Mr. E.T. - 80s Retro Vintage Mash-Up by Captain RibMan

I pity the fool who doesn't think E.T. dressed up as Mr. T is the toughest and gnarliest mashup in nerd history- because that fool's sense of humor is broken! Imagine the look on Elliot and Gertie's face when they see E.T. strolling in, his long neck covered in gold chains and his turtle-y head covered with a mohawk, they would flip their wigs! Of course, once they find out E.T. is now an alien enforcer who has come to collect the twenty bucks Elliot owes Billy the bully the costume won't seem so funny after all...

Get dressed up for geeky fun with this Mr. E.T.- 80s Retro Vintage Mash-Up t-shirt by Captain RibMan, and you'll make people smile wherever you go!

Visit Captain RibMan's Facebook fan page, official website and Twitter, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more out of this world designs:

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image: @peliman

Love Shiba Inu and coffee? Take a look at these wonderful Shiba latte art by Mr. R Drinks in Taipei, Taiwan. The mini Shiba Inu head is actually marshmallow, which floats in the drink and watch you with its serene smile as you slurp your coffee.

The Pacific and Indian oceans are dangerous places, so the stonefish is always ready for a fight. It's even packing a switchblade ... in its face.

W. Leo Smith was dissecting a stonefish that was once his own pet, when discovered a switchblade-like device in the cheeks of the fish. Fifteen years later, he and his colleagues at The University of Kansas published the research paper that explained the mechanism behind the "lachrymal saber" of stonefish.

To help the stonefishes deploy the switchblade, an unusually large number of muscles and ligaments attach to bones comprising the lachrymal saber system compared with species outside the stonefish family, according to the researchers.

“There can’t be any other reason for those muscles and ligaments except to control this mechanism,” said the KU researcher.

Read the rest of the story over at KU News (Image: William Leo Smith/The University of Kansas)

After her mother died two years ago, 11-year-old Isabella Pieri went to school with messy and tangled hair. Her father tried to help, but styling a girls' hair was well outside his area of expertise.

Enter Isabella's bus driver, Tracy Dean.

Every morning, Dean takes the time to brush and braid Isabella's hair before she drives the girl to school.

Zoe Weiner of TODAY has the story:

After more than a year of riding on Dean’s bus, Isabella noticed that the driver had been helping a fellow classmate style her braids before school every morning. She eventually approached Dean and asked if she could have help with her hair, too. “Isabella just said, ‘Hey, will you do mine if I bring a brush?'" Dean recalled. "And I was just thinking to myself, 'Oh thank you, Lord.'"

(Image: Tracy Dean)

Bad news, night owls! Turns out that we're going to die sooner than those annoying morning people.

A new study by researchers at the University of Surrey and Northwestern University found that people who liked to stay up late were more likely to die within the six and a half year-long study period than those who were early risers.

"Night owls trying to live in a morning lark world may have health consequences for their bodies," Dr. Kristen Knutson of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine to The Telegraph. "It could be that people who are up late have an internal biological clock that doesn't match their external environment."

Sarah Knapton of The Telegraph has the full story.

You know what this means: time to adapt and change our sleeping habits into mid-afternoon narwhals (Image: Hoot! Night Owl by ivejustquitsmoking)

The producers of The Walking Dead have been building up to this Sunday's episode for about three years now, and fans have become fatigued with the "all out war" between Rick's group, with their allies from various communities, and the Saviors under the leadership of Negan. This conflict should have been wrapped up a year ago. We've been told it will conclude this weekend. Season nine is going to be very different, which is promising. But first we have to have a final battle, and someone, maybe a lot of people, are going to die. Continue reading for the prospects of each character, which contain spoilers for those not current in the series.

Eastern Europe did not have as many hotels under Communist rule as they do today, but back then the hotels were huge, grand in their brutalist way, and dominated the market. The government owned them, so they simplified tourism by putting everyone into one building. That made it easier to serve travelers and tourists ...and easier to keep an eye on them. Each nation had an agency that oversaw all hotels.

It’s not immediately obvious why the party and state-security apparatus would take such a keen interest in running hotels, until you consider the fact that these places were tremendous moneymakers for the regimes.

They could charge for the rooms and meals in hard currencies (mainly, at the time, U.S. dollars or German marks) and had a captive clientele of relatively well-off foreigners to whom they could market their off-the-books services like prostitution and money changing.

There was simply too much cash floating around to pass up.​

Many of these hotels remain decades later. Even though they've been remodeled after the fall of Communism, they still retain their Soviet-era creepiness, which is particularly obvious to those who recall those days. See a roundup of such hotels at Radio Free Europe. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Mark Baker)

It's a great deal of trouble to get your kids to pick up their LEGO blocks that end up all over the floor. It would be easier to just do it yourself, but the one who left them in the floor should do it. However, if your kid is a talented engineer like YouTuber The Brick Wall, he or she will invent a machine to do it. The Lego Rumba is a machine that picks up LEGO pieces, itself made of LEGO pieces. My guess is that "Rumba" is pronounced like the vacuum instead of the dance. Watch it in action.

(YouTube link)

To be honest, this is an automated broom and dustpan. But for kids who need to pick up their toys, it's a lot more fun. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Iceland has 340,000 people and averages only 1.6 murders a year. Most of those are young men killed by someone who knew them, as in fights. Iceland's most famous murder case took place in 1828, but a 2017 case may eclipse it. On January 13, Birna Brjánsdóttir disappeared while walking home from a night out on the town in Reykjavík. The investigation into Brjánsdóttir's disappearance involved the police and the citizens of Reykjavík, who spread the word through social media and pitched in to find the young woman, or evidence of her fate.

On the morning of Saturday 21 January, a week after she vanished, the biggest search operation in Iceland’s history began. Ice-Sar alone deployed 835 volunteers and 87 vehicles, an extraordinary response in a small country. Across the island, people waited anxiously for updates.

“Today she is our sister, our daughter – that became the mantra,” said Guðbrandur Örn Arnarson, Ice-Sar’s project manager. “We don’t live in a society where we tolerate a 20-year-old woman being abducted in the night.”

Clues led to an international fishing trawler, a rental car spattered with blood, and almost $2 million worth of hashish. Read the entire story as it unfolded at The Guardian.

(Image credit: Reykjavik Metropolitan Police)

The folks from The Cut drew a colorful hopscotch board on a sidewalk in Seattle, just to see how many people would use it. They recorded video for ten hours and counted the people who walked by. To be honest, only a small percentage of people tried it, but thankfully, this video is mostly edited to show those who did.

(YouTube link)

And they are worth watching. The simple game brought a smile to a lot of faces. -via Tastefully Offensive

Let me tell you a story about how a typo helped end World War Two... (thread) pic.twitter.com/HxismWwlzE

— Florence Schechter (@floschechter) April 9, 2018

Geoffrey Tandy was a highly-regarded marine biologist at the Natural History Museum in 1939, when he volunteered for the Royal Navy Reserves. The powers-that-be saw Tandy's information and immediately summoned him to Bletchley Park for a secret mission, cracking Axis codes.

They show him the enigma machine and are like "dude, you gotta help us crack it - you're the best cryptogrammist in all of the UK!". And poor Geoff is like "this is super awks, I'm a cryptoGAMMIST not a cryptoGRAMMIST. I'm not a specialist in codes, I'm a specialist in algae..." pic.twitter.com/tJymArsZ1k

— Florence Schechter (@floschechter) April 9, 2018

Once the mistake was revealed, they couldn't just dismiss Tandy from the secret project, but what could he do? So Tandy remained attached to Bletchley Park, and two years later, became the hero of the secret cryptography department when his exact expertise was needed. Comedian Florence Schechter tells the entire story in a thread at Twitter, with illustrations. Even if you hate reading Twitter threads, this one is well worth the effort, and she has a list of sources at the end in case you want to read more about Tandy and his adventures during the war. -via Mental Floss

Crazy Moon Cat Lady by Dooomcat

People say Sailor Moon is crazy to be so obsessed with cats, but the way Moon sees it you have to be nuts not to adore those cute little furry critters- especially when one of them is your guardian and adviser. But not everyone has as close a relationship with their cat like Moon has with Luna, so maybe if people knew what it was like to truly love a kittie and have them love you back they might not think of Moon as such a loon! Of course, nobody has the nerve to call her a loon to her face...

Add some purr-fectly geeky fun to your geeky wardrobe with this Crazy Moon Cat Lady t-shirt by Dooomcat, featuring a delightful design that'll blow nerdy minds wherever you go!

Visit Dooomcat's Facebook fan page and official website, then head on over to her NeatoShop for more cool for cats designs:

View more designs by Dooomcat | More Funny T-shirts | New T-Shirts

Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!

A global industry exists to set standards for everything, from the kilogram to keeping time. There's even a set international standard set for making tea. People will argue their entire lives about the best way to make a cup of tea, but few have ever made an International Standard cup of tea, and Tom Scott explains why.  

(YouTube link)

I make tea all afternoon and evening when the morning coffee pot runs out, so I take all the shortcuts: teabags and a microwave. That's because tea isn't a social occasion or a treat for me -it's what I drink. The standard for most Americans was posted at reddit.

Your mileage may vary. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The ability to use GPS, or SatNav if you're British, is a modern convenience that boggles the mind for those of us who managed to travel without it for years. However, there's still value in learning to navigate the old-fashioned way, with hard copy maps, a trained sense of direction, and the willingness to ask for directions. Those skills might lead you to a nagging suspicion that Google Maps isn't leading you in the right direction, and it's time to double check. If you place too much trust in your map app, you could learn better by reading some chilling stories of complete failure.  

In 2017, 24-year-old [Amber] VanHecke had embarked on a solo trip to the Grand Canyon. In the middle of the Arizona desert, she noticed that she only had 70 miles' worth of gas left in the tank. Not an issue, as her Google Maps reassured her that she was only 35 miles away from a highway. Trusting Google, she obediently followed the app to bring her safely to civilization. Instead, Google told her to turn onto a completely nonexistent road, which led her to a nonexistent spot on the map. And then she ran out of gas.

VanHecke spent five days in the desert before help arrived. Unlike most travelers, she had a supply of water and food in her car. Read her story and six others at Cracked.

(Image credit: Arizona Department of Public Safety)

The Greatest Showman was loosely based on the life of PT Barnum. Proving that there's a sucker born every minute, my brother took his entire family to see the movie without realizing that it's a musical. That bothered him more than the fact that the story was totally fictional and had nothing to do with the real Barnum.

(YouTube link)

Screen Junkies corrects that by giving new lyrics to the songs in this Honest Trailer for The Greatest Showman.