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Some smugglers dug tunnels (hard work!), others try to slip their contraband through customs. These enterprising smugglers in Hong Kong had a better idea: they used a zip line!
Sixteen members of a smuggling gang in China and Hong Kong have been arrested for rigging a 300-metre long cable to send contraband goods across the heavily-policed border, a newspaper reported Thursday.
The gang had initially used a crossbow to shoot the cable across the fenced-off border between the two sides, before stringing it from the top of a Chinese highrise down to a village house in Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post reported.
Investigators said the gang had likely been operating for two to three weeks, using a zip wire and pulley system to whisk small batches of goods along the cable, mostly at night.
Most people simply ignore a sad traffic median full of weed, but not this guy: Scott took it on his own to create a "traffic median oasis" by secretly planting it. Turns out, he’s not a lone – there’s a growing league of "guerrilla gardeners" who plant without approvals …
BRIMMING with lime-hued succulents and a lush collection of agaves, one shooting spiky leaves 10 feet into the air, it’s a head-turning garden smack in the middle of Long Beach’s asphalt jungle. But the gardener who designed it doesn’t want you to know his last name, since his handiwork isn’t exactly legit. It’s on a traffic island he commandeered.
"The city wasn’t doing anything with it, and I had a bunch of extra plants," says Scott, as we tour the garden, cars whooshing by on both sides of Loynes Drive.
Scott is a guerrilla gardener, a member of a burgeoning movement of green enthusiasts who plant without approval on land that’s not theirs. In London, Berlin, Miami, San Francisco and Southern California, these free-range tillers are sowing a new kind of flower power. In nighttime planting parties or solo "seed bombing" runs, they aim to turn neglected public space and vacant lots into floral or food outposts.
Link (Photo: Mark Boster / LA Times)
I’ve always been fascinated by the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, thanks in large part to the plaster cast there of Chang and Eng, the reason the term “Siamese Twins” came about (is that a politically incorrect term now?). The museum is also the final resting place of the twins’ conjoined liver. Although they are arguably the most famous conjoined twins, they are far from the only ones – below are a few that were/are relatively famous. I’ll start with the Bunker Twins, though, for a little background:
Chang and Eng were born on May 11, 1811 in Thailand (then Siam). They were joined by nothing but a piece of cartilage; their livers were fused together but functioned independently so separating them wouldn’t have been a problem. Although the operation would have been relatively simple by today’s standards, it was much trickier back then, so they remained joined their entire lives. They toured the world for a while under contract with a British merchant and ended up going into business for themselves once thy made some money and their contract was up. They settled in North Carolina, married sisters and ended up being quite prolific – Chang and his wife had 10 kids; Eng and his wife had 12. Many of their descendants still live in the Mount Airy, N.C. area. In 1874, Chang passed away after being in poor health for quite some time. Eng followed just a few hours later.
I’m intrigued by these two. They were Italian twins from Genoa and were conjoined in the middle – Lazarus was able to stand upright and Joannes kind of intersected him. Joannes’ left leg stuck out of his brother. However, he never spoke and almost always kept his eyes shut and his mouth open. If Lazarus wasn’t exhibiting himself and his brother to make some money, he simply threw a cloak over Joannes and pretended he wasn’t there. It’s now thought that Joannes stopped receiving nutrients from the umbilical cord in the womb and parts of his body began to atrophy, which is why he only had one leg and was missing some vital organs.
Hey, a pair of Hiltons who are famous for actually doing something! Daisy and Violet were born in 1908 to a barmaid named Kate Skinner; Kate’s boss recognized that she could make a lot of money off of the conjoined twins and bought them from their mother. She toured them though Germany, the U.S. and Australia – they even had a tap dancing routine in one of Bob Hope’s acts. They sued for their independence in 1931 and won that, plus $100,000. They went into vaudeville as the Hilton Sisters and had numerous affairs, plus a couple of marriages and divorces. They ended up settling in Florida for a while and owned a hamburger stand called the Hilton Sisters’ Snack Bar. Their last public appearance was at a drive-in in Charlotte, N.C., but their tour manager abandoned them there. Having no money and no way to get around (they never passed a driving test), they stayed there and took a job in a local grocery store. They died in 1969.
Actually, on their birth certificate, these girls are listed under one name – Dacha. Their spines were conjoined and they had a total of three legs. When they were born, doctors took Masha and Dasha away from their mother and told her they died shortly thereafter. When the twins got older, they were told that their mother died while giving birth.
Until their teens, Masha and Dasha were subjected to medical experiments but finally put their (collective?) foot down at the age of 12 and refused to participate any longer. When they were 17, they had a surgery to remove thei third leg, which was actually both of their inner legs that had fused together. Without the leg, they couldn’t walk and had to get around on crutches. Eventually they received a wheelchair.
Dasha became very depressed and tried to kill herself several times. When that didn’t work, she turned to alcohol. Although she was the one who was drinking, it was Masha who died of heart failure in 2003. Dasha had the option to receive medical care from doctors, but she refused it and was instead given a sleeping pill. She died about 17 hours later.
If you haven’t heard of Millie and Christine, maybe you’ve know them by their nickname – The Two-Headed Nightingale (or maybe you still don’t. I didn’t.).
Millie and Christine’s parents were slaves on the farm of Alexander McCoy in North Carolina. They were sold to a showman, but kidnapped by a rival showman who took the girls to the U.K. Smith (the original showman) traveled to the U.K. to retrieve the twins and also reunited them with their birth mother. Smith and his wife taught the girls how to play music, sing and speak five languages, which got them a spot in the Barnum circus. Queen Victoria was apparently so taken with Millie and Christine that she gave them a sizable diamond necklace.
In 1961, the Schappell Twins were born as Lori and Dori. Dori, an aspiring country singer, took the name Reba for a while after her idol Reba McEntire. I can’t find a reason why, but Dori/Reba now prefers to be called George.
Lori and George are joined at the head and share 30 percent of their brain matter. Even so, they have very different personalities and live different lives as much as possible. While George is trying her hand at singing, Lori works at a laundry and schedules her shifts around George’s performances.
The two of them were 24 before they were able to declare their independence and go to college – prior to that they lived in an institution in Reading, Pa.
In what must be one of the first documented cases of conjoined twins ever, Eliza (or Elisa) and Mary Chalkhurst were born in Kent, England in 1100. This was the same year the King William Rufus died; some people believed that the death of the King caused many strange things to happen that year, including the birth of the twins. The girls were literally joined at the hip, although most pictures of them show that they were joined at the shoulder as well.
When the twins died in 1136, they left a sum of money and 20 acres of land to the local church and said that they wanted bread and cheese given to the poor people in the village every Easter on their behalf. They also specified that cakes with their image on them should be given out. The church did just that, but I’m not sure if it still occurs – some sources say it does, even almost 900 years after their deaths, and others say the practice has stopped. Anyone know?
Behold the "Fullmoon" credenza by Sotirios Papadopoulos for ENNEZERO. The piece is painted with glow-in-the-dark paint called Ecolightinside, so the furniture gives off a soft glow in the dark: Link
Cracked has a rundown of 5 scientists who performed experiments on themselves and and one facility that will make you cringe. Usually I recommend an article based on the subject matter (which is fascinating here), but this one is also fun to read for the inspired hyperbole of the writing.
Here we look at seven self-endangering scientists who only wear lab coats because you can’t get explosive-bear-proof tuxedos outside of MI6. Each one of these researchers has been voted “Most likely to inject themselves with the Omega Serum while shouting, ‘Dammit, there’s no time for testing!’”
It’s from Cracked, so heed a warning for language. Pictured is Albert Hoffman, the only featured scientist most people are familiar with. Link
A fish over eight feet long is thought to be the largest line-caught halibut ever! Fisherman Soren Bec landed the fish off the coast of Norway after a “titanic struggle.” The trophy measure 8’ 1” and weighs 31 stone (434 pounds). Link -via Digg
Balloon twister Addi Somekh gives a demonstration on making a Bass Instrument with balloons. The instrument is based on the balloon resonator originally concieved by Canadian twister Sean Rooney.
Link: YouTube
Today’s collaboration with What is it? blog brings us this strange device: what is it for?
Place your guess in the comment section – no prize this week, you’re playing for bragging rights and fun only. For more clues, check out What is it? blog. Good luck!
Update 5/30/08 – the answer is: An automatic bookmark, it’s clipped onto the back cover of a book with the pin placed between the pages to mark your place, patent number D163572.
Congratulations to Jim A. who got it right first!
I still remember losing my grip on a balloon and watching it fly away when I was a small kid, so I can totally sympathize with Michel Fournier.
See, the French daredevil wanted to set the world record for free falling from the highest altitude. But his effort was thwarted when the $500,000 balloon flew away during the set up!
A mechanism that connects the balloon to three parachutes — which are designed to carry the gondola safely back to Earth after Fournier begins his descent — prematurely caused a separation. [...]
Observers who watched the translucent, jelly fish-like balloon float away over the prairie landscape were left guessing at what happened. [...]
"Everything seemed to be going according to plan. The team’s chase helicopter had risen into the air and was hovering and suddenly for reasons no one can explain, the balloon slipped free and began to ascend," Oliver told Canada AM.
Link (Photo: David Stobbe / The Canadian Press)
Previously on Neatorama: Skydiving from the Edge of Space
58-year-old Miss Ruth is tailor to one of the world’s most hateful (and hated) group, the Ku Klux Klan:
Coming from five generations of Ku Klux Klan members, 58-year-old "Ms. Ruth" sews hoods and robes for Klan members seven days a week, blessing each one when it’s done. A red satin outfit for an Exalted Cyclops, the head of a local chapter, costs about $140.
I didn’t realize there are so many steps in making a KKK robe! I thought it was simply:
1. Take bedsheet
2. Cut eyeholes
3. ???
4. Profit!
Here’s a photo essay by Anthony Karen for Mother Jones: Link – via Liberal Avenger
Handsome Dan is the bulldog mascot of Yale’s football team.
Princeton had a tiger as a mascot and Harvard had the "Orange Man," a stand-in for Puritan John Harvard. So, in 1889, Yale undergraduate student Andrew Graves bought a bulldog and named him "Handsome Dan".
This is what the Hartford Courant had to say about it:
"In personal appearance, he seemed like a cross between an alligator and a horned frog, and he was called handsome by the metaphysicians under the law of compensation. The title came to him, he never sought it. He was always taken to games on a leash, and the Harvard football team for years owed its continued existence to the fact that the rope held." (Source)
I’m loving these ads for Evil Dead: The Musical, which use iconic images from other famous musicals … but with a zombie twist! The tagline "It’s like the musicals you love, only evil" is golden!
Via Ads of the World
In video games, final bosses get all the glory. I mean you probably remember Bowser and Mother Brain … but what about those mini bosses, "the assistant managers of evil"?
Crave Online has a neat run down of 10 of the Most Memorable NES Minibosses. Take, for example, Abobo from Double Dragon:
Abobo may just be the most unfortunate looking thug to ever appear in a fighting game to this day. With a head like a giant meatball, accented by a truly bitchen handlebar mustache, Abobo looks like a grotesquely muscled leather daddy in purple capris. His comical appearance won’t stop him from kicking the sh-t out of Billy and Jimmy Lee, so be sure to attack first and laugh later when confronted by Abobo.
You’re looking at an impulse generator at the National Grid High Voltage Laboratory at the University of Manchester.
No, it’s not a part of a Star Trek spaceship, but it does something pretty cool: it lets researchers study how materials react to lightning.
Ian Cotton, a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester’s School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, says: "We do a lot of lightning protection work here."
Electricity is taken straight from the mains, at the UK’s standard 240 volts, but a towering impulse generator then ramps it up to a massive two million volts – creating a voltage that can be used to see how lightning attaches to objects.
Link – via Blue’s News
Here’s the story, from a Sun-Sentinel article in 2005 … it’s just like what it said on the headline:
A man reported missing from a Florida hospital was found in North Carolina dressed like a doctor and driving a stolen ambulance with a dead deer wedged in the back, authorities said.
Leon Holliman Jr., 37, was reported missing from a River Region Human Services facility in Jacksonville last month. The North Carolina State Highway Patrol found him driving the ambulance with the deer on Sunday. “I don’t know how the man got it up in there,” said Sgt. Robert Pearson. “It was a six point buck.”
It wasn’t known where Holliman got the deer, which had been dead for some time, Pearson said.
Only in Florida, folks: Link (Photo: WFMY) – Thanks Becky!
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. . .Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. . . Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."
– Helen Keller, deafblind American author, activist and lecturer
The highest-ranking female at the Wakayama Electric Railway Co. does nothing more than sit around looking cute, but no one minds because she’s single-handedly caused ridership on the struggling transit system to jump more than 10 percent.Make that single-pawedly.
The miracle worker that’s turned the Japanese railway around is a nine-year-old cat. Her name is Tama, she wears a stationmaster cap and she has her own office. And she’s responsible for one of the the greatest business turnarounds since Steve Jobs saved Apple.
“She never complains, even though passengers touch her all over the place,” company spokesman Yoshiko Yamaki told the Associated Press. “She is an amazing cat. She has patience and charisma. She is the perfect stationmaster.”
Before Tama came along, Wakamaya was losing 500 million yen ($4.7 million US) a year as passengers abandoned the Kishigawa line in western Japan. In an effort to staunch the red ink, railway officials all but shut down Kishigawa station.
But Tama stuck around, and the passengers returned.
It didn’t happen overnight. Railway officials laid off the station’s staff in April 2006, but Tama — who’s mother was a stray that lived at the station — didn’t leave. She became a popular fixture among riders, and railway officials formally named her “stationmaster” in January 2007.
Cats are considered good luck in Japan, and Tama’s promotion made her a national sensation. Tourists flocked to the station to take pictures and buy souvenirs — postcards, erasers, notebooks and pins. Ridership rose 17 percent in the month after her appointment, and rose another 10 percent the following year.
Thrilled by her performance, the railway promoted Tama to “super-stationmaster” in January, and she is “the only female in a managerial position.”
“She now holds the fifth-highest position in the company,” Yamaki told AFP. Tama got her own office — a renovated ticket booth — in April during a ceremony that the president of the railway and the mayor of Kinokawa attended. A local grocer looks after Tama, who’s salary is paid in cat food, and she works from nine to five with Sundays off.
Tama is slated to appear in a documentary, being directed by Myriam Tonelotto, about amazing cats around the world.
I have unsubstantiated reports that they are also talking about bringing back the little birds that pick lottery ticket numbers for waiting passengers in return for a small fee, but the video clip I had was seized electronically by the dreaded Kempeitai animal exploitation division. If I suddenly fall off the radar, please tell my compatriots to look towards the land of the rising sun, for it is there where the next war for using domesticated animals to mock important municipal institutions and procedures must be fought – and won.
[Wired's Autopia via Salon.com]
They came, they saw, they were pretty cool, all things considered.
An Asian act called “Signature” made a splash on the UK’s performing talent cousin of American-idol show Britain’s Got Talent. Signature really brought their initial performance to bear. OK, it was a bit cliche and we’ve seen the same sort of thing done a dozen times over the past 20 years. Adding the UK urban-Asian element of Bhangra to what could have been standard Michael Jackson fare is what put them over the top.
Simon Cowell asked the right question at the end of their very well received first performance: can you pull it off again the next time? I think you’ll agree that they did – once again wielding the Bhangra as their weapon of choice.
Here’s the first performance:
And here they are on a subsequent show:
What do you think? Can they bring it a third time? What should they do next?
[YouTube videos 1 & 2 via the Sepia Mutiny Blog]
Gabe Fidanque, owner of Wagon Wheel Liquors in Durango, Colorado, was tired of losing as much as $1000 a month to shoplifters, so he instituted his own punishment: he told those caught shoplifting to give him one of their shoes or he’ll call the cops!
But that turns in itself turns out to be robbery – so the police told him to stop or risk running afoul of the law:
"I give them the choice – I say ‘I’m either going to call the cops or you give me one of your shoes,’" Fidanque said Thursday, a day before he decided to abandon his plan on advice from the Durango Police Department.
He said he started looking at alternatives about two years ago because he was frustrated that people he caught shoplifting and reported to the police frequently returned to the store within hours of their arrest.
But Durango Police Department Capt. Micki Browning said Fidanque’s punishment puts him in serious jeopardy by substituting a felony offense for a misdemeanor.
"I would suggest that he find a different option that doesn’t involve giving up property," Browning said. She said that because Fidanque requires the offender to surrender property through intimidation, the shoe penalty is tantamount to felony robbery under state law. Shoplifting is a misdemeanor.
"What’s the difference between him saying, ‘give me $20 and I won’t call the police’ or ‘give me your shoe?’" Browning asked.
The queue to enter the Hindu Temple is long, people from all over the world sometimes wait for hours to enter a shrine created by Mrs. Sushila Karia and her husband Dhirajlal.
This may not be a strange sight for a temple in India, but the shrine is located in a spare bedroom of the Karias’ house in Essex, England!
It has proved so popular that for the last 29 years, the house has attracted worshippers and visitors from all over Britain and across the world – 50,000 of them at the last count, and still arriving by the coachload. On particularly busy days they might wait hours in the queue for the chance to spend ten minutes in private prayer in the 9ft by 6ft spare bedroom, used as a humble study before Mr Karia came up with his brainwave.
Seventeen gods and goddesses central to the Hindu religion are represented in statue form, strategically placed in the room. They were blessed by five priests from India in a 13-day inauguration ceremony that involved carrying the statues to the nearby beach and bathing them in the sea. The blessing is designed to bring the statues alive and make them worthy of prayer.
Thus, everything a Hindu pilgrim might want is available here – peace, prayer, friendship and happiness – and of course, Mrs Karia’s tea. Since suffering a bout of pneumonia, the 67-year-old part time teacher can no longer cope with preparing food and treats for everyone but guests are welcome to bring their own.
The couple created the temple because none was available locally when they moved in the 1970s from North London, where they ran a newsagents. In those days Mr Karia, an electronics engineer from Uganda, and his wife, from India, had to make a 90-mile round trip to the capital to the nearest temple. So instead, they made their own.
Paul Harris of the Daily Mail has the story: Link (Photo: Peter Lawson / Eastnews)
Previously on Neatorama: 10 Most Amazing Temples in the World
Photo: hellolukira
Continuing our strange bus shenanigans, here’s what happened when a bus "swallowed a VW kombi … Thanks Lukira! | One more photo of the Solstice Bus
This is weird, but in a sad way: a man grieving over the death of his girlfriend tried to kill himself by climbing into a morgue freezer to be with her!
The 41-year-old man was discovered on Monday when workers detected an unusually high temperature in the freezer and realized the hatch was not securely fastened.
"A morgue manager opened the hatch, saw two people lying inside, felt scared enough to yell out and then even cried," the Liberty Times reported. "She didn’t stabilize for a long time."
Link (Photo: Stringer/Reuters)
Update, 5/30/08: Real or fake? The debate rages on in comments below. Neatorama homeslice Rhett breaks out the old slide-rule on his site DotPhys and tries to answer the question. Check it out.
In the comics, Wolverine painfully pops his claws out right through his skin, and when they retract, his skin heals up. There’s a group of frogs in Africa that do the same thing!
The frogs defend themselves with sharp bone claws on their hind feet but to do so, the animals have to drive the claws through their own skin. It’s an extreme defence that is completely unique in the animal world.
The clawed frogs belong to a family called Arthroleptidae that were discovered in Central Africa more than a century ago. At first, people wondered if the claws just stuck through the skin as a side effect of the preservation process. Alternatively, the frogs may have used them to grip or climb. Their true function as defensive weapons only became clear when naturalists first described actually picking up and handling live animals.
Doing so is a mistake, and anyone who makes it is punished with a series of deep, bleeding wounds inflicted by the struggling animal as it kicks out violently with its claws. The ability is well known to the people of Cameroon, who only ever hunt the frogs with machetes or spears.
Scientists are still not sure what happens to surviving frogs after the claws are no longer needed. Link
14-year-old Sam Hawthorne was bitten by a shark in his sleep! He was sleepwalking one night and walked right into a trophy shark’s head that was hanging on his bedroom wall. His mother found him bleeding from a wound on the cheek, and the shark still imbedded in his face.
‘The shark must have been embedded in Sam’s cheek for about 15 minutes and he was in a lot of pain,’ she said.
Fortunately, Sam escaped with just a small scar. ‘It was the most frightening experience of my life,’ he said.
Today’s Neatorama and Hobotopia’s Caption Monkey has a little twist: your task is to do your best to provide the funniest commentary on the recent toilet problem at the International Space Station.
But first, the story. Here’s what John Schwartz of The New York Times wrote:
Four words you don’t want to hear in space:
“The toilet is broken.”
The crew aboard the International Space Station is working on a problem with the system for collecting solid and liquid waste, which is a trickier proposition without gravity than it is on the Earth. Space toilets use jets of fan-propelled air to guide waste into the proper container.
A NASA status report noted that last week, while using the toilet system in the Russian-built service module, “the crew heard a loud noise and the fan stopped working.” The solid waste collector is functioning properly, but the system for collecting liquid waste was not.
The crew tried replacing one device, an air/water separator, and then a filter, but nothing seemed to bring the toilet back to full operation. Russian mission control told the crew — Russian Cosmonauts Sergey Volkov and Oleg Kononenko, and Garrett Reisman, a NASA astronaut, to use the toilet on the Soyuz capsule that is attached to the station as a lifeboat. But that system has very limited capacity, and so repairing the system has become an increasingly urgent issue.
As so often happens when there’s a plumbing problem, house guests are on the way: the space shuttle Discovery is scheduled to launch on Saturday, with seven astronauts aboard. The shuttle, however, has its own toilet.
You can simply come up with a new caption for the speech bubble above (yes, that’s my attempt at humor), or imagine a conversation between ISS and ground control, or whatever. Funniest one will win a free drawing by Adam "Ape Lad" Koford (a monkey drawing or any other critter … your imagination is the limit!).
Good luck!
Update 5/29/08 – Congratulations to trestleboy, who came up with the winning caption of “No. You misheard. The ship didn’t hit the fan.“
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