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For his Eagle Scout badge, Kevin Anderson, a 17-year-old junioar at Southern Lehigh High School, spent 250 hours over several weeks clearing a path at his local park so people could enjoy walking and biking along the river. What did he get for this good deed?
Little did the do-gooder know that his altruistic act would put him in the cross hairs of the city’s largest municipal union.
Nick Balzano, president of the local Service Employees International Union, told Allentown City Council Tuesday that the union is considering filing a grievance against the city for allowing Anderson to clear a 1,000-foot walking and biking path at Kimmets Lock Park.
"We’ll be looking into the Cub Scout or Boy Scout who did the trails," Balzano told the council.
Balzano said Saturday he isn’t targeting Boy Scouts. But given the city’s decision in July to lay off 39 SEIU members, Balzano said "there’s to be no volunteers." No one except union members may pick up a hoe or shovel, plant a flower or clear a walking path.
"We would hope that the well-intentioned efforts of an Eagle Scout candidate would not be challenged by the union," said Mayor Ed Pawlowski in an e-mail Friday. "This young man is performing a great service to the community. His efforts should be recognized as such."
Link – via Michelle Malkin
TMZ has side-by-side photos of celebrities and the Sesame Street Muppets that they resemble. Queen Elizabeth II, Nick Nolte, Dustin Diamond, and Zach Braff are among the mocked.
Transit officials have been touting the benefits of public transit for years and apparently these goats got the message. But when they tried to board the C-Tran bus in Vancouver (update 11/18/08 – that’s Vancouver, Washington, by the way, as pointed out in the comment – Thanks John Milligan!), they were turned away, as you can see in this surveillance video.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – Thanks Tiffany!
Let’s have a little fun: punniest comment will win a free Funny T-Shirt from the Neatorama Shop. One entry per comment, please. You can enter as many as you’d like. Good luck!
Although this wood sculpture looks basic enough, it’s actually quite remarkable. You see, artist Ron van der Ende creates works like this out of found wood – and makes bas relief sculptures. So while you’re correct in deducing the width and height, the depth is only a few centimeters.
Inspired by working in his father’s woodshop as a young man, Ron went to art school where he studied painting. Dissatisfied and longing for working with wood again, he opted for sculpting, and soon found a knack for off-beat bas relief.
I collect old doors and stuff. Old painted wood that I find in the street. I take it apart and skin it to obtain a 3mm thick veneer with the old paint layers still intact. I construct bas-reliefs that I cover with these veneers much like a constructed mosaic. I do not paint them!
This one took me a while just to figure out what I was looking at!
Link to Interview on diskursdisko. Ron’s website. via The Donut Project.
I guarantee you have never seen a “tear-down” house like this one. A Minnesota company is disassembling an immense home in the prestigious Lake Minnetonka area west of Minneapolis.
This massive structure is filled with room after room of salvageable building materials in pristine condition, ranging from sprawling kitchens and custom cabinetry to a unique sauna and indoor pool slide.
At the company’s link are several pages of photos and a walk-through video.
The company saves money by inviting the public to go directly to the home to harvest materials; what remains is transported to their warehouse and store for resale.
Link.
“Own goals” (kicking a ball into one’s own net) are uncommon in soccer (“football”) and ice hockey. Because this one occurs in a youth sporting event, it is just indescribably cute.
Via BuzzFeed.
Interred in a cemetery? Stored in a traditional urn? How old-fashioned! From being fired into space to crushed into diamonds, there’s few limits to what you can do with your cremated remains. If you’re going to go out, might as well go out in style.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by nuiloa.
X-Flex wallpaper is designed to hold together even under extreme stresses, such as a bomb detonation. It’s hoped that this invention by Berry Plastics will make buildings more secure from attack in dangerous places like Iraq and Afghanistan:
[...]this lifesaving adhesive is designed for use anyplace that’s prone to blasts and other lethal forces, like in war or natural-disaster zones, chemical plants or airports. To keep a shelter’s walls from collapsing in an explosion and to contain all the flying debris, you simply peel off the wallpaper’s sticky backing, apply the rollable sheets to the inside of brick or cinder-block walls, and reinforce it with fasteners at the edges. Covering an entire room can take less than an hour.
X-Flex bonds so tightly, it helps walls keep their shape after blast waves. Two layers are strong enough to stop a blunt object, like a flying 2×4, from knocking down drywall. During our tests, just a single layer kept a wrecking ball from smashing through a brick wall. The wallpaper’s strength and ductility is derived from a layer of Kevlar-like material sandwiched by sheets of elastic polymer wrap.
The video above is a demonstration by Popular Science of the technology’s effectiveness.
Children’s author and photographer Walter Wick decided to balance 117 toys of various sizes and shapes on a LEGO block to create the shot that he was looking for. And then, with some difficulty, he knocked it down.
I created this photograph for the Kids Gallery of the Connecticut Science Center in Hartford. It shows 117 objects balancing on a single Lego block. No adhesives, glue or hidden supports were used. The stability of this improbable pile of objects is helped by positioning the center of gravity of each horizontal section directly above the Lego block and by lowering the center of gravity of the entire structure as much as possible through the use of hanging objects.
The process involved about a week of trial and error, with many, many crashes along the way. After settling on a design for the lower half of the structure, I worked on the horizontal segments separately, adding them to the stack with temporary supports in place. This allowed me to swap out different objects and shift them around until all the parts were in balance. I then removed the supports and took this photograph. The stack remained up until I decided to knock it down (captured on video!)
Resulting Photograph via Gizmodo | Artist’s Website
Goons is a Chicago-based street artist who, with the help of director Ace Norton, and sponsor Orbit, created this stop-motion one minute clip. You can see that Goons has a theme to his work at his website. (via Bifurcated Rivets)
That reminds me, I need to clean my house. Music: “Keep it Clean” by Camera Obscura.
A group of explorers from New Zealand are traveling to a campsite of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1909 Antarctic expedition in the hopes of finding whiskey left behind beneath the floorboards of a shelter:
Among the supplies British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton abandoned on his unsuccessful 1909 expedition to the pole were two crates of the now extinct rare old brand of McKinlay and Co whisky.
Now Whyte & Mackay, the drinks giant that owns McKinlay and Co, has asked for a sample of the drink for a series of experiments, the Telegraph newspaper reported in London.
The New Zealanders will use special drills to free the trapped crates and rescue a bottle from the crates, discarded near the Cape Royds hut used by the Nimrod expedition, or at least draw off a sample using a syringe.
The crates were discovered in January 2006, but the bottle couldn’t be removed as they were too deeply embedded.
Link via Discover | Image: NASA
| The following is an article from Uncle John's Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader Tired of Top 10 lists? Well, here's the cure: Bottom 10 Records, from the good folks at Bathroom Reader Institute. Behold, the official BRI countdown - and they do mean down. These don't sink any lower, folks ... These records are so bad, they're good! | |
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10. EILERT PILARM: Greatest Hits Anyone who's expecting this Swedish impersonator to resemble the King will be very disappointed. Wearing white leather and rhinestones, he comes across like somebody's Uncle Olaf after a drunken weekend in Vegas. His singing sounds as if he hit puberty around age 60. Our favorite: "Yailhouse Rock." Wanna hear it? Visit Eilert Pilarm's MySpace webpage. |
9. MAE WEST: Way Out West
Photo: bradleyloos [Flickr]
Is that an electric guitar in your pocket or are you just glad to see
me? On this 1969 album, the then-70-year-old former sex symbol tries to
prove she's still relevant by talking her way through rock classics like
"Day Tripper" and "Twist and Shout."
Wanna hear it? Here's the YouTube
clip |
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8. PADDY ROBERTS: Songs for Gay Dogs Roberts sing about the sex life of fish in "Virgin Sturgeon" and serves up a steaming pile of potty humor with "Don't Use the WC," a song about dirty bathrooms. It's not just in bad taste - it's bad. By the way, this LP has nothing to do with Spot's alternative lifestyle. So what does the title mean? Well, most of the songs are drinking songs - maybe he was under the influence when he picked it. Wanna hear it? Amazon has the sampler. |
| 7. SAMMY PETRILLO: My Son, the Phone Caller Media Funhouse interviews Sammy Petrillo [YouTube Clip], with a sample at the end Petrillo was an awful Jerry Lewis impersonator who starred in a few el cheapo flicks, including the memorable Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. This album features him doing moronic phone pranks like calling hospitals and saying that he's got a pregnant pet gorilla in labor, then asking how to deliver the baby. | |
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6. THE NATIONAL GALLERY: Performing Musical Interpretations of the Paintings of Paul Klee Four beatniks from Cleveland introduce us to the German Expressionist painter by performing "rock-art" song versions of his paintings. Complete with acid-drenched lyrics like "Boys with toys, alone in the attic / Choking his hobby horse, thinking of his mother." Want to hear it? Check it out at Frank's Vinyl Museum |
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5. HELEN GURLEY BROWN: Lessons in Love The editor of Cosmopolitan magazine gives advice to swinging singles on the finer points of adultery. It may have been edgy back in 1963, but today it sounds like Martha Stewart reading Affairs for Dummies. Side 1 (for men) covers topics like "How to get a girl to the brink and ... keep her there when you're not going to marry her." |
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4. LITTLE MARCY: Little Marcy Visits Smokey the Bear A creepy singing ventriloquist's dummy visits Smokey and his animal pals in the woods. Part of an evangelical Christian children's act, Little Marcy had an eerie grin and a high-pitched singing voice that were probably responsible for frightening thousands of kids into becoming atheists. Wanna find out more? Visit Little Marcy's MySpace page (Don't miss the Devil Devil Go Away) |
| 3. MR. METHANE: Mr. Methane.com [YouTube Clip] The masked Mr. Methane is a "fartiste" in the style of Frenchman Le Petomaine. He breaks new wind by pooting his way through classics like "The Blue Danube," Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and "Greensleeves," proving conclusively that he doesn't have to be silent to be deadly. Wanna hear more? Check out the official Mr. Methane website | |
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2. LUCIA PAMELA: Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela A former Miss St. Louis, Pamela claims that she and her band flew to the moon in her own rocket ship to record this concept album about her trip to "Moontown." Sounding like an off-key Ethel Merman, she clucks like a chicken when she forgets the words. Wanna hear it? Check it out at Lala |
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1. MUHAMMAD ALI: The Adventures of Ali and His Gang vs. Tooth Decay Recorded in 1976. Ali assembled an all-star bicentennial cast, including Frank Sinatra, Richie Havens, and Howard Cosell, for this "Fight of the Century" against Mr. Tooth Decay and his evil sidekick, Sugar Cuba. Old Blue Eyes sounds like he's working on his fifth martini as a shopkeeper who offers Ali's gang of hyperactive kids free ice cream. The Champ sends Frankie packing back to Vegas to "tell Sammy, and all them cats like old Dino" about the horrors of periodontal disease. Wanna hear it? Check it out at Frank's Vinyl Museum |
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The article above is reprinted with permission
from Uncle John's Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular
books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure
yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom
Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
 |
Well, if he didn’t have hedge clippers, then he had no alternative. Two men (who prefer that their names be kept confidential) in Cambridge, New Zealand hauled a lawnmower into the sky with a crane in order to trim a hedge:
The man had expected a real hedge trimmer to turn up on Sunday to mow the hedge, but when he didn’t his mate arrived with his crane and a ride-on mower.
The next thing he knew he was being hoisted up on top of the two-metre high hedge.
“We were supposed to get all dressed up in our Mooloo gear and show people that this is how the Waikato boys mow their hedges.”
The unusual sight bemused passing motorists. One passer-by, Bart Dinger, said it was a classic case of Kiwi ingenuity.
“A kiwi classic – jandals and all,” he said.
One of the pair is being treated for a broken hand that resulted from the stunt.
Link via Geekologie | Image: Bart Dinger
People who suffer from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease have bronchial cilia in their lungs that produce too much mucous. Acoustics engineer Sandy Hawkins has developed a flute that produces a sound that dislodges excess mucous in the lungs. In Popular Science, Corey Binns writes:
Hawkins began building an electronic sound machine that would produce waves of 16 hertz—the same frequency at which the cilia move—to help break up the mucus. Generating a hum of such a low frequency normally requires van-size subwoofers, and so he spent 15 years honing and shrinking the speakers. Then one day as he was testing a mouthpiece filter for his machine, he noticed that blowing through it sent a slight vibration into his chest. Within five seconds, he sketched out the Lung Flute to amplify the effect. Blowing into the tube flaps a reed-thin sheet of plastic, which vibrates the chest and shakes the mucus until it’s thin and mobile enough for the cilia to usher it up your throat. “I felt so stupid because the answer was so simple,” Hawkins says.
Today, doctors in Japan use the $40 Lung Flute as a tool to collect sputum from patients suspected of carrying tuberculosis, and in Europe and Canada it’s used to help test phlegm for lung cancer. Clinical trials in the U.S. have shown that it is at least as effective as current COPD treatments. At press time, Hawkins expected the device to receive FDA approval any day, and says the reusable device could also provide home relief for patients with cystic fibrosis, influenza and asthma.
Link | Video of the flute in use | Image: Popular Science
31 years ago today, on Nov 17, 1978, CBS broadcast what has become one of the most maligned TV programs of all time, The Star Wars Holiday Special. It was so bad Lucas disowned it and famously said he’d want to smash every bootleg copy with a sledgehammer. This article takes a look back at the Holiday Special and the special brand of retarded it brought into Star Wars fans’ lives.
Is the Special really that bad? Yes it is. The format is similar to variety specials that were popular in the ’70s. The main story involves Chewie and Han as they are racing back to Chewie’s homeworld for Life Day, a generic Star Wars version of Thanksgiving. The story goes back and forth following Chewie and Han and then following Chewie’s family (wife, son and father). Little to no action happens when the camera is with Chewie’s family.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by pholley.
Adam "Ape Lad" Koford did a set of Twitter avatar designs based on the outline of the Twitter bird. I particularly love the one based on Where The Wild Things Are. Can’t wait for the new ones (get crackin’ Adam!) Link | Apelad’s Tweets
Award-winning author Beverly Cleary gave us books about Ramona and the kids from Klickitat Street. In today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, find out how much you remember from the books. I scored miserably because I read some of these so long ago, and others weren’t written until I was an adult. Link
The Hamster Hotel is now open in Nantes, France. No, it’s not just a clever name. Frederic Tabary and Yann Falquerho converted a room in an old building to a human-sized hamster cage complete with a running wheel and hay to sleep on! Guests will be able to live like a hamster complete with grain offered for meals.
“The hamster in the world of children is that little cuddly animal. Often, the adults who come here have wanted or did have hamsters when they were small,” said Mr Falquerho, who was dressed as a hamster.
The price for the room is currently 99 euros for a night, but the price will go up when Wifi and a TV screen are installed. Link -via Arbroath
Social networking on the internet has given us plenty of new words and terms (such as “social networking”), and the New Oxford American Dictionary is paying attention. The publishers announced that “unfriend” is their word of the year for 2009.
unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.
As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”
“It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most “un-” prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar “un-” verbs (uncap, unpack), but “unfriend” is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”
Other words considered for the honor included hashtag, sexting, and paywall, all of which are unfamiliar to my spellchecker. Link -via Mashable
It seems you can make a bag out of (or to look like) anything! An armadillo? Ground beef? Skunk fur? What I really can’t get my head around is why there’s a stall somewhere in the world selling hollowed out toads as handbags. Despite the zippable reptilian skin, golden chain strap, and dead toad eyes to keep an eye on your belongings, this bag is only for witches, wizards and Marilyn Manson. See these and a total of 50 of the most unusual bags seen anywhere.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
This clever candy is packaged to look like our favorite lucky cat, Maneki Neko! But open the cellophane and all you get are two white balls of candy. The cellophane is where the cat is at -in fact there are several wrappers with different cat expressions. Link -via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
