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Archive for November 13th, 2006

Digging for Diamonds: For $6, it's Finders Keepers!

Whenever Bob Wehle could get away, he would go to the Crater of Diamonds in Arkansas, plunk down $6, and dig for diamonds.

His friends razzed him. His wife rolled her eyes. Until, that is, he found a 5.47-carat canary yellow gem of unusual clarity he named the Sunshine Diamond.

"My wife, she’s OK with this now," Wehle, 36, said with a chuckle. "My friends, they’re not laughing at me anymore."

The discovery of Sunshine was another glittering chapter in the legend of Arkansas’ Crater of Diamonds State Park, one of the more unusual public attractions in America.

For a $6 fee, visitors can scour the mouth of an ancient volcano in search of a priceless stone. Most days one or two get lucky, as a 9-year-old from Illinois did this spring when she scooped up a clear white diamond with her toy shovel and named it Sparkles. The 50,000 people who visit each year find ground rules that are tantalizingly simple: finders keepers.

It’s a fantastic story of a public garden that has yielded 75,000 diamonds, and all you have to do is pay the fee and start digging!

Link | Official Crater of Diamonds State Park website

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The Other White Meat.

Yum…. Waitaminute, what’s this dish again?

I never would have guessed what this white meat dish is made from …

Find out what it is at w.y.’s blog: Link

Update 11/14/06: Neatorama reader Lyndon reminded me that we’ve featured something like this before: Link.

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Galvanized Steel Pipe Menorah.

Yes, that’s a galvanized steel pipe menorah.

Link – via Cribcandy

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Steam-Powered Rolling Balls.

I-Wei Huang, who we had featured before for making those gorgeous steam-powered RC tank, has made a steam-powered rolling ball contraption from Bandai Spacewarp toy. Link (don’t miss the video!) – via Make.

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Parasite-ridden Ancient Toilet Provides Clues to Dead Sea Scroll Sect.

Scientists dug up a toilet of an ancient Jewish sect, who had bizarre toilet habits that left them riddled with parasites.

This bizarre habit happened to be described in the Dead Sea Scroll, so naturally the scientists thought they’d found the authors of the mysterious scrolls when they found dead eggs from intestinal parasites preserved in the soil of where the toilet had been.

The scrolls describe strict rules for where the Essenes were allowed to defecate: far enough away from the camp not to be visible, sometimes as much as 3,000 cubits (1.4 kilometres) away in a northwesterly direction. They had to bury their faeces and perform a ritual all-over wash in the local waters afterwards.

Link

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Fatboy Slim's Domino Effect Music Video.

Another domino effect clip (using CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, boxes, etc), this time from Fatboy Slim’s Champion Sound music video.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – Thanks Simon Powell!

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Swimming with Polar Bears.

You can (almost) swim with polar bears in the Polar Bear Habitat & Heritage Village in Ontario, Canada.

Link – via Fogonazos, Thanks aberron!

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Medieval Crane.

How did they lift the huge stones to build the cathedral hundreds of years ago, before the invention of the crane?

Jeffrey Martin took this VR photo of a replica of a medieval crane, built without power tools (or even screws or nails!), which is now used to replace statues on a cathedral in Prague.

Link – Thanks Jeffrey!

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elgooG

ElgooG is a Google mirror… by mirror I mean that the whole page is flipped horizontally and even you must typeyour search from right to left.

Link – Via

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Weird Dating Mail.

Anytime you sign up with a dating service, you get tons of useless inquiries for every possible match. At least that’s what I’ve heard. A friend of mine has launched a new site called Weird Dating Mail to share some of the stranger messages she’s received through online dating services, unidentified of course. You are invited to submit your own weird dating mail! Link

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Vintage T-Shirts.

Vintage T-Shirts, a collection of more than 500 authentic tees from the ’70s and ’80s, is a book by Lisa Kidner and Sam Knee. This book documents the history of the ubiquitous T-shirt through the history of rock-and-roll and pop culture.

From the book:

The roots: The T-shirt began life as a functional item of underwear designed not to be seen. In the early days it would have been considered offensive to reveal the shirt.

WW1: The origins of the T-shirt stem from Europe. During WW1, American soldiers were sweating in their woolen uniforms while their European counterparts were less restricted in their lightweight cotton undershirts.

WW2: The cotton T-shirt was standard issue as an undergarment in the US armed forces. WW2 also provided another preview of the T-shirt as soldiers crudely customized their vest-style tees to identify their station and using any materials they could find – often handmade, cut-out stencils and vehicle spray paint.

1940s and 1950s: American colleges started printing their names and logos on tees: in the early days, normally using flock iron-on fonts. These were sold in the college stores on campus for students to wear with American pride. Later versions fo these Americna university tees, such as Yale and Harvard, became a part of the early 1960s English mod look alongside other US Ivy League-style preppy garments.

The trend for small US businesses, such as garages, diners and electrical stores, to print their own logo or products on shirts for customers became common in the 1950s. They advertised brand loyalty in this way long before the major big league companies caught on. By th emid-1960s these ‘walking billboard’ advertising tees were big business.

Marlon Brando and James Dean shocked Americans by wearing their underwear on the big screen in The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause. This marked the T-shirt’s long-awaited progression from underwear to outerwear, infusing the style with a fashionable sex appeal at the same time. The rebel association was the catalyst for the style becoming a desirable item of clothing with the youth of the day and coincided with the birth of rock and roll.

1960s: The popularity of the printed rock-and-roll band shirt exploded in the 1970s, but the roots lie firmly in the 1960s. Although mid 1960s invasion-style groups dipped their toes in the T-shirt market, it was West Coast gig promoters, such as Bill Graham pushing local acts like the Grateful Dead, who first realized this emerging potential to sell T-shirts as well as gig tickets at venues.

1970s: The first wave of Sex Pistols and Clash fans, particularly those outside central London, had to take it upon themselves to create their own customized Kings Road-esque creations. These do-it-yourself T-shirts were crudely vandalized and defaced using marker pens, tape, pins and zips.

Who knew T-shirts had such a history, anyway?

Links: Vintage T-Shirts at HarperCollins | Kidner and Knee Interview with the Guardian

Book courtesy of Harper Collins – Thanks Felicia! Please contact us if you want your book reviewed in Neatorama.

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Angry Gods.

1. Artemis: The Angry Bathing God. The ultimate definition of a woman scorned, Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt, of nature, and of chastity, had a temper notorious even by the standards of her fellow anger-prone Olympians. the fact that she killed her follower Maera and changed another friend, Callisto, into a bear was the least of it (in both cases, by the way, the hapless ladies had committed the "crime" of losing their virginity). Along with her brother Apollo, Artemis slaughtered the children of the Theban queen Niobe, for no more than insulting their mother. On two separate occasions young men had the misfortune to stumble upon Artemis while she bathed naked in the forest; one was turned into a stag and promptly killed by his own hounds, while the other got off easy (only being turned into a woman). Artemis even killed a girl name Chione for the sin of being too beautiful – which became more of a sin when the girl’s beauty was said to rival the goddess’s.

2. Kali: The Badly Dressed God. A Hindu fertility goddess, Kali is the female aspect of divine energy and the consort of Shiva, the Destroyer. As the slayer of evil spirits and the somewhat unpredictable mother of all life, she also moonlights as the goddess of death. Not a bad gig, except the uniform’s a little scary. To show how many evil spirits she’s slain, Kali’s usually depicted wearing a necklace of human skulls and a girdle of severed arms, children’s corpses as earrings, and cobras as bracelets. The outfit is pulled together, however, by her ferocious grimace and the blood smeared on her face. And in her eight arms she holds weapons or the severed head of a demon, representing both her creative and her destructive power. Some followers honored her with animal sacrifices, though a few even took things to the next level. One India-wide sect, the Thuggee, kidnapped and murdered humans as sacrifices to "the Dark Mother" until they were wiped out by British colonial authorities in the 1800s.

3. Huitzilopchtli: The Needy (in a Human Sacrificial Way) God. Huitzilopchtli, the Aztec god of the sun and war, was worshiped with rites so horrific that they probably couldn’t be shown in the most demented of horror movies today. As far as the mythology goes, he’s been causing a violent ruckus since birth. Right after he was born, Huitzilopchtli killed his own sister, Coyolxauhqui, and hung her head in the sky as the moon. He then killed thousands of his other siblings and placed them in the sky as the stars and planets. Not easily appeased, Huitzilopchtli, like virtually all Aztec deities, demanded constant human sacrifice as his price for not destroying the world. And boy did he get ‘em! Every day, people were slaughtered in his temples and their hearts offered to the sun. Of course, during festivals, you could count on Huitzilopchtli’s wrath to make sure that thousands of people were sacrificed at a time.

4. Thor: The God of Hammer Time. The Norse god of thunder and protector of the common man, Thor wielded a war hammer so heavy that only he could use it. In fact, the weapon was so unwieldy that he was known from time to time to fly off the handle (no pun intended). Of course, that wasn’t his only unusual gimmick. Like any god who commands respect, thor enjoyed rolling around town in a pimped-out chariot drawn by – what else? – magic goats. And as if that doesn’t sound tough enough, his ride also was equipped to scorch earth wherever it went. But back to his wrath; nothing could get on Thor’s nerves like Loki, the divine trickster. And eventually, it was Thor’s anger that became the driving force behind Loki’s torturous imprisonment, strapped down to a rock under a mountain with venom dripping in his face. Not that the rascal didn’t deserve it. You can’t, after all, just go around stealing the hair off Thor’s wife’s head and expect not to have to pay. Aside from cruelty to Loki, though, Thor’s anger also emerged when he treated a group of dwarves rather roughly for making advances on the goddess Freya. But then again, Thor was generally on the hunt for a good fight. What more can you expect from a god whose favorite pastime is killing giants and monsters?

5. Balor: The Never-Look-Him-in-the-Eye God. Balor of the Evil Eye, as he was called, was the Celtic god of the underworld and king of the Fomorians, a race of giants whom myth assigned to the Emerald Isle. As the story goes, Balor’s mere gaze was enough to kill anyone it fell on (though, he normally kept his eye closed). That, of course, didn’t keep him from doing plenty of wrong. Among his more nefarious doings was locking up his daughter Ethlinn in a vain attempt to keep her from having her child, a prophesied savior (Her son, Lugh, eventually became god of the sun and killed Balor by throwing a spear into his eye). Balor was also pretty fond of picking wars in order to use his evil eye. In fact, in one of them, Balor was thrilled to put an end to King Nuada, the Celtic sea god, using just his fearsome gaze.

From mental_floss’ book Forbidden Knowledge: A Wickedly Smart Guide to History’s Naughtiest Bits, published in Neatorama with permission. Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ extremely entertaining website and blog!

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Amateur.

Lasse Gjertsen is no musician, but he can sure edit video! -Hi play or go to Link [YouTube] via Arbroath

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The Google Book.

FAR! FAR away, the Google lives, in a land which only children can go to. It is a wonderful land of funny flowers, and birds, and hills of pure white heather.

The Google has a beautiful garden which is guarded night and day. All through the day he sleeps in a pool of water in the center of the garden; but when the night comes, he slowly crawls out of the pool and silently prowls around for food.

From The Google Book, by V.C. Vickers, 1913. Link -via the Presurfer

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Domino Effect with £10,000 Coins.

Suddenly, all those thousands of falling dominoes tricks don’t seem so cool anymore when compared to the £10,000 coins domino effect! Hit play or go to Link [Google Video]

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Your Name in Hieroglyphics.

Yes, that’s "Neatorama" in hieroglyphics. Here’s how to generate your own: Link

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Harvest Moon.

David Haworth took this amazing photo of the reddish orange harvest moon. Link

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Animals That Are Better Than You.

It’s so depressing to see all the animals that are better than us. Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Arbroath

Update 11/13/06: It’s from the Australian comedy show called ““The Ronnie Johns Show” – Thanks AD_!

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Which Tastes Better, Cat Food or Dog Food?

A while ago, we featured a story on Adam Scott trying to live on monkey chow. Today, we’ll go to JimmerUK who’s testing which is better tasting, cat food or dog chow. Link – via A Welsh View

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Mutation Leads to Super Dense Bones.

From the website:

In 1994, an athletic man we’ll call John was involved in a car crash. He was uninjured, and X-rays of his spine showed no fractures. They did, however, reveal unusually dense bones. John’s radiologist referred him to Karl Insogna, the director of the Yale Bone Center. "His bone density was eight times higher than average for a man
his age," Insogna recalls. This fact may not have surprised John, who used to sink like a stone when he tried to swim.

Six years later, Insogna heard a fellow physician mention he’d seen a family with very high bone mass. Together they traced the family tree, linking John to an extended kin group sprinkled up and down the Eastern seaboard. The affected kin all had very dense bones and unusually square jaws, but otherwise normal skeletons. One of the affected family members is a physician in Alabama. "He’s had several failed hip replacements because they can’t screw the prosthesis into his bone," Insogna says. "It’s too hard." Studying the family, Insogna’s team zeroed in on a region of chromosome 11 likely linked to the unusual trait. But at the time, he says, the region was just too long to sequence.

Link – via Starspirit

Photo caption: Torus palatinus, a bony, lobulated outgrowth typically found in the hard palate of people with a particular LRP5 mutation.

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Rusty the Narcoleptic Dog.

Remember the fainting goats? Now, we have Rusty, the narcoleptic dog! Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

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On the MOOve.

Found at Bits & Pieces.

Update 11/13/06: It’s a dutch milk company Melkunie’s ad for a milkshake. See the video!

Thanks Kees de Vries!

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Elephant Poop Catcher.

No matter how bad your day is, be thankful that you’re not an elephant poop catcher! Found at Miss Cellania.

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Artificial Stomach.

UK Scientists invented this computer-controlled model to simulate human digestion in an effort to reveal the mechanism how the ingested food is broken down and nutrients absorbed in the gut.

The device, made from sophisticated plastics and metals, can withstand the corrosive gut acids and enzymes, and can be fed real food.

It mimics both the physical and chemical reactions that take place during digestion – and can even vomit.

It even mimics the stomach contractions which are used to break up food, and send it on its way along the alimentary canal.

Link

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The Barney Timeline.

Quick! How many Barneys do you know? There are probably more than you can remember right off hand. To help you along, you can consult the The Barney Timeline. Link

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