Paul Gallagher at Dangerous Minds: "There are some things in life that are best left unsaid. For everything else, there’s cake!"

Gawker's Garielle Bluestone on the flight from hell: "Traveling means inevitably forgetting something at home, but America's most hated airline, United, took it to another level this week."

I've seen tons of Games of Thrones cosplay before, but never one featuring Renly Baratheon and after seeing this one -I don't think anyone else could even compete. If you don't recognize the scene being cosplayed, it's the one where Stannis' bizzare shadow baby killed the rival king.

Link Via Fashionably Geek

Until 1978 foreigners were officially classified by the government as livestock and were subcategorised by odour.

Defining who was and wasn't English became complicated. By the end of the decade, right-wing nationalists had drawn up a list that demanded the deportation of everyone apart from 9 people, all of who claimed to be the only true English. They even insisted on the deportation of all foreign foods (which they later amended, granting visas to pizza, kebab and curry sauce).

Their spokesperson, Colin Head, said at a 1976 rally:  

"We reject foreign influences in England. That is our weltanschauung. Multiculturalism is our bête noire and we strongly believe that English culture is destined to become kaput if the current zeitgeist continues to be de rigueur. But it doesn't have to be a fait accompli and that's why we will continue to be the enfant terrible of modern politics. It's time to act: Carpe diem!"

Ex-germinate! Allegedly, this planter is owned by Chris Balcombe, an accomplished collector of Doctor Who memorabilia. I like the idea of using the shells of slain Daleks as decorations.

-via Nerd Approved

We've come too far
To give up who we are
So let's raise the bar ...

... with Daft Punk, Pharrel Williams and Nile Rodgers' Get Lucky* as covered by talented amateurs. We're up all night compiling these just for you, Neatoramanauts!

Daft Pianist

YouTube Link

cdza or Collective Cadenza is a group of 55 musicians who create musical video experiments - in this case, five of them decided to recreate Get Lucky with the piano and aptly called the music video Daft Pianist.

Get Lucky, Irish Waltz Style

YouTube Link

Daft Punk may be French, but their song still sounds pretty good when covered in the style of traditional (well, sort of) Irish waltz by Scott Bradlee and the Postmodern Jukebox. We'll raise a pint of Guinness to that!

Black Simon & Garfunkel's Get Lucky

YouTube Link

If you thought that Get Lucky should be covered by Simon & Garfunkel, well, that ain't happening. But there's something even better: Black Simon & Garfunkel!

As you can see from this clip from Jimmy Fallon's Late Night show, Black Simon & Garfunkel (that's Questlove and "Captain" Kirk Douglas from The Roots), has got Get Lucky down pat.

Boots & Cats

YouTube Link

What could make Daft Punk's megahit even, uh, harder better faster stronger? Add a little "boots and cats", then change "lucky" to "neefy," just like Oliver Age 24 did. Doin' it right, I say.

Evolution of Get Lucky

YouTube Link

Not content just to cover Get Lucky, French musician PV Nova covered it in a range of musical styles of 1920 to 2020. Behold, the Evolution of Get Lucky. C'est vraiment fantastique!

Get Twangy!

YouTube Link

Paddle faster! We hear Get Lucky on a banjo (or should it be Get Twangy?). Charles Butler is the man behind this bit of brilliance. Like that? Check out Charles' Beats Antique cover of Get Lucky.

Acapella Get Lucky

YouTube Link

Of course, Get Lucky cover won't be complete without an acapella version. The Sons of Pitches has got that covered!

*Get Lucky, of course, is a disco. What? You thought disco sucks? Silly you!

What did we miss? Kindly inform us in the comments!

Fame is a fickle mistress. You never when she will bestow her blessings upon you, and you don’t know when she’ll take it away — although starring in really crappy scifi and fantasy movies is a pretty good way to make the latter happen. Here are 15 poor souls whose movie careers ended rather abruptly.

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Extreme Boating

Question:What would it be like to navigate a rowboat through a lake of mercury? What about bromine? Liquid gallium? Liquid tungsten? Liquid nitrogen? Liquid helium? By:–Nicholas Aron Let's take these one at a time. Bromine and mercury are the only known pure elements that are liquid at room temperature. Rowing a boat on a sea of mercury just might be possible. **Mercury** is so dense that [steel ball bearings float on the surface](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGv_YVQHu7U). Your boat would be so buoyant that you'd barely make a dent in the mercury, and you'd have to lean your weight into the paddle to get the end of it below the surface. Image:boat_mercury.png:'Michael, row the boat ashore.' 'I'm TRYING!' In the end, it certainly wouldn't be easy, and you wouldn't be able to move *fast*. But you could probably row a little bit. You should probably avoid splash fights. **Bromine** is about as dense as water, so a standard rowboat could in theory float on it. However, Bromine is awful. For one thing, it smells terrible; the name "bromine" comes from the ancient Greek "brōmos", meaning "stench". If that weren't enough, it [violently reacts](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCwHzTsx5yY) with a lot of materials. Hopefully, you're not in an aluminium rowboat. Imageboat_bromine_aluminium.png:The mercury one was going to be the least deadly, wasn't it. If that's not incentive enough to avoid it, the [Materials Safety Data Sheet on bromine](http://avogadro.chem.iastate.edu/MSDS/Br2.htm) includes the following phrases: - "severe burns and ulceration" - "perforation of the digestive tract" - "permanent corneal opacification" - "vertigo, anxiety, depression, muscle incoordination, and emotional instability" - "diarrhea, possibly with blood" You should not get in a splash fight on a bromine lake. **Liquid gallium** is weird stuff. Gallium melts just above room temperature, like butter, so you can't hold it in your hand for too long. It's fairly dense, though not anywhere near as dense as mercury, and would be easier to row a boat on. However, once again, you'd better hope the boat isn't made of aluminium, because aluminium (like many metals) absorbs gallium like a sponge absorbs water. The gallium spreads throughout the aluminium, dramatically changing its chemical properties. The modified aluminium is so weak it can be [pulled apart like wet paper](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaMWxLCGY0U). This is something gallium has in common with mercury—both will [destroy aluminium](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Ilxsu-JlY). Like my grandma used to say, don't sail an aluminium boat on a gallium lake. (My grandma was a little strange.) **Liquid tungsten** is really hard to work with. Tungsten has the highest melting point of any element. This means there's a lot we don't know about its properties. The reason for this—and this may sound a little stupid—is that it's hard to study, because we can't find a container to hold it in. For almost any container, the material in the container will melt before the tungsten does. There are a few compounds, like tantalum hafnium carbide, with slightly higher melting points, but no one has been able to make a liquid tungsten container with them. To give you an idea of how hot liquid tungsten is, I could tell you the exact temperature that it melts at (3422°C). But a better point might be this: *Liquid tungsten is so hot, if you dropped it into a lava flow, the lava would freeze the tungsten.* Needless to say, if you set a boat on a sea of liquid tungsten, both you and the boat would rapidly combust and be incinerated. **Liquid nitrogen** is very cold. Liquid helium is colder, but they're both closer to absolute zero than to the coldest temperatures in Antarctica, so to someone floating on them in a boat, the temperature difference is not that significant. A [Dartmouth engineering page on liquid nitrogen safety](http://engineering.dartmouth.edu/microeng/ln2.html) includes the following phrases: - "violent reactions with organic materials" - "it will explode" - "displace oxygen in the room" - "severe clothing fire" - "suffocation without warning" Liquid nitrogen has a density similar to that of water, so a rowboat would float on it, but if you were in it, you wouldn't survive for long. If the air above the nitrogen was room temperature when you started, it would cool rapidly, and you and the boat would be smothered in a thick fog as the water condensed out of the air. (This is the same effect that causes steam when you pour out liquid nitrogen.) The condensation would freeze, quickly covering your boat in a layer of frost. The warm air would cause the nitrogen on the surface to evaporate. This would displace the oxygen over the lake, causing you to asphyxiate. If the air (or the nitrogen) were both cold enough to avoid evaporation, you would instead develop hypothermia and die of exposure. **Liquid helium** would be worse. For one thing, it's only about one-eighth as dense as water, so your boat would have to be eight times larger to support a given weight. Imageboat_large.png:Frankly, what they needed was a smaller shark. But helium has a trick. When cooled below about two degrees kelvin, it becomes a superfluid, which has the odd property that it crawls up and over the walls of containers by capillary forces. It crawls along at about 20 centimeters per second, so it would take the liquid helium less than 30 seconds to start collecting in the bottom of your boat. This would, as in the liquid nitrogen scenario, cause rapid death from hypothermia. If it's any consolation, as you lay dying, you would be able to observe an odd phenomenon. Superfluid helium films, like the one rapidly covering you, carry the same types of ordinary sound waves that most materials do. But they also exhibit an additional type of wave, a slow-moving ripple that propogates along thin films of helium. It's only observed in superfluids, and has the mysterious and poetic name "[third sound](http://www.physics.berkeley.edu/research/packard/current_research/schechter's%20web/page2.html)." Your eardrums may no longer function, and wouldn't be able to detect this type of vibration anyway, but as you froze to death in the floor of a giant boat, your ears would be filled—literally—with a sound no human can ever hear: The third sound. And that, at least, is pretty cool. Imageboat_cool.png:Worth it.

A recent Jägermeister pool party in Mexico turned to panic after organizers poured four buckets of liquid nitrogen into the water, sending eight to hospital and leaving one partygoer in a coma. As you'll see in this video, things got ugly pretty quick.

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My knowledge of subatomic particles is… let’s just say “lacking.” So I’ll let creator Virtox explain the science behind their magnificent line of 3D printed jewelry:

Ever since I first learned about subatomic particles and their spiral movements in magnetic fields, I could not help but be inspired. The different charges, masses and speeds determine the trajectories and create these astounding images in bubble chambers. With the arrival of accessible 3d printing, I got to work to capture this beauty in jewelry. I wrote a piece of software that would trace possible (and impossible) orbits and trajectories in 3 dimensions.

After partnering with MixeeLabs, Quark Jewelry was born. You can check out more of the (gorgeous) pieces behind the cut.

Science, man. Science.

(via: Fashionably Geek)

Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

Here's the brand new video for The Postal Service's "A Tattered Line of String," one of the fresh bonus tracks on the deluxe 10th anniversary edition of their classic LP "Give Up." This was the song the reunited group played during their first ever TV appearance on last night's episode of The Colbert Report. You can watch the live performance here and the interview segment below. I can't wait to see them live!

No such thing as too many cars!

While he's at it, should Superman get an Instagram account? We want to know what the Man of Steel eats while he's eating it.

-via Nerd Approved

(Photo: unknown)

It's the folk-rock polka music that really makes it.

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In case you missed it, here's all the artses from yesterday.

For Video Games Week, Jimmy Fallon offered a heartfelt tribute to World of Warcraft through a 1980′s-style pop anthem. Joining him in celebration of the MMO are some famous people such as Felicia Day, Chris Hardwick, and the viral video star “Leeroy Jenkins.” There are also some not-so-famous people, like the guy with the horse mask.

As a side note– you know the Lich King was killed two expansion packs ago, right? Yeah. Just checking.

(via Blastr)

Previously in World of Warcraft

• Blizzard Offers Kittens in Hurricane Relief Promotion
• Go Outside, If You Can. If Not, Play Video Games
• Laying Down My Sword: How Games Can Inspire Moral Decisions, Even Without Asking

Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

As illustrated by Trent Reznor‘s twitpic above, David Lynch will be directing the video for Nine Inch Nails’ Come Back Haunted.

Pitchfork confirmed that this picture means a video is in the works. Or they guessed. But probably confirmed. Their story isn’t entirely clear how they know, but I trust they do.

The video is only one of Lynch’s recent or ongoing projects, which include his new album The Big Dream, a paper lightning bolt and a box with wallpaper and a nude woman.

You can listen to Came Back Haunted with the Soundcloud player below, and below that see Lynch and Likke Li‘s new video for I’m Waiting Here.

And, then, below those, is Mark Romanek‘s video for Nine Inch Nail’s The Perfect Drug, a song that Lynch used on the soundtrack of Lost Highway. This is about the gold standard of Nine Inch Nails videos so far but unfortunately, this isn’t the gold standard of uploads.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

David Lynch Directing A Video For Nine Inch Nails

This is Uraba lugens, a caterpillar that wears a bunch of its old heads on top of its current head like the world's most ridiculously macabre hat. The part of this photo where the otherwise horizontal caterpillar goes vertical? That's a pyramid of exoskeleton head capsules, stacked in descending order from smallest to largest.

The venerable Bug Girl has some better shots of this phenomenon at her blog, along with lots of great information explaining how the heck Uraba lugens ends up making this questionable fashion statement. She also offers this helpful advice:

If you do happen to see one of these, you should not touch it! Apparently these caterpillars are covered with highly itchy and irritating spines–which seems to make their chapeau of old heads a bit redundant.

Image: Uraba lugens, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from dhobern's photostream

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Imgur user ytegg gives us Game of Thrones reimagined as other popular TV shows. Might I also add Teen Wolf for Bran and Summer? I’m pretty sure he’s only 12, but he can send his consciousness into a wolf, and that has to count for something. Work with me here.

OK, fine. The Lannisters with Modern Family? Olenna sassing all her younger relatives with Downton Abbey? Walder Frey with Bridezillas?

Sorry, too soon?

(via: Tastefully Offensive)

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Loving this minimalist homage to the greatest mathematical companion/handheld gaming device of all time (Falldown, anyone?), created by Brooklyn Designer Jonathan Bobrow.

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[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

Brad Downey is familiar with both sides of the art world, with a fine arts degree and gallery exhibitions, on the one hand, and run-ins with the authorities about his sometimes-unsanctioned street art on the other.

His work is harder to describe that it is to simply see, since it is often in the most public places you could imagine (or documented via extensive photography) – erupting from sidewalks, disrupting bicycle lanes or literally ripping up cobbled streets

Per the pictures, sometimes these installations transpose ideas and objects from other contexts, but they also frequently warp existing everyday objects like bicycles, cars, signs, benches, shopping carts and garbage cans.

Sometimes he works alone – sometimes collaboratively. Some of his pieces are stand-alones and one-offs while others form sets, like Wedging (shown above), which is a series of experiments of balance and obstruction in alleys with ordinary household items.

He has had run-ins with police while working in cities ranging from London to Amsterdam, on both art and guerrilla marketing projects performed in that gray area of public and possible vandalism.

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[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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bigredrobot:

Action Comics #224
“The Secret of Superman Island!”
Cover by Al Plastino

Shadowrun’s been away since time immemorial. It hasn’t had a videogame in ages – well, except 2007′s bizarrely out-of-character multiplayer shooter revival, but we don’t talk about that. As a result, however, The Rules dictate that Shadowrun’s next digital dalliance constitutes a return, and so it is with Shadowrun Returns. The technomagical role-player looks positively fantastic, so we at RPS are awaiting it with baited breath. That’s right: we’re actively making our mouths smell more appealing so as to lure it into grasping/maybe-licking range. And clearly, it’s worked, because Harebrained just announced that it’ll be out next month – and fully editable on day one, to boot.

(more…)

Ok, it's no NFL bad lip reading but this fake commentary by a British broadcaster of a baseball game is still pretty hilarious.

He runs in to bowl...Mork and Mindy, that's going for six! No! Caught by the chap in the pajamas with the glove that makes everything easier. And they all scuttle off for a nap.

Tags: baseball   sports   video

http://www.pattonoswalt.com/index.cfm?page=spew&id=167