In Italy, the custom of celebrating Easter with eggs and candy has evolved into the custom of giving gifts tucked inside chocolate eggs. There are mass-produced chocolate eggs with treats inside for children, and beautiful artisanal eggs made by chocolatiers, that are either wrapped in fancy paper and ribbons, or decorated with intricate edible art right on the chocolate. And the gifts can be customized.

In mass-produced eggs, the hidden prize is often a simple trinket, such as a key chain. But artisanal chocolatiers also abound — and many will make customized eggs for clients with a personalized gift hidden within. And the gift-giving can get quite elaborate.

"Engagement rings and car keys are typical gifts," says Maurizio Proietti, a second-generation chocolate maker and owner of Rome's La Bottega del Cioccolato, naming some of the gifts he's been asked to conceal. "Two tickets to a tropical island — that was something unusual."

The surprise inside, adds Minchilli, depends on whom it's for. "A typical gift would be a charm for a necklace or bracelet," she tells The Salt. "But if it's for your wife, you might get a very small egg with gold earrings inside. A child might get a small toy."

Read about the chocolate eggs of Italy at NPR. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user blese)

Inspired by Game of Thrones, Caldwell Tanner imagined sigils and words for twelve popular websites, including Netflix, Google and DeviantArt. You can view them all at the link. If the House of Neatorama had a sigil and motto, what would they be?

Link

Photo: Ryo Ichikawa

Will the wonder that is Japan ever cease? First, the country gave us Dragon Ball Z. Then she gives us Kamehameha, a meme where people imitate anime fight scenes. How awesome is it? Let's just say that it's over NINE THOUSAAAAAAND!

More over at Kotaku - via PetaPixel

Photo: @mrmr0630

Photo: @ari_snows

Having a bad day? That's impossible after seeing these awesome photos of Boom of Super Pitbulls frolicking with bunnies and a chick: Link - via Buzzfeed

When the competition is so fierce, how do you rank librarians by coolness? Flavorwire's Emily Temple found a way. She's compiled descriptions of ten hip and innovative librarians, including MetaFilter's own Jessamyn West:

The tagline of West’s website, Librarian.net, is “putting the rarin back in librarian,” which should give you an idea about her attitude. A library technologist based in Vermont who spends her time thinking and talking about “the digital divide,” she is the irreverent, awesome librarian of the future (and also the present).

Link | Photo: Jessamyn West

P.S. If the list was expanded, I'd linclude io9's Jess Nevins, an expert on pulp fiction and comics, as well as Amanda Brennan, the resident librarian at Know Your Meme.

We hear about tech companies going public all the time, but why not actual people? That's what Mike Merrill, 35-year-old tech support rep at a small Portland, Oregon, software company did. He decided to go public with shares of himself:

On January 26, 2008, a 30-year-old part-time entrepreneur named Mike Merrill decided to sell himself on the open market. He divided himself into 100,000 shares and set an initial public offering price of $1 a share. Each share would earn a potential return on profits he made outside of his day job as a customer service rep at a small Portland, Oregon, software company. Over the next 10 days, 12 of his friends and acquaintances bought 929 shares, and Merrill ended up with a handful of extra cash. He kept the remaining 99.1 percent of himself but promised that his shares would be nonvoting: He’d let his new stockholders decide what he should do with his life. [...]

Merrill wasn’t running a startup per se, but he had plenty of great ideas and ambitions—videogames he wanted to develop, a data backup service he wanted to launch, a whiskey-tasting society he hoped to form. He needed venture capital, but as an ordinary guy, he had limited access to capital markets. That didn’t hold him back. He simply relied on the support of the motley group of programmers, bloggers, and baristas he knew in Portland. It was Silicon Valley–style finance, writ small.

But, like many entrepreneurs before him, Merrill soon learned the downside to taking on outside funding. In the ensuing months and years, 128 people bought shares of Merrill, and he fell victim to competing shareholder interests, stock price manipulation, and investors looking for short-term gains at the expense of his long-term well-being. He was overwhelmed by paperwork and blindsided by takeover interest. He found himself beholden to his shareholders in ways he had never imagined, ruining personal relationships along the way. Through it all, Merrill clung stubbornly to the belief that since an IPO had worked for Google and Amazon, it should work for an individual too.

Read the rest of the story by Joshua Davis over at Wired: Link

How do you make Greek epics even more, um, epic-er? Add superheroes. That's what Nicholas Hyde AKA Harshness did by featuring Thor, Spider-Man, and Batman in the style of ancient Greek pottery. Via Geek Art

A post at Cake Wrecks featuring the pictured cake of a lamb with a cigarette in its mouth led me to a previous collection of such cakes, which led to a post about the possible meaning of what appears to be a tradition, although not common enough to be well documented. Lamb cakes are baked for both Passover and Easter, and sometimes for a Catholic child's First Communion. The blog Romantoes gathered several theories from commenters.

* It's Joe Camel.

* The lamb is smoking to signify the end of Lent, and the enjoyment of vices one might have given up for Lent, such as smoking.

* The cigarette is supposed to represent a paintbrush, and is colored on the end to suggest the lamb's blood that was used to paint door frames during the original Pesach.

* What looks like a cigarette is actually a scroll, and is in the lamb's mouth to illustrate a passage from Revelations: "Then I saw, between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders, a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. The Lamb went and took the scroll from the right hand of the one who was seated on the throne."

I looked around at forums that discussed the matter, but no one knew with authority what the "cigarette" meant. However, a few people mentioned that they had seen such lambs for sale at Jewish delis, which leads me to think the third explanation may be the one. Link

(Image source: Cake Wrecks)

Old colorful iMac G3 shells are now overhead lamps at Toronto travel agency G Adventures. Is this brilliantly clever or tragically tacky? Link  -via Gizmodo

Fourteen-year-old Katelyn Norman of LaFollette, Tennessee, has terminal bone cancer. One of the items on her bucket list was to go to the prom. Campbell County High School had their prom early and arranged for her to go, but then Katelyn's declining health landed her in East Tennessee Children's Hospital.

In stable condition and in high spirits, Katelyn was able to have a make shift prom in her room.

The hospital staff decorated the room and her date gave her a corsage and a special sash. Family and friends gathered outside with candles.

Meanwhile, in Campbell County, the celebration of Katelyn was taking place.

The music was blaring, the decorations were hung, it was meant to be Katelyn's perfect night, and she wanted it to go on, even if she wasn't there.

"She contacted me and said prom must go on, that's her, and you can't help but feed off that energy, that life," said Sharon Shepard, an instructor at Katelyn's school and organizer of the prom.

The night was a celebration of Katelyn, featuring all her favorite things.  But most important, the people she loves most.

Link to story.

Link to pictures. -via reddit

(Image credit: Michael Dayah) 

Update: Katelyn passed away the day after this was posted. Link

With low shutter speeds, photographer David Orias can create stunning images of the waves off the coast of California. He writes:

I often use the camera to see our world in ways our eyes cannot see. I do this by using long shutter speeds and camera motion to achieve this goal. I am often asked where the colors on my waves come from. I shoot mostly at dawn and the geography of the location allows higher ambient light levels before the full illumination by the sun. Colors are created by different weather conditions, amount of clouds or even smoke in the air from local wildfires which are often prevalent.

Gallery and Photographer's Website -via Colossal

(Video Link)

YouTube member deneui made this bizarrely fascinating video in 1987 while attending Arizona State University. While snapping a riding crop for encouragement, librarian Betty Glover puts her staff through a vigorous workout using common pieces of library equipment.

-via Breda Fallacy

Bill Gekas, an internationally award-winning photographer, feels inspired by the visual ambiances of the Old Masters of Western European painting, particular Vemeer and Rembrandt. He duplicated them magificently in a photo series that includes his daughter and himself:

Using various models, including his five-year-old daughter, Gekas has brilliantly re-imagined the masters, replicating the lighting style for which they are famous. The so-called Rembrandt lighting is characterised by strong window light falling on one side of the subject's face and body, producing shadows amid a rich glow. Gekas uses artificial light to simulate the admired window-lighting effect.

Gallery, Photographer's Website and News Story -via American Digest

The iPad first appeared on Star Trek: The Next Generation in 2364, so it makes sense to accent one accordingly. Knitter Who made several custom iPad covers styled like the uniforms of the Enterprise-D's bridge crew. Warning: encasing your iPad in a Worf cover voids the warranty.

Link -via Knit Queer

P.S. Be sure to check out our line of iPad acccessories now on sale in the NeatoShop.

Owen Sherman of Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, just turned seven years old. He asked his friends and family to skip getting him a birthday gift, but instead he requested donations for an animal shelter where he found his best friend, Eli.

Owen, a first-grader at SeDoMoCha Elementary School in Dover-Foxcroft, has bilateral fibular hemimelia — a congenital absence of the fibula bones in both legs. His legs were amputated below the knees when he was 8 months old. He now wears prosthetic legs, which he was walking on as early as 13 months old, according to his mother Barbara Estabrook Sherman.

After the family dog, Sparky, died last year, Owen and his father, Shane Sherman, went looking for a new dog.

“My husband and he went behind my back and searched over the Internet and found Eli,” said Sherman. “[Owen] fell in love with Eli sight unseen.”

Sherman said Eli, a boxer-lab mix, had to have one of its hind legs amputated.

“We believe he had been abused and somehow an infection set in,” she said. “He was given up and he had to have that leg amputated.”

Owen and Eli are inseparable. The Underhound Railroad Rescue now has at least $120 coming that would have been spent on Owen's birthday gifts. Link  -via Fark

(Image credit: Barbara Estabrook Sherman)