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So you thought that cross-stitching was something only your sweet elderly friends and relatives did? That the themes were always friendly and heartwarming? The example on the left is just the beginning of a vast, disturbing and entertaining collection from Katie Kutthroat. Be warned: adult language is used and the images may not be the best to view at work.
A litter of four baby armadillos have been taken in by environmental activist Kamilo Lara after their mother was killed by poachers in Nicaragua. When the pictures in this article were taken, they were a mere four days old.
When they are old enough – in about two months’ time – Mr Lara will release them back into the wild.
The tiny creatures, who are being bottle-fed, are Common Armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus), an endangered species, and were found and rescued by Mr Lara of environmental organisation Alerta Mundial (World Alert).
Mr Lara eventually wants to create a rescue centre that will focus on restoring the natural habitat of the armadillos and other at-risk creatures.
Link -via Unique Daily
The Maryland Zoo recently unveiled a new prairie dog exhibit. The zoo’s prairie dogs had not been on display for four years, until a new $500,000 enclosure was designed and built. Despite a concrete base, aircraft wire, and slick walls, several prairie dogs got out of the habitat within a few minutes! None got away, as zookeepers responded with nets.
Zoo staff members say the animals cannot burrow their way out because the former Kodiak bear environment is essentially a large concrete swimming bowl. The soil depth at Prairie Dog Town ranges from 6 feet to 8 feet.
“The dirt must be deeper than 36 inches in order for the prairie dogs to make their burrows under the frost line,” Kranz said. “We took soil samples from the old exhibit so the soils could be matched exactly to what they were used to having.”
After foiling the escape attempt, zoo workers adjusted wire fencing and installed more slippery plastic on the walls.
Link -via Boing Boing
(image credit: Kim Hairston/Baltimore Sun)
George Foreman famously said, "Boxing is the sport to which all other sports aspire." Here’s a brief history of one of the most testing sports one could participate in.
All sports have the potential of becoming about much more than athletics, transforming into symbols of a culture’s and country’s mood, insecurities, conflicts, and hopes. But perhaps no sport lends itself to this kind of transposition more than boxing.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
These days, it’s a big deal when celebs like Jennifer Lopez and Katie Holmes get six and five-carat diamonds in their engagement rings (respectively). But compared to these 10 gems, those trinkets are nothing. Here are the stories behind some of the largest and rarest diamonds ever found.
1. The Eugénie Blue
This Titanic-esque vivid blue diamond is 30.82 carats. It’s called the Eugénie Blue because of an old legend that the sparkly stunner originally belonged to Empress Eugénie de Montijo, the wife of Napoleon III. There is no evidence to support this tale, though, so many people prefer to simply call it “The Blue Heart” instead. The gem was cut into its distinctive shape in 1909 or so (some accounts say it was 1910) and was bought by Cartier shortly thereafter. Since then it has bounced around from a wealthy Argentinian woman, Van Cleef and Arpels, a European family, Harry Winston, Marjorie Merriweather Post, and, finally, the Smithsonian, where The Blue Heart has resided since 1964. And although it may look like it inspired the fictional Heart of the Ocean from the 1997 Leonardo DiCaprio epic, it didn’t – the Heart of the Ocean was actually based on the infamous Hope Diamond.Photo from DiamondArticles.com.
2. The Centenary Diamond
On March 1, 1988, De Beers was having a big bash to celebrate their 100 years in business. Chairman Julian Oglivie capped off his speech with a little tidbit that stunned the crowd – De Beers’ Premier Mine had recently uncovered a diamond that was perfect in color and weighed 599 carats. It had been found nearly two years before; the company kept it quiet for the sole purpose of flaunting it at their 100th anniversary. It didn’t get to keep all 599 of those carats, though – it had to be cut down to remove some cracks around the edges and it took 154 days to cut 50 carats away. That was just the beginning of the stone’s overhaul – when all was said and done, the Centenary ended up weighing 273.85 carats with 247 facets. It was on loan to the Tower of London for a number of years (have any of you seen it?), but it’s rumored that the stone has since been sold. De Beers remains mum on the subject, saying they respect their clients’ anonymity.
Photo from FamousDiamonds.
3. The Cullinan Diamond
At an insane 3,106.75 carats (that’s about one and a third pounds!), the Cullinan is the largest diamond ever found. It didn’t stay that way, though – it was split into nine big chunks, 96 small ones and 9.5 carats of unpolished pieces. So where are those nine big chunks? They’re all part of the Crown Jewels or belong in the private collection of the royal family:
Photo from DiamondArticles.com.
4. The Golden Eye Diamond
As far as we know, this beauty is the world’s largest flawless Canary Yellow diamond. For quite a few years it remained in its original uncut 124.5-carat state. This particular type of diamond – a fancy intense yellow – accounts for less than 0.1 percent of all natural diamonds, so you can imagine how rare one this size is. The gem was cut to a still-huge 43.51 carats and somehow became entangled in a drug dealing and money laundering ring in Ohio, which was busted in 2006. As a result, the unusual jewel became property of the U.S. government. Just as of May 11, 2009, it was declared that the Golden Eye diamond belonged to the government, and in turn, the government announced that it would be auctioning the diamond off. So if you’re looking for a rare yellow diamond in the neighborhood of $15-$20 million, keep your eyes peeled!
Photo from the Israeli Diamond Industry blog.
5. The Koh-i-noor
6. Spirit of de Grisogono
The largest cut black diamond in the world is also the world’s fifth-largest diamond of any kind, weighing in at 312.24 carats. It was 587 carats before it was cut. The Spirit of de Grisogono is set in a ring that contains 702 white diamonds and is thought to have been sold to a private collector.
Photo from DiamondArticles.com.
7. The Earth Star
When this huge sparkler was found at a South African De Beers mine in 1967, it was a whopping 248.9 carats. As you can imagine, it caused quite the stir in the industry, and not just because of its massive size. It was actually the color everyone was talking about: The Earth Star was brown. The Baumgold Bros. jewelers bought the enormous jewel and cut it into a pear shape that ended up weighing 111.59 carats, which was the largest brown diamond in the world at the time (it’s still the third largest brown diamond… we’ll get to the largest in a minute). It was Baumgold that gave the diamond its name. For more than 15 years, the Earth Star traveled the world in various exhibitions, but it was bought by a private citizen in 1983 for the staggering sum of $900,000.
8. The Golden Jubilee
Sure, the Golden Jubilee is widely celebrated now – it’s the largest faceted diamond in the world. But when it was first discovered in 1985, people in the industry refered to the 755.5 uncut rock as “The Unnamed Brown” and “The Ugly Duckling.” Since it was kind of homely, De Beers decided to let jewel cutter Gabriel Tolkowsky try an experimental method of cutting using some untested tools. They figured if he messed it up, it was no great loss – the thing was going to be unmarketable anyway. Under Tolkowsky’s hands, though, the Ugly Duckling turned into an amazing yellow-brown diamond of epic proportions. It was presented to the King of Thailand for his Golden Jubilee in 1997, which is when it finally received an appropriate name. It’s still a part of the Crown Jewels of Thailand today.
Photo from DiamondArticles.com.
9. The Ocean Dream Diamond
The Ocean Dream may be small – a mere 5.51 carats – but it’s the only diamond in the world of its kind. No other diamond is known to naturally possess a blue-green hue like this one. The color is thought to have come from being exposed to natural radiation in Central Africa for thousands of years. It’s currently owned by the Cora Diamond Corporation, but you might have seen it at the Smithsonian as part of “The Splendor of Diamonds” exhibit a few years back.
Photo from the Smithsonian Institute.
10. The Hope Diamond
Photos from the Smithsonian Institute.
Rugby players aren’t afraid of anything, including playing naked! A match in the nude over the weekend in Dunedin, New Zealand went off without a hitch, except for chilly weather and a streaker!
The nude rugby international, which started as a celebration of New Zealand’s national nude day, was held yesterday as a warm-up – although temperatures were reportedly cold enough to prove embarrassing – to the forthcoming match between the All Blacks and France.
Needless to say, there were plenty of tackles flying about with only one interruption … when a fully-clothed streaker ran on to the pitch.
(image credit: Stephen Jaquiery/Otago Images/Otago Daily Times)
Pizza
Boss 3000 Pizza Slicer - $14.95
Father's Day is this coming Sunday, and if you're looking for a Father's Day gift, we've got a number of neat items on the Neatorama Online Store. Like this Pizza Boss 3000 above, a pizza slicer shaped to look like a circular saw. Just the thing for your pizza lovin' power tool usin' handyman dad! Link
A few more items from the store:
 Glow-in-the-Dark Zombie Play Set ($15.95) and other weird action figures |
 Warning: Retiree Knows Everything ($9.95) and other funny one liner T-Shirts |
 Bacon Wallet ($10.95) and other funny bacon stuff |
 Stock Market: The Ride ($9.95) and other shirts about the economy |
 Gin & Titonic Ice Tray ($6.45) and other fun ice trays |
 Occam's Razor ($11.95) and other funny science T-shirts |
Your purchase helps support the blog - thank you!
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USS Enterprise (NCC-1701), the starship in the original Star Trek TV series
To boldly go where no man has gone before, you'd need a really good starship - and to launch Star Trek, the pop culture phenomenon that entertained and inspired millions, you'd need a pretty darned good one! And that is exactly what the United Space Starship Enterprise delivered. Here are 8 Starship Enterprise facts every Trekker should know:
(L) The tenth HMS Enterprise, an Arctic survey sloop (1848), painting
by WH Browne from the National
Maritime Museum online collection;
(R) USS Enterprise at Valcour Island, Lake Champlain, New York (1776)
from Dictionary
of American Naval Fighting Ships
Before Star Trek, there have been many actual ships named Enterprise. The very first one of note was a French frigate L'Enterprise, which was captured by the British Royal Navy in 1705 and renamed as HMS Enterprise. It served as a British gun ship until it was wrecked just two years later. After this ship, there were 14 other HMS also named Enterprise (sometimes spelled Enterprize).
The United States have 8 battleships named Enterprise, including the first nuclear powered aircraft carrier in the world. The very first one (before the US became a country, so technically it was a ship of the Continental Navy) was an armed sloop on Lake Champlain in 1775 named the United States Ship (USS) Enterprise.
During the American Civil War, aeronaut and scientist Thaddeus S.C. Lowe built a balloon named Enterprise, to be used by the Union Army to perform aerial recon on Confederate troops.
(L) Enterprise, a gas inflated aerostat (1858); (M) Space Shuttle Enterprise; (R) Artist rendering of VSS Enterprise
And who can forget the Space Shuttle Enterprise? It was the very first Space Shuttle orbiter, built for NASA in 1976. The Shuttle was supposed to be named Constitution, but a write-in campaign successfully persuaded NASA to name it after the Star Trek starship. (Interestingly, the fictional Starship Enterprise was a Constitution-class vessel - coincidence? Hm....)
The last actual Enterprise hasn't been built yet but it already has a name: Virgin Space Ship (VSS) Enterprise and yes, it's an homage to Star Trek. It's a suborbital spaceplane being built by Sir Richard Branson of Virgin for the purposes of space tourism.
Ironically, when Sir Richard offered the first flight to William Shatner, the actor declined and revealed that he's actually afraid of space travel, "I'm interested in man's march into the unknown but to vomit in space is not my idea of a good time. Neither is a fiery crash with the vomit hovering over me." Shatner added that he's not entirely against the idea - he just needed some reassurance. "I do want to go up but I need guarantees I'll definitely come back." (Source)
Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who pitched the TV show as "Wagon Train to the Stars," didn't tell art director Matt Jefferies what Starship Enterprise should look like, instead he told the bewildered art director what he did not want to see. Starship Concept Art has reprint of a nifty article in Star Trek: The Magazine by Jefferies about the design process:
"In my approach to Star Trek I wanted to be as practical as possible," Jefferies says. "I could tell Gene was serious enough, but I really didn't know where to start. I knew the Enterprise was going to be on the cutting edge of the future, but essentially he gave me the job of finding a shape, and I didn't know what the shape looked like." Although Roddenberry knew a lot about his ship, he had never visualized it, and consequently made the situation more complicated since he couldn't give Jefferies a detailed sense of direction. According to Jefferies, Roddenberry was absolutely clear to avoid any resemblance to a 1960's rocket ship. "Gene described the 100-150 man crew, outer space, fantastic, unheard-of speed, and that we didn't have to worry about gravity. He had emphasized that there were to be no fins, no wings, no smoke trails, no flames, no rocket.
After hundreds of drawings, Jefferies came up with this:
Image via Starship
Concept Art
In his honor, the crawl spaces on all of the Starfleet starships on Star Trek are called Jefferies tubes.
That's
right - the iconic starship wasn't always named USS Enterprise ... in
the original draft, Roddenberry named it USS Yorktown after a World War
II aircraft carrier. The starship was commanded by Captain Robert April,
then Christopher Pike, before Roddenberry settled on James Tiberius Kirk.
By the way, William Shatner was the third choice for Kirk. The role was offered to Lloyd Bridges and Jack Lord, both of whom declined it.
How did the famous USS Enterprise get its registration number NCC-1701 is the stuff of legend. There are conflicting stories, including one where 1701 is a tribute to Roddenberry's childhood neighbor's house number or that Jefferies got it from the registration number of his airplane.
Here's Matt Jefferies' explanation when he was asked during a BBC Interview:
NC, by international agreement, stood for all United States commercial vehicles. Russia had wound up with four Cs, CC CC. It’d been pretty much a common opinion that any major effort in space would be two expensive for any one country, so I mixed the US and the Russian and came up with NCC.
The one seven zero part - I needed a number that would be instantly identifiable, and three, six, eight and nine are too easily confused. I don’t think anyone’ll confuse a one and a seven, or the zero. So the one seven stood for the seventeenth basic ship design in the Federation, and the zero one would have been serial number one, the first bird.
Originally, Roddenberry envisioned the USS Enterprise to land on various planets, but it turned out to be too expensive as it would require them to build expensive sets. The next idea was to use shuttles - but when filming began, the full-sized shooting model wasn't ready. So, they came up with the idea of "beaming down" the crew via a teleportation device and thus the transporter was born! (Source)
In 1994, TIME Magazine interviewed Star Trek technical expert Michael Okuda about the intricacies of the transporter:
"It should be possible if we decompile the pattern buffer."
Transporters can send people instantly from one location to another by converting their molecules into energy, then reassembling them. Every living being has a distinct pattern of molecules; the pattern buffer fixes the configuration by adjusting for the Doppler effect -- the apparent change in the frequency of the energy waves caused by motion.
"I'll verify the Heisenberg compensators."
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that you cannot know a subatomic particle's exact position and its exact direction and velocity at the same time. To transport people you have to know all those things, so the Heisenberg compensator was devised to overcome that problem. It's an attempt by the Trek writers to signal that they are at least aware of the issue. And how does the Heisenberg compensator work? "It works very well, thank you," says Okuda.
Jefferies
designed the bridge in the original USS Enterprise in the style of a Navy
battleship, with specialized workstations for its crew. When set designer
Richard James updated the bridge for Star Trek: The Next Generation
(restriction: no
purple!), Jefferies was asked about the new look. To which he replied:
Gene asked me how I liked the show, and I said that he had taken the bridge of my ship and turned it into the lobby of the Hilton. And I have just never watched any of them since. I’m lost.
Ironically, Star Trek and Hilton actually did come together to create a theme attraction. Star Trek: The Experience opened in 1998 at the Las Vegas Hilton. It closed in 2008 due to low attendance (though it is due to re-open in a different location in 2010).
Photo: Carolyn Russo / Smithsonian
If you visit the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian, definitely check out the actual model of the Starship Enterprise used in the filming of the original Star Trek TV show.
The hull and one nacelle of the original Star Trek Starship Enterprise
model as it was received by the National Air and Space Museum from Paramount
Studios on March 1, 1974. Image WEB11192-2009. Photo: Smithsonian
(with permission)
The model of the Enterprise was sent to the museum in crates, donated by Paramount Studios five years after the series ended.
Enterprise during its first Smithsonian restoration. SI Neg #74-3977.
Photo: Smithsonian
(with permission)
The Smithsonian performed extensive restoration to put the starship model back together, and for the first time ever, the photos of the restoration process are available to the public at the museum's blog.
The Museum Registrar Gregory K.H. Bryant has more on this behind the scenes look at the icon science fiction model: Link - Thanks Llori!
For his movie Star Trek, director J.J. Abrams decided that the USS Enterprise could use a face-lift and worked with artists at Industrial Light & Magic to update the starship - like Roddenberry, he gave a simple directive:
"He wanted a hot-rod type of vehicle, but they also wanted to preserve the Enterprise kind of look," model maker John Goodson said in a presentation at ILM's San Francisco headquarters earlier this month.
"J.J. Abrams kept saying, 'Make it a bigger movie. Make it a bigger shot,'" creative director David Nakabayashi added. "I think that's one thing you see in this film, at least: The stuff I've seen is just everything is big."
SCI FI Wire has the interview with model maker John Goodson and visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett about the new Enterprise: Link
The official website for JJ Abram's Star Trek movie has a nifty 360° panorama of the bridge of the new starship:
Following up on our 8 Starship Enterprise Facts Every Trekker Should Know post, here are some of the neatest Star Trek cakes ever made. Enjoy (Resistance is futile!)
Star Trek Cake by Ace of Cakes - via TrekMovie
(note the angry nerd comments)
CakeCentral user Spense uploaded these photos of the Captain
Kirk Cake made for the 2009
Star Trek Cake Contest (many, many more cool Star Trek cakes there)
Another one for the CakeCentral Star Trek Cake contest, this one is simple yet very chic: the Star Trek Uniform groom cake by CakeCentral user tenmeows.
USS Reliant Birthday
Cake complete with blue LED, by Victoria Sgro-Konopka of SunShine's
Cake Creations
Star
Trek Communicator Cake by Rick Reichart of Cakelava
This one is quite beautiful: Jonathan Lane's groom cake, over at USS
Angeles.
The four sides of the cakes include messages from the Klingons ("Where
do you keep the chocolate" - chocolate is an aphrodisiac for Klingons),
Ferengis ("You humans still owe us for this cake"), Romulans
("The Praetor says hello"), Cardassian ("Hey, why weren't
we invited to the wedding"), Bajoran ("May the Prophets guide
you both in your lives together") and Vulcans ("Live long and
prosper") - in their native languages.
The Star Trek Enterprise Cake by Edward and Antoni Frys of
European Cake Gallery
(ironically, in Texas) - via Cake
Wrecks
A Star
Trek Birthday Cake by Alix Lewer of Alixs
Cakes - a wonderful fondant work!
Star Trek
Cupcakes by Clares Cupcakes
Borg Wedding Cake
(look at the lil' Enterprise getting phasered!)
And last but not least, the Picard Cake to celebrate Captain Picard Day tomorrow (June 16):
Captain Picard Cake at POWET.TV
Remember Sonya the Slow Loris? While it’s illegal for people to own a slow loris in most countries, it’s not the case in Russia. And while some of you objected to someone adopting a slow loris as a pet, it seems to me that Sonya leads a pretty darned good life!
If you can’t get enough of the cuteness, check out this two-minute clip of a day in the life of Sonya the Slow Loris: Link
Sometimes Hallmark just doesn’t have the card that expressed exactly how you’re feeling (case in point, the Prizon Greeting cards).
When Julianna Holowka lost her job, her apartment and her studio all in the span of a week, she was devastated. With her last $13.25, she bought art supplies to draw her gloom away. She gave them to friends (who loved the humor) and started selling them as uh, shall we say, anti-Hallmark greeting cards, and thus "Mean Cards" was born.
If dark humor is your cup of tea, definitely check out her work and blog: Link – via The Zeray Gazette
