Forget ball drops and champagnes. Thai people really know how to ring in the new year: with a water fight! During the Songkran festival (the last one was April 13 to 15, 2013), Thai people roamed the street with water buckets and water guns filled with ice cold water to drench friends and foes alike.

Ex-pat Willy Thuan of Phuket 101 has great photos of the festivities, including this one above where the policeman seemed to enjoy being the target, for once:

Everybody will join the Songkran festivities, kids, teens mostly, but also adults and tourists, divided in two camps: the 'Strategically Ambushed' by the road side with plenty of water ammunition, and the 'Mobile Units' in the back of pick up trucks. Shops and supermarket make fortunes selling all kinds of colorful and humongous water guns. But the best weapon remains the good old plastic bowl and a big tank of icy cold water! 

Cops doing traffic and security on the road are always the favourite targets for everyone, but they are used to this and keep a smile all day or even play along. 

Link

Artist James Hance mashed up Wizard of Oz and with a bit of Bouguereau to create this fantastic piece: The Adoration of Elphie. Flying monkeys have never looked so cute!

View more Wizard of Oz stuff from the NeatoShop.

Last week, NASA astronomers monitoring the Moon saw an explosion larger than anything they've seen before. On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in the Mare Imbrium area at an astounding speed of 56,000 mph. The resulting explosion packed as much energy as 5 tons of TNT and left a crater that could be as wide as 65 feet.

NASA astronomer Bill Cooke said:

"On the night of March 17, NASA and University of Western Ontario all-sky cameras picked up an unusual number of deep-penetrating meteors right here on Earth," he says. "These fireballs were traveling along nearly identical orbits between Earth and the asteroid belt."

This means Earth and the Moon were pelted by meteoroids at about the same time.
“My working hypothesis is that the two events are related, and that this constitutes a short duration cluster of material encountered by the Earth-Moon system," says Cooke.

Why, NeatoShop artist Wirdou has the perfect T-shirt for you to commemorate this event:

The Bodyguard | View more Funny T-shirts over at the NeatoShop

It's got to be the beard. Or perhaps the stovepipe hat (which may actually be a fake). Or his poetry. Or his vampire-fighting prowess. But there's no argument that Lincoln is hot (much to the consternation of the Lincoln haters), as this Bizarro comic from Dan Piraro illustrated.

Previously on Neatorama: A Few Things You Might Not Have Known About Abraham Lincoln

Artist Gris Grimly of Mad Creator Productions lived up to his name when he created the spookiest Mickey you've ever seen. Behold, Mickey the Conjurer, as inspired by the Sorcerer's Apprentice from Fantasia. Via Geektyrant.

The Interweb isn't all lolcats and fail memes, in fact it has given us a few new and very interesting words. Tom Chatfield wrote about them in his new book Netymology:

2. Hashtags

In 1920s America, the # sign served as a shorthand for weight in pounds (and they still call it the pound sign). It was first brought to a wider public thanks to its adoption by telephone engineers at Bell Labs in the 1960s as the generic function symbol on their new touch-tone phones – and if you're looking to sound clever, you could call it an "octothorpe", the tongue-in-cheek term coined at Bell to describe it. It's on Twitter, though, that hashtags have really come into their own, serving as a kind of function code for social interaction #ifyoulikethatkindofthing.

8. Meh

There's a special place in my heart for the supremely useful three letters of "meh", which express an almost infinitely flexible contemporary species of indifference. In its basic exclamatory form, it suggests something along the lines of "OK, whatever". As an adjective, it takes on a more ineffable flavour: "it was all very meh". You can even use it as a noun: "I stand by my meh." Apparently first recorded in a 1995 episode of The Simpsons, some theories trace meh back to the disdainful Yiddish term mnyeh. Its ascent towards canonical status, though, embodies a thoroughly digital breed of boredom.

9. Cupertinos

Also known as "auto-correct errors", a Cupertino error occurs when your computer thinks it knows what you're trying to say better than you do. The name comes from an early spell checker program, which knew the word Cupertino - the Californian city where Apple has its headquarters - but not the word "cooperation". All the cooperations in a document might thus be automatically "corrected" into Cupertinos. Courtesy of smartphones, Cupertinos today are a richer field than ever – a personal favourite being my last phone's determination to transform "Facebook" into "ravenous".

Tom has a few more examples over at The Guardian: Link

So this is what living in M.C. Escher's Relativity feels like! Play the Cardboard Box Assembler flash game by Fernando Ramallo and Miguel Ángel Perez Martínez: Link [Flash game] - via Look At This

Sara Rosso loves Nutella. In fact, she loved it so much that seven years ago, the hazelnut chocolate spread superfan founded World Nutella Day, a celebration of all things Nutella.

Over the years, the event grew from a few food bloggers posting recipes to thousands of participants Tweeting, pinning recipes on Pinterest, making songs, poems, and short films.

It's not surprising, because, as you know, yummy Nutella goes with everything. Well, almost everything. There's one thing that doesn't mix well with Nutella and its fans: lawyers.

Sara Rosso wrote on World Nutella Day's website:

On May 25, 2013, I’ll be darkening the World Nutella Day site, nutelladay.com, and all social media presence (Facebook, Twitter), in compliance with a cease-and-desist I received from lawyers representing Ferrero, SpA (makers of Nutella).

Seven years after the first World Nutella Day in 2007, I never thought the idea of dedicating a day to come together for the love of a certain hazelnut spread would be embraced by so many people! I’ve seen the event grow from a few hundred food bloggers posting recipes to thousands of people Tweeting about it, pinning recipes on Pinterest, and posting their own contributions on Facebook! There have been songs sung about it, short films created for it, poems written for it, recipes tested for it, and photos taken for it.

The cease-and-desist letter was a bit of a surprise and a disappointment, as over the years I’ve had contact and positive experiences with several employees of Ferrero, SpA., and with their public relations and brand strategy consultants, and I’ve always tried to collaborate and work together in the spirit and goodwill of a fan-run celebration of a spread I (to this day) still eat.

I have hope that this is not a goodbye to World Nutella Day forever, for the fans’ sake, and hopefully it will live on in one form or another in the future.

Nutella dissing its fans? Now that's just plain nuts: Link

Photo: Miaow Miaow/Wikimedia

Love may just be a subway ride away. Ropid, Prague's public transport company, is planning to provide singles-only train cars:

The project's planners hope the single-only carriages will provide people with a rare opportunity to meet and form a relationship in an increasingly frantic world dominated by work.

"In the metro you can already read and learn, so why not find a partner?" said Filip Drapal, spokesman for Ropid, Prague's transport company. "We want to make life more pleasant. People today have no time to meet.

"We do not know yet whether the dating car will be the last carriage on each train and whether it will work day a week or one an hour," he added.
"We need to do some fine tuning."

Aneta Rehkova, spokeswoman for the metro system, said they were conducting surveys to find out what age groups would be interested in the special carriages and what times would be best to run them.

Link

We're not in Kansas anymore, Neatoramanauts. We're now in the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, which has the world's tallest indoor tornado.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] (via Techeblog) to see it in action:

It's a bird ... it's a plane ... it's ... SKYWHALE! The flying cetacean is a wonderful hot air balloon by sculptor and artist Patricia Piccinini. View more over at the Sky Whale's official website: Link

For an advertisement for Anchor milk, Damon Duncan of New Zealand's creative studio Assembly created a herd of glass cows. Glass cows? Yes, you read that right. Hit play or go to Link [vimeo] to watch:

Here's how it was done:

Photos: Henrik Petersson

Add this to the list of amazing cityscape art we've featured on Neatorama before: Still Life by Petter Johansson of PJADAD, made as an advertisement for Atelier Food. Link - via Dezeen

There's no KFC in the Gaza strip, a 140-square mile coastal strip 1.7 million Palestinians call home, but that doesn't mean that you can't get the Colonel's finger lickin' good chicken there.

Where there's a will, there's a way - and by way, we mean smuggling tunnels:

... after Mr. Efrangi brought some KFC back from El Arish for friends last month, he was flooded with requests. A new business was born. [...]

... whenever there is a critical mass of orders — usually 30 — he starts a complicated process of telephone calls, wire transfers and coordination with the Hamas government to get the chicken from there to here.

The other day, after Mr. Efrangi called in 15 orders and wired the payment to the restaurant in El Arish, an Egyptian taxi driver picked up the food. On the other side of the border, meanwhile, Ramzi al-Nabih, a Palestinian cabdriver, arrived at the Hamas checkpoint in Rafah, where the guards recognized him as “the Kentucky guy.”

From the checkpoint, Mr. Nabih, 26, called his Egyptian counterpart and told him which of the scores of tunnels the Hamas official had cleared for the food delivery. He first waited near the shaft of the tunnel, but after a while he was lowered on a lift about 30 feet underground and walked halfway down the 650-foot path to meet two Egyptian boys who were pushing the boxes and buckets of food, wrapped in plastic, on a cart.

Mr. Nabih gave the boys about $16.50, and argued with them for a few minutes over a tip. A half-hour later, the food was loaded into the trunk and on the back seat of his Hyundai taxi, bound for Gaza City.

Fares Akram explains how one smuggles KFC from Egypt into Gaza in this story over at The New York Times: Link (Image: Wissam Nassar for the NY Times)

Image: Igor Kolos/Shutterstock

For the fourteenth year in a row, Jacob is America's most popular baby boy name - but there are new entries in the list as compiled by the U.S. Social Security Administration. Here are the most popular baby names in 2012:

As we mentioned above, Jacob has been champ for 14 years since 1999 ("Michael" held that title from 1959 to 1998). This is the second year Sophia came at number one for girl names. Liam cracked the top 10 for the first time, perhaps because of recent movies starring Liam Neeson.

The US Social Security Administration also released the names that underwent the greatest change in popularity from 2011 to 2012:

From Social Security's press release:

Many pop-culture naming trends appear in a popular feature of Social Security’s baby names website--the “change in popularity” page.  This year’s winners for biggest jump in popularity in the Top 500 are Major and Arya.

The fastest riser on the girls’ list may have been influenced by the popular cable TV series “Game of Thrones.”  Arya is the daughter of a leader of one of the Seven Kingdoms.  She also is an expert sword fighter, so doubt her influence on the popular names list at your own risk.   

For the boys, parents may associate Major with the military title.  Acting Commissioner Colvin added “I have no doubt Major’s rising popularity as a boy’s name is in tribute to the brave members of the U.S. military, and maybe we’ll see more boys named General in the future.”  You also might trace Major’s increase in popularity to a cable TV show.  “Home by Novogratz” is a popular home design show featuring Major Novogratz, the youngest son of designers Robert and Cortney.

The second fastest riser for boys was Gael, and for girls, Perla.  Both names most likely are on the rise due to the increase in the Spanish-speaking population in the United States.  Perla is the Latinized version of Pearl and is popular among Hispanic-Americans.  Gael’s popularity could be tied to Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal.