Weta made a mermaid tail for a double amputee

Nadia Vessey lost both legs as a child. Weta made her a functional mermaid's tail. (Old to the internet, new to me.) Via.

Super athletes by UDON for ESPN Rise

Alvin Lee of Udon created several illustrations for ESPN's magazine about high school athletes - ESPN Rise:



Illustration of Michael Gilchrist, top high school prospect out of St. Patrick, NJ.



Illustration of Daniel Norris, who has already pitched a perfect game.



Illustration of Jadeveon Clowney, a defensive lineman who will play for South Carolina (and who told ESPN that Nick Saban is short and boring).



Illustration of Nick Vena, shot put champion.


And speaking of ESPN Rise, right now they have a article about Chance Anthony, a one-armed high school football receiver. Here's a great video about him:

Link roundup

1. Watch this uplifting video about Kevin Connolly - - he was born without legs, but has a great attitude, and is a fiend on three skis.

2. Pages 1, 2, and 3 of rejected (NSFW) Conan pitch by Paul Maybury for Dark Horse.

3. "Adult kidney stem cells found in fish." Sounds like something ominous from a Michael Crichton novel, but it's apparently very good news.

*Buy Conan Vol. 3: The Tower of the Elephant and Other Stories at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. The lousy storytelling in the Star Wars prequels still gets a lot of press, but really, isn't that old news? What I'd like to know is why the Clone Wars cartoons are so bad (and by bad, I mean boring characters in boring plots) and bereft of fresh ideas. It doesn't even pass the laugh test that the major new villain is a Darth Maul clone named "Savage Opress." I can't believe that the problem with the show is that the people working on it have no fresh, exciting ideas. I'd definitely like to know what the problem is, though. At least at the shops I visit in LA, the pegs are absolutely clogged with Star Wars figures, while competing lines of toys fly off the shelves. So it doesn't seem like my family is alone in being unimpressed with Lucas's recent offerings.

2. Emerald City Comicon 2011 screen print poster by Dean Trippe.

3. Mike Mitchell talks about being a late bloomer as a talented artist. Relatedly, Chrissie Wellington didn't discover until her mid 20's that she was an (extremely) talented endurance athlete.

Link roundup

1. This really is a great start to a story.

2. Fox News reports that "BMWs" or "Big Mexican Women" have been smuggling Afghan soldiers from Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, to Canada. Via.

3. "Starting with an old cell phone a friend gave him, 17-year-old Steven Ortiz of Glendora, CA, used Craigslist to trade up 14 times over two years to eventually end up with a Porsche Boxster. Here's how he did it."

*Buy military patches at eBay.

When John Lasseter snuck onto a construction site at Disneyland

Excerpt from a long interview with Tony Baxter, the Senior Vice President of Creative Development for Walt Disney Imagineering and the Creative Executive for Disneyland:

Really when John [Lasseter] came, and there are others like Pete Docter who are absolutely obsessed with Disneyland, and I think John put it into his contract that not only would he take on the film responsibilities of animation at Disney and animation at Pixar but he had to have his hand in Imagineering as a chief advisor. It’s purely out of that 12 year old mentality that, I think, John has to this day of what Disneyland meant to him growing up in Whittier, CA. He was only about as far away from the park as I was and those visits.

When I first met John, he was very cordial and overly nice to me, and I was trying to figure out “What is this about?” I should be agog at you, but it was kind of the opposite. It turned out, he was a ride operator at Disneyland on the Jungle Cruise and had come over and snuck through the fence when I was building Big Thunder. This would happen all the time, so I don’t remember it, whereas for him it was one of those milestone days. I guess I was there and he said – you have a very cool job, how did you get this job? And I said, oh come on, I’ll walk you through the whole ride. I gave him this tour and talked to him about Imagineering. Like anybody that was young and wondering what their future’s going to be it was something that was really important to him.

I had had the same thing happen to me with Claude Coats. I had snuck into the pirate ride when I was scooping ice cream at Disneyland. I peeked around the corner and they were doing the work, and I thought I was going to get arrested. Instead, I heard this voice that said, “Oh, you can’t see anything good from there – come on over here!” And it was this guy who was delighted in showing it off – turned out it was Claude, but it was always to me “just this guy.” Years later after I’d been working with him three years, I opened my old souvenir book from Pirates, and I looked at “this guy” in the picture that was in there and went “Oh my gosh, that’s Claude!” It was Claude Coats. So I could hardly wait to go into work the next day and I go “Do you remember a guy in a red and white striped…” He goes, “Yeah, yeah, the guy at the ice cream counter, I used to go get ice cream from him and I thought I’d show him the tour.” As he was saying it he goes, “Nooooo.” It suddenly dawned on him that we’d met, and he had so inspired me with that tour. When they docked me for the hour I was late, I said, “I don’t care.” I had just had the best hour of my career so far.

Via.

*Previously: Indiana Jones: Temple of the Forbidden Eye as a Left 4 Dead level.

*Buy Disneyland collectibles at eBay.

Captain Caveman sketch (link roundup)

Captain Caveman illustration by Rich Page.

And a few more links:

1. Batman Tumbler golf cart.

2. "The so-called healing stone of Wahiawa, venerated for more than 20 years by a local Hindu group as an embodiment of the god Shiva, was removed from its display platform on California Avenue last week by a group of Hawaiian nationalists intent of returning it to its earlier resting place near the Kukaniloko birthing site." Much more here. Via.

3. How a shoe store employee who was unusually good at getting people to buy shoes became a major NBA power broker.

*Previously: Vintage Batmobile.

*Buy Captain Caveman toys at eBay.