In 1978, George Lucas had an idea for a movie called "Raiders of the Lost Ark," and invited Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan to a brainstorming session to flesh it out.

Luckily, the transcript of the session is available online. Here's an inside look at how the character Indiana Jones came to life:

George Lucas: The fact that he is slightly scruffy. You don't know it until it happens. Now, several aspects that we've discussed before: The image of him which is the strongest image is the "Treasure Of Sierra Madre" outfit, which is the khaki pants, he's got the leather jacket, that sort of felt hat, and the pistol and holster with a World War One sort of flap over it. He's going into the jungle carrying his gun. The other thing we've added to him, which may be fun, is a bull whip. That's really his trade mark. That's really what he's good at. He has a pistol, and he's probably very good at that, but at the same time he happens to be very good with a bull whip. It's really more of a hobby than anything else. Maybe he came from Montana, someplace, and he... There are freaks who love bull whips. They just do it all the time. It's a device that hasn't been used in a long time.

Steven Spielberg — You can knock somebody' s belt off and the guys pants fall down.

George Lucas — You can swing over things, you can...there are so many things you can do with it. I thought he carried it rolled up. It's like a Samurai sword. He carries it back there and you don't even notice it. That way it's not in the way or anything. It's just there whenever he wants it.

Read the entire transcript over at Mad Dog Movies: Link [PDF] - via The New Yorker

Ever got a dollar bill stamped with a Where's George stamp? It's a fun game to most people, where they can enter a banknote's serial number to track where it has been, but to theoretical physicist Dirk Brockman, they represent data on money - and therefore human - mobility.

In 2006, after crunching the data, Brockman came up with a completely different map of the United States, where states' geographic boundaries melt away and are replaced with financial ones. Here's the map he created when he, well, followed the money:

Theoretical physicist Dirk Brockmann used the dollar bill tracking site Where’s George to see how money moves, and create new state boundaries based on our economies. The darker the blue lines, the less likely it is a dollar bill will have crossed it.

Read more over at this article by Stan Alcorn over at Co.Exist: Link

When asked how he felt that his wife earns more than him, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said, "Listen. I just have three words for you: joint checking account. That money all lands in the same place, baby."

In 2011, Mary Pat Christie, a bond trader, earned more than $307,000 whereas her Republican governor husband earned a bit more than half her pay, $175,000. The trend of the wife being the breadwinner of the family - a role reversal from the traditional Ozzie and Harriet family in sitcom of the 50s - has been gaining in the United States.

Dennis Cauchon of USA TODAY wrote:

A USA TODAY analysis of Census Bureau data reveals a revolution in the traditional roles of men and women that extends from college campuses to the workplace to the neighborhoods across this nation. Today, when one spouse works full-time and the other stays home, it's the wife who is the sole breadwinner in a record 23% of families, the analysis finds. When the Census started tracking this in 1976, the number was 6%.

What do you think of the trend?

What's better than going on a walk with a St Bernard dog? A whole ARMY of them! Tikki Smith of Lasquite's Saint Bernard went for a walk with her son and 42 St. Bernards for a day in the woods.

Oh, imagine the slobber! Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via The Dish

French art collective Maentis spoofed the famous March of Progress by Rudolph Zallinger to create the 99 Steps of Progress. Here are some of our favorites:

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

Photo: Vitaliy Raskalov

When Russian photographers Vadim Makhorov and Vitaliy Raskalov went to the Pyramids at Giza, Egypt, the duo couldn't resist embarking on a great adventure: climbing to the top of the Pyramid and taking photos of the world below.

Problem was, it's illegal to do so. Makhorov explains to CNN:

"No words can express the fascination I felt when seeing my childhood dream come alive. Probably this very feeling made us climb onto the top of the Pyramid and see the the panorama of the whole complex, the desert and Cairo itself.

"It was already pitch black and nobody paid us any attention. We started climbing as fast and as soundless as we could. You have to be quite strong and agile to climb onto a meter-high block covered with dust.

"It was exhausting, but the thought that we were going to witness something spectacular pushed us forward.

"It took us around 20 minutes to get to the top. We were taken breathless by the view.
"What we saw from up there was the seventh wonder of the world. We tried to capture the beauty of the scenery in the photos, so that the others could also see this magnificent panorama.

We're left with the magnificent photos from the duo's criminal adventure, which you can see over at CNN: 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

This carpet by Federico Uribe (featured on Neatorama previously) looks nice and comfy, but don't you try to sit down on it: the entire thing is made from electronics. The artwork, titled Tapete (Carpet), is made from wires, keyboard keys, pieces of motherboards, and other miscellaneous computer parts.

Colossal has more pics: Link

Don't Make Me Send Out the Flying Monkeys! won by Christian 2

Congratulations to the winners of our latest Choose Your Own NeatoShop Funny T-Shirt giveaway. The random winners have all been contacted via private message - they have three days to respond and claim their prize.

Three of the winning entries are reserved NeatoMail subscribers, so subscribe to our weekly email newsletter to boost your chance of winning the next contests and giveaways!

President Obama's March 4 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee look like a regular political event, but thanks to this YouTube clip video, the conspiracy is revealed at last: "a shapeshifter alien humanoid working for the powers that be, caught in a high-definition video during an event of the Zionist cabal."

Now, conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen, but when asked by Wired's Danger Room blog, National Security Council chief spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said something interesting:

The White House dismissed the alien bodyguards as too costly in this era of budgetary austerity. “I can’t confirm the claims made in this video, but any alleged program to guard the president with aliens or robots would likely have to be scaled back or eliminated in the sequester,” Caitlin Hayden, the chief spokeswoman for the National Security Council, e-mails Danger Room. “I’d refer you to the Secret Service or Area 51 for more details.”

I didn't see a "no" there, did you? So it's settled then: no denial = confirmation of shapeshifter alien humanoid working with the government. Someone get me my tinfoil hat so we can properly welcome our new shapeshifter alien humanoid overlords!

Link

Ack! We've been underpricing our T-shirts over at the NeatoShop! Choire Sicha of The Awl has discovered the most expensive T-shirt for sale in New York City: a crocodile skin T-shirt in the Hermès men's store on Madison Avenue, listed for $91,500.

This t-shirt, to be fair, is made out of crocodile, hence its price. Literally, the entire shirt is just luxurious, beautifully sewn swaths of crocodile. This makes it possibly rather uncomfortable, and perhaps a little heavy, for a t-shirt. Seems like you might feel a little clammy in it? Also kind of awkward to just have everyone stare at your shirt. ("Is that strange rich man wearing a crocodile???)

Forgive me for not having pictures of the t-shirt itself; photographs are forbidden at the Hermès store, most probably as an anti-knockoff policy, or possibly to keep secret the fact that there are t-shirts that cost MORE THAN THREE OR FOUR ACTUALLY QUITE DECENT CARS.

Link

And what does a $91,500 crocodile leather t-shirt look like? The Daily Mail has the pic. I'll wait till it goes on sale at TJ Maxx!

Every December, Sweden's Language Council issues a list of new words. The year 2012 brought the word "ogooglebar," which means "ungoogleable." Google objected, noting that its name is a trademark, and shouldn't be used in an unauthorized manner.

Exasperated, Sweden's Language Council director Ann Cederberg opted to delete the word from the list because she had "neither the time nor the inclination to pursue the lengthy process that Google is trying to launch."

But this is the Interweb - and rather than letting the matter slide into obscurity, the Streisand Effect has been invoked. Now, "ogooglebar" is spreading. As Cederberg wrote (and Google translated)

"Google has forgotten one thing: language development does not care about brand protection. No individual can decide the language. Whoever in the future googling ogooglebar will not only find the wording that Google wanted to change, and that will remain online despite that Language Council amended the list. Anyone looking will also find all the comments that follow after the news spread that word was removed. That is how the Internet works."

One thing's for sure. Irony is not ogooglebar. Quartz has the story: Link

As if sharks aren't scary enough, here comes the two-headed version. A fisherman found the two-headed bull shark - in this case, a single shark with two heads, rather than a conjoined twin - in the uterus of an adult shark. The shark was brought to the marine science department of Florida Keys Community College and was sent to Michigan State University for further study:

Wagner and his team were able to detail the discovery with magnetic resonance imaging. Without damaging the unique specimen, the MRIs revealed two distinct heads, hearts and stomachs with the remainder of the body joining together in back half of the animal to form a single tail.

Link

Image: Michael Warner

The Walken Dead

Street artist and punmeister Hanksy (featured previously on Neatorama) hit Los Angeles and had a run-in with the LAPD. Benjamin of Krause Gallery told us:

The handcuffs came out and the blue/red were lit up while Hanksy was putting up the Weird Gal Yankovic piece. The artist said the police were laughing and taking photos of the art piece while he was in handcuffs.

Hanksy was in town to promote his upcoming solo exhibition at Gallery1988. The show opens on May 24th.

Thanks Benjamin! (Photo: Jared Soule)

In the mean time, check out more of Hanksy's work (most of these are in LA):

Weird Gal Yankovic. Melrose/La Brea, Los Angeles

Cage Against the Machine. Melrose/La Brea, Los Angeles

Pee-Wee Merman. Big Adventures in LA. Culver City, California