I don't think water will dissolve mortar. If you look at the fourth picture down, you can tell clearly that the bricks ARE melting (top right in the photo).

Clearly, these aren't fireplace bricks (which have very high melting point).

I love fried eel! My favorite dish growing up ... one day, I wandered to the back of the restaurant (I was a little kid) and saw how they prepared the eel :)

@philliposophy - @airinn
You shouldn’t be embarrassed that you got this mixed up with boingboing. After all, since this is a repost of an article that was already on boingboing, it is neatorama that should be embarrassed.

Um, we don't coordinate postings with the great Boing Boing, y'know :)

What a story! That one-star review, airplane ticket, and hours spent in the airport certainly gave Cuhaci a lot of buzz!

I've noticed that there has been a rash of downvoting submissions regardless of their quality.

While we don't yet have the ability to match identity to votes, please be assured that an editor will look through each and every one of the submissions and may promote your post even if it got downvoted out of the Queue.

@VonSkippy - I think the change in digg is directed or explicitly allowed by its admins. That website certainly has an enviable growth during the past couple of years, though it remains to be seen if digg can be profitable.

@AJ - it's a delicate balance to maintain friendliness of the blog as Neatorama grew over the years. Our "troll be gone" background picture in the comment box seems to help somewhat, but its effectiveness is wearing down ...

I'm a firm believer that more openness is a good thing. I still think the Upcoming Queue will be good for the blog.

@twit - automated promotion has been de-emphasized, though it will remain a factor in the Upcoming Queue.

@Front page sans Queuebot posts - this is more difficult to achieve. I'm not convinced that quality and Queuebot are mutually exclusive - so please give it some time. I think we saw an irregular spike in dubious post quality that has been fixed. We can implement a "secondary front page" for those who dislike the UQ if warranted in the future. Maybe (I don't know technically how to do that yet)

FTFY, Jake - also gussied up the description a bit before pushing this to front page.

Did any of you catch that this was promoted from the Upcoming Queue? See? It's neat, right?

Just published my "official" response - please check it out here: Improving the Neatorama Upcoming Queue

For those of you who want Queuebot-less RSS feed, here it is (simply copy and paste):

http://www.neatorama.com/feed/?author=-5587

Thank you for your feedback, everyone! Please feel free to comment in the new post - we'll continue to listen.

Wow - over 100 comments overnight, that's quite something!

First of all, please let me thank rellimz for submitting the post and all of you who commented for the feedback. I want you to know that I read every single one of the comments, and am going to post a response after a cup or two of coffee to make sure I'm thinking straight.

A lot of you have raised similar concerns: the sheer quantity of posts that made it to the front page and the quality of those posts. I gather that for the feed readers, seeing their "unread posts" number from Neatorama shoot through the roof must be kind of unnerving (that's the reason I stopped using a feed reader, by the way, and simply visiting my favorite blogs in their native environment).

A number of you also raise the issue of sifting through a lot of unneat post to find the gems in the Upcoming Queue.

I'll be sure check this post again to read new comments.

It's not the first time we've posted something and link it to an order page (because that page the most original source). If I could find the artist that made this (though I doubt it's a unique item - it seems to be a mass produced one), then we would've linked there.

This looks familiar - I thought we had something like this on Neatorama a while ago, but that one turned not to be half as mesmerizing as this one.

Good find, Jake!

Wow - our first "meta" post. Obviously I have an opinion about this, but I'd like to listen to all of yours first.

BTW, I delinked the post, since it went into the archives (I know the original poster rellimz had to pick a URL. It's not a bad one to pick, but irrelevant to the discussion at hand.)

No, not "neat" but definitely interesting!

Of course - sorry for the typo! Fixed now.