The objects above are remarkably ornate baby rattles/ teething toys, as crafted by a master silversmith. They are attributed to Nicholas Roosevelt, an 18th-century American craftsman, and are now part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This rare and precious gold toy, with its elaborate chased and repoussé ornament, might have been given as a lavish christening gift. It consists of a whistle, a piece of teething coral, six of the original eight bells, and a loop to hang a toy on a ribbon around the child’s neck. Aside from being a teething device, the coral in the whistle and bells was thought to ward off enchantment and disease.
One can’t help but wonder if creations such as this had some influence on the development of the idiom “bells and whistles” to describe supplementary showy functions.
Link, via Titam et le Sirop d’Érable.
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The US division of the Boy Scouts turns 100 today. The movement began in Britain under the leadership of General Robert Baden-Powell. An American publisher, William Boyce, met a Boy Scout in London and was so impressed that he decided to bring scouting to the United States. It grew rapidly during World War I and reached its peak with 6.5 million members in the 1972:
Supporters say the scouting experience builds strong, confident leaders. They point with considerable pride to its roster of former Scouts who went on to great achievement, including President Kennedy, astronaut Neil Armstrong, baseball great Hank Aaron and filmmaker Steven Spielberg.
“I think the Scouts have changed America profoundly, because as of now, 110 million people have worn the Scout uniform in one way or another. And the moral lesson and the experiences that have been imparted to them have obviously percolated through society as a whole just too profound to really enumerate,” said Wills.
Link via Fast Company | Image: Norman Rockwell
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Having solved all serious crimes, New York City Department of Education focused its might to quash the scourge of doodling in today’s school.
Here’s what doodling on a school desk with erasable marker will get you: a perp walk in cuffs!
Alexa Gonzalez was scribbling a few words on her desk Monday while waiting for her Spanish teacher to pass out homework at Junior High School 190 in Forest Hills, she said.
"I love my friends Abby and Faith," the girl wrote, adding the phrases "Lex was here. 2/1/10" and a smiley face.
But instead of simply cleaning off the doodles after class, Alexa landed in some adult-sized trouble for using her lime-green magic marker.
She was led out of school in cuffs and walked to the precinct across the street, where she was detained for several hours, she and her mother said.
Another hardened criminal off the street! Good job, New York. Good job. Link
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Can your kid get into trouble for playing with a two-inch LEGO gun at school? Here’s a story that illustrates why we should have zero tolerance for inane "zero tolerance policies":
Patrick Timoney, a 9-year-old student at PS 52 in Staten Island, N.Y., was in the school cafeteria Tuesday playing with LEGOs when he was taken to the principal’s office and threatened with suspension. One of his toys was a LEGO policeman that holds a 2-inch plastic gun. The school has a no-tolerance policy when it comes to toy guns. [...]
The boy’s mother, Laura Timoney, 44, was fuming over the issue.
“You don’t traumatize a child who loved to go to school, who wanted to be early every day to school, you don’t make him cry, you don’t make him fill out statements,” she told WNBC, holding back tears. “You don’t do it.”
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Bunchland Magazine, a digital magazine that features awesome and
creative families from all over the world, received this submission for
our food section, called Munchland. In this section, families send us
videos of themselves cooking or talking about food.
This video, entitled The Dessert of Frankenstein, came
from dad Eric Woolfe, a brilliant playwright/actor who creates
deliciously macabre horror-inspired puppet shows.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
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Rickshaw cyclist Chen Chuanliu can’t afford daycare so he has to think of a way to prevent his 2-year-old son from wandering off on his own when he has a fare.
His solution? Chain him up on a pole!
The rickshaw cyclist, from the Chinese capital Beijing, decided to put tot Lao Lu under lock and key after his four-year-old daughter Ling went missing last month.
Child snatching is rife in China where strict laws govern the size of families.
"My wife is ill and I can’t stop work. So I chain him to a pole when I have a fare. It seems harsh but it is better than losing him," said Chen.
The problem is that he’s probably training the kid to think like Houdini: Link
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I know how much Neato readers appreciate good captions, so here’s a site I just discovered via Ellen Maguire on Twitter. It’s called Unhappy Hipsters and it gives funny captions to photos that have appeared in Dwell magazine. Here’s an example:
“Still recovering from broken trust, neither wanted to be the first to try the eggs.”
Photo: Mark Mahaney, Dwell, November 2009
Link: Unhappy Hipsters
I like this one too:
“You can come out when you can properly explain the differences between Modernist architecture and postmodern ornamentation.”
Photo: Craig Cutler, Dwell, February/March 2006
Link: Unhappy Hipsters
There are lots more where those came from.
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Combine the imagination of a five-year-old with the talent of a professional comic artist and you get Axe Cop. Malachai Nicolle comes up with the stories and his 29-year-old brother Ethan Nicolle {wiki} draws them. The result is wonderful! Anyone who’s ever had, or ever been, a five-year-old storyteller will get a real kick out of this. Link
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Winston in southern Oregon is where many tourists stop on their journeys north and south along Interstate 5; it’s where Wildlife Safari is. Recently the park acquired some help in the form of Wylie Malek, an autistic young boy people are calling a “natural elephant man.” It seems he’s bonded with the gentle giants, and has had breakthroughs of his own.
The young man’s communication skills have improved through the interactions, his father said, both with the adults at Wildlife Safari and with kids in his classes at Green Elementary. Sometimes it is hard to get the otherwise reserved boy to stop talking about the elephants, his father said. When he recites for the fifth time how much an elephant can eat, his family has to change the subject, Kris Malek joked.
Link | via The Obscure Store and Reading Room | Photo Credit: Robin Loznak
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We don’t usually post about pranks and means things like that on Neatorama, but this one is just too cute to pass. Here’s Becky prank calling a local demolition company in Dublin, asking them to demolish her school (with her teachers in it because they give her extra homework on Friday!). Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
More prank calls here: 10 Telephone Pranks That Make You Squirm – Thanks David!
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The experimental Quest to Learn School in New York City opened last September. In the hopes of preparing students for high-tech careers, it teaches students almost entirely though video games:
This year’s 72-student class is split into four groups that rotate through five courses during the day: Codeworlds (math/English), Being, Space and Place (social studies/English), The Way Things Work (math/science), Sports for the Mind (game design), and Wellness (health/PE). Instead of slogging through problem sets, students learn collaboratively in group projects that require an understanding of subjects in the New York State curriculum. The school’s model draws on 30 years of research showing that people learn best when they’re in a social context that puts new knowledge to use. Kids learn more by, say, pretending to be Spartan spies gathering intel on Athens than by memorizing facts about ancient Greece.
Most sixth-graders don’t expect to ever need to identify integers, but at Quest, it’s the key to a code-breaking game. In another class, when creatures called Troggles needed help moving heavy objects, the class made a video instructing how long a ramp they should build to minimize the force they needed to apply. “They’re picking concepts up as well as, if not better than, at other schools,” says Quest’s math and science teacher Ameer Mourad. Beyond make-believe, Quest is the first middle school to teach videogame design. Salen says building games teaches students about complex systems, which will prepare them for growing fields such as bioinformatics.
Link via Fast Company | Official Website | Photo: Claudio Midolo
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John Farrier’s post on Where’s Waldo prompted me to shine the spotlight on another series of puzzle-tastic find-me books that feature actual photographed objects.
The tableau of I Spy puzzles vary between scattered and seemingly similar objects to exquisitely staged snapshots of a closet, and even other worlds. Here’s one.
Photo/Artist Walter Wick came up with the idea of finding hidden objects in plain sight…by accident.
I was organizing screws, paper clips and other odds and ends. As I began sorting, I liked the way the objects looked spread out on my light box. After hours of careful arranging, I took a picture (left). This photograph of odds and ends was the spark that helped inspire the first I Spy book! But that would take another 10 years.
Photo: Walter Wick/I Spy
I Spy an anchor, 2 shovels, plus a sleeping man. Helicopter, knight, and a cooking pan. (That was all mine, anyone care to do better?)
Read more about Walter Wick here, and remember this video from last November? That’s him. And he apparently has a new book series called Can You See What I See? where he writes his own poem hints.
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Well, they wanted it. That’s the reason Jo-Jo Marsh gave for tattooing her own children (one as young as ten years old) with a home-made tattoo gun (with a guitar string as a needle, no less):
"We were making it look like it was a cross," said Jo-Jo Marsh, "so the kids could have something they could say it was."
Jo-Jo Marsh shows Eyewitness News the tattoo on her son’s hand. The mark is a cross-like symbol left by a home-made tattoo gun with a guitar string as a needle.
"We didn’t even break the skin barely," said Marsh, "they are very tiny, just through a few layers, on the top, they will fade away, that’s how minuscule this is."
Marsh and her husband, Jacob Bartels, face child cruelty charges after detectives found the same mark on six of the couple’s seven children. One of the children is just 10 years-old. [...]
Marsh defends her actions saying the kids were begging for tattoos like hers.
She told [WRCB TV] multiple times during our interview that she changed the needle each time.
Marsh believes as the children’s guardian, she should have the right to tattoo them if she chooses. "Shouldn’t I have say so over what goes on in my child’s life," said Marsh, "I have custody of my child, I’m not going to hurt my child."
Child abuse or simply a mom with a cutting edge sense of style? Link
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I had to find out who sells that pacifier. You can get one at Perpetual Kid. Video via Unique Daily.
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No, not that Ball Drop. The Science Museum of Western Virginia hosted this superball drop at noon on New Year’s. About 11,000 balls were dropped, and the kids loved it.
We were stationed on the ground floor, where I hoped my Superball-loving Geeklet would get a good view of the big bounce. While the folks up top had the fun of dropping balls from five stories up, we had the wild experience of being inside the ricochet zone. Yep, I took a couple of hits, but it was worth it — especially when we started scooping up the balls.
via GeekDad
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Superman and Batman (1977)
Growing up Heroes is a fascinating tumblr blog by Belgian comic book fan Franz Donovan, where people submit their old childhood photos of themselves dressed up as superheroes. From Wired’s Underwire Blog:
Donovan pictures his online scrapbook as an exercise in nostalgia. “Growing Up Heroes brings back vivid memories of our own attempts to be heroes when we were uncomplicated, over-imaginative, nerdy kids,” he said.
The only things lacking are the "after" photos of these people all grown up: Link – via The Zeray Gazette
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The task for the architecture students from Trondheim, Norway was this: build a library for an orphanage in a village in Thailand using natural materials to fit in with the surrounding environment, with room for books, a computer, and 42 students of different ages.
Sami Rintala of Rintala Eggertsson Architects led the project, which resulted in a structure that is simple, elegant, practical and versatile. The library was constructed with natural lava stone from the site, plus concrete bricks, wood and bamboo, with natural ventilation and sunshades incorporated into the design.
Link: DesignBoom; all images courtesy of Rintala Eggertsson Architects
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Watch videos of ten child prodigies in action, in the fields of medicine, geography, music, business, and of course school subjects like science and math. Shown is Adi Putra Ghani, who gives lectures on business even though he’s only ten years old!
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
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In this variation on Dr. Seuss’ classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Rorschach from Watchmen punishes the people of New York City for their Christmas cheer. I’m not sure who the author is, but I’ve seen it vaguely referenced to the posters at 4chan — and I’m not about to go searching that site to find out for sure.
via Popped Culture
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The artblog A Journey Around My Skull has a compilation of unusual and surreal illustrations from children’s books of the Soviet Union. This image is from the 1989 book Hello, I’m A Robot Stanislav Zigunenko and illustrated by E. Benyaminson. At the link, you’ll see the first post in a series about such illustrations.
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The viral versions of the infamous Evian; Skating Babies ad campaign have reached new heights in Advertising history on November entering the Guinness Book of World Records as the most viewed viral ads of all time. Their antics have received 45, 166,109 hits since posting making them the most efficient viral campaign ever.
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Food Face Kid’s Dinner Plate – $9.95/plate
W00t! We’ve just gotten a surprise partial shipment of the Food Face Kid’s Dinner Plate (it’s not supposed to be in until 2010) over at the Neatorama Shop. These plates turn dinner times into fun times for your toddlers. Bring out the peas and the mashed potatoes and let your kids express their creativity.
These plates are extremely popular and we’ll probably run out soon, so if you’d like one, get it now, mmkay?
Christmas shipping note: the last day to place an order for Christmas was yesterday (12/17/09) and though the window has passed, we’ll try our hardest to ship it so you’ll get it by Christmas. Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee shipment by Dec 24, 2009, but we’re sure your kids will still like ‘em regardless 
Link: Food Face Kid’s Dinner Plate | Also just back in stock: Fisticups | More neat Dishware, Drinkware and Flatware
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YouTube user NunzioRaso was having trouble getting his toddler daughter to sleep for more than two hours – a common dilemma in any such household. He decided to help her out by getting into the crib with her. His intention was a success, but it wasn’t the most comfortable night of his life.
I hope everyone finds some sweetness like this in their world this weekend. I, for one, will be giving my daughter a little extra love and attention!
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When my hometown of Vancouver, Washington isn’t landing on Neatorama for its bus-riding goats, it’s usually quiet on the odd news front. But yesterday, firefighters had to remove a middle schooler’s tongue from a frozen flagpole.
Firefighter Mike Swanson then applied warm water to the boy’s tongue to get it unstuck. The firefighter crew gave the boy hot chocolate and cookies and he required no further medical attention. ”This is a first [in] my 18 years with the fire district,” Swanson said.
A news release from the fire department said that even when issued a “triple-dog dare,” they advise people against putting their tongue on a metal pole in the cold.
(Sigh) It’s beginning to look a lot like A Christmas Story.
Link. Photo: Warner Brothers Pictures.
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In a three-part post. you’ll see dozens of beautiful illustrations from Iranian children’s books of the past few decades. These works of art were gleaned from the International Children’s Digital Library. The illustration pictured is by Mohammadrezaa Daadgar from the book As the Sparrow Says by Qeysar Aminpour. Link (links to the other posts are at the bottom of the page) -Thanks, Will!
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The Murphy Family home in Jupiter, Florida features a child’s bed shaped like a dinosaur mouth. Bonnie Murphy, a muralist, did the painting and her husband did the carpentry. Can you imagine anything more soothing?
Link via Geekologie | Photo: 3 Murphys
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Photo submitted by Z. (Sketchy Santas)
Sketchy Santas is a site devoted to reader-submitted pictures of that bastion of the season: sitting on Santa’s lap. It’s a time when children are either enchanted with the prospect of meeting the magic man who will bring them whatever toys they desire… or it’s nightmare time.
Link. Previously on Neatorama: Scared of Santa.
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What do you get when you mix Twitter with toddlers? Behold the Twoddler, a tricked-out Fisher Price Activity Center that lets toddlers send pre-arranged tweets to friends and family:
… the Twoddler, a tricked-out Fisher Price Activity Center with pictures of family members and friends attached and an Arduino board inside.
When a child presses a certain picture for a select amount of time, software captures sensor data from the activity center and selects and sends a predefined text related to that data.
For example, when Bobby plays with Mom’s picture for more than three minutes, a Twitter message will post to Bobby’s personal Twitter account saying, "@mommy_bobby Bobby misses mommy and looks forward playing with her this evening" (or as the messages get more refined and personalized: "@mommy_bobby Bobby is having a temper tantrum and wants mommy home now."
It even won at the 2009 Innovative and Creative Applications competition: Link | INCA Award 2009 – via Wired’s Gadget Lab
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The scintillating smell of yummy, oh-so-delicious bacon or the faint smell of throw-up? Well, duh! No wonder we prefer the smell of bacon to newborn baby, according to a survey of thousands of Brits by OnePoll:
TOP 20 SMELLS WHICH MAKE BRITS HAPPY
1. Freshly baked bread
2. Clean sheets
3. Freshly mown grass
4. Fresh flowers
5. Freshly ground coffee
6. Fresh air after rain fall
7. Vanilla
8. Chocolate
9. Fish and chips
10. Bacon frying
11. Roast dinner
12. Babies
13. Lemon zest
14. Lavender
15. Petrol
16. Apple and blackberry crumble in the oven
17. A freshly lit match
18. Roses
19. Party poppers
20. Rubber tyres
Freshly lit match? Petrol? Rubber tires? What's up with that?! Link
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Remember Donald Mill’s collection of Young People: The Trading Cards we featured before on Neatorama? Well, the crabby old fart (hey, that’s what he called himself) has new ones.
I’m particularly fond of #13 The Assclown:
Find out more at Donald’s blog, aptly titled The Problem with Young People:
Link
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