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Neatorama reader Chris Dyer spotted what is probably the first time "LOL" is used outside of the Web. Thanks Chris!
Etsy seller AmeliaMakesArt makes a mini-likeness of your dog out of wool:
I am in love with making these little needle felted dogs and would love to make one for you! I can make a dog of the breed you love or I can make a portrait of your dog from photos you would email me.
Each little pooch is sculpted out of Icelandic and Merino wool. The technique is needle felting and uses a special barbed needle tool to create the form. Each dog is one of a kind and sculpted in fiber like one would sculpt clay. There is no sewing, stuffing or pattern of any kind.
Link – Thanks bethany!
The Map of Humanity by Rex Libris and Nil creator James Tuner is a giant atlas listing human emotions, states of mind, characters and such, placing real and fictional locations in their (mostly) appropriate territories.
If you look closely at the larger picture, you’ll see that Bangkok and Los Angeles are next door to each other in the land of Hedonism, just west of Depravity. Las Vegas? Why, it’s in the province of Greed, which borders Envy.
Fun stuff! Link – Thanks Gitai!
Can’t come to coffee shop? Let the coffee shop come to you! Espressi is a Dutch company that brings mobile Italian espresso machines to wherever a cuppa is needed: Link [in Dutch, but you can just oggle cute little cars] – via shitscar.de, thanks Robert Jung!
The map above (click here for the large version) shows what the world would look like if each country’s size was proportional to their proven oil reserves. I find it a little surprising that the world’s largest oil consumers (North America, Europe and China) have such a small portion of the world’s oil.
If the presented figures are correct, the U.S. would deplete its entire supply of oil in about 3 years without imports (and could single-handedly deplete the entire world’s reserves in 50 years). Makes you wonder why the U.S. government isn’t more supportive of alternative energy. Link via digg
Scientists have recently found a 260-million-years old fossil of a weasel-sized prehistoric reptile from Russia that had the first modern ears:
Paleobiologists uncovered large-eyed fossils of these reptiles with surprisingly advanced ears near the Mezen River in central Russia. They are a kind of now-extinct reptile called a parareptile.
The outside of the cheek in the reptiles was covered with a large eardrum. This structure was connected with the inner ear and the brain with a bone comparable to those in human ears.
Jeff Gagliardi has drawn da Vinci’s Mona Lisa using an Etch-a-Sketch toy (or lineography set, to you hoity-toity art crowd!)
Gagliardi, who runs a graphic design company, has also drawn the Taj Mahal and the Vitruvian Man.
Previously on Neatorama: Etch-A-Sketch Art | Master of Etch-A-Sketch | Etch-A-Sketchiness, a compendium of everything Etch-A-Sketch
and Mona Lisa Redrawn by Cartoonists.
Earlier this week, waiter Juan Canales saw a woman being carjacked from a parking lot near the Florida restaurant he worked, ran out, and rescued her.
Proving that no good deed goes unpunished, when he walked back to the restaurant, he was fired!
Canales was fired after subduing a knife-wielding man who tried to steal Massiel Marquardt’s Honda CRV outside the restaurant, at 979 State Road 84. After Canales got suspect Albert Means on the ground, three other men helped hold Means down until police arrived.
Canales spent an hour talking to police and the media. He returned to work but when the lunch shift ended, his boss fired him. No one answered the phone at 84 Thai Food Tuesday.
Many business owners found out about this and offered Juan jobs: Link
A Russian home made lawnmower made from a tricycle.
This particular lawnmower still works and sometimes is used by this Russian man on his “dachaâ€, the summer wooden cottage where he spends some of his weekends, like many other Russians do.
Did you like the Super Coat Hanger? How about a matching laptop?
The Superman Learning Laptop is meant as a tool for kids to learn spelling, mathematics, logic, and more.
Link (with video demonstration)
Popular Mechanics has published a list of 25 skills every man should know. They are:
1. Patch a radiator hose
2. Protect your computer
3. Rescue a boater who as capsized
4. Frame a wall
5. Retouch digital photos
6. Back up a trailer
7. Build a campfire
8. Fix a dead outlet
9. Navigate with a map and compass
10. Use a torque wrench
11. Sharpen a knife
12. Perform CPR
13. Fillet a fish
14. Maneuver a car out of a skid
15. Get a car unstuck
16. Back up data
17. Paint a room
18. Mix concrete
19. Clean a bolt-action rifle
20. Change oil and filter
21. Hook up an HDTV
22. Bleed brakes
23. Paddle a canoe
24. Fix a bike flat
25. Extend your wireless network
I know how to do most of these. What do you need to know to hook up an HDTV? Could it possibly be harder than hooking up my TV/VCR/DVD/RF/cable box combination? Link -via Fark
The current Ebay bid stands at around $2000 US.
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Marry Our Daughter is an introduction service assisting families to arrange marriages for their daughters. Kyra A, a 14 year-old who hails from the southeast and loves the outdoors, comes with a bride price of USD 27, 995.
The site has gotten 20 million page views in the last two weeks and gets around a thousand (mostly angry) emails a day. The site’s creator (and active nudist), John Ordover, has revealed that the site is indeed a prank.
Mr. Ordover quickly conceded the page was a parody aimed at drawing attention to inconsistencies in state marriage laws. States consider it a crime for adults to have sex with minors, but they allow kids as young as 12 to get married with parental and sometime judicial permission.
Link | New York Times article – via linkfilter
This week’s collaboration with What is it? Blog brings us this strange tool: can you guess what it is?
Since last week’s game was solved in just 10 minutes after posting, we’ll have another prize for this game: a Free Live! Pro Webcam by Creative. It’s not the newest model available today, but hey! It’s never-opened and it’s free!
Contest rules are simple: place your guess on the comment section, one guess per comment but you can guess as many times as you’d like. Please post no URL, let others play. First one to guess right gets the prize (unfortunately, I can only ship this to US and Canada – if you’re elsewhere, you’d just have to comfort yourself with a Neatorama T-shirt).
For more clues, check out What is it? blog. Good luck!
Update 9/14/07 – the answer is:
This is a universal tool used for lifting hot plates, pots, and stove lids. It can also be used as a meat tenderizer and a trivet, patent number 241,893.
No one got it, so the prize will carry over to next week.
Everything’s so much weirder in Japan … their scarecrows are no exception:
While frightening the birds away, about 60 scarecrows along a stretch of the Route 280 Bypass in Aomori are attracting the attention of passing motorists. The scarecrow display, which includes one modeled after sumo wrestler Asashoryu scandalously playing soccer, is part of Kakashi Road 280 (kakashi means “scarecrow”), a recently established annual September event designed to stimulate the local economy and welcome the 2010 opening of Tohoku Shinkansen Shin-Aomori station. Organizers hope to eventually create 150 scarecrows to watch over the 15-kilometer stretch of road.
Pink Tentacle has more pics: Link
For his artwork, French illustrator Serge Kliaving mashed up cute cartoon characters with superhero and gore comics: Link – via who killed bambi?
CIO has a neat write up about the Seven Wonders of the IT World. For example:
World’s fastest supercomputer:
IBM BlueGene/L (BGL)Powered by: 65,536 dual-processor computer nodes.
Home base: This 2,500-square-foot marvel lives at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.
Claim to fame: Helps researchers answer physics questions about stockpiled nuclear weapons and materials like Plutonium.
Power requirements: 1.5 megawatts (equivalent to a 2,000-horsepower diesel engine).
Clocked speed: Rated fastest in the world after clocking sustained performance of 280.6 trillion operations per second, or teraflops.
Approximate cost: As part of a larger contract including other supercomputers, just under $100 million.
Measure of compute capability: To match the power of this behemoth, every man, woman and child on Earth would need to perform 60,000 calculations per second (without transposing digits or forgetting to "carry the one").
Brawny bandwidth: Its internal communication network would support 150 simultaneous phone conversations for every person in the United States.
Link – via metafilter
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Here’s a hanger fit for a superhero: a “Superman” coat hanger designed by Roman Ficek:
Link – Thanks Joe!
Now THIS is what they should do in hockey and baseball: why fight when you can hop around on one leg?
Link [embedded YouTube clip]
Animated Knots by Grog is a website that, as the name suggests, explains how to tie some common (and some uncommon) knots with a series of step-by-step pictures.
Like this one to the left, which is called the Monkey Fist (really!)
Link – Thanks Eric Haines!
Not one to be outdone by American arsenal, the Russian had successfully tested a new non-nuclear "vacuum" bomb:
Channel One television said the new weapon, nicknamed the "dad of all bombs" is four times more powerful than the U.S. "mother of all bombs." [...]
The U.S. Massive Ordnance Air Blast, nicknamed the Mother Of All Bombs, is a large-yield satellite-guided, air-delivered bomb described as the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in history.
Channel One said that while the Russian bomb contains 7.8 tons of high explosives compared to more than 8 tons of explosives in the U.S. bomb, it’s four times more powerful because it uses a new, highly efficient type of explosives that the report didn’t identify.
While the U.S. bomb is equivalent to 11 tons of TNT, the Russian one is equivalent to 44 tons of regular explosives. The Russian weapon’s blast radius is 990 feet, twice as big as that of the U.S. design, the report said.
Link | Video at Reuters – Thanks Algonkin!
You know how it is, you’re strolling along the Amazon and meet the soul mate of your dreams, and you just happen to have a dozen long-stemmed roses but they need trimming before you can present your snazzy bouquet to him or her. And to your embarassment, your garden shears have turned up missing again! Well worry no longer, friend! This handy-dandy bloodthirsty fish trims your stems, slices, dices, and even makes tons of julienne fries!*
*Not responsible for severed digits or missing children. Offer void where prohibited by law. Close cover before striking. Push Play or go to YouTube. Found at FunnyAnimalVideos.Com. So there. Nyah.
