What would the 24 TV series have looked like if it was created some 10 years ago? Maybe something like this. One thing’s for sure, the “damn it” would still there.
Since Fox will not be airing a new season of “24″ due to the writers’ strike, they plan to air a season that was originally filmed in 1994. CHTV obtained this exclusive clip.
Link [CollegeHumor]
What do you get when you mash up The Beatles and zombies? Here’s the ZomBeatles playing their hit "A Hard Day’s Night of the Living Dead."
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Locust & Honey
Previously on Neatorama: A Hard Day’s Night of the Living Dead, the mashup trailer version.
British food artist Prudence Emma Staite created sculptures of Pope Benedict XVI, the Colosseum, and the Spanish Steps using pizza dough! She used enough dough to make 500 pizzas.
YumSugar has the gallery: Link – Thanks Sabrina!
Yoga is a big business in United States, but it’s hard to get adults to stretch and put themselves in odd and unnatural positions. So that’s why Helen Garabedian’s idea is so brilliant: 1) young children are an untapped market for yoga, and 2) they do all those yoga poses all the time anyhow!
"Let’s start with a little centering," Blythe Berube Rowan says, and even those with a less-than-Seinfeldian sense of irony can find humor in this, as we are surrounded by manic munchkins speeding around the dance studio floor.
"Breathe in," Berube instructs as my 3-year-old daughter catapults onto my back. "Breathe out." (Indeed.)
Other children, wondering why all these grown women are on the floor, arrive in time to witness lion pose – mamas sticking their tongues out, widening their eyes and, basically, roaring. A few roar along. There is laughter.
Yoga or not, seems like the little squirts are having fun! Link (photo: Steve Zylius, The Orange County Register) – Thanks Julie Anne I!
Humans go to great lengths to prove themselves in sports. If one particular sport is "too easy" then we combine ‘em with others (like the triathlon) to make it harder for ourselves. But this particular sport takes it to the extreme – it combines the physical pain of boxing and the mental exertion of chess.
Ladies and gentlemen, heeeeeeeeereee’s chess boxing:
Berlin is hosting the first ever chess boxing world championship. It has been organised by the man who invented the sport – Dutch artist Iepe Rubingh.
"Chess and boxing have lots of things in common," Mr Rubingh assures me.
"If you move the pawn, it’s like moving your jab. If you come with the knight, it’s like a hook. If you come with the rook, it’s a straight right. And if you march in with the queen, it’s a knockout," he says.
Two sports in one means double the pain – and double the pressure.
Links: BBC article | World Chess Boxing Organization | Chess boxing [wiki] – Thanks Oscar Yan!
The new ad for Guiness stout will debut on TV tonight, but is available on the net already. It shows the biggest domino fall you can imagine.
Shot in an Argentinian mountainside village, it features a game of dominoes which escalates to include suitcases, tyres, oil drums, fridges, wardrobes and cars.
Proving that “Good Things Come to Those Who Wait”, it culminates with the pages of 10,000 books flipping open to create a giant pint of Guinness.
The advert, part of a £10 million campaign, was directed by Nicolai Fuglsig, who was behind the Sony Bravia “balls” commercial.
Update: I did a little digging, and this has been identified as the Perito Moreno Glacier {wiki} in Los Glaciares National Park. The breakup is a natural phenomena that can be forecasted, but it’s not regular, happening every one to ten years. It’s a big tourist attraction.
Breakfast of champions, perhaps?
The bankrupting bagel is the creation of chef Frank Tujague of the Westin New York hotel at Times Square and was designed in part to help raise funds for Les Amis d’Escoffier scholarship, which provides scholarships to students of the culinary arts.
The bagel is topped with white truffle cream cheese and goji berry-infused Riesling jelly with golden leaves.
Via wbztv.com
This week’s collaboration with What is it? Blog brings us this strange contraption: can you guess what it is for?
Place your guess in the comment section – one guess per comment, please! You can guess as many times as you’d like. Please post no URL, so others can play. No prize this week – you’re playing for fun and bragging rights only.
For more clues, check out What is it? Blog.
Update 11/9/07 – the answer is:
“The X Rays Egg Tester”, manufactured by The Reeves-Rigling Egg Tester Co., Hamilton, Ohio, Patent number 940,361. Also known as an egg candler, these were used for detecting embryonic development or for separating shell eggs.
Congratulations to Bill #14 who got it right!
We’ve all heard about the Zimbabwean crisis be it on the TV or print media, but here is a small selection of statistics from an extensive fact sheet to show how much of a crisis it really is:
Population
Estimated population in 2000: between 12.5 and 13 million; current estimates indicate the population could be as low as 8 million
Economic Collapse
The world’s fastest shrinking economy – exports: R50 billion in 1997, R9 billion in 2007
Agricultural Sector
Up to 70% of commercial agriculture has been destroyed
Emigration / Brain Drain
75% of Zimbabweans with a job are employed outside their country
Living Standards
45% of the population is malnourished, one of the highest rates in the world
Health
Number of doctors per 10 000 people: 1 (World Health Organisation statistic 2006)
Mugabe’s Mansions
Located 16 km north of Harare, Mugabe’s 25 en suite bedroom mansion is the size of a medium-sized hotel
With all the space and satellite technology and what not, you’d think that they had done this a while ago, but apparently scientists had just gotten around to take the world’s first high-definition image of the moon:
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and public broadcaster NHK have succeeded in capturing the world’s first high-definition video of the moon taken from lunar orbit. The 8x time-lapse video was shot using an HDTV camera aboard the KAGUYA lunar explorer, a.k.a. SELENE (SELenological and ENgineering Explorer), while in orbit 100 kilometers (62 miles) above the lunar surface.
JAXA has posted an online version of the video, which is divided into two parts. The first part was shot on west side of the Ocean of Storms as the explorer moved from south to north, and the second part was shot from a location north of the Ocean of Storms (Oceanus Procellarum) as the explorer moved toward the north pole. The footage was taken on October 31.
By now, you’d probably heard about the Writers Guild strike (or at least noticed that all the late night shows are airing only reruns) – but what is it all about anyhow?
In this short clip, the Writers Guild of America explained what they wanted and why they’re striking (yup, it boils down to more money, from DVD sales and future revenue streams from the Internet, the so-called "New Media").
The video clip makes their position sounds fairly reasonable (for example, an increase of DVD residuals from 4¢ to 8¢ per copy, and that new media will likely supplant DVD sales). The studios countered that DVD sales are necessary because of rising production and marketing cost – and who knows what all the Internet hoopla will bring? It’s an unproven market.
While the strike plays out, let me play the devil’s advocate here: why have residuals at all? Don’t writers get paid well to begin with? If they don’t think they’re making enough without residuals, why not ask to get paid more in the beginning? Isn’t that how market forces are supposed to work?
Or maybe the solution is to make the residual system more fair: writers get a bigger share of the pie if the movie makes money, but have to pay if the movie flops and the studio loses money. That way, they’re truly partners – Fair is fair, right?
What do you think?
Links: United Hollywood, a blog by the writers on strike | 2007 Writers Guild of America Strike [wiki]
And while we’re still on the subject of strike, our pal mental_floss has a neat and timely post about the 8 strieks that turned ugly (or inspired Keanu Reeves movies!)
When Laura Cirioli gave birth to twins, she never thought that Daylight Saving Time would be such a headache. Consider this:
Peter Sullivan Cirioli was dubbed "Baby A" at WakeMed Cary when he arrived early Sunday morning.
“Yes, Peter was born first, it was at 1:32 a.m.,” mother Laura Cirioli said.
Thirty-four minutes later, Peter’s twin sister, Allison Raye Cirioli, known as "Baby B," made her entrance into the world.
Because of Daylight Saving Time, Allison’s time of birth was 1:06 a.m., which makes her 26 minutes older than her brother even though he was born first.
So does this make the baby who is born first younger than his brother? Link (article with video clip)
If you were monitoring a network of water pipes supplying water to various areas, and are worried about an outbreak of water-borne disease, you can monitor the spread of this disease by placing sensors at important junctions and pipes (instead of monitoring every single pipe).
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University used this approach to answer the question "Which blogs should I read to be most up-to-date with important stories?"
They took data from 45,000 blogs and 10 million posts over one year (2006) and tracked 1 million links from blogs to blogs to see how information spread, and to determine which blogs were at the most important junctures, therefore worth reading.
They came up with a list of 100 blogs – some of the blogs listed make sense (like Boing Boing, metafilter, TUAW, and so on) but others really don’t: donsurber.blogspot.com? He’s not even in the top 100,000 of Technorati but is listed as #2 on the list. Anglican.tk? That’s just a spam blog, guys!
Some that should be on the list weren’t: Engadget, the world’s top ranked blog by technorati isn’t there, neither is gizmodo, the second ranked blog. Where’s Huffington Post? If you include reddit as a blog to watch, then where is digg?
A big flaw in the paper (which I didn’t read carefully) is the presumption that there is a single blogosphere where in fact there are networks of blogs that don’t actually link to one another. You’d expect political blogs, which dominate this list, to link to other political blogs, but not to technology blogs. Which "blogosphere" you end up monitoring depends on which blog you pick first.
Link – via New Scientist Technology Blog
And no, Neatorama wasn’t on it – the researchers are correct on this count because Neatorama doesn’t cover important stories, only interesting ones 
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