flickering pictures

Sand animation is the art of storytelling through continuously created and recreated images in sand, and there may be no one better at it than Kseniya Simonova. In the video above, she steals the show on Ukraine’s equivalent of the America’s Got Talent TV show, and has the judges and audience in tears as […]

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As the Western world looks for ways to stave off a massive impending nursing shortage, the Czech Republic has come up with a novel way to attract nurses from other, richer countries: free boob jobs for everyone. I’m not sure if this makes the Czech Republic a better place to be a nurse, but […]

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When I stumbled across a brief history of bartitsu on the Web, I assumed it was a Simpsons joke at best or a ninth-rate Shaq-Fu clone at worst. But as it turns out, bartitsu is a legitimate blend of jiujitsu, sumo wrestling, French kickboxing, stick fighting, and other martial arts. And despite all […]

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Sweden’s Flygbussarna bus company has built a 300-ton “bus” out of 50 crushed cars, to highlight the fact that each of its buses can potentially take 50 cars worth of emissions out of our air. They’re calling it a bus, but it’s really more a rectangular heap of twisted metal, with wheels tacked on […]

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Yes, it’s a rock. But a lot of people want it. Here’s why.
The creatively named island of Rockall sits just northwest of Ireland and south of Iceland in the Atlantic Ocean, and unless you to listen to BBC shipping forecasts, it’s a safe bet you’ve never heard of it. At about 83 […]

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The Vatican has rejected yet another potential U.S. ambassador — Caroline Kennedy this time — because even though she’s Catholic, she isn’t anti-abortion. And as if to drive home the point, the Vatican chose Easter to express its outrage at Washington’s “calculated insult to the Holy See.”
Washington’s previous nominee, a former lawyer for Reagan […]

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This would be hilarious if it weren’t so terrifying.
The BBC reports:

HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant were badly damaged in the crash in heavy seas earlier this month.
[…] The submarines are equipped with sonar to detect other vessels nearby but our correspondent said it be might the case that the anti-sonar devices, meant to hide […]

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Germany’s world-renowned Max Planck Institutes, whose science and technology researchers are among the world’s finest, accidentally printed an ad for a Chinese brothel on the cover of its latest journal.
The Independent reports:

There were red faces on the editorial board of one of Germany’s top scientific institutions, the Max Planck Institute, after it ran the text […]

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Yesterday’s Boston Globe featured an unbelievable collection of photos of the ongoing anarchy in Athens. Nearly any one of these shots, if you took them, would be the best photo you’d ever take.
The riots were sparked by the police shooting of Alexis Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old boy who was allegedly with other youths who threw […]

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Equal parts gimmicky and awesome, the Black Cab Sessions feature musicians from Lykke Li and the Cold War Kids to the Raveonettes and Martha Wainwright, all playing in the back seats of London’s iconic black cabs. The videos on the official site can sometimes be more than a little choppy, but the Youtube versions […]

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