Step 1. Buy a $20,000 Smart Car
Step 2. Spend another $20,000 tricking it out
Step 3. ????
Step 4. PROFIT ... or at least, notoriety for having the cutest lil' lowrider/race cars/mini-monster trucks on the road
Zusha Elinson of the Wall Street Journal takes us on a strange trip through the world of Smart Car enthusiasts who love to soup up their tiny rides, including one guy who put a train horn on his:
Jeremy Cox, 26, who parked next to Mr. Redmond at Cars and Coffee, says that his friends call his bright green Smart car convertible a "pregnant roller skate." So Mr. Cox, who has spent about $20,000 modifying his car, exacted a small measure of revenge by installing a 195-decibel train horn.
"You don't expect it coming out of Smart car," says Mr. Cox, who proceeded to unleash a powerful blast, causing a nearby cluster of car enthusiasts to jump. "I don't really have any response when people say stuff—but I do have the horn."
We don't know whether Martin Teel of Christopher, Illinois, delivers newspaper on Easy Street, Middle Road, or Hard Way, but we do know that he's proof that you're never too old to deliver the newspaper. You see, he's 90 years young:
Imagine biking three miles a day, rain or shine. Now imagine doing that when you're 90-years-old. There is one paperboy in southern Illinois who doesn't let anything stand in his way.
Every afternoon Marvin Teel of Christopher heads out on his daily route. "I have about three miles to cover all over town," said Teel. "(It) takes about an hour and a half."
Kadee Brosseau of KFVS12 has the story - Thanks Tiffany!
We've featured Dan Wilbur of Better Book Titles, who "improved" book covers through clever Photoshoppery, before on Neatorama. This time around, Dan focused on improving children's books. I'd say he nailed them!
Forget cronuts! Here comes the latest donut craze, this time from Japan: Animal donuts (or "doubutsu doonatsu")
Brian Ashcraft of Kotaku explains:
Floresta, which has locations throughout Kansai, apparently debuted this style of animal donuts in Japan. Floresta's main shop in Nara told Kotaku that a customer suggested animal donuts a few years back. Thus, the shop gave it a whirl and began making their own cute critter treats.
One of the Floresta staffers who helped create the animal donuts, a woman named Ikumi Nakao, has spun off an animal donut specialty shop called Animal Doughnut of Ikumimama, which opened in Kawasaki this past June.
James Pegrum is a building surveyor by day and master LEGO builder by night. His epic "British History" series depicts the history of Britain from Stonehenge to Margaret Thatcher with LEGO. View more photos over at Pegrum's MOCpages and Flickr set.
2500 BC Stonehenge. Construction of the inner horseshoe with massive trilithons.
56 BC
Julius Caesar landed in Britain for the first time. He was repelled, but returned a year later and conquered the land.
56 AD Roman built a huge theater near the Temple of Claudius, Camulodunum (modern day Essex)
1100 AD Murder of King William II in the New Forest
1170 AD The death of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket
Earlier this week, Oprah Winfrey revealed that she, too, was victim of subtle racism during an interview with Entertainment Tonight. She told a story that while in Zurich, Switzerland, she went into a store and asked to see a handbag on the shelf, but was refused:
"I go into a store and I say to the woman, 'Excuse me, may I see the bag right above your head?' and she says to me, 'No. It's too expensive.'"
When Winfrey insisted, the shop assistant allegedly replied: "No, no you don't want to see that one, you want to see this one because that one will cost too much. You will not be able to afford that."
The star said she left the shop calmly without arguing, but that the experience was proof that racism continues to be a problem
Oprah, whose net worth is $2.8 billion, could've bought the entire store, of course, but she didn't name the store or the handbag in the interview. Nonetheless, the ensuing media storm revealed that the store was the Trois Pommes and the handbag as a version of "Jennifer" bag by designer Tom Ford. The price of the bag? A cool $38,000.
The store's owner was put on the defensive, of course, and claimed that it was not racism - rather, a "misunderstanding" by the salesperson, and refused to dismiss the employee. Others, however, disagreed. The Zurich tourism board, realizing that the event had been a complete PR nightmare, immediately apologized and said that it was "never happy when our guests' feelings are hurt."
We can't help but notice: $38,000 FOR A HANDBAG? What was it made of? SOLID GOLD? Maybe it came with a car.
Adam Wingard's new horror film "You're Next" is about a gang of mysterious killers who attacked a vacationing family. But apparently, being attacked by ax-wielding murderers wearing creepy animal masks isn't scary enough for one fan, who decided to upgrade the level of horror by introducing a much more menacing character:
Provenance unknown - does anyone know who created this?
A mysterious virus has been killing increasing number of piglets - which has pushed the price of pork skyrocketing to historic levels, as bacon lovers get worried about the supply of their favorite food.
The Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus (PEDV) is not new - it was first identified in England in 1971 - but it has not been found in the United States ... until now. Though only about 400 cases of death due to PEDV have been officially confirmed by the United States Department of Agriculture, it is estimated that the toll has already been in the hundreds of thousands. With mortality rate of as high as 100 percent in early-weaned pigs, it's no wonder that pig farmers are worried.
Escape artist Anthony Martin locked himself in a casketand had it thrown out of a plane at 14,000 feet. It's a good thing that he managed to pick the lock and escape ... but if you think about it, even if the trick went south, he's already in a casket ...
Martin said the escape was exhilarating but that he was disoriented because the plywood casket whipped wildly from side-to-side while he picked the locks, and he struggled to open the door.
"I didn't feel any force, but what I felt was a lot of jostling," he told The Associated Press. "It seemed to me like I had a glimpse of the ground for a second then it (the door) came back and I had to give it another push."
Martin, who began teaching himself to pick locks at age 6, somersaulted out of the box as he pushed his way to freedom.
"I didn't know where I was ... but I was hypnotized as I watched the box falling behind me," he said.
Andrea Thomas of the Associated Press has the full story: Link
Toilet not flushing properly? Perhaps you've got FATBERG in the sewers.
That's what happened when residents in an apartment building in London noticed that they couldn't flush their toilets: a giant 15-ton blob of congealed fat and baby wipes had lodged in a sewer drain. That's enough "wrongly flushed festering food fat mixed with wet wipes" to fill a double-decker bus!
It'll take the utility company Thames Water six months to remove Fatberg, which you can see in a video clip below:
Street artist ABOVE created a stencil graffiti on a street in Shoreditch, London, that looks quite odd during the daytime. But it turns out that timing is everything: the graffiti made perfect sense at night when the shadow of a nearby street sign completes the effect. Thanks Above!
After his Amazon shipment was brazenly stolen from his front porch, Tim
Lake of Arcadia, Arizona, was determined to catch the thief. He has footage
from surveillance camera and decided to craft a tongue-in-cheek poster
to find the "un-American" criminal.
The poster describes the suspect as a "jerk" of "about
yay" height with "vacant, uncaring, and lacking a soul"
eyes. Nationality: "Un-American" and occupation: "Burglar."
Yes, yes, we know that China has a lot of fake handbags,
knockoff watches, and pirated DVDs. That's ho-hum, but the country seems
to be all about pushing the envelope and testing the limits of what can
be faked. Let's take a look at the 9 most outrageous things ever faked
in China.
1. Fake Receipts
Photo: China's Ministry of Public Security
What? Why in the world would anyone need phony receipts? To claim fake
tax deductions and defraud employers for reimbursements, of course! In
fact, fake receipts or "fapiao" is big business in China - for
example, employees of the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline managed
to submit $6 million worth of fake receipts over the years.
You can get any kind of fake receipts you want. Need travel receipts?
How about something more, uh, specialized like waste material receipts?
Not a problem - in fact, the business of forged receipt is so consumer
friendly (after all, it is a service industry) that you can get
special discounts and same-day delivery of the goods. [Source: NY
Times]
2. Fake Businessman or "White Guy in a Tie"
Writer
Mitch Moxley was approached by a friend of a friend in Beijing and offered
a sweet deal: "Basically, you put on a suit, shake some hands, and
make some money. We'll be in 'quality control,' but nobody's going to
be doing any quality control. You in?"
He was, and the deal was indeed very good. Moxley was paid $1,000 a week,
put up in a fancy hotel, wined and dined. All he had to do was be himself,
a white guy in a tie:
... so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig
for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works
in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech
espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act
as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to
create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese
companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how
much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice
suits gives the company face.” [Source: The
Atlantic]
3. Fake Apple Store
The Apple Store in Kunming, China sure looks the part: gleaming iPads
displayed on minimalist beechwood tables, crisp marketing graphics and
eager associates in blue shirts ready to assist you with the latest gadgets.
But something juuuust doesn't seem quite right, as blogger
BirdAbroad noted.
Well, as you've guessed, though the Apple products were real, the store
itself was completely fake. But you know what's amazing about the level
of fakery? Even the employees working there believed that they were
actually working for Apple!
4. Fake IKEA Store
Photo: Reuters
If you think about it, Apple Stores are small and therefore quite easy
to copy. But how about the Swedish furniture behemoth IKEA? Now their
warehouse-styled stores are SO huge that they'd be impossible to knockoff,
right? Not in China!
Meet 11Furniture, which has copied not only IKEA's products but also
its signature blue-and-yellow color scheme, 100,000-square feet warehouse
complete with showrooms, mini pencils, and cafeteria-style restaurant!
Well, at least they don't have products with unpronounceable Swedish names
... [Source: Daily
Mail]
Apparently, the cow didn't hear the pilot's frantic yelling for it to "mooooooove."
Lion Air flight JT 982 was trying to land in the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, when it crashed into something unusual, an errant cow that had wandered onto the runway.
According to the BBC, Pilot Iwan Permadi said that he could "smell burning meat." He thought that he had ran over feral dogs when the plane skidded off the runway, but realized that it was a much bigger animal when he inspected the landing gear.
All of the plane's 110 passengers were safe, but the same couldn't be said for the cow, which got crushed under the plane wheel.
