When you see an old lady whose dog is wearing clothes, a fun thing to ask her is how long ago the evil wizard turned her husband into a dog.
— KenJennings

Once again, the World’s Oldest Living Person has died– Serial killer?
— kellyoxford

If you found out you were dying would you be nicer, love more, try something new?
Well, you are.
We all are.
— shanethevein

[sexy librarian removes glasses] nice [removes hair] what [takes off wooden arm] NO [rolls glass eye across counter] um, just this book ok
— ceejoyner

“The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be… AWESOME! Watch me shoot lightning FROM MY HANDS.” ―Palpatine
— DeathStarPR

He died doing what he loved: revealing his evil plans while I unlocked my handcuffs
— briangaar

Lets take a moment and thank God that spiders can’t fly.
— OhMrWonka

We are the livestock of plants and trees, which feed us and give us air knowing that we will soon die and feed them.
— NightValeRadio

1. Dress as puppet. 2. Stand in elevator with strings running from your limbs to ceiling. 3. Whisper, “Help me…” as other passengers enter
— rolldiggity

“JEFFREY ALLEN MCINTOSH! IF YOU DON’T GET IN THIS HOUSE RIGHT NOW, I SWEAR I WILL GET WERNER HERZOG TO STARE AT YOU WHILE YOU SLEEP!”
— sween

This is much more adorable than it has any right to be.

I recently mentioned Evil Mad Scientist Labs’ Snap-o-Lantern kit, which allows you to animate a mini-pumpkin with snapping jaws and light-up eyes. They’ve used the same kit to create a Peek-o-Book: An innocent-looking book which periodically opens and peeks out with its LED eyes before snapping shut again. Here it is in action:

It just looks so…coy.

The mechanism does require that the book be hollowed out, so it’d be best to use a thrift-store find rather than a beloved personal book. You can always cover it with paper if you don’t care for the subject matter.

The book could also be decorated: Painted, decoupaged, covered with pretty gift wrap or ribbon; you could even go the full Harry Potter route and make a prop Monster Book of Monsters that opens up and snaps at you. The only caveat would be to make sure that the cover doesn’t get too heavy for the li’l motor to lift.

This would be a great candidate for wiring up with a motion sensor rather than a timer, so it could wake up and take a peek whenever it detects movement.

This Key & Peele sketch is full of win.

Horror Happy Meals These parody happy meal boxes (complete with toys!) by artist Newt Clements are wonderful.

Mister Finch – Creator of lovely soft sculptures and miniatures. I adore his serene Tea-Making Spider.

Hand-Engraved Harry Potter Covers – Created for an edition of the book targeted at adults, these are all kinds of gorgeous.

Dia de los Muertos Wedding – Some lovely theme ideas from Hostess with the Mostess. (A couple other recent party themes from the same site: Steampunk and Thriller.

What’s That Bug? – Handy site which allows users to submit bug photos for identification. Lots of interesting photos and discussion.

Werewolf Bar Mitzvah – “Werewolf bar mitzvah, spooky scary, Boys becoming men, Men becoming wolves.”

The Seven Lady Godivas – Dr. Seuss once did an “adult” book. His nudes are still adorably Seussian.

Melting Table – Amazing carved wooden side table which resembles a dripping candle.

I am Already Disturbed – Amusing sign seen on Etsy. The original has sold, but this would be super-easy to DIY with a stencil.

Dare to Wear – Goth fashion for curvier girls.

I found this a little late for those of us headed into “real” winter, but folks with mild winters and people in the other hemisphere can use it now; the rest of us can tuck it away as an idea for next spring.

I’ve mentioned Atlas Obscura, an online guide to “the world’s wondrous and curious places,” previously; but I didn’t know until recently that they also have a real-world arm called the Obscura Society. They host regional events to seek out, “secret histories, unusual access, and opportunities for our community to explore strange and overlooked places hidden all around us,” and one of their recent excursions was a spider safari in a California nature preserve.

We started the day with a little learning: Spider anatomy, spider sounds, spider molting, and finally spider sex. We also got to see an amazing video of the tiny jumping spider’s throaty mating song. After our lesson we headed into the hills and valleys of the preserve to see what we could find.

I think this is simply a brilliant idea, either as an activity for children or as an adult outing. It’s inexpensive (or free, if you go no further than your back yard or a local park), educational, and fun. Look online for field guides to spiders commonly found in your region, pack a lunch, and go spider-hunting. Once you start really looking for them, it’s surprising how abundant they are.

Admire their colors, watch them scurry around their webs, and marvel at their complex behavior. It’s a lovely excuse for a stroll, and a great way to spark an appreciation for arachnids in children (or in adults who are unenthusiastic about spiders).

Incidentally, I suspect that the video mentioned by the Obscura Society might have been this one. So adorable:

Designer Fiona Roberts, in an attempt to make sure nobody ever sleeps again, upholstered a chair with plastic eyeballs.

The eyes on the Scopophilia Chair are held in place by folded red-velvet “eyelids” secured with brass tacks. The result is both fascinating and flesh-crawly.

Even better, the technique is simple enough that something similar should be DIY-able. Upholstering a whole chair might be a little daunting (hey, these would make a cute set of dining chairs, wouldn’t they?), but something smaller like a throw pillow or a decorative table runner should be reasonably easy.

If human-looking eyes aren’t your thing, there are dozens of other varieties used for taxidermy; reptile eyes would be particularly effective. You could also obviously use other fabric besides velvet (with the caveat that it can’t be too stiff to fold and snuggle nicely around each eyeball): Leather or a scale-print vinyl would add to the “this chair is alive…and watching you” illusion.

With the holidays coming up, this technique could also be used to make a really arresting wreath. It’d also be a cute way to make a little toy shoggoth.

(via Old Fashion Halloween)

W. S. Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) wrote a large number of poems, ballads, and “funny articles” for the magazine Fun under the pen-name “Bab.” These came to be known as “Bab Ballads,” and in addition to being famous in their own right some were the source for plots and songs for the G&S operas.

This one, The Ghost to His Ladye Love, would be a fine addition to a wedding invitation.

Fair Phantom, come! The moon’s awake,
The owl hoots gaily from its brake,
     The blithesome bat’s a-wing.
Come, soar to yonder silent clouds;
The ether teems with peopled shrouds:
We’ll fly the lightsome spectre crowds,
     Thou cloudy, clammy thing!

Though there are others, spectre mine,
With eyes as hollow, quite, as thine,
     That thrill me from above —
Whose lips are quite as deathly pale,
Whose voices rival thine in wail
When, riding on the joyous gale,
     They breathe sepulchral love.

Still, there’s a modest charm in thee,
That causes thee to seem to be
     More pure than others are —
Though rich in calico and bone,
Thou art not beautiful alone —
For thou art also good, my own!
     And that is better, far.

United, we’ll defy alarms:
A death-time in each other’s arms
We’ll pass — and fear no dearth
     Of jollity: when Morpheus flits
O’er mortal eyes, we’ll whet our wits,
And frighten people into fits
     Who did us harm on earth!

Come, essence of a slumb’ring soul,
Throw off thy maidenly control
     Un-shroud thy ghastly face!
Give me thy foggy lips divine,
And let me press my mist to thine,
And fold thy nothingness in mine,
     In one long damp embrace.

And here’s another, The Ghosts’ High Noon, which would be great as part of a party invitation.

When the night wind howls in the chimney cowls,
and the bat in the moonlight flies,
And inky clouds, like funeral shrouds,
sail over the midnight skies –
When the footpads quail at the night-bird’s wail,
and black dogs bay the moon,
Then is the spectres’ holiday –
then is the ghosts’ high noon!

As the sob of the breeze sweeps over the trees,
and the mists lie low on the fen,
From grey tombstones are gathered the bones
that once were women and men,
And away they go, with a mop and a mow,
to the revel that ends too soon,
For cockcrow limits our holiday –
the dead of the night’s high noon!

And then each ghost with his ladye-toast
to their churchyard beds take flight,
With a kiss, perhaps, on her lantern chaps,
and a grisly grim “good night”;
Till the welcome knell of the midnight bell
rings forth its jolliest tune,
And ushers our next high holiday –
the dead of the night’s high noon!

(via SheWalksSoftly)

Cassandra Peterson’s alter ego Elvira has never suffered from underexposure, appearing in everything from video games to comic books to calendars; but I had no idea that she nearly had her own sitcom.

In 1993 CBS produced a pilot episode of The Elvira Show, which involved two witches (Elvira and Katherine Helmond) moving to Manhattan, Kansas, with their talking cat. The pilot was never aired, but it’s available on YouTube.

Huh.

(Hat tip to Pixel Pixie)

Spine Vodka – Cool design concept by Johannes Schulz.

Delia’s Shadow – Novel set in the early part of the last century, involving a woman haunted by the last victim of a serial killer. The author discusses her work here.

Steampunk Cruise – “7 Days of Steampunk Music, Literature and Lace on the high seas.”

Anatomy Sweatshirt – Vintage sweatshirt depicting human innards, complete with an odd flap representing the head. Might be DIY-able. The flap would still be weird, though.

Vulture Pillow – Interesting hooked throw pillow. I’m rather sorry it’s a finished pillow rather than a kit.

Baby Bats – A collection of squee-worthy photos.

Wilder Mann – Series of photos depicting costumes worn in European pagan rituals. (Hat tip to xJane)

Universal Monsters – Handy set of thumbnails of the classic monsters. Useful for profile photos and the like.

Tales You Lose – Micro-art project in which the faces on coins are painted to give them superhero masks or Bride of Frankenstein hair. It would be fun to occasionally sit down with a handful of change, paint them up, and then send them back into the wild.

Macabre Disney Heroines – A collection of artist Jeffrey Thomas‘ creepy reimaginings. I particularly like the supporting characters (like Rapunzel’s chameleon).

Slate Magazine is doing a series of articles on life expectancy in the U.S., and their kickoff piece was an overview of the medical and public health advances that have contributed to the increased longevity of humans in the developed world.

It’s a fun conversation starter: Why are you not dead yet? It turns out almost everybody has a story, but we rarely hear them; life-saving treatments have become routine.

Or, as the article puts it with a riff on The Gashleycrumb Tinies:

M is for Maud who was swept out to sea…then brought back to shore by a lifeguard and resuscitated by emergency medical technicians.

O is for Olive run through with an awl…but saved during a four-hour emergency surgery to repair her collapsed lung.

S is for Susan, who perished of fits…or who would have, anyway, if her epilepsy hadn’t been diagnosed promptly and treated with powerful anticonvulsant drugs.

So I’ll pose the same question to you: Would you have survived the Middle Ages (or, possibly worse from a medical standpoint, the Victorian period)? Myself, I would have likely made it to adulthood (assuming my father hadn’t died of that burst appendix when he was six). I would probably have survived the teratoma* I developed in my late 20s, providing it didn’t strangle anything important. So far my closest brush with death has been childbirth, when my son would likely have died (the umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck), and I may or may not have followed. So, provisionally, my status is, “I’m not dead yet.”

How about you? (Bring out your dead!)

*A teratoma is a usually-benign-but-really-freaky tumor which frequently contains tissue that resembles human body parts: Most often teeth and hair, but occasionally even stuff like eyeballs. They can cause problems when they grow big enough to interfere with your innards. (The strangest look I have ever received from anybody came from my surgeon, when she explained the removal procedure and asked me if I had any questions. I said, “If this thing has teeth, can I have them?” Her reaction indicated that she had never been asked that question before, ever. I was serious, though. Wouldn’t that be a great icebreaker at parties? “Hi, nice to meet you. You’ll never believe what these earrings are made from.” But I digress.)