How can you tell when a star is actually singing or just moving their lips to a recorded track? This Slate video uncovers the many ways you can tell if they're actually performing or faking it.
How to tell when a singer is lip-syncing
Woman animates her dysfunctional family's conversations
For her "True Stories" series, cartoonist Lauren eLL (Lorenzo) gives us a candid look into her dysfunctional (her words, though it's hard to disagree) family's life by secretly recording their conversations and then animating them.
Her latest one is called A Family Dinner and we're all welcome to take a "seat" at the table with Lauren (who's portrayed as male, for some reason), her brother (who "hates everyone"), her "troublemaker" sister, her mom (who "tries"), her short-tempered dad, and her 99-year-old grandmother Nanny.
Lauren's most popular video in this gem of a series is "Alexa Ruins Families" from March:
Upgrade your trampoline by adding interactive LEDs
Adafruit Industries has created a tutorial to upgrade an ordinary trampoline by adding fun, interactive NeoPixel LEDs.
This is a really fun project that lights up when you jump on it! These trampolines are meant for exercising and jumping on this thing for just a few minutes feels like a working out so perfect for tiring out kids, just be sure to supervise them. It works really well and looks amazing at night, especially around a fire pit with a fog machine.
Yes, please!
Learn the art of hand-pulling noodles by two masters
Here where I live in Alameda, California, there's a Chinese restaurant where they hand-pull noodles behind a window in the back of the room. The atmosphere at Ark feels dated but the food's pretty good and watching the guy swinging around noodle dough makes it worth the trip. However, there's no opportunity to talk to the noodle maker and learn his story.
So, I was thrilled to see this Tasty video show up today. It gives insight on the artistry of hand-pulling noodles by two noodle masters, Peter Song of Kung Fu Kitchen in New York City and Shuichi Kotani, the CEO of Worldwide-Soba. Come for their stories but stay for the awesome footage of two pros making noodles dance (or vice versa). Read the rest
GQ's comedy issue cover is an intentionally-'shopped winner
GQ has made the perfect funny with the cover of their comedy issue. It pokes fun at Vanity Fair's cover fail last year with Reese Witherspoon and Oprah Winfrey.
GQ would like to apologize to Kate McKinnon, Issa Rae, and Sarah Silverman for the egregious mistakes made in the process of creating the cover for our 2018 comedy issue, the latest in our pantheon of mostly annual love letters to the funniest humans we know. Our intention was to celebrate the three super-funny superstars, who are all that is smart and perceptive and riotous and necessary in comedy right now. We deeply regret that the results violated GQ's rigorous standards of editorial excellence and the laws of nature.
In an effort to ensure that an error of this magnitude never happens again, and because this sounds like the right thing to say, GQ will be conducting a thorough internal audit of our cover-development process. To demonstrate our commitment to transparency, we will release the results of the review, quietly, in 17 months, on Medium.
And to you, our respected readers, we know that GQ must work doubly hard to earn back your trust. Until then, we'll be ignoring our mentions.
Come back to GQ.com next week to read the profiles of our three wildly talented, extremely two-handed cover stars. In the meantime, we'll be praying that Donald Trump tweets something about Chrissy Teigen in the next hour so everybody forgets all about this.
Acting out (almost) every type of crying
YouTubers Tripp and Tyler (and friend) perform the Lip Quiverer, the Fugly, the Whaambulance, the Friend Just Fell Off a Cliff, and other styles of crying, all over the last Slim Jim.
It's alright...
Thanks to Doc Pop, there's going to be a yo-yo emoji
About a year ago, professional yo-yoist (and hand-knit Pac-Man Icelandic peysa wearer) Doc Pop submitted a proposal for a yo-yo emoji. He's just learned that it was approved!
He explains how he made it happen (fascinating!) in his most recent PopCast:
Last year I started working on a proposal for a yo-yo emoji, with the helps of my friends at Emojination. It’s been an interesting experience and I’m really excited to say that it’s been officially accepted by the Unicode Consortium. Expect to see it in Unicode version 12, early next year.
Here's what the yo-yo emoji will look like:
You can submit an emoji proposal too. Check it out. Read the rest
Rating stranger's attractiveness to their face
This might be the most awkward thing I've seen in a while.
It's a video by The Cut where people are rated how attractive they are on a scale from 1 to 10, by strangers, in person. Read the rest
$70 million Picasso painting accidentally damaged, pulled from auction
Oops.
On Friday, a painting by Pablo Picasso was damaged by Christie's auction house and has been withdrawn from their May 15 sale.
The painting, Le Marin (The Sailor), was created by Picasso as a self-portrait in 1943. It was sent to auction by its owner, accused rapist Steve Wynn.
Read the restThe unnamed client of Christie’s had been identified by Bloomberg in April as the casino mogul Steve Wynn, who in February resigned as chairman and chief executive of Wynn Resorts as a result of sexual misconduct allegations. In 2006, Mr. Wynn, who suffers from the degenerative eye disease retinitis pigmentosa, accidentally put his elbow through the canvas of Picasso’s celebrated 1932 masterwork “Le Rêve,” which he had agreed to sell to the billionaire hedge fund collector Steven A. Cohen for $135 million. The painting was restored and was eventually sold to Mr. Cohen in 2013 for $155 million. It is currently on show in the exhibition “Picasso 1932: Love Fame Tragedy” at Tate Modern in London.
Christie’s has not divulged the precise nature of the damage to “Le Marin,” but following the mishap, the auction house said in an email that Picasso’s 1964 painting “Femme au chat assise dans un fauteuil” (“Woman With a Cat Seated in an Armchair”), estimated at $22 million to $28 million, has also been withdrawn from the sale. This second Picasso had also been identified as being offered by Mr. Wynn. Like “Le Marin,” it had been guaranteed to sell courtesy of a third party.
Tony Hawk at 50 performing 50 tricks from his youth
Spliced with footage of him skating in his youth, here's a video of skate legend Tony Hawk showing what he can still do at age 50. A lot, as it turns out.
I never imagined being able to skate into my adult life, or that anyone would still care if I did. To celebrate, I did 50 tricks that I've created (and/or pioneered on vert). Thanks to all of you that made this dream possible. It's been an unreal ride, but I'm not done yet.
Previously: Watch Tony Hawk's awesome 900 at age 48
"Dirty jokes" found in Anne Frank's diary
There was more to Anne Frank's diary than we once thought. Two pages, which were previously covered in a brown masking paper, have been revealed by researchers at Dutch museums. The pages contained "four risque jokes and candid explanations of sex, contraception and prostitution" written by the Jewish teen, according to The Guardian.
The Anne Frank Museum, the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands used digital technology to show the writing on the pages.
Read the restThey photographed the pages, backlit by a flash, and then used image-processing software to decipher the words, which were hard read because they were jumbled up with the writing on the reverse sides of the pages.
In the passage on sex, Anne described how a young woman gets her period around 14, saying that it is “a sign that she is ripe to have relations with a man but one doesn’t do that of course before one is married”.
On prostitution, she wrote: “All men, if they are normal, go with women, women like that accost them on the street and then they go together. In Paris they have big houses for that. Papa has been there.”
Anne wrote her diary while she and her family hid for more than two years. The family was provided with food and other essentials by a close-knit group of helpers, until 4 August 1944 when they were discovered and ultimately deported to Auschwitz.
Only Anne’s father, Otto Frank, survived the war.
New Yorkers can now get pickle-flavored soft serve
In a real life case of "We can pickle that," New York City's Lucky Pickle Dumpling Co. has pickled... ice cream. Well, sort of, they made pickle-flavored soft serve.
It sells for $5/serving.
Previously: Pickle juice slushies are coming to Sonic Drive-In this summer
pickle image via Wikipedia Read the rest
Here's a Tesla Model X towing an airplane
There must have been one helluva marketing meeting to come up with this PR stunt.
"No one believes electric vehicles have pulling power!"
"Let's prove they do!"
"With a 287,000 pound plane!"
Silence.
Six months later...
On a remote taxiway at Melbourne Airport, a Tesla Model X P100D with the greatest pulling power of any electric passenger vehicle came face to face against the newest star of the Qantas fleet, a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner.
The stunt earned a new Guinness World Record for "heaviest tow by an electric production passenger vehicle," according to CNN Money.
Doc Martens with velcro straps
Daiki Suzuki's menswear brand Engineered Garments took the iconic Dr. Martens 1461 shoe and made them into grandpa shoes by adding velcro straps.
They're available in five colors at End. Clothing for $229/pair.
Previously: William Blake Doc Martens and Turn your shoes into roller skates
Cat using a door knocker to be let in
Just when you think you've seen everything, a cat in Bootle, England has been captured on camera using a door knocker to be let inside. The 26-year-old man who got the footage, Daniel Richardson, had pulled over to the side of the road when he saw the cat.
He told the Liverpool Echo Saturday:
I was in my car and I caught a glimpse of it happening.
Then I watched and the cat started to climb up the door again so I whipped out my phone to record it.
I looked and wondered if that had just really happened - I was baffled.
It is not something you see everyday.
He added, "It would have only made it better if someone came out to let it in."
Stillborn two-headed fawn discovered in the woods
Two years ago, a freshly-born two-headed fawn was discovered dead in a Minnesota forest by a mushroom hunter. It has now been confirmed, in a recently-published study in The American Midland Naturalist, that the specimen is the first known case of a "conjoined two-headed white-tailed deer brought to full-term gestation and delivered."
"It’s never been described before," said Lou Cornicelli, a co-author on the study and a wildlife research manager for the DNR. "There are a few reported cases of two-headed ungulate fetuses, but nothing delivered to term. So, the uniqueness made it special..."
..."Animals that are stillborn, they don’t last long on the landscape because of scavengers," said Cornicelli. "In our case, we were lucky that he found the fawn before it was eaten and turned it into DNR."
...Wild Images In Motion Taxidermy mounted the unique two-headed fawn on a bed of greenery, where it lies as though it is just waking from a nap. The mount will eventually be moved to the MNDNR headquarters in St. Paul, where it will be on public display.
"We all thought it was pretty neat and were glad to be able to show it to the public," said Cornicelli. "The taxidermists, Robert Utne and Jessica Brooks did a great job with the mount and treated it very respectfully."
Conjoined White-Tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus) Fawns
screenshots via Prairie Sportsman
Made in Italy: Overpriced, hand-painted, 50s style refrigerators
Luxury brands Dolce&Gabbana and SMEG have teamed up to create a series of hand-painted, 1950s style refrigerators that have been made available at Neiman Marcus. There are six designs in total, all painted in Italy by Sicilian artists including Michele Ducato, Gianfranco Fiore, and Michelangelo Lacagnina.
On one hand they're charming. On the other, they cost $50,000 each (plus $495 for shipping) and have a "care" note that's of concern:
Read the restThe refrigerator compartment has automatic defrosting. During normal operation of the refrigerator, frost forms on its back wall when the compressor is working and dissolves when it is not in operation. When the compressor is not working, the frost which has built up on the back wall melts and the water flows into the opening provided in the bottom of the body of the refrigerator. From here, it flows into the tray on the compressor, where it evaporates.
The freezer compartment has to be defrosted manually. When the thickness of frost or ice on the shelves exceeds 0.75" or 2 cm, the freezer should be defrosted. A few hours before defrosting, use the knob provided to set the thermostat on 7 in order to further lower the temperature of the frozen foods. Then turn the knob to the 0 (STOP) setting and disconnect the plug from the electrical mains. Remove the frozen foods from the freezer compartment and protect them from thawing while cleaning. Place a container underneath the pipe to collect the defrosted water.
Clean both refrigerator and freezer compartment about once a month to prevent odors from building up.
