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An awesome panoramic photograph showing the whole of New York City. Link - via Digg
The 2006 winners of the Darwin Award just got announced! And the winner is:
The Hammer of Doom
August brings us a winner from Brazil, who tried to disassemble a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) by driving back and forth over it with a car. This technique was ineffective, so he escalated to pounding the RPG with a sledgehammer. The second try worked–in a sense. The explosion proved fatal to one man, six cars, and the repair shop wherein the efforts took place.14 more RPG grenades were found in a car parked nearby. Police believe the ammunition was being scavenged to sell as scrap metal. If it wasn’t scrap then, it certainly is now!
No, not that digg. In this fun and addictive Flash game Motherload, you’re a little digger that excavates ores, sells them for money to upgrade your machine and dig even deeper to get more ores, ad infinitum. Somehow, they made it fun!
Erik Kirschbaum of Reuters wrote about the oddities of 2006. Included is the spray-on condom we featured on Neatorama before (pic on the left) and many other items, such as:
Careless thieves once again made headlines round the world. A burglar in Germany left behind a vital clue — his finger tip.
"We usually find finger prints but it’s not every day that the thieves leave the original there too," a police spokesman said. It took only a few hours to track down the thief.
A Jordanian salesman was arrested for trying to fleece a money exchanger with a fake ID card bearing a Brad Pitt picture.
In Vienna, burglars fled after finding eight severed human heads. A dentist had stored the mummified heads for research.
Village leaders in India ordered 150 men to dip their hands in boiling oil to prove their innocence after food was stolen.
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Glenn & Heidi Reed’s Where on Earth? is an online catalog full of weird stuff you can buy (and some you cannot). This one "Toadcessory" hat and purse are but a small sample of the weird stuff they’ve got. Check it out: Link
The White Horse of Uffington, with its elegant lines of white chalk The horse was ritually scoured every seven years under the jurisdiction of the local Lord, who had to fund the event. The festival – for that is
bedrock, is thought to be the oldest hill figure in Britain. The image
is a stylised representation of a horse (some would say dragon) some
374 feet in length, and is thought to date back as far as 1000BC in the
late Bronze Age. Similar images have been found depicted on coins from
that period, and it is thought that the figure represents a horse
goddess connected with the local Belgae tribe. The goddess is generally
believed to be one form of Epona, worshiped throughout the Celtic world.
what it became – could last for over three days and consisted of fun and games, traditional cheese rolling, wrestling and other pastimes. The focus of the games was in the enclosed earthen banks of Uffington Castle an Iron Age hill fort, which the White Horse seems to be galloping to when viewed from the air. The cheese rolling was held on the steep sided valley known as The Manger, the place where the horse was said to feed on moonlit nights. The festival, which may have had ancient origins, lapsed about a hundred years ago, and it is fortunate that the White Horse did not become completely overgrown. The horse isnow cleaned by members of English Heritage, who are responsible for the site.
–Mysterious Britain
Photo from ABC Australia
HAKODATE, Hokkaido — Five members of a local riding club rode up 134 steps on native Hokkaido-bred horses to make their first visit of 2007 to Hakodate Hachiman shrine in style.
The riders from the Dosanko Farm riding club wore traditional horseback archers’ kimonos, in a New Year’s club custom that began eight years ago to pray for the safety of people and horses. (Mainichi)
Hans Nyberg’s Panoramas.dk has the neatest list of New Year panoramas you’ll find on the Web. The one above is from Sydney, Australia (no, not Sidney, Montana).
See 25 other cities: Link – via Bits & Pieces
Here’s a little clip called Pump Action by Phil McNally. The scene is from the movie Reservoir Dogs.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Fresh Creation and Eduyayo
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This is why you should never feed your sea turtles some brussel sprouts:
A turtle given a Christmas treat of Brussels sprouts caused a Boxing Day emergency when it set off an alarm at a sea life centre – by passing wind.
Its bubbles in the water tank were sent up a tube to the surface, where they popped and splashed water on to a sensor.
Marine biologist Sarah Leaney rushed to the 500,000 litre tank in Weymouth, Dorset, assuming it was overflowing.
‘Sprouts are a healthy Christmas treat for sea turtles,’ she said. ‘But they give similar side effects to those experienced by humans.’
Link – via Scribal Terror
This is a weird one: Richard Kavanagh broke the world record for most number of kicks to one’s own head. He did 60 in 38 seconds.
Hit play or go to Link [Google Video] – via Random Citations
Dead Man Eating Weblog, a blog dedicated to last meals, last words and other things of executed inmates has the details on Saddam Hussein’s last meal:
Hussein had a final meal request of boiled chicken and rice. With the food he drank several cups of hot water laced with honey. It was a drink which dated back to his childhood.
Link – via Miss Cellania
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In 2005, Steve Arnold found a 1,430-pound meteor in Greensburg, Kansas using a homebrewed metal detector cobbled together with PVC pipes and duct tapes. It was worth more than $1 million:
FOR TWO WEEKS, STEVE ARNOLD TRUDGED through the dusty farmland of Kiowa County, Kansas, a 6-foot rope trailing over his shoulder. Tied to the end of the rope was a metal detector cobbled together from PVC pipe and duct tape. Back and forth Arnold paced, pulling the jury-rigged device across the dirt, hunting for meteorites. He had already found a few, but nothing bigger than 100 pounds or so. Mostly, he found horseshoes. And beer cans. Soon the farmers would want him off their land; planting season was coming. To speed things up, Arnold attached his contraption to a tractor. He was sure there was a bigger rock out there, just a few feet beneath the turf.
Here’s the story of the American meteor farmer: Link – via Listics
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It was the night before Christmas, and Ebenezer Scrooge was facing the three ghosts. Or was he?
Robert Chance Algar, a Californian neurologist, and his aunt Lisa Saunders, a medical writer and physician, believe that the affliction that made Scrooge a byword for miserliness and redemption was Lewy body dementia (LBD), a disease so complex that doctors did not include it in the medical lexicon until 1996.
Link – via The Boomer Chronicles
Haha.nu has a couple of pictures of a funny ad campaign by a deodorant, titled "Get Rid of Deadly Foot Odor": Link
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Digital Photography School has a neat basic primer on how to photograph waterfalls. Even though you’re not a shutterbug, you’ll probably still appreciate several of the fantastic photos they have on the page: Link
This one above is taken at the Chittenango Falls State Park, upstate New York: Link [Flickr]
If you like that one, I bet you’ll like what I consider to be one of the most beautiful waterfalls in the world: The Plitvicka Waterfalls in Croatia, taken by Jack Brauer.
Before the blockbuster Fantastic Four movie in 2005 [wiki], there was a previous low-budget B-movie version produced by Roger Corman [wiki], who was famous for producing these types of film.
The low-budget 1994 movie was never officially released, but now you can watch it at YouTube. Here it is: Part 1 (see link within for Part 2 to 10) [YouTube] – via The Cartoonist
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Here’s a test to see whether you’re an idiot. Truth be told, it took me several times to "pass" the test. Link
