Andrew.frampton

Just because the Disney princesses are royalty doesn't mean they don't enjoy a little Halloween fun and in Isaiah Stephen's fun artworks, these classic characters have some pretty varried interests that leave them dressed up in all kinds of cute pop culture characters. 

While the art is great and the idea is fun, some of his choices are totally fitting for the characters -particularly Mulan as Xena and Belle as Hermoine Granger.

It's particularly nice to see Aurora in control of a dragon version of Malificent while she trick or treats as Daenerys Targaryen -if only because she does so little during Sleeping Beauty.

Via The Mary Sue

What's underneath this massive, overgrown, pile of leaves? Believe it or not, it's a car. A zombie car, actually.

The abandoned old blue van was found parked on a street in Huayang village, China. Residents of the neighborhood called it the "zombie car" or "jiangshiche" a term that has been used to call abandoned vehicles in China. Photo of this particular zombie car went viral on China's Weibo social network.

See also: Houses Covered in Kudzu

Hello! Who's in there?

When police officials tracked down the owner, he told them that he sold the car three years ago but didn't remember anything about the buyer. Police tried to remove the vines but soon gave up. Instead, they opted to tow the whole thing as is:

NBC News's Behind The Wall has more on this nifty story.

Photos: CFP

Deborah Solomon remarks that “although [Norman] Rockwell is often described as a portrayer of the nuclear family, this is a misconception”:

Of his 322 covers for the Saturday Evening Post, only three portray a conventional family of parents and two or more children (Going and Coming, 1947; Walking to Church, 1953; and Easter Morning, 1959). Rockwell culled the majority of his figures from an imaginary assembly of boys and fathers and grandfathers who convene in places where women seldom intrude. Boyishness is presented in his work as a desirable quality, even in girls. Rockwell’s female figures tend to break from traditional gender roles and assume masculine guises. Typically, a redheaded girl with a black eye sits in the hall outside the principal’s office, grinning despite the reprimand awaiting her.

Although he married three times and raised a family, Rockwell acknowledged that he didn’t pine for women. They made him feel imperiled. He preferred the nearly constant companionship of men whom he perceived as physically strong. He sought out friends who went fishing in the wilderness and trekked up mountains, men with mud on their shoes, daredevils who were not prim and careful the way he was.

(Image: Shiner illustration © SEPS. Used by courtesy of Curtis Licensing)

In January, 1977, actor Vincent Price appeared on The Muppet Show. Though he was most famous for his B-movie horror roles, Price was a classically trained and highly accomplished stage actor.

In this scene, Kermit interviews Price about the actor’s craft. Price has vampiric fangs. How?

Price explains that after years of concentrated effort and skill development, a master thespian can grow fangs at will. Kermit, as you can see, learns quickly.

-via Super Punch

Track: Civilization | Album: Audio, Video, Disco | Artist: Justice

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The Nerdist has a review:

From one of the brilliantly twisted minds that brought you Neil’s Puppet Dreams comes the retelling of Rambo you never knew you needed, complete with three musical numbers and more homoerotic subtext than a Whitesnake music video: Michael Serrato’s Rambo…But Gay. Okay, maybe subtext is a generous term, but as Serrato explains in the video, he wanted to take something that society has branded to be hypermasculine and hyper-heterosexual and give it a gay retelling. The result is a campy, over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek take on Rambo’s bloody revenge saga, but with way better choreography and wardrobe.

Serrato was a cast member of Logo's Big Gay Sketch Show.  The bit about the restrooms slayed me. Toddrick Hall has got some serious competition.

(Tipped by JMG reader Sam)

The tittle gives everything away. If you love mid century modern design then you will fall in love with this cute little tumblr blog

House stenographer and conservative martyr Dianne Reidy explained her Wednesday night outburst in an email to Fox News’ Chad Pergram: “For the past 2 and 1/2 weeks, the Holy Spirit has been waking me up in the middle of the night and preparing me (through my reluctance and doubt) to deliver a message in the House Chamber.
 That is what I did last night.”

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via thisislifecharliebrown. More peanuts here

I’ve put Manningface on all 32 logos

I’ve made all 32 logos into fine British gentlemen

I’ve re-designed all 32 uniforms

I’ve Photoshoped every QB onto their team’s namesake

It is now time for my next 32 team project. I present to you, the answer to a question literally no one asked. What if all 32 team logos…WERE FAT?!?

 

I guess the answer is most of them would be food. Until my next 32 team nightmare, try not to eat too much.

via incidentalcomics

Britney Spears is already ruling dancefloors with top 20 hit “Work Bitch” but the track will go supernova in clubland when its mash-up with Martin Garrix‘s surprise Billboard Hot 100 hit “Animals” reaches the DJ booth. The 17-year-old wunderkind is already one of the hottest properties in EDM but it certainly can’t hurt to be associated with the future Las Vegas resident.

The mash-up/remix works so well because Britney’s motivational anthem is already an electro-house track squeezed (somewhat uncomfortably) into a pop framework. The Dutch DJ simply frees the song of its melodic shackles and throws in the insanely catchy hooks that made “Animals” an international smash.

The end result? Everything has been dialed up to 11. The synths are now heavier, giving clubbers an even bigger “beat to dance off”. Slip on your bikini, grab a martini and dance bitch. Listen to the winning overhaul after the jump.

Should this be released as an official remix? Your thoughts in the comments below.

One of the proposed Manhattan super-skyscrapers that I mentioned last month has been approved by the city. At a comparative height of more than 100 floors, it will have only 100 apartments.

Ever want to look down on the Empire State Building? How about from your apartment? In three years, well-heeled buyers will be able to do that from the top floors of a 1,350-foot tower that won approval Tuesday. The building’s roofline is 100 feet higher than New York’s famous skyscraper — minus its iconic antenna — and will rise like a serrated knife next to Steinway Hall on W. 57th St. The new-old tandem, due for completion in 2016, will contain about 100 apartments. Construction should start next spring, and the famed piano company will move out of its 1925 home. The designers said they got their inspiration for the sleek structure from early cloud-busters such as the Empire State and Woolworth buildings.  .

The New York Times weighs in:

Thomas Bender, a cultural historian at New York University, said the ultraluxury towers represented a flouting of the social distribution of wealth around the world. “These are the kinds of buildings that the robber barons built,” Professor Bender said, “but it’s also what you see in rapidly developing societies where billionaires seek to distinguish themselves in the midst of poverty.” A century ago, the beauty of the 840 acres that make up Central Park inspired another boom in ultraluxury housing: Millionaires’ Row. The Astor, Vanderbilt, Frick and Whitney families built mansions along a stretch of Fifth Avenue north of 50th Street. In 1905, Andrew Carnegie erected a four-story, 64-room palatial home at 91st Street. But the new luxury towers are not aimed exclusively at New Yorkers or even Americans.

Apartments at the upper floors of the above building are expected to sell for $50M and higher.

Dishheads know I believe that you cannot understand the current GOP without also grasping how bewildered so many people are by the dizzying onset of modernity. The 21st Century has brought Islamist war to America, the worst recession since the 1930s, a debt-ridden federal government, a majority-minority future, gay marriage, universal healthcare and legal weed. If you were still seething from the eruption of the 1960s, and thought that Reagan had ended all that, then the resilience of a pluralistic, multi-racial, fast-miscegenating, post-gay America, whose president looks like the future, not the past, you would indeed, at this point, be in a world-class meshugganah, cultural panic.

When you add in the fact that the American dream stopped working for most working-class folks at some point in the mid 1970s, and when you see the national debt soaring from the Reagan years onward, made much worse by the Bush-Cheney years, and then exploded by the recession Bush bequeathed, you have a combustible mixture. It’s very easy to lump all this together into a paranoid fantasy of an American apocalypse that must somehow be stopped at all cost. In trying to understand the far-right mindset – which accounts for around a quarter of the country – I think you have to zoom out and see all of this in context.

Many of us found in Barack Obama a very post-ideological president, a pragmatist, a Christian, and a traditional family man, and naively believed that he could both repair the enormous damage done by the Bush-Cheney administration and simultaneously reach out to the red states as well. I refuse to say the failure is his. Because he tried. For years, he was lambasted by the left for being far too accommodating, far too reasonable, aloof, not scrappy enough, weak … you know the drill by now. In fact, he was just trying to bring as much of the country along as he could in tackling the huge recession and massive debt he inherited at one and the same time, and in unwinding the 9/11 emergency, and in ending two wars and the morally and legally crippling legacy of torture (about which the GOP is simply in rigid denial).

Obama got zero votes from House Republicans for a desperately needed stimulus in his first weeks in office. So I cannot believe he could have maintained any sort of detente with the Republican right, dominated by the legacy of Palin, rather than McCain. But the healthcare reform clearly ended any sort of possibility of coexistence – and the cold civil war took off again. The first black president could, perhaps, clean up some of the mess of his predecessor, but as soon as he moved on an actual substantive change that he wanted and campaigned on, he was deemed illegitimate. Even though that change was, by any standards, a moderate one, catering to private interests, such as drug and insurance companies; even though it had no public option; even though its outline was the same as the GOP’s 2012 nominee’s in Massachusetts, this inching toward a more liberal America was the casus belli. It still is – which is why it looms so large for the Republican right in ways that can easily befuddle the rest of us.

But it is emphatically not the real reason for the revolt. It is the symptom, not the cause. My rule of thumb is pretty simple: whenever you hear a quote about Obamacare, it’s more illuminating to remove the “care” part. And Obama is a symbol of change people cannot understand, are frightened by, and seek refuge from.

That desperate need to certainty and security is what I focused on in my book about all this, The Conservative Soul. What the understandably beleaguered citizens of this new modern order want is a pristine variety of America that feels like the one they grew up in. They want truths that ring without any timbre of doubt. They want root-and-branch reform – to the days of the American Revolution. And they want all of this as a pre-packaged ideology, preferably aligned with re-written American history, and reiterated as a theater of comfort and nostalgia. They want their presidents white and their budget balanced now. That balancing it now would tip the whole world into a second depression sounds like elite cant to them; that America is, as a matter of fact, a coffee-colored country – and stronger for it – does not remove their desire for it not to be so; indeed it intensifies their futile effort to stop immigration reform. And given the apocalyptic nature of their view of what is going on, it is only natural that they would seek a totalist, radical, revolutionary halt to all of it, even if it creates economic chaos, even if it destroys millions of jobs, even though it keeps millions in immigration limbo, even if it means an unprecedented default on the debt.

This is a religion – but a particularly modern, extreme and unthinking fundamentalist religion. And such a form of religion is the antithesis of the mainline Protestantism that once dominated the Republican party as well, to a lesser extent, the Democratic party.

It also brooks no distinction between religion and politics, seeing them as fused in the same cultural and religious battle. Much of the GOP hails from that new purist, apocalyptic sect right now – and certainly no one else is attacking that kind of religious organization. But it will do to institutional political parties what entrepreneurial fundamentalism does to mainline churches: its appeal to absolute truth, total rectitude and simplicity of worldview instantly trumps tradition, reason, moderation, compromise.

Francis Wilkinson has studied the scholarship of Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, authors of The Churching of America 1776-1990. He wrote a passage yesterday that resonated with me:

An important thesis of the book is that as religious organizations grow powerful and complacent, and their adherents do likewise, they make themselves vulnerable to challenges from upstart sects that “impose significant costs in terms of sacrifice and even stigma upon their members.” For insurgent groups, fervor and discipline are their own rewards.

Right now, the Republican Party is an object of contempt to many on the far right, whose adamant convictions threaten what they perceive as Republican complacency. The Tea Party is akin to a rowdy evangelical storefront beckoning down the road from the staid Episcopal cathedral. Writing of insurgent congregations, Finke and Stark said that “sectarian members are either in or out; they must follow the demands of the group or withdraw. The ‘seductive middle ground’ is lost.”

In other words, this is not just a cold civil war. It is also a religious war – between fundamentalism and faith, between totalism and tradition, between certainty and reasoned doubt. It may need to burn itself out – with all the social and economic and human damage that entails. Or it can be defeated, as Lincoln reluctantly did to his fanatical enemies, or absorbed and coopted, as Elizabeth I did hers over decades. But it will take time. The question is what will be left of America once it subsides, and how great a cost it will have imposed.

(Photos: from a Tea Party rally, Ken Cucinnelli, far right candidate for governor of Virginia, and Michele Bachmann, apocalyptic prophet, by Getty Images.)

From digital artist Zach Dougherty comes a fantastic assortment strange, surreal, and dreamlike animated gifs that are guaranteed to make you stop and stare.

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Researchers at Connecticut College have found evidence that proves that Oreo cookies—at least for lab rats—are as addictive as cocaine.

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Hooray! It seems that the two videos we got earlier this year of Bee and Puppycat—the charming and kind of eccentric cartoon by Natasha Allegri, character designer and storyboard artist for Adventure Time—aren't all of what we get to see of the show. Well, not if Frederator Studios can raise enough money on Kickstarter.

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via intj-madscientist

 

– Legendary dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, who defected from Russia in 1974, in a statement released to the No More Fear Foundation

With the Diamondbacks and Braves gone golfing, who will make sure the game is played the right way? Worry not, the Cardinals are here to bitch about a pair of Dodger celebrations.

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