What Is It? Game 132 - Neatorama

This week's collaboration with the What is it? Blog brings us this gruesome looking tool. Do you know what it is for? You can win a T-shirt of your choice from the Neatorama Shop.

Write your guess in the comment section. One guess per comment, please. You can enter as many as you'd like. Please write no URL or weblink - doing so will invalidate your entry. You have until the answer is revealed at the What is it? Blog tomorrow.

The first correct guess and the funniest albeit incorect guess will win T-shirts from the Neatorama Shop. IMPORTANT: Please write your choice of T-shirt along with your entries. So take a quick look at the shop, mmkay?

Check out the What is it? Blog for more clues. Good luck!

Update 3/30/10 - the answer is: A hand operated ice plow, used for finishing out the groove made by a horse drawn ice plow. After the ice plow had made grooves in the ice, an ice saw was used to finish the cut.

Congratulations to Jerry Kelly who came up with "ice plow" first and to RobbyBobby who came up with the funniest guess: ninja lawnmower.

Comments (53)

Newest 5

Newest 5 Comments

I figured it was a blade to a wheat thresher.

T-Shirt:
Something Somewhere Went Terribly Wrong (Black, Large).

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A 6-in-1 slice tool every rabbi should have come the baby boom season!

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It's actually a stalk chopper.............and I really, really could use it... if it's for sale......Ever since a guy that I detest survived my attempt to run him over with my soccer-mom mini-van..........I've been looking for such a practically perfect amputation tool for his head (or other body parts).

size L When life gives you mold, make penicillin

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It's clearly a guitar-string cutter. Every guitarist has one.

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This is an electron microscope enhanced view of the latest creation in the line of muti-bladed razors. Notice the fine edges as each successive blade pulls and cuts your beard growth even closer, taking at least 3 sub layers of skin with each pass.

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Humans were always capable of rationality; mystery solved. No, no, I know, they worshiped these devices, err. they used them to try to contact the Gods. Erm What else can I suppose that diminishes the intellect of every generation that ever came before this one? Oh I know, Aliens!

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Baigong pipes explained:
http://skepticblog.org/2009/12/03/researching-the-baigong-pipes/

Sometimes people want to believe strange things, even when there are logical explanations.

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Antikythera Machine explained:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

and rebuilt with Legos:
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/12/lego-antikythera-mechanism/

How many more of these are completely explainable?

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@Miiike Yeah people will believe anything. But if you're going to try and dispute something maybe you should use better evidence than a "behind the scenes" article where the skeptic admits to getting ALL of their information from second and third hand sources. And didn't have the foresight to know that bamboo is grass and therefor doesn't have tree rings.

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Hopefully these mysteries are bit more difficult to solve than the Bouvet Island boat mystery. It took about an hour doing web searches and a trip to the library down the street to solve that one. Not that I'm bragging (ok, I'm absolutely bragging).

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Am I imagining things, or was that Crack'd article more profuse in its vulgarity than normal? Maybe I just wasn't expecting it, but wow.

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@Jason 123

can you explain further?

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The unexplainable, of course, led to religion. You'd think we had progressed beyond that by now.

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Those stone balls in Costa Rica are natural concretions. They form underground then are exposed by the surrounding substrate eroding away. You can see the same process in action with the Muraki boulders in New Zealand - the spherical boulders are revealed as the sea washes the sandy soil away

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Do not confuse unexplained with unexplainable.

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While not all of these mysteries have been conclusively solved, most have at least a couple plausible explanations. Because, y'know... most things ultimately do. At least four of these have episodes on the Skeptoid podcast dedicated to them. (Voynich Manuscript, Antikythera Mechanism, Baigong Pipes, The Bloop.) Probably worth a listen whether you agree with the show or not.

Anyway, I don't think these phenomena need to be inexplicable to be incredibly cool. They're still intriguing, beautiful, and bizarre.

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google told me this

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4181

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