❄️ Driving in heavy snow can be a chore, but at least we get to suggest names for snowplows! The Minnesota Department of Transportation plowed (hah) through 20,000 name ideas and 60,000 votes to pick 8 names for their 2022 snowplows shown above - but other cities and states in the North America are in on the fun. Here are the funniest and best-named snowplows in North America.

🕹️ Watch how Scorpion's "Get Over Here" spear move was filmed in this Mortal Komba behind-the-scenes footage. Flawless victory!

🚁 500 years later, engineering students from the University of Maryland finally turned Leonardo da Vinci's iconic aerial screw into an actual flying drone.

👚 Simply ear-esistible: Fashion designer Stella McCartney dressed Minnie Mouse in a pantsuit.

⚗️ File this under "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should": Scientists can change a cat's fur color by feeding it different things.

🐱 Meet Mostaccioli, the cat that looks like Freddie Mercury. Don't stop me-ow!

More neat posts over at our new sites: Infinite 1UP, Laughosaurus, Pop Culturista, Pictojam, and Supa Fluffy.

Featured art: Coffee Makes Me Feel Less Murdery by indie artist Tobe Fonseca.

See also: Funny T-Shirts from the NeatoShop

Janelle Shane at AI Weirdness tested four algorithms to see if neural networks can generate valentines. Sure they can! For this project, she used the simple, hokey type of valentines that children give their classmates. Since the algorithms already knew English and already knew that Valentines Day is a holiday, she only fed ten examples into their training programs.

The original intent was to have the machines generate both a greeting and an image, but Shane knew from experience that even if these algorithms could handle it (which they couldn't), the images would be illegible and creepy. So she asked for a greeting plus a text description of an image to go with it. While the cards she fed into the learning program had images that supported the pun wording in the greeting, these algorithms didn't quite get it. But they generated a greeting and a description of a random image, which Shane illustrated herself. See a bunch more of these neural network-generated valentines at AI Weirdness.

This visualization of how deep underground structures go will blow your mind. As you go down as deep as Mammoth Cave, the video pauses and you think it might be over, but oh no. That's when the scale can no longer show the surface of the earth, and they switch to a graphic on the right for scale to go much, much deeper. The caves, of course, were formed by the earth itself. The manmade structures are astonishing. It's nice to know that radioactive waste is buried so deep, but the further you go, the more likely they are to be wartime facilities, and even deeper for pure profit. The newer ones were dug by machines, but the older ones were dug by human labor, maybe slave labor or Stalinist prison labor, and who are the people working at the bottom? I looked up a few of the deeper places.

The Mponeng gold mine in South Africa is so deep that the temperature at the bottom is about 151°F (66°C), and they send ice down the shaft to cool it to bearable working conditions.

The Kola Superdeep Borehole was drilled over a 19-year period by the Soviets, in Russia near the Norwegian border. It was a scientific project to see how deep a hole could be dug.  

-via Laughing Squid

The Victoria Cross is the highest honor that a member of the British armed forces can receive. Since Queen Victoria instituted it in 1856, only 1,358 people have received this award for extreme gallantry in the midst of the enemy, witnessed by compatriots to who attest to the courage of the recipient.

Lieutenant Commander Gerard Roope of the Royal Navy is one such man honored by Britain. An article in the January 1, 2010 issue of magazine Military History (sorry, it's paywalled) describes the unusual circumstances of this award. It was the enemy commander who recommended that the British War Office award Roope with the Victoria Cross.

On April 7, 1940, Roope was in command of HMS Glowworm, a destroyer. He encountered a squadron of German vessels in the North Sea on their way to invade Norway. At the center of this formation was the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper.

Roope's Glowworm was massively outnumbered and outgunned. In keeping with the traditions of the Royal Navy, he nonetheless immediately attacked the enemy formation.

The German destroyers scattered and Glowworm was soon facing Admiral Hipper alone. Hipper's heavy guns delivered brutal blows to the much smaller British ship. Roope ordered his crew to throw up a smokescreen, which he used to feint a retreat. Then he turned and rammed the Hipper, doing great damage to the heavy cruiser.

The Glowworm began to sink. Roope ordered his crew to abandon ship, which they did. After Glowworm sank, Captain Helmuth Heye of the Hipper ordered his crew to pick up the survivors, rescuing 31 out of the total crew of 149 men. Captain Roope was not among them.

Captain Heye was so impressed with the intrepidity of Roope that he sent a message to the British War Office through the International Red Cross, urging them to award his foe with the Victoria Cross. Regulations required that at least three witnesses, preferably of high rank, attest to the courage of the honoree. In this case, the War Office decided to accept Captain Heye's testimony, as no British officers were available. In 1945, they postumously awarded Lieutenant Commander Gerard Roope with the Victoria Cross. You can read his citation here.

Image: 

The game Wordle shows no sign of losing popularity, even as we hear the announcement that it was acquired by the New York Times. The newspaper said the game will still be free ...for now. Better get in the game before it's monetized! And computational biologist Devang Thakkar has developed Wordle  Archive so that you can play previous games or more than once a day. But how does one win at Wordle?

The object is to guess the five-letter word of the day. You have six guesses, and each guess will let you know whether a letter is right and if a right letter is in the right place. It would have never occurred to me to develop a strategy, but Minnesotastan did. While some folks begin with ADIEU to find the vowels, he uses words designed to cover the most common consonants. Those words are BRINK, CADGY, WHELM, and POUTS (although he switched to SPOUT upon learning that Wordle disallows a lot of words ending in "s" because they may be plurals). In the example above, he found the vowels in the right place in two guesses, and discovered all the consonants in three guesses. Read his thinking behind this strategy at TYWKIWDBI, and the strategies of others in the comments. This method won't always ensure that you win in fewer guesses than the next person, but it will help you to get the right word more often. Do you have a strategy for playing Wordle?

The New Zealand parrot called a kea has been known to steal interesting objects from humans. In this case, a family visiting Fiordland National Park were recording a kea when the bird decided to take that GoPro camera. It flew off and got some nice footage of the scenery. Away from the people, the kea decided to eat the camera, but had some difficulty snapping off a small piece. It probably didn't like the way the plastic tasted, either. But how was the camera found? The bird's flight was not as far as it appeared to us, and the family followed it visually and then heard the commotion as he tried to tear the GoPro apart. -via Boing Boing

Addison Del Mastro was intrigued by the building you see here. Yes, it's a Pizza Hut, but it is somewhat different from the iconic architectural style of the pizza chain. We've seen plenty of buildings with that style that used to be Pizza Huts, but this is the opposite- a Pizza Hut that apparently used to be something else. So Del Mastro started researching the location's history. It wasn't easy.

While the story behind the building is quite a ride, the greater story is the way record-keeping is changing and and how fragile digital records really are. Digitizing books, photos, historical records, and newspapers seems like a wonderful idea, because it saves physical storage space and makes searching easier, but it also relies on changing technology. Think of all the digital files that are lost when a storage system becomes obsolete. Online digital files depend on servers, which depend on power, which depends on money. Many historic document files will only be kept as long as they are profitable. A lot of what Del Mastro found was crowdsourced from people's memories, and those people and their memories won't be around forever. Read about this particular architectural history project and the roadblocks thrown up at The Deleted Scenes. -via Metafilter

Grocery store pickup can be helpful, but Cookpad Mart, an online grocery retailer in Japan, offers an even more accomodating service. The company already provides delivery to lockers inside convenience stores. Now, Sora News 24 informs us, it's offering grocery pickup inside train stations.

This service is, so far, available at four stations of the East Japan Railway company. Customers can make an online cart and choose a station. Their groceries will be ready for them when they arrive at the pickup point in the selected station.

Think of what a great time saver this could be! People getting off of work could pick up food on the way home with only a brief detour inside a train station. I wonder if this could work in some American cities that have extensive rail networks.

Photo: PR Times

High Wycomb is a small town west of London. Every year, the charter trustees elect a mayor, who, upon taking office, is immediately weighed on a huge scale by officials wearing period costumes from the Eighteenth Century. At the end of his or her term, the exiting mayor is weighed out. It is imperative that the outgoing mayor not weigh more than at the beginning of the term. If s/he does weigh more, public jeers follow.

Why? The New York Times tells us that the tradition dates to 1678, when the mayor developed a reputation as drunken lout who had got fat at the expense of the taxpayers. High increased weight was taken as proof of his profligacy with municipal funds.

Now, the ceremony is an excuse for a party and fun. The macebearer will read out the weight at the beginning of the term and say "and some more" if the mayor has gained weight or "and no more" if the mayor has not.

-via Amusing Planet | Photo: Mayor of High Wycombe

You've heard that goods are worth exactly what people are willing to pay for them. British Airways was getting rid of some of their older planes, and offered a Negus 747 for the low, low price of £1 ($1.30). After all, the pool of potential buyers was limited, because where would you park this plane? Cotswold Airport bought the airliner, as they had a place to put it. But instead of trying to refurbish and fly it, they turned it into an event space.



After 14 months of renovations, the Negus is ready to book parties, weddings, and other events- for £1000 ($1,300) an hour. That's some return on investment! But the makeover was expensive at about £500,000 ($671,000). And that doesn't include upgrading the restrooms, which still hasn't been done. See, toilets for planes are designed to work at altitude, and must be completely replumbed to work on the ground. But at $1300 per hour, they might be able to bring in some porta-potties. Read more about the Negus party plane at CNN, and see more pictures at Instagram. -via Jalopnik

The "adorable blob" above is a White's tree frog named Cousin, in a picture taken around the time Cousin came into the care of Be Wild Reptile Rescue in Durham, North Carolina. He had lived in several homes and weighed 144 grams. A large tree frog should weigh around 40 to 50 grams. Here's a picture of Cousin taken a year later.



As you can see, Cousin has lost weight, but still has to deal with the large amount of skin that comes with obesity. And he has some physical impairments from his former size. But he is much healthier now, at 120 grams. Here's his story.  



We don't know how old Cousin is, but we're glad he has a home at the shelter where he will be permanently cared for. -via Laughing Squid

Bill Watterson drew the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes from 1985 to 1995. During that time, Watterson fought tirelessly to elevate the art of the comic strip, and resisted lucrative merchandising deals. Then he retired the comic and withdrew from public life at the end of 1995. He refused to allow old Calvin and Hobbes strips to be syndicated, and forbids all licensed merchandising of the characters.

That's why the only sign you see of Calvin for sale today is the common sticker you see of the 6-year-old peeing. It is a sign of disdain, and varies according to what the sticker shows he's peeing on- a brand, a sports team mascot, a political figure, you name it. Why anyone would want to use a bootleg image of a beloved character to call attention to what one hates is a question for another day, but manufacturers have made money off Watterson's art this way since around 1995. Those under 30 are more familiar with the peeing Calvin and his evil smile than they are with the child who talked to his tiger. Read about the rise of the peeing Calvin and its continuing profitability at Mel magazine. -via Digg

🎂 A grandmother was celebrating her 70th birthday at Disney World when her entire family showed up to surprise her. Watch the heartwarming video when she realized that the strangers that quickly surrounded her were actually members of her family.

🍔 BBQ pork bun and a side of sarcasm? That's my kind of breakfast!

😱 A History of Horror is a three-part series that explains everything you want to know about horror movies - from the 1925 silent film The Phantom of the Opera, to modern day slasher films. Grab a tub of popcorn (or three) and watch.

❤️ Valentine is coming, where is your boyfriend? If you don't have one, the Kabusa Oriental Choir has a three-part song that explains what's going on.

🦉 How do you convince a bunch of burrowing owls to move into a new neighborhood? Telling them that the rent is cheaper didn't work, instead you've got to trick them with fake poop.

🩺 When the doctor tells you to eat poop, he's legit trying to cure your C. difficile infection.

More neat posts over at our new sites: Pop Culturista, Pictojam, Laughosaurus, Spooky Daily, and Supa Fluffy.

Current NeatoShop special: Save up to 20% on all Sci-Fi T-Shirts, Fantasy Tees, and Horror T-Shirts.

In case you haven't been paying attention, the Winter Olympics are about to begin in Beijing. They officially run from February 4th to the 20th, but some events, such as curling, are already running qualification rounds. The coverage has been pretty low key because of covid restrictions and the fact that we just had Olympic Games last year. But they are the Winter Games, and every time they come around, we have to confront the fact that we mainly watch them to see people slip and slide on snow and ice, waiting for someone to fall.

So to plan your television engagement with the games, The Ringer has a list of 30 events, ranked by how terrified you would be to try them yourself. There's no doubt that curling doesn't seem too dangerous, even if it is fascinatingly silly. Singles figure skating? Well, you might fall, but rarely does someone break a leg doing it. That's not the case with downhill skiing, speed skating, and luge. How about the biathlon? That's cross-country skiing and shooting, which is only dangerous if someone shoots at you. See where your favorite winter sport lands in the ranking, and read up on what's involved in all of them at The Ringer. -via Digg

(Image credit: Martin Rulsch)

Wait. You're saying that while each and every one of us has their simple names like Linda or Matt misspelled, they actually spelled yours right, as a historical first?

— Roland Venesz (@steerio) January 8, 2022

In this modern world, people who already have the names Alexis or Siri get some grief. Having your name associated with a meme is troublesome; just ask any woman named Karen. But imagine if your name was Kovid! Just writing that sentence is difficult, because spellcheck wants to change it to covid. Kovid is a not-all-that-uncommon name in India, and has been for a long time. Kovid Kapoor has been hearing the same jokes for two years now.  

Kapoor has largely turned to humor, telling his Twitter followers he’s been “kovid positive since 1990” – when he was born – and he could only laugh with the airport employees carefully reviewing his passport on his recent trip to Sri Lanka, his first time leaving the country during the pandemic. Or at Google’s assumption his own name must be spelled wrong.

Similar stories can be told by women named Rona, Delta airlines, and of course, Corona beer. Read the stories of several Kovids, both men and women, and what they've had to put up with these last two years. -via Metafilter