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In an effort to ensure this site isn’t biased towards the left, I thought you may all appreciate these silly Hillary Clinton items. Although, to be fair, now the site seems sexist against women politicians, so I assume everyone will still be unhappy.
I bow to the food prep-fu of Anna The Red of Bento Factory, who made these excellent Where The Wild Things Are Bento Boxes.
I know Neatorama isn’t a political blog, (yet another thing I love about it), but I just couldn’t resist the chance to share this special Sarah Palin toilet paper. Regardless of your own political affiliation, you have to admit, it takes a special person to have a toilet paper printed with your face on it.
Maybe you never liked Palin, maybe you’re just upset at her for losing the election, but whatever your reason for wanting to buy this, it’s still going to run you a pretty hefty $9. So I guess you’d better really want it.
Also, if this floats your boat, you may enjoy the John McCain punching bag for the same reason.
D+Caf strips are strips of paper coated with antibodies that react to the presence of caffeine. Strangely, these appear to be made to help people avoid caffeinated drinks — a desire that I simply cannot fathom. But if you’re interested, for 50 cents a strip, you can avoid the pleasures of real coffee.
Link via Geekologie
HST inspired countless thousands of writers over the years. I wonder what sort of inspiration these posters could provide?
Commuters driving to work early today on the Palmetto Expressway in Florida encountered something weird: thousands of shoes on the road:
According to Florida Highway Patrol spokesman Lt. Pat Santangelo, thousands of pairs of used shoes mysteriously appeared at 7:42 a.m. on the southbound lanes of the Palmetto Expressway between the Bird Road and Miller Drive exits.
Employees of the Florida Department of Transportation’s Road Rangers service, which is meant to provide roadside assistance, managed to push all the shoes into one lane using large brooms.
A private contractor was hired to use a front-end loader to pick up the shoes by the dozen and load them into a large dump truck, Santangelo said.
”At this point, no one’s claimed the shoes,” Santangelo said.
Can you sleepwalk your way into crime? That’s what happened to Adam Ball, who sleepwalked into an underaged girl’s bed:
Just over a year ago, Alan Ball went to a New Year’s Eve house party, drank heavily and fell asleep on a sofa.
At some point during the night, he got up, went upstairs and climbed into bed with an under-age girl, whom he kissed on the lips.
After a year in which this lorry-driving father lost his job and was able to see his five-year-old daughter only during supervised visits, a judge at Preston Crown Court this week cleared him of sexual assault after the 35-year-old claimed he was sleepwalking at the time of the incident and had no memory of the events.
Marcus Dunk of The Daily Mail has the story: Link
(Photo: Bruce Adams)
Take that, sweet mystery of rock ‘n roll. Math has just solved the Holy Grail of Rock: the mysterious "A Hard Day’s Night" chord.
Dalhousie University math professor Jason Brown applied Fourier transform to solve the Beatles’ riddle: there was a mystery piano!
… the frequencies he found didn’t match the known instrumentation on the song. “George played a 12-string Rickenbacker, Lennon had his six string, Paul had his bass…none of them quite fit what I found,” he explains. “Then the solution hit me: it wasn’t just those instruments. There was a piano in there as well, and that accounted for the problematic frequencies.”
Photo: IanVisits [Flickr]
Inspired by a scene of abandoned London in the zombie horror flick 28 Days Later, Ian Mansfield of IanVisits blog decided to bike down to London early Christmas morning and snap a few photos. This one above is of Piccadilly Circus, in London’s West End, completely devoid of humans.
Link | More at Ian’s Flickr photoset
There are two remarkable things about this BBC news report from Edinburgh, Scotland. First, a man tried to break into a flat carrying a pitch fork. And second, he was chased away by a man dressed as the Norse god Thor.
"Thor" was actually Torvald Alexander, who was dressed-up for a New Year’s dress party. Link
If you’re curious, Telegraph has a photo of Torvald in his Thor costume.
Scientists have long pondered an event 12,900 years ago that caused the disappearance of the Clovis people of North America and the extinction of large mammals such as the mammoth, mastodon, saber-toothed cat, and the North American camel. One theory is that a comet broke into fragments and showered burning material over the continent. Now there’s some evidence -a layer of nanodiamonds have been found at a layer of sediment buried 12,900 years ago. The diamonds could have only been formed by a high-pressure high-temperature event.
These diamonds are measured in nanometers — mere billionths of meters — and one of them would not suffice for an engagement ring unless the recipient had an extremely small finger. Indeed, these diamonds are visible only with the aid of the most advanced microscopes.
The wide distribution of the nanodiamonds could be a sign that the comet broke into pieces in space and that the fragments burned up explosively over a broad area of North America. The heat and pressure from the event transformed carbon on the planet’s surface into the tiny diamonds, the scientists said.
“Imagine these fireballs exploding in the air. A Clovis hunter standing and looking at these things would have seen a canopy of fire as these things came in and exploded,” said Allen West, a geophysicist and one of the paper’s co-authors. “There would have been no sound. There would have been massive explosions. Brilliant light, brighter than the sun. There would have been radiant heat — it would have been capable, at the very least, of giving him serious burns and, at the maximum, of incinerating him.”
This theory would explain the climate change at the time, when the warming planet was plunged into another, shorter ice age. Skeptics cite lack of a crater or other surface evidence in refuting the theory. Link -via Digg
Psycho - Shower Scene (may not be suitable for younger audience) [YouTube
Link]
Motion picture decency standards in the 1960 didn't allow for things like nude women being stabbed to death in showers. Consequently, Hitchcock was forced to create the impression of nudity and violence without actually showing a breast, a buttock, or a knife puncturing skin. The result is a terrifying masterpiece of a montage. And even though it's probably the most analyzed (and parodied) 45 seconds in film history, we're willing to bet the following tidbits slipped past you.
Forget the bloody corpse in the bathtub: what really got "Psycho" censors worked up was the toilet. Just before stepping into that fateful shower, Marion tears up an incriminating note and flushes it. Hitchcock's close-up of the swirling commode water was the first ever allowed in an American film.
What looks like blood funneling down the drain is actually Bosco chocolate syrup. Hitchcock thought it looked more real in black-and-white than the fake stuff. Tastier, too.
The scene is composed of more than 90 shots seen in 70 different camera angles. It took Hitchcock and his crew an entire week to film it. To put that into perspective: The entire film took only six weeks.
The woman who played Janet Leigh's body double in about half of the shower-scene shots was named Myra Jones. In a sad case of life imitating art, Jones was stabbed to death in 1988. Her killer? A mentally disturbed handyman who targeted older women. He'd murdered at least one other before her - that police know about.
After the release of "Psycho," Hitchcock received an irate letter from a man whose daughter had refused to take baths after seeing the French thriller "Les Diaboliques" (in which a man is drowned in a tub). After seeing "Psycho," she refused to take showers as well. Hitchcock's reply? "Send her to the dry cleaners."
Although popular with most audiences, "Psycho" was reviled by ophthalmologists. Eye doctors everywhere pointed out that a corpse's pupil dilate, yet - in a stark close-up of her face after her supposedly deadly shower - Janet Leigh's eyes remain contracted. Ever the obsessed technician, Hitchcock listened, using dilating eyedrops for stiffs in all future films.
The article above was written by Ransom Riggs, as part of a longer article Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in the Nov-Dec 2006 issue of mental_floss, published here with permission. Visit mental_floss for more fun stuff everyday!
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Green Tie in Front of a Green Screen
It certainly made the weather report more interesting, perhaps all weathermen should wear green ties! |
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Backwards Beethoven Previously on Neatorama: Singing Backwards |
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Yoshimoto Cube Philip Brocoum explains: Link |
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Bob Munden: Fastest Gunman Ever
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Simpsons Duet: 2 Guys 1 Piano They're pretty awesome! Link |
For more the web's most interesting videos, check out: VideoSift.
It doesn’t get much stranger than this, folks: Here’s SHIKITO in Brown, which from what I can gather is a cute little turd-shaped vinyl mascot figure by Superdeux from STRANGEco.
The "Lauda Shikito Salvatorem" byline in the backside (where else?) of the cute lil’ turd means "All Praise Shikito the Savior!" Link
