an unrecognizable worker. But when the artist refused (Rivera offered instead to balance the picture with a portrait of Lincoln), he was paid his full fee, then barred from the site. The mural was immediately covered, and months later, workers were ordered to destroy the piece altogether.

Photograph of the original mural before it was destroyed. (Image credit: Lucienne Bloch)

It wasn’t long before the artist got his revenge. Later that year, Rivera re-created the piece for the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Only this time, he added a portrait to the capitalist side; it was of Nelson Rockefeller, holding a martini glass, under a swarm of syphilitic bacteria.

2. Robert Arneson’s “Portrait of George”

The Moral: If you’re going to put the Mayor on a pedestal, don’t build that pedestal with Twinkies.

In 1978, after mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated, the city of San Francisco wanted to commemorate its fallen leaders. Officials set about building a new convention center in Moscone’s honor, and held a competition for a proper memorial sculpture to be displayed in the lobby. Artist Robert Arneson quickly won over the selection committee with his proposal for a grinning, oversize bust of the slain mayor.

But when the sculpture was unveiled in 1981, it was met with gasps of horror. The audience wasn’t shocked by Moscone’s smiling head, but by its nearly 5-foot-tall pedestal, which was imprinted with five bloody bullet holes and graffiti that read “BANG BANG BANG” and “HARVEY MILK TOO.” Arneson even included an image of a revolver and a Twinkie—a reference to the assassin, Dan White, who’d tried to exonerate himself in court by arguing that junk food binges were to blame for his violent mood swings.

Arneson claimed he was trying to portray the totality of the crime, but San Franciscans wouldn’t have it. Mayor Moscone’s successor, Dianne Feinstein, denounced the work, and the city demanded its money back. 

A handful of people did appreciate the sculpture, though. A private collector purchased the piece immediately, and in 1997, “Portrait of George” resold for $155,000. Today, even Feinstein agrees the work would be “appropriate for a museum.” Just don’t count on it showing up in the Moscone Center lobby anytime soon.

3. Horatio Greenough’s “George Washington”

(Photo credit: Wknight94)

The Moral: Founding Fathers look less distinguished in the nude.

In 1832, Congress commissioned a giant sculpture of George Washington for the 100th anniversary of the President’s birth. They tapped artist Horatio Greenough for the job, and he seemed like a perfect fit. Not only did the Boston native come with a great reputation, but he’d also trained in Rome with the best European artists. Considering Greenough’s background, Congress assumed that his work might be classically influenced. What they didn’t expect was to see the Founding Father on a pedestal, naked as the day he was born.

To be fair, Horatio Greenough had good intentions. Inspired by ancient depictions of Greek gods, the artist wanted to portray America’s first president with the strength of Zeus, bestowing power on the people. But when Greenough unveiled his work in the Capitol rotunda, the audience didn’t get it. Instead of greeting the statue with thunderous applause, onlookers simply gawked and snickered at the half-naked George Washington. Wrapped loosely in a toga, the president looked out of character with his nipples and belly button exposed. Worse still, Washington’s arm was extended outward in a grand gesture, and many in the crowd joked that the embarrassed president was trying to reach for his clothes.

Congress was outraged. They tried to relocate the piece, eventually sticking it on the east lawn of the Capitol. By 1908, however, politicians had acquired a sense of humor about the sculpture, and the statue was moved to the Smithsonian. Today, it can be seen in all its naked splendor at the National Museum of American History.

4. David Černý's “Entropa”

(Photo credit: Flickr user Cea.)

The Moral: Not everyone appreciates racist, nationalist humor.

On January 1, 2009, the Czech Republic took over the revolving presidency of the European Union, and to commemorate the event, the government turned to Czech artist David Černý. For his piece, Černý proposed working with 26 other artists, one from each EU member nation, to create a grand monument. But when “Entropa” was unveiled on January 12, the international community was scandalized. Rather than celebrating Europe, “Entropa” mocked each and every country.

“Entropa” is a huge map in which each nation is represented as a stereotype. Some are silly; others are blatantly offensive. Romania is depicted as a Dracula theme park; Germany is a network of motorways that resembles a swastika; Sweden is a large, IKEA-style box; Bulgaria is a collection of squat toilets. 

Upon seeing the work, the Bulgarian government immediately issued a formal complaint. The controversy grew when newspapers noticed that Černý's “team” of international artists was nowhere to be found. Černý soon admitted that they didn’t exist; his only collaborators were his two assistants. Outraged, Czech officials accused him of misappropriating state funds, but Černý insisted that he’d always intended to return the money. Three days later, when the work was ceremonially presented to the public, Černý formally apologized to the Czech government. He said his intention was “to see if Europe is able to laugh at itself.” Apparently, it can’t.

_______________________

The article above, written by Elizabeth Lunday, is reprinted with permission from the July-August 2010 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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