Redditor Proteon posted this image of a fossilized snail turned to opal recently. Opal forms in cavities inside rocks. If a cavity is created due to a bone, shell or pine cone being buried in the sand or clay that later became the rock, and conditions are right for opal formation, then opal forms a fossilized likeness of the object. A silica-rich environment is required for opal formation. -Via Science Dump

The east Texas city of Lufkin is home to Lufkin Industries, which makes oil field equipment, including pumps. While other towns have a municipal Christmas tree lighting ceremony, Lufkin instead lights up Rudolph the Red-Nosed Pumping Unit, who then dips his nose festively from 10AM to 10PM through the Christmas season. The tradition has been going on in Lufkin since 1966, and this year’s lighting ceremony was on November 21st. From the Lukfin Convention and Visitors Bureau:

Brought to us by Lufkin Industries, Rudolph is a full-size Mark 640 oil pumping unit. The unit is fully operational; however, the red paint job is a special touch reserved only for the holiday season. It takes nearly three days for a crew to get Rudolph moved in to his holiday spot in the Lufkin mall parking lot. It takes an electrician about four days to set up the 1,000+ 7-watt lights that adorn Rudolph. When the unit is fully extended, it is 45 feet from top to bottom. Talk about a Christmas miracle! Attached to Rudolph is a 38-foot dump trailer decorated to look like Santa’s sleigh, complete with a wooden cutout of Santa and all of his gifts for the good boys and girls of Lufkin.

(YouTube link)

Every year, the new, locally manufactured pumping unit is sent out to work in the oil fields after doing its Christmas duty. So the next time you are traveling through oil country and see a bright red oil well pump that resembles Rudolph, you’ll know why. The video above is from the lighting ceremony in 2011. -Thanks, Russ!    

(Image credit: Lufkin Industries)

In 1992, Erik and Lina Runestam, a brother and sister in Sweden, along with their friend Christoffer Hogstrom, wrote a message and partially burned it to make the letter look like an old dip pen message written on parchment. Then they sealed the bottle and threw it into the sea from the coastal town of Hunnebostrand.

Last month, Leonard Pearson of Panama found it. He wrote to the brother and sister 22 years after they sent the bottle on its long journey. BBC News reports:

Erik remembers being excited about sending the message in the bottle.

He told Newsbeat: "Our dad told us we should wait until the wind was blowing off land because it might go as far as England, so we were a bit excited about that.

"It would have travelled north of Denmark, through the English Channel to cross the Atlantic. Our hopes weren't that high to even get to England."

Erik had lost touch with his childhood friend Christoffer - they hadn't spoken for 10 years. So Erik was very surprised when Christoffer sent a photo of the letter with a reply from Panama.

The letter - dated 6 November 2014 - reads: "Bueno dias. I have found this message in a bottle at Playa del Dragos, Bocas del Toro.

"I used Google Translate, and it seems the message is in Swedish? I hope that the address is correct and that this letter reaches the kids who sent the message."

-via Nothing to Do with Aborath

Maxx and Crossbones by Dann Matthews

He's got a face only a mother could love, or at least we assume he does since he's always wearing that strange mask of his, but if you're looking for good looks you should look elsewhere, like to his gal pal Julie. But if you're looking for some serious muscle, someone who can crush those creeps keeping you up at night then the Maxx is defiintely your guy! He's so big and scary that just wearing his toothy masked visage on your shirt should help protect you from Mr. Gone and the Isz which are always around him, but if you're ever feeling trapped with nowhere else to turn remember there's always that outback in your mind...

Keep your torso protected at all times with this Maxx and Crossbones t-shirt by Dann Matthews, it's the fun way to show the world you like your comic books cerebral and surreal!

Visit Dann Matthews's Facebook fan page, official website, Twitter and Tumblr, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more geek-tastic designs:

Dunderhead	I (Big Butt Skinner) Springfield	Usagi-182	Metal Muncher

View more designs by Dann Matthews | More Funny T-shirts | New T-Shirts

Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!

Chris Garcia (l) and Temar Boggs (r)

Sometimes news items that make us feel positive about humanity are scarce. Particularly when current events are rife with upsetting situations, it's good to read about people who take great pains, sometimes even endangering their own lives, to help their fellow human beings. The following is one such story. 

Temar Boggs and Chris Garcia, at the time 15 and 13 respectively, were at an apartment complex helping their friend move a couch one summer day in 2013 when they saw police cars outside. The policemen told the teens that they were looking for a lttle girl who had been abducted from her front yard earlier that day. Officers and citizens had been searching for 5-year-old Jocelyn Rojas for two hours without success.

At that time, Boggs, Garcia and five other friends, who didn't know Jocelyn, decided to look for her. At first the teens were on foot, but later, Boggs and Garcia began riding bikes to look in the surrounding neighborhoods. After almost an hour, Boggs, who had biked ahead of Garcia, saw a man driving suspiciously in the neighborhood. Boggs noticed that the man turned his car around when a group of policemen were up ahead. Boggs pedaled closer to the car, at which time Garcia caught up with him. The teens could see a little girl in the car. When the driver noticed he was seen, he panicked, stopping the car and pushing little Jocelyn out the door. She had already been assaulted after having been taken to an ice cream shop.

Boggs grabbed the little girl, who ran to him after her trauma. He rode with her on his bike for a while until deciding that wasn't safe. The young man dropped the bike and ran with the girl to find the authorities. Jocelyn clung to Temar, fearful because of her horrible experience. After delivering her safely to authorities, the teens were modest about being referred to as heroes, saying they just did what any person would do. 

Boggs said in an interview,

"I had the gut feeling that I was going to find the little girl... It was like fate, it was like meant for me and Chris to be there. If we wouldn't have left (to look for the girl) who knows what would have happened to the little girl?"

The child's abductor, 73-year-old Harold Leroy Herr, was eventually caught. The kidnapper reportedly said "You're pretty, I think I'll keep you" when he grabbed her from in front of her home. Boggs and Garcia may have saved her life that day.

Read about other selfless, courageous people and their heroic acts here.

Image: Lancaster Online

Adam Wibler's Pyro is an amazing gadget that looks and acts like something out of a James Bond movie or My Little Pony. It's a wrist-mounded device that shoots fireballs up to 10 feet away from the user. It has 4 chambers, each of which carries a single fireball load.

Pyro has a built-in remote control system. It's possible to activate a unit from up to 30 feet away. So if you have a friend wearing a Pyro unit, you could use the remote control to play mirthful pranks on him.

(Video Link)

-via Design Boom

Some people can't stand watching television, others don't dig video games, but everybody likes the movies. When Hollywood brings a story to the big screen people show up in droves to see the latest in cinematic storytelling come to life on the big screen.

Here's a selection of NeatoShop t-shirt designs inspired by classic movies, all of which cost less than the price of a pair of movie tickets!

Movies have made a big impression on folks from the very beginning:

Dracula by Matt Fontaine

And when movies went full color things got even more interesting:

The Sultry Lagoon by Hillary White

Monsters reigned supreme in the early days of cinema:

Kaiju Alpha by Pigboom

And to this day people like to see a giant monster stomping around destroying a big city:

We're Ready To Believe You by Austin James

Filming for the first Star Wars movie began in 1976. The actors weren't kids back then, so they've certainly aged a lot in the intervening 39 years. Now, in The Force Awakens, Luke, Han, Leia, Lando, and Chewbacca have new challenges, such as mobility, endocrine health, and diminished mental acuity.

(Video Link)

In this great sketch from Saturday Night Live (content warning: foul language), you can see how well the actors have held up. No one is going to jump around a sail barge anymore without breaking a hip in the process.

The scene with Leia trying to figure out R2-D2's controls is perfect.

-via Uproxx

A few months ago, we posted a story about how many Southern plantations gave tours that whitewashed their histories and made life there seem genteel and aristocratic. Today marks a step in changing that.

The Whitney Plantation in Louisiana was founded in 1752 by Ambroise Heidel. His family raised indigo and then sugar cane by the labor of slaves for generations until the Civil War. New Orleans lawyer John Cummings purchased the Whitney Plantation in 1998 and spent $7 million transforming it into a museum of slavery. Slave quarters, work buildings, and a church have been brought in to restore the plantation to what it may have looked like as a working sugar plantation. There’s also a granite wall inscribed with the names of the slaves who worked there, and life-size statues of slaves. The original “big house” is still there, but it’s not the focus of the museum tours.

The Whitney Plantation Museum will have its ribbon-cutting ceremony today, and open for regular tours on Monday. You can see more pictures here. -via reddit

Sandro Engel and Holger Michel are interaction design students at HAWK University, a college in Hildesheim, Germany. They wanted to discourage people from running across busy streets. So they found a way to make waiting at a traffic light fun, rather than annoying. Their solution was to build a simple video game into a traffic light.

(Video Link)

Engel and Michel call the game STREETPONG. It only works when the crosswalk is closed. Players on opposite sides of the street use a touch screen to maneuver boards back and forth, bouncing the ball toward each other.

-via Colossal

Cast of The Addams Family

 These 1964 photos are of auditions for the television series The Addams Family, which ran from 1964-1966. John Astin, who played patriarch Gomez Addams, was cast before the other characters, as a number of these photos show Astin reading lines with the actresses auditioning for the part of his wife, Morticia. Eventually, actress Carolyn Jones was chosen to play Morticia. Perhaps the other hopefuls should have spoken French to him?

A bit of trivia: according to the IMDb, the Addams were the first television family to have a home computer, which was a UNIVAC. See more photos from The Addams Family auditions here. 

Images: Life


Actress auditioning for the part of Morticia


Wednesday Addams hopefuls; Lisa Loring (l) was eventually cast

 
Pugsley Adddams wannabes; Ken Weatherwax (r) was cast

(John McNamee/Pie Comic)

Preach on, robot! Kids of all forms, organic and metallic, don't understand how fortunate they are. Back in my day, when a robot tried to kill me, it was only after I had walked to the robot factory uphill both ways in the snow. And when a robot tried to strangle me, I respected it. That was a robot trying to do quality work.

(YouTube link)

Warning: the following video will cause frustration and possibly hair-pulling. The car is fairly small. The parking lot is not crowded. There is snow on the ground, but it doesn’t appear to be slippery. So why does it take this driver four minutes to get out of the lot? He/she is trying to complete the classic 250-point turn! Get ready to cringe at dozens of poor decisions made during the maneuvers. The worst was continuing to leave after dinging the red car. The Calgary police are looking into the incident. -via Viral Viral Videos

Biologist Forrest Galante was free-diving for lobsters off the coast of Anacapa Island, California when he found the grand daddy of all lobsters, a Paciific spiny lobster weighing 11.5 pounds and estimated to be 60-70 years old. Galante intended to release the creature back into the wild, but before he did, he gave the ample arthropod a little sightseeing land tour. Galante took him home to meet his family, including his dog, who came snout to shell with him. The lobster had a stay at the Santa Barbara sea center for a bit. Eventually, Galante took the lobster to the middle of a marine reserve, where he would be free to breed, safe from fisherman. Once released, the big guy swam off, and all was well. 

Images: Barcroft TV

YouTube Link

Idjits by Dooomcat

Bobby sometimes wondered why he kept running around with those Winchester brothers, especially because between the two of 'em you'd have a hard time making one brain, but when the supernatural stuff hit the fan those boys were there for ol' Bobby. Even though Bobby has been gone for a while both Sam and Dean swear they can hear him calling them both idjits from beyond the grave, although it's usually just Crowley tryin' ta get under their skin by trying to sound like poor old Bobby...

Show the world you have a supernatural sense of smile, and a delightfully dark sense of humor, with this Idjits t-shirt by Dooomcat, it's the fantastic way to show your love for a fallen TV hero!

Visit Dooomcat's Facebook fan page and official website, then head on over to her NeatoShop for more frightfully cool designs:

The Owl and The Weasel	Mouse On A Mission	Officiate	Off Season

View more designs by Dooomcat | More Funny T-shirts | New T-Shirts

Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!

Pringle is a fashionable and adventurous bearded dragon who lives in Melbourne, Australia. He lives the high life, playing games, going on outings, and dressing up for the camera. And he’s very popular!

Continue reading to see more of Pringle.

In The Godfather, Michael Corleone murders two enemies, then flees from New York City to hide in Italy. He goes to the a small town in Sicily and meets a pretty woman named Apollonia. He approaches her father at a bar and asks for permission to court her. You can watch the scene here.

The scenes were shot in the Sicilian town of Savoca. The bar is a real bar called Bar Vitelli. It still exists and remains open. You can see photos of it, inside and out, at Messy Nessy Chic. 

(Video Link)

This video shows Bar Vitelli and the surrounding streets in Savoca.

New York-based illustrator PJ McQuade has been featured previously at Neatorama, the last time for his cool Star Wars Christmas cards. McQuade has expanded the line for this season, which now includes Star Trek, Breaking Bad, Doctor Who, Alien, and Game of Thrones-themed ornaments and cards. The illustrations are fun — the artist adds festive clothing to the characters — and very likely to please fans of the franchises. Have a look at McQuade's offerings in his Etsy shop.
 

An architect, an engineer, a ninja turtle, a painter--Leonardo da Vinci did it all. He applied his mind to every field of study available to him. You can get a sense of that from a to-do list that he jotted down sometime in the 1490s. Scholars found it in one of his surviving notebooks. Pictured above is an artistic representation of it by Wendy MacNaughton. In a 2011 article on National Public Radio, Robert Krulwich argues that Leonardo's scattered attention teaches us something about how we less ingenious people can improve our minds:

"We live in an age that worships attention," says my friend (and Radiolab colleague) Jonah Lehrer. "When we need to work, we force ourselves to concentrate. This approach can also inhibit the imagination. Sometimes, it helps to consider irrelevant information, to eavesdrop on all the stray associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain."

That ability to let go, float free, does seem like an essential part of a creative mind, not just in giant ones. Those of us who make our livings closer to the ground, have to do it too. In his forthcoming book, (coming to bookstores this Spring) Jonah mentions a study by Dr. Holly White, then at the University of Memphis, and her colleague Priti Shah, of the University of Michigan. […]

Minds that break free, that are compelled to wander, can sometimes achieve more than those of us who are more inhibited, more orderly, the study suggests. Or, as Jonah chose to put it, there are "unexpected benefits of not being able to focus."

-via David Thompson

YouTube Link

This hilarious video footage shows 12-year-old yellow Lab Allie helping herself to anything and everything edible that she can get her paws on once her human leaves the house. Unfortunately for Allie, it was a setup. The humans of the house knew she was stealing food, but couldn't quite figure out how she was doing it. Hence, the video cam. Next time disable the camera first, Allie. I have no doubt that's not an accomplishment beyond your level of intelligence and problem solving ability. -Via Tastefully Offensive

These are Milli Chairs, a novel design by Duffy London. They're made to resemble millipedes. They don't move (although that would be a nice feature), but they look like they're ready to crawl right over you!

They're easy to adjust. The back becomes the bottom and vise versa by flipping them over. I suggest collecting and arranging a bunch of them. If you get 54 Milli Chairs, you can simulate the Illacme plenipes, a millipede with 750 legs.

-via Geekologie

The blog NYC, 1981 focuses only on the city of New York, and only on the year 1981. There is no dearth of material- after all, the city’s newspapers were filled every day. The blog was set up to promote the upcoming movie A Most Violent Year. The fact that it’s a promotional blog doesn’t make it any less interesting, as the subject matter could well stand on its own.

New York City, 1981. It is a time that contributed massively to culture as we know it today, but a place where you would probably not want to raise your children. Pulsing with chaotic energy and apparent lawlessness, the city was in a fragile state with a total of 637,451 felonies committed in 12 short months. It was an era where the line between good and evil often seemed blurred, and an individual’s success was a testament to their persistence. But there were fissures of creativity and light in the city’s asphalt crust, and remarkable moments in cultural history happened on the regular.

It was the year that Fort Apache, The Bronx was filmed amid protests against the production, the city’s sanitation department went on strike in December, and hip-hop music was in its infancy. There’s also retro media, profiles of neighborhoods, and plenty of graffiti.  -via Laughing Squid

(Image source: Classic New York Street Gangs)

Now, this is how you sell a house!

A real estate broker in Ermelo, the Netherlands, found a great way to encourage prospective buyers to take a quick tour of this house: his company built a roller coaster through it. There's a single-person car which whisks a potential customer through the house while speakers describe its amenities.

(Video Link)

-via Lustik

YouTube Link

In what stage of sleep to you dream? During how much of your sleep time are you dreaming, on average? Do older people need less sleep? What's the best course of action when you're unable to sleep? Mental Floss discusses these matters and more in this interesting video. -Via Laughing Squid

(Photo: Andy Ihnatko)

The merc with a mouth is finally coming to the big screen. Ryan Reynolds, the actor who briefly played Deadpool in the 2009 movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine, will reprise the role in a feature-length film about our favorite psychopath.

To mark the occasion, Uproxx rounded up photos of 41 fantastic cosplays of Deadpool, including him as Sailor Moon, the Eleventh Doctor, Groot, and a French maid. The photos are divided into 2 posts, which are here and here.

Retro Swanson by Bamboota

Ron was once referred to as a recreation loving butterfly trapped in a net by the Parks department, and despite his attempt to get fired he has been promoted many times since his capture.Swanson is like a moustachioed masterpiece, perfected in the 1980s and carried through life by his passion for woodworking and a desire to one day eat his body weight in steak. You can't spell old school without Ron Swanson, well, you can but why would you want to?!

Take your geeky style back to the 80s with this Retro Swanson t-shirt by Bamboota, it's the stylin' way to show your love of classic TV comedies and their timeless characters!

Visit Bamboota's Facebook fan page, Twitter and Tumblr, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more ridiculously cool designs:

Battle Of The Bands	Boat Tour Adventures	Precious Companions	Born To Shred

View more designs by Bamboota | More Funny T-shirts | New T-Shirts

Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!

(YouTube link)

A stray cat roaming the streets of Varna, Bulgaria, stands out against the crowd of feral felines. We’ve featured a green cat before (and puppies, too), but this one looks like something out of a science fiction movie. At first, people thought the cat was painted by vandals. But it came to light that this cat regularly sleeps on a pile of discarded green paint in a garage. By licking his fur, he has spread the green all over his body. That didn’t sound quite right to me, because cats cannot lick or reach their spines well. But if you look closely, especially in the second video, you’ll see that the cat’s spine is only lightly tinted green. It still looks like a special effect

A Bulgarian commenter says the cat, although unfriendly, is a celebrity in Varna and gets plenty of food, and has also been checked out by a veterinarian. No doubt his cat buddies also benefit from the attention. -via Buzzfeed

Every year, generally around the first of April, products are introduced that get our hopes up then dash them against the sidewalk like a soda bottle, as the pranksters tell us we were fools to believe such a product could exist. But we live in a world full of clear toasters, bubblegum flavored toothpaste and pajama jeans, so why wouldn’t we believe in the power of new products?

These nine products could have changed our lives, but instead they’re just something we wish actually existed.

1. Accordion Hero-

(Image Link)

The accordion has fallen out of favor with the young folk, except those rare kiddie polka fans and merchant marines under ten, but Accordion Hero could have brought the squeeze box back to the front of the stage where it belongs. Sadly, it was nothing but a cruel joke played on those of us who enjoy that unique accordion sound, but one guy did manage to create some semblance of the game with a toy accordion, so that's something:

(Image Link)

2. The SlipQuit-

(Image Link)

Quitting your job isn't as cool as it looks in movies and TV shows- you just announce you’re leaving then walk out, no dramatic monologue, just the act of quitting and the workplace left behind.

But that was all about to change thanks to the SlipQuit, the strap-on inflatable slide pack that was supposed to make quitting fun! Imagine quitting by yelling “adios mofos!” then jumping out a second story window onto a SlipQuit, sliding into the parking lot, and the annals of workplace history, like a real boss.

3. Animatronic Admiral Ackbar-

(Image Link)

Big Mouth Billy Bass showed us that a talking animatronic fish can be fun, at least for a few minutes at a time, but imagine all the fun you could have hanging out with a Star Wars Admiral Ackbar Singing Bass talking about all those darn traps! 

ThinkGeek teased us with this geeky piece of home decor a few years ago, and despite an outpouring of Star Wars fan love we're still stuck with tired old Billy...use the force to make it so, ThinkGeek!

4. Chicken Wing Ice Cream-

(Image Link)

Aren’t you tired of eating foods that are just one thing? Sick of "the man" telling you when it's okay to eat? Don’t you want to break with tradition and start eating dessert all day long? Then you're like me- someone who desperately needs some Perry's Chicken Wing Ice Cream in their lives.

Too bad we're stuck dreaming of what it would be like to use Sriracha, or barbecue sauce, to make the ultimate ice cream sundae...

5. BMW Stroller-

Even thought the Will Ferrell movie Elf seems fairly recent among classic Christmas movies, it is eleven years old now. You may enjoy watching it again this year, but you’ll enjoy it even more when you learn a few things that went on behind the scenes. Such as

3. Director Jon Favreau favored practical effects.

Inspired by the Christmas specials he grew up with, Favreau explained in the film's commentary track that he employed “old techniques” instead of CGI whenever possible. This included stop-motion animation, and using forced perspective to make Buddy look like a giant among his elf peers. For North Pole scenes, two sets were built—one larger scale for the actors playing elves, the other smaller to make Buddy and Santa look big. These elements where then carefully overlaid in camera, using lighting to blend the seams.

14. Will Ferrell broke James Caan.

The Academy Award-nominated Godfather star was hired to play Walter in part because Favreau wanted a stern persona to play against Ferrell's giddy Buddy, and Caan took the comedy of Elf seriously. He knew it was crucial for Walter to be annoyed—never amused—by his supposed son's antics. But when it came to the blood test scene where Buddy bellows when pricked by a needle, Caan cracked. Watch closely and you'll see he turns away from the camera so as not to ruin the take.

Now, see, these are things you'll notice and appreciate the next time you watch the movie. Read the rest of 21 trivia tidbits about Elf at mental_floss.

(Image: WDKY Fox 56)

John Wayne, also known as Michael Fleet, escaped from a prison in Kentucky last week. Or that's the impression you would get by this graphic shown by WDKY Fox 56, a television station in Lexington, Kentucky. It displayed mugshots of the two escaped prisoners. One of them showed the late actor John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn, a character that he played in two western films: True Grit and Rooster Cogburn.

The news broadcasters later explained that the graphic shows the image of John Wayne as a default setting. They neglected to upload a photo of escaped prisoner Michael Fleet before displaying it on live TV.

-via Dave Barry