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Knitters around the net rejoice, Threadless is holding a new contest until January 18, 2010. Whoever makes the coolest knitted version of one of their shirts wins, so get your needles clicking.
Pet rocks are way too old school, but not anymore thanks to ThinkGeek’s new USB powered pet rock. The rock with a glued-on USB cord will only run you around $10.
Link Via Foolish Gadgets
Ever think about which veggies look like our insides? This clever ad can help…not that you need to think about food anymore after your Thanksgiving feast.
Link Via Craftzine Image Via International Vegetarian Union
Alex may think his turkey cake looked like poo, but it has a long way to go to make it to this collection of Thanksgiving turkey cakes gone wrong. Link
Whoa! Where did the time go? I’d like to wish everybody a Happy Thanksgiving! Thank you for reading Neatorama – the blog won’t be as fun without its loyal readers and commenters 
(My wife and I lovingly call the cake above, which we got from the local supermarket, our Thanksgiving poo cake. I think that’s supposed to be a turkey or something. Oh, and it was surprisingly good!)
These little critters, known as puggles when they are babies, are notoriously hard to breed, but the Perth Zoo in Australia has managed to successfully breed them three years in a row. The zoo thinks it’s now ready to start working on a reproduction program for their critically endangered cousins, the long-beaked echidna of New Guinea.
Link Images Via Lincoln Baker
According to a new study published in Nature, our skin helps us decipher the sounds we hear with our ears. Blindfolded volunteers listened to the “pa”, “ta”, “da”, and “ba” sounds. Unknown to the participant, a puff of air, softer than would be felt in normal conversation, accompanied some of the sounds. Sometimes the puff of air accompanied the appropriate sounds, at other times not.
The researchers found that if there was no air puff, participants misheard “pa” for “ba” and “ta” for “da” 30 to 40 percent of the time. The accuracy improved 10 to 20 percent when an air puff over the hand or neck accompanied “pa” and “ta.” No improvement occurred, however, if an air puff was sent through the tube in the ear, suggesting that the participants were not simply hearing the airflow.
The opposite effect was observed when the participants received an air puff with the inappropriate sounds— “ba” and “da.” While subjects correctly identified these sounds in about 80 percent of cases when played without the release of air, the accuracy decreased by about 10 percent if the sounds were accompanied by puffs of air.
Most of the volunteers were not consciously aware of the puffs of air. Link
Jalopnik asked its readers for suggestions on what vehicles would be best for surviving and traveling in a post-apocalyptic world. Nine existing vehicles and one semi-fictional vehicle made the cut. Pictured is the Dobbertin Surface Orbiter.
Built out of an old milk tanker, the Orbiter was designed to circumnavigate the globe on land and water, which is good for when you’re on the move and forced to deal with the suddenly changing seasons that the nuclear fallout will likely bring. And like all good survival vehicles, it comes complete with a kitchen and porta-potti.
Link -via the Presurfer
Life isn’t easy for a long-legged wading bird with only one leg, but this one got help to live a relatively normal life. A stork named Dietmar has become the world’s first stork with a prosthetic wooden leg. The stork is under the care of a bird sanctuary in Saxony, Germany. Medical specialists crafted a new limb after sanctuary workers raised a £1,000 to finance the venture.
“He gets on very well in the sanctuary with his new leg but he can’t live in the wild any more so he’s here with us for the rest of his days,” said keeper Rolf Arensberg.
We all know about the Puritans and the Indians, and we love to stuff ourselves with turkey and cranberry sauce. But how much do you really know about this popular holiday? For instance:
Although the official proclamation was to celebrate Thanksgiving on every fourth Thursday of November, Franklin Delano Roosevelt actually changed the date to the third Thursday of March from 1939-1941. He made the change on the assumption that the economy would benefit from a longer holiday shopping season. Public outrage, however, soon changed that and Thanksgiving was back on schedule ever since.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by nuiloa.
Doing some Black Friday shopping? Make sure you get your caffeine, have plenty of cash and checks on hand, and program your doctor’s office on your speed dial. As the day and the deals have gotten more hyped up over the past several years, stampedes and fights have broken out in the frenzy, resulting in injuries and even death. Here are a few of those incidents.
Just last year, a “greeter” at Walmart in Valley Stream, New York, was killed when the crowd of 2,000+ people trampled over him when the doors opened on Black Friday. Jdimytai Damour was 6’4” and 270 pounds and was trying to hold back shoppers who were pressed up against the sliding glass doors. The doors shattered from the pressure, Damour was thrown to the floor, and shoppers rushed over him in a craze to get to their bargains. The official ruling was that he died of asphyxiation. Although other shoppers were injured in the stampede, Damour was the only fatality – the other four injured people were treated and released from the hospital, including a woman who was eight months pregnant. There were reports that she had miscarried, but they were false. Damour’s family has filed a lawsuit against Walmart, citing that the company “engaged in specific marketing and advertising techniques to specifically attract a large crowd and create an environment of frenzy and mayhem and was otherwise careless, reckless and negligent.” Photo from FoxNews.com.
In 2005, it wasn’t a stampede to get to items that caused trouble at Walmart – it was a single line-cutter. People were waiting in an orderly line at an Orlando store to get a heavily discounted computer when one man jumped ahead in the line. The assembled crowd wasn’t really appreciative of this – they ended up wrestling him to the ground.
Last year was definitely a bad year for Black Friday shoppers. On the same day, but a different coast, two men were shot and killed after an argument at a Toys “R” Us in Palm Desert, California. The women they were with were arguing – even coming to blows, according to the Huffington Post – and the fight escalated when the men discovered that they belonged to rival gangs. They ended up shooting only each other – no other injuries were reported. Photo from LAist.com.
Another computer was the source of a riot at the same retailer in 2005. When a laptop went on sale for $100 off the normal price, Cecelia Brannon of Jacksonville, Fla., was second in line because she wanted to get one for her daughter in college. When the doors opened, she got pushed under the rushing crowd and ended up suffering from a concussion and continuing back and neck problems. “This is America’s version of the running of the bulls,” her husband said. As of 2007, Cecelia was still walking with a cane as a result of her Black Friday injuries and still had to take a slew of prescription medications. “I saved 100 on that computer,” she said. “I’ve spent probably $100,000 on medical bills.”
P.S. – I didn’t intend to hate on Walmart, but a vast majority of the Black Friday incidents happened there! If you’re headed to score some deals tomorrow, be extra careful. What’s your opinion – should the onus be on the retailer for not providing enough security, or should people be responsible for their own actions?
There’s a blog devoted exclusively to the autocompletion feature in Google search. It reveals what will happen if you start to type in a phrase such as “Google won” or “How to ra”. Answers below.
Try it yourself and see.
Thanks to Nag On The Lake for finding this.
