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Meet John Hammons, a 19-year-old college freshman at the University of Oklahoma. He was just elected mayor of Muskogee, a city of 38,000 in northeastern part of the state!
Hammons, who will be sworn in next week, said he plans to continue his college education but expects to transfer to a school closer to Muskogee.
"Being elected does not change my desire to continue my education," he said. "We will schedule our time in an appropriate fashion so that I can be mayor and stay in school."
In 2005, Aaron Koblin took all of the air traffic over United States data, as seen by the FAA, and visualized it in a beautiful animation. Aaron’s work was originally developed as a series of experiments for the "Celestial Mechanics" project (eye candy!) by Scott HEsels and Gabriel Dunne at UCLA.
The video clip above tracks all flights over the United States over a few days in March 2005, which brings this question to my mind: "where are all those people going?" Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] | Flight Patterns website
Pablo Picasso was commissioned by the Spanish government to commemorate the Nazi Germany bombing of Guernica, Spain, during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. The result is Guernica, a black and white painting that depicts the suffering and brutality of war.
Fast forward to 2008, where Lena Gieseke turned Picasso’s Guernica mural into 3-D for her degree in computer animation from the University of Georgia.
Don’t miss it: Link [Flash movie]
Just. How. Awesome. Is This. Behold, the Darth Vader typography, created by David Friedman of Ironic Sans.
And another one by Justin Crisostomo:
Also on Neatorama: Miss Baskerville Typography Shirt by Matt Sutter
MUTO is a new short film by Blu: it’s a time-lapse "wall animation" made in Buenos Aires and Baden, guaranteed to be the best graffiti you’ll see today.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
…the character select screen would look like this. Art by Lysol-Jones. Visit his DeviantArt gallery or his personal site. I’d absolutely buy this game.
Italian comic artist Donald Soffritti drew very funny cartoons of what super heroes and villains would look like in old age! Doc Ock above doesn’t seem too thrilled having all those arms to carry grocery bags home.
Tons of other excellent drawings of super heroes as fat, middle aged men and women: Link – Thanks Haendel Dantas!
The Art of Manliness blog has a huge archive of the manly things manly man should do, like How to Break Down a Door, or How to Hug like a Man, so it’s refreshing to see something different.
Here’s a neat list of the 100 must-read books, the essential man’s library, by Jason Lankow, Ross Crooks, Joshua Ritchie, and Brett McKay:
There are the books you read, and then there are the books that change your life. We can all look back on the books that have shaped our perspective on politics, religion, money, and love. Some will even become a source of inspiration for the rest of your life. From a seemingly infinite list of books of anecdotal or literal merit, we have narrowed down the top 100 books that have shaped the lives of individual men while also helping define broader cultural ideas of what it means to be a man.
Good to see some of my favorite books listed, (yes, they’re not *just* for guys). Link
Adam Buxton of the British TV comedy show "Adam and Joe" showed us why you don’t need a Bollywood song for funny song lyrics subtitle.
Here’s one that he did for Songs of Praise ("translations of popular hymns for the hard of hearing, by the hard of hearing"): Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – Thanks Robert Rezabek!
(Okay, okay, that was just all in good fun. No offense meant and no hate mails, please!)
ACME is a worldwide leader of many manufactured goods. From its humble beginnings providing corks and flypaper to bug collectors (“Buddy’s Bug Hunt/1935″) to its heyday in the American Southwest supplying a certain coyote, from Ultimatum Dispatchers to Batman outfits, ACME has set the standard for excellence.
For the first time ever, information and pictures of all ACME products, specialty divisions, and services featured in Warner Bros. cartoons (made by the original studio from 1935 to 1964) are gathered here, in one convenient catalog. For more information about any ACME product, simply click on the thumbnail picture.
Link -via Dump Trumpet
The National Film Board of Canada, in association with the Cannes Short Film Corner and partner YouTube, presents the fourth annual Short Film Online Competition – Cannes 2008.
Between May 9 and May 19, 2008, filmmakers from 40 countries entered the NFB Online Competition when they registered their films with the Cannes Short Film Corner, the meeting place for short films at Cannes.
These 9 films were selected for our Online Competition by short-film expert Danny Lennon, programmer of this year’s Short Film Corner. They represent the best in the world and were culled from over 650 submissions.
Now it’s your turn to choose. The winning short film will be determined by your ratings on a scale of one to five stars. The name of the winner will be announced in Cannes this coming May 21. The winner will receive a HD MINI-DV camera from the NFB and a laptop with an editing suite.
The site has a link to a YouTube playlist, where you can see each and rate them. Link -via Underwire
I’ve always been a fan of horror movies, but in the past couple of years I’ve really gravitated toward, you know, the living dead. Shaun of the Dead is pretty much my favorite movie of all time. George Romero? Can’t get enough. And lately I’ve been delving into zombie lit, or Z-Lit if you will. Max Brooks (son of Mel) has a tongue-in-cheek book out called The Zombie Survival Guide. It’s all those essential things you need to know when Z-Day finally happens. He followed that up with World War Z, which takes place post-zombie apocalypse and talks to people who survived, documentary-style. It’s not funny like the Survival Guide is; it’s dead serious and pretty fascinating.
Now let me backtrack a little bit. Every Thursday night, my husband and I get together with a group of friends to watch Lost. We call this, appropriately if not unoriginally, Lost Night. Even when Lost ends for the summer (or for their mid-season hiatus), we still get together and do something in its absence. Last summer we watched a new Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) every Thursday. This summer, we’ve decided to watch zombie movies. This all started because I DVRed what is possibly one of the worst zombie movies ever made last week and was crying from laughter trying to explain it to our group.
The movie? Return of the Living Dead.
Now, before you all jump on me, let me preface with this: I love zombies, but I am by no means an expert. I am not purporting to have seen every zombie movie ever made or know the names of the Zed extras in Night of the Living Dead. I don’t even know the Thriller Dance. That being said, I thought Return of the Living Dead was George Romero’s sequel to Night of the Living Dead. I only saw the title on the Independent Film Channel; I was not privvy to that outstanding movie cover or a plot or anything. Wow, was I wrong. Turns out George and John Russo, one of the writers of the original movie, were in disagreement with how to follow up their hit movie. They went their separate ways. George ended up coming out with Dawn of the Dead 10 years later; Return of the Living Dead is what Russo came up with in 1985.
It. Is. Bad. Comically bad. Let me try to sum up for you: High school dude, Freddy, has a new job at a medical supply warehouse. On the job, a co-worker informs Freddy that Night of the Living Dead was a true story – a gas was accidentally released that reanimated the dead. Only a few barrels of the gas are still in existence, and, surprise! They’re at the medical supply warehouse. The co-worker shows Freddy the barrel containing the gas and thumps on it to prove its durability, but the gas leaks and the two men are knocked out. Of course, zombies start running amok. Coincidentally, Freddy’s friends are waiting for him to get off work and decide to kill time in the cemetery across the street. Makes sense. Somehow this results in Trash, one of Freddy’s friends, ripping off her clothes and dancing on top of a grave wearing nothing but leg warmers (I’m proud to say the actress, Linnea Quigley, is from Davenport, Iowa). I know you’re wondering, and yes, she does end up as a “seductive”, dancing, naked zombie wearing leg warmers.
The zombies are smarter than you might think – when paramedics arrive on the scene, they are killed by the zombies who then call dispatch and request that they “send more paramedics.” Seriously. The same thing happens when the cops show up. Also, at some point, a zombie is captured and questioned as to why they are feasting on humans. The zombie replies that it hurts to be dead, and eating live brains is the only thing that relieves the pain.
Oh, and although skeletons are rising out of the cemetery – full skeletons, not skin and muscle or anything like that – they still have tongues and eyeballs.
So, after describing this, my friends and I did a little research and discovered that some truly heinous zombie movies are floating around out here. Some that we will be viewing this summer are Redneck Zombies, Zombies on Broadway, Motocross Zombies from Hell, Hard Rock Zombies and the MST3Ked Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. Oh! And also, Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave (“Dance til you drop… dead”).
So. The point of this long-winded post is to ask you two things:
1. What’s the worst horror movie you’ve ever seen?
2. Do you have any good (read: bad) zombie movie recommendations?
Some people collect stamps, others collect comic books. The people on this list, however, collect things that are far, far stranger. Behold, Neatorama's guide to the 25 Strangest Collections on the Web:
Graham Barker's Navel Fluff Collection
Some people see navel fluff or bellybutton lint as life's little annoyances. Not Graham Barker: he began collecting them since 1984, and now has the world's largest collection of navel fluff according to Guiness Book of World Records:
It was on the 17th of January 1984 that I found myself under-occupied in a youth hostel in Brisbane. The night was steamy and stormy - too wet outside and too hot inside to do very much, and my attention drifted to my belly button. There it was ... fluff! I must have seen it before that night, but this occasion was the first time I ever picked it out and wondered about it. I became curious about how much navel fluff one person could generate (enough to stuff a cushion, maybe?), and the only way to find for sure was to collect it and see. My first piece of navel fluff was stored in an empty film canister, and the collection had begun.
Like its name implies, the Air Sickness Bag Virtual Museum is all about vomit bags. Indeed, it catalogs more than 2,000 photos of air sickness bags from all over the world.
In addition to airplane air sickness bags, the website also has a collection of bus sickness, sea sickness, and even space sickness bags!
Though most are underwhelming in terms of design, some are actually quite artistic. Virgin Atlantic airlines even held a "Design for Chunks" project in 2004, where artists submit their designs to be put as a limited edition barf bags!
Before you check out the website, I'll leave you with a few of the more unusual bags from the Visitor's Favorite section:
From left to right: Brooklyn Artist Sarah Nicole Phillip's Little Brown
Barf Bag, a parody of Bloomingdale's Little Brown Bag; The Space Shuttle
Sickness ("Emesis") Bag; Barf Bag One, unfortunately only a
gag gift and not the real thing.
If
you want to collect handcuffs, then Joseph W. Lauher is your man, and
handcuffs.org is the website to see. Indeed, Joseph has the largest collection
of handcuffs (with focus on vintage ones), leg irons, nippers, and thumbcuffs
on the Web: Link
What's a nipper and a thumbcuff? Well, a nipper is a handcuff that locks only one hand, but has a handle for keeping the cuffed person under control (Photo to the left is a 1888 nipper made by Thomas & Smith).
A thumbcuff, like its name implies, cuffs both of the person's thumbs.
Bob Toelle collects posters - but not any poster, just the ones about fish - and he's got a lot of it. Currently, Bob has more than 700 fish posters from around the world: Link
Amputation set by Ferris & Co., Bristol (c. 1885)
Dr. Douglas Arbittier collects old medical equipments, and specializes in cased surgical sets. His collection includes a lot of amputation saws, and bloodletting artifacts (leech jar, anyone?).
When you visit his website, keep what Dr. Arbittier said in mind: "be thankful you live in today's medical world ...": Link
Texan artist Barney Smith has an unusual choice of art medium: toilet seats! For the past 30 years, Barney had created over 700 artistically decorated toilet seat lids. Check it out here: Link
W.T. Odhner Arithmometer (1890)
Sergei Frolov has a fantastic collection of over 150 Soviet-made calculators, as well as vintage computers, watches and slide rules. I'm particularly fond of the old mechanical arithmometers, as shown above: Link
Phil Miller is a sucrologist - meaning that he collects sugar packets and sugar cube wrappers. Indeed, Phil has been collecting since 1978 when he started with the Presidents of the United States sugar packets, and he hasn't looked back since. Life must be sweet if you collect sugar packets ... Link
The
Asphalt Museum is actually a real museum in a real building in Sacramento,
California, but it's weird enough that we'll just have to include it on
this list. It has a large collection of (you guessed it) everything asphalt.
The museum was founded by Scott Gordon and Marie Vans in 1991, while both attended Colorado State University.
In addition to asphalt "samples" from famous (like Route 66, Highway I, and the ancient Roman road Appian Way) and not-so-famous roads, the museum also has a recipe on how to make your own asphalt: Link
Gideon Weiss must've had one really itchy back when he started collecting back scratchers. His online collection has grown to include 236 of the strangest back scratchers I've ever seen: Link
Michael
Lewis welcomes visitors to his website with these warm words: "Welcome
to the exciting world of Moist Towelette Collecting."
Though I'm not sure just how wet naps would rank in the excitement scale, Michael's collection sure is something: Link
Don't miss the "Awards" section!
What
is a mangle? You'll be forgiven if you don't know what it is: a mangle
is a cast iron contraption with two wooden rollers, a spring, and a side
wheel with handle. Its function is to wring clothes dry after you wash
them, so obviously it's now obsolete with the invention dryers and all
...
A few years ago, Nancy Alford was in a local department store when she saw, and fell in love with, a mangle. For her sixteenth wedding anniversary, Nancy wanted (and got) - you guessed it, a mangle. Her husband thought she was mad.
Since then, she has collected so many of them that they had to build a new house (which she aptly named Mangleten) to fit all her mangles. Link
Victor Taylor is a lotologist (yes, a made up word meaning someone who collects lottery tickets). He has a particular interest in "Instants" Scratchcards, produced by Camelot for the UK National Lottery. As far as I can tell, none of the scratchcards have been scratched, so he's sitting on a potential goldmine worth bazillions!
Check out his incredibly detailed collection, which starts with the 1995 issues: Link
Younger Neatorama readers may not be familiar with AOL CDs, but the rest of us surely remember getting spammed with tons of these discs from America Online.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, AOL produced over a billion CDs (with over 1,000 distinct designs) for its direct mail campaign. The strategy was a huge success: AOL became the largest dial-up Internet Service Provider in the world (for a while anyway). After its fateful merger with Time Warner and the decline of dial-up as a mean of accessing the web, the company stopped producing the discs in 2006.
But fear not. Lydia of Lydia's AOL Disks shares with us her collection of over 2,500 unique AOL diskettes and CDs. Check it out here: Link
The
Museum of Burnt Food is dedicated to accidentally burnt food, er ... carbonized
culinary masterpieces (no intentionally burned artwork there!). The museum
was founded by harpist Deborah Henson Conant, who recounted this tale:
The museum was founded in the late 1980's one night when Deborah put on a small pot of Hot Apple Cider to heat, then received an unexpected . . . fascinating . . . and very long phone call. By the time Deborah returned to the kitchen, the Cider had become a "Cinder" and thus the first, and perhaps still the most impressive, exhibit: "Free Standing Hot Apple Cider" was born.
SINCE THEN, countless other works have entered the museum, such as "Thrice Baked Potato," "Why Sure, You Can Bake Quiche in the Microwave," the indestructible "Mmmm……Soy Pups," and the lovely matching set of Pizza Toast.
Deborah has a tip on kitchen decorating, which I think everyone should heed: "Never scrimp on fire extinguishers and smoke alarms." She would know now: Link
From left to right: Auto Club of Southern California Stop Sign (c. 1940);
Children "Wanted Alive" sign, the equivalent of "Slow -
Children at Play" sign (c. 1950); "T" Intersection with
Marble Reflector (c. 1940); Eagle 4-way 12" Beacons (c. 1930)
Steve Salcedo's fascination with street signs and traffic lights began when he received a bulletin board about traffic signs when he was just a small boy. Two years later, his collection was well under way.
Currently, Steve has over 350 street signs in his collection - all legal (rescued from street departments before they were scrapped, purchased from antique stores, flea markets, etc.): Link
In 1996, Martin Mihál's began collecting empty chocolate wrappers from around the world with a sizeable collection of 674 wrappers. A decade later, his collection grew to an astounding 38,579 wrappers! Martin has over 8,700 wrappers from Germany alone and even a few wrappers from far-flung countries like Oman and Uzbekistan.
So, the next time you eat a chocolate, think of Martin before you throw away the wrapper! Link
In 1991, Becky Martz first noticed banana labels when she put two bunches of bananas in the fruit bowl together. She noticed that the "Dole" labels actually weren't quite the same: one said Guatemala and the other said Honduras. Later that year, she noticed a particularly festive Chiquita label and decided that she wanted to collect banana labels.
Today, Becky has more than 7,000 different banana labels and even branched out to collect asparagus and broccoli bands.
If you think that this is a strange hobby, well, ... it is. But Becky isn't alone: there are others like her in the world, and they even have their own Banana Sticker Collector Convention. Check out Becky's collection here: Link
The
Museum of Talking Boards is all about collecting Ouija boards. The site
is quite neat: it explains the history
of the board, theory
as to how it works, as well as things
you should never do or ask.
And, of course, it has a fantastic gallery of over 80 antique talking boards.
The board above is the original Ouija board, created by Elijah Bond and Charles Kennard and produced in 1891 by Kennard Novelty Company.
Visit the Museum of Talking Boards here: Link
Date
Nail is exactly that: a marked nail hammered into poles and bridge timbers
to identify or date them.
Scott Weed of Nailhunter, who has a huge collection of these nails, wrote that "unlike most collectibles, Date Nails can still be found in the wild. With a couple of tools, some spare time and transportation, the world of Date Nail is open to everyone."
Indeed, but for now, I presume all of you will just satisfy yourself with visiting his website: Link
Dr. Val Kolpakov is a practicing dentist in Saginaw, Michigan, so it's only natural that he has an unnatural affinity to toothpaste.
Starting in 2002, Dr. Val began collecting toothpaste from around the world. His website, Toothpaste World, categorizes toothpastes according to location, brand name, and year of production. Right now, he has over 1,400 items: Link
I'd be remiss if I didn't share with you a toothpaste trivia from Dr. Val's website. Here's the world's oldest known formula for toothpaste:
The world's oldest-known formula for toothpaste, used more than 1,500 years before Colgate began marketing the first commercial brand in 1873, has been discovered on a piece of dusty papyrus in the basement of a Viennese museum.
In faded black ink made of soot and gum arabic mixed with water, an ancient Egyptian scribe has carefully described what he calls a "powder for white and perfect teeth".
When mixed with saliva in the mouth, it forms a "clean tooth paste".
According to the document, written in the fourth century AD, the ingredients needed for the perfect smile are one drachma of rock salt - a measure equal to one hundredth of an ounce - two drachmas of mint, one drachma of dried iris flower and 20 grains of pepper, all of them crushed and mixed together.
The result is a pungent paste which one Austrian dentist who tried it said made his gums bleed but was a "big improvement" on some toothpaste formulae used as recently as a century ago.
Ever got a strange fortune from a fortune cookie? Well, it belongs in the ever-growing collection at Weird Fortune Cookie Collection. Seriously, head on over there and browse their gallery (preferably after a nice little Kung Pao Chicken meal): Link
British Anzani Lawnrider (c. 1960)
The tireless curators of the British Lawnmower Museum, Brian and Sue Radam, dedicate their lives to preserving the best example of British engineering prowess: the lawnmower!
The lawnmower was invented in 1827 by English engineer Edwin Beard Budding, who wanted a superior alternative to the scythe. He took a machine designed to cut the knap off cloth and used it to cut grass instead. At the time, people thought that he was mad, so he tested his invention in the middle of the night so no one could see him!
The British Lawnmower Museum's now has over 200 vintage lawnmowers and part of 400 others: Link
Napkins: you use and throw them away, but Helena Vnouckova collects them. A lot of them - in fact, she has over 16,000 napkins from around the world (with sets of Christmas themed napkins, company napkins, and even airline napkins): Link
I'm
going to end this long list with Neatorama pal Alex Boese's excellent
website: Museum of Hoaxes.
Alex Boese probably has the strangest collection of them all: he collects stories about and examples of scams and hoaxes! In 1997, Alex created the Museum of Hoaxes as research notes for his doctoral dissertation, and the website quickly became popular. So much so that Alex the "hoaxpert" wrote three books which we have featured on Neatorama before: The Museum of Hoaxes, Hippo Eats Dwarf, and Elephants on Acid And Other Bizarre Experiments.
If you haven't seen it before (perhaps you've been living under a rock), then definitely check out the Museum of Hoaxes: Link - you won't be disappointed!
I'll be the first to acknowledge that this is but a short list of unusual collections you can find on the Web. For more weird things people collect, check out MuseumStuff's Unusual Museums and Strange Collections, and Unusual Museums of the Internet at RingSurf.
If you or someone you know has an unusual collection we should list here, please let me know in the comment section!
