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Jumbolair in Ocala, Florida, is an "airpark" where people live in homes with garages for … airplanes! This one above is the house of actor John Travolta, who has a Boeing 707 in his garage.
Fogonazos has the story: Link – Thanks Aberron!
The first ever International Alchemy Conference will take place in (where else?) Las Vegas on October 5 – 7, 2007.
It’s the largest gathering of alchemists in 500 years, and will feature workshops in transforming metals, Egyptian alchemy, alchemy of the Kabbalah, anti-aging alchemy, and so forth.
In his book, Imagining the Tenth Dimension, Rob Bryanton explains – in plain English – the weirdness of string theory and the tenth dimensional (where all possibilities for everything are contained) physics using a clever Flash animation.
The beginning reminds me of the intriguing book Flatland [wiki], a 1884 book by Edwin Abbott.
Link | Rob’s Blog – Thanks Eli Packouz!
In this funny animated clip from Tom Dor, a magical "box" falls from the sky and disturb the peaceful lives of two prehistoric brothers.
What kind of box? You’ll have to watch to find out: Hit play or go to Link [Aniboom] – Thanks Benh!
Think you can solve global warming? In this game called Climate Challenge from the BBC, you’re a president of the European Nations and have just 10 years to tackle the global climate change through instituting policies and persuading competing regional blocs to reduce their carbon emissions.
Link [Flash] – via Celsias and Hugg (which is like digg, but for green news)
Archaeologists have found an ancient settlement used by the builders of Stonehenge:
Excavations at Durrington Walls, near the legendary Salisbury Plain monument, uncovered remains of ancient houses. …
In ancient times, this settlement would have housed hundreds of people, making it the largest Neolithic village ever found in Britain.
Link: BBC News
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| Writing takes a lot of focus – here are a few authors who got rid of all sorts of distractions, including their clothes, while writing: | |
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When Victor Hugo [wiki], the famous author of great tomes such as Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, ran into a writer’s block, he concocted a unique scheme to force himself to write: he had his servant take all of his clothes away for the day and leave his own nude self with only pen and paper, so he’d have nothing to do but sit down and write. |
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Ernest Hemingway [wiki] did not only write A Farewell to Arms, he also said farewell to clothes! The inside dirt is that Hemingway wrote nude, standing up, with his typewriter about waist level. Indeed, there might be a nudist streak in the Hemingway genes: Ernest’s cousin Edward Hemingway opened Britain’s oldest nudist colony, a nine-bedroom chateau called Metherell Towers, back in the 1930s! |
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Perhaps it’s not so surprising that D.H. Lawrence [wiki], who wrote the controversial (and censored) erotic book Lady Chatterley’s Lover, liked to climb mulberry trees, in the nude, before coming down to write. |
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James Whitcomb Riley [wiki], America’s "Hoosier Poet," had his friends lock him up in a hotel room to write, naked, so he wouldn’t be tempted to go down to the bar for a drink. |
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French poet and author Edmond Rostand [wiki], who is best known for his play Cyrano de Bergerac, was so sick of being interrupted by his friends that he took up working naked in his bathtub. |
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Apparently Rostand wasn’t the only one with this bright idea – Benjamin Franklin [wiki] also liked to take baths. In fact, he liked to take "air baths," where he sit around naked in a cold room for an hour or so while he wrote. |
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Mystery writer Agatha Christie [wiki], whose books have been translated in 40 languages and outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare, liked to write anywhere, including in the bathtub! Sources: A Blank Page by Sam Elmore, In The Nude by So Many Books, Literary Life and Other Curiosities by Robert Hendrickson, Dressing to Write by Bibi’s Beat. |
Don’t worry, she got it off. From Denver Channel via Jonco
This stunning home video captured the world’s worst mouse plague, which happened in southern Australia in 1993.
Warning: distrubing and icky images of, well, millions of rodents (doesn’t this make you really want to see it?). Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via VideoSift, Thanks James Roe!
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Death by … Hetvägg?By the time Adolf Frederick [wiki] came to occupy the throne of Sweden in 1751, a long period of monarchy-weakening reforms called the Age of Freedom left him with very little power. But his appetite didn’t seem to suffer. In fact, the old Swede died in 1771 at the age of 61 from digestive problems caused by a giant meal (the dinner table being the only place left to him to indulge his power). His final feast? Smoked herring, lobster, caviar, sour cabbage soup, and a heapin’ helpin’ of a dessert called Hetvägg, a bun filled with marzipan served in a bowl of milk. It’s no wonder the hapless monarch went down in history with an unfortunate (but accurate) epithet: “the King Who Ate Himself to Death.” Maybe it’s not always that good to be the king. |
Mardi Gras’ Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Granddad
Just as the pagan Saturnalia was co-opted by Christmas and the Celtic Samhain got translated to All Hallow’s Eve/Halloween, the pre-Lent binge of Mardi Gras [wiki] has its origins in a pagan festival. On March 15, the ancient Romans celebrated the Lupercalia [wiki], a festival commemorating the founding of Rome and the suckling of the infants Romulus and remus in a cave (the Lupercal) on the Palatine Hill. While the festival had a solemn religious aspect to it – you know, the standard blood and animal sacrifice – the celebration was marked by much drinking, revelry, and a general buffoonery. Boys clad in loincloths and smeared with blood would run through the city, as boys tend to do, lashing bystanders with strips of skin from sacrificed goats. After all, the lashings were said to promote fertility and easy childbirth, so young wives were particularly eager to meet the lash. When Rome became Christianized, the Lupercalia was replaced by Carnivale (literally “Good-bye to the Flesh”), the day before the beginning of the solemn season of Lent. In fact, the day before Ash Wednesday saw so much drinking and feasting that the medieval French dubbed it Mardi gras, or “Fat Tuesday.” The Sumo Diet
Like nearly every aspect of sumo life, the famed Japanese wrestlers’ diet is based in centuries of tradition. So, what exactly makes up this traditional food? Sumo wrestlers [wiki] put on their enormous weight – 700 pounds and more – mostly by consuming a Doesn’t sound particularly fattening, does it? By itself, it isn’t, even with the side of rice. In fact, chankonable is actually quite healthy, high in both protein and vitamins. But three factors play into the whole weight-gaining aspect of it for sumo wrestlers: (1) They ate a lot of it – an awful lot of it; (2) they traditionally skip breakfast, consuming most of their calories at an enormous midday meal, after which (3) they immediately take a three- or four-hour nap. As most nutritionists will tell you, skipping breakfast and then sleeping immediately after a meal is a guaranteed way to pack on the pounds. |
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The Babe’s Bad Day at the PlateHome wasn’t the only plate at which George Herman “Babe” Ruth [wiki] was a dominator. This guy had a big appetite for everything – food, drink, women, you name it. In fact, “The Sultan of Swat’s” favorite breakfast was said to include a porterhouse steak, six fried eggs, and potatoes, all washed down with a quart mixture of bourbon whiskey and ginger ale. The Babe also had a certain fondness for hot dogs, downing between 12 and 18 one day in April 1925. Shortly thereafter, he blacked out on a train and was hospitalized for an intestinal abscess (recent historians have attributed his hospital stay to gonorrhea, not a tummy ache). Disgustingly enough, one of the Babe’s partially eaten hot dogs (now black and shriveled and nasty) is still on display at the Baseball Reliquary in Monrovia, California. And although Ruth became pretty hefty in the last few years of his career, the rumor that the Yankees adopted their famous pinstripes to make him look smaller is false. The pinstripes first appeared in 1912, when the Yanks were still the New York Highlanders. |
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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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Ever wonder how the dog sounds in French and Croatian?
Well, this list of onomatopoeias lists animal sounds in several languages. Some have even sound files attached. Catherine N. Ball, Proffesor of Linguistics in Georgetown University made this complete compilation.
For Example: The Cat
Afrikaans: miaau
Albanian: mjau
Arabic (Algeria): miaou miaou
Bengali: meu-meu
Catalan: meu, meu
Chinese (Mandarin): miao miao
Croatian: mijau
Danish: mjav
Dutch: miauw
English: meow
Esperanto: miaw
Estonian: näu
Finnish: miau, kurnau
French: miaou
German: miau
Greek: niaou
Hebrew: miyau
Hindi: mya:u, mya:u:
Hungarian: miau
Icelandic: mjá
Indonesian: ngeong
Italian: miao
Japanese: nyaa
Korean: (n)ya-ong
Norwegian: mjau
Polish: miau
Portuguese: miau
Russian: myau
Slovene: mijau
Spanish (Spain, Argentina): miau
Swedish: mjau
Thai: meow meow (with high tone)
Turkish: miyauv, miyauv
Ukrainian: myau
Vietnamese: meo-meo
Billy Mavreas of yesway blog posted an excerpt of a 1937 issue of Life Magazine discussing Russel M. Arundel’s book "Everybody’s Pixillated" which features doodles of famous people. This one above is US President Thomas Jefferson, who apparently had a major hobby of creating secret codes!
See also: Presidential Doodles
William Wegman [wiki] is an art photographer famous for his compositions of his Weimaraner dogs in costumes. This trailer is of his movie Alphabet Soup, featuring – you’ve guessed it – those cute (and very patient) dogs!
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Put On Your Drinking Cap
Oh, this has got to suck:
A model was showing the ancient mirror to the audience when it slipped from her hands and fell to the floor.
It shattered into pieces, shocking the audience – especially owner Chen Fengjiu who was sitting in the front row.
Fengjui, a renowned mirror collector, said: "The mirror has been part of my collection for 16 years and is the best one out of more than 1,000 mirrors."
Link – via occasional fish
A fully automated basement parking garage is slated to be unveiled in New York City’s Chinatown this February. This garage will cram 67 cars into a volume typically occupied by only 24 cars in a traditional garage. Via San Francisco Chronicle.
I’m just waiting for New York to build parking garages like Volkswagen’s storage facility in Germany [Neatorama].
Cybele May of the Candy Blog, who probably has the best gig ever (she eats and rates candies!), found this awesome candy called Candy Blox:
They’re a compressed dextrose candy (what I call chalk candy) shaped like Lego building blocks. They’re about the same size and work the same, only without the firm snap to keep things together. Some of my little candies were actually missing their nubs, but they had enough to build little walls and stuff.
The best thing is, by the pound, they’re cheaper than Lego and taste much better!
Michael Meier of Oakado blog (fun illustrations, btw) found this awesome interactive installation called Bright Nights in New York City’s Union Square:
The project was called »Bright nights« and the code for the installation was made with java and c++. It workes basically like the particle-system in maya or 3d studio max but with an essential difference, it is generated in real time. Overall Marcus and Andrew did 12 different interactive games for this project which had the ability to morph into each other. So long-lasting fun was guaranteed.
Apparently, there’s a secret little spot in Modesto, California that is home to about a gazillion geese!
Links: Modesto Bee article | Photo from Jenguin
The Periodic Table of Comic Books is lovingly compiled by John P. Selegue and F. James Holler of the University of Kentucky’s Chemistry Department. The website lists comic book pages having to do with any particular element in the periodic table!
Link – via Cosmic Watercooler
Instead of those stuffy classics, Play! symphony plays a medley of songs you’ll definitely recognize. I won’t tell you what it is, you have to see it for yourself: Hit play or go to Link [Google Video] – via Brohans
From the website:
A young disabled man who receives care for his life-limiting illness at a hospice run by a nun spoke yesterday of his decision to use a prostitute to experience sex before he dies.
Sister Frances Dominica gave her support to 22-year-old Nick Wallis, who was born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Sufferers usually die by their thirties.
Mr Wallis told staff at the Douglas House hospice in Oxford that he wanted to experience sexual intercourse. He explained that he had hoped to form an intimate and loving relationship with a woman, but his disability had acted as a barrier.
He told The Daily Telegraph: "It was a decision two years in the making and I discussed it with my carers and my parents. Telling my mother and father was the hardest part, but in the end they gave me their support.
Link – via Liberal Avenger
Here’s something for the fans of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat arcade games: a very detailed and fantastically choreographed Flash movie by Newgrounds user Proxicide called MK vs. SF 2.
Hit play to see the battle sequence (3 min) or go to Link [YouTube] | The full length movie (8 min) at Newgrounds – via AQFL
Found at Hemmy – via Valley Daze
Yuck! Someone vomited on Neatorama! Well, not really – that’s just Net Disaster, a website where you can (safely) plaster a website of your choice with pesky animals, graffiti, wrath of nature, vomit, and many more.
It’s an oldie but goodie: Link – via sam bot
They may seem crappy but some of these office-made rubber band guns could kill you. In the gallery you can see all the gun models built only using office tools. Also there are comparatives and photos of demostrations of penetration power and so forth.
For our weekly collaboration with Cellar Image of the Day:
Some fathers and sons play catch, but not electrical engineer Jason Rollette and his 12-year-old son Trevor. They built their own spy sub (for only $300)!
Electrical engineer Jason Rollette and his 12-year-old son Trevor are a little more ambitious. Hoping to explore the lakes and rivers near their Milwaukee home, they’ve built their own underwater remote-operated vehicle, or ROV. Controlled and powered by a laptop, their ROV can swim more than a quarter of a mile, to depths of 250 feet, while a home-surveillance camera sealed inside sends a live feed to the pilots onshore.
The camera, electronics and lights fit inside two- to four-inch-diameter PVC piping. The pipes had watertight O-rings at their joints, so Rollette created windows from Plexiglas and screwed them onto the ends. Bilge pumps—which typically pump water out of a boat—act as thrusters, each spitting out up to 1,250 gallons an hour in different directions through plastic tubes. He plans to attach a motorized claw for grabbing treasure.
Link: Popular Science article – be sure to check out Cellar IoTD for more fun pictures!
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The world’s oldest newspaper, Sweden’s Post och Inrikes Tidningar (Post and Domestic Newspapers), has embraced the digital age, ending its run as a print publication and opting to be published exclusively on the Internet.
The paper was founded in 1645 by Queen Christina and was a staple for readers in Sweden throughout the late 17th and 18th century. While the paper has not covered news stories for more than 100 years, the World Association of Newspapers recognises it as the world’s oldest still in publication. Link
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simple diet of chankonabe, a thick boiled stew containing tofu, carrots, cabbages, leeks, potatoes, lotus roots, daikon radishes, shitake mushrooms, and giant burdock in chicken broth. Some recipes call for shrimp, noodles, raw eggs, or beer (interesting note: since falling to all fours in a match means a loss, many sumo wrestlers superstitiously avoid eating any four-legged animals. So there’s no beef or pork in their chonkanobe). 
