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Do you remember the insanely great Frozen Grand Central prank?
Well, Charlie Todd of Improv Everywhere, the guy that did it, replicated this stunt at a suburban Taco Bell Grand Opening. The facial expressions of the unsuspecting lunchtime crowd when 40 performers just froze mid-slurp and mid-bit are pure gold!
Check out the video clip: more …
Eminence Orchestra wants to open up classical music to new listeners, especially younger people who think that a symphony is either a milk chocolate bar or music for old people. So they don’t play Bach or Beethoven – rather, they composed and play music straight out of video games!
If young people won’t come to the orchestra, then Eminence Orchestra will bring music to them … through YouTube. I’ll skip the oft-played Super Mario Bros. theme song (though it’s good) – rather, let’s listen to something from …
Metal Gear Solid [YouTube Link]
… or from a year ago:
Final Fantasy VII (One Winged Angel) [YouTube Link]
Link: Eminence Orchestra website | YouTube Profile - Thanks Noel!
Previously on Neatorama: 10 Operas You Didn’t Know You Already Like
Ah, South Korea: a major economic powerhouse of Asia, world leader in technology and a …. superstitious country?
Here’s a particularly strange urban legend of "Fan death" where an electric fan, if left running overnight in a closed room, can cause death of those inside. The urband legend is so pervasive in South Korea that manufacturers had to equip fans with a timer switch that turns them off after a certain period of time!
Can an electric fan cause harm to its user? The Korean Consumer Protection Board once stated:
"If bodies are exposed to electric fans or air conditioners for too long, it causes bodies to lose water and [causes] hypothermia. If directly in contact with [air current from] a fan, this could lead to death from [the] increase of carbon dioxide saturation concentration and decrease of oxygen concentration. The risks are higher for the elderly and patients with respiratory problems. From 2003 [to] 2005, a total of 20 cases were reported through the CISS involving asphyxiations caused by leaving electric fans and air conditioners on while sleeping. To prevent asphyxiation, timers should be set, wind direction should be rotated and doors should be left open."
Link – Thanks Stephanie D!
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary when Norfolk civil commissioner performed a wedding ceremony for the young couple … except that later on they found out the bride actually wasn’t a woman!
"Holy crap," Al Coward recalled thinking in Friday’s paper. "They were very good, obviously. They fooled a lot of people."
Antonio Blount, 31, and Justin "Just Call Me Justine" McCain, 18, fooled Coward and the Newport News Circuit Court clerk who issued the marriage license March 24 for the same-day ceremony.
McCain (a.k.a.: the bride) looked every inch a lady, clerk Rex Davis said later, raising no suspicions he was "anything but a woman."
If McCain hadn’t returned to the clerk’s office two weeks ago to try to change his name legally, the bogus marriage might never have been outed.
Now, it seems like the two are in a whole bunch of trouble: Link
Jenna Wortham has compiled a pretty neat gallery of 13 best robot love stories, from Wall-E to Weird Science, for Wired Magazine. Who remembers this from Blade Runner:
Bounty hunter Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) falls hard for a genetically engineered clone called Rachel in Ridley Scott’s 1982 cyberpunk thriller. Although Deckard’s primary mission is to assassinate rogue "replicants," he finds the charms of an experimental model (Sean Young) difficult to resist.
RoboLove Meter Reading — 5/5: Since all signs indicate that replicant assassin Deckard was likely a clone, too, Blade Runner gets points for cyborg-on-cyborg romance.
Hello Neatoramans! I’ve just finished reading a novel and have got a question for you: what books would you recommend for summer reading?
I’m kind of a light reader, mind you – so no treatises for me. My favorite books have been easy-to-read thriller novels by Frederick Forsyth, the usual NY Times Best Sellers fare like those by Douglas Preston and Lincoln
Child, and so on.
I’ve got a book on order (from the library – yes, that way it’s free!), the latest one by Lee Child called Nothing to Lose, but I’m always interested in learning about new authors.
What would you recommend and why? Thank you!
Woohoo! It’s time for our top 5 video clip picks from VideoSift – today, we’ve got some great ones!
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Girl Spins on Escalator |
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How to Distract Your Employees |
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Horde of Puppies Chase Boy |
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Why Women Hate Sports The ending will getcha (No, I won’t give it away). Link |
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Chinese Farmer Makes Home-made Airplane Do you remember those old magazine ads selling a kit to make a lawnmower helicopter? Well this is something like that: a farmer in rural China decided to make his own airplane … and shot a video of himself flying the deathtrap: Link |
For more the web’s most interesting videos, check out: VideoSift.
The notion of an arranged marriage seems so foreign to the Western world that it evokes an image of a time long, long ago – but the tradition is alive and well in certain parts of the world.
In India, arranged marriages take place alongside "love marriages" – and both seem to be acceptable to society there.
Swati Pandey of the LA Times recounts her experience attending one such arranged marriages, of her cousin Garima to a man she had just met:
All of it — the years spent selecting a suitor, the final minutes of anticipation, the newness of the couple, a man and woman not shaped by former loves and heartbreaks — was romantic in a way I hadn’t expected. Growing up in America for all my 25 years, I’d long ago given up on the tradition, but by midnight, I had started to wonder.
What I never realized, as a googly-eyed adolescent who had imagined eloping with a George Clooney type, was that "love marriage," as many Indians call it, is the aberration.
Arranged marriages are common in countries and cultures that came belatedly to Romanticism and rock ‘n’ roll and whatever else gave rise to what we call youth. It’s difficult to quantify them because the term is such a broad one — encompassing a childhood betrothal and a parent’s mere suggestion of a vetted match.
We’ve posted a video post on contact juggling before, but these performances by Okotanpe and Mister Om are pretty trippy!
See how Okotanpe makes the ball seem to float in place …
[YouTube Link] – Thanks Justin!
… and Mister Om contact juggling a ball inside a giant inflatable ball …
Mister Om contact juggling [YouTube Link]
We all know that the real estate market is really bad right now, but apparently it’s also very difficult time for finding love.
So, single mom and real estate agent Devon Traboscia came upon a brilliant (or brilliantly crazy) idea of selling her house … and herself on eBay and Craigslist:
In the ad, Traboscia writes:
"If you want to live the never ending dream and experience the real love, life and the romance you have always felt was a fairytale then this is the vibrant outstanding woman of your dreams! To sweep this European Loving Lady off her feet send in your application right now."
She goes on to say that her four bedroom, 2,000 square-foot home, that will be included in the deal, has "neutral colors, Berber carpet, and upgraded tile".
Now that is the way to travel in style! The guy must’ve really love his Volkswagen Beetle to create a custom trailer modeled after the car …
Found at Daily Motorcycle News
Photo: rent-a-moose
Jowling (also known as slap n’ flap) is a fun portrait photography where you get your subject to relax their facial muscle completely and then shake their head from side to side. Then you snap away (hopefully one of the pics will come out perfectly silly!)
Link | Why, there’s a website specifically for jowlers ("where distortion is cause for celebration") – via Didn’t You Hear?
After 200 years of debate, the Supreme Court has finally ruled that the Second Amendment means that individual Americans – as opposed to state militias – have a constitutional right to own guns (at least in their homes).
In a tight 5-4 decision, Justice Antonin Scalia stated:
"Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security and where gun violence is a serious problem," Scalia wrote. "That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct." [...]
"The Constitution leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns," Scalia wrote. "But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home."
Link | Previously on Neatorama: US Supreme Court to Review Right to Bear Arms
Do you agree with the ruling?
Throughout most of medical history, doctors thought that itch was a mild form of pain – then in 1987, scientists found out that it’s a completely separate form of sensation. Still, itching can be extremely aggravating, especially if the feeling won’t quit.
Here’s a fascinating though a bit long article at the New Yorker by Atul Gawande about itching. It talks about a woman called "M." who suffered a persistent scalp itch that, of course, led to constant scratching, and a man called "H." who suffered from itching and pain in his arm after a spinal cord surgery.
“Scratching is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature, and as ready at hand as any,” Montaigne wrote. “But repentance follows too annoyingly close at its heels.” For M., certainly, it did: the itching was so torturous, and the area so numb, that her scratching began to go through the skin. At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab. M. tried bandaging her head, wearing caps to bed. But her fingernails would always find a way to her flesh, especially while she slept.
One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.
(Okay, that may be a stretch – but the rest of the article is very good)
Link (Photo: Gerald Slota) – via Ectoplasmosis
Matthew Stromberg is a professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). He also creates “explosive art”.
Matthew Stromberg uses a wide variety of powerful and volatile substances, including rocket fuel, explosives, gunpowder, propellants and bullets, aka energetic materials, in order to create art rather than destroy. The Savannah College of Art and Design professor utilizes these forceful methods to apply his mark to wood, metal and paper. The results are quite visceral and evocative of the violent patterns of nature– images seared and impressed in high-energy events. They kick ass, too.
Uncertain Times has videos of Stromberg at work with rocket fuel, homemade explosive, and a submachine gun. Link -Thanks, John!
In the 1950’s, radio host Jean Shepherd constructed one of the most infamous literary hoaxes of all time. Annoyed with how bestseller lists worked at the time, Shepherd urged his listeners to visit their local bookstores and request a book that didn’t exist. Shepherd supplied the listeners with a fake title, a plot summary and a fictitious author. Soon, the nonexistent book, “I, Libertine,” became a real bestseller.
WFMU has posted a 1968 radio show of Shepherd telling the whole story.
Link
Via Boing-Boing
In an effort to make a statement on sweatshop labor and content ownership, artist Adam Brandejs has constructed an animatronic Nike sneaker which appears to be made of human skin. In actuality, the piece is made up of latex prosthesis cast from the skin of the artist.
“Each piece of skin is a different in color, size, and texture and the Nike Logo is done in white, slapped overtop of all the other colors. Really, either you’re going to get it or you’re not. “
A 60 centimeter crocodile wandered into a pub in Noonamah, Northern Territory, Australia on Sunday evening. He almost made it to the bar when he was grabbed by patrons. They posed for pictures with him while waiting for a Parks and Wildlife agent to come.
The little punter was sent off to start a sober life out at Darwin Crocodile Farm.
The saltie saga is a first for the tavern, which has hosted horses and buffalo in the front bar over the years.
Tavern owner Tony Innes said crocs were welcome to visit the pub as long as they were all under a metre long.
The pattern of recent disasters in China has had many superstitious people concerned about the Olympic Mascots (the Fuwa) – claiming that each of the five reflects/predicts a particular disaster.
The five mascots of the Beijing Oympics are each blamed for a recent natural or man-made disaster in China. Blogadilla has details. Link -via Dump Trumpet
A 6-year old-boy in India is in training to make his goal to limbo skate under 100 cars in one minute. So far he has managed to do 57. Check out the video clip:
Link [YouTube] via Geekologie
Something a little different for today’s collaboration with What is it? blog – it’s a true "what the heck is it?" meaning we don’t know what the doodad pictured above is for!
This device has been sitting on someone’s mantle for years, and if you know what it is for (with proof – article, patent no. or photo of it in use), then you’ll win a free shirt from Neatorama’s online shop! If no one gets it right, then funniest/most creative entry will win instead.
Contest rules are simple: Enter your guess in the comment area, one guess per comment, please but you can enter as many as you can think of. We usually discourage URLs, but for this game, we actually encourage it (you’ll need to link to the proof anyhow). First one to tell us what it is for wins the shirt, or if nobody does, then the funniest guess gets it. Good luck!
Update 7/6/08 – since no one gave convincing proof, the funniest guess wins it. Congrats to Fuzz, who came up with “Flux Capacitor v1.0″
This guy has skills. I once tried a RC helicopter once and the results were disastrous. To be able to manipulate all theses servos takes great skills and this dude demonstrates it with the neat clip.
Those moves defy Newton’s Laws of Motion…even at that scale.
Enjoy!
Link: YouTube
(image credit: aarrgh)
