Check out this road in the Yungas region of Bolivia, and tell me that isn’t the most dangerous driving condition you’ve ever seen…

Link – via Presurfer

When hunting for that perfect birthday card, Charlotte Robertson ran across a lost family photo of her father, Edward, taken more than 40 years ago when he was just three years old:

His GP parents, Margaret and Douglas, had commissioned John Doidge(corr) to produce a set of pictures of their son which they could hand out to relatives.

For a joke, the photographer asked the toddler to put on his mum’s sunglasses and don an Austrian hat with a feather. He also got the cheeky youngster to pick his nose.

Yesterday Mr Robertson told how his parents ordered a set of pictures from the photographer, but rejected the nose-picking shot – because they thought it was tasteless.

The image only surfaced when Mr Doidge died, and card publishers Statics bought the copyright to the shot from his widow, Anne.

Link – via Arbroath

Check out this Pacman-playing bonobo chimp!

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] via grow-a-brain

How about a fan-made video of the newly re-tooled Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Disneyland?

Link – also via Miss Cellania

Ron Rodriguez looks amazingly like Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean – so much so that he won first prize (a car!) in a look-alike contest

Links: Herald-Sun News | SFGate: Day in Pictures | Celebrity Lookalike: Ron Rodriguez – via Miss Cellania

That’s right – The Hoff wants you in his car…

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

One year and 14 trades later, Kyle MacDonald had successfully bartered a single, red-paper clip all the way up to a house (shown on the left)

MacDonald began his quest last summer when he decided he wanted to live in a house. He didn’t have a job, so instead of posting a resumé, he looked at a red paper-clip on his desk and decided to trade it on an internet website.

He got a response almost immediately — from a pair of young women in Vancouver who offered to trade him a pen that looks like a fish.

MacDonald then bartered the fish pen for a handmade doorknob from a potter in Seattle.

And so forth, and so forth …

Link – via Metafilter

All that’s missing from this stretch SUV Limo is the pole… If this isn’t big enough for all of your buddies, check out the LimBusine.

Link – via Ursi’s Blog

As an object, skulls are powerfully symbolic. An ancient Indiang legend said that there were 13 crystal skulls of the Goddess Death, and that they had to be kept separate from each other and hidden throughout history.

Archaeologists (and paranormal hunters, ok maybe mostly paranormal hunters) have discovered a few of them:

First, art critic Frank Dordland started investigating the strange skull. After a closer investigation, he discovered that the skull had a complicated system of lenses, prisms, and channels, creating unusual optical effects. The investigator was surprised to discover no signs of processing on the skull’s perfectly polished surface. They couldn’t be seen even with a microscope. Frank Dordland even addressed Hewlett-Packard, the famous company that specialized in crystal oscillators at that time, for a competent examination of the crystal. …

Researchers found that the skull had been carved against the natural axis of the crystal. Modern crystal sculptors always take into account the axis, or orientation of the crystal’s molecular symmetry, because if they carve "against the grain," the piece is bound to shatter — even with the use of lasers and other high-tech cutting methods.

To compound the strangeness, HP could find no microscopic scratches on the crystal which would indicate it had been carved with metal instruments. Dorland’s best hypothesis for the skull’s construction is that it was roughly hewn out with diamonds, and then the detail work was meticulously done with a gentle solution of silicon sand and water. The exhausting job — assuming it could possibly be done in this way — would have required man-hours adding up to 300 years to complete.

Link