Japanese company Samurai Age creates this epic samurai armor for cats and dogs! They offer standardized armor sized for cats and small dogs and they also make custom designs. They also sell pet fashion sets made after armor worn by the legendary Japanese samurais. For instance, the red armor on a Shibu Inu in the pics below is actually modeled after the armor worn by Sengoku hero Sanada Yukimura...
Fulfilling the ancient prophecy. You may think the Master Sword is the classic way to defeat such an evil. While it is powerful, don't let it blind you from the destructive force of the Bombchu. Yes, they are random, but that's why they are a secret weapon. You never see them coming. $39.99
Light it up. Yeah, Bruce is usually pretty dark and skulking, but he's ready to brighten up a bit. He's going to enter the room and start beating up baddies with some pizazz going forward. Might not help much when he's trying to hide in the cover of night. Worth it. $29.99
"Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?"
Amazon tried to release a smartphone once, a device called the Fire Phone, which was a heavily modified handset similar in scope and appeal to its Fire tablet lineup.
Amazon tried to position the Fire Phone as a proper competitor to other smartphone releases in the United States, but it didn’t really take off. Depending on who you ask, the fact it didn’t have access to the proper Google Play Store might have been one of the reasons it didn’t fare well. And apparently Amazon might agree with that.
Today we’re seeing a report that Amazon is currently working on a smartphone codenamed “Ice” that will include access to Google’s Play Services, including the Play Store, so owners can download apps directly from the digital storefront and not rely solely on Amazon’s Appstore.
The report from Gadgets 360 says that Amazon will be putting its focus on emerging markets with its Ice phone, like India, and that it will have a display somewhere between 5.2 and 5.5 inches. It will apparently have 16GB of built-in storage, 2GB of RAM, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 435 processor to power things along. It may even have a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor. What’s more, the publication says the handset could launch with a price tag of only $93 or so, but that could change ahead of its launch.
As it stands right now, one interesting omission is apparently Amazon’s own Alexa, which is certainly a curious holdout if true. However, that detail may change before the phone’s arrival.
If the Ice phone is real, it sounds like Amazon’s change in direction for the smartphone market might serve it well. Did you ever try out a Fire Phone?
"In modern America, anyone who attempts to write satirically about the events of the day finds it difficult to concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not actually come to pass while the article is still on the presses."
The state of Arkansas was apparently originally known as the Territory of Arkansaw [sic]. Why would they have changed the spelling from Arkansaw to Arkansas despite the latter not resembling the name’s pronunciation?
User ScallopOolong responded with a long comment beginning:
George R. Stewart has a whole chapter on this general topic in Names on the Land. He says that Arkansas is the only state name “about which pronunciation and spelling ever rose to be a major issue”. Arkansas/Arkansaw, originally referring to the river, was part of the Louisiana Purchase and, like many other place names in the region, Americans adopted the French pronunciation (or at least an approximation of it). And the name was often, but not always, spelled accordingly: Arkansaw.
In 1819 Congress passed a law creating a territory spelled, according to the Act of Congress, Territory of Arkansaw. In the very same year a New Yorker named William Woodruff moved to the new capital of Arkansaw Territory. Woodruff felt very strongly about language and spelling. He even attacked Noah Webster for including the word “lengthy” in his dictionary, for clearly not being a real word. Woodruff was also a printer by trade and set up a newspaper in the new Arkansaw Territory. In the first issue he printed the Act of Congress that had created Arkansaw Territory. In this Act the word “Arkansaw” occurred eight times. Woodruff felt very strongly it ought to be Arkansas, which was still a common alternate spelling. In his newspaper’s printing of the Act of Congress he changed all eight mentions of Arkansaw to Arkansas.
The population of the territory was only about 10,000, and very many could not read. And most had little to no preference over the spelling of the territorial name. In any case, Woodruff’s newspaper had a huge influence on this particular issue. As Stewart puts it, “Apparently even Congress forgot about [their] original spelling, and later bills used Arkansas”. Reprintings of the Act of Congress quickly started spelling it Arkansas, even official, federal printings. In short, official documents “simply changed the spelling without comment, as if a mere clerical error were being corrected”.
There are a great many more details which I will elide to get to this part:
In 1881 the state legislature passed an official resolution declaring the pronunciation to be “Arkansaw”, in accord with the local manner of speech. They also declared the pronunciation Arkánsas “an innovation to be discouraged”.
For most of the country, this settled it. The state was spelled Arkansas but pronounced Arkansaw. So be it. Except! There is also the Arkansas River, which flows through a great deal of Kansas. The people of Kansas tended to call the river the Arkánsas River. And there was a town by the border called Arkánsas City. After the state of Arkansas declared the pronunciation Arkansaw, and the rest of the country said “okay”, dictionaries soon began to say the river was also pronounced Arkansaw, as was Arkansas City, in Kansas. Some people of Arkansas tried, mostly half-heartedly, to convince the people of Kansas to pronounce the river and Arkansas City “arkansaw”. But since they had called upon local usage tradition in their own support of “arkansaw” they could not easily say that the people of Kansas had to abandon their local pronunciation traditions.
Arkansas City, Kansas, is still pronounced Arkánsas. And in much of Kansas the Arkansas River is likewise pronounced Arkánsas. The same goes for Arkansas Street, in Wichita, Kansas.
Fascinating stuff, especially if you have roots in Arkansas, as I do. (I wrote about Names on the Landhere and here.)
A couple pushes on the Waterfall Swing and you'll be...swiiiing-in' in the rain, just swing-in' in the rain. What a glorious feeling.... This impressive piece of interactive art consists of a steel framed swing set housing a series of mechanical solenoids that create a streaming curtain of water when activated.
Swingers can pass through the straight-streaming waterfall on their way up and then again on the way back. Or they can play around with the set's timed and patterned cascades, trying to pass through center right as the middle jets stop and create an arced opening.
The Waterfall Swing also has settings that allow it to "rain" letters and shapes, as demonstrated in the second video in the gallery above.
Waterfall Swing design credits go to Mike O'Toole, Andrew Ratcliff, Ian Charnas, and Andrew Witte; the set was built by Dash 7 Design. While not mass produced or, at least at printing, available for purchase, you may stumble upon the Waterfall Swing in a town near you, as it travels the world and installs itself for public test drives.
I think this python skin Death Trooper Helmet solidifies maker ELEMNT's position on Team Dark Side. Their first snaked-out Star Wars replica payed homage to Darth Vader, and was shaped around one of the 1,200 collector's edition helmets Disney made with the mold used to cast the Dark Lord's helmets in the original Star Wars series.
For python Star Wars, version Death Trooper, ELEMNT used the original Death Trooper helmet designed for Rogue One and, like before, has made just one piece. It shows off all of the mold's details, including dents and abrasions, through the snakeskin, and you can sport it as a functional piece of headwear if you've got somewhere appropriate to wear it to. I'm thinking black tie event. Or summer wedding. Well. As long as it's indoors and air conditioned.
The reptilian Death Trooper Helmet also comes with a clear display case and black base in case you prefer to show it off on your table or desktop rather than your head.
Note to Harry Potter House Slytherin fans: The python skin Darth Vader and python skin Death Trooper Helmets are the only pieces of Voldemort-approved Star Wars gifts.
While some are drawn to the strong brushstrokes of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, others prefer gazing at the gilded glory of Klimt’s The Kiss, but one thing is certain: people love art. In fact, each month, there are more than 500 million art-related searches on Google. Now whether you’re a casual fan or a true culture vulture, Google can help you become an art expert. Starting today, when you search for art-related things, you’ll have access to more relevant results and the ability to dive deeper into topics of interest. We’ve also added a new feature in Street View (think digital museum guide!) that gives you key insights about the artworks on your virtual museum visits.
Explore more art right from Google Search
To help make your search for art a masterpiece, the Google Arts & Culture team joined forces with Google Search engineers to improve how our systems understand and recognize artworks, the places you can see them in person, the artists who made them, the materials they used, the art period they belong to and the connections among all these.
Now when you search an artist like Gustav Klimt, you’ll see an interactive Knowledge Panel that will highlight ways you can explore on a deeper level, like seeing a collection of the artist’s works or even scrolling through the museums where you can view the paintings on the wall. And for some pieces, you can click through to see picture-perfect high-resolution imagery right from Google Arts & Culture.
Google Arts & Culture, your virtual museum guide
You can visit hundreds of museums around the world right from your laptop with Google Maps and Google Arts & Culture. And starting today your virtual Street View tour is more informative on desktop and in the Chrome browser on mobile. Now as you walk through the rooms of the museums on Google Maps you’ll see clear and useful annotations on the wall next to each piece. Clicking on these annotations will bring you to a new page with more information provided by hundreds of the world’s renowned museums. You’ll also be able to zoom into high-resolution imagery—getting you closer to these iconic works than you ever thought possible.
To create this feature, we put our visual recognition software to work. Similar to how machine learning technology in Google Photos allows you to search for things in your gallery, this software scanned the walls of participating museums all over the world, identifying and categorizing more than 15,000 works.
Discovering the art world has never been easier on Google, and we hope this inspires you to brush up on your art knowledge. So take a moment. Dive in. Who knows—with a stroke of luck, you may find yourself drawn...to art!
Nearly 75 years after first appearing in All Star Comics #8, Wonder Woman continues to be a symbol of female empowerment, breaking through stereotypes pervasive in comic books, gaming and pop culture.
Now, Wonder Woman’s Super Hero story is coming to the big screen in her first-ever movie, which opens in theaters tomorrow. Throughout the film, we see Princess Diana's strength through her leadership, perseverance, courage and camaraderie.
Wonder Woman is also one of the strongest characters on the small screen in the game DC Legends, which just released an update tied to the movie on Google Play. The update brings exclusive movie content, two major new game modes and special in-game events inspired by the film. Only a small percentage of video game characters are female, but in the DC Legends game, girls can select Wonder Woman and channel her strength while they play.
Wonder Woman’s strength is more relevant today than ever, especially in the technology space, since girls are less likely than boys to be encouraged to pursue computer science and only 22 percent of gaming developers are women. Made with Code, Google’s initiative to champion the next generation of female leaders and inspire them to see coding as a way to pursue their dreams, is releasing a new interactive coding project for wonder women everywhere to add coding to their superpower toolkit. With the project, teen girls can code three unique scenes from the film, using introductory coding principles to help Wonder Woman navigate obstacles and reach her goal.
As part of this collaboration, Google Play and Made with Code are teaming up with Warner Bros to bring together more than 100 teen girls from Los Angeles to advance screen the Wonder Woman movie, play the updated DC Legends game and complete the coding project. We hope Wonder Woman’s message of empowerment inspires teen girls, and women, to build confidence in pursuing careers in computer science, engineering, gaming—or whatever their dreams may be.
Gotta love blue shells. The true unfair equalizers.
