When Star Wars beat Jaws for the box office record Spielberg took out this ad congratulating George Lucas.

The tradition is explained in this Reddit comment:

“Later, after ET retook the record, Lucas ran an ad with R2D2 putting a crown on ET’s head.

Then in 1997 when the Star Wars Special Edition regained top-grossing spot, Spielberg’s congratulatory ad showed a long line of movie characters with R2D2 zipping past to the front of the line.

This ad of ET returning the crown to R2D2 fits in there somehow as well. I hadn’t heard of this one before toefer dug it up.

I guess it’s time for Jim Cameron to run an ad congratulating himself for beating his own record.”

This is my favorite version – the congratulations sent from Lucas to Cameron when Titanic took over the record.

Over the years he has perfected a special frame which allows plants to grow on vertical walls. Some of the wall gardens are the size of several tennis courts.

They look great. I love the way he has clearly planted different plans in sections to create patters.

Sure enough, it has been redone and some mad fan has gone to the trouble of generating a comparison.

There is also a side-by-side video comparison on YouTube.

This page that includes a few of the images (the official page is quite rubbish).

His name is Edgar Mueller and he’s from Germany. He’s been producing street art for decades. It seems there is a whole street painting community because he was awarded the maestro madonnari’ (master street painter) at the world’s largest street painting festival.

I was looking over some of the older ones and was blown away by some of them. Here are a handful of the best.

This one was taken with the lens half submerged. If it wasn’t from National Geographic I wouldn’t believe it was real. I’m still skeptical…

This is one of the best photos I’ve seen. I had to read the explanation to understand what was going on. It’s taken near sunset in the deserts of South Africa. There is a massive sand dune rising in the sunlight in the background.

Alligator claw. Awesome.

There are many other excellent pictures, but I restricted this post to three that I really liked.

I thought it was pretty random so I Googled the incident and it turns out that Jimmy Carter was indeed ‘attacked’ by a swimming swamp rabbit in 1979! Read about it in the Wikipedia article: Jimmy Carter Rabbit Incident. There are also links to more detail.

Jimmy Carter stares at the crazed swamp rabbit that he had just fought off. Carter was out fishing alone when the swamp rabbit swam towards him and tried desperately to enter the boat. Mr President was forced to fend it off with an oar. Not sure that I believe this – but it does seem to be legit…

• There are awesome online communities. People commenting, organizing groups, messaging each other, etc
• A lot of the images are Creative Commons licensed so they can be used for all sorts of things (they often pop up on Do Stuff in Cape Town)
• Flickr have opened up an API which allows other programs and websites to easily access their data
• They come up with interesting features like the Interestingness feature for finding great pictures

Every now and then I send Jules a mail with some of the best photos that I have seen recently on Flickr. I thought I would turn that mail into a blog feature. So, here is the first of the “Friday Five Flickr Fotos” series. Enjoy.

It took me a little while to figure this one out. A mostly submerged trolley in some reflective water. Nice effect

Taken between two cruise ships in Greece

Taken from behind glass in a zoo

You don’t need to tell me twice!

One of my own photos

One of the things that I always enjoyed about GTA is the open gameplay style. They have created a working city complete with streets, buildings, people, cars, trains, boats, etc. Players are free to explore the city, interact with citizens, steal cars, fight gangsters, etc, etc.

The key to making that fun is to have a rich and realistic in-game world and these guys have done an amazing job modelling New York as the ‘Liberty City’ of the game.

Here are some pictures taken of the game (on the right) and the associated spot in the actual NYC (left). Awesome work.

Statue of Liberty. If you want to get there in the game you need to hijack a boat or helicopter…

Anyway, I had assumed that birds develop in the yolk – I don’t know why. But this chick definitely develops outside the yolk and consumes the yolk through a network of blood vessels. Very interesting.