Like Wedge Antilles famously said in Star Wars, "Look at the size of that thing!" He's referring to the Death Star, of course, before Red Leader infamously told him to cut the chatter. Via Obvious Winner and Geekologie

We've featured Dan Wilbur of Better Book Titles, who "improved" book covers through clever Photoshoppery, before on Neatorama. This time around, Dan focused on improving children's books. I'd say he nailed them!

View more over at Better Book Titles - via Laughing Squid

Forget cronuts! Here comes the latest donut craze, this time from Japan: Animal donuts (or "doubutsu doonatsu")

Brian Ashcraft of Kotaku explains:

Floresta, which has locations throughout Kansai, apparently debuted this style of animal donuts in Japan. Floresta's main shop in Nara told Kotaku that a customer suggested animal donuts a few years back. Thus, the shop gave it a whirl and began making their own cute critter treats.

One of the Floresta staffers who helped create the animal donuts, a woman named Ikumi Nakao, has spun off an animal donut specialty shop called Animal Doughnut of Ikumimama, which opened in Kawasaki this past June.

View more cute animal donuts over at Kotaku.

See also: Cat Donuts, previously featured on Neatorama back in 2011

James Pegrum is a building surveyor by day and master LEGO builder by night. His epic "British History" series depicts the history of Britain from Stonehenge to Margaret Thatcher with LEGO. View more photos over at Pegrum's MOCpages and Flickr set.

2500 BC Stonehenge. Construction of the inner horseshoe with massive trilithons.

56 BC Julius Caesar landed in Britain for the first time. He was repelled, but returned a year later and conquered the land.

56 AD Roman built a huge theater near the Temple of Claudius, Camulodunum (modern day Essex)

1100 AD Murder of King William II in the New Forest

1170 AD The death of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket

1215 AD The signing of the Magna Carta

Earlier this week, Oprah Winfrey revealed that she, too, was victim of subtle racism during an interview with Entertainment Tonight. She told a story that while in Zurich, Switzerland, she went into a store and asked to see a handbag on the shelf, but was refused:

"I go into a store and I say to the woman, 'Excuse me, may I see the bag right above your head?' and she says to me, 'No. It's too expensive.'"

When Winfrey insisted, the shop assistant allegedly replied: "No, no you don't want to see that one, you want to see this one because that one will cost too much. You will not be able to afford that."

The star said she left the shop calmly without arguing, but that the experience was proof that racism continues to be a problem

Oprah, whose net worth is $2.8 billion, could've bought the entire store, of course, but she didn't name the store or the handbag in the interview. Nonetheless, the ensuing media storm revealed that the store was the Trois Pommes and the handbag as a version of "Jennifer" bag by designer Tom Ford. The price of the bag? A cool $38,000.

The store's owner was put on the defensive, of course, and claimed that it was not racism - rather, a "misunderstanding" by the salesperson, and refused to dismiss the employee. Others, however, disagreed. The Zurich tourism board, realizing that the event had been a complete PR nightmare, immediately apologized and said that it was "never happy when our guests' feelings are hurt."

We can't help but notice: $38,000 FOR A HANDBAG? What was it made of? SOLID GOLD? Maybe it came with a car.

Adam Wingard's new horror film "You're Next" is about a gang of mysterious killers who attacked a vacationing family. But apparently, being attacked by ax-wielding murderers wearing creepy animal masks isn't scary enough for one fan, who decided to upgrade the level of horror by introducing a much more menacing character:

Provenance unknown - does anyone know who created this?

Watcha think? Is that an improvement?

The movie's original poster is below:

NoooOOOOoooOOOooo!

A mysterious virus has been killing increasing number of piglets - which has pushed the price of pork skyrocketing to historic levels, as bacon lovers get worried about the supply of their favorite food.

The Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus (PEDV) is not new - it was first identified in England in 1971 - but it has not been found in the United States ... until now. Though only about 400 cases of death due to PEDV have been officially confirmed by the United States Department of Agriculture, it is estimated that the toll has already been in the hundreds of thousands. With mortality rate of as high as 100 percent in early-weaned pigs, it's no wonder that pig farmers are worried.

Perhaps it's time to stock up on Tactical Bacon!

Image: Slicey the Pig from the NeatoShop

Photos: Scott Eisen

Escape artist Anthony Martin locked himself in a casketand had it thrown out of a plane at 14,000 feet. It's a good thing that he managed to pick the lock and escape ... but if you think about it, even if the trick went south, he's already in a casket ...

Martin said the escape was exhilarating but that he was disoriented because the plywood casket whipped wildly from side-to-side while he picked the locks, and he struggled to open the door.

"I didn't feel any force, but what I felt was a lot of jostling," he told The Associated Press. "It seemed to me like I had a glimpse of the ground for a second then it (the door) came back and I had to give it another push."

Martin, who began teaching himself to pick locks at age 6, somersaulted out of the box as he pushed his way to freedom.

"I didn't know where I was ... but I was hypnotized as I watched the box falling behind me," he said.

Andrea Thomas of the Associated Press has the full story: Link

Video clip below:

Toilet not flushing properly? Perhaps you've got FATBERG in the sewers.

That's what happened when residents in an apartment building in London noticed that they couldn't flush their toilets: a giant 15-ton blob of congealed fat and baby wipes had lodged in a sewer drain. That's enough "wrongly flushed festering food fat mixed with wet wipes" to fill a double-decker bus!

It'll take the utility company Thames Water six months to remove Fatberg, which you can see in a video clip below:

Street artist ABOVE created a stencil graffiti on a street in Shoreditch, London, that looks quite odd during the daytime. But it turns out that timing is everything: the graffiti made perfect sense at night when the shadow of a nearby street sign completes the effect. Thanks Above!

Larger pics below:

Pardon the vertical video, we heard that format is supposed to be slimming ... but it didn't work for Linda Joiner's 26-lb (11.8 kg) cat who won't stay outside. Now if that's not a real life Garfield, I don't know what is!

Previously on Neatorama: Top 15 Amazingly Fat Cats

After his Amazon shipment was brazenly stolen from his front porch, Tim Lake of Arcadia, Arizona, was determined to catch the thief. He has footage from surveillance camera and decided to craft a tongue-in-cheek poster to find the "un-American" criminal.

The poster describes the suspect as a "jerk" of "about yay" height with "vacant, uncaring, and lacking a soul" eyes. Nationality: "Un-American" and occupation: "Burglar."

Tim describes his ordeal to CBS5:

Yes, yes, we know that China has a lot of fake handbags, knockoff watches, and pirated DVDs. That's ho-hum, but the country seems to be all about pushing the envelope and testing the limits of what can be faked. Let's take a look at the 9 most outrageous things ever faked in China.

1. Fake Receipts

Photo: China's Ministry of Public Security

What? Why in the world would anyone need phony receipts? To claim fake tax deductions and defraud employers for reimbursements, of course! In fact, fake receipts or "fapiao" is big business in China - for example, employees of the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline managed to submit $6 million worth of fake receipts over the years.

You can get any kind of fake receipts you want. Need travel receipts? How about something more, uh, specialized like waste material receipts? Not a problem - in fact, the business of forged receipt is so consumer friendly (after all, it is a service industry) that you can get special discounts and same-day delivery of the goods. [Source: NY Times]

2. Fake Businessman or "White Guy in a Tie"

Writer Mitch Moxley was approached by a friend of a friend in Beijing and offered a sweet deal: "Basically, you put on a suit, shake some hands, and make some money. We'll be in 'quality control,' but nobody's going to be doing any quality control. You in?"

He was, and the deal was indeed very good. Moxley was paid $1,000 a week, put up in a fancy hotel, wined and dined. All he had to do was be himself, a white guy in a tie:

... so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.” [Source: The Atlantic]

3. Fake Apple Store

The Apple Store in Kunming, China sure looks the part: gleaming iPads displayed on minimalist beechwood tables, crisp marketing graphics and eager associates in blue shirts ready to assist you with the latest gadgets. But something juuuust doesn't seem quite right, as blogger BirdAbroad noted.

Well, as you've guessed, though the Apple products were real, the store itself was completely fake. But you know what's amazing about the level of fakery? Even the employees working there believed that they were actually working for Apple!

4. Fake IKEA Store

Photo: Reuters

If you think about it, Apple Stores are small and therefore quite easy to copy. But how about the Swedish furniture behemoth IKEA? Now their warehouse-styled stores are SO huge that they'd be impossible to knockoff, right? Not in China!

Meet 11Furniture, which has copied not only IKEA's products but also its signature blue-and-yellow color scheme, 100,000-square feet warehouse complete with showrooms, mini pencils, and cafeteria-style restaurant! Well, at least they don't have products with unpronounceable Swedish names ... [Source: Daily Mail]

Photo: Ferdy Firmanto - via detik

Apparently, the cow didn't hear the pilot's frantic yelling for it to "mooooooove."

Lion Air flight JT 982 was trying to land in the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, when it crashed into something unusual, an errant cow that had wandered onto the runway.

According to the BBC, Pilot Iwan Permadi said that he could "smell burning meat." He thought that he had ran over feral dogs when the plane skidded off the runway, but realized that it was a much bigger animal when he inspected the landing gear.

All of the plane's 110 passengers were safe, but the same couldn't be said for the cow, which got crushed under the plane wheel.

Forget elephants! A new study has shown that bottlenose dolphins have the longest memory in the animal kingdom.

Each bottlenose dolphin has a unique whistle that fuctions like a name. Research by Jason Bruck, animal behaviorist at the University of Chicago, shows that dolphins remember the unique whistles of other dolphins they've lived with, even after 20 years of separation.

Bruck got the idea for the study when he visited his family and was greeted by his brother's dog, who is usually wary of strangers. The dog remembered him from Bruck's last visit four years ago. That got him thinking, "How long do other animals remember each other?"

Dolphins, it turns out, are the perfect test subject. According to Christine Dell'Amore of National Geographic News:

[Bruck] collected data from 43 bottlenose dolphins at six facilities in the U.S. and Bermuda, members of a breeding consortium that has swapped dolphins for decades and kept careful records of each animal's social partners.

He first played recordings of lots of unfamiliar whistles to the dolphins in the study until the subjects got bored and stopped inspecting the underwater speaker making the sounds.

At this point, he played the whistles of the listening dolphins' old friends.

When the dolphins heard these familiar whistles, they would perk up and approach the speakers, often whistling their own name and listening for a response.

Furthermore, it seems like the dolphins actually enjoyed hearing whistles from their old friends. Bruck added that a set of cheeky young dolphins came up to him and whistled the names of other dolphins they wanted to hear next.

Read the rest over at National Geographic - Thanks Megan!