This kitty can’t stand other cats, even photos of them. His destructive nature is adorable though.
Link Via YesButNoButYes
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Whether you love PETA or hate them, you still may find the humor in their new campaign to change the word for “fish” to “sea kittens.” Maybe they took the word “catfish” a bit to far, but you have to wonder is a fish still a fish by any other name?
Personally, I find this to be further discrimination against ugly animals. If they con you into thinking fish are like adorable little kitties, will it really get you to stop eating more fish? As for me, go ahead and dish me up some delightful meowing sushi, I’m hungry.
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Boston.com has a very cool chart detailing how to mess with your mind’s perceptions, naturally. I think the most interesting one is definitely the first one. It tells you how to hallucinate with ping pong balls and a radio. If you’ll excuse me, I need to go cut some ping pong balls in half and listen to static for the next hour or so.
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Web Urbanist has a great new post up of some really unique felines. There’s the cat that predicts death, the seeing eye cat, the station master kitty and more. Most of them, if not all, have already been featured on Neatorama, but it’s great to see these kitties all in one place.
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I know some people find text-based games (“Interactive Fiction”) a little dull, but I love them. I was seriously addicted to a certain text-based game back in the day, so I have a soft spot for them. This one is pretty fun – you’re an, um, not-so-smart guy named Grunk who works on a farm herding pigs. Except you’ve lost one. Naturally, you need to go find it if you want to keep your job, but you don’t have much direction as to how to go about that. Imagine you were actually looking for a lost pig and think about what you would do first. You’d listen for pig noises, wouldn’t you?
There, I’ve given you your first hint. Oh, and in case you’ve never played these types of games before, just type simple commands: “E” for go east, “get shovel” for, well, get shovel… that sort of thing. Have fun!
Link via Jayisgames (with a walkthrough in case you get stuck)
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I don’t remember to watch Saturday Night Live very often, but I’m glad I remembered to last weekend because I was completely delighted by this Digital Short of Neil Patrick Harris and the cast jamming out to the Doogie Howser, M.D. theme song. However, I woke up with that song stuck in my head both yesterday morning and this morning. Consider yourself warned.
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Paul and Caragh Brooks spent a total of about $200 on their wedding, in front of family and friends at a Taco Bell restaurant in Normal, Illinois.
With several dozen invited guests in the room, the couple sat in a decorated booth with Ryan Green of Normal, a friend of theirs who became an ordained minister online. As Green, dressed in a T-shirt, officiated, they said the same vows.
“I promise to honor your life’s choices, comfort you in sorrow, celebrate in your joy and support your endeavors…,” they said. “Whatever the world brings, I take you as my partner.”
Business went on as usual in the front area of Taco Bell, and some customers in the Friday night supper rush stopped to watch.
Shortly before the ceremony, Kathy Brooks, the groom’s mother, said, “This is the way to go — there’s no stress.”
Link -via Gorilla Mask
(image credit: The Pantagraph/B MOSHER)
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Was it a case of drug smuggling or not? First, closed circuit cameras picked up the image of a tiny helicopter flying into the compound at Elmley Prison in Sheerness, Kent, England. The next night, guards saw the flying object.
However, staff could not find any trace of either the helicopter or the package which it appeared to be carrying underneath it when they searched the Category C jail.
‘Using a mini-helicopter to get contraband into jails is unprecedented. When officers spotted it they nearly fell off their chairs’, a prison source told the Sun.
‘It could have been drugs or a mobile phone in the package. It is possible it was a dummy run.’
Maybe the helicopter flew out as well. Link -via Unique Daily
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Watch this guy’s moustache dance! A short stop-motion film by Bo Henry, art director for the movie Coraline. Link
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Who hasn’t wanted their very own private island? And what if you could build it with some friends and free recycled objects. Sound too good to be true? This guy has built not one but two!
The original Spiral Island was (as its successor will be) built upon a floating collection used plastic bottles, all netted together to support a bamboo and plywood structure above. Located in Mexico, the original was 66 by 54 feet and was able to support full-sized mangroves to provide shade and privacy, yet also able to be moved from place to place by its creator as need with a simple motorized system.
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DarkRoastedBlend has what is indesputably the most comprehensive and impressive collection of dangerous roads around the world – and part six to the ongoing series is no exception.
Want to feel happy and safe? Then gaze on this picture for a while, because the rest of this page is only going to unnerve and distress you.
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Jonathan Janson paints today’s interwebby people in a 17th c. Dutch sort of way. Among his works are Girl in a Red Cap, Young Man with a Cell Phone, and my favorite, Young Girl Writing an Email.
Janson’s paintings have the luminous quality that made Vermeer famous, and his website, Essential Vermeer, indicates he’s spent a lot of time studying the master. He’s learned some good lessons.
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Only $495, the perfect gift for anyone! Looks like the real thing, everybody needs their water resonated!
The WATER RESONATOR is the original water balancing technology used by Tibetan and Buddhist monks for hundreds of years. Each one has been meticulously designed and handmade by Buddhist monks. Each consists of a gold-plated platform affixed to a gold-plated frame that is geometrically precise. The gold-plated platform has a neodymium activator magnet at its center on the underside. Mounted to the three precise triangles are the three primary resonator arrays which consist of three Siberian Blue, optically clear, laboratory grade quartz crystals.
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A hotel in Bolivia always has salt on its dining table – actually, its dining table is salt! Here’s the strange Salt Hotel of the Uyuni Flats:
The hotel was built in 1993 by a salt artisan who saw a mint in the number of tourists looking for places to stay while visiting the flats. The lodge has 15 bedrooms, a dining room, a living room and a bar.
The buildings’s roof, and bar are built of salt and even the floor is covered with salt granules. The walls are made of salt blocks stuck together with a cement-like substance made of salt and water. During rainy seasons, the walls are strengthened with new blocks, while the owners ask the guests to avoid licking the walls to prevent deterioration.
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Catherine Brahic of New Scientist blog wrote a pretty neat post about the weirdest animals species of 2008. Take, for instance, the "bone breaking horror frog":
“Amphibian horror” isn’t a movie genre, but on this evidence perhaps it should be. In May, biologists described a hairy frog that actively breaks its own bones to produce claws that puncture their way out of the frog’s toe pads, probably when it is threatened.
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Since 1985, Robitaille’s Candy Co. in Carpinteria, CA has been the exclusive purveyor of handmade chocolate mints for the presidential inauguration parties.
Every four years, Robitaille’s switches from its normal pastel color scheme and produces patriotic mints in red, white and blue known as the Inaugural Mints. If you miss your chance to taste one at the upcoming festivities, you can order a box online from the Robitaille’s website. They also make some wicked looking chocolate walnut fudge. It’s a family-run business with no machines; all the mints are handmade.
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It seems as if this famous ninja cat has got a stair climbing cousin.
Link [YouTube] – via Videon.se
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Apparently it’s called a frogfish, and while it looks sort of cute from afar, this thing is ugly… and fascinating. DarkRoastedBlend has a whole gallery of different types of frogfish, from the fluffy to the warty.
Link via DarkRoastedBlend
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This chart shows how heavy metal band names are related to each other and how you can place them in various categories – like deadly things and badass misspellings.
Link – via kottke.org
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Now there’s an online tool available that allows you to turn your photos into something that looks like tilt-shift, the technique that’s been used in these videos for example.
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The following is a guest blog by Kelsey Timmerman of Travelin Light | Blog
During my research for my book Where
am I Wearing: A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People that
Make Our Clothes
Arifa holding her daughter Sadia
Arifa
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Quote: “Their father was a crook, and the government doesn’t
take care of my children. It’s not like the USA or the UK.”
Arifa is a single mother. She lives on the sixth floor of a crumbling apartment building in Dhaka with her daughter Sadia, 4, and her son Abir, 11. She has another son, Arman, 18, who went to Saudi Arabia to work. He sends half of his money home to help his mom and siblings Arifa works at a nearby garment factory where she earns $24/month. A trip through the market is enough to show that Arifa is well respected by all and feared by merchants, who don’t dare bargain with her.
Nari (left) with roommates
Nari
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Quote: “The workers at beauty salons make less than garment
workers, but I will be an owner and make more.”
Nari works at a factory that makes blue jeans. She shares an 8’ X 12’ apartment with seven other girls. Four of the girls sleep on a bamboo bed and the other four sleep on the concrete floor. Nari irons jeans. It’s a job that she had to pay a $50 bribe – a month’s wage – to get. Fifty dollars is probably enough for one person in Cambodia to live on, but Nari, like many of the garment workers in Cambodia, supports her family of six. She is attending beauty school and hopes to open her own salon someday. She doesn’t like bowling.
Ai
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Quote: “I miss working and talking in the rice fields. At the
factory, we aren’t allowed to talk. The bosses want us to work as
quickly as possible.”
Ai shares an apartment with Nari and works at the same factory. She is a checker, looking for flaws. Eighty-five people have a hand in sewing together a single pair of blue jeans, and Ai makes sure that no one screwed up. Like many garment workers, she lives far from her home village and rarely visits; a six-day workweek won’t allow it. Ai doesn’t have a contract with the factory, which means she doesn’t have the same rights as other workers. She can be fired for absolutely no reason. She supports six people on her wage of $55/month. She owns a Tweety Bird shirt, but has no idea who Tweety Bird is.
Zhu Chun (left), Dewan (right)
Dewan and Zhu Chun
Guangzhou, China
Quote by Zhu Chun: “One thing is for sure. I don’t want
(my son) to come here to work in the factory. I just want him to study,
because people like us who don’t have knowledge have to work very
hard.”
Dewan and Zhu Chun moved from their village 600-miles away to Guangzhou to get a job at a factory making shoes. They haven’t seen their 13 year-old-son in three years. The original plan was to work a few years to pay off the home they built in their village, but Dewan’s mother got sick and died. Now they have a house and expensive medical bills to pay off. A few years have become a few more. The law limits their workweek to 44 hours, but they often work more than a hundred. Neither one of them has eaten cheese.
Debbie holding the author's favorite shorts
Debbie
Perry, New York
Quote: “They would have to push me out the door to get me to leave.”
Debbie’s job working for Champion was supposed to be a filler between college and whatever she decided to do next. Twenty-eight years later she is still working at the factory, which is no longer owned by Champion. In 2002 Champion moved the factory’s work and hundreds of jobs to Mexico. Lucky for Debbie the community of Perry pulled together and a new company, American Classic Outfitters, was born from the ashes of Champion. You’ve seen Debbie’s and ACO’s work. They make uniforms for 16 of the 30 NBA teams, all of the WNBA, 73 colleges, and 3 NFL teams.
Kelsey
Timmerman is the author of Where
am I Wearing
Ninety-seven percent of our clothes are made overseas. Yet globalization makes it difficult to know much about the origin of the products we buy—beyond the standard "Made in" label. So journalist and blogger Kelsey Timmerman decided to visit each of the countries and factories where his five favorite items of clothing were made and meet the workers. He knew the basics of globalized labor—the forces, processes, economics, and politics at work. But what was lost among all those facts and numbers was an understanding of the lives, personalities, hopes, and dreams of the people who made his clothes.
In Bangladesh, he went undercover as an under-wear buyer, witnessed the child labor industry in action, and spent the day with a single mother who was forced to send her eldest son to Saudi Arabia to help support her family. In Cambodia, he learned the difference between those who wear Levi's and those who make them. In China, he saw the costs of globalization and the dark side of the Chinese economic miracle.
Kelsey's blog is full of neat tidbits from the book. Don't miss the Underwear Wall of Fame and his informal survey of where people's T-shirts were made.
Oh, one more thing: his wife Annie just gave birth to the couple's first child, Harper Willow Timmerman, on January 6, 2009. She's very cute! (Congrats Kelsey!)
Are you an author and would like your books promoted on Neatorama? Let's talk about a possible guest blog post just like this one!
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This is a fantastic idea to build buzz in the blogosphere: the creators of Coraline, a movie inspired by the novella by Neil Gaiman, sent out 50 handmade boxes with items from movie to their favorite bloggers.
Super Punch tracked down 46 22 of the 50 boxes: Link | Coraline (the Book)
Previously on Neatorama: Video: Coraline movie footage | Explore the Coraline Site
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Robert Birming, the author of GeekAlerts, has decided to close down his gadget blog (because it simply takes too much time, a luxury he doesn’t have at the moment).
Robert, who is also an author on Neatorama and a rock star (he’s the drummer of the Swedish rock band Eskobar) will continue to post on smidigt.se. It’s a good thing that pictures are a big part of his blog, because it’s in Swedish (well, there’s an automatic translation to English here, but you know how that goes!)
Rob is now blogging on Neatorama as Smidigt, so say goodbye to GeekAlerts and hello (or "hej" in Swedish) to Smidigt.se!
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It takes real talent to make test pattern cool, but film student André F. Chocron did just that. Here’s a minute-long animation, titled Bars and Tones, set to Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s Perpetuum Mobile.
Link [embedded Vimeo clip]
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Guys have been able to erhm, order, a mail order bride from Russia and Asia for quite some time now. But what about the ladies? Fulfilling an obviously under-served niche is this fantastic website, Mail Order Husbands.
This one to the left is "Steven"
I’m definitely a classic romantic. I like a candlelight dinner, some quiet background music, and a couple hits of ether. I prefer a woman that has insurance and a car would be great as I need to make the occassional trip to Mexico to pick up "souvenirs".
I’m sure this is the foremost questions your mind:
Q: What does it cost the parties involved?
Art: It all depends on the demand. We have an excellent variety of quality bachelors, and the highest demand is for men around 30 years old with lots of hair. For example if you want to order a 52 year old bald man who has bad psioriasis, well then maybe $600.. but say we had a candidate that looked like a young Erik Estrada, well that kind of product doesn’t last long, we typically charge around $9,000.
Don’t forget to take the compatibility test! Link – via Rue the Day
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I learned something new today: the ugly concrete building style of the 50s to the 70s, exemplified by Le Corbusier, has a name. It is called Brutalist Architecture (the term brutalist originates from the French béton
brut or "raw concrete," but the name does fit the style
well):
The movement was initiated by French architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, known more popularly as Le Corbusier. The Brutalist approach was marked by an unashamed display of building functions and construction using poured concrete in a way that did not disguise the rough materials with which buildings are made. Brutalism [sic] completely rejected the classical norms of beautification and decoration for hard angles, rough surfaces, and exposed plumbing and machinery.
Link | Brutalist Architecture at Wikipedia | Brutalist Architecture Flickr pool
(Photo: Barbican Centre in London by GarySmith70 [Flickr])
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From our pal mental_floss, here’s a really fun post by Stacy about the origins of … the Muppets! Here are two of my favorites:
12. You have to love Statler and Waldorf. I couldn’t find much on their particular inspiration, but I can tell you that they’ve been around since the 1975 Muppet Show pilot. They are named after popular New York City hotels (the Statler Hotel was renamed the Hotel Pennsylvania in 1992.) Guess what Waldorf’s wife name is? Yep… Astoria (she looks startlingly like Statler.) FYI, Waldorf is the one with the mustache and white hair. Statler has the grey hair. Apparently Waldorf has had a pacemaker for more than 30 years.
Link – via i met a possum
Oh, I almost forgot: did you know that Statler and Waldorf now have their own YouTube account?
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The following is reprinted from The Best of The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
Ever heard of Norman Borlaug? Most people haven't, yet he's credited with a truly amazing accomplishment: saving more life than anybody else in history. THE POPULATION BOMB
Ehrlich's chilling book predicted that a rapidly growing world population would soon lead to massive worldwide food shortages, especially in third-world countries. World population was just over 3.5 billion at the time and was increasing at a faster rate than food production. "In the 1970s and 1980s," Ehrlich wrote, "hundreds of millions of people will starve to death." Most experts agreed with Ehrlich's dire predictions ... but they hadn't anticipated Dr. Norman Borlaug. (Photo: Center for Conservation Biology, Stanford University) FARM BOY Borlaug was born in 1914 and grew up on a farm in Saude, Iowa. In 1942 he graduated from the University of Minnesota with PhDs in plant pathology and genetics. In 1944 he was invited by the Rockefeller Foundation, a global charitable organization, and the Mexican government to head a project aimed at improving wheat production in Mexico. His assignment: to develop a more productive strain of wheat that was also resistant to stem rust, a fungal disease that was becoming a major problem in Latin America. Borlaug chose two locations with an 8,500-foot altitude difference for his testing. He grew and crossbred thousands of different strains of wheat, and worked with the latest fertilizers, looking for plants that could grow in both environments. Reason: they had to be able to grow anywhere. Over the next several years Borlaug was able to develop hardy, highly productive strains, but he found that the tall wheats he was using would not support the weight of the added grain. So he crossed the tall wheats with dwarf varieties that were not only shorter but had thicker, stronger stems. And that was his breakthrough: a semi-dwarf, disease-resistant, high-output wheat. He worked incessantly to get the seeds distributed to small farmers throughout Mexico, and by 1963 Borlaug's wheat varieties made up 95 percent of the nation's total production, with a crop yield that was more than six times greater than when he'd arrived. Not only could Mexico stop importing wheat, they were now an exporter - a huge boost to any nation's nutritional and economic health, but especially to an underdeveloped one. And now Borlaug wanted to take his high-yield farming global. He wanted, he said, to secure "a temporary success in man's war against hunger and deprivation." ANOTHER VICTORY In 1963 the Rockefeller Foundation sent Borlaug to Pakistan and India, two nations with severe hunger and malnutrition problems. Borlaug's help was resisted at first; there was cultural opposition to new farming methods. But when acute famine struck in 1965 (1.5 million people would die by 1967), the barriers came down. And the results were incredible: by 1968 Pakistan, which just a few years earlier relied on massive grain imports, was entirely self-sufficient. By 1970 India's production had doubled ad it too was getting close to self-sufficiency. At four o'clock in the morning one day in 1970, Margaret Borlaug got a phone call. She raced out to the fields and informed her husband, already hard at work, that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. "No, I haven't," he said. He thought it was a hoax. But he had indeed won it for having saved the lives of millions - perhaps hundreds of millions - of people in India and Pakistan and for the message it had sent to the world. "He has given us a well-founded hope," the Nobel committee said, "an alternative of peace and of life - the green revolution." NOTHING ESCAPES CONTROVERSY Borlaug had also been working on other grains, such as corn and rye, and in the 1980s began developing more productive strains of rice to increase production in China and Southeast Asia. He was setting up similar programs in Africa, but ran into a major hurdle: environmentalists opposed his methods. Among their charges: spreading the same few varieties of grains all over the planet is harming biodiversity; huge farms are benefiting from his high techniques and killing off the small farmer; inorganic fertilizers used in the Borlaug method are harmful to the environment; and genetically engineered food is unnatural and potentially dangerous. "Some of the environmental lobbyist are the salt of the earth," Borlaug said," but many of them are elitists. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things." He admitted that he would rather his work benefited small farmers, but added, "Wheat isn't political. It doesn't know that it's supposed to be producing more for poor farmers than for rich farmers." Supporters argue that Borlaug's high-yield method has actually been a boon for the environment, saving hundreds of millions of acres of wild land from being turned into farms. The controversy continues, but none of it has stopped Borlaug from his mission. KEEP ON PLANTING
As of 2005 - at the age of 91 - Norman Borlaug is still at it. He continues to work with Mexico's International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, still heads the SAA, runs research programs, teaches young scientists, gives lectures, and of course, still works in the field. Over his 50-plus-year career he has been credited with saving as many as a billion people from starvation, and has received numerous international awards. In May 2004, he was presented with another: at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in Borlaug's college town of Minneapolis, he was shown their new "Window of Peace." The Minneapolis Star Tribune described the event: "He gazed upward to see the sun shining through a 30-foot-tall stained glass window. There - along with depictions of Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, and other modern-day peacemakers - was a life-size likeness of Borlaug, holding a fistful of wheat." |
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The article above is reprinted with permission from The Best of the Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. The Bathroom Reader Institute handpicked the most eye-opening, rib-tickling, and mind-boggling articles from everything they have written over the last ten years and carefully crammed them into 576 pages of the book. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute.
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Norman Borlaug was featured on Penn and Teller's BS on genetically modified food: |
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Got
a neat story? Share it with the world by writing your very own Neatorama
blog post with the Upcoming
Queue. Who knows, you might just win something ... 
In
his 1968 best seller, 
, author and biologist
wrote that "the battle to feed all of humanity is over."
In
1984, with the help of Japanese philanthropist Ryoichi Sasakawa, Borlaug
set up the Sasakawa Africa Association (SAA), training more than a million
farmers throughout Africa. Result: using Borlaug seed and methods, cereal
grain yields have increased from two- to four-fold.
