Don't you hate it when a salesman approaches you in a place where there's no escaping their sales pitch? It makes you feel like a sheep being sized up by a hungry wolf, and once they've hit you with the product demonstration it's almost impossible to turn them away.
But before you turn them away you should really see what they're offering, because it could be something amazing that will make your life worth living again. (NSFW language)
Cosmos Laundromat: First Cycle is an awesome looking and really far out 3D animated short by the Blender Institute in Amsterdam. The film, and all the artwork files used to make the film, are free and open source and available for digital artists to play with here.
We’ve all heard of the Ford Model T—but we rarely hear about the earlier automobiles in the whole “model-letter” scheme. So hear you go…
ALPHABET CITY
In 1908, the Ford Motor Company, founded by Henry Ford just five years earlier, released its first Ford Model T—and the world has never been the same. The Model T was the first car that ordinary people could afford, and is regarded by automobile historians as the car that ushered in the Automobile Age (and killed the then extremely popular electric car). From 1908 until production ended in 1927, more than 16 million Model Ts were sold worldwide. No other car model ever sold as well …until 1972, when it was finally surpassed by the VW Beetle.
But the Model T’s great success overshadows all the models that came before it—all of them based on previous alphabet letters. Did Henry Ford make nineteen earlier models before the Model T—one for each letter before “T”? No. Most were experimental and never made it to production. But eight did.
There is obviously a good reason this cat is alone. All by himself. Lonely. Antisocial. Awash in his solitude, he turns to poetry. But no one is fooled by his plight -he likes it that way! This comic is from Jimmy at the treasure trove known as They Can Talk.
Residents of Hawaii will never forget the bogus nuclear missile warning they got last Saturday that sent them all into a panic. Everyone had to quickly decide what they wanted to do in the few minutes they had left to live. One metric that can be used to track behavior is web traffic. Pornhub, the huge pornography sharing site, released its traffic statistics for Hawaii last Saturday (link goes to Twitter). You can see from the graph that when the alert went out at 8:07 AM, traffic at the site plunged 77% below normal for that time of day. The correction went out at 8:45, and traffic began climbing again -to even higher levels than normal! Folks were making up for lost time, it seems. You have to wonder about the 23% of users who stayed online with the site even during the alert. My guess is that they weren't paying attention to anything else. -via Boing Boing
Grammy-winning violinist Augustin Hadelich wrote a little story about a violinist (himself) who plays music for a cat, which draws all the street cats out to listen. He plays Caprice No. 17 by Nicolò Paganini. The cats are so impressed, they start to dance. They aren't very good at the beginning, but as they lose themselves in the music, they get better. Oh, and stay for the twist ending.
Hadelich, who is a cat person as well as a musician, called his story Fantasia dei Gatti, or Fantasy of the Cats. Tam King did the animation. The music is from Hadelich's album Paganini: 24 Caprices. -via Laughing Squid
The Winter Games open February 9 in PyeongChang, South Korea. Almost every Olympics has new competitions, usually after they have built an international following and have been showcased as exhibits during previous games. In 2018, these will include Men’s and Women’s Snowboard Big Air, Team Alpine Skiing, Men’s and Women’s Mass Start Speed Skating, and for the many who have fallen in love with curling, Curling Mixed Doubles. All these events appear to have been selected for the maximum possible TV audience.
While it started out as an X-Games event, extreme athletes will now get their chance to win gold medals in Men’s and Women’s Snowboard Big Air, which sees competitors performing their best spins and tricks after launching off a large (about 160 feet) ramp. For the first time, the Alpine skiing Nations Team Event will make its debut; the event features mixed teams of two men and two women going head-to-head in a series of downhill slalom races in a best-of-four competition.
Super Bowl ads are really big business, and companies pay millions for the chance to get millions of people talking about their ads, but this year Skittles is skipping the Super Bowl and going ultra exclusive with their ad.
Skittles has decided to change things up a bit by creating "the most exclusive Super Bowl ad ever made" which will be seen by only one person- a 17-year-old from Canoga Park named Marcos Menendez.
“We’ve been a big part of the Super Bowl and continue to be a big part of the NFL," Matt Montei, marketing VP, fruit confections at Mars Wrigley Confectionery explained. “We really felt like we wanted to continue to reinvent ourselves around this timeframe and one way to do it is to just try a completely new way in.”
Montei elaborated that Menendez was chosen because he’s a true Skittles fan. Menendez will get to watch this “exclusive” commercial during the Super Bowl, while everyone else will just get to see Menendez’s reaction to the ad, streamed on Facebook.
Look at this beautiful Art Nouveau building! This is the the Paris Metro station at the Bastille. Or it was, before it was torn down in 1962. By that time, it was considered old fashioned, and was demolished to make way for something more modern. The Bastille station was considered "garish" even when it was first built, one of 141 train stations designed by Hector Guimard and erected at the turn of the 20th century. A few still remain in the city.
Today, the Guimard stations are considered French national treasures, and there’s even a replica station in the New York MOMA’s Sculpture Garden. But back in the 1960s, a number of the stations were torn down as the city continued to modernize and expand the subway system. Tragically, the Bastille station was no exception.
The death of a television network can cause quite a stir in the TV world, especially when that network is beloved by fans, but Spike TV has died and I don't think anybody really cares.
The channel once billed as "the First Network for Men" is now the Paramount Network, so the person running Spike TV's Twitter account bid the channel a not-so-fond farewell by revealing the network's darkest secrets.
I was baked when I pitched 1000 Ways to Die. Those episodes are mostly based on my nightmares.
The embittered employee spent January 16th tweeting all kinds of wacky stuff about the network that is still up on the SPIKE Twitter page, because apparently Spike is dead so nobody gives a crap about their Twitter page.
I clogged up the 4th stall in the 7th floor men’s room over 30 times last year.
Ship's cats have always been common, because they are the best way to exterminate rats and other vermin on long voyages. However, cats are just one of many types of pets taken on ocean travels throughout history. Sailors have been accompanied by dogs, pigs, chickens, rabbits, and other animals, and not all of them were for dinner. Patricia Sullivan, founder and curator of the online Museum of Maritime Pets, talked to Atlas Obscura about the little-known tradition of land animals at sea. They served in wartime and peace time, too.
Pets were also trusted companions for maritime explorers. “Many pets were working animals on exploration vessels,” Sullivan says, with dogs used for hunting at ports of call and cats on exterminator duty. More than all of this, seafaring animals played important emotional roles on long, grueling, monotonous, dangerous voyages plagued by uncertainty. “Sailors were out at sea for months or years at time, so pets were important de-stressors” she says. “I think people would have gone mad without something to pet.”
A few years ago, Sari Mäenpää, a curator at the Maritime Museum of Finland, was conducting research when she first really noticed the presence of pets in the museum’s image archives. “I came across loads of photos, especially from the sailing ship era, where cats and dogs were portrayed in ‘official’ crew photos, and suddenly I started seeing images of them everywhere.”
Why is it so hard for some people to accept the verdict when someone they proposition tells them "NO"? Maybe their ego can't handle the rejection, or maybe they think if they just press on the person will magically change their mind and accept their indecent proposal? It doesn't matter the reason why they persist with their pestering, their unwanted advances are annoying and these knuckleheads really need to start accepting that NO MEANS NO! So the next time you hear a big fat hairy NO from someone you're hitting on take the two letters as they are and walk away, because life's too short to spend it harassing uninterested people like a jerk.
Spread the word in the age of consent with this No Means No t-shirt by Harsimran_Sain, it's a fun text design with a serious message behind it.
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!
I can't help but think of video games like Tomb Raider when I see pics of people exploring underwater caves, because the whole environment looks too fantastic to be real.
But there are plenty of real, and really beautiful, drowned caves out there that have yet to be discovered, and the Yucatan Peninsula is the place to go when underwater explorers are searching for flooded caves:
The low-altitude, limestone-laden expanse of the Yucatan peninsula is the perfect place for the formation of submerged underground caves—geological features the ancient Maya people referred to as “cenotes.”
Divers with the Gran Acuífero Maya project led by Robert Schmittner have spent the last ten months trying to prove two massive underwater cave systems in the Yucatan are connected- the 163-mile-long Sac Actun and the 51-mile-long Dos Ojos.
And on January 10th their dedication paid off when they finally found the connection between the two caves, making it the largest known flooded cave system on Earth:
Prior to the discovery, the Ox Bel Ha system, located just south of Tulum, was ranked as the world’s largest at 167 miles (270 km). According to caving naming convention, when two cave systems are found to interconnect, the largest cave absorbs the smaller one. So the Dos Ojos system is no more, subsumed by the larger Sac Actun system.
The 1991 romantic comedy Doc Hollywood starred Michael J. Fox as a doctor on a road trip from Washington, DC, to Beverly Hills to begin a new job. That was his intention, but when things goes wrong, his plans eventually change. It's a familiar plot made special by Fox's talents and a heartwarming script. Let's learn what went into the making of Doc Hollywood.
10. Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease shortly before this film was made.
He started noticing a mild twitch in his left pinky finger. The disease didn’t start getting worse until later but it was diagnosed in 1990.
9. The movie was filmed in Florida.
Micanopy, Florida is a small town just south of Gainesville and was inhabited by less than a thousand people at the time.
It's crazy to think that Fox has been dealing with Parkinson's for 28 years. Read more about Doc Hollywood at TVOM.
Even though it's easy to shoot your own digital photos and get them printed any way you'd like people still hire professional photographers to shoot their "special" photos because they think the pics will turn out better.
Pam says she hired a pro photographer to shoot some nice pics of her family, but the final photos she received had been "retouched" by the pro, who admittedly had no clue how to retouch photos or how to take a professional-grade photo.
Looks to me like this pro has been hanging out with the pro who "restored" the Ecce Homo Jesus fresco a few years back.
What's going on with these mantises? Are they about to fight? Are they posing for a picture? Are they even alive? Yes, they are alive, and it appears to be a kind of stand-off, where they are bluffing each other, waiting and even daring one of them to make the first move. Bluffing and posturing are perfectly good tactics in the animal kingdom.
Turns out they are in their fighting stance in reaction to the camera, as it eventually becomes clear that's what they are looking at. They sure are pretty, for a bunch of bugs. Adrian Kozakiewicz (previously at Neatorama) of InsecthausTV has plenty more videos that delve into the mysterious world of insect behavior. -via Boing Boing
