Justin Glow of Gadling wrote an article about 13 heists from around the world, for example:
Not everyone steals famous paintings, cash, or microchips. In fact, some people go to great lengths to get their hands on some very unsavory — yet quite expensive — items. In November of 2005, a farmer at Smithburg, Maryland’s Stonewood Acres had ventured to Pennsylvania to visit relatives. When he returned to the farm, he noticed a 70-pound tank filled with $75,000 worth of bull semen had been opened up, with sixty-five "straws" containing the sperm of nearly 50 bulls missing. "Frozen bull semen is big business because it saves on the transportation cost of putting a bull and a cow into the same pen to breed," explains the Washington Post. "Frozen semen can also last for many years, outliving the bull who produced it." Moo?
Link – Thanks Justin!
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Sickb*stard has compiled the Top 5 Jedi fight videos, made by college students. We’ve featured one before (Ryan vs. Dorkman), but they’ve made an excellent sequel.
Link [YouTube clips] – Thanks sickb*stard!
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When I was in high school, my brother and his friends would play a futuristic PC game called Mechwarrior 2. Could this Hubo FX-1 Chairbot be the first step towards creating deadly world-ravaging Mechwarriors? Maybe … although the designers might first want to work on the speed before field testing in the war zone.
Given that it’s called a chairbot, I’m sure the designers had a much more altruistic aim in mind (I just can’t figure out what it might have been). Hit play or go to link [youtube] to see the chairbot in action. via Gizmodo
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In the early Eighties, fashion designer Pierre Cardin wanted to buy an atypical summer house in Cannes. While searching, he stumbled across a construction site being built by architect Antti Lovag for a French industrialist. When the owner died before the Bubble home’s completion, Cardin bought asked the architect to complete it for him. The finished home is all curves, inside and out. Pretty neat!
See more great pictures at Ken Sparkes Photography, or read more on the home at Interior Design.
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This 21-year-old Kalamazoo, Michigan man got his wheelchair stuck to the front grill of a semi and got the ride of his life!
A 21-year-old Kalamazoo, Mich., man, unidentified by police, in this a motorized wheelchair, found himself stuck to the front grill of this semi truck and pushed eastbound on Red Arrow Highway near Paw Paw, Mich., Wednesday, June 6, 2007, for four miles (6.4 kilometers) at about 50 mph (80 kph), authorities said. The young man, reportedly unhurt, was quoted by police as saying, "It was quite a ride."
Link – Thanks virginie!
Update 6/7/07: The man’s name is Ben Carpenter – Thanks Miss C!
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Today’s weird car wreck is brought to you by Wrecked Exotics – can you imagine the phone call to the insurance company about this car?
Link – See more photos of weird car wrecks at Wrecked Exotics – Thanks Gregg!
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Like that popular Desktop Tower Defense game? Flash Element TD by David Scott is kind of like it, but funnier. With sheeps, rabid dogs, little boys, and peasants instead of creeps.
Link [Flash game]
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Everyone’s doing a viral website, even the Got Milk people. Here’s a cute and beautifully-rendered Flash "board" game, where you get to help the milk-deprived Adachi Family break into Fort Fridge and "Get the Glass".
Link [Flash] (Hint: to start, click on the dice in the lower part of the screen) – Thanks moronic50!
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Does saving really work for poor people? This study [pdf] from the National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative thinktank, said no:
Low-income households face "astronomical" penalties for saving, according to the report by the National Center for Policy Analysis. For example, each $1 saved by a single mother earning $15,000 a year would cost her $2.60 in higher taxes and lost government benefits.
"We’re constantly told that we need to save early and often to prepare for retirement," said Laurence Kotlikoff, professor at Boston University and author of the study. "Yet government policies tell low-income families, ‘If you save for the future, you won’t get our help today.’ "
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US and Japanese scientists managed to create embryonic stem cells from mouse skin cells through some genetic trickery:
"It’s pretty phenomenal," Michael Rudnicki, scientific director of Canada’s Stem Cell Network and director of molecular medicine at the Ottawa Health Research Institute, said in an interview.
The skin cells reverted to embryonic stem cells, or a state that the scientists describe as nearly identical to it, after they added four genes to the skin cells. The genes triggered a process that made the cells become "pluripotent" and capable of turning into any type of cell found in the body, which is the hallmark of embryonic stem cells and what makes them so alluring.
"This is very exciting scientifically because these four genes can reprogram any cell, it would seem, to become an embryonic stem cell," says Rudnicki. The technique presents a possible "work around" that could eliminate the need to use embryos to generate cells for regenerative medicine, he says.
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A mentally unbalanced man tried to jump into the popemobile yesterday:
A German man tried to jump into Pope Benedict XVI’s uncovered popemobile as the pontiff began his general audience today and held onto it for a few seconds before being wrestled to the ground by security officers.
The pope was not hurt and didn’t even appear to notice that the man — who was between 20 or 30 years old — had jumped over the protective barrier in the square and had grabbed onto the white popemobile as it drove by. The pontiff kept waving to the crowd and didn’t even look back.
Link (with video)
I say bring back the covered Mercedes Benz popemobile!
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Ever forget where you put something just a minute ago? How about if you had to find a thousand things that you hid in a thousand different places months ago?
That’s not a problem for this bird, Clark’s nutcracker:
This amazing little bird, a member of the famously clever corvid family, collects 30,000 or so tiny pine nuts each fall, and then hides them in about 5,000 different locations over an area of about 15 square miles.
Then in the winter, when snow blankets its natural habitat in the western United States, the nutcracker returns to collect its cache with astounding precision.
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via Arbroath
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While some suburbanites worry about being "terrorized by turkeys," others have even more interesting forms of wildlife to contend with:
Because Anchorage butts up against an undeveloped half-million-acre state park, there is plenty of nearby wilderness in which bears can thrive. Meanwhile, the city itself is home to a large and healthy moose population, which starts calving about the middle of May. For the bears, those calves are meat on the hoof. For people, it’s all just potential trouble. "You’ve got the bears in town chasing moose calves,” Sinnott said. "You’ve got the moose cows trying to protect their calves. … It’s almost the perfect storm.” . . .
It makes life easy for wildlife photographers, though. When a family of moose which had taken up residence in a suburban backyard was preyed on by a neighborhood bear, a National Geographic team knocked on the door and asked to film from the deck:
"Their producer brought them coffee and sushi. They said it was the cushiest wildlife shoot they’d done in a long time," Gabrielle said. The grizzly reappeared in the afternoon and this time with the body of the second calf which it had left buried behind a shed near the house. The bear dragged what was left of the calf toward the street and finished its meal in full view of the neighborhood. The crew filmed the last scenes of the bloody reality of nature from the deck in Double Tree while a stream of cars full of passengers hoping to spy the bear motored past.
The grizzly bear photo is from National Geographic
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Popular Science reports:
In what has to be today’s strangest news, Reuters reports that forest guards in western India are using cell phones to entrap stray leopards. Rather than using the time-honored method of lashing a goat to a tree, The top ringtone downloads for hungry leopards include: the mooing
today’s Indian leopard hunters rely on a sophisticated trap equipped
with speakers and a cell phone playing ringtones of various helpless
animals begging for their lives.
cow, the crowing rooster, and—the chart-topping favorite among these
big cats—the bleating goat. Unlike that dork next to you in the grocery
store who mercifully answers his “Gilligan’s Island†ringtone after the
“three-hour tour†portion, the Indian prey-tones play for upward of two
hours before an angry leopard stomps over to the trap to silence the
digital lamb.
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The following is reprinted from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader: World of Odd. Here’s the story behind one of the most peculiar (and most popular) grave sites in the entire United States. More than 60 years after it was completed, it still attracts tens of thousands of visitors a year.
FORBIDDEN LOVE In the mid-1870s, a college student named John Davis was forced to drop out of Urania College in Kentucky after his parents died and he was unable to pay tuition. He became an itinerant laborer, taking work wherever he could find it, and in 1879 he signed on as a farmhand for Tom Hart, a wealthy landowner in tiny Hiawatha, Kansas. Davis was a good worker, but that didn’t count for much when the penniless lad fell in love with Sarah Hart, the boss’s daughter. When the two announced their plans to marry, Mr. and Mrs. Hart, furious that Sarah would marry so far beneath her station, disowned her. MOVING UP Ever heard the expression "living well is the best revenge"? John and Sarah got back at the Harts by becoming one of the most prosperous couples in Hiawatha, though it took them a lifetime to do it. After scraping together enough money to buy a 260-acre farm, they managed it so wisely that they were able to use the profits to buy a second farm, which also did well. Then, after 35 years of living in the country, the childless couple moved to a stately mansion on one of Hiawatha’s best streets. They were still living there in 1930, after more than 50 years of marriage, when Sarah died from a stroke. At first John commissioned a modest headstone for Sarah in Hiawatha’s Mount Hope Cemetery, but soon decided it wasn’t enough. He’d never forgotten how Sarah’s family had spurned them when they had nothing; now that they were more prosperous than the Hart clan, he decided that he and Sarah should be laid to rest in the nicest, most expensive memorial in town. EDIFICE COMPLEX Davis was friends with a local tombstone salesman named Horace England, and together the two men designed a memorial consisting of life-size marble statues of John and Sarah as they looked on their 50th wedding anniversary. The statues would stand at the foot of the graves and face the headstones; the cemetery plot would also be protected from the elements by a 50-ton marble canopy supported by six massive columns. England stood to make a small fortune on such a grandiose memorial. Even so, he suggested that it might be a little much, especially considering that the country was in the depths of the Great Depression and folks in Midwestern towns like Hiawatha had been hit especially hard. Davis thanked him for his opinion and then offered to give the business to another tombstone salesman. England assured Davis that that would not be necessary and committed himself wholeheartedly to the task at hand. As far as anyone knows, he never raised another objection.
Davis approved the final design and sent his and his wife’s measurements off to Carrara, Italy, where master craftsman carved their likenesses out of the finest Italian marble. Completed in 1931, the Davis memorial was easily the most impressive in Hiawatha, probably in the entire state. And yet when Davis got a look at it he felt something was missing. The giant stone canopy dwarfed the pair of statues beneath it. The solution? More statues. "I thought it still looked too bare, so I got me another pair," Davis explained. The second set of statues depicted John and Sarah as they would have looked on their tenth wedding anniversary, much earlier in life than the first pair of statues showed them. NO STATUE OF LIMITATIONS By now Davis was pretty much out of loose cash, so he signed over his two farms to Horace England for $31,000—more than enough money to pay for the second set of statues. What did he do with the money that was left? He bought a third set of statues, showing Sarah and himself seated in comfy chairs as they would have looked in 1898, after 18 years of marriage. (John is depicted clean-shaven—in the late 1890s, he had burned his beard fighting a brush fire and for a time went without his flowing beard.) Why stop at three pairs? Davis then decided he wanted a fourth pair of statues. Again John is shown seated, this time missing his left hand, which he lost to infection in 1908 after he injured it while trying to trim his hedges with an axe. (The axe is on display in the nearby Brown County Agricultural Museum.)
Because this fourth set of statues depict John after his wife’s death, her absence is represented by a statue of an empty chair. (Just in case anyone misses the symbolism, the words "THE VACANT CHAIR" are carved into the chair.) Unlike the other statues, this pair was done in granite instead of marble. Davis claimed it was because he thought men looked better carved in granite. FORMING A CROWD
When the odd jumble of statues started to attract visitors, some of whom were disrespectful and climbed the statues or sat in The Vacant Chair, Davis had a three-foot-high marble wall built around the entire memorial, with marble urns at the corners inscribed "KINDLY KEEP OFF THE MEMORIAL." The wall is just low enough for the seated figures to be seen peeking over the top. [Note: Image Credit: Kansas Travel] ANYONE’S GUESS Why did Davis keep adding statues? Some people speculate that with no family of his own, he was determined to blow his entire fortune to keep his wife’s relatives from getting a penny of his money. Others speculate that Davis was motivated by guilt—he was apparently a very jealous man and during the more than 30 years that he and Sarah had lived on the farm, he had rarely let Sarah go into town alone or even visit the neighboring farm wives. Now, realizing too late how hard that must have been for Sarah, he was making it up to her in marble. A third theory, simple but compelling, is that Davis was just plain nuts. He became a compulsive memorial builder in much the same way that some people are compulsive collectors. Even if he did realize that each new addition of statues further cluttered an already crowded memorial, he couldn’t stop himself. THE END…OR IS IT? In 1937, the same year that he signed over his mansion to Horace England, John Davis learned from his doctors that he had less than six months to live. Davis quickly gave away the rest of his fortune—possibly as much as $55,000—prepared to join his wife in their final resting place. Six months passed…and then a year…and then two years, until eventually Davis realized that the same doctors he blamed for losing his hand after his axe incident had also botched the diagnosis of his "terminal" illness. He didn’t have six months to live, he had ten years to live, and now that he had given away his entire fortune he couldn’t even afford to live in his mansion, even though it was rent-free. He moved into the local poorhouse and lived there for the rest of his days, though he did spend a lot of time out at the cemetery, proudly showing off the 11 life-size statues and The Vacant Chair to the throngs of people who came to see it. He died in his sleep in 1947. In all, Davis is believed to have spent $200,000 on his memorial, the equivalent of well over $1 million today. (Many locals also credit him with giving tens of thousands of dollars to the needy during his lifetime, usually in small sums. But since this giving was done in private, it has been overshadowed by the memorial.) A SIGHT TO BE SEEN The Davis Memorial isn’t the prettiest grave in America. It looks like a cross between a gas station and a statue-company showroom. Nevertheless, it attracts as many as 30,000 visitors a year, many of whom go straight to the cemetery without bothering to visit the town. Perhaps it’s only fair, then, that Hiawatha’s townspeople are as ambivalent about Davis today as they were during the Depression, when he memorialized his wife in stone instead of building a library or a hospital that would have honored her memory while contributing to the common good. But Davis wouldn’t have had it any other way. "They hate me," Davis admitted late in life, "but it’s my money and I spent it the way I pleased." |
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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd. This book focuses on the odd-side of life and features articles like the strangest TV shows never made, the creepiest insect on Earth, odd medical conditions, and many, many more. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute
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This week’s collaboration with What is It? Blog is this strange object – it has a very specific function. Can you guess what it is? More clues at What is It blog.
Place your guess in the comment section (post no URL, please – let others play). Two Free Neatorama T-Shirts as prizes: one for first correct guess and another one for funniest/most creative guess. Answer tomorrow (Friday).
Update 6/8/07 – The answer is:
Train order hoop, when a train wasn’t scheduled to stop at a station but they needed to give the engineer new orders, they would attach them to this hoop and pass them to the train as it went by.
From this site:
Moving aboard the train at great speed, the trainman ran his arm through the hoop, pulled it out of the hand of the telegrapher, took the order, and threw the hoop down alongside the track. Injuries occurred when the telegrapher was slow to let go of the hoop. Occasionally the telegrapher was jerked down on his back. Likewise, the trainman sometimes suffered arm injuries.
The old train order hoop was replaced with the “Y” shaped train order stick. The telegrapher placed the order in a string and then threaded it around the stick. The telegrapher held the stick and the trainman took only the string with the order attached in a slip knot.
These were also used to pass mail to the train. A Y shaped order stick can be seen here.
Congrats to Chief-Ten-Bears (#4) who guessed right, and Randall (#8) for most creative answer.
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Hairshirt [wiki], as the name implies, got its name because it is a shirt made from animal hair (now it means object that is worn to induce discomfort or pain). Who would wear such a shirt? mental_floss explains:
Hairshirts used to be the clothing article de rigueur for penance and mortification. [...] Beyond their famous use by ascetics, lay persons also wore them periodically to stave off the corporeal temptations, and men of note sometimes wore them under their robes. Today only the Carthusians and Carmelites can be seen wearing them
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Tennis elbow is so 1980s. Today, the disease in vogue is this:
Bonis, 29, had spent hours playing Nintendo’s new video game in which players simulate real movements. Bonis had been playing simulated tennis.
It was not quite tennis elbow, he decided.
"The variant in this patient can be labelled more specifically as ‘Wiiitis,’" Bonis, a family practice physician, wrote in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine.
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You’re looking at the Citarum river, near the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, which is probably the world’s most polluted river:
More than 500 factories, many of them producing textiles which require chemical treatment, line the banks of the 200-mile river, the largest waterway in West Java, spewing waste into the water.
On top of the chemicals go all the other kinds of human detritus from the factories and the people who work there.
There is no such luxury as a rubbish collection service here. Nor are there any modern toilet facilities. Everything goes into the river.
The filthy water is sucked into the rice paddies, while families risk their health by collecting it for drinking, cooking and washing.
Link – via eBaum’s World
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Photo Credit: Kristen Ankiewicz
What is Dance Dance Immolation?
Dance Dance Immolation is an adaptation of the popular arcade video game Dance Dance Revolution, but with fire! Basically, you play DDR; when you do well, the computer shoots big propane blasts up into the air. When you do poorly, it shoots you in the face with flamethrowers. Yes, you, as in your actual corporeal body. And yes, flamethrowers, like the kind that are on fire.
Link | Additional photo gallery at CNET – via Blue’s News
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Jake von Slatt of Steampunk Workshop created this fantastic steampunk LCD monitor mod to match his steampunk keyboard! Link – via Boing Boing
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"Corporate comedian" Don McMillan has a bit called Life After Death by PowerPoint, where he pointed out what he hated about the software.
Those who have had to sit through a boring PowerPoint presentation will appreciate it: Link
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The Banpresto Face Bank piggybank robot will literally eat your money in order to save it!
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] | Product page at strapya-world – via Gizmodo and Tokyo Mango
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Got
a neat story? Share it with the world by writing your very own Neatorama
blog post with the Upcoming
Queue. Who knows, you might just win something ... 
Who says four pairs of statues are enough? Davis commissioned a fifth and then sixth. When the money from the sale of his farms ran out, he signed over his mansion to Horace England for $1, on the condition that he be allowed to live in it for the rest of his life. That solved Davis’s money problems, which may be why the fifth and sixth pairs of statues were once again done in Italian marble. The sixth—and—final—statues depict John and Sarah as angels kneeling over each other’s graves.
