Remember when my friend Meggs came and stayed with me and I told you I would show you what he was working on? Well, I’m finally allowed to show you! Enjoy!
Max and the entire gang at Endeavor have always been good to me, when I designed snowboards for them several years ago (here) it was kind of like my first big break. Support these guys!
Katie Mello, a professional stop-motion character fabricator at LAIKA/house, made this awesome AT-AT costume for her pup, Bones Mello. You can check out her process shot on Bones’ Facebook page. Katie writes, “From the first time we saw Bones, an Italian Greyhound, my husband and I thought he looked like an AT-AT. He has such an unusual shape. Three years later, I finally made him this costume.” Bones has a little hand-sewn and painted “speed suit” topped with body pieces made out of 1/4″-thick foam sheets. Katie ensured that the costume would be cozy for Bones by sewing a soft fake fur lining into the light body piece. The little canons on the sides of his head are too cool, and he’s clearly ready for action!
Our friend Bonnie Burton interviewed Katie on the Star Wars blog to get the inside scoop on how the costume was made, how Bones likes wearing it, and what other costumes he has. What a lucky dog!
Inspired to make something for Halloween? Be sure to enter it in our MAKE Halloween contest to win cool prizes. Costumes, decor, food, whatever you create for Halloween, is welcome in the contest.
Read our full contest page for all the details.
Dan Lewis runs the popular daily newsletter Now I Know (“Learn Something New Every Day, By Email”). To subscribe to his daily email, click here.
Grand Central Terminal, located in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, has more than 40 platforms. But one of those platforms is almost never used.
In 1871, Grand Central opened its doors. While the building itself stretches from 42nd Street to 45th Street, the terminal as a whole extends — underground — as far uptown as 50th Street. One of the buildings above these tracks, somewhere between 49th and 50th Streets, was a powerhouse for the Terminal. The powerhouse had its own loading platform beneath it, used for discharging workmen and transporting machinery to the site as needed. But when Con Edison, the local utility company, began to provide power to the Terminal, the powerhouse became redundant. By the late 1920s, the world famous Waldorf-Astoria Hotel took over the entire block between 49th and 50th, bulldozing the powerhouse. By historical accident, the Waldorf-Astoria has its own, rarely used, train station.
Rarely used. But not never used. When the President of the United States is in town, the platform is a backdoor to safety.
For decades, the Waldorf-Astoria has played host to presidents visiting the city. In the mid-1940s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt visited the hotel, and a potentially apocryphal story suggests that he, for reasons of both vanity (he wanted to hide the fact that he was wheelchair-bound) and security, employed a custom-made train car that brought him right to the Waldorf-Astoria’s “secret” train station. The custom-made car—replete with bullet-proof glass, gun ports, and plate armor—still sits on the tracks, somewhere beneath Grand Central, as it is too large to move without taking it apart. It also remains on site because it may be useful. When the President is in town, all the entrances to the platform are guarded by police officers and military personnel, ensuring safe access to this underground escape route by the President in case of emergency.
***
BONUS FACT: The Waldorf is not the only New York landmark with an unused subterranean train platform. City Hall, in downtown Manhattan, is home to an unused, frozen-in-time subway station. There was also a whole hidden subway system in New York City, as well as ones in Chicago, Cincinnati, and Washington, DC.
The original source for this post is a great CNET News article about the secrets of Grand Central. But a comment therein suggested there was more to the story. A bit of Googling led to the details above. –Dan
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Polish artist Zbigniew Libera's Konzentrationslager is a work of art he created in 1996 with the unwitting help of the Lego Group, who were happy to help out with a few buckets of bricks until they realized that Libera's project consisted of fake Lego packaging detailing an Auschwitz-style death camp.
From the Cult of Lego:
From the beginning, Konzentrationslager caused a huge sensation, with viewers split on whether it was an important work or a travesty. Depicting genocide with a toy made people uncomfortable. Some Holocaust activists saw the work as trivializing the experiences of survivors, while others disagreed. The Jewish Museum in New York City displayed the sets for several months in 2002 as part of an exhibit on Nazi imagery in modern art.
Even LEGO joined in the criticism, complaining that Libera hadn't told the company what he was intending when it donated the bricks and that this contribution didn't constitute sponsorship as implied by the packaging’s labeling. LEGO tried to get Libera to stop displaying the work, backing down from its pressure only after the artist hired a lawyer.
Libera, one of Poland's preeminent artists, was asked to attend the Venice Biennale in 1997 -- on the condition that he leave Konzentrationslager at home. The artist had been imprisoned in the early '80s for publishing an underground comic mocking Poland's Soviet rulers, and that kind of put him off of censorship, so he chose not to attend.
Images Courtesy of Raster Gallery, Warsaw
Photo: Jeff Hindman
Boing Boing reader Jeff Hindman says he chanced across a "giant Legoman washed ashore" today while strolling on the beach at Siesta Key Village, Fla.
"It is very big, about 8 ft. tall," Hindman said. " ... I worked with Lego in my younger days, but this piece is amazing, it's still there on the beach."
A photo of the creature shows it beached on a sandbank, in otherwise good condition. On its chest is the message, "No real than you are."
This suggests it has the same origin as Lego men who washed ashore in Zandvoort, Holland, three years ago, and then in Brighton, England.
A tourist shot footage of the Holland landing:
Some more coverage of the earlier beaching was posted at Emvergeoning.
Further searching reveals the homepage of Ego Leonard.
My name is Ego Leonard and according to you I come from the virtual world. A world that for me represents happiness, solidarity, all green and blossoming, with no rules or limitations.
Lately however, my world has been flooded with fortune-hunters and people drunk with power. And many new encounters in the virtual world have triggered my curiosity about your way of life.
I am here to discover and learn about your world and thoughts.
Show me all the beautiful things that are there to admire and experience in your world. Let’s become friends, share your story with me, take me with you on a journey through beautiful meadows, words, sounds and gestures.
Has this Lego man been afloat for years on a translatlantic journey?
UPDATE: Video! HowBoutJoey shot some video of the beached Ego Leonard. He also stood it up, revealing the number 8.
Through a widely-reported poster campaign (see inset), "We're a Culture not a Costume" is a sincere and laudable effort to draw awareness to the perpetuation of prejudice through racist Halloween costumes. Not some big-budget ad campaign either; a project that came out of a smart and resourceful student group at Ohio University.
But as with all things sincere and laudable, the internet has turned it into lulz.
The originals really are great, though. It's nice to laugh at Daleks and golden retrievers, but the message of the original campaign is a meme that really does deserve spreading. Kudos to the designer, whoever he or she may be!
Performer, muse and model Rick Genest, who has tattooed himself from head to toe to resemble a corpse, vaulted to icon status when he appeared in Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” video — with fashion maven Gaga even dressing up like him. This past spring, he was entered into the Guinness World Book of Records for boasting the most insects tattooed on a human body (178!) and the most bones tattooed on a human body (138!). That makes it all the more impressive that for their newest beauty campaign, makeup brand DermaBlend completely erased Genest’s tattoos with their new tattoo primer and body makeup. We have to say, the results are pretty amazing. If you’ve always wanted to know what Zombie Boy looks like without the ink (we have), click through and check out this video.
[via NYLON]
According to Instructables user nsnip, they’re made from Baltic birch! To make this board, he cut the rounded ends off stacks of sticks with a table saw, laminated them stick-by-stick in five layers with alternating grain directions, and glued the whole thing together in an improvised vacuum press made from a clothes storage bag. Impressive, meticulous craftsmanship.
More:
Make: Projects — Simple Longboard
