Halloween at Big Cat Rescue in Florida means giving pumpkins and other gourds to the cats to play with (and nom). This year, they've spiced things up by giving the lions, tigers, leopards, servals, cougars, and other cats piñatas, hanging bats, and wooden tombstones to play with as well. As usual, what we get is powerful and adorable destruction on a grand scale. -via Tastefully Offensive
Reuben Fischer-Baum, who created the map of The Most Popular Girls' Names, State by State, from 1960 to the Present, has his followup ready, this time for boys' names. Naming baby boys is a less trendy venture, and there have been only at few names at the top. On this animated map, the name in color is the one that was most popular nationwide that year, and for fifty years there have been only two: Michael and Jacob. The biggest names from years gone by are still popular today, and just about all of them are Biblical. The data used was from the Social Security Administration. You can see the maps for each year separately at Jezebel. -via Daily of the Day
It's almost Halloween and reader Cassandra Gallegos did a great job meeting the deadline to finish her handmade Ghostbusters costume on time. Captain, her precious little chihuahua mix, might not look too excited to be decked out for ghostbusting, but that's just because he's too cool for your Halloween games. He knows you don't have to dress up to actually bust ghosts.
Don't forget, if you want to see your pooch, kitties or other critters in costumes on our site, be sure to send your cute pictures to jill@neatorama.com.
This video from the Oregon Zoo is actually titled Lily's First Halloween, but squishing squash is what the elephants did Friday. Samudra, Packy, the baby Lily, and other elephants are given pumpkins to play with and snack on to kick off the zoo's Halloween celebration. Other activities this weekend include a scavenger hunt and a costume party. Oh yeah, that really big pumpkin? It weighed 1,300 pounds before the elephants got ahold of it! -via Tastefully Offensive
This clever ad for the Honda CR-V shows a wide array of clever optical illusions. As the viewer’s perspective shifts, objects change size, arrangement and dimension. The ad uses these impossible images as metaphors for the car’s fuel efficiency. Chris Palmer directed it for the Mcgarrybowen agency in London.
Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamun in Egypt in 1922. On March 24, 1923, novelist Marie Corelli warned him in the press that bad things happen to those who desecrate tombs. Within two weeks, Lord Carnarvon was dead from an infection brought on by a mosquito bite he suffered just two days after Corelli's warning was published. The mummy's curse caused it, of course.
The idea of the mummy’s curse was already a popular story, but Carnarvon’s demise (and Corelli’s apparent prediction of it) turned it into one of the great legends of the age. Rumours quickly spread that Carter had found warnings in the tomb itself. There were reports of a clay tablet, allegedly found over the tomb’s entrance, that read: ‘Death shall come on swift wings to whoever toucheth the tomb of Pharaoh.’ According to the stories, Carter buried it in the sand in case it scared his labourers into stopping their work. The whole situation was a gift for journalists who, four months after the tomb’s discovery, were desperate for more Tutankhamun-related news. Once the curse story took off, they began running daily updates, roping in scholars to debate whether evil spirits were to blame for Carnarvon’s demise.
In the next twelve years, six of the people who were present when the tomb was opened were dead. The mummy's curse? Not when you consider there were forty people there, and they weren't all young and healthy. Curses against grave-robbing had been around for a long time, and they were particularly attached to mummies when modern archaeologist began to exhume them. How many other mummies were unearthed with no dramatic deaths? But the power of a good story propelled the mummy's curse into popular consciousness. Read how it happened at Aeon magazine.
Peyton Robertson lives in Florida, America’s hurricane magnet. So he knows how much damage a flood can do and the value of a wall of sandbags when the water rise.
Most sandbags used for this purpose are heavy and porous. That’s why he invented one that isn’t filled with sand, but salt and an expandable polymer substance. It’s lightweight, so it’s easy to move them in bulk to flooding locations. When they’re piled in place, just hose them down with water. The polymer swells and solidifies. Conveniently, the bags, when filled, swell into a shape that makes them easy to interlock.
This invention earned Peyton the grand prize in the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge, which comes with a $25,000 check and a trip to Costa Rica.
Here at Neatorama we love the work of the Brooklyn-based artist Nina Katchadourian. We’ve seen her re-arrange book titles to create stories, mend real spider webs with sewing thread and, most famously, re-create old Flemish-style portraits using materials found in airplane bathrooms.
Her latest project is called “Seat Assignment.” She’s back on airplanes again. But this time, she’s staying in her seat. Ms. Katchadourian took photos of fellow travelers in the reflections of shiny seatbelt buckles. The project spanned 107 flights between March 2010 and August 2013. She first exhibited the project in 2011 in New Zealand, making most of it on the way:
Since I had 22 hours of flight time from New York to get to the Dunedin I proposed to make the bulk of the work for the exhibition on the way there. In the exhibition, two of the three galleries focused on work made entirely en route.
Inspired by the creative works of Adele Enersen, Anna Eftimie and Anne Geddes, freelance artist and mother-of-three Queenie Liao imagines the dream of her child Wengenn. In her album Wengenn in Wonderland, Liao composed more than 100 creative photos of her then-three-month-old son.
Liao's imagination seems boundless - she's dressed up her sleeping son using readily available things in her home - to create the various themes of the photos. Liao said to Bored Panda, "Every day just before Wengenn's nap, I would imagine him being the main character in one of my favorite episodes, and 'paint' a background setting with plain clothes, stuffed animals, and other common household materials, just like how an artist would with her paint brushes."
Liao has published a book in Taiwan titled "sleepy Baby" that provided step-by-step details of how some of her pictures were taken, and is working on the English-version of the book.
Yes, there's a dog under all that. The crew at the veterinary clinic in Brantford, Ontario, nicknamed him Shrek because he looked like a swamp creature. Dean Gough found the dog in the rain near a pond in the woods. His wife, veterinarian Dr. Brenda Gough of the Southern Cross Equestrian Facility and the Park Road Veterinary Clinic, took charge of the poor dog. Clinic staff removed 3.5 pounds of matted hair, revealing a small white male dog underneath. His skin was badly irritated by the matted coat, and he had a burr in his eye. He was also malnourished -and terrified.
The clinic's Facebook photo gallery tells the dog's story. See a news video as well. Officials at the Brant County SPCA are looking for anyone who might know how the dog came to be in such a state. Shrek is now recovering at the Gough family home, where he is receiving lots of love and attention. -via Arbroath
Although it doesn’t have the same effect as holding up the heart of one your enemies, this is still pretty badass. But dealing with hardship with good spirits has always been Penny Smith’s strength. She had cancer when she was 3 years old and developed heart problems in 1994. Last year, she had a heart transplant.
Here she is holding up her old heart while her new one keeps her alive. This photo was taken a few months after her transplant:
"That was in the hospital in the pathology lab," Smith said. "I was saying goodbye to my heart, actually, because I felt like it got me through half of my life and I needed to say goodbye to it. So I was saying goodbye, and getting to know my new heart.
"My doctors made me wait because they didn't think I was ready. I wanted to be able to hold it, and they didn't want me to drop it.
"I was happy to see it again-well, see it for the first time, I guess.
"My husband even got to hold it. It felt really weird for both of us, but it was amazing to get to hold something that was once in someone."
You may think you're tough, but are you "Holding your own heart in your hand" tough? pic.twitter.com/rgJYZKeZg4
Visual Burrito (Royce Hutain) made a Halloween costume for his 22-month old daughter, using LED technology to make the child easy to see in the dark. I'm sure you'll agree that she shows up well in the dark -as a cartoon stick figure! I bet she can even draw herself. It's not the first LED stickmen that he's made: here is the adult version, made for nighttime snowboarding. -via reddit
Electrician Helen Stevens got in her work van in Melton, Leicestershire, England, and sped off to another job in another town. She did not know that a cat was on her van's roof! Stevens got up to 70 mph on the highway when she saw another vehicle flash its lights at her. She pulled over, checked her van, and found a cat clinging to a ladder for life. Stevens took the terrified cat to a veterinary clinic. The clinic, where they nicknamed the cat Batman, put an appeal on Facebook to find the cat's owner.
We've featured videos from Gracie, Leo and Tommy before, but usually they're such happy, cheerful affairs, even Tommy's previous Halloween video was filled with lively fun. This time it's a real horror story, or at least as close as it gets for this family of critters.
Will they fall prey to these attacking arachnids? Or will these kitties come out on top? Only time will tell...though I'm sure you could probably guess the outcome considering they're fake spiders and this is just a silly and cute pet video. Really, these two seem to think the spiders are just great toys.
