Hooray!
I'm sure you've noticed by now that Neatorama has a new look (all you
RSS readers, come take a look)
and a couple of new features.
First of all, I'd like to thank Nathan Mazur of Scared of Bees who did the new art for the blog. Nathan, as you may know, also designed some of the neatest T-shirts we carry on the Neatorama Shop. I think that his quirky and fun style certainly compliments what the blog is all about (be sure to scroll all the way down!)
The blog has two new major features:
- Lite/Mobile version by Mobify. This is a full version of the blog that is optimized for viewing on your phone (though you can certainly use your regular browser). This "lite" version has no ads and fewer bells and whistles.
- Best of Neatorama, a compilation of featured Bathroom Reader and mental_floss articles, as well as Neatorama Exclusives. I think the tiled images present a good way to scan quickly through the many full-length articles we've published before. We've only covered 2009 and 2010 articles so far ... we'll roll out more later.
Besides the blog, the Upcoming Queue and the Neatorama Shop also have new skins, so be sure to check 'em out (technically, this has been a triple re-design, which may explain why it took so long!).
Undoubtedly there are bugs (I apologize ahead of time). If you noticed that something is awry, please let us know in the comment section. We'll continue to roll out the redesign over the next couple of days. We'll also announce the winner of the T-shirts as promised in our previous post on redesign suggestions soon.
As a final note, I'd like to mention that one big aspect of this redesign is to use the blog to introduce indie artists to millions of new fans. I hope that we can institute a regular rotation of artists (the first being Nathan) through website designs, and regular as well as featured blog posts, in order to give them a significant exposure on the web.
So. Do you like it/hate it? What do you think?
Loading ...Update 2/3/10 – added poll. I should also add that in our almost-5-year history as a blog we’ve had 7 layout/design changes (some announced, most not – they’ve been incremental and so subtle that most people didn’t even notice) before this radical one 
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We may not be at the top of the food chain, exactly, but we at least have our inanimate food conquered. Bread, veggies, milk – these things don’t pose a threat to our existence. At least, not usually. On at least a couple of occasions, some faulty (or just old) construction has resulted in freak accidents that caused a lot of death and injury. Here are the two most famous events.
If you’re going to go out, you might as well go out doing something you love. You hear that saying a lot, but I doubt even the most die-hard beer-drinker would have enjoyed drowning in 232,000 gallons of suds during the London Beer Flood.
The year was 1814, and a very old vat at Meux’s Brewery containing 135,000 gallons of fermenting porter finally decided to give in to old age. One of the metal hoops surrounding the vat snapped; the resulting noise was heard up to five miles away. As if that much on and as if that wasn’t bad enough, it knocked over a bunch of other vats, causing a grand total of nearly 1.25 million liters of beer to spill out onto Tottenham Court Road and other surrounding streets. The gush was so massive and powerful that two houses were entirely destroyed. At a nearby pub – which had probably previously enjoyed their proximity to Meux’s Brewery – a wall caved in, killing a teenage girl who worked there. The Brewery was located in a poor part of town called St. Giles Rookery, which was a bunch of tenements and low income housing. Entire families lived in basements of these buildings, and when the beer suddenly rushed into through windows and walls, people were unable to get out and drowned. All in all, eight people were killed that day. Another person is said to have died from alcohol poisoning the following day.
People capitalized on the tragedy, though – many of the residents ran out to the streets with pots and pans to salvage whatever free alcohol they could get their hands on. And shockingly, some people took to exhibiting their dead friends and family for money. Obviously this was quite the freak accident and people outside of the area were curious. To raise a little money, enterprising citizens decided to show the corpses for a fee. The police had to put a stop to this practice when too many gawkers crowded into one house, which was structurally unsound from the flood. The floor collapsed, dumping the lot of them into a basement that was still half-full of beer.
Despite paying for the funerals of the drunkenly departed, the Meux Brewery was still sued for neglecting their equipment, especially when it came to light that an employee had previously alerted a boss to a crack in the vat that eventually erupted. However, the judge presiding over the trial declared the whole tragedy an Act of God, finding the company free of fault. Something tells me the ruling would be a little different today.
You think drowning in beer is bad? At least you could attempt to swim through the beer. Trying to fight through a sea of molasses would be all but futile.
And that’s exactly what happened in 1919, when a vat of the sticky stuff exploded at the Purity Distilling Company in Boston. The tank was 50 feet tall, 90 feet in diameter and held 2.3 million gallons of molasses. Much like the vat of beer in London, the tank just gave out. First-hand accounts from people in the area said the rivets popping out of the tank sounded like a machine gun being fired. And then came the wave – a solid, 15-foot-tall swath of molasses, 160 feet wide and moving at an astonishing 35 miles an hour. When you consider that molasses is the epitome of “slow,” 35 miles per hour is nearly unthinkable.
It happened at 12:30 p.m., just as a bunch of workers at the factory were taking lunch. They were among the largest group of fatalities, which also included two 10-year-old children and a 65-year-old woman who was just sitting on her porch when the entire house was smashed on top of her. Two entire blocks were practically flattened by the tsunami of syrupy sweetness – buildings in the immediate vicinity were completely knocked clear of their foundations and fell to rubble in a matter of seconds. When it settled, the molasses was waist deep, making it almost impossible for rescuers to wade through and try to save survivors.
Sadly, this disaster definitely could have been prevented. The tank was hastily constructed thanks to the increasing demand due to the war – back then, molasses was used in gunpowder. The foreman who oversaw the construction of the tank had no background and apparently couldn’t even read a blueprint, according to multiple sources. He was in such a hurry he didn’t even bother to test the tank for leaks with water when it was complete, as was standard practice. The vat was immediately filled with molasses, and you’d better believe it started leaking almost immediately. It leaked so much that neighborhood kids could stop by, fill up cans with syrup, and take it home to their mothers. In response to complaints about the leaky monstrosity, the company had the vat painted brown so the leaks wouldn’t be so noticeable. Pretty responsible, huh?
The company tried to make the public believe that the “sudden” explosion was the result of dynamite deliberately planted by anarchists, but the public didn’t believe it – and neither did the judge and jury. It took nearly six years of investigation, but the report found without a doubt that the company had been extremely negligent. U.S. Industrial Alcohol was ordered to pay the families of the 21 victims a total of $1 million. Boston smelled of molasses for decades afterward; some residents say it still permeates the air on the right day with the right wind.
Photo from http://edp.org/molasses.htm.
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Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a staple in our household, which is funny, because I remember being quite scared of the steamroller scene near the end when I was a kid. Now that I’m older, I appreciate it more from standpoint of how much work it took to get such a groundbreaking movie made – and here are some of the inside details on exactly what it took to make that happen. For the record, I still find the steamroller scene a little creepy.
Like so many movies, this one was a book before it ever hit the screen. In this case, the book was named Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, by Gary K. Wolf. But the film doesn’t follow the book exactly. For instance, the book took place in present day – which was 1981 – not 1947.
And instead of famous animated cartoon characters making appearances, famous cartoon strip characters pop up to chat with Roger, including Dick Tracy. Most Toons like Tracy “spoke” in the book the only way they knew how – through word bubbles. Some became “bilingual” and could speak without balloons. The only line in the whole book that made it to the silver screen was spoken by Baby Herman – “I’ve got a 50-year-old lust and a three-year-old dinky.” In the book, though, Baby Herman was actually 50, not 36. The ending is a lot different too, but I won’t spoil that for you (Google will tell you pretty quickly, if you’re dying to know).
After the movie became a success in 1988, Wolf wrote a second book (though not necessarily a sequel) that fell more in line with the movie than with his original book. It’s called Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit?
It’s probably music to the ears of Roger Rabbit fans: a prequel. According to the prequel, Roger grew up on a farm in the midwest and headed out to California to try to find his real mother. That’s how he falls in love with Jessica Krupnick (Jessica Rabbit has a much better ring to it, don’t you think?) and eventually meets not only his mother, but his father too – none other than Bugs Bunny.
The movie would have been a direct-to-video release. As of 1997, Michael Eisner was onboard for the prequel and commissioned a rewrite of the script; in 1998 some test footage was even shot. After estimations brought the cost of the movie to about $100 million, the idea was more or less shelved.
However, just last year, Robert Zemeckis said he was interested in doing the prequel and it’s rumored that the script is being worked on again. I guess we’ll see. I’d certainly go see it.
I did. Here are some other fun facts from the movie.
Although Roger and his cartoon pals have largely been abandoned at Disney, you can still find traces of them here and there. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled the next time you’re at Disney Hollywood Studios – if you look in the right place, you’ll find Eddie Valiant’s office, complete with the “hole” where Roger busted through the glass. There’s also a billboard for R.K. Maroon Studios.
Kathleen Turner famously provided Jessica Rabbit’s sultry voice, but Amy Irving – then Steven Spielberg’s wife – was her singing voice.
This was the last film Mel Blanc provided his famous voices for, including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird, Porky Pig and Sylvester the Cat – with one exception. He did provide Daffy’s voice one more time in 1988 before passing away in 1989.
The movie’s original budget was $29.9 million dollars – the most an animated movie had ever cost at the time. But the price tag could have been even more astronomical – Roger was slated to cost $50 million at first, but Disney refused to shell out that much and wouldn’t approve production until costs were slashed. Rumor has it that by the time production was finished, the budget had soared to around $70 million.
Despite the cavalcade of characters from across the cartoon universe, a few that Disney wanted are missing: Popeye and Olive Oyl, Tom and Jerry, Casper the Friendly Ghost and Deputy Dawg. They couldn’t secure the rights for these in time for the movie.
Before the final title was finally settled on, others that were considered included Murder in Toontown, Dead Toons Don’t Pay Bills, Trouble in Toontown and Eddie Goes to Toontown.
The book has a question mark after the title, but the movie doesn’t – ending a movie title with a question mark is considered bad luck in the industry, apparently. This hasn’t stopped Who’s Harry Crumb?; What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; or Dude, Where’s My Car?. The principle does apply to What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Who’s That Girl, however.
Warner Brothers would only allow the use of their toons if they got the same screen time as Disney’s toons. Thus, when you see Bugs, he’s usually with Mickey, and when you see Daffy, Donald is probably there too. Screencap from Obsessed with Film.
To make Judge Doom extra creepy, Robert Zemeckis had Christopher Lloyd refrain from blinking during his scenes. I’m tempted to watch just to see if I can catch him. Tim Curry auditioned for the role of Judge Doom, but he was so disturbingly sinister that Zemeckis, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner all nixed him for fear that he would give children nightmares.
The inspiration for Jessica Rabbit was taken from a bunch of Hollywood glamour girls, including Lauren Bacall, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth and Veronica Lake.
Zemeckis and Spielberg both really wanted Bill Murray for the role of Eddie Valiant, but Murray is notoriously hard to get a hold of, so it never happened. Murray has said that when he later found out that he was the number one choice for the role, he screamed out loud because he would have loved playing Eddie.
If you haven’t kept track of all of the animated cameos in the movie, here’s a list to watch for the next time you catch Roger on T.V.:
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January is National Hot Tea Month, and to celebrate, we at Neatorama invite you to brew a cup of your favorite variety and curl up for some good old fashioned facts about one of the most popular beverages in the world — second to only water. Before we begin though, let’s make one thing clear; herbal teas (including South African red teas) are not real teas because they are not made from the Camellia sinensis a.k.a. the tea plant — sorry chamomile fans.
While there really is no consensus on exactly where the earliest tea plants were grown in Asia and how people got the idea to drink it, there are a number of myths concerning how tea originated and why people started drinking it. One story says that a Buddhist monk named Bodhidharma, the founder of Chan Buddhism, was meditating for nine years, at which point, he fell asleep. The story says he was so upset that he cut off his own eyelids, which took root and grew into the first tea plants. Other versions of the story say that Buddha himself was the one who cut his eye lids off and started the first tea plants.
The story of how tea was first consumed says that Emperor Shennong was drinking a bowl of water when leaves from the plant blew into his water. He tried the concoction and was quite happy with the drink’s flavor. Another story says that Shennong was testing the medicinal properties of different herbs and when he discovered an herb was poisonous, he used tea for an antidote.
While the history of the plants and how they started to be consumed as beverages are the stuff of legends, there are certainly a few well documented facts about the brew’s history. The oldest known still cultivated tea plant grows in the Yunnan Province in China, it is estimated to be over 3,200 years old. Records of China’s tea consumption go back all the way to 10th century BC. At one point, bricks of tea were actually used as currency in the realm, particularly in areas that were very rural and devoid of coin currency.
Chinese Buddhist monks introduced the drink to Japan, where it quickly became a favored drink of royalty. Within no time, seeds were imported into the country and cultivation began. Centuries later, tea ceremonies were introduced by Buddhist monks as well, where they slowly evolved into the highly formal tea ceremonies that Japan is known for today. In the sixteenth century, the tea ceremonies played a big role in feudal diplomacy.
Tea wasn’t introduced into Europe until the 17th century, when it was first brought to Amsterdam. Around this period it was introduced to France and Russia where it was quickly made popular in both countries. It’s introduction into English society was perhaps the place that it had the biggest impact though.
By 1750, tea became the national drink of Britain. Unfortunately, Britain developed a need for Chinese goods, but China largely had no use for English goods. For a while, England sent out silver bullion, but it wasn’t long before they began trading opium (grown in India and still illegal in China) for tea. Thus, tea played a major role in the Opium Wars and the treaty for the war actually required the Chinese ship tea to England in exchange for the drug.
At the same time, the Brits decided that they needed to stop being dependant on the Chinese for their supply of tea, so they hired Scottish botanist Robert Fortune to steal a tea plant from China and then cultivate it in India. The plants fared well in this new environment and now India is one of the biggest producers of the plant.
Image via Okinawa Soba [Flickr]
Most people prefer to make tea from tea bags, but tea purists consider the tea from the bags to be far inferior to loose-leaf tea. Part of the reason is that the small bits of leaves used are often just the waste products left behind from loose-leaf tea. Another problem is that more of the leaf’s surface is in contact with the air, allowing it to lose flavor faster. Some people also claim they can taste the flavor of the bag when they drink it this way. Others claim that tea bags are too small to allow the tea to properly diffuse in the water, which is why Lipton released their line of Pyramid Teas to counteract these problems, but many tea aficionados still don’t like them for the other reasons listed above.
Image by Wikipedia user Andre Karwath.
As I said before, real tea is only made from the Camellia sinensis, which means that red tea and other herbal teas don’t make the cut. Even then though, there are still six different varieties of tea, each created by a different processing method. The tea plant’s leaves wilt and oxidize very quickly after it is picked, and each type of tea is made through drying the leaves at a different point of the leaf’s cycle. White tea is wilted and unoxidized. Green tea is unwilted and unoxidized. Yellow tea is unwilted and unoxidized, but allowed to yellow. Oolong tea is wilted, bruised and then partially oxidized. Black tea is wilted and fully oxidized. Post-fermented tea is created by allowing green tea to ferment, it is largely reserved for medicinal purposes and not casual drinking. There’s a cool visualization of the process here.
While each type of tea naturally has its own distinct flavor, most teas you buy at the store have their own flavoring made by mixing different blends together or by adding other flavors to the mix. Some of the more popular tea flavors include:
Source Image by Wikipedia user lateasquirrel.
Tea contains a number of different antioxidants, one of which, catechins, actually makes up 30% of its weight. This antioxidant can help fight tumors. White and green teas contain the most antioxidants. On the other end of the spectrum, black tea has the most caffeine. Caffeine makes up about 3% of black tea’s dry weight, more than even coffee. The reason coffee gives you more of a buzz when you drink it though is that it’s less diluted than tea. Tea also has fluorine, which prevents dental decay.
Studies have shown that tea can help normalize your blood pressure, lower your stress levels, prevent heart disease, reduce depression and prevent diabetes. It also has germicidal properties that help you prevent sickness(which shows just how terrible my immune system is, given that I drink tea daily and still get sick all the time). A study released last year showed that white tea can boost your metabolism, reduce fat cells and help you lose weight. Another study that came out last year showed that drinking tea daily can reduce your chances of having a stroke by as much as 21%.
The tea plant grows year-round and though it prefers tropical and sub-tropical climates, it has survived as far north as England. Only the top one to two inches of a mature plant are used for tea. These parts of the plant are called flushes and the plant grows a new flush every week or so during growing season. The Chinese believe that a higher elevation makes for better tea plants because the plants grow slower, allowing the buds to become more flavorful.
The evergreen plants are sort of like poinsettias, in that those that aren’t properly cultivated will naturally grow into a tree.
Image by Wikipedia user Dave Oceano.
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I like to think that I’ve picked up a lot of random trivia as a writer. I often blurt out trivia at really inappropriate moments in casual conversation. I like to think that I would rock on Jeopardy!, but I have taken the show’s sample audition quizzes before, and the fact is… I suck. However, if there’s ever a Jeopardy! category about Jeopardy!, I might just ace it… and now you can too.
1. The original name of the show was What’s the Question? After pitching it to the network brass, Merv Griffin decided to change the name to the catchier one we know today. The reason? One of the execs thought that the game was a great idea, but that the game needed more jeopardies. NBC ended up buying the show without even seeing a pilot.
2. The winner with the smallest amount of earnings at the end of the game managed to triumph over the other two contestants by keeping a mere dollar. On January 19, 1993, Air Force Lt. Col. Daryl Scott cleverly bid just enough to keep him afloat. The other contestants got the question wrong and lost everything. No one else has ever won by keeping a single George Washington. The answer? “His books ‘No Easy Walk to Freedom’ and ‘The Struggle is My Life’ were published during his imprisonment.” The question? “Who is Nelson Mandela.”
3. The infamous Final Jeopardy music has a name – it’s called “Time for Tony” and it was written by Merv Griffin as a lullaby for his son. If you’re familiar with the song, no doubt it’s not much of a lullaby to you – it serves more as a reminder that time is running out and you’d better hurry. It was tweaked a little bit and renamed “Think!” Over the years, Griffin estimated that royalties from the theme song earned him roughly $70 million.
4. The record for the largest one-day total ever belongs to Ken Jennings, of course. He’s the only contestant to surpass $52,000 in one day, and he surpassed it by a landslide with $75,000. Jennings actually holds 11 of the top 15 earnings spots. One of these top 15 spots was actually earned during Jeopardy! Kids Week by a 12-year-old from Virginia named Kunle Demuren, whose knowledge and quick buzzer finger earned him $49,000. Photo from Moore’s Lore.
5. Back in the pre-Trebek era when Art Fleming was the host, contestants could start the audition process by just giving the office in New York a call. They would pass preliminary tests over the phone and then set up a date and time to audition in person if the were eligible. Once they made it to the actual office, potential contestants went through a written test and a faux game. These days, the audition process often starts on the Internet during designated testing times. Sometimes a “Brain Bus” also roams the country and tests Ken Jennings-wannabes. If you think you have what it takes, one of the online testing periods is coming up soon – January 26-28 for adults.
6. In the show’s entire history, a three-way tie has only happened once. It happened fairly recently too – on March 16, 2007, every single contestant ended Final Jeopardy with $16,000. They all returned the following week to play again. You can see it happen here – Alex Trebek seems quite pleased.
7. “I Lost on Jeopardy” was released by Weird Al Yankovic in 1984. Original host Art Fleming has a cameo as himself and original announcer Don Pardo shows up to tell Yankovic all of the fabulous prizes he failed to win. The funny thing is, Weird Al was actually on Rock & Roll Jeopardy and lost to Gary Dell’Abate, better known as Howard Stern’s sidekick Baba Booey.
8. Julann Griffin, Merv’s wife, was integral to the development of the show. She helped him develop the unique answer-and-question format when they were on a plane ride to New York in the early ’60s. From 1964-1975, a piece Julann composed served as the theme to the show. It was called “Take Ten.”
9. If Alex Trebek seems a little condescending when he corrects players with wrong answers, as if he would know the answers himself even without his cheat sheet, well… he just might. Trebek is pretty brainy. Time magazine once asked him if there was an easy question that he ever didn’t know the answer to, and this was Trebek’s response:
We were doing some shows at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, and during the commercial breaks I’d go out and talk to the people in the audience. And a little boy stood up and asked, When was the Magna Carta signed? I said 1216. I was off by a year. I know a lot about the Magna Carta, but unfortunately I got the date wrong in front of 6,000 people.
He admits that he probably wouldn’t do too well if he actually had to participate on the show, though, due to his slow reflexes.
Read more of that interview at Time.
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Most animals don’t like being dressed up in human clothes, but we love to make them do it anyway –after all, it is absolutely adorable. Of course, some animals love it. My own dog seems to get a little strut in his step when he wears one of his cute little tee shirts –he isn’t a big fan of rain coats though.
Of the handful of critters that seem to enjoy playing dress up, an even smaller group has actually enjoyed a relative amount of success from their imitation of human clothing. In honor of National Dress Up Your Pet Day, we at Neatorama celebrate the few, the brave, the clothed.
While most pets who agree to wear costumes tend to be dogs, the animals that have become best known for their clothing antics are a variety of species. One of the best known costumed animals is Sugar Bush Squirrel, whose owner, Kelly Foxton, started making her tiny little outfits and photographing her in wonderfully elaborate settings.
Foxton soon started adding the images to a website, where Sugar Bush developed a huge cult following. Since then, the little critter was featured in a number of advertisements and has been the subject of a documentary. Sugar Bush even holds the unofficial title of World’s Most Photographed Squirrel –someone call Guinness quick!
Source Sugar Bush Squirrel Website, Sugar Bush Squirrel The Movie Image Via Sugar Bush website.
Of course, some animals are costumed out of necessity. If it weren’t for Keyboard Cat’s stylish garb, you would be able to see his owner’s hands manipulating him to play the piano. It’s just not the same getting “played off” by a Keyboard Cat who doesn’t appear to be doing the work himself. There are over 4,000 videos of Keyboard Cat playing someone off these days, but the original was done by Brad O’Farrell who actually got permission from the film’s original owners for both his clip and anyone who followed in his remashing footsteps.
It should be noted that this meme, which exploded last year was actually filmed back in 1984. Since then, “Fatso,” as he was known by his close family, has passed. Let’s pay our respects to this beloved kitty icon by enjoying Keyboard Cat play off a Glen Beck guest as he passes out. A moment of silence while you watch, please.
Source Wikipedia
Pankun is another star of internet videos you may recognize. He is the Japanese chimp often paired up with a bulldog named James and then asked to do simple human tasks. Best of all, Pankun is usually dressed in human clothing while he does sit ups, buys birthday cakes and rides Segways. In some ways, he’s the Japanese, reality-television version of the old Lancelot Link show.
He now lives in a Japanese zoo called Cuddly Dominion, where he and James put on live acts. His current show casts him as an astronaut that has landed on the planet Inusaru.
Here’s an old Pankun clip where the chimp gets a birthday cake, which is stolen by a hawk. Fortunately, he recovers the cake and brings it home in time for his party, where a good time is had by all.
Source Wikipedia, Cuddly Dominion
Speaking of Japanese animal celebrities, frequent Neatorama readers are also sure to remember Tama the Station Cat. Tama’s story started when the Wakayama Electric Railway decided to unman all of their stations and hire only one person at each stop to serve as the station master. At Kishi station, a neighborhood grocer named Toshiko Koyama was named as the station master. Koyama had adopted a number of stray cats, feeding them at the station.
In 2007, the company opted to name one of the strays, Tama, as the official station master. In lieu of pay, Tama has been rewarded with free cat food, and a cool hat. Tama’s success actually helped increased traffic to the area and brought 1.1 billion Yen to the local economy. As a result, the company promoted her to “super station manager,” and she is now the only female manager in the company. She now has two feline assistant station masters at her disposal.
As an extra honor, the governor of Wakayama has provided her with a medallion representing her honorary knighthood.
Source Wikipedia, Japan Probe Image Via Wikipedia user Takobou
I wrote about Mr. Winkle before in the famous shelter dogs article. He is a unique mix that looks somewhat teddy bearish. While he started out on the streets, his adopted owner, magazine photographer Lara Jo Regan, has given him everything a pup could ever dream of, including his own internet site and web television show. Mr. Winkle’s been featured on Sex and The City and a number of news programs. As for his costume work, there’s plenty of dress up photos available on his site. You can even buy books and calendars of his pin up works.
Source Mr. Winkle Website, Wikipedia Image Via Mr. Winkle’s site.
Oscar is the one animal on this list that is known for being totally naked. While she may look cute dancing and singing, her hard life makes her an inspirational tale of overcoming hardships.
In her early years, Oscar actually was rescued from a crack house by police officers. After suffering from both a beak and feather disease, she completely lost all of her feathers, even after she was nursed back to health by the Humane Society. At the time, vets gave her only six months to live –over 13 years ago.
Since then, Oscar was adopted by Cherie Wachter, who takes great care of her and has been known to post naked videos of the little bird all over the internet. Oscar’s feathers may never grow back, but her brave spirit has never dwindled.
Source DListed, Huffington Post Image by Barry Bland via The Sun.
Well readers, now it’s your turn. Any of you know any famous dressed up animals not mentioned here or care to share some of your favorite costumed pet pics?
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Today would be Jack London’s 134th birthday. The man was not only one of the most popular writers at the turn of the last century, he was also one of the first writers to see his novels be turned into a movie. In fact, his novel, The Sea Wolf, was adapted into the first full-length feature film. Also notably, he was one of the first celebrities to use his endorsement to advertise a product –in his case, grape juice and dress suits. To honor this prolific man, let’s take a look at the life and times of Jack London.
Jack London never was certain of who his actual father was, although most biographers believe his dad was astrologer William Chaney. His mother, Flora Wellman, claimed that Chaney insisted she have an abortion and that when she refused, he refused all responsibility for the child and left the city. Flora shot herself as a result of her overwhelming depression. Although she survived, she was temporarily deranged, and after Jack was born, she gave him to an ex-slave named Virginia Prentiss. After Flora married a Civil War veteran named John London, baby Jack was given back to the her, but Virginia remained a strong maternal figure to Jack throughout his life.
When Jack was 21, he searched for newspaper reports of his mother’s attempted suicide and was able to research the name of his supposed biological father. He wrote to William Chaney, but William claimed he couldn’t be Jack’s father because he was impotent. He claimed Flora slept around and that she had slandered him when she said he told her to get an abortion. Needless to say, Jack was devastated.
Jack grew up very working class and was forced to educate himself in the public library, as he could not afford to attend primary school. He was mentored by Oakland public librarian Ina Coolbrith who became California’s first poet laureate later on. Jack referred to Coolbrith as his “literary mother.”
At only 13, Jack started working at Hickmott’s Cannery clocking in for anywhere between 12 and 18 hours per day. In an effort to get out of this difficult life, he borrowed money from his foster mother and bought a boat. He then started working as an oyster poacher. Within only a few months, his boat was damaged beyond repair and he soon started working for the California Fish Patrol to hunt down fish poachers.
A few years later, Jack started protesting and fighting for labor unions in Kelly’s Army. He was known for giving stump speeches on Socialism to eager-eared workers. Soon enough, he spent 30 days in jail in Buffalo on vagrancy charges. The experience disturbed him seriously and he later wrote about it:
“Man-handling was merely one of the very minor unprintable horrors of the Erie County Pen. I say ‘unprintable’; and in justice I must also say undescribable. They were unthinkable to me until I saw them.”
He returned to California where he finally started school at Oakland High. It was here, in the school magazine, that he was first published. His first story was Typhoon off the Coast of Japan, a recount of his experiences as a sailor. While attending classes, he was inspired to become a writer when he read the book Signa by Ouida, which told the story of an unschooled Italian peasant who became a famous opera composer. He credited this book as being the seed of his writing career.
After high school, Jack eventually was able to attend the University of California, Berkeley. Unfortunately, the depression he began to experience after recently hearing from his father, paired with crushing financial circumstances, forced him to leave school only a year later.
Most people know that Jack London was part of the Klondike Gold Rush, as this was the setting for his most popular story, Call of the Wild. Not everyone knows that the main character in the story, a dog named Buck, was based on a dog that Jack’s landlords had lent to him while he stayed in Dawson.
While in the north, he developed a number of health problems, including scurvy, which eventually led to the loss of his four front teeth. The many hardships he faced during this period later served as inspiration for what is often called his greatest short story, To Build A Fire.
When Jack left the Klondike, he wanted to escape the difficulties of working class life and he realized his ticket out was his writing. Jack’s first work printed by a major publisher, To the Man On Trial, ended up almost causing him to quit as soon as he started because the publisher was so slow to pay and the pay itself was so low. His second published story actually ended up being his first paid assignment, as they actually came through with payment on time. Luckily, that second story’s payment gave him the motivation he needed to continue writing, he entered his field at just the right time, as magazine production (and subsequently, the market for short fiction stories) was skyrocketing due to new technologies that allowed for lower production costs.
Among the first stories he sold were Batard and Diable, which were two very similar stories about a French Canadian man who brutalized his dog, who then kills the man out of revenge. Those familiar with The Call of the Wild will recognize these plot lines as being fairly similar to the novel.
Jack’s first marriage was to a friend Bessie Maddern. The couple never actually had a romantic relationship together –even after their marriage. They agreed to be married because they believed they would be able to produce strong and healthy children. While they had a loveless marriage, things remained exceptionally cordial before the children came along; Bessie edited Jack’s manuscripts and helped him improve his writing. After they had children though, the relationship became strained. Jack complained that “every time I come back after being away from home for a night she won’t let me be in the same room with her if she can help it.”
Not surprisingly, the couple’s relationship ended in divorce. Jack’s next marriage was notably more successful, largely because it was based on love and not good genes. While his nickname for Bessie was “Mother-Girl,” his nickname for his new wife, Charmian Kittredge (pictured at right), was “Mate Woman.” With Charmian, Jack found more than a friend, he found a soul mate and a lover. She had been raised without prudishness and was very open to any and all of Jack’s lustful fantasies –this certainly helped keep Jack interested, as he was known for being a bit of a womanizer at the time.
Speaking of his true loves, Jack was enamored with the ranch he bought in Sonoma County in 1905, saying, “next to my wife, the ranch is the dearest thing in the world to me.” Jack wanted his ranch to become its own money making enterprise and dedicated a lot of his time to growing and improving the farm. It wasn’t long before he started writing only to support his farm. His daughter, Joan, noted that after 1910, “few reviewers bothered any more to criticize his work seriously, for it was obvious that Jack was no longer exerting himself.”
While the ranch ended up being a failure, Jack was largely ahead of his time and would likely have thrived in today’s eco-friendly world. He was one of the first U.S. farmers to practice the concept of sustainable agriculture and designed the first concrete silo built in California. His home was designed and constructed by the finest Italian and Chinese stonemasons. Unfortunately, just before the mansion was completed, it was destroyed by fire. Nowadays, his ranch is a National Historic Landmark and part of the Jack London State Historic Park.
Many people, both past and present, have claimed London plagiarized much of his work. To some extent, the accusations were fair. When accused of basing The Call of the Wild on Egerton R. Young’s My Dogs in the Northland, Jack admitted that it was a “source” and he said he wrote a letter to the author thanking him for the inspiration. Jack even bought plots and novels from Sinclair Lewis and used them as his own.
The most damning case against him involved a chapter in his book The Iron Heel. Jack claimed that he based this chapter on a speech by the Bishop of London that he clipped from an American newspaper that he didn’t realize was actually an excerpt from an ironic essay by Frank Harris called “The Bishop of London and Public Morality.” Harris was angered by this use of his essay and he argued that he should receive 1/60th of all royalties for the book.
On the other hand, some of the plagiarism accusations against Jack were merely a result of his using newspaper stories to inspire his plots. A 1901 newspaper article criticized how similar his “Moon-Face” story was to Frank Norris’ “The Passing of Cock-eye Blacklock.” London defended himself by proving that both stories were inspired by the same newspaper story. Soon, there was even a third similar story discovered to have been written about the same article. This one was published a year earlier.
When criticized for writing a story directly from a non-fiction article by Augustus Biddle and J. K Macdonald, London argued that it was fair game, saying, “I, in the course of making my living by turning journalism into literature, used material from various sources which had been collected and narrated by men who made their living by turning the facts of life into journalism.”
Like most of us, Jack London was an extremely complex individual. As a result, many of his views seemed contradictory, even hypocritical. He was a life-long socialist, but was devoted to monetary pursuits. While he always looked to his black foster mother as a role model and worried about the white man destroying indigenous cultures, he also bought into Social Darwinism and eugenics. While he was a self-proclaimed alcoholic, he supported prohibition.
Jack died in 1916 of uremia. The kidney stones and dysentery he was suffering from at the time were extremely painful, so he was taking morphine, which may have contributed to his death. Because he wrote so many stories about people who killed themselves though, many people mistook his death for a suicide.
A decade later, a writer known as B. Traven started to become known as “the German Jack London.” This author kept his identity secret his entire life, which led to some people speculating that Jack actually was B. Traven. Some supporters of the theory claim that Jack faked his own death only to reappear as the German later on. Funny enough, Traven’s own widow revealed his identity after his death, but some conspiracy nuts still claim he was actually Jack London, while others claim he was actually Ambrose Bierce.
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If you grew up in the ’80s and early ’90s and had access to Nickelodeon, no doubt you found yourself watching Inspector Gadget at one point or another. The cartoon about a bumbling detective and his genius niece Penny and her dog Brain who are constantly saving the day only ran for two seasons, but the reruns lived on (and were popular enough to warrant a 1999 live-action movie).
Because Neatorama is always on duty, here are a few wowser facts about the good Inspector, Penny and Brain:
1. If some of the voices from the cartoon sound familiar, it’s because you’ve almost certainly heard them elsewhere. Cree Summer, the voice of Penny, has also been in Tiny Toon Adventures as Elmyra, Rugrats as Susie Carmichael and Drawn Together as Foxxy Love (among lots of one-off voice appearances and guest spots).
2. Even if you were never a fan of the cartoon (or the movie, for that matter), you might be familiar with the Inspector Gadget theme song. In 1984, Doug E. Fresh sampled it for his classic song The Show, which resurfaced in the 1991 Wesley Snipes movie New Jack City.
3. The original song was inspired by a classical work – “Hall of the Mountain King” by Edvard Grieg.
4. In 2006, a couple of the original voice actors reprised their roles for a Robot Chicken skit. Sadly, Don Adams had died the previous year, so Gadget was voiced by Joe Hanna. But the voices of Penny, Brain and Dr. Claw are all done by the originals. Chief Quimby was voiced by Robot Chicken co-creator Seth Green. If you’ve ever wondered what a cross between Gadget and the Terminator would look like, here you go:
5. You might remember Gadget’s best gadgets: binoculars, skates, springs, extra hands. But those are just the tip of the iceberg. Gadget also had a necktie-lasso, a parachute, a respirator, skis, pulleys, eyeballs that could pop out of his head and spy on people, and even radar (among other things). Those are but a fraction of the gadgets the inspector has at his disposal, though – he was said to have about 14,000 gadgets in all.
6. The 1999 movie starring Matthew Broderick revealed a lot of things the cartoon never did. For instance, Inspector Gadget’s name was John Brown and Dr. Claw’s name was Sanford Scolex. A 2002 cartoon called Gadget and the Gadgetinis, however, tells us that the Inspector’s nemesis was born as “George Claw” and he has a twin brother named “Dr. Thaw” who wears dishwashing gloves instead of a menacing spiked glove like his sibling.
7. You know you’ve got a classic theme song on your hands when street performers add it to their repertoires. Check out this busker in Australia playing the catchy tune by hitting beer bottles with a wooden spoon. It’s pretty awesome.
8. Inspector Gadget had a mustache in the 1983 pilot episode. Almost immediately after the show, DIC, the company who created Gadget, received a “friendly” letter from MGM saying that their cartoon seemed to closely resemble a character they had recently created. Thus, Gadget was clean-shaven for the rest of the series. Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out which MGM character that might refer to – anyone have any guesses? Photo from SearchforVideo.com.
9. Fans already know that Don Adams – probably most famous for playing a somewhat similar character in Get Smart, Maxwell Smart – was the voice of Inspector Gadget. What you might not know is that it wasn’t Don’s first venture into the world of animation. In the ’60s, Adams endeared himself to children as the title voice on Tennessee Tuxedo and his Tales (you’ll see that Tennessee Tuxedo sounds just like Inspector Gadget).
10. Dr. Claw is a spoof on a famous Bond villain, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who was seen in several films including You Only Live Twice and Thunderball. In fact, he may be one of the most spoofed Bond villains of all time – Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers series is the spitting image of Blofeld.
11. There was a way to see Dr. Claw’s face prior to the 1999 movie – back in 1992, a Dr. Claw action figure was produced. But there was a catch – a large sticker on the package obscured Claw’s face, so to get a glimpse, you actually had to buy the toy. Clever. Here’s what he looked like when you bought the action figure:
Pictures from ProgressiveBoink.
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It seems strange that a man best known for creating the quintessential detective, who based his deductions solely on reason, would also be one of the biggest proponents of Spiritualism around the turn of the last century. Equally strange is that a man who based his career of performing illusions and magic tricks was one of the most stringent disbelievers of the same religion. Perhaps strangest of all was the friendship of these two men, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini.
Houdini met Doyle while doing a performance tour in Europe. While the magician did not believe in Spiritualism, he had a strong interest in the subject and said many times that he did desperately want to believe, as he truly wished to speak to his beloved deceased mother.
Doyle was already well-known for his support of the belief by this point, and was considered by many to be a saint of Spiritualism. When he met Houdini, he went about bringing him to some of the best mediums in Europe in an attempt to convert the magician. At this point, Houdini attempted to lead Doyle to believe that he was very open to the idea, but just undecided. He did enjoy hearing about the religion from a person he considered to be on the same intellectual plane as himself and not an entirely gullible person.
Still though, the magician was able to see through the parlor tricks used by the mediums that Doyle brought him to. The more of the mediums he saw, the less convinced he became. While he did not yet begin exposing the frauds, he did record their methods and become increasingly frustrated with their taking advantage of people’s trust.
Soon enough, Houdini started to begin his famous crusade against fraudulent mediums. He eventually even became part of a Scientific America committee offering a massive reward to anyone who could prove their methods were authentic –of course, no one ever managed to claim the reward. As his fame grew for these acts, Houdini even started attending séances in costume, taking with him a reporter and a police officer.
Funny enough, Doyle actually supported these efforts at first, because he was afraid the fakes would damage the religion’s legitimacy. Although Houdini offered to show Doyle how to spot the tricks used by mediums, Doyle insisted that the mediums he knew were extremely honest and would never cheat their followers.
As Houdini started to push Doyle even further to admit the people were acting dishonestly, Doyle soon converted to the belief that Houdini himself was one of the most powerful mediums around. Doyle and other Spiritualists who held this belief claimed the magician actually dematerialized himself to make his famous escapes. They believed he was working to discredit other mediums so he could gain publicity and take his act even further. Doyle expressed many of these beliefs in his last book, The Edge of the Unknown.
Houdini, unfortunately, was caught between a rock and a hard place with these accusations. He couldn’t actually reveal his tricks, but by not doing so, the Spiritualists still had ammo to claim he was a medium. While he simply stated that his escapes were all performed by physical means, these tales haunted him until his death.
In an attempt to prove to Doyle that his performances only involved trickery, Houdini offered to perform a special trick for his friend. The two men were joined by the Bernard Ernst president of the American Society of Magicians for the test, which started with a room filled with a slate, five cork balls and some white paint. Doyle was instructed to choose one of the balls at random and then place it in the container of paint. He was then given a pencil and a piece of paper and was told to go wherever he wanted to write a message of his choice on the paper.
Houdini and Ernst stayed in the room, while Doyle left the house, walked three blocks away and then wrote a message on the paper. He then folded the paper, put it in his pocket and returned to the house.
Upon his return, Houdini instructed Doyle to pick up the ball and put it on the slate. The ball then began to roll over the slate, where it spelled out the words Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin, the same words Doyle wrote on the paper.
While Houdini devised this test to show Doyle these methods all involved simple tricks, Doyle was convinced more than ever that Houdini was a medium.
The two continued to be friends and spent a vacation together in Atlantic City shortly after Doyle’s speaking tour in New York. During the vacation, Doyle’s wife, lady Jean offered to perform a séance for Houdini. He accepted, trusting her sincerity and honesty, and tried to completely accept the realism of the experience. As stated earlier, Houdini wanted to believe, he still had not found anyone who was worth believing in though. He was particularly excited about the séance when Jean announced that she would be try to contact his mother. Houdini said, “I had made up my mind that I would be as religious as it was in my power to be and not at any time did I scoff during the ceremony… with a beating heart I waited, hoping that I might feel once more the presence of my beloved mother.”
Lady Jean entered a trance during the séance and her hand started moving, scribbling words across paper, which Doyle then handed to Houdini. The message detailed his mother’s pleasure in finally getting to contact her son. They started off saying, “Oh my darling, thank God, thank God, at last I’m through. I’ve tried, oh so often — now I am happy. Why, of course, I want to talk to my boy — my own beloved boy — friends, thank you, with all my heart for this.”
After the séance, Houdini wrote a small note on the bottom of the paper, saying, “Message written by Lady Doyle claiming the spirit of my dear Mother had control of her hand — my sainted mother could not write English and spoke broken English.”
A few months after the Doyle’s returned home to England, Houdini went public about the incident. He said there was no chance his mother had been summoned in the séance based on her poor English and the fact that she never learned to read or write. He said he believed the Doyle’s did not deceive him intentionally, but were victims to their own gullibility.
Doyle tried to argue against these claims by saying that language is universal to the dead. He also said Houdini was too nervous about the encounter to accept that it was his own mother speaking to him from the beyond.
After this, the pair tried to maintain some level of strained friendship, but the final blow came when Houdini began publicly attacking Mina “Magery” Crandon. His Scientific American panel was fervent in discrediting Mrs. Crandon after she came forward to claim the prize. Doyle was a huge supporter of Crandon, even praising her in his later book The History of Spiritualism. “The commission is, in my opinion, a farce,” he wrote, “and has already killed itself.”
The two began privately quarreling, but by 1923, the were exchanging criticizing letters to one another via the New York Times. After they publicly feuded when their tours happened to cross in Denver, they stopped talking for good.
A few years later, Houdini died. When his wife, Bess began clearing out his property, she uncovered a huge collection of books on Spiritualism and she opted to send them to Doyle. The author wrote back to her, stating his reluctance to accept the gifts though, because he thought Houdini harbored bad feelings against him up until the time of his death.
Bess wrote back and said that Houdini had, in fact, held out hope of contacting his mother up until his death and even told her so on his death bed. She assured Doyle that Houdini carried no resentment towards him and that the press had greatly exaggerated the feud between the two. She best summed up Houdini’s thoughts by writing, “he was deeply hurt whenever any journalistic arguments arose between you and would have been the happiest man in the world had he been able to agree with your views on Spiritism. He admired and respected you –two remarkable men with different views.”
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Hello,
Neatoramanauts!
Boing Boing did it, Engadget did it, and now it's Neatorama's turn. Yep, we're going to give the blog a makeover. It's time to shake things up a bit. Keep Neatorama fresh and all that.
Now, blog redesigns are fraught with potential problems (this is not our first redesign, but so far, all Neatorama's theme changes had been incremental and evolutionary - I'm thinking that we should shake it up by a lot this time), some people simply hate change, and it's just nice to have our readers to be involved - so let me ask you: what can we do to improve the blog? What should and shouldn't we do in this redesign?
There are things that I can't change: we need ads to help defray the cost of running the blog, so eliminating ads is not a viable option (though we try to keep the number of ad spots to a minimum), and no, we won't get rid of the Upcoming Queue :) (I believe the quality of front-paged UQ posts have improved greatly since the last Great Upcoming Queue Revolt of 2009)
I'd like to keep Neatorama's "everything on the front page" philosophy. We've had this from the start: all of Neatorama's full posts (and comments - if you check the "show comment" box in the footer of the blog) are visible on the front page. The good thing about it is that there's not a lot of clicking. The bad thing is that there's a lot of scrolling - the blog's front page can get quite long. For an ad-supported blog, this philosophy is quite paradoxical. After all, a lot of clicking translates into more pageviews and therefore more ad revenue. But we're not shooting ourselves in the foot here: I believe Neatorama is more reader-friendly because of it and that this philosophy encourages frequent repeat visits. After all, 31.8 million visitors in 2009 (and growing) couldn't be wrong, could they?
There's a lot of things to consider:
Above all, I'd appreciate your input and feedback. Love it or hate it, I'd like to hear what you think about Neatorama. Best 5 comments (it doesn't have to be related to the redesign, and it doesn't have to be all lovey dovey - your honest opinions about the blog, please) will get free T-shirts from the Neatorama Shop.
Thank you!
Update 1/4/10 – Wow, thanks for the thoughtful responses, guys. Do you think that we have too many posts on Neatorama? Too few? Should we do more long posts or less?
Update #2 – The Nokia banners are for a temporary ad campaign. So don’t worry about it being the redesign, mmkay?
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Some scientists say that bowling has existed since Egyptian times and that one of the earliest Egyptian pharaohs was uncovered with primitive bowling pins and balls in his tomb. Others dismiss these findings, but historians agree the sport has existed in some form or another since at least 300 AD in Germany. Needless to say, the sport has come a long way in the last millennia. In fact, it is now the most popular sport outside of soccer (football) worldwide and there’s even an active movement to make bowling an Olympic sport.
The sport was referenced in writing for the first time when the English King Edward the III banned his troops from lawn bowling in order to prevent their being distracted from archery practice. While the game is now considered to be largely blue collar, Henry VIII is said to have been a fan of the game and used cannon balls in sport.
Meanwhile, Germans continued playing a traditional outdoor version of the sport known as skittles, which used heavy balls to knock down small pins called skittles. This game served as the inspiration for the more popular modern forms of bowling, starting with ninepin, which was introduced in America in the colonial era. Unfortunately, the sport began being associated with gambling, workplace truancy, and crime, leading to its illegalization in many cities.
In 1841, the entire state of Connecticut banned ninepin bowling, which some claim led to the invention of tenpin bowling by people who were circumventing the law. Others claim the game started earlier though and that it only gained popularity in the area due to the outlawing of the more common ninepin game. It is said that the wooden version of the modern bowling ball was invented on December 29, 1862, but it’s difficult to find more information on this claim than the date. Regardless, the first standardized rules for tenpin were undoubtedly established in New York City in September 9, 1895.
Sources #1, #2 Image Via John McNab [Flickr]
In 1914, Brunswick improved the game switching out wooden balls with hard rubber balls. In 1936, bowling became a lot quicker and less expensive because the pinboys were replaced with semi-automatic pinsetters. In 1946, AMF created the first completely automatic pinsetter, which was soon replaced by a 1955 Brunswick model. The later versions of this machine are in operation in the majority of alleys today.
The game’s popularity exploded in the U.S. in the 1970s after automatic scorer became commonplace in bowling alleys across the country. Because the scoring for bowling is somewhat complicated, bowlers before this invention came out had to have a somewhat detailed understanding of the game. Nowadays, casual bowlers, professionals and kids can all share the same lanes and not have to worry about the difficulties of keeping score.
Source #1, #2 Image Via Hryck. [Flickr]
I’m sure most of you know that in bowling, when you knock down a pin, you get a point for that pin. The confusion about scoring comes into play when the bowler gets a strike or a spare. When you get a strike, you get 10 points, plus the points for the next two balls thrown. When you get a spare, you get 10 points and the points for the next ball thrown. So, if you got a strike and then you get four pins and then six pins (a spare) and on your next frame you get one gutter ball and then one pin, you would get 20 points (10+4+6) for the strike, 10 points (4+6+0) for the spare and then 1 point for the open frame, for a total of 31 points for all three frames. In the last frame, if you get a strike, you get more balls.
One reason the experts will still count their games by hand sometimes is that the pinsetter will occasionally knock down a pin that moved positions during play. The automatic scorer will often count these pins, but according to the official rules of the game, only pins that fall over on their own are supposed to be counted.
If you happen to make strikes the entire game, you get 300 points for the twelve roll game. This is known as a perfect game.
Source Image Via Roadsidepictures [Flickr]
While you may have laughed at the pathetic professionals in the movie King Pin, bowling celebrities, particularly in the 60’s were actually a big deal. In fact, the first athlete of any kind to receive a million dollar endorsement deal wasn’t a basketball or football player, but instead a bowler. Don Carter received this extraordinary deal in 1964 when he signed a multi-year deal with Ebonite International.
In more modern times, there are still some notable celebrities in the sport, like Jeremy Sonnenfeld, who, in 1997, became the first person to ever roll three perfect games in a row in a three-game series. Also impressive was 2006’s 10 year-old star Chaz Dennis who was the youngest person in history to bowl a perfect game.
With 1024 possible outcomes in a game of bowling, it is easy to see just how hard it is to achieve the perfect game. Still, a number of bowling purists claim that technology has been making this feat increasingly easy to accomplish. Changing materials in balls, synthetic lane materials, oiling machines that lay out the oiling patterns in ways that make it easier to hit the pins, have all made bowling increasingly easy. Reports of perfect scores have increased by several thousand percentage points between the 80s and today. As a result, these dedicated bowlers have developed a specific set of rules for what they call “sport bowling,” that makes the game more challenging, as it was in the 1970s.
Source Image Via Johnathan Cohen [Flickr]
Like all sports, bowling has its own jargon that can be difficult for non-bowlers to understand. In case you want to hold a conversation with some league players, here’s a few terms you may want to know (note the number of food-related terms, should bowling replace American football as the national Thanksgiving Day sport?):
-Bedposts: A 7-10 split
-Dutch 200: A game where the player consistently alternates between strikes and spares, resulting in a score of exactly 200
-Goal posts: A 7-10 split
-Golden turkey: Nine strikes in a row
-Ham bone: Four strikes in a row
-Six pack: Six strikes in a row
-Thanksgiving turkey: A perfect game
-Turkey: Three strikes in a row
-Turkey sandwich: When someone gets a spare and then a turkey, followed by another spare
-Wild turkey: Six strikes in a row
While most people have a less-than-athletic image of bowlers, the sport can actually be a good form of exercise and may help improve social relationships. Studies have shown it helps burn calories, regulates blood pressure and prevents osteoporosis and works muscle groups that are not normally exercised.
Source Image Via calaggie [Flickr]
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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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Hello Neatoramanauts! A quickie update from Neatoland:
Christmas Orders
A big thank you for everyone who placed their orders from the Neatorama Shop this Christmas season. Your orders help support the blog and all of us here are thankful for your business.
Christmas is coming up quickly – and if you haven’t placed your order, it’s really going to be close. Though the cut-off date for orders was December 17, 2009 as outlined in the Shop’s shipping guideline, we’ll continue to process order and will do our best to ship them so they arrive in time for Christmas. A lot of this, however, will depend on the weather being cooperative
Tokyoflash Treasure Hunt
A couple of weeks ago, we had our tenth Tokyoflash Treasure Hunt. It was harder than the previous hunts, but nearly 400 of you got the answers right. A winner was selected at random from the list. Congratulations to jocelynese who won a Kisai Keisan Black with Green LED, courtesy of the good folks at Tokyoflash.
What is it? Games
We’ve been having a lot of fun at our weekly What is it? games. Congratulations to Bruno Cabral and Muppetmaker who won Game 118, and to canem and Fuzz who won Game 119. I’ve just sent the T-shirts recently (Sorry – swamped with work here). There’s a game on right now, so here’s your chance.
Ad with Audio
We’ve run into a small bug here with some ads that self-start with audio. Sorry about that! It’s not supposed to be (only a small fraction was affected), so please be patient while we chase down that bug.
Thank you!
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Hopside Down Beer Bottle in a Glass - $19.95 | Borrow My Pen - Humorous Pens everyone will want to borrow! - $6.45 | Road Mice Computer Mouse - shaped like your favorite cars! |
Buckyballs:
Buckyballs (w/ Mystery Bonus)
Today's the last day to order for Christmas with regular delivery (for US destinations), so if you've spotted something you want (or want to give) from the Neatorama Christmas Special list, it's time to act! Every purchase will come with a free Mystery Bonus while supplies last.
Your purchase helps support the blog. Thank you!
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We all know the tired old legends and facts – George Washington ‘fessed up to chopping down a cherry tree; Abraham Lincoln lived in a log cabin; JFK had an affair with Marilyn Monroe; Bill Clinton had some laundering issues with a Gap dress. But there’s more than meets the eye with the Presidents – here are a few lesser-known facts about each of them. And in case you’re wondering about the weird math, Grover Cleveland was President for non-consecutive terms (the only President to ever do so, actually), so he technically counts as Presidents #22 and #24.
1. George Washington indulged in luxuries such as leopard-skin blankets for all of his horses.
2. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day – July 4, 1826, which just so happened to be the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
3. Thomas Jefferson attributed his long life (he lived to the age of 83, which was pretty long in the tooth for the early 1800s) to his daily habit of cold foot baths.
4. James Madison is the shortest president to date, standing just 5’4”. His stature didn’t go unnoticed – John Quincy Adams’ wife once described him as “a very small man in his person with a very large head.”
5. James Monroe once chased William H. Crawford, his secretary of the treasury, out of the White House with a pair of red hot tongs from the fireplace. Crawford gave Monroe a list of people he wanted considered for “political patronage,” and when Monroe informed Crawford that his list was not needed or wanted, Crawford called the President “a damned infernal scoundrel.” When he brandished his cane at Monroe, Monroe went for the tongs.
6. John Quincy Adams didn’t have such a great relationship with his three sons. When one of them failed to make the top 10 in his class at Harvard, JQA wrote to him and said that he felt “Nothing but shame and sorrow in your presence.” That was his namesake, John, who later became an alcoholic, as did brother George. George later committed suicide.
7. Andrew Jackson was nearly assassinated. A man named Richard Lawrence decided that Jackson was the only thing keeping him from inheriting the British throne and tried to shoot him as Jackson was leaving the Capitol. The gun misfired. Lawrence came prepared with a backup gun, drew it, and fired again. It also misfired. Legend has it that about this time, Jackson started beating his would-be killer with his cane. Davy Crockett was one of the men who helped disarm Lawrence.
8. Martin Van Buren didn’t relish his days in the White House, to be sure. He once said, “As for the presidency, the two happiest days of my life were those of my entrance upon the office and my surrender of it.” It didn’t stop him for running for a second term (he didn’t achieve it).
9. William Henry Harrison. His death is the reason we have firm plans in place for the presidential succession. Harrison served just 31 days, 12 hours and 30 minutes of his presidency; he died of pneumonia and septicemia and was the first American President to die in office. At the time, no one was sure if the Vice President should become President or would merely be Acting President. It was decided that since Harrison’s VP John Tyler took the Oath of Office, he would retain the title for the duration of Harrison’s original term.
10. John Tyler married a girl 30 years his junior (Julia, pictured) and began courting her just three months after his wife’s death. His youngest daughter – the fifteenth Tyler child – was born when Tyler was 70.
11. James K. Polk never vacationed, kept long hours and was always all business. He accomplished much during his presidency, including a victory in the Mexican-American War, founding an independent treasury, opened the Naval Academy, issued the first postage stamps, opened the Smithsonian Museum and oversaw the groundbreaking for the Washington Monument, and expanded the United States further west. He also died just three months after leaving office – most historians agree that he basically worked himself to death.
12. Zachary Taylor was a big fan of chewing tobacco and had no problems with spitting his chaw juice out on the White House carpet if a suitable urn wasn’t available.
13. Millard Fillmore met Queen Victoria in 1855. She promptly declared that Fillmore was the handsomest man she had ever laid eyes upon. He was also the last member of the Whig Party to be President.
14. Franklin Pierce was a rather tragic figure. His first two sons died in childhood – one at birth and one at the age of four. Young deaths were not uncommon at the time, but it caused his wife to become a bit overprotective of their third and last son, Bennie. Two months before Pierce took office, he and his family were traveling in a train that derailed and then slid down an embankment. The only fatality? Eleven-year-old Bennie.
15. James Buchanan is the only president who never married. He was engaged once, but it ended pretty badly – her parents convinced her that Buchanan wasn’t good enough for her, so she broke it off. She then took ill and died soon after. Buchanan wrote a letter to her father and asked to be allowed to follow after her coffin at the funeral; her father had it returned to sender.
16. Abraham Lincoln was notoriously messy. Legend has it that his office was a terrible mess and that he kept an envelope in his desk that said, “When you can’t find it anywhere else, look into this.”
17. Andrew Johnson was a tailor and absolutely loved his job. In fact, when he was governor of Tennessee, he took time out of his busy schedule to custom make a suit for a local blacksmith.
18. Ulysses S. Grant’s grandson, Ulysses S. Grant III, graduated sixth in his class at West Point Academy in 1903. The best student that year? Douglas MacArthur.
19. Rutherford B. Hayes didn’t actually win the presidential election – he lost to Samuel Tilden by about 250,000 votes. But the vote tallying was a mess and a bunch of the electoral votes were in dispute, so the Electoral Commission was quickly formed to determine the outcome. They obviously found in favor of Hayes, leaving Tilden supporters to dub Rutherford “Rutherfraud,” “His Fraudulency” and “His Accidency.”
20. James A. Garfield was shot on July 2, 1881, but he didn’t die until September 19. Most historians agree that the doctors who poked and prodded and used rather strange and unsanitary measures to try to “save” him are probably the ones that actually killed him.
21. Chester A. Arthur was a clotheshorse and was the first president to hire someone to attend to his wardrobe. He reportedly had more than 80 pairs of pants.
22. Grover Cleveland had a secret operation to remove a tumor in his mouth while he was president. He boarded a yacht headed upstate as if it were a fun diversion, but while he was tucked away from the public eye, doctors removed the tumor from his upper palette. No one knew about the incident until 24 years later, when one of the doctors who performed the surgery finally spilled the beans. You can now visit the tumor at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, which has an exhibit dedicated to the event.
23. Benjamin Harrison was the last president to wear a beard.
24. William McKinley’s wife had epileptic seizures on a fairly regular basis. He responded to them by arranging his handkerchief over her head – the darkness seemed to help – and carrying on as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.
25. Theodore Roosevelt was a big fan of food. He drank about a gallon of coffee a day and would sometimes eat a dozen hard-boiled eggs for breakfast.
26. William Howard Taft is the only man, thus far, to have been the leader of both the Executive and Judicial branches of government. He became Chief Justice eight years after his term as President ended and considered this the highlight of his career – “I do not remember that I was ever President,” he once said.
27. Woodrow Wilson was one of the few Presidents to endure dating while acting as Commander in Chief. His first wife died of Bright’s Disease in 1914, and by 1915 he was dating his would-be second wife, Edith Boling Galt. As you might expect, the media followed them around mercilessly and reported on their dates. The Washington Post once typoed that President Wilson “spent most of his time entering Ms. Galt.” Whoops. Since they meant to write “entertaining,” that entire newspaper was recalled. Wilson also signed off some of his letters to Galt as “Tiger.”
28. Warren G. Harding loved gambling and once lost an entire box of White House china in a game.
29. Calvin Coolidge’s son is probably the only fatality to occur at the White House because of the White House. He was playing a game of tennis with his older brother and developed a blister on his big toe. The blister became infected and Cal Jr. died of blood poisoning within days.
30. Herbert Hoover wrote a book called Fishing For Fun – And To Wash Your Soul. An excerpt: “Association with the placid ripples of the waves and the quiet chortle of the streams is soothing to our ‘het-up’ anxieties.”
31. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was driven around in a hand-me-down Cadillac that previously belonged to Al Capone. After Pearl Harbor, the Secret Service decided that the limo FDR was tooling around in wasn’t safe enough. Capone’s car was outfitted with a ton of armor since he was so commonly targeted, so it was deemed safe enough for Roosevelt.
32. Harry S Truman. The “S” in Harry S Truman doesn’t stand for anything. His parents argued over whether it should stand for “Shippe” or “Solomon,” his paternal and maternal grandparents respectively, and so it was just left as “S.”
33. Dwight D. Eisenhower desperately wanted to play professional baseball. Later in life, he said that “”not making the baseball team at West Point was one of the greatest disappointments of my life, maybe my greatest.”
34. John F. Kennedy’s 1935 yearbook named him “Most likely to become President.”
35. Lyndon B. Johnson. For two hours and eight minutes after JFK’s assassination, we had no President. LBJ was sworn in on Air Force One in Dallas at Love Field Airport; he is the only President to be sworn in on Texas soil. He was also the first President to be sworn in by a woman.
36. Richard Nixon always wore a coat and tie – even when he was at home by himself, according to one biography.
37. Gerald Ford is the only President who also had a modeling career. He was in Look magazine in 1939 and was on the cover of Cosmopolitan in 1942. He’s also the only President to ever tackle a future Heisman winner – when he played football for the University of Michigan Wolverines, he tackled University of Chicago running back Jay Berwanger, who won the first-ever Heisman Trophy the following year. 
38. Jimmy Carter is the only President to file an official report to detail a UFO sighting. He claimed he and several members of his Lion’s Club saw a UFO hovering about 900 yards away from them in Georgia in 1969.
39. Ronald Reagan was a notorious doodler and wasn’t immune to entertaining himself during “boring” meetings by doing such. Those are his scribbles to the left.
40. George H.W. Bush was awarded an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in 1993. He’s just the third President to receive the honor – the other two were Eisenhower and Reagan.
41. Bill Clinton. There’s a statue of Clinton playing golf in Ballybunion, Ireland.
42. George W. Bush is the only U.S. President to have an MBA.
43. Barack Obama’s brother-in-law is the head men’s basketball coach at Oregon State University.
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Bombs
Away Shot Glass - $19.95
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w00t! We've just gotten a new shipment of some of our most popular products ... so we've just added them to the Neatorama Christmas Special. Every purchase will get you a free Mystery Bonus.
Quantities are very limited, so order now to get it in time for Christmas, mmmkay? Your purchase helps support the blog. Thank you!
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Zoos, or at least animal menageries, have been around since at least Roman times when exotic animals were collected for the purpose of being used in battles in the coliseum. During medieval times, the greatest zoo around was actually contained in the Tower of London. It was opened to the public for the first time during the reign of Elizabeth I. During the 18th century, guests could visit the zoo for only three half-pence, or they could come for free if they brought a dog or cat to feed to the lions. This animal collection was eventually moved into the world’s first official “zoo,” the London Zoological Gardens.
Over the years, zoos have moved from being collections of caged animals designed to please the public to expansive parks dedicated to maintaining ecological diversity and conservation. While modern day zoos are mostly safe places where the public can go to see wild, exotic animals, this isn’t always the case. Here are some weird stories relating to modern zoos in honor of Visit The Zoo Day on December 27.
Image Via www.theedinburghblog.com [Flickr]
When the only two zebras in the Mara Land Zoo in Gaza Strip starved to death during the Israel-Hamas war, zoo officials knew they needed the popular creatures in order to entertain the crowds. Unfortunately, replacing the expensive attractions through the secret underground tunnels in the area was not an option for the financially strapped zoo. So keepers did what any good zoologists would do and just faked their zebra collection by painting donkeys to look like their stripped cousins. To give them the dye jobs, zoo keepers used masking tape and black hair dye to create “authentic” stripping patterns on the creatures. While it may sound like a bad solution, many of the zoo’s young guests had never seen a real zebra and were equally impressed by the frauds. I guess it is still better to see a mock wild animal than no wild animals.
Source Image Via Associated Press
What’s exotic to one culture may just be a standard farm animal to another, as evidenced by Khanzir, the only known pig in all of Afghanistan. Because pork products are illegal in the country, the pig is a true rarity in the country, who received Khanzir as a gift from China. As if the poor pig wasn’t lonely enough grazing beside goats and deer, when fear of the swine flu hit the country, he was forced to spend his time in quarantine all by himself.
The zoo director, Mr Saqib explained the zoo’s decision to isolate the animal, despite the knowledge that it would not actually be able to infect the general public, “The only reason we moved him was because Afghan people don’t have a lot of knowledge about swine flu, and so when they see a pig they get worried and think they will get ill.”
Mr. Saqib does have hopes to alleviate the pig’s loneliness though, he says after the swine flu concerns die down, he would like to get Khanzir a female companion. Perhaps then, poor little Khanzir could at least be a member of the only pig family in the country.
If you’ve ever wondered how keepers prepare for the possibility of an animal escaping the zoo, you’re not alone. Fortunately, thanks to the miracle of the internet, a Japanese training session to get keepers prepared for a potential rhino escape has been caught on tape and made its way into your home. The “rhino” in this case is pretty darn terrifying, what with its eight legs and all. While the team’s efforts seem effective, you have to wonder if they would work nearly as well when the beast is actually 1 ton and angry as all heck.
Perhaps those zoo keepers should have worked on their plans for escaped primates rather than escaped rhinos. A video seen on Animal Planet (sorry its not embedded, but they don’t offer that service) demonstrates the terrifying things that happened when a four-hundred pound angry orangutan broke out of its cage and chased tourists and charged security guards. During his escapade in the outside world, Blacky also smashed some scooters and took control of a camera tripod hoping to use it as weapon against the guards who shot him with a tranquilizer dart.
In the shot, you see just how long it takes for a huge animal to fall after getting shot with a tranquilizer dart –meaning the rhino training exercise certainly was optimistic about that part of the procedure.
In nature, it is not uncommon for a mother to abandon her cub. Some environmentalists claim that the best thing to do in these situations is to let nature take its course and let the cub die off. But when the animal is already affected by human intervention because it lives in a zoo, it seems more than a little cold-hearted to just abandon the cub. Zookeeper Thomas Dörflein agreed, which is why he saved a two newborn polar bears that were abandoned by their mother.
One of the bears died of an infection within four days, but the other, Knut, was hand raised by Dörflein, who provided the cub with around-the-clock care. Only a few months into little Knut’s life, a German tabloid carried an article about Knut that featured a quote by animal rights activist Frank Albrecht, who said the bear should have been left to die rather than be subjected to a life as “a domestic pet.” The director of another local zoo agreed with Albrect and said that keepers should have “had the courage to let the bear die.” To be fair, both of the people quoted said they were taken out of context and Dörflein has said that he was making a point about a German court’s decision saying that it was OK for another zoo to have euthanized an abandoned cub in a similar situation.
Naturally, animal lovers everywhere rallied in support of the little bear and the Berlin Zoo vowed to keep him alive and care for him. As a result of the controversy, Knut became a worldwide celebrity and videos of the little cub with his zookeeper were loaded onto YouTube for everyone to marvel at. His fame brought so many visitors to the zoo that it soon experienced its most profitable year out of its entire 163 year history.
As Knut grew older, he continued to be a popular attraction for visitors and he is still living at the zoo. Unfortunately, Dörflein died of a heart attack in 2008, although he remains a hero to many residents of Berlin.
Source Image Via Jean-Luc [Wikipedia Commons]
A long time ago (actually as recent as 1958 in Brussels), it wasn’t uncommon for humans of other races to be displayed in zoos alongside exotic animals. While racism in that time is not unusual, having people live in a zoo these days certainly is. But in 2007, the Adelaide Zoo in Australia ran a zoo exhibit where humans were housed in a former ape enclosure (they did get to go home at night). Inhabitants took part in a number of exercises and the amused onlookers were then asked for donations towards a new enclosure for a new exhibit for the chimpanzees.
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Goldilocks
and the Three Bears: The True Story - $14.95
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Howdy everyone! We've just added Mike Jacobsen's excellent T-shirts to the Neatorama Shop's Christmas Special. Every purchase will get you a free Mystery Bonus, and it's not too late to order for Christmas (it's almost time - you've got till Dec 17, 2009 to order with regular shipping for the United States): Link
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Ford
GT Red/White Stripes - $58.95
We've just gotten our shipment of Road Mice, the wireless computer mouse shaped like your favorite cars! These puppies are gorgeous - and come complete with functioning headlights and smooth lines that give it a realistic car look and feel (except, you know, they're tiny!)
To sweeten the deal, we've added our Christmas Special Mystery Bonus to these items. Every purchase of the Road Mice computer mouse will come with a free Mystery Bonus.
The Road Mice will make the perfect Christmas gift for the car lovers in your family. Quantities are extremely limited - in the past, we've sold out of these in just a couple of days, so get yours now: Link (scroll down)
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Just added to the Neatorama Shop's Christmas Special, where every purchase will get you a free Mystery Bonus. Your purchase helps support the blog, so skip the hassle of going to the mall this Christmas and buy something, mmkay? :)
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These days, everyone’s heard of Michel de Nostredame, better known as Nostradamus, but most people just know that he was one of the most famous seers in history. Most people don’t really know about his specific predictions, his life or why he’s so famous. To help clear the air and to celebrate Nostradamus’ December 14 birthday, here’s a bit of info on the most famous psychic in history.
A lot of the books about Nostradamus’ prophecies also include pieces of his biography. Unfortunately, just as the prophecies suffer from poor or manipulated translations, his biographies in these texts are often based on rumors or complete fabrication. There are stories that he was educated by his grandfathers, who were both physicians to the court of Good King Rene of Provence, but there is no evidence of this at all.
The books also claim he obtained his medical doctorate from Montpellier University and that he then began lecturing at the school, but this is directly contradicted by the slim bit of documented facts about his life. Before attending the university, he traveled the countryside working as an apothecary, which led to his expulsion from the university after the administrators learned that he used to work as an apothecary, which was expressly banned by university rules. The University of Montpellier still has the expulsion documents related to the incidents in its library. Needless to say, it seems unlikely the university then hired him to work as a lecturer.
Other tales about Nostradamus say that he cured the plague. While the plague was certainly a big part of his life (it resulted in his leaving his first formal school at University of Avignon after the college closed due to a plague outbreak and, later, it killed his first wife and their two children), I’m sure you already know that the seer did not make any major advances in curing the disease.
That’s not to say he didn’t try to cure the plague though. After his expulsion from the University of Montpellier, Nostradamus became well-known around the country for creating a rose pill that allegedly protected against the plague. If the pill worked though, his wife and kids may actually have survived.
He wrote about the methods he used to treat the plague in his medical book Traité des fardemens, where he admitted that none of his techniques, which included bloodletting, actually worked.
Later on, he started to move away from his work as a healer and towards the occult. As was common for seers in the time, he wrote an almanac in 1550. This was when he first changed his name from the French Nostredame to the Latin Nostradamus. The almanac did so well, that he started writing at least one annually after that.
The almanacs are known to contain over 6,000 prophecies and 11 annual calendars, which all start on January 1. The many biographies about him by his followers claim that he identified the future pope, but again, there is no evidence to suggest this was actually true. After his almanacs did so well, it wasn’t long before people started approaching him for horoscopes and psychic advice.
When Nostradamus did psychic readings, he often asked his clients to bring their own birth charts for him to base his predictions on, unlike professional astrologers who would have calculated their own charts. When he had to use common published tables of the time, he made many errors and never adjusted the predictions for his client’s birth dates or place, as astrologers were supposed to do.
When he started writing Prophecies, astrologers thought Nostradamus was a fool because he claimed to be able to predict the future by comparing past planetary configurations with the events that unfolded at the time to future planetary alignments.
Interestingly, research has suggested this is not even how he made his predictions. Instead, he combined ancient end-of-the-world prophecies with references of historical events and omen report anthologies. Only then did he actually use any astrology to actually help project the events into the future. He mentions astrology only 43 times in his full prophecies, even though the predictions are supposedly based on this pseudoscience.
Speaking of shortcomings, Nostradamus was a bit of a plagiarizer. To be fair, it was common for authors of the time to use the works of others and not credit them, but a lot of his books, even his predictions, were total rip-offs of other people’s ideas and works. A lot of his astrological references are almost word for word the same as the 1550 book Livre de l’estat et mutations des temps by Richard Roussat.
One of his biggest sources in prophecies was the Mirabilis liber of 1522, which had a wide range of prophecies from well-known seers. The book was widely successful when it came out, but because it was difficult to read due to its Latin text, Gothic script and difficult abbreviations, it had fallen out of favor by the time Nostradamus paraphrased it. Some experts believe this is why he is credited with many of these prophecies, even though they were known long before he wrote them.
Another of his sources, a book on Chaldean and Assyrian magic by a 4th century Neo-Platonist called Iamblichus, was paraphrased almost word for word in a part of his Prophecies.
You may wonder how the Prophecies were received at the time. After all, it seems like the Catholic Church may have opposed anything occult and many biographies by his supporters claim he was afraid of the Inquisition. In reality though, prophecy and astrology were not considered heresy at the time and Nostradamus was careful to avoid practicing magic, which the church was against.
The Church actually had a good relationship with Nostradamus and they supported his work as both a healer and a prophet. He was temporarily imprisoned in 1561, but this was only because he published one of his almanacs without having permission from a bishop, which violated a recent royal decree.
Despite the Church’s support of his work though, some people still thought he was evil and Nostradamus worked to avoid persecution from religious fanatics by obscuring his works by mixing a variety of languages, including Greek, French, Italian and Latin, together. Of course, like today, other people believed he was purely a fraud.
Still, many people (often the elites) did enjoy his Prophecies and one of his biggest admirers was Queen Catherine de Médicis. In fact, she summoned him to Paris to explain his predictions from his 1555 almanac that hinted at threats to the royal family. While there, she had him draw up horoscopes for her children as well. When he was ordered to come to Paris, he said he was worried he was to be beheaded, but instead he found one of his greatest supporters. By the end of his life, eleven years later, he was the Counselor and Physician-in-Ordinary to the king, Henri II of France.
In 1566, Nostradamus realized that the gout he had long been suffering from would probably get the best of him soon. He summoned his lawyer and drew up a will for his wife and children. Again, many biographers took liberties with this point of his life, as many claim he gave his son a lost book of his prophetic paintings, but yet again, there is no evidence of this.
On July 1st, claims say he told his secretary, “You will not find me alive at sunrise.” He was found dead the next morning.
He was buried in the local chapel (interestingly, part of this chapel is now incorporated into a restaurant), and many of his followers claim he was buried standing up, although he wasn’t. During the French revolution, his body was moved to the Collégiale Saint-Laurent. His followers claim that when his body was excavated he was wearing a medallion bearing that exact date. Needless to say, this was a complete fabrication.
Since his death, Nostradamus’ predictions have constantly been claimed as accurate immediately after a major world event has occurred. Those who translate his texts often do so inaccurately, so they can be used to predict past events. His works are retranslated constantly so they can be applied to new events that have happened.
Some of his followers even claim that he has coded his works with certain misspellings or punctuations, but this is completely wrong because the printing practices during his lifetime meant that no two editions of his original works are the exact same.
Events he has said to have predicted include the French Revolution, the Great London Fire, Napoleon’s rise, World War II, the challenger space shuttle’s crashing, and, most recently, September 11. Fortunately for his followers, none of his predictions are dated and they are all vague, so it’s easy to take loose translations of his prophecies and apply them to just about any of these events after they have happened. No one has ever been able to use one of his predictions to accurately predict an event before it happened.
The prophecies people most often use to refer to World War II include the word “Hister,” which is often wrongly translated directly to “Hitler.” However, Hister is a classic name for the lower Danube River. Some of his followers acknowledge this error and then try to claim that Nostradamus was still referring to Hitler because he was born near the lower Danube.
After the September 11 attacks, followers of the seer immediately went to work looking for verses that could be applied to the national tragedy. One of their favorite verses was:
In the City of God there will be a great thunder,
Two brothers torn apart by Chaos,
while the fortress endures,
the great leader will succumb,
The third big war will begin when the big city is burning
One of the variants of this quote actually was said to be signed by Nostradamus in 1654, when he would have been 150 years old. Funny enough, this verse was never even written by Nostradamus. The first four lines were constructed by Canadian grad student Neil Marshall, who was trying to make a point in a research paper about how vague statements by Nostradamus are often used retroactively to describe world events. Obviously, his point was pretty valid. The last line on the verse (notably longer than the others) was made by an anonymous internet user, who completely ignored Nostradamus’ writing style in his Prophecies.
Another verse used by the fans of the “seer” to prove he predicted the attacks said:
Five and forty degrees, the sky shall burn:
To great ‘New City’ shall the fire draw nigh.
With vehemence the flames shall spread and churn
When with the Normans they conclusions try.
This quote was at least by Nostradamus, but even so, it hardly proves the prophet was able to foresee the September 11 attacks. Followers say the “five and forty degrees” related to the latitude of New York City, but the latitude of the city is actually 40 degrees. Naturally, fans also say “New City” refers to New York, when it actually is literally any new city. The “Normans” line, of course, doesn’t make any sense to fit in with the attacks, so many people have conveniently just left them out when quoting his predictions.
Scholars that study Nostradamus say that these lines are merely future projections of the 1139 conquer of Naples by the Normans. The fire lines refer to a violent eruption of Mount Vesuvius that happened at the same time as the attack. In this case, 45 degrees actually is the latitude of Naples.
The internet hoax about the 9-11 attacks were not the only time that someone has used a quote by someone else and used it in Nostradamus’ name. After the 2000 presidential election, the following quote was widely circulated as a Nostradamus prophecy:
Come the millennium, month 12
In the home of greatest power
The village idiot will come forth
To be acclaimed the leader.
Most scholars believe this one was actually written as a joke, but someone picked it up and decided to spread it as though it really was a prediction of the seer.
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Just added to Neatoama Shop's Christmas Special, where each purchase gets you a free Mystery Bonus. It's not too late to order for Christmas delivery (last day to order is Dec 17 for US orders) : Link
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Gin & Titonic Ice Tray – $6.45
How do you make sure that your next party is unsinkable? The answer may just be in your drinks.
Just added to the Neatorama Shop’s Christmas Special, where every purchase gets you a free Mystery Bonus. At just $6.45 (the cheapest price on the Net, I might add) it’ll make a great Christmas gift that you can use year round.
Your purchase helps support the blog, thank you! Link | More Fun & Unusual Ice Trays
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Arch
Enemy T-Shirt by Adam Koford
Our pal Adam "Ape Lad" Koford has a new line of colorful T-shirts over at the Neatorama Shop that'll make the perfect Christmas gift. The shirts are based on some of his tweets.
Help support Adam and Neatorama, and get a great T-shirt to boot! Check 'em out:
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Part of Neatorama's Christmas Special, where purchase of every item gets a free Mystery Bonus: Link
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Borrow My Pen – $6.45
Tired of people "borrowing" your pen all the time? Well, give ‘em a little shock with these subversively funny pens. Each of them are printed with fake but very funny company names and tag lines, such as:
Part of Neatorama’s Christmas Special (purchase of each product will get you a Free Mystery Bonus). Perfect for stocking stuffers. Get ‘em while you still can: Link
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We think we live in such modern times, with fabulous inventions that make our lives easier and provide great convenience. But some of those inventions might not be as modern as we think. Take a look at these five inventions that may have been around for thousands of years before we “invented” them.
A jet engine in the first century B.C.? Perhaps. A jet engine in the first century A.D.? Definitely. The aeolipile is a rocket style jet engine that spins when it’s heated and is the first-ever device known to use steam for a rotary motion. Although it was “invented” in 1698 by Thomas Savery, the original may have been invented in the first century B.C. Roman architect Vitruvius’ De architectura, a work on then-modern architecture written around 25 B.C., includes a device called the aeolipile. However, it has never been verified that his aeolipile (which translates to “ball of Aeolus,” who was the god of the wind, so it’s kind of a generic name that could apply to various inventions) was the aeolipile that we know existed in the first century.
That’s the aeolipile that Hero of Alexander wrote about, including a detailed description of how to construct one. The invention credit is usually given to Hero instead of Vitruvius.
That Hero was a pretty smart guy. He also invented the vending machine long before we were prying Kit Kats out of them in our office break rooms. Hero rigged it so that when a coin was dropped into a slot, it fell on a pan, and the weight of it on the pan triggered a lever that opened up a valve that let some holy water flow out to the person who dropped the coin in. The pan kept tilting until the coin fell off of it, and when that happened the valve closed and the water would no longer dispense. The first modern-day vending machine came about in the 1880s, so you could say that Hero was well ahead of his time.
We’ve long thought that the first astronomical clocks didn’t show up until the 14th century in Europe. That all changed in 1900 when a group of divers discovered shipwreck thought to date back to 150-100 BC. A lot of the loot was stuff you might expect from that era – statues, busts, instruments and utensils. But then one of the divers spotted what looked like a gear stuck in a rock, which was eventually found to be just one of many pieces of the same thing. Upon closer inspection and much analysis (decades of analysis, in fact), it was determined that the gear and its 80+ other pieces were part of a complicated mechanism that precisely calculated the position of the sun, moon, planets and other astronomical information. It was capable of predicting an eclipse right down to the hour that it would occur. Astronomer John Seiradakis has called it the “pocket calculator of its time.” Its construction was so perfect and exact that many historians and archaeologists believe that the Antikythera Mechanism was just one of many similar devices – we just haven’t discovered the other ones yet.
Here’s curator Michael Wright with his working replica of the Antikythera Mechanism – it’s pretty interesting stuff. Photo from the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project.
We’re not sure about this one – it’s just a theory. But there is some speculation that the ancient Egyptians may have understood how to harness electricity. The entire argument is based on stone reliefs inside the Dendera Temple complex in Egypt. What the etching appears to depict, to some, are bulbs, filaments and insulators. It also looks like a lotus flower and a snake. The argument could probably stop there – obviously humans are programmed to spot patterns in things and could easily see a now-everyday object in an ancient etching when it’s really not there. But English scientist J.N. Lockyer (he discovered helium) pointed out that the tombs were conspicuously soot-free – if Egyptians were using candles or torches, there would no doubt be some evidence of it on the walls or ceilings. But there is no evidence. A lot of people believe that the Egyptians used a series of mirrors to reflect the sunlight into the temple, but others say that their mirrors were too weak to do any such thing. Thus, the argument continues. What do you think? Photo from Wikipedia user Liftarn.
Along the same line as the Dendera Temple light is the Baghdad Battery. In the mid-1930s, a number of artifacts thought to date back to 200 BC were found in Khuyut Rabbou’a, a village near Baghdad. The combination of objects – a five-inch long clay jar and a copper cylinder that encased an iron rod – led researchers to believe that the ancient artifacts were actually used as batteries. Batteries for what, we still don’t know. Unlike the Dendera light though, there’s some evidence that these really were batteries – replicas have been made that did, in fact, conduct an electric current, sometimes as much as two volts. One theory is that the batteries were hidden inside of idols to give tiny little shocks to people, scaring people who didn’t understand the trick and often forcing them to give up secrets or confess to crimes. Photo from the BBC.
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This Christmas, skip the long lines and hassles of going to the mall. Neatorama’s got your covered: you’ll get a free Mystery Bonus with every purchase of select items in our Christmas Special (while supplies last, no rainchecks). New items are added regularly ’til Christmas, so check back often!
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Both Christmas and National Poinsettia Day (December 12) are coming up soon, which brings up some interesting questions you may never have considered before. For example, why is a flower indigenous to Mexico commonly recognized as an international symbol of Christmas? Or why is it so darn hard to keep your poinsettias alive and blooming once you’ve bought them at the store? You may have never thought too hard about the most popular potted plant in America, but here’s your chance to learn about these fascinating blossoms.
Most people consider the bright red (or occasionally pale green, white, orange, cream, pink or marbled) areas on the plants to be the blooms, but in reality, these are just groupings of colored leaves called bracts. The actual flowers are those tiny little buds inside of the bracts (seen above) and these are called cyathias.
While we’re at it, most people think of poinsettias as red flowers, but as mentioned above, they can come in all the colors listed above. Still, over 74% of Americans prefer their poinsettias red, while 8% prefer white and 6% prefer pink.
Image Via Martin Heigan [Flickr]
In Aztec times though, it was called “Cuetlaxochitl,” which means skin flower. In Chile and the Andes, it was known as the “Crown of the Andes.” According to legend, King Montezuma would have the flowers carried up to Mexico City because the flowers would not grow in such a high altitude.
Later on, German botanist Wilenow gave the plant its Latin name, Euphorbia pulcherrima, meaning “very beautiful.” Soon after, it was introduced into the U.S. in 1828 by the first U.S. Minister to Mexico, Joel Roberts Poinsett. Years later, historian and horticulturalist William Prescott was asked to give the plant a new name. Having just written a book about Mexican history, he recalled Poinsett’s role in bringing the flowers into America. Prescott named the plant in Poinsett’s honor. In modern Egypt, they still call the plant “Bent El Consul,” meaning “the consul’s daughter” after Mr. Poinsett.
In Spain, the flower is known as “flor de Pascua” or Easter flower. In Mexico and Guatemala, it is commonly called “Noche Buena” or “Christmas’ Eve.”
Speaking of Christmas, it seems rather strange that these New World plants would become synonymous with a holiday celebrating the birth of a Middle Eastern carpenter. Still, they are in fact the most popular holiday plant around, representing over 85% of all potted plant sales in the holiday season.
The reasons go all the way back to the 16th century, where a Mexican legend began spreading about a young girl who couldn’t afford a gift for Jesus’ birthday. She was said to be told by an angel to gather weeds from the roadside and place them in front of the church altar. Soon after, crimson blossoms sprouted from the weeds and became poinsettias. Starting in the 17th century, Franciscan friars in Mexico began to include the plants in the Christmas celebrations.
Image Via Southern Pixel [Flickr]
Fast forward into America during the sixties and this Mexican tradition started spreading across the U.S. thanks to Paul Ecke Jr. This young man was a marketing genius who started sending television networks free poinsettias for display on air between Thanksgiving and Christmas. He also appeared on programs like “The Tonight Show” and Bob Hope’s Christmas specials to help promote the plant. His efforts were highly successful and largely responsible for the association of poinsettias with Christmas outside of Mexico.
Lest you think Paul was simply an overly enthusiastic supporter of the flower, his intentions were mostly monetary. Paul was an heir of the Ecke family, owners of a virtual monopoly on our modern day idea of poinsettia flowers.
His German immigrant grandfather, Albert Ecke, started selling the plants from street stands after 1900. Paul Ecke the first, Albert’s son, developed a grafting method that resulted in a fuller, more compact plant than the wild plants (seen to the left). He additionally discovered a phytoplasma infection to the plant would induce it to produce far more flowers than its natural, weed-like cousin. The family held the secret to these techniques up until the 1990’s, giving them a monopoly on the poinsettia market up to that point.
In the nineties, a researcher discovered the Ecke’s method and published it, allowing for competitors to the company. These days, many companies in Latin America sell the flowers all over the world, but the Ecke’s family (who now exclusively uses farms outside the U.S.) still controls about 50% of the worldwide market.
Image Via Jiggs Images [Flickr]
In 1919, a completely unfounded story began to circulate that a two year-old child died after she ate a poinsettia leaf. Researchers who looked into the story found that it is all hearsay and about as truthful as the razors in candy apple stories that circulate around Halloween. Ohio State University researchers found that a 50 pound child would have to eat 500 bracts to even get a sore tummy. Despite this, the rumor continues to circulate that poinsettias are poisonous and should not be kept around pets or children.
On the other hand, the sap from poinsettias can cause temporary blindness when introduced directly in the eye and some people with latex allergies will have an allergic reaction to the plants. So the only people who need to be wary of the plants are those that have a latex allergy or anyone with a habit of putting things in their eyes for no reason.
Image Via distopiandreamgirl [Flickr]
If you’ve ever bought poinsettias during the holiday season, you may have noticed just how finicky these beautiful plants can be. Even if you live in an area with a warmer climate that is suitable for the tropical buds, you still may not be able to get your plants to reflower the way they did when you bought them.
The reason for this is encoded in the plant’s genes. In order to produce the vibrant, thick blooms the plant is known for, the plant needs to have two months of completely dark nights in the autumn. Even minor exposure to houselights can hamper flower production. If you really want your plants to reflower, you need to cover the plant with a light-proof bag between 5 pm and 8 am starting early October and stopping when the bracts begin to show colors –usually around mid-December. To make gardening the plant even more complex, you also have to be sure the nighttime temperatures are below 75 degrees Fahrenheit, but also not too cold. Failure to keep the plant in the right temperature can also result in decay or lack of flowers.
Personally, I love gardening and I love poinsettias, but the effort involved with trying to keep them reflowering is just way too much for me. Have any of you had better luck?
Image Via Property#1 [Flickr]
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Because you Neatorama readers are so smart, you might already know how sickle cell anemia makes someone resistant to malaria. This apparent evolutionary disadvantage has actually survived through the generations because it makes individuals more fit for survival in other ways.
While sickle cell anemia is the best known of these evolutionary diseases, it is not the only one. Migraines, depression and bipolar disorder are all passed down genetically, and there’s a good reason these traits that seem to be negative haven’t been eradicated through the millenia.
Migraines don’t just cause majorly painful headaches, they also stimulate the nervous system, making people far more sensitive to light and sound. While this doesn’t really help modern day migraine sufferers, it could help save someone’s life in prehistoric times. Scientists speculate that migraines allowed prehistoric men and women to be one step ahead of their predators and their prey, making them more fit for survival.
Source Image Via Migraine Chick [Flickr]
While between 30 to 50 percent of all people suffer from depression at some point, it doesn’t seem the condition would offer any advantages. Surprisingly, depression actually helps people focus on their problems and then think more clearly about the possible solution to the issues that are bothering them.
Studies show that people who are depressed tend to score better on complex problems in intelligence tests than those who are not. Side effects of depression, such as lack of sexual interest and lack of appetite, can even help prevent distractions from our problem solving abilities.
Source Image Via Darkwood67 [Flickr]
Bipolar disorder works in a much different manner. When individuals inherit severe bipolar disorders, they can have a hard time concentrating, making sound decisions, feeling comfortable in social situations and organizing their time. But, when someone gets the right combination of the genes that cause bipolar disorder, they can see increased creativity, courage and productivity.
Source Image Via Ventolinmono [Flickr]
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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?
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