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For a Carrier air conditioning convention last year, LEGO artist extraordinaire Nathan Sawaya built a functioning air conditioner out of LEGO bricks!
… when I was asked to build an air conditioner, I thought "Nathan, let’s not just make a replica of an air conditioner. No, Nathan, here’s a golden opportunity to make something cool. Let’s make a functioning air conditioner. Now that would be cool!" Please note that by ‘functioning’ I just meant a spinning fan. And by ‘cool’ I meant someone who would not address themselves by their own name.
Working feverishly at the 2006 Carrier Convention I built a functioning replica of Carrier’s newest air conditioner, complete with the compressor, valves and working fan. It took every hour of both days of the convention, but in the end I was happy with the result. And with that spinning fan, wow, what a breeze!
Link (Nathan did it again this time for Bryant air conditioner) – via Make (who has a neat post with a run-down of all sorts of DIY air conditioners)
If you haven’t converted to digital photography, or you’re a packrat who still has empty photo film canisters, you can make your very own salt and pepper shaker by punching holes in the lids!
Or if you have more money than creative talent, then you can buy a set by Rita Bothelo for $35 (Whaaat!?). Perfect for the photography enthusiast in your family: Link
Update 11/8/07: Maybe this is a bad idea, guys – there may be bad chemicals left by the film or even in the non-food-grade plastic itself (see comments).
When Johnny Virgil was installing an attic fan at his wife’s grandfather’s house, he ran into a JC Penney catalog from 1977.
Obviously, the right thing to do was to scan the pages and share it with the world:
And this — Seriously. No words.
Oh wait, it turns out there are words after all, and those words are What. The. Fuck. I’m guessing the snap front gives you quick access to the chest hair. I think the little tie must be the pull tab. If you look really closely, it says, "In case of chest hair emergency, pull tab quickly and back away."
Link – via Needcoffee
Remember the story about the car crushed by a runaway wrecking ball? If you thought that was weird, it was nothing compared to this:
A Michigan couple is lucky to be alive after their minivan was hit by a falling cow on Sunday.
According to a report in the Wenatchee World newspaper, Charles Everson, Jr. and his wife Linda were driving on Highway 150 about one mile east of Manson in Chelan County when a cow fell about 200 feet off a cliff and landed on the hood of their minivan.
"It was ‘bam’- you just saw something come down and hit the hood," Everson told the newspaper from a hotel room in Manson.
To promote its new Wii game Super Mario Galaxy, Nintendo hired astronaut Buzz Aldrin to show Mario how to move around in zero G aboard the Vomit Comet (er .. Weightless Wonder, according to NASA!)
Kotaku has more pics: Link
Srsyl cool has a tribute post on Ultima [wiki], the longest running RPG franchise and computer game series:
Once upon a time before there was WoW, and actually before many of us existed, a series of games called Ultima was created. 27 years later you probably know it only as Ultima Online, but before MMORPG superceded RPG it was a long-running series of games loved by generations.
If you remember this, you’d be showing your age! Link – via Blue’s News
That’s architect and sculptor Robert Bruno’s steel house/sculpture in Lubbock, Texas. Bruno spent 23 years building this strange home that looks like a giant pig out of 110 tons of steel!
Links (lots of pics): Robert’s official website [Flash] | Article at Dallas Art Revue, Sociothought, video at Ursi’s Blog
You never know when this will be useful: this video shows you how to make fire using a potato, toothpaste, salt, cotton, and toothpicks. [warning: gratuitous use of a girl in bikini in start of video]
If you can’t see the embedded video, go to 5 Min Life Videopedia: Link
Helen Ruth Thrash just realized her dream of a lifetime when she turned 100: she got a free ride on the Goodyear blimp!
Just snagging a seat on the blue, gold and silver airship makes her a member of a pretty elite club. However, Mrs. Thrash’s 30-minute flight helped usher her into super-elite status.
That’s because the feisty Hartville resident will soon mark 100 years of living. [...]
”I sure do enjoy this! It would be worth a dime of anybody’s money,” an animated Mrs. Thrash said of the airship, which is 192 feet long, 50 feet wide, 59.5 feet high and has a volume of 202,700 cubic feet.
Link (Photo: Lew Stamp/Akron Beacon Journal) – Thanks Marilyn!
wedged between the walls of a mountain crevice in norway is a rock called kjeragbolten. the rock is often stood on by tourists for a crafty photograph whilst attempting not to look down at the 3000ft+ drop. i’m assuming the sheep/goat in the picture below was a local.
Kjeragbolten is just one of a collection of “rocks that rock” today at deputy dog. Link
You can just picture Jerry Seinfeld explaining each of these terms. Here are just a few:
Caught in a Pick at the Light – when a person is waiting in their car at a traffic light and decides to scratch the outside of their nose, where it appears (to their date, who just happens to be in the car or cab next to them) that they are actually picking their nose
Head-First Parker – 1) a person who tries to pull into a parking space head first as opposed to backing into the space 2) a person who pulls into a parking space head first with the intention of screwing someone else out of the space
Level Jumping (on a friendship) – when casual acquaintances attempt to become better friends with certain acquaintances (ex. asking an acquaintance to be a godparent to one’s child/children)
There are enough definitions here to keep you busy for quite a while. Link -via the Presurfer
To followup the story from Monday, The Hindustan Times reports that surgeons have completed the surgery to remove two-year-old Lakshmi Tatma’s parasitic twin, and she is in stable condition.
“Lakshmi is doing fine and her condition is stable,” Chief Coordinator of Sparsh Hospital, Dr Mamata Patil told PTI.
The next 48 to 72 hours are critical and a team of doctors will monitor Lakshmi, who is put on ventilators in the Intensive Care Unit, she said.
The surgery lasted 27 hours and involved 36 doctors. Link
Jackie Bibby, the "Texas Snake Man," has set a new world record for … sitting in a bathtub with snakes!
Bibby spent about 45 minutes in a see-through bathtub with 87 rattlesnakes on Monday, fully clothed, shattering his own record by 12 snakes just in time for Guinness World Records Day, which is on Thursday. A Guinness official certified the record, in Dublin, Texas.
The snakes crawled under his arms, between his legs and anywhere else they could slither, Bibby said. None bit him.
Just seeing the picture gives me the willies: Link
We’ve featured the Superman coat hanger on Neatorama before, so it’s Batman’s turn now: here’s the Bat clothespin, officially named the Vespertilium clothes peg (huh?), designed by Yegor Zhgun for Art Lebedev.
Meet Steve Searles, the bear whisperer of Mammoth Lakes, California:
Since he became the Police Department’s volunteer wildlife specialist in 1996, Searles has gained a national reputation as a bear whisperer, someone who can deal with problem bears without killing them.
He tries to think like a bear. He studies their habits and social hierarchy. He has participated in Native American ceremonies to learn what the tribes perceive as bears’ spiritual nature. He even has been known to spread his own urine to drive away territorial animals.
"I’m the biggest, baddest, meanest bear in this town — that’s what I want them to think," said the 48-year-old. "I’m the alpha male, and they must obey me."
But not everyone was happy with Steve’s methods: he was eventually fired by the authorities, though he’s now back due to popular demand.
Here’s the fascinating story of the man who shows the bears who’s boss: Link (with video clip)
Tom Mosser form Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is ambidextrous: he can draw a caricature with both hands at a time!
Damn, I’d give one hand to have the other be able to draw like that … and the Tom has two of them!
Hit “Play” or go to Mosser’s YouTube site for the video.
One day, this guy named RicMoo came home from a party where they had joked about mashing up Pac-Man with Zork [wiki]. Being a little drunk, RicMoo decided to actually make the game:
Wth?! Why would anyone invest the time and effort to build such a useless game?
Well, I had just got back from a party where the concept of a Pac-Man + Zork hybrid came up as a joke. So, being 2am with a little alcohol in my system, I thought it’d be funny to code it up (as far as I could before collapsing). So, a couple hours later it was looking complete-ish (minus the ghosts’ AIs and graphic assets). The next morning [read: aftenoon] when I woke up, since I have an inability to realize sunk costs, I decided to throw some crappy AI in for the ghosts, put a few graphics on it (courtesy of FastIcon.com) and voila! A domain name purchase or two later, and here we go.
Here it is: Pac-Txt (hint: look around) – via Waxy
Nepal is the only country in the world that doesn’t have a rectangular flag. Nepalese flag is shaped like a two overlapping triangles.
Doug Laubert was punching holes in his wall to run TV cables when he found this mysterious creature in the attic of a schoolhouse in New Jersey:
"The general consensus is that maybe it’s a deformed flying squirrel," Laubert said of the freakish mummy-thing. "Maybe it’s a salamander – but it has hair! Maybe it’s a chipmunk – but it has a fish tail! When I first saw it, I thought it was a mudskipper – but it has teeth!"
He and his family have thought up some names for the ungodly fish-being, among them "The Spawn of the Jersey Devil" and his nephew’s suggestion, "Herman the Vermin."
Steve Lemongello, who wrote this article for The Press of Atlantic City, has a practical suggestion if you should happen to find this creature in your attic:
So if you see something like this in your own home, whether it’s slowly crawling along your floor or simply creeping unseen into your bed in the middle of the night, just try not to look directly into its eyes.
If it starts talking to you, run.
Link (Photo: Vern Ogrodnek / Press of Atlantic City)
Scott Rench of Yosoh blog spotted this awesome furry (and horny!) bike in Copenhagen, Denmark. Take a look at some other weird stuff he found there at his blog: Link – Thanks Scott!
