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Do you have a special connection with bacon? Can you get it to pose for you in sexy positions? The Official Bacon Contest at Mr. Baconpants might be your chance to win all kinds of glorious bacon prizes. Categories include:
Most Creative: This is a photo that shows a creative way to use bacon. Think bacon AK-47 or Waken Bacon. Funniest: This is a photo that incorporates bacon that will make us laugh. Think Lol Cats or Fail photos. Sexiest: This is a photo of bacon that will make us drool for two reasons. Think bacon babes.
To enter, send your photo to jmosely@mrbaconpants.com and use “photo contest” as the subject line.
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If you think those professionally created dog costumes are mean to force pets to wear, then you really ought to see the options people turn to when they don’t just buy the pre-made costumes. I guess this is why Star Trek fans shouldn’t get drunk.
Eggshells are a wonder of nature. They are the perfect packaging for bird babies and the food they need. Eggshells are full of calcium. And they have a great many uses after you take the yolk and the white out. I put all my eggshells in the compost as a matter of habit. I didn’t know they were also good for repelling bugs and deer, and I certainly have never thought of putting them in the coffee! Find twelve ways to use eggshells at The Daily Green. Link -via Digg
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Research into the subject of why humans cry (and animals don’t) has produced several theories. Some say it’s to shed harmful chemicals from the body. Others theorize that crying is a holdover from the way infants communicate needs. And some have said that the process just makes us feel better. Now we have a new theory.
“Crying is a highly evolved behavior,” said researcher Oren Hasson, an evolutionary biologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel. “My analysis suggests that by blurring vision, tears lower defenses and reliably function as signals of submission, a cry for help, and even in a mutual display of attachment and as a group display of cohesion.”
Crying as a social behavior? What do you think? Link -via Digg
After 26 years of teaching children (literally my entire life), Reading Rainbow is being cancelled. It’s not for a lack of interest, but a lack of funding for the show. NPR says the show also was victim of a “shift in the philosophy of educational television programming,” that started under Bush.
I don’t know how many of you grew up in the 80′s, but Reading Rainbow will be sorely missed by those of us who did have the show to thank for our early interest in reading.
InventorSpot has posted their yearly list of top pet costumes for Halloween. As always, the selection fails to disappoint, like the little Football Star Costume shown. The whole list is great.
Wired has a list of some of the strangest mission patches that NASA has produced. The patch above was for the creation of the Multi-Purpose Logistics Modules of the International Space Station. NASA selected a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle to represent the project because three of the four modules share names with those characters. The modules were built by the Italian Space Agency, so they are named after the Italian Renaissance artists, rather than the turtles.
A month ago, I linked to a news story about plans for a full-sized LEGO house in the UK. James May, the TV host responsible, has construction of the three-million brick project well underway. And yes, it has a functioning bathroom. You can view twenty photos of the construction process at the link.
Link via Geekologie
Linsey Pollak, Brendan Hook, and Ric Halstead comprise The Cycologists, an Australian band that bases its preformances on a bicycle theme. They’ve fitted their instruments into their bicycles, as the video above demonstrates when the musicians use their seats as clarinets. Other instruments include tuned bicycle bells, flutes that work as handlebars, and panpipes powered by tire pumps. The Cycologists’ stage shows are quite complex and you can see videos of them at the link.
Brooklyn-based artist Ranjit Bhatnagar works with sound installations and homemade instruments. He created this music box guided by a Möbius strip. It’d be perfect for playing “The Song That Never Ends“! Bhatnagar made the music box as part of a project to create a musical instrument every day for a month.
Artist’s Website via Popular Science
Photographer Brian Ulrich has spent the last few year examining “the peculiarities and complexities of the consumer-dominated culture in which we live.” His latest project captures the beauty and sadness of empty stores and failed businesses.
Most recently a new project began in 2008 entitled Dark Stores, Ghost Boxes and Dead Malls. In the recent economic downturn some of the very stores I photographed at the beginning of the project are now emptied and laid barren in the hulking empty architecture of the big box, mall or store.
Link -via Metafilter
James Hayes-Bohanan, Ph.D. is a professor of geography AND a scholar with the Vanderbilt University Institute for Coffee Studies. His website Geography of Coffee is full of information about coffee around the world, including the places coffee is produced, shipped, and sold. You’ll also find out about fair trade and the politics of the coffee business. Of course, there are also coffee reviews and instructions for making the perfect cup. Link -via the Presurfer
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This is a slice of cartoonist Jim Unwin’s diagram of mythical creatures. Unwin, based out of South London, is also noted around the Internet for his “virtual collection” of chairs from The Incredibles and as the designer of the video game Little Big Planet. Full sized image at the link.
Link via Popped Culture
Looks like America is not the only country that needs to be weary of fast food. While not many outside the US can see the appeal of
a Big Mac, people in Morocco just love the McArabia.
This new sneaky tactic of adapting global fast food chains to the local palette is happening all over the
world from squid topped Dominoes pizza in Taiwan to KFC’s vegetarian Chana Snacker, a chickpea burger topped with Thousand Island sauce, in India.
Watch out global obesity! I see a plot for a Super Size Me sequel.
Walk into a McDonald’s in Morocco and you’ll find a sandwich you can’t get anywhere else in the world: a cumin-spiced flatbread creation called the McArabia Tagine.
“Honestly it tastes Moroccan,” said Noor El Ghoumari, 34, a man who had just paid 53 dirhams, or about $6.60, for a meal with one of the ground beef sandwiches in Rabat on a recent afternoon. “This is a local McDonald’s and obviously they have to adapt.”
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by CherryBomb.
Fans of the book will love these delicious cupcakes. They’d be great for any kids party, but that doesn’t mean adults won’t enjoy them too.
These are texas-sized snickerdoodle cupcakes. For frosting and decorations I used chocolate ganache (Moishe), canned vanilla frosting (Max), sprinkles, store-bought gumpaste eyes, and fondant colored tinted by hand.
Psychologists Paul W. Andrews and J. Anderson Thompson, Jr. argue that depression may be an evolutionary advantage developed early in human history. What could be good about depression?
Depressed people often think intensely about their problems. These thoughts are called ruminations; they are persistent and depressed people have difficulty thinking about anything else. Numerous studies have also shown that this thinking style is often highly analytical. They dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.
This analytical style of thought, of course, can be very productive. Each component is not as difficult, so the problem becomes more tractable. Indeed, when you are faced with a difficult problem, such as a math problem, feeling depressed is often a useful response that may help you analyze and solve it. For instance, in some of our research, we have found evidence that people who get more depressed while they are working on complex problems in an intelligence test tend to score higher on the test.
Link via Instapundit
Photo credit: Guillermo Perales Gonzalez
YouTube user bengraphics created this montage of film clips from the past 100 years, demonstrating the evolution of cinematic special effects. It was originally just intended for a class lecture, but has gone viral. Featured films include The Enchanted Drawing (1900) Thief of Baghdad (1940) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). Run time: 5 minutes.
Via Geekologie
Dutch artist Peter Jansen creates polyamide and bronze sculptures that look like a split second in time. They don’t actually move, but they look like they are in motion. Perhaps appropriately, he started out as a physics student rather than as an artist.
Kazakhstan has commissioned BIG Architects to build a library and cultural center in the city of Astana. The design that the firm submitted in response is shaped like a Möbius strip — a structure that has only one side:
The building itself is a complicated juxtaposition of different ideas and concepts. It forms a spiraling circle around a strong vertical core that allows visitors to the library to move between floors. The museum’s curves form a möbius strip, so the interior becomes the exterior and back again; likewise the walls become the roof and the roof transforms back into the walls. The interior corridors are naturally daylit through geometric openings in the exterior shell, creating beautifully lit spaces perfect for reading.
To minimize cooling loads on the library, BIG Architects employed some advanced computer modeling to calculate the thermal exposure on the building envelope. Because of the warping and twisting of the exterior, some parts of the building receive more light than others. By taking that information, BIG was able to create a geometric pattern or “ecological ornament” to regulate the solar impact.
Photo gallery at the link.
You may not be able to travel to Kazakhstan to view the building, but you can experience the same one-sided sensation with our Möbius strip t-shirt, now on sale at the Neatorama Shop.
MacGyver Chef is a new series at the gadget blog Gizmodo about attempts to cook meals without conventional cooking implements. Author Dan Nosowitz has previously poached chicken and couscous in a coffee maker. In his most recent post, he experimented with steaming salmon and cilanto sauce in a dishwasher. You can view read a step-by-step guide and view photos of the process at the link.
The cheery-looking machine has long, multi-jointed arms embedded with an array of tactile sensors that help it optimize the lifting and carrying of humans. For safety purposes, RIBA’s entire body is covered in a soft skin molded from an advanced lightweight urethane foam developed by TRI. The soft skin is designed to ensure the comfort of patients while they are being carried. In addition, the arm joints yield slightly under pressure — much like human arms do — further increasing the level of comfort and safety.
A new study shows that elderly people who are overweight or obese have significantly less brain tissue than those of normal weight. The difference was 4% for overweight people and 8% for the obese in a study of 94 people in their 70s. The volunteers were followed for five years, and anyone who showed cognitive impairment was excluded from the final sample.
“The brains of obese people looked 16 years older than their healthy counterparts while [those of] overweight people looked 8 years older,” said UCLA neuroscientist Paul Thompson, senior author of a study published online in Human Brain Mapping.
Much of the lost tissue was in the frontal and temporal lobe regions of the brain, the seat of decision-making and memory, among other things.
It is not clear whether weight gain caused a reduction in brain tissue, or if a smaller brain contributes to weight gain, or there are other factors contributing to both. Link -via Lifehacker
(image credit: Flickr user erat)
Mark Wattson of Swindon, England was diagnosed with a ruptured appendix in August. He thought the doctors must have made a mistake, since his appendix had been removed in July! Nevertheless, his appendix was removed in a second surgery.
“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” Mr Wattson said. “I told these people I had my appendix out just four weeks earlier but there it was on the screen for all to see.
“I thought: ‘What the hell did they slice me open for in the first place’?”
And that wasn’t the end of his troubles.
The blunder has left Mr Wattson jobless, as bosses at the shop where he worked did not believe his story and sacked him.
Wattson is considering taking legal action against the hospital. Link -via Arbroath
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Golden Retriever Takes on White Tiger Cubs
Isabella, a golden retriever and recently a first time mom, adopted these three white tiger cubs after they were rejected by their mother at the Safari Zoological Park in Caney, Ks. |
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Interview with Cyberstalking Suspect goes Pretty Well
All hell breaks loose when a local reporter enters a costume shop to interview its eccentric owner who is up on cyberstalking charges. I think she got the better of the exchange … |
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Mitchell and Webb: Casino Carnivale
Another hilarious short clip this week from the fantastic British skit comedy show, Mitchell and Webb. |
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900RR Go Kart
These guys put the powerful engine of a Honda CBR 900RR motorcycle into a go-cart, to make a rip-roaring real-live Mario Kart. The drifting and acceleration are quite impressive. |
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Autotune the Cats!
Some of the greatest cat meowing clips, melded together into an auto-tuned masterpiece of music – enjoy! |
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