(YouTube link)
Cute little Cookie is a penguin of the species known as Little Penguin {wiki}. He is the mascot of the Zoo Bird House at the Cincinnati Zoo. On a related note, I looked up "bumblefoot" and found out where they got the name for the penguin in the movie Happy Feet. -via Ever So Strange
I love spring, but man, it keeps you busy: spring cleaning, garden planting, Easter preparations -whew! But you need to take some downtime this weekend and catch up on what's been going on here at Neatorama.
My Parents Hate Me at NeatoBambino is the story of a drum set the grandparents bought. Tiffany had to be creative to thwart their diabolical plan! And if you've been keeping up with her series called Weeks and Counting, you now know what her real title is.
Phil Haney brought us the lowdown on The Almost Famous Relatives of Famous People.
Jill Harness dug up 10 Origin Stories of Common Household Products for your edification.
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader followed the deterioration process in When Good Food Goes Bad.
The Annals of Improbable Research gave us What Lies Behind the Grand Canyon?
We learned the story behind "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson, courtesy of mental_floss magazine.
In the What Is It? game this week, it took more than 50 guesses for someone to come up with the correct answer! Berhard finally said this object is a corn dryer. You stick it into an ear of corn to hang and dry it so you could use the kernels for seed corn. trishlovesdolphins gave us the funniest answer: it’s the air freshener from Mad Max’s car! Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop.
We've got a lot of in-depth articles compiled over the years on subjects that are way more interesting than you might have thought. You'll find those at The Best of Neatorama, arranged by year, with pictures to make it easy for you to find something good to read. And there's more on the way next week!
If you have any suggestions, comments, or questions about Neatorama, feel free to leave them here in these weekend roundup posts anytime. We'd love to hear from you!
My Parents Hate Me at NeatoBambino is the story of a drum set the grandparents bought. Tiffany had to be creative to thwart their diabolical plan! And if you've been keeping up with her series called Weeks and Counting, you now know what her real title is.
Phil Haney brought us the lowdown on The Almost Famous Relatives of Famous People.
Jill Harness dug up 10 Origin Stories of Common Household Products for your edification.
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader followed the deterioration process in When Good Food Goes Bad.
The Annals of Improbable Research gave us What Lies Behind the Grand Canyon?
We learned the story behind "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson, courtesy of mental_floss magazine.
In the What Is It? game this week, it took more than 50 guesses for someone to come up with the correct answer! Berhard finally said this object is a corn dryer. You stick it into an ear of corn to hang and dry it so you could use the kernels for seed corn. trishlovesdolphins gave us the funniest answer: it’s the air freshener from Mad Max’s car! Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop.
We've got a lot of in-depth articles compiled over the years on subjects that are way more interesting than you might have thought. You'll find those at The Best of Neatorama, arranged by year, with pictures to make it easy for you to find something good to read. And there's more on the way next week!
If you have any suggestions, comments, or questions about Neatorama, feel free to leave them here in these weekend roundup posts anytime. We'd love to hear from you!
Comedian Todd Lamb often posts odd signs from a fictitious person named Chris on lamp posts in New York City. They form an ongoing story about the life of an eccentric man who wants to meet other people like him. The Village Voice interviewed Lamb about the project:
Tell me about the Chris character.
I feel like a lot of New Yorkers are in their own little world, whatever that world is. I wanted to see if I could break them out of that. For Chris, all he wants to do is meet up with people, because he's not busy. He's the opposite of all these New Yorkers who are booked solid throughout the day, and even if they had free time, they wouldn't want to meet up with you.
Chris has lots of time and is wiling to meet you for the most mundane things. And no one wants to do those things except Chris. Like, Chris wants to eat some Fritos and move a mattress. He just wants soda, snacks, and your time.
http://web.mac.com/lambtodd/iWeb/todd%20lamb%20/Todd%20Lamb%20Notes%20From%20Chris.html via Super Punch | Interview
+1 for originality. This tattoo mashes up Cthulhu and Rich Uncle Pennybags, the mascot from the board game Monopoly.
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I know the skeptics among you probably think that this is a bad idea, but you also scoffed when they made a robot that could feed off human flesh. And that's turned out okay so far, right?
So: no worries. The Punching Pro is designed to help human users learn how to box. That's all.
Product Site via Geekologie | Previously: Robot Trained to Repeatedly Punch Humans
Veronica Knight made a full-length crocheted Viking costume. It served as her entry into tomorrow's mustache and beard competition in Detroit. We ought to do something similar among Neatoramanauts, but with an original twist. Perhaps a back hair competition.
Link | Competition Website
This gem comes courtesy of redditor ultimobranchialbody. Adherence is mandatory.
Link via Geekosystem
Salt Power Salt & Pepper Battery Shakers - $11.95
Does your kitchen table need more energy? You should get the Salt Power Salt & Pepper Battery Shakers from the NeatoShop! With these little beauties your kitchen table will feel instantly recharged.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop's large selection of funky and unusual Salt & Pepper Shakers!
Photo: Fritz Hoffmann
In the past few decades, Shaolin Temple has become famous. Indeed, for many it is synonymous with kung fu. The temple has become an international business empire - it has built martial arts academies, funded touring kung fu troupes, shot film and TV projects.
But as it is gaining in fame, is Shaolin Temple losing its soul? Peter Gwin of National Geographic writes this fascinating article about the lives of a couple of Shaolin disciples:
On the last morning I spend at his retreat, Dejian shows me his private quarters, a tiny stone cupola perched on the tip of a sheer cliff. He leads the way out to a terrace with a view of the deep, bowl-shaped valley carpeted with thick pine forests. A weather front is blowing in, and his thick wool cape flutters behind him.
Without warning he jumps up onto the low wall bordering the lip of the cliff, the wind filling his cape so that it flows out over the void. I suddenly feel guilty, that I somehow prodded him onto the ledge, like a morbid voyeur. I hadn't consciously considered it before, but of course that's why many people come up to see Shi Dejian, to watch him challenge death. Maybe this time death wins. But standing on the ledge, he smiles at me. "You are afraid?" he asks, seeing the look on my face. "Kung fu is not only training the body; it is also about controlling fear." He hops lightly from one foot to the other, lunging, punching, spinning, each step inches from a horrifying fall. His eyes widen as he concentrates. The cape billows and snaps in the cold wind.
"You cannot defeat death," he says, his voice rising over the wind. He kicks a foot out over the abyss, balancing on one of his tree-trunk legs. "But you can defeat your fear of death."
Just like humans, whales also have "pop songs," complete with music mania that sweeps across the ocean:
The findings are based on 11 years of recordings from underwater microphones slung over the sides of boats, which were collected by marine biologist Ellen Garland of the University of Queensland in Australia and colleagues. Picking out the patterns took a while; the team had to listen to 745 songs in total from six whale populations across the South Pacific over the 11-year period. The researchers identified 11 distinctly different styles (audio). Sometimes the "hit song" contained snippets from previous seasons, sometimes it was entirely revolutionary. But at any given time and place, there was only one song. What's more, the popular song switched incredibly rapidly; it took only 2 to 3 months for whales in a given region to entirely change their tune, the team reports online today in Current Biology.
For male whales, singing is known to be a mating behavior, and Garland calls the results a "weird interaction of constrained novelty" where each whale wants to one-up the whale next to it but still feels pressure to conform enough that it doesn't stand out as an oddball. But whether a whale primarily intends its song to impress females or to intimidate other males with its swanky style remains unclear.
Humpback Idol, anyone? http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/04/whale-pop-songs-spread-across-th.html?ref=hp
Punt guns were enormous shotguns used to hunt waterfowl in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. They were so heavy that they were normally attached to small boats called punts and the boats were then pointed as birds resting on the water's surface:
Punt guns were usually custom-designed and so varied widely, but could have bore diameters exceeding 2 inches (51 mm) and fire over a pound (0.5 kilos) of shot at a time.
A single shot could kill over 50 waterfowl resting on the water's surface. They were too big to hold and the recoil so large that they were mounted directly on the punts used for hunting, hence their name. Hunters would maneuver their punts quietly into line and range of the flock using poles or oars to avoid startling them.
Generally the gun was fixed to the punt; thus the hunter would maneuver the entire boat in order to aim the gun. The guns were sufficiently powerful, and the punts themselves sufficiently small, that firing the gun often propelled the punt backwards several inches or more. To improve efficiency, hunters could work in fleets of up to around ten punts.
The practice faded as wild waterfowl stocks were depleted. It was eventually banned in the United States, though I gather it is still legal in the United Kingdom.
Link via The Firearm Blog | Photo: The Underhammer Society
Previously: World's Largest Shotgun
I'm not sure whether the Hamburglar put her up to this, but a 64-year-old woman refused to stop when pulled over by police. Instead, she got herself into a McDonald's drive-thru lane and ordered lunch:
Officer Courtney Vassell pulled up behind Spen in the drive-thru lane, and got out of the patrol car. With police lights flashing behind him, he told her to pull out into the parking lot for a traffic stop, according to a police report.
Spen, though, completed her food order, paid the bill, and then drove her bronze 2001 Chevrolet out of the parking lot and onto Northwest Sixth Court, Vassell said.
Vassell again flipped on his siren and stopped Spen outside the McDonald's, where he said she "rolled her window down one inch and said she was not speeding and she would not roll her window down."
Meet Father Jose Francisco Syquia. He's a Roman Catholic priest in Manila, Philippines, with a rather unusual job: he's head of the Manila Archdiocese's Office of Exorcism.
A blood-curdling scream echoes through the Roman Catholic chapel in Manila as Father Jose Francisco Syquia says a prayer of exorcism over a Satanic cult member believed to be possessed by the devil.
"It's very painful," the woman cries in an unearthly voice, her body contorting in an attempt to break free from the tight grasp of Syquia's assistants. After a few minutes she falls silent, her limp body exhausted.
The case is among hundreds documented on video and kept by Syquia, who heads the Manila Archdiocese's Office of Exorcism -- the only one that exists in the Catholic nation of 94 million people.
"She would have levitated had she not been restrained," Syquia said of the woman in the video, portions of which were shown to AFP during a rare interview at his office in the basement of a seminary in Manila.
Syquia believes he is in the frontline of the battle between good and evil on earth.
"There is a great dramatic increase of possessions right now," said the 44-year-old priest. "More and more the demons are gaining a foothold into this society."
Photo: Piotr Naskrecki - via LifeScience Image of the Day
Talkin' bout the devil - here's a picture of the Satanic Leaf-Tailed Gecko (previously on Neatorama):
The satanic leaf-tailed gecko (Uroplatus phantasticus) is the smallest of 12 species of bizarre-looking leaf-tailed geckos. The nocturnal creature has extremely cryptic camouflage so it can hide out in forests in Madagascar. This group of geckos is found only in primary, undisturbed forests, so their populations are very sensitive to habitat destruction. Large Uroplatus species have more teeth than any other living terrestrial vertebrate species.
The gecko species was discovered in Mantadia-Zahamena corridor of Madagascar in 1998 during one of the Conservation International (CI) "Rapid Assessment Program" (RAP) surveys.
