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ABC World News Webcast has the this guy named "Chicken Charlie", a culinary genius who deep fries everything!
Chicken Charlie has sold close to 100,000 fried Twinkies, 200,000 fried Orio cookies in the last five or six years, 10,000 Krispy Kreme chicken sandwiches in the last two years. New for this year selection is Fried S’mores and the deep fried peanut butter, banana, and honey sandwich. He sells about 300 to 400 of those every day!
And boy do Americans looove fried food: Charlie’s little trailer sells about 3,000 to 5,000 orders every day and grosses about $1.5 million a year.
Our friend Felicia Sullivan will have a new book coming out soon. Titled The Sky Isn’t Visible from Here: Scenes from a Life, the book is a biography of her growing up with a beautiful but deceitful drug-addicted mother, her life amongst drug dealers, succumbing to drug abuse and finally redeeming herself.
The Huffington Post has a particularly moving piece on Felicia’s troubled relationship with her mother – and how she came to realize that a mother’s love is not required in life.
Giggling, my mother reveals that she’s leaving us for another man, one she met in a bar — he’s taking her to Disneyland! Disneyland! — and could I not call her for six months, make that a year, because she’s concerned that I would inevitably wreck her happiness. You always do. In the same breath, my mother tells me, Oh, the sex. You wouldn’t believe. I start to shake because my mother is leaving us for a man and mouse ears. I look up at my mother, watch her scrape her teeth with her fork, slurp the last dregs of her piña colada, and I writhe. I hate her. I hate you.
Nine months later, on the eve of my college graduation, my mother calls me, hysterical. The man who bought her mouse ears tried to strangle her. She’s been fired, living on white bread, and can still see the marks his hands left on her neck.
Could we take her back? Could life be the way it was?
I pause, wondering if it’s possible to drown standing up. I want to be the dutiful daughter, the one who loves beyond repair. But I think about the way it was: the woman who never allowed me trespass to my real father, a mother who stole my childhood from me. I remember the years of neglect, rage and abuse, her decade-long cocaine addiction, the fear of angering her and the terror of wondering whether she would get even in my sleep, and the countless times she told me I wasn’t worth her labor. I wasn’t worth anything at all.
I told my mother that she made it impossible for me to love her. Her response was a cold fuck you.
Link | Felicia’s blog – Thanks Felicia and congrats on the new book coming out!
Recently, CNN Young People Who Rock Blog, which focuses on noteworthy youths, has a feature on Lindsay Avner.
Lindsay, 23, is a healthy young woman who volunteered to undergo double masectomy because virtually every woman in her family (her mother, grandmother, great greandmother, aunts, and cousins … all suffered from or died of breast cancer).
Avner took control of her own destiny after a blood test revealed she had a genetic predisposition to the disease. She didn’t want to live in fear. She wanted to meet her future husband and say, "we got this out of the way so our family won’t go through what I did growing up."
A truly brave woman: Link | Lindsay’s new nonprofit organization Be Bright Pink
Flickr user cakeyvoice has an excellent gallery of zombie knitted dolls from Dawn of the Dead! Link – Thanks John!
What better way to celebrate summiting the 15,771 ft (4807 m) tall Mont-Blanc, the Alps, than to strip down, put on some bathing suits and jump in a jacuzzi?
Here’s the story of the crazy mountaineers who specializes in mashing up mountain climbing with the relaxing in the hot tub:
Link (see also an earlier journey to the top of another mountain in Allalin, Switzerland) – Thanks Kris!
Picture this: Hunter-trapper Brian LaDoon was taking care of his pack of Husky dogs on a Canadian tundra and German photographer Norbert Rosing was setting up his cameras, when out of nowhere a large polar bear walked up to one of the dogs.
Brian knew that the bear had not eaten for months, and thought it was "curtains" for the dog when something completely unexpected happened: the polar bear and the dog started playing with each other!
Here’s a fantastic audio slideshow (lots of neat pics) given by Stuart Brown about the encounter: Link – Thanks Jennie!
Linn Murphy with his homemade remote-controlled UFO.
Photo: Leonard Ortiz / The Orange County Register
51-year-old Irvine man named Linn Murphy has a strange hobby: the hoaxster likes to fly a homemade radio-controlled "UFO" over parks and public events which caused hundreds if not thousands of calls to the police!
Now, the jig is up:
[The UFO inventor, Steve Zingali] built one anyway. It flew, but couldn’t handle the wind. So he tweaked a few things and doubled its span from 18 to 36 inches. A phenomenon was born. Soon, Orange County motorists were chasing strange lights in the sky. Orange County’s Mutual UFO Network was taking calls about erratic, flying objects. And the Web site UFOinfo.com was posting reports of “glowing orbs” in south Orange County.
One 53-year-old man reported a large glowing ball that “appeared to drip fire.” It traveled about five miles in a few seconds, he said, and left an “acrid type odor” in the air.
Where? Right here. Right where Zingali is now connecting a 7.4-volt lithium battery to a foam toy with flashing lights that make it appear to spin. He starts the propeller and sends it into the night sky above the Aliso Viejo Town Center.
Voices rise as quickly as the UFO: “Oh my God.” … “UFO.” Shoppers gallop up the hill, including Haywood Bagley, who told his wife: “I hope they don’t start shooting. If I go down, you get in the car, Baby.”
The police, to their credit, thought Linn and Zingali’s shenanigans were kind of cool:
“We’ve had strange calls – people reporting UFOs and strange sounds in the air,” says Lt. Rich Paddock, police chief for Aliso Viejo. “But they’re not doing anything illegal. There’s no ordinance that says it’s illegal to fly a super-double-secret, gyroscoptic UFO in county airspace.”
Link – Thanks Julie Anne!
Remember the old myth that swallowing chewing gum will stay in your digestive tracts for seven years? That turned out not to be true, but what actually happens to a swallowed gum, anyhow?
Scientific American has got the answer (including a gruesome but rare case of gum-based gastrointestinal blockage that looks like a prickly porcupine!): Link – Thanks Scott!
HenryvKeiper took footage from the 1954 movie The Dam Busters and synced it with audio from the climactic Death Star scene from Star Wars episode IV. Read about the connection at Wikipedia. Push play or go to YouTube. -via Cynical-C
on the art of Andy Goldsworthy.
There is another remix by the same YouTube remixer worth a look here, but I recommend you turn the volume off on that one as the choice of music isn’t good.
Unedited clips from the film here and here.
And the wonderful ArtisanCam site in the UK has a lot on Goldsworthy. The best section is here.
St. Wilgefortis became popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She was known by names that translated as “Strong Virgin” and “The Liberator”. Legend says that the young noblewoman prayed to be delivered from an arranged marriage and miraculously grew a beard that broke the deal. The actual story is even stranger! Read about it at Curious Expeditions. Link
“Among its many amenities, the house features four deluxe toilets,” said the group, started in South Korea and dedicated to providing clean sanitation to the more than 2 billion people who live without toilets.
The home has a showcase bathroom located in its centre. Other toilets have features that range from elegant fittings to the latest in water conservation devices.
Video showing the kind of Transformers costumes we’ve seen pictures of earlier.
Link [Dailymotion] – via haha.nu
Yay! It’s time for our weekly collaboration with What is it? Blog. If you can guess correctly this strange contraption, there’s a Free Neatorama T-shirt for you!
Contest rule: place your guess in the comment section, one guess per comment but you can guess as many time as you’d like. Post no URL, please – let others play.
For more clues, check out the What is it? Blog (I promise, it’s NOT a torture device!)
Oh, and Steve Walker who won the last What is it? game – you’ve got one week to contact me and claim the prize (a Free Live! Pro Webcam by Creative) or we’ll just toss the prize back in for future game.
Update 10/12/97 – here’s the answer:
Leather creasing machine, used for continuous creasing of straps up to 1-3/4″ wide.
Congratulations to craig clayton #8 who got it right first.
Donald Trump and Steve Irwin LEGO minifigs
Brickshelf user Morgan19 has a neat collection of "historical" minifigs – basically LEGO minifigs dressed up and styled to look like celebrities and figures from history: Link – via Look At This …
We’ve posted a story about Hal-tank, an old Shaolin monk who is the only person in the world who can do a one-finger handstand.
Turns out, the secret is simple! Just channel all of your chi (or qi) on that finger.
A few people in the world can come close, like this guy on the ri
ght who can do a four finger handstand, but Hal-tank remains the only man who can do it with just one finger.
Link (embedded LiveLeak)
Here’s the story of a guy who tried to pass a $1 million bill at his local supermarket:
Change for a million?
That’s what a man was seeking Saturday when he handed a $1 million bill to a cashier at a Giant Eagle supermarket on Pittsburgh’s North Side.
But when the employee refused and a manager confiscated the bogus bill, Samuel Porter flew into a rage, police said.
Porter slammed an electronic funds-transfer machine into the counter and reached for a scanner gun, police said.
Police arrested Porter, 66, who was not carrying identification and refused to give his name to authorities. He is being held in the Allegheny County Jail.
Link – via Unique Daily
Image from Museum of Hoaxes, who also has another million dollar bill story.
I’ve just discovered cartoonist Mike of See Mike Draw blog, and boy am I hooked! His stuff is pure funny (some w/ NSFW speech bubble and/or risqué concept – but hey! That’s what makes his drawings funny).
Link | Link to the original panel of the cartoon above – via Militant Platypus
This weekend, do something fun with the kids, like making your very own pop-up photo!
WikiHow has the step-by-step guide: Link – via Curbly and swissmiss
