The northern Chinese city of Harbin is hosting its annual ice-and-snow festival – one of the largest of its type in the world.

Eighteen couples braved the cold to get married at this year’s festival, before ice-skating together.

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Bank tank.

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Religion and war have always been mixing and closely related throughout history. Missouri-born artist Kris Kuksi took notice of this connection, repeating itself throughout history, and decided to unveil it in his Churchtanks sculpture series. By creating the juxtaposition between the classical world and the modern war gear, Kuksi transforms churches into tanks, blending the two structures smoothly and seamlessly.

As explained in his statement, creation of the sculptures is a “process that requires countless hours to assemble, collect, manipulate, cut, and re-shape thousands of individual parts, finally uniting them into an orchestral-like seamless cohesion that defines the historical rise and fall of civilization and envisions the possible future(s) of humanity.” Churchtanks thus represent the ability of art to fascinate and at the same time to raise awareness.

Division between church and state.

 

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They don’t make lunch boxes, also known as lunch kits, like they did back in the sixties and seventies. The tin boxes which had a thermos inside were adorned with pop culture icons, TV shows, movies, sports heroes, historical events and many other topical subject matter.

The vintage lunch box as we think of it today was born in 1935. That’s when a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, company called Geuder, Paeschke, and Frey licensed the likeness of a new cartoon character named Mickey Mouse for the top of its oblong-shaped “Lunch Kit.” The metal container was sealed at the top with a loop of stiff wire that doubled as a handle.

From that moment on, placing a character of any sort on the side of a lunch box (or lunchbox, as it is often spelled) became the standard for the lunch boxes children toted to school. Before long, the signal a lunch box sent to your peers could mark you as a cool kid or a dork, depending on if your PB&J was packed inside a Mercury’s Space capsule Container (Universal, 1962) or a Evel Knievel lunch box (Aladdin, 1973).

Modern lunch boxes just don’t have the same eye-catching appeal of the old boxes. The lunch boxes today are more practical and cater to contemporary technology.

A three decker.

The majestic old lunch boxes:

 

The interior of a vintage box.

When buying a Roy Rogers and Dale Evans box on the right, included was a toy horse. It goes by the name Trigger.

Not sure where this one came from.

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Toronto Maple Laughs

 

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Donald’s cabinet positions are starting to fill up. He has appointed a climate change skeptic as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the head of oil giant Exxon-Mobile as Secretary of State. Trump called the big oil guy a great deal maker. With the Donald it’s all about deal making. Government in the U.S. is going to be run like a multi-national Fortune 500 company. Good or bad, have to wait and see.

Donald doesn’t believe the CIA when it says it has very good evidence that the Russians hacked American political parties during the election campaign. If you don’t believe your own intelligence agency, who are you going to believe?

Changing subjects

Eventually Trump is going to have to deal with this psycho sociopath.

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Saw this on Ozzy and Jack’s World Detour.

 

In Croaker, Virginia stands a sight that would make just about anyone stop in their tracks. 43 ghostly effigies of presidents past crowd together in the tall grass. Some of the 18-to-20-foot busts have crumbling noses. Tear-like stains fall from the eyes of others. All have bashed-in heads to some degree. This could be a scene from the world’s most patriotic horror movie, but it’s all too real—and Howard Hankins’ family farm is just the latest stop on the busts’ larger-than-life journey from iconic pieces of art to zombie-like markers of America’s past.

The busts are all that remains of Virginia’s Presidents Park, a now-defunct open-air museum where visitors could once walk among the presidential heads. Presidents Park first opened in nearby Williamsburg in 2004, the brainchild of local landowner Everette “Haley” Newman and Houston sculptor David Adickes, who was inspired to create the giant busts after driving past Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.

But their presidential visions soon (literally) went bust. The park, which cost about $10 million to create, went belly-up due to a lack of visitors in 2010. Doomed in part by location—it was hidden behind a motel and slightly too far away from colonial Williamsburg’s tourist attractions, the park went into foreclosure.

That’s where Hankins, who helped build the park, comes in. Before the land was auctioned off, Newman asked him to destroy the busts. But Hankins didn’t feel right about it, and instead offered to take the heads and move them to his 400-acre farm. And so began the laborious process of moving 43 giant presidents, each weighing in between 11,000 and 20,000 pounds, to a field ten miles away. Hankins estimates the weeklong process cost about $50,000—not including the damage done to each sculpture during the move.

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Crazy baby Kim

Mitt Romney went on a family road trip many years ago and strapped the dog in its carrier to the roof of his car.

Putin moon over Syria

 

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