Here's a special blend of my favorite and most popular reader's stories featured during the month of August. Please, click one of the social buttons below to share this post with friends and family so I can grow the Ventipop family. Thanks for your continued support.
- "The man who lost his voice was a gentle man who didn’t ask terribly much of life." A nice story by the New York Times.
- It's as if you're seeing vintage vacation photos from some parallel alien planet. That's how I'd describe Spanish artist Paco Pomet's surreal oil paintings. At first glance, all appears normal, but on close inspection there's always something amiss; usually something with the legs. Paco Pomet likes messing with people's legs. I love the grayscale immersed in unexpected shades of neon. So talented.
- Vonnegut, Kerouac, Murakami, Bukowski...not the names I would have suspected to be on the bookstore list of the most stolen books.
- Famous writers detail there love of superheroes in a new book edited by Liesa Mignogna. Last Night, A Superhero Saved My Life dives deep into how heroes shaped the authors lives and helped them through their childhoods and hard times. Featured writers include Neil Gaiman, Jodi Picoult, Joe R. Lansdale, Karina Vaughn, Brad Meltzer & more.
Stll Not an Elton John autobiography.
- Hudson University isn't real and neither are these 10 Fictional Brands Hollywood Loves To Use in Movies and TV.
- Author Neil Gaiman, aka Mr. Amanda Palmer, on why we read and how reading changes us.
- 10 tricks to make your summer a little easier:
- We've all known a "Coleman Sweeney". Here's an unexpected approach to encouraging organ donation:
- Ventipop loves innovation in design. The simpler the design, the simpler the product, the more I hit myself in the forehead shouting things like, "You're so stupid! Why didn't you think of this?!" The Rinser Toothbrush is one of those products and is available now for pre-order.
- Turns out all the maps are wrong, you don't live where you think you live and we've been taught to look at the Earth upside-down. Cartographers use a 2D projection to convert our spherical world into a flat world for mapping purposes; which distorts the hell out of everything and misrepresents the sizes of geography everywhere. This projection is called the Mercator Projection. After a couple scientists watched an episode of The West Wing (see clip below), they created this app, The True Size Of.., with the hope teachers would use it to show their students just how big the world is.
- Want some more weird history? Here are some horrible things that happened to famous people's bodies after their deaths; including Mozart's skull, Anne Boleyn's heart and the one I'm going to have nightmares about: Napoleon's penis.
- A canoe is a canoe. Until now. Belgian designers at Onak Canoe have created a foldaway canoe in a box for two. Their Kickstarter campaign has been funded and they expect to begin selling the canoe to the public later this year.
- Steve Hartman's simple story of a girl and her duck kick things off today:
- Serbian artist Nikola Čuljić claims his artwork is not 3D. I've watched this video all month and I'm still unconvinced...and thoroughly confused.
