Archive for April, 2008
Man Tried to Cash Check for $360 Billion
We’ve featured many stupid criminals on Neatorama, but I think this guy may just be the dumbest one yet. Meet Charles Ray Fuller, who was arrested for forgery when he tried to pass a check for … $360 billion! (Yes, that’s $360,000,000,000).
He claimed that it was given to him by his girlfriend’s mother to start a record business.
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Colossal Squid at Te Papa Museum in New Zealand
Photo: Te Papa Blog
That’s Dr. Steve O’Shea and Dr. Tsunemi Kubodera of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, preparing to preserve their colossal squid specimen, caught in the Ross Sea in February 2007 and kept frozen until now.
Everyone’s enthralled with the squid’s eyes, which are the size of dinner plates. But I was more amazed at the tentacle hooks:
The arm hooks are set in fleshy, very muscular sheaths and are strongly attached to the arms. They are likely to assist in holding and immobilising struggling prey as it is being killed and eaten. Most of the arm hooks have the main strong ‘claw’ (visible below), and also two smaller auxiliary cusps closer to the hook’s base, making them three-pointed and maximising their ability to hold and dig in. The base of each hook also has a complex structure that is set deep into the surrounding musculature. (Source)
Photo: Kat Bolstad
The Te Papa’s Blog has the entire story: Link – Thanks Geekazoid!
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Rally Trouble - Ayayay!
This particular spot seems to be really great for the spectators and really bad for the rally car drivers! After watching this, I just had to say “ayayay” at everything that went wrong today!
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – Thanks Christophe!
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10x10
100 pictures, arranged in a 10×10 grid, showing the biggest news stories of the hour.
Each hour is presented as a picture postcard window, composed of 100 different frames, each of which holds the image of a single moment in time. Clicking on a single frame allows us to peer a bit deeper into the story that lies behind the image. In this way, we can dart in and out of the news, understanding both the individual stories and the ways in which they relate to each other.
10×10 runs with no human intervention, autonomously observing what a handful of leading international news sources are saying and showing. 10×10 makes no comment on news media bias, or lack thereof. It has no politics, nor any secret agenda; it simply shows what it finds.
You can pull up clickable headlines by clicking on the pictures or the one-word headlines on the right side at the site, but the pictures are not explained. This screenshot was taken at 11PM Wednesday (the time in Italy). Link -via YesButNoButYes
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First Drawing of Spider-Man Now at Library of Congress
The Library of Congress had just acquired the original 1962 drawings from Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s "Amazing Fantasy #15" – complete with Ditko’s pencil erasures and white-out opaquing fluid – in which Spider-Man made its first appearance in print!
Matt Raymond of the Library of Congress Blog wrote:
People who are more familiar with Amazing Fantasy #15 than I are probably not surprised by this fact, but I got a good chuckle from the disclaimer that appeared at the top of the first page (pictured at left). It almost seems to be begging skeptical readers to give Spider-Man a chance, completely unaware of the phenomenon that was about to be unleashed on the world.
The excessively exclamatory paragraph reads: “Like costume heroes? Confidentially, we in the comic mag business refer to them as ‘long underwear characters’! And, as you know, they’re a dime a dozen! But, we think you may find our SPIDER-MAN just a bit … different!”
The good folks at the LOC promises to digitize the collection forthwith! Link – Thanks Matt!
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Coffin Couches
The guys at CoffinCouches.com sells sofas made from recycled coffins (coffins that are not used for burial because of cosmetic defects):
Our niche happens to be 18 gauge steel coffins which we collected from local funeral homes primarily in Southern California. It is a health and safety law that funeral homes cannot resell used coffins to the general public. We approached funeral directors with the attitude of recycling. These coffins are not used for burial due to slight cosmetic inconsistencies. They are reconfigured and modified resulting in a finished product – a unique one a kind coffin couch.
If you notice (although it may be too small) the six cast iron heavy duty legs are embossed with the universal biohazard insignia. The reason we utilized this sign was because safety was our utmost concern. If you are not aware, once a human body is placed in a coffin it is considered biohazard tissue. The legs have the embossed insignia for
precautionary reasons in the event body fluids are exchanged on these coffins. Perhaps you would feel safe knowing that you are in designated biohazard scene! Ha!!
Link – Thanks Piper Kinison!
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Honesty is the best policy
I found this great R-rated video on the Runaway Box site responsible for the Ewok song/video in the previous Neatorama post. Don’t click if you don’t want to hear about some of the smoothest and most honest love-making to hit the net since R. Kelly. Runaway Box.
Update: Commenter “jodie” asks: “Is that the same guy who sings the ‘One Semester of Spanish – Spanish Love Song’? i don’t his name, but that’s a really good one too.” Good eye, Jodie! This does indeed appear to be “Spanish Mike” of the Spanish Love Song. Further update: Here’s “Spanish Mike” performing the Spanish Love Song on a Spanish-language Late Night show on Telemundo.
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In Praise of Ewoks
(YouTube link)
From Runaway Box, who brought you the One Semester of Spanish Love Song. Lyrics are available at the YouTube link. -via Digg
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Siobhán's Miracle
Eight years ago, Siobhán Kilfeather, who was suffering from a deadly cancer, went to Lourdes to pray to the Virgin Mary not for survival, but for more time to allow her young children to remember her.
When she returned to London, her doctors were amazed at her recovery:
Siobhán and Peter clung to each other as the radiologist continued. "Back in December we spotted a small lesion on the lungs. One month later the abnormality was the size of a walnut. By now we expected to be examining irregular cells the size of a grapefruit.
"Instead, there’s nothing to be seen. The abnormalities have disappeared."
Siobhán’s cancer returned seven years later, and this is her story as told by her mother-in-law Ellen Jameson in an upcoming book Siobhán’s Miracle:
"I finally managed: ‘How long do you think I’ve got?’He turned his face away from me and didn’t answer. My head is so full of clutter I can’t think straight.
"I should write to old friends I’ve lost touch with. Tell them I’m going to die. I can’t seem to get things into proportion. The most important considerations are obviously my children and my husband, but also my work is important to me.
"My writing, my book, my students. Should I spend the last 12 hours of my life reading Jane Austen or writing an essay or singing nursery rhymes to my children?"
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Trivia: World's "Un-thirstiest" Animal
The water holding frog can go without a drink for a whole year.
Thirsty? Consider this: when it rains in the arid floodplains of Australia, the water holding frog absorbs water through its skin and then burrows into the soil. It then sheds a layer of its skin which harden into a cocoon to keep it from drying out. The frog then enters a deep resting stage and stays there until the next rainy season, which can be a full year away or longer.
The Aborigines sometime dig up the water holding frog from its burrow and squeeze it for a sip of water.
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Are Lice Art?
Are lice art? A group of young artists from Berlin think so – and they’re willing to go the distance to prove it: by living in an Israeli museum for three weeks with lice in their hair!
"The idea is that we live in the museum as their guests, and at the same time we are hosting lice on our heads," said artist Vincent Grunwald, 23, wearing a plastic shower cap to prevent the lice from spreading. [...]
"Art is no longer just a painting on the wall," Milana Gitzin-Adiram, chief curator of the Museum of Bat Yam near Tel Aviv, told Reuters. "Art is life, life is art."
The exhibition has caused controversy — unintended, the artists say — in a country where the mention of lice may revive memories of Nazi propaganda that described Jews as "parasites."
The artists, who sleep, eat and bathe in the gallery, said the exhibition toyed with ideas about hosts and guests in line with a theme set by the museum and aimed to blur the boundaries between art and reality.
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Pikesville Nighttime Explosion Mystery Solved
For years, neighbors in Pikesville, a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland, had been distrubed by a big boom and a flash of light in the middle of the night:
"The bedroom actually lights up like day," says Elaine O’Mansky, who lives in the Stevenson Commons condominium building near Beth Tfiloh. "It’s instantaneous and wakes us up out of a very deep sleep."
She isn’t alone. Barbara Friedman is Homeowner’s Association president for the area. She was up late one night sweeping her back patio when she heard the boom. "I hit the deck," Friedman explained. "It was so loud, I thought I was being shot. I literally hit the deck."
After she realized she hadn’t been shot, she started emailing other homeowners to see if they heard it too. "Then my email got flooded because hundreds of people were hearing these noises and thought it was their imagination," she said. (Source)
Turns out, it was a disgruntled man who decided to piss of his neighbors by setting off fireworks at 2 a.m. in the morning! The police caught him after setting up a video camera to record the bang:
"After actually evaluating this videotape, the bomb unit technician was almost able to pinpoint the exact condominium where this was actually coming from," said Cpl Mike Hill with Baltimore County Police.
That’s how police met Mackler, who apparently confessed to creating the disturbance. Inside his home, investigators found quantities of drugs, guns and fireworks. Police say he had been having problems with neighbors in the building.
"He would get up in the middle of the morning, around 2 a.m., fire one of these pyrotechnic devices and be done," Hill said.
Derek Valcourt of WJZ reports: Link – via reddit
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Quote: Paul Ehrlich on Computer
"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer."
– Paul Ehrlich, scientist
and Nobel laureate– Thanks Fred!
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Scandal-gate Quiz
It’s 80s week for mental_floss’ lunchtime quizzes. Today’s quiz asks you to match 10 newsmakers with the scandal they were involved in. I scored 70%, because if I did one thing in the 80s, it was read the newspaper. It’s still hard to recall names of people you don’t hear about anymore. Link
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Instructables Cake Contest
Instructables has 44 entries in their cake contest. Contestants were invited to focus on either tasty recipes or elaborate decoration. Voting is open until tomorrow, but you must register in order to vote. Even if you can’t decide between them, you’ll find links to recipes, photographs, and instructions for all the entries, ranging from a completely vegan chocolate cake to a tank birthday cake with a rotating turret. Link
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Caminito del Rey
This limestone gorge in the south of Spain, through which passes the Guadalhorce river, sits the Desfiladero de los Gaitanes pass that is 700m (2296 feet) high. Famous its very dangerous path, the Caminito del Rey is not what I would call a tourrist attraction. In 2000, the paths was remove because a tourrist died trying to cross it. Just watching that video gave me vertigo. You wouldn’t catch me going there…ever! Some people are fearless such as this camera man.
Links/Sources: Brightcove – Wikipedia
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Escaped Flying Pig Recovered
A signature Pink Floyd giant inflatable pig escaped its tether and flew away during the Coachella music festival last weekend.
Former Pink Floyd star Waters said “that’s my pig” as it drifted away during Sunday’s gig.
Coachella spokeswoman Marcee Rondan said: “It wasn’t really supposed to happen that way.”
The pig was tethered to the ground with ropes and floated away as Waters was playing one of the versions of Pink Floyd song Pigs.
The tattered pig came to ground in the driveways of two families in La Quinta, California. The families will split a $10,000 reward offered by Coachella organizers. They will also share four life tickets to the annual music festival. Link -via Digg
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Chaos in the Print Shop
(YouTube link)
This ad for Clustarack print shop racks would make Rube Goldberg proud! Link -via Metafilter
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The Poop Report Gives Back
The Poop Report is a blog of scatological humor, but this is a serious project where you can make a difference. Karanpur is a village in Uttar Pradesh, India with a school for 700 lower caste girls. The village has no plumbing. The girls must rise before dawn to attend to their toilet practices in a field before daylight. School founder Virendra “Sam” Singh wants to provide toilets for the village.
Here is an appliance that embodies his philosophy. A toilet protects its owner from the danger and humiliation of outdoor defecation. But it also provides a haven for neighbors to achieve the same standard of safety and dignity — educated or not, Sam knows, no woman wants to poop in the fields. Here is an inexpensive way to improve health and spread sanitary practices beyond the walls of his students’ dwellings.
Sam settled on the Sulabh toilet model, which collects and composts waste in alternating pits that need to be emptied only once every ten years. But as inexpensive as they are, they still cost too much for Sam to fund them on his own. He approached participants of the World Toilet Summit for fundraising help. My wife and I accepted his offer to tour the school and meet his students; and now I’m passing his plea for help on to you.
Sam’s immediate goal is 43 toilets in Karanpur itself, followed by a toilet for each of the 700 girls in his school. Every cent will help achieve this goal. A dollar is lunch for four workers building a toilet. Twenty dollars may pay the labor cost altogether. And $250 — which is no small sum, even for an American — will fully cover the cost of bringing health, sanitation, and dignity to a student of Pardada Pardadi, her family, and her neighbors. For $250, Sam and his team can build a complete toilet.
Any amount donated will be appreciated. If you sponsor a complete toilet for $250, you get naming rights for the facility. Donations can be made through a PayPal link at The Poop Report. Link -via Boing Boing
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Cthulhu Cake
Photo: raingirllori
Flickr user raingirllori made a Cthulhu-themed cake:
Here is Cthulhu rising from the oceans, using a convenient little island with a tower on it to climb up. The base was cherry-chip cake, the island and tower a mix of cherry chip and yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Also used small chocolate ‘pearls’ as rocks. Cthulhu himself is all fondant, with two chocolate pearls that I seeped in red dye for eyes.
Link Corrected Link
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A Large-Hearted Gentleman
Jim Corbett was a renowned tiger hunter who was born in India in 1875. Through many amazing kills and several close calls, he developed a profound respect for the big cats, including maneaters.
In a time when a hunter was measured for how many fearsome animals he could kill, Corbett exuded pride at never having killed a large cat for sport or financial gain. He refused even to hunt leopards which were often regarded as vermin at the time. “Those who have never seen a leopard,” he said, “can have no conception of the grace of movement, and beauty of colouring of this the most graceful and the most beautiful in our Indian jungles. Nor are his attractions limited to outward appearances, for pound for pound, his strength is second to none, and in courage he lacks nothing.” Corbett began lectures in various schools and nature societies with a message to protect the vanishing tiger and leopard populations. He referred to his youth as “days when there were ten tigers to every one that now survives.”
Corbett knew tigers better than anyone. His conservation efforts went against the grain of the times, but his legacy lives on in a national park named after him, and a tiger species named Panthera tigris corbetti. Read his fascinating story at Damn Interesting. Link
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Iron (Wo)Man Subway Ad and Other Mash Ups
Remember the Star Wars / Murakami / Beer Ad Mashup post on Neatorama before? Well, Jeff Simmermon of And I Am Not Lying For Real has more: Link – Thanks Jeff!
Update 5/15/08: More subway poster ad remix here: Link – Thanks Jeff!
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Johan Lorbeer's Still Life Performance Rises Above All Else!
Photo: fotoburra [Flickr]
That’s Johan Lorbeer just hanging out and interacting with his viewers during his "Still Life Performance" (this particular pose is called "Tarzan" – don’t ask us why …).
Is it magic or does Johan really have superhuman ability? Ah Boon has more photos and Johan’s little secret: Link | Johan Lorbeer’s website (in German, click on the HTTP link, then Projekte, and then Still-Life-Performance) – Thanks Johnhow!
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Yexel's Toy Museum: The Ultimate Toy Collection
Yexel of Las Pinas, the Philippines, is a hardcore toy collector. He has so many toys and statues of superheroes and other cartoon characters that he practically had to build his house around his collection!
Here’s an interview with the guy at Mechazilla (complete with a photo of "Yexel’s Toy Museum", of course): Link – Thanks Celeste!
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Porky Pooper and Friends.
To a kid, this candy dispenser must be either utterly disgusting, or the coolest thing ever. As one of Porky’s distributors describes him:
These cute little pigs dispense dainty candy doo doo for the munching pleasure of friends and loved ones. Just pop off the head to fill the body with jelly beans and let the silly giggles begin. Each 4-inch plastic pig poops jelly bean droppings when you push down on its behind.
Mmmm … who can resist shelling out up to $5.90 for a 1 oz portion of candy doo doo? Or over $20 for their Pooping Herd of Reindeer? Are Pez dispensers just not cool enough nowadays?
Link via Wacky Archives
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The Ultimate Act of Sportsmanship
Two NCAA Division II schools were playing softball. Western Oregon senior Sara Tucholsky had never hit a home run in her college career, but with the score tied 0-0, she hit one out of the park. Two players on base ran home, and Tucholsky ran toward first base, missed it, then turned around. Her knee suddenly gave out and she collapsed. Tucholsky could not reach first base.
If she received any help from her coach or teammates, she would be out. The coach could replace her with another runner and keep a two-run single, but that would rob Tucholsky of her only possible collegiate homer.
That’s when the opposing team stepped in. Central Washington senior and scoring leader Mallory Holtman asked if she and her teammates could carry Tucholsky to each base.
“Honestly, it’s one of those things that I hope anyone would do it for me,” Holtman said. “She hit the ball over her fence. She’s a senior; it’s her last year. … I don’t know, it’s just one of those things I guess that maybe because compared to everyone on the field at the time, I had been playing longer and knew we could touch her, it was my idea first. But I think anyone who knew that we could touch her would have offered to do it, just because it’s the right thing to do. She was obviously in agony.”
Holtman and shortstop Liz Wallace lifted Tucholsky off the ground and supported her weight between them as they began a slow trip around the bases, stopping at each one so Tucholsky’s left foot could secure her passage onward. Even with Tucholsky feeling the pain of what trainers subsequently came to believe was a torn ACL (she was scheduled for tests to confirm the injury on Monday), the surreal quality of perhaps the longest and most crowded home run trot in the game’s history hit all three players.
After that, does it really matter who won the game? You can read the entire story at ESPN. Link -via Metafilter
(image credit: Stephen Katin/WOU)
Update: See a picture of Tucholsky “running the bases” in this story.
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A Functional Wrist-Mounted Flame Thrower
(YouTube Link)
The first 30 seconds of this video is a clip from one of the X-Men movies, and the rest is footage of an explanation and demonstration of this marvelous gadget.
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New Legless Lizard Species Found in the Brazilian Cerrado
Photo: Cristiano Nogueira / Conservation International
Scientists from the Conservation International and Brazilian universities found 14 new species in the protected wooded grassland of Brazil’s Cerrado. Amongst the new species is this legless lizard of the genus Bachia:
This species of lizard of the genus Bachia is one of the new species discovered during the expedition. Although there are other species of the genus in the Cerrado (almost all discovered and described only recently), this new species has only been recorded in the Ecological Station. The absence of legs and the sharply pointed snout help in locomotion over the surface layer of sandy soil, predominating in all the Jalapao, formed by the natural erosion of the escarpments of the Serra Geral plateaus.
Link | View the new species at CI’s gallery – Thanks Lindsay Walter-Cox!
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Caption Monkey 28: Lemur!
Photo: Tambako the Jaguar [Flickr]
Yay! Today’s the day for Neatorama and Hobotopia’s Caption Monkey contest. Your mission, should you accept it, is to caption this funny-looking ringtail lemur from the Knie Kinderzoo in Rapperswil, Switzerland.
Whoever submits the funniest caption will win a free copy of Meet the Laugh-Out-Loud Cat by Adam "Ape Lad" Koford of Hobotopia. Adam’s book is a nifty compilation of 250 comic panels of the adventures of Kitteh and Pip (including some never-before-published comics).
Contest rules are simple: place your caption in the comment section – one caption per comment, please. You can submit as many funny ones as you can think of. (Congrats to inkedgal who won last week’s game. Maybe today is YOUR lucky day!)
Good luck! (and if you don’t win, you can still buy Adam’s book at Lulu)
Update 4/30/08 – Congrats to Aby, who won with this caption: “It’s not my fault my mom was a squirrel & my dad was a skunk“
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President Bush's State of the Union Addresses Infographics
Inspired by the amazing infographics of Stephanie Posavec’s "On The Map," David Sparks of The Arbitrarian blog put together his own set of sentence diagrams, focusing on the State of the Union Addresses given by President Bush over his 8 years in office:
In eight State of the Union Addresses, President George W. Bush spoke almost 50,000 words. People around the world were listening, and his words were chosen with care, conveying precisely the right message. These sentence diagrams are in attempt to relate some of the substance of the words President Bush used. Starting at the black dot (and ending at the red), each line segment represents the length of each sentence spoken. Each sentence is in turn colored according to its subject: our nation in general (American, nation, citizen, etc.), national ideals (freedom, hope, liberty, etc.), fiscal/economy (budget, economy, funding, etc.), domestic policy (health, reform, insurance, etc.), security/foreign policy (terror, Iraq, troops, etc.), and everything else. From these rough outlines a short list of President Bush’s most frequently used uncommon words, one can get a general idea of the nature of each Address, and we can begin to envision the legacy established by Mr. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States of America.
Link | Link to the infographics [png image file] – Thanks D. Sparks!
Previously on Neatorama: State of the Union Address Analyzer
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BuckyBalls Magnetic Toys are 216 rare earth magnet balls that can be shaped and molded into virtually any shape. Tear 'em apart and snap 'em back together in unlimited ways for hours of fun! Watch the video for a quick demo of what BuckyBalls can do. Remember to get two for twice the fun! Link |
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