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The video clip at Japan Probe tells the story (in Japanese) of a Thai man who lost his wife and his job, then met a baby crocodile and bonded with him. Link ~via Gorilla Mask
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An animated song from ytmnd. A silly, sadistic, somewhat gory song. Poor hamster, poor hamster, why must your life be so tough? Link ~via b3ta
Comments Off Ectype’s End is a fabulous animated short by New Zealand studio Rhubarb Zoo about 3C70, a little worker in a strange clockworld whose only purpose is to duplicate and multiply. That is, until his small little world is turned upside down when a plant popped into his life.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Drawn!
Etsy seller jenmaestre decided to "dip her snout into the costumecon competition" by making a mosquito-inspired mask, complete with drinking tube proboscis!
This mosquito-isk (ick) mask is made of coiled, sewn, polyester horsehair braid.
One cool thing about this mask- it has a drinking tube up the proboscis. Nothing stinks more than having to remove your face each time you’d like a sip of something tasty at a party! Plus, it looks wicked pissah, watching red wine run up the tube.
Worst part- see picture #5; it is hard to drink responsibly with a drinking tube in your face.
From the chart of the three (main) phases of matter from third grade:
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Takes Shape of Its Container
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Has Definite Volume?
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Solid
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No
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Yes
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Liquid
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Yes
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Yes
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Gas
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Yes
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No
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This cat A) takes the shape of its container and B) has a definite volume, ergo this cat is liquid! Found at the always-cute Cute Overload!
Thousands of bananas washed up on a Dutch shore when a container fell off a cargo ship and burst open during a storm!
If that’s not weird enough, apparently the island’s residents were used to things washing up on their shores:
Terschelling residents are no strangers to stuff turning up on their beach; a year ago thousands of tennis shoes, aluminum briefcases and children’s toys washed ashore, drawing crowds of treasure-hunting residents. Some 20 years ago it was a load of sweaters.
Plenty of beachcombers came early Wednesday for a look, said Buren, "but not as many as when we had the sneakers."
Link (Photo: Marleen Swart/Associated Press) – via Arbroath
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Artist Andrea Dezsö has an embroidered drawings art series called "My Mother Claimed" (2006) where she embroidered words and images of her mom’s sayings as a way to explore her family’s superstition, intolerance, bigotry and cultural impatience of her native Transylvania.
Link: Start of Gallery (to see subsequent pages, click the numbers next to Embroidery under the menu heading Art Projects on the right hand side navigation bar) – via Craft
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Whoa! Brickshelf user Mike Yoder created a series of incredibly detailed LEGO dioramas of the movie Aliens, including the Bridge, Ladder-Room and Hallway scenes.
Link – Thanks Andrew Becraft!
What is the Monkeysphere and what does it have to do with war, oppression, and crime? A lot, apparently.
From a Cracked article by David Wong, here is the Monkeysphere:
First, picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if that helps you. We’ll call him Slappy.
Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. Think how sad you’d be if Slappy died.
Now, imagine you get four more monkeys. We’ll call them Tito, Bubbles, Marcel and ShitTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them now. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is quiet, the other just throws shit all the time. But they’re all your personal monkey friends.
Now imagine a hundred monkeys.
Not so easy now, is it? So how many monkeys would you have to own before you couldn’t remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? Even though each one is every bit the monkey Slappy was, there’s a certain point where you will no longer really care if one of them dies.
So how many monkeys would it take before you stopped caring? That’s not a rhetorical question. We actually know the number.
Despite the humorous tone of the article, it’s actually a very interesting and thought-provoking one. Find out what the "magic number where you stop caring" is: Link – Thanks Emily!
Toronto is the proud home of what is now officially recognized as the World’s Biggest Christmas Stocking.
The stocking’s final length was measured at 27.46 metres (90 feet 1 inch) long and 11.3 metres (37 feet 1 inch) wide (heel to toe), shattering the old record established on Jan. 11, 2006 by shoppers and staff of the MetroCentre in Gateshead, UK which measured 19.25 metres (63 feet 2 inches) long and 8.23 metres (27 feet) wide (heel to toe).
World’s Fattest Santa not available for comments, but blogTO has the story: Link – Thanks photosapience!
Zombie attacks are a very, very serious matter. So it’s only right that the Archaeology, a publication of the always serious Archaeological Institute of America, delved into the evidence of a zombie attack, caused by the Solanum virus, in 3000 BC Egypt:
… in 1892, a British dig at Hierakonpolis unearthed a nondescript tomb containing a partially decomposed body, whose brain had been infected with the virus (Solanum) that turns people into zombies. In addition, thousands of scratch marks adorned every surface of the tomb, as if the corpse had tried to claw its way out!
The intrepid archaeologists posited that these zombie attacks were caused by a viral culprit:
The idea that zombies are supernatural beings needs to be discarded. They are not the Spawn of Hell, although, they certainly look the part. They are, or were, people who were infected by the Solanum virus. The virus creates a zombie by eating away the frontal lobe of the brain for replication, thus destroying it. The virus mutates the brain and allows the brain to remain alive but dormant and without the need for oxygen. Once the mutation is complete, approximately 23 hours from infection to fully functioning zombie, the ghoul will be on the unending search for living human flesh, thus spreading the infection (Brooks 2003: 2).
And zombies weren’t confined only to ancient Egypt – if you look closely, there are other archaeological evidence that the undead were humanity’s oldest struggle:
Were any ancient cultures particularly successful in containing zombie outbreaks?
The Roman Empire was very efficient at dealing with the living dead. The fact that they referred to their zombie containment tactics simply as "XXXVII" shows how practical their legions were when dealing with a zombie outbreak.
The article ends with an ominous warning: "This may seem absurd, but you won’t think its funny when you are feasting on the corpses of your friends and fellow researchers, in fact, you won’t be thinking at all." Link – Thanks Lemons!
License to Rant is a blog of license plates, particularly vanity plates that cause you to scratch your head and wonder what they were thinking. This one was inspired by the wedding scene in The Princess Bride. Others are so hard to decipher that commenters leave their best guess. Link ~via Grow~A~Brain
You may have guessed that Sir Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking have high IQs, but some of these may surprise you. This post gives some background on IQ (Intelligence Quotient) and has a list of people alive today with high IQs and estimated IQs of people from history. Link ~via the Presurfer
Six-year-old James Scowcroft came up with the idea of a talking schoolbag, which can remind students of the things they need to pack.
James devised his Robo Rucksack, with flashing antenna and five buttons to allow the owner to pre-record messages, as part of a museum competition.
James’s bag was judged the best and turned into reality by design firm Innovate.
James said he is keen to keep on inventing in the future, with a rucksack that helps with the cleaning next on his list, along with a time machine to allow him to see the way his mum looked “in the old days”.
The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, England sponsored the competition. I want two, as I repeat myself too many times about packing a schoolbag every morning! Link ~via Arbroath
Continuing our coverage of the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike, here are samplings of a few interesting posts in the blogosphere about the subject:
From ScrappeFace, Scott Ott pointed out that despite the writers billing themselves as the creative force behind the shows, so far their strike is pretty ho-hum:
Critics slammed the new strike by the Writers Guild of America (WGA), which debuted Monday, calling it “unimaginative,” “derivative” and “a tired rehash of previous work by other unions.” [...]
“When the greatest minds in Hollywood get together,” the unnamed Variety critic wrote, “what do they produce? Picket lines, posters, inane slogan chanting…in others words, exactly what the United Auto Workers or the International Ladies Garment Workers have done before.
In Huffington Post, actress Jamie Lee Curtis declared her support for the writers, but lamented their inability to come up with witty slogans for the strike:
I am for the writers. They are the starting point for any movie or TV project so without a writer, there is no content. My beef is that the slogans that they are chanting are so poorly written.
"What do we want?… INTERNET!… When do we want it?… NOW!"
That’s the best these writers can come up with?
Darren Barefoot asked the question in many of our minds: so, exactly how much are the writers being paid anyhow?
Assuming Ms. Vernoff wrote both the story and the teleplay for each episode, she’d earn a minimum of US $30,823 per episode, or about US US $92,500 for the three she wrote. This has nothing to do with the popularity of “Grey’s Anatomy”–these are standard minimums for writing sixty minutes or less of network prime time TV. Maybe there are bonuses or premiums for working on popular shows? [...]
Network prime time television is pretty splashy, admittedly. What about somebody who’s slaving away for a daytime soap opera or so-called “strip program”? If you’re the head writer on an hour-long soap opera, you earn US $31,879 a week, minimum. If you’re a contributing writer on a soap opera, you earn a ’script fee’ of US $3,087 per script.
Forbes has an article about why the strike is do or die. The writers must win, if the union wants to survive:
When 12,000 Hollywood writers traded pencils for picket signs this week, they took a huge risk. Even riskier: not striking. Losing to the studios now could doom their union as television gives way to the Internet.
“We know that the future of the industry is the Web, and that in the near future television sets and computer monitors will merge into the same screen,” says Kate Purdy, a writer for CBS’ (nyse: CBS – news – people) Cold Case and a blogger behind a new strike-related writers’ blog, United Hollywood.
Despite the excerpts above, most of the postings in the blogosphere and on the web in general came out in support of the writers.
United Hollywood, an unofficial blog started by a group of strike campaigns, has an online petition you can sign to show your support for the writers. So far, they’ve garnered over 8,000 signatures in just 24 hours.
One final thing: despite the wide coverage over the writers strike here in Los Angeles, it’s interesting to note that the strike seems not to be a major concern everywhere else. The term "writers strike" does not appear in the top searches on Technorati, Google Hot Trends, Yahoo! Buzz, and AOL Hot Searches.
Image above is from Here in Van Nuys [Flickr], who has a few more shots of the strike.
Chinese artist Lei Xue created these awesome painted porcelain soda cans! Found at Martina Detterer Gallery – via Cribcandy
Remember the Ben "Dell Dude" Curtis, the star of the "Dude, you’re getting a Dell" commercials?
Well, after he was caught buying pot in 2003, Ben was fired by Dell. He’s now a waiter and bartender in a restaurant in New York:
Do people ask you to repeat the catchphrase?
I’ve had tables of young girls who think they recognize me, and when they ask me, I say “yes” and then they don’t believe me and they start arguing and ask me to do the catchphrase and I’ll laugh and say, “It’s been four years, but I’m glad you’re a fan.”
New York Magazine has a quick interview with Ben: Link (Photo: Melissa Hom)
Want a six-pack abs but too lazy to do cruches? Well then, do it the American way: with plastic surgery!
The technique, called abdominal etching, is a kind of precision liposuction. The doc sucks out the fat that’s standing between the patient and, if everything goes well, the six-pack.
The suction six-pack costs between $4,000 and $7,000 and is only suitable for certain patients, Aldo Benjamin Guerra, the Arizona plastic surgeon who authored the abstract, told us. "I probably turn down about twice as many patients as I work on," he said. "You have to have a certain amount of fat. If you have too little or too much you’re not going to get the definition."
Link (Image: Aldo Benjamin Guerra, MD)
What do you get when you cross an RV with an off-road vehicle? The UNICAT, a seriously awesome RV that can go anywhere!
Comments Off Tired of being told that your going nowhere fast on a treadmill? Well, Guido Ooms and Karin van Lieshout of Studio Ooms have something for you: the Ooms Rollator treadmill.
Check it out in action: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
Can you get any nerdier than this? Halo 3 gamer Moviesign proposed to his girlfriend Furtive Penguin in a game of Halo 3!
Instead there was a nice top-down view where he had spelled out a proposal in weapons. He then asked her to be his teammate for life.
She said yes.
Furtive penguin and Moviesign recently moved from Indianapolis to Chicago where she (penguin) is a copyeditor and he (Movie) is a graphic designer. They haven’t set a wedding date yet. As furtive penguin said, "We’re waiting to see what the release date is for the next Halo game. We don’t want any conflicts."
Link (larger pic)
Maybe they’ll do something like this for their wedding cake.
This is cool: Jonas Samson has created a light-emitting wallpaper that you can use as a light source instead of a lamp. Or you can just marvel at the glowing design.
When the wallpaper is turned "off" it is indistinguishable as a source of light.
Instructables user Kipkay created this awesome Star Trek Phaser from a blu-ray laser from Playstation 3.
Here’s the DIY guide on how to build you own (but be careful where you point that thing, hear?) Link – via Boing Boing
Finally! Gabriel Ortiz and a team of software developers are working on a "stupid filter" that promises to do to stupid blog comments what spam filter does to junk emails:
Ortiz’s team is readying a free, open-source version they hope to release by year’s end and make available as a standard plug-in on the popular Firefox browser by early next year.
How does it work? Say a user wants to post a really, really dumb comment on, for example, cnnmoney.com, where some of you might be reading this now.
If cnnmoney had the filter installed on its servers, it would intercept the comment just before it was published and flash a little alert at the author that reads: "This comment is more or less unintelligible. Please try to restate it."
The writer would get another crack at it, and another, until at last he was able to muster a few words of intelligence, or in frustration wandered off to inflict those LOL!!!!!s and OMG!!!!s on some more tolerant site.
Links: CNN Money article | StupidFilter website (Excellent illustration by Steve Brodner)
Comments Off For those who liked the Elvistrooper here’s a co-production of two of the big bloggers in the Japan blogging scene, Kirai and Danny Choo.
It’s amazing to realize that not even five of the people walking by actually stop and stare at the stormtrooper dancing in the middle of the street…
Link to YouTube video – via TV in Japan
[Previously on Neatorama: Dancing Stormtrooper - Alex]
In ancient Olympics, winners weren’t given gold medals – they were given an olive wreath instead.
The first “gold medalist” on record was Coroibus of Elis, a cook who won a 200-yard dash.
US and Greek scientists studying a 2,400-year-old shipwreck in the Aegean Sea did a DNA analysis of an earthen jar they had found and discovered that it contained … salad dressing!
Genetic analysis has revealed the contents of an ancient shipwreck dating back to the era of the Roman Republic and Athenian Empire. The cargo was olive oil flavored with oregano.
Beyond discovering ingredients for Italian salad dressing on the sea floor, such research could provide a wealth of insights concerning the everyday life of ancient seafaring civilizations that would otherwise be lost at sea.
