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Last fall, a seafood shop owner in Marugame, Japan spotted this rare Octopus with nine tentacles. While he apparently boiled and sold the oddity to a “lucky customer”, I think he may have generated more marketing appeal if he had tried to pit it against the Henry the Hexapus or had it try out for Gimme Gimme Octopus.
Appropriately, via Pink Tentacle
Jordi Vayreda of Spanish design studio Jordivayreda Projectteam created this floating staircase for a client’s home that looks awesome, but a little bit too dangerous for klutzy old me!
Link – via Apartment Therapy
Previously on Neatorama: Awesome Floating Staircases
Update 5/15/08: Jordi Vayreda told us the secret of his floating staircase (excuse the English, this is verbatim from Jordi’s email – but I think you get the idea):
Because of the huge number of comments around the world about my floating staircase design I explain the mystery which people want to know.
First of all, this stairs goes to a small maintenance loft zone for climatic systems, there is another type of staircase to go to the bedroom zone. I design this type of staircase thinking in a sculptural solution because it is situated in front of the principal entrance of the house and we don’t want a collapsible staircase which some designers use for zones with difficult entries, we want something different.
This loft zone it’s 2,40 m height and combines wall and glass wall. Is there, between these two types of walls where I’ve done a width change that people can use like a handrail. It is not appreciated in a front view but you can notice it in a side view. This camouflage handrail will see you to the 1,20 m height which corresponds to the half of the staircase.
Steel is the material which we use to construct the staircases, 100 mm thick and each of them is welded to a 250 mm thick beam. The secret is putting reinforcements to prevent the inertias that can be generated and another one is lean the beam on two walls: the front wall and the lateral.
The staircase is 65 cm wide and it can support 200k, consequently we get the minimal flexion. To obtain the minimal vibrations too, we line the lateral walls with a carton plaster plaque.
This is the result of my floating staircase design.
More photos – Thanks Jordi!
Some of NYPD’s finests are in trouble: two undercover police officers ordered a black man out of his parked car with guns drawn … without realizing that the guy’s an off-duty NYPD chief!
"How you can not know or recognize a chief in a department SUV with ID around his neck, I don’t know," a police source said.
Chief Douglas Zeigler, 60, head of the Community Affairs Bureau, was in his NYPD-issued vehicle near a fire hydrant when two plainclothes cops approached on May 2, sources said.
One officer walked up on each side of the SUV at 57th Ave. and Xenia St. in Corona about 7 p.m. and told the driver to roll down the heavily tinted windows, sources said.
What happened next is in dispute. In his briefing to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, Zeigler said the two cops, who are white, had no legitimate reason to approach his SUV, ranking sources said.
After they ordered him to get out, one officer did not believe the NYPD identification Zeigler gave him.
Translating Hollywood, the new book by Sam Sarowitz of Posteritati, takes a look at movie posters from around the world (and how different they are from the US versions). Take a look at this gem of an example: the Japanese Army of Darkness movie poster (why the soup cans? Because the actor’s name is Bruce Campbell, get it?)
Posterwire has the big version of the poster: Link
Previously on Neatorama: American Movie Posters in Belarus | Movie Posters Re-Made Grindhouse Style
"Infected" is a game by Emily Jo Cureton, where one player draws a "disease" card and then enacts the symptoms/description of the disease. The other players then get to guess what affliction it is. Kind of like “who am I” or charades, but with illnesses!
Previously on Neatorama: NY Times Crossword Drawings
What to do with lots of remnant linoleum floorings? Why, you can make a kitchen floor out of it – and that’s just what the guys over at Dairy of a Vermont Eco Builder did:
In keeping with our eco design model, and just for the sheer fun of it, we’ve decided that the kitchen floor will be made up from all the leftover pieces of Marmoleum we’ve saved so far.
(The floor’s not finished yet – they just put down the pieces to see where they’d go.) Link – via materialicious
Real people don’t read your blog.
A fact that I wasn’t made aware of when I signed up for these things; It now seems so obvious.
If you are reading this and you do happen to be a real person then why not send me a photo (one which includes your real face) and I will draw a picture of you and post it here to serve as everlasting proof that sometimes facts are wrong.
Damien is in Japan until June, but will return and begin drawing again. I was hooked when the first portrait I saw was Juan Carlos drawn as Maneki Neko! You can send in your picture, too. Link -via Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy
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Elizabeth Halverson is a judge, but what she really wanted to be is a queen:
Her former bailiff, for example, says Halverson made him feel like a "houseboy." He says the judge — who is obese and uses a motorized scooter to get around — made him put her shoes on her feet, massage her back, cover her with a blanket for naps and make sure her oxygen tank was filled. He says she asked him, "Do you want to worship me from near or afar?"
Halverson also surrounded herself with her own hired guards, saying she did not trust the courthouse security force to protect her. Another time, she allegedly had her husband sworn in so that she could ask him under oath whether he had completed chores at home.
She has since been locked out of her Las Vegas (where else?) courtroom, and suspended from the bench. And though her case is now up at the Judicial Discipline Commission, she is still running for re-election: Link | Halverson’s website
In the Wingding Controversy, if you type out "NYC" in Microsoft’s wingding font, a skull and bones, Star
of David, and a thumbs up glyphs appear.
Some people interpret this as an approving message of killing jews in New York City. Microsoft strongly denied that this was intentional. The company did, however, intentionally arrange the glyphs of an eye, a heart, and a city skyline as the "NYC" sequence in the later-released
webding font.
The Duggars, who already have 17 children, making them America’s largest family, continues to embiggen. Michelle and Jim Bob have just announced that they’re expecting a new baby on New Year’s Day, January 1, 2009.
All of their children’s names start with the letter “J,” so Discovery Health is taking polls on what you think the name should be: Link
Meet Ho Eng Hui, the 56-year-old Kung Fu king/street performer in Malaysia that used his index finger to smash through the tough shells of coconuts.
After doing weekly performances for 8 years, Ho is retiring. If you’re wondering why the finger is crooked, Ho broke it in 1993, but perservered to win an entry in the Malaysian Book of Records for breaking through 3 coconuts in just over a minute.
Paul Chapman of Reuters reports: Link [Reuters video]
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Golfers who want to play on the Fort Brown Golf Course near the US-Mexico border in Brownsville, Texas will soon need a passport.
That’s because the Department of Homeland Security, in an attempt to build a more or less straight fence, decided to put the US golf course
on the Mexican side of the border fence!
Imagine being a United States citizen having business … a business in the United States and then finding out the Department of Homeland Security is building its Mexican border fence with you on the Mexican side!
Podcast by Dick Helton at KNX1070 Newsradio – via LA Times
"What a waste it is to lose one’s mind- or not to have a mind. How true that is."
– Dan Quayle, 44th Vice President of the United States
This one’s a bit old, but if you haven’t read it yet, it’ll be new (and newly disgusting) to you. Over at The Sneeze, you can find a compilation of every “Steve, Don’t Eat It!” feature, in which Steve eats things most of us only have Fear-Factor-induced nightmares about eating. Think of it like “Jackass” for your stomach. Among the thing he samples: Dog treats, black fungus…and his own wife’s breast milk:
I couldn’t bring myself to just do the whole shot at once, so I started out with a little girly sip. And the truth is it’s not that bad at all. It tastes like milk, just slightly more sweet. And mentally, just slightly more making me want to gargle with Clorox and assume the fetal position while I question my life.
Hit the Link to read more of Steve’s gourmet adventures. WARNING: This is link not for the faint of heart.
(image credit: VideoJug)
"Charge it!" That seems to be how more and more people in the United States are surviving (and as you can guess, a poor long-term strategy):
Government and agency statistics illustrate this troubling trend. The Federal Reserve reported Wednesday that Americans’ credit card debt jumped 6.7% in the first quarter of this year to $957.2 billion, This spike comes despite the fact that nearly one in three banks is tightening guidelines for credit cards.
In Atlanta, debtors calling the agency in the first quarter of this year had an average of $29,300 in unsecured debt, primarily on credit cards, up from $25,700 in 2007. They spent $335 on groceries and $242 on gas, on average, in April. A year earlier, those outlays averaged only $291 and $181, respectively.
For many people, racking up credit card debt is not a choice they want to make, experts say. Not too long ago, they could have tapped into the equity in their homes through loans or lines of credit or refinancing. But this debt, which usually carries lower interest rates, is no longer as widely available with the collapse of the housing market.
So, faced with soaring costs for food and fuel, people find they must charge more to make ends meet.
Whoa – take a look at this custom "Freddy Krueger" Nike SB, featuring the famous red and green striped sweater pattern of Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street‘s monster. The shoes also have blood stains and special soles that look like Freddy’s undead skin.
The number of genome copies in cells vary by species: most cells in the human body have two, whereas most bacteria have only one.
But not this particular bug: the Epulopiscium, a giant bacterium that lives in the intestines of unicorn fish, has up to 200,000 copies
of its genome!
Angert suspects that Epulopiscium ’s extravagant collection of genomes may be a way for it to reap the benefits of size without the drawbacks of starvation. She hypothesizes that the genomes are arrayed just beneath Epulopiscium ’s cell membrane. This arrangement means that the cell could respond to nutrients and other environmental molecules without waiting for them to diffuse throughout the cell. “If you waited for an environmental signal to get to you, relying solely on diffusion, it would take forever,” says Anger. “It would be really unreliable. This opens up that door of allowing the cell to get big and not allowing diffusion to limit its volume.”
We’ve posted about how a person’s beauty "advertises" good genes and fertility. Well, here’s new study in the same vein: Nathan Pipitone and Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York found that a woman’s voice becomes more attractive when she is most fertile:
The pair recorded women counting from 1 to 10 at four occasions during their menstrual cycle. They then replayed the recordings at random to male and female students and asked them to rate the attractiveness of the voices. Both males and females judged the women’s voices to be most attractive if they were recorded during the peak fertility period of the menstrual cycle, and less attractive if they were recorded during
non-fertile periods …The results are in line with evidence that the female voice box, or larynx, is under the influence of sex hormones, says Gallup. He says the changes in the female voice during peak fertility support the view that women are "different" at that point in the menstrual cycle – in other words, that they experience oestrus.
Here’s a real life Edward Scissorhands: Israeli hairstylist Danny Bargil wanted to break the world record for multi-scissors haircut (who knew there’s such a record?) by cutting a woman’s hair with 10 pairs of scissors.
Link [Reuters video]
