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Visne saltare? Viam Latam Fungosam scio.
That’s how you say “Do you want to dance? I know the Funky Broadway.” in Latin. Courtesy of MIT, you can learn how to say handy Latin phrases such as:
Link via Ironic Catholic
Previously on Neatorama: Latin You Should Know
Image via Flickr user raypilla
When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?
By default, Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend as that is the time you’re most likely to need it. Once enabled, you can adjust when it’s active in the General settings.
Link -via J-Walk Blog
If you’re not too busy playing online games today, you can help Jason Morrison and his wife name their baby!
My wife and I are expecting, and thus we have to pick a name for our new baby. We’ve perused baby name websites and tried the Freakonomics tactic of predicting popular names, but to be honest none of it was really working.
As a Googler, though, the answer should have been obvious – let the Internet do it! So that’s what we’re doing, opening up our baby’s name to an Internet-wide vote.*
* We do reserve the right to ignore the results of the poll completely. Otherwise we’ll end up with a kid named Mr. Splashy Pants. Actually, that has a nice ring to it…
Vladimir Putin, the "world’s most manly leader," has yet another display of his masculinity: a new "Let’s Learn Judo with Vladimir" DVD!
Today he presented the instructional judo DVD that shows him throwing an opponent to the mat.
‘Let’s Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin’ is the product of collaboration between Putin – a black belt – and former World and Olympic judo champion Yasuhiro Yamashita.
At a nighttime presentation minutes into his 56th birthday, Putin said the title was little more than an ‘advertising trick’.
Anyone who watches it ‘will be learning not from your humble servant but from real geniuses’ of the martial art, he said.
If the service is bad at this Japanese restaurant because the waiters are monkeying around that’s because … they’re monkeys!
Here’s the story of Yat-chan and Fuku-chan, two macaque monkey pets that serve customers hot towels and drinks (for soy bean tips!):
"Yat-chan first learned by just watching me working in the restaurant. It all started when one day I gave him a hot towel out of curiosity and he brought the towel to the customer," the 63-year-old owner of the tavern, Kaoru Otsuka, told Reuters.
Both monkeys are household pets and are certified by the local authorities to work at the tavern. They clock in a maximum of two hours a day and are appreciated by customers who tip them with boiled soya beans.
"The monkeys are actually better waiters than some really bad human ones," customer Takayoshi Soeno.
Link (Flash video) – via Boing Boing
There was a bit of excitement in the usually stodgy Imperial Palace in Tokyo: a fat and naked tourist went for a skinny dip in the palace moat!
The man, believed to be in his 40s, jumped into the moat and started throwing rocks and splashing two policemen.
Police subsequently chased him in a rowing boat, a scene captured by local TV footage.
Eventually, the man got out of the water and climbed up the 26ft stone wall of the palace – only to find police waiting for him.
And thanks to YouTube, we can now see the video clip (don’t worry, the offending … uh, bits are obscured)
Frozen human eggs at a fertility center. Photo: Mark Boster / LA Times
After successfully conceiving a daughter through in vitro fertilization, Gina Rathan and her husband Cheddi was faced with a moral dilemma they didn’t expect to encounter: what to do with the "leftover" preserved frozen embryos they created, but hadn’t used?
"I don’t see them as not being life yet," says Gina Rathan, 42, a pharmaceutical sales representative. "I thought, ‘How can I discard them when I have a beautiful child from that IVF cycle?’ "
Many other former infertility patients also appear to be grappling over the fate of embryos they have no plans to use: An estimated 500,000 embryos are in cryopreservation in the United States.
As with the Rathans, this unexpected conundrum often arises well after the infertility crisis has passed, triggering impassioned and highly personal debates about the science and ethics of human life. The discussion boils down to a fundamental question: What is this icy clump of cells smaller than a grain of sand?
When Eve the chicken got cancer, her owner didn’t warm up the oven and prepare her for dinner. Instead, they spent £1,400 on radiation therapy to cure her!
The couple, who are self-employed accountants, took her to the vets who told them that Eve had developed the disease in her remaining leg and the Denneys faced the heartbreaking prospect of having her put down.
So they decided to save her life – by paying for surgery to remove the growth, followed by a course of radiotherapy, at a total cost of £1,400.
Mrs Denney, 43, said: "Eve is a pet to us. It doesn’t matter if she has four legs, two, or, in this case, one. She jumps around the garden and responds to her name just like a cat or dog.
"If we hadn’t done anything, she would have had maybe two or three months to live and one of our options was to put her to sleep. But after a lot of soul-searching we decided to do what we could for her.
In these tough times, it’s easy to forget that the economic crisis isn’t limited to the United States. In England, many property owners were frustrated with tenants who do not pay their rent, so one real estate agency decided to get a little creative:
Merseyside-based Sutton Estates has placed placards reading ‘Rent dodger lives here’ outside two of its properties.
The agency hopes the signs will embarrass tenants who avoid rent collection into meeting their payments.
Neil Heffey, a partner in the company, said he was tired of being avoided by those who refused to pay for their living accommodation, provided by or through his company.
‘They can avoid us, but not their neighbours. Now, every time they walk in and out of their door, the neighbours will be laughing at them’ said Mr Heffey, who also insisted that genuine cases of hardship would not be targeted.
(Photo: Liverpool Echo)
So you think you know pop culture (or more exactly, YouTube pop culture). Quick, what’s the most popular fan-made music video on YouTube? It’s Canon Rock, a rendition of Pachebel’s classical music played by Jeong-Hyun Lim (better known as his online handle funtwo). The video clip has been viewed nearly 50 million times.
So what happened to Jeong-Hyun? David Farrier of TV3 in New Zealand went in search of funtwo, and found him not in South Korea, but in Auckland, New Zealand, studying computer science!
Here’s David’s interview with the YouTube sensation:
Thanks David!
Photo: Erwan Fichou
Photographer Erwan Fichou has a really neat gallery of photos he took of people wearing sweaters and coats made from … their pet dogs’ fur!
Link (click on Dogwool) – via If It’s Hip, It’s Here, thanks Marilyn!
Previously on Neatorama: Couple’s Beloved Dogs Made Into Sweaters
Hooray (and a barrel of simians!) – it’s time for this week’s Neatorama and Hobotopia’s Caption Monkey game. But first, the story of the wheelbarrowful of orangutans. From the Daily Mail:
Orphaned by Man’s folly, [the orangutans] are unable to rely on their parents to teach them the ways of the animal world. So every day at the rescue centre which is their home, they are wheeled into the forest to learn.
Link (with loads of baby cute orangutan photos!)
Okay, onto the game: funniest caption will win an original Laugh-Out-Loud Cat comic by Adam "Ape Lad" Koford. One caption per comment, please. You can enter as many funny ones you can think of.
Oh, don’t forget to check out Adam’s blog for inspiration. Good luck!
Update 10/8/08 – Adam has picked the winner! Congratulations to planettom who won with this poem (inspired by this Neatorama post):
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
full of
baby orangutangs
(with apologies to
William Carlos Williams)
