Steampunk has jumped the shark
I stole this post title and all from Tiffany of Curious Goods.
Retro
Chillingworth the owl
I sent this link over to Becky for the CRAFT blog but I got jealous after she put it up and had to post it here, too. Chillingworth may be the coolest stuffed animal I have ever seen. He was made from an antique bodice by Ann Wood of Brooklyn.
Atlas-F missile silo converted to ultimate survival mansion
From silohome.com:
NY’s Adirondack State Park – During the late 1950’s and early 1960’s when the Cold War was escalating, the U.S. government built hundreds of Atlas-F missile silos (each for 18 million in 1961, with the rising cost of construction today one could barely fund the excavation.) to prepare the country for an attack that never came. Today, most of these silos lie abandoned and filled with water, monuments to a bygone era of American history and left to waste. But now, thanks to two entrepreneurial cousins, Bruce Francisco and Gregory Gibbons, one of these silos located in beautiful Adirondack State Park near Lake Placid is finding new life as a luxury home safe haven getaway complex accessible by plane or car. The real estate includes 20 acres of land with approximately 78 acres available as 10 approved building lots. The home is conveniently located to Montreal, Lake Placid and Plattsburgh and boast such outstanding year round activities as golfing, hunting, fishing, boating, hiking and world class skiing.
The price, regrettably, is north of two megabucks. But when I finally marry that wealthy heiress this place is at the top of my shopping list. Bruce was nice enough to provide us with a high-resolution scan of the plan view, above, which (for the time being anyway) is exclusive to the MAKE blog. You can click on the image above to see it at 1000 pixels wide.
Vampire and/or werewolf hunting kits
Everybody’s favorite Xeni recently linked to this cool collection of slayer kits from around the web. Many of these are antiques and have sold for large sums at major auction houses, but I remain dubious as to how serious anyone ever really was about the whole business. [via Boing Boing]
Motion-activated “Jan in the Pan”
Reader JC just submitted this fantastic haunted house prop to our Make: Halloween Contest 2009. It’s a recreation of the always-lovely female lead from 1962’s sci-fi camp classic The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, immortalized in 1993 as Mystery Science Theater 3000’s experiment 513 (and, arguably, before that by Steve Martin’s The Man with Two Brains).
“She won’t be doing any heavy lifting for awhile…”
Drilling square holes with a Watts drill
Interesting thread over on The Home Shop Machinist describing the use of H.J. Watts’ 1918 US patent 1,241,176 drill, based on the Reuleaux triangle (Wikipedia), for drilling a (mostly) square hole.
Thomas Bloch plays the glass armonica
This instrument is known both as a “glass harmonica” and a “glass armonica,” and I personally favor the later spelling to distinguish it from the better-known free-reed mouth harp also called a “harmonica.” The tone of a glass armonica is stunningly beautiful; a great 18th-century myth is that the purity of its sound will eventually drive a virtuoso to madness. Thomas Bloch’s website has more info about his work and about the particular custom-built instrument shown here.
