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We’ve posted about Loic Jean Albert skydiving with a wingsuit a while ago, but this YouTube clip still took my breath away.
Behold Loic and a couple of his colleagues BASE jumping with the wingsuit – they got so close to the side of the mountain they could practically touch it!
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – Thanks Tyler Henderson!
Photo: Pancake Blog – via Cute Overload
That’s Mr. Pancakes aka Cakes or Baby Cakes, a cute little bunny with his own blog.
Your task for today’s Neatorama and Hobotopia’s Caption Monkey, gentle readers, is to caption the photo. Funniest caption will win a free copy of Adam "Ape Lad" Koford’s book Meet the Laugh-Out-Loud Cat (also available at Lulu). Adam’s book is a nifty compilation of 250 comic panels of the adventures of Kitteh and Pip. If you like Adam’s old0timey cartoons, this is the book for you!
Contest rules are simple: place your caption in the comment section – one caption per comment, please, but you can submit as many funny ones as you’d like. (Congrats to Aby who won the last Caption Monkey game – maybe today is YOUR lucky day!)
Hop to it! Good luck!
Update 5/14/08: Congratulations to lordunger, who won the Free book by Adam Koford with this caption, “No one will ever find me under here.”
Gokhan Mutlu of Manhattan is suing JetBlue Airways for $2 million because a pilot made him sit on the toilet for 3 hours!
Mutlu was traveling on a a "buddy pass," a standby travel voucher that JetBlue employees give to friends, from New York to San Diego on Feb. 16, and returned to New York on Feb. 23, the lawsuit said.
Initially, Mutlu was told a flight attendant had taken the last seat on the plane, but then he was advised she would sit in the employee "jump seat," meaning he could have the last seat, the lawsuit said.
The pilot told him 1½ hours into the five-hour flight that he would have to relinquish the seat to the flight attendant, court papers say. But the pilot said that Mutlu could not sit in the jump seat because only JetBlue employees were permitted to sit there, the lawsuit said.
When Mutlu expressed reluctance to go sit in the bathroom, the pilot, who was not named in the lawsuit, told him that "he was the pilot, that this was his plane, under his command that (Mutlu) should be grateful for being on board," the lawsuit said.
When the aircraft hit turbulence and passengers were directed to return to their seats, but "the plaintiff had no seat to return to, sitting on a toilet stool with no seat belts," court papers say.
Photo: Véronique Huyghe
Narcisse is an art project by French artist and designer Mathieu Lehanneur. It’s a giant bowl with mirrored surface filled with water – as soon as someone comes close to see his/her own reflection (just like Narcissus [wiki]), a promiximity sensor will trigger the interior basin to rotate and deform the reflection.
Link [Flash, it's no. 25 on the tabs below]
Paul Loughridge of Lockwasher Design makes awesome robots, ray guns, and rockets out of vintage cans and other found objects (read: junk).
We’ve actually featured Paul before on Neatorama a while ago, but this one sculpture, the Sir Lube of Can-O-Lot, is so awesome we just have to post about it. The robot is made from an old hydraulic pump oiler, and comes complete with with a custom made helmet with hinged face guard!
Link | Paul’s robot set at Flickr
That’s fractal 23, a chest of drawers by Japanese furniture designer Takeshi Miyakawa. I’m guessing from the name that it has 23 drawers (indeed, if you count them, it makes sense) but to make use of them all,
you’d have to put it in the center of the room!
Link – via Boing Boing
(image credit: SY Dration/Cute Otters)
Neptune Memorial Reef, three miles off Key Biscayne, Florida offers a final resting place for those who love the sea. Earthly remains are cremated then mixed with cement and laid on the ocean floor, with a memorial plaque.
Artist Kim Brandell, who designed the reef, said he was given no parameters in the reef’s designs, which grew as they waited three years for permits. The structures are 90% cement. Some of the sculptural elements are in bronze and steel. It is the same pH balance as the sea, Brandell said.
“I designed it to be a divers’ location. I am hoping and planning it be to the most dived location on the planet. I didn’t want it to look like Roman or Greek architecture. I wanted it to be contemporary or modern in design.”
As a diver swims down the pathways of the reef there will be themed areas, like dancing or sports. “If it’s music I might have concrete or metal musical instruments,” Brandell said. “Nothing is going to be in words to describe these features. It will be sculptural elements.”
The cemetery lies 14 meters below the surface. Link to story. Link to website. -via Arbroath
(image credit: Wilfredo Lee/AP)
62-year-old rocker Neil Young has been honored with his own species, a trapdoor spider named Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi.
An East Carolina University biologist, Jason Bond, discovered a new species of trapdoor spider and opted to call the arachnid after his favorite musician, Canadian Neil Young, naming it Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi.
“There are rather strict rules about how you name new species,” Bond said in a statement.
“As long as these rules are followed you can give a new species just about any name you please. With regards to Neil Young, I really enjoy his music and have had a great appreciation of him as an activist for peace and justice.”
The new species was found in Alabama in 2007. Link -via Geek Like Me
(image credit: Reuters)
The following is an article from Uncle John's Triumphant 20th Anniversary Bathroom Reader
Downtown Modesto, California, on a Sunday night. One of the oldest corners
in downtown Modesto is dominated by bail bonds businesses. Photo: Inkyhack
[Flickr]
Every city has something to be proud of, but some cities, despite their
beauty, charm, or cultural importance, also have features of which they
might be a little less proud. Here are a few cities with dubious distinctions.
• According to a survey by AutoVantage (an auto club like AAA), Miami, Florida, is the city with the rudest drivers. • A Cornell University study determined that New York City has the lowest quality of housing. The World Health Organization says that New York is also the noisiest city in the United States. • Because of high divorce and unemployment rates and consistently gloomy weather, the city statistics analyzing firm BestPlaces named Tacoma, Washington, the country's most stressful place to live. • Breathe easy if you don't live in these places: Greenville, South Carolina (where residents suffer the most respiratory tract infections); Scranton, Pennsylvania (the worst city for asthma sufferers); and Tulsa, Oklahoma (the pollen capital of America). • Based on the number of accidents and fatalities, the International Federation of Bike Messenger Associations named Boston the most dangerous place to ride a bike. • Zero, a group dedicated to slowing population growth, determined what cities were the best and worst in which to raise children based on the quality of healthcare, education, public safety, transportation, the job market, and the natural environment. The best was Fargo, North Dakota; the worst was Newark, New Jersey. • According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, Sarasota, Florida, is the city most hostile toward homeless people. • Forbes magazine named Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the worst city for single people. Reasons: expensive beer, few nightclubs, and not enough single people. • Worst traffic congestion: Los Angeles. (Not coincidentally, it also has the worst air pollution.) • City with the bumpiest, most pothole-infested roads: Seattle. • In 2007 Men's Health magazine analyzed various cities' obesity rates, eating habits, and other data, including how much time people spend exercising and sitting in traffic. Result: Las Vegas was judged the nation's "fattest city." • The city with the most suicides per capita is Medford, Oregon. • Decatur, Illinois, has the highest skin cancer fatality rate. • America's most rat-infested city is Baltimore. • New Orleans leads in both gun- and diabetes-related deaths per capita. • Hallmark Cards call El Paso, Texas, the city with the worst sense of humor, based on polls in which very few people said they considered themselves funny. (The city also has very low sales of Hallmark's humorous cards.) • City with the highest percentage of lawyers: Washington, D.C. Nearly 2% of all residents are attorneys. • According to the book Cities Ranked and Rated, the worst overall city in America is Modesto, California. The city scored a 0 on the book's 100-point scale for its high cost of living, high unemployment rate, lack of activities, and the highest car theft rate in the United States. |
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The article above was reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Triumphant 20th Anniversary Bathroom Reader.
Proving that some things do get better with age, the latest Bathroom Reader is jam-packed with 600 pages of fascinating trivia, forgotten history, strange lawsuits and other neat articles.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
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Under Scots law, there are three potential outcomes of a criminal trial: "proven" (guilty), "not guilty", and "not proven."
The "not proven" [wiki] verdict, also called the Scottish Verdict or the "bastard verdict," is where although the juries don’t think that the case has been proven against the defendant, they also not convinced of his innocence.
Photo: Yangtse
There was a sight to be seen at a bridge in Taizhou, Jiangsu Province, China a couple of days ago: the migration of thousands of toads!
Thousands of toads were spotted at a bridge in Taizhou, Jiangsu province, China, on May 9. According to local expert, the toads were enduring a mass migration because of the depleting oxygen resource in a nearby river.
From the pic it seems like the chance of survival for the toads are not looking good on the road too…
Link – Thanks Jee!
Look closely. Or not too closely … and you’ll see an optical illusion on the album sleeves of the band Soulwax. (Need a hint? Don’t look directly at your monitor – view the picture above at an angle).
The Monkey Buddha has one more example: Link | Another Phantom Message – Thanks Paul Micarelli!
Update 8/1/08 – Sleevage featured this first (they also have many more cool album covers) – thanks Ashley Ringrose!
Chilli loves to munch on grass and do other things regular cattle do. He’s just like one of the guys, with one big difference: the black and white Friesian bullock is the size of a small elephant!
Despite his grand stature, Chilli only grazes on grass during the day and enjoys the occasional swede as a treat.
The heifer, who is almost as high as he is long, lives at the Ferne Animal Sanctuary in Chard, Somerset, after he was left on their doorstep aged just six-days-old.
Nine years on, Chilli has kept on growing, and staff believe the giant will smash a record for Britain’s tallest ever cow.
Link – Thanks cuimhne!
Forget your run-of-the-mill demolition derby (where junker cars smash into each other). In Lind, Washington, they have demolition derby competition with … combines!
Each June the small town of Lind, with it’s one restaurant and one bank, celebrate Lind’s weekend complete with BBQs, car races, grain truck races, and the Combine Demolition Derby!!!! Hell, a normal demolition derby is great, let alone massive harvesters crashing into each other at what I can only imagine is high speed.
Link (with embedded Revver video) – Thanks Scott!
The folks at the Swedish brewery Krönleins Bryggeri created this line of Cider "Smile" drinks with a clever and playful logo. What? You can’t see the little emoticon of the guy winking his eyes at you?
Link – via Comunicadores, thanks Haendel Dantas!
Compare that with
West Magoon of Muddy Mountain Pottery created some awesome looking ray guns out of ceramics, with a technique called raku firing:
All of the Ray Guns are glazed and fired using the low-fire raku firing technique. The sculptures are pulled from the kiln while the glaze is red-hot and molten and placed into a metal barrel filled with newspaper which is then covered. This smothers the fire, which creates a reduction atmosphere, giving the glazes their metallic look.
West named each guns after a sci-fi author or character. This one above is the Rotwang Retrovivifier (+10 points if you know who Rotwang is – no Googling!)
Link – Thanks Tana Libolt!
Photo: KATRIN Main Spectrometer
In November 2006, the people of Leopoldshafen, Germany, saw the spectacle of their lives:
It looked like an alien spaceship, but it was actually the main spectrometer of the KATRIN experiment, a project that will try to to measure the mass of the electron neutrino in 2009.
The spectrometer was built 400 km (250 mi.) away in Deggendorf, but when they wanted to transport it, they found out that it was too big for the roads and the canals, so the spectrometer had to travel the nearly 9,000 km (5,600 mi.) journey through Austria, Hungary, Romania, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the Netherlands and finally back to Germany!
Fogonazos has more pics and a couple of YouTube clip about the epic journey of the 200-ton spectrometer: Link – Thanks aberron!
Talkin’ about depressing places to live, Neatorama reader Michael submitted his wife Desy’s blog, 56 Houses Left, about what remains of Carrollton subdivision in Bridgeton, Missouri. The place where she and thousands of other people grew up.
The subdivision was bought out by Lambert Airport for a runway expansion. Nearly 1,900 homes were bought out and since then crushed by bulldozers and trucked away. As of October 9, 2007, only 56 houses remained:
This is where I grew up… and over the past decade, a little bit is erased away each day. It used to not have much significance in my life. After all, I knew this would come… ‘they’ have been talking about it ever since the early 90s. Even then, even when they took my friends’ houses, or the house where my cousins
lived, or my teacher’s house… I was still too young to grasp it… too young to sit up and pay attention…. to care. It wasn’t until I saw the wrecking crew blow through my old bedroom on October 24th, 2006 when finally it all came slamming into my face- this place, this land was all I ever really known. My house, my friends’ and my families’ homes, my sidewalks, pools, parks, churches, schools, businesses… everything… gone. Soon, I will never be able to come back to this place again. If I have kids, I will never be able to show them where I came from. They will never know the place where I once played… the place where I once dreamed of one day leaving… This place that now I come back to wonder what exactly happened… and why. (Link to this Post)
Just a couple of week ago, Desy wrote something ironically poignant:
The article today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch puts Lambert International, and with it the fate of Carrollton, into startling perspective.
It is true, and now there is even more evidence- the destruction of our homes was, officially, for no reason. According to the article, the airport has been classified as simply a ‘mid-sized’ airport since 2003. In 2003, the new runway was barely started and many houses on the south still remained. Aside from hardship cases, my mom’s side of Carrollton was not approached for buy-out in 2003. She was not approached until 2006. Nearly all of my friend’s houses were still standing in 2003. All of the destruction could have been stopped when the officials realized that Lambert will NEVER fill the numbers of flights they had in the 1990s. Even those flights were executed without the shiny new runway that now sits uselessly in Bridgeton.
Its a brutal shock to me that they could take everything away, without doing their homework, without doing the research or checking their facts, but take it all for landlust and false pretenses. All that had existed from my childhood has been bulldozed down to dirt and busted roads, all for absolutely nothing. (Link to this Post)
Link – Thanks Michael! (Photo: radio_inactive [Flickr])
"So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?"
– Ayn Rand, American novelist and philosopher
