Neatoramanaut and artist extraordinaire Nathan Mazur (he's the awesome creator of the Neatorama Squid and the I Love Teuthology T-Shirt) is having a solo show at the Zombo Gallery in Pittsburgh. The show will run till Oct 16th, so visit soon if you're nearby, mmkay?
The show is titled Mini Monsters and Tiny Terrors, which sound suspiciously like my children, and features a collection of pint-sized (2" x 3") paintings of monsters, ghouls, cryptids, and other things that go bump in the night. The pieces are available for purchase, and you can also order yourself a commisions at a reasonable rate. Take it from me, Nathan is one heck of an artist.
More info (just in time for Halloween!) on his website: Link
Inspired by the book Pizza Fun by Judy Bastyra, Flickr user hale_popoki (that's Hawaiian for "Cat House") made this Cat Pizza. Actually, it's supposed to be a brown tiger pizza, but it sure looks more like a cat. I can haz pawperroni?
Urlesque blog has many more examples of pizzas shaped like things that aren't pizzas (and vice versa): Link
Master Sword and Pedestal by Xenonray - via Nintendo Papercraft
Whoa! This is awesome: Gajitz blog has a nice compendium of the various papercrafts inspired by the Zelda games. I remember fondly playing Zelda II: The Adventure of Link on my NES oh so many years ago.
Link | More at the excellent blog Nintendo Papercraft (you can lose hours there!)
Bad idea: being a Somali pirate and attacking ... Really bad idea: ... in the middle of the night ... Neatorama-worthy: a ship that turns out to be a French navy ship!
Admiral Prazuck told French TV station La Chaine Info the pirates seemed to be surprised that the navy ship fought back.
"Once they realised they were facing a ship that was responding and was heading towards them, they stopped shooting and attempted to flee," he said.
If you think the Somali pirate had a bad case of mistaken identity, check this one out: when two thugs decided to attack a pair of transvestites, they found out the hard way that their intended victims were cross-dressing cage fighters!
The Daily Mail has the story:
Dean Gardener, 19, and Jason Fender, 22, singled out the two men walking along a street in wigs, short skirts and high heels.
Bare-chested Gardener was caught on CCTV confronting one of the men in a pink wig, black skirt and boob tube - then seen swinging a punch, a court heard.
But the other cage fighter, wearing a sparkling black dress and matching long wig, sprang to his friend's help, delivering two lightning-quick punches to the two stunned yobs.
The defense attorney for the two remarked:
Mark Davies, defending, said: 'You know it cannot have been a good night when you get into a fight with two cross-dressing men.
No words on why the cage fighters were out wearing such lovely dresses in the first place: Link (CCTV still image: Wales News Service)
With all the commotion over swine flu, who knew that the culprit - H1N1 Influenza Virus - could be so ... cute? Here's the popular Giant Microbe plush toy based on cause of the global flu pandemic. Get yours before the second wave of the pandemic hits!
Featured Item: every order will get a Free Mystery Bonus. It's for a limited time only, so get yours today!
From the Neatorama Shop: H1N1 Swine Flue Virus Plush Toy | Other Giant Microbes | Swine Flu: Bacon's Revenge T-Shirt
The web is full of online tools, but I bet that you just use a handful of them every day. Indeed, the hardest thing about using online tools is finding them - sometimes you have to wade through a lot of mediocre tools to find the one that suits your need.
Well, here's my list - a set of 10 online tools that I use daily (or almost daily) to blog. For example:
Ta-Da is a very useful, easy to use - and best of all, free - online to-do list by the folks at 37signals. I use it every day to jot down tasks and ideas. You can even share your list with other people or make it public.
Link: 10 Most Useful Online Tools Ever! over at Cluebert.
Here's this week's collaboration with the What is it? Blog. Can you tell us what this strange tool is used for? The first correct guess AND the funniest guess win this awesome Ice Invaders Ice Cube Tray from the Neatorama Shop.
Game rules are simple: place your guess in the comment section. One guess per comment, please. You can enter as many guessed as you'd like. Please post no URL or web links - doing so will forfeit your entry.
Update 10/9/09 - the answer is: A clockwork roasting jack, used to turn meat while it was roasted over the fireplace. Congratulations to PaulS who guessed right and to Abe Normal who suggested that it was a wind up grenade!
Hello
everyone! I'm happy to announce that we've just launched Cluebert,
a new website about time and money-saving tips, useful news and practical
knowledge and hacks for everyday living.
We know that there are a lot of "how-to" websites and blogs
on the Net. But we're confident that we can bring a unique and fun spin
in this crowded field.
We'll be adding new posts daily to Cluebert - Please take
a look at these:
Unusual
Uses For Lemons
Stop
A Baby From Crying ... Instantly!
The
No Sacrifice Money Saving Tips for Washer and Dryer
Today's Neatorama and Hobotopia Caption Monkey game comes via National Geographic's The Daily Dozen (October 2009 - Week 1), the always excellent user-submitted gallery of photographs curated by photo editor Susan Welchman.
This photo was taken by William Lascelles who wrote "My parents live very close to the city airport and every other year they host an air show. This year the Blue Angels were the highlight and were flying over the house during performances. I took my father's dog outside and made him pose!"
Your task is simple: caption the photograph above. The best/funniest comment will win a Caption Monkey, courtesy of Adam "Ape Lad" Koford. You can enter as many as you'd like below, but please only one caption per comment.
For inspiration, check out Adam's blog. Good luck!
Update 10/7/09 - Adam has picked the winner! Congratulations to DeepForestGreen who won with this caption: Bernard was less famous that his brother, Clifford the Big Red Dog, but the locals knew that he was the best air traffic controller their town had ever seen.
Update 10/7/09 - Winner #2 (DeepForestGreen told us that he won before, and graciously offered the prize to another Neatoramanaut). Congrats to: nate who came up with this caption: Henry didn’t believe the fleas when they said “We’ll be back but in F-16’s.” He will now. Oh yes…he will now.
Update 6/15/2010- Months after this photograph won the Your Shot competition at National Geographic, it turns out that the photo did not conform to the rules. After some investigation, William Lascelles has admitted that his photo submission is a digital manipulation! National Geographic has posted a correction and the story behind how the fabrication came to light. We still believe, however, that the captions submitted here are actual fabricated captions. -Thanks, John Fleming!
The following is reprinted from Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again The guano-rich Chincha Islands of Peru (1863) The next time a pigeon drops a load onto the windshield of your car, spare a thought for the guano miners of Peru's Chincha Islands. They spent their working lives knee-deep in the stuff. The economies of most countries are founded on things like farming or factories. But that was not the case for Peru, the mountainous South American country just north of Chile. Back in the 1800s, this country's national wealth was based on bird poop!
THE REIGN OF SPAIN
The Spanish explorer Francisco Pizarro arrived in Peru in 1532. After taking a good look around and figuring out that the local Indians would be no match for Spanish firepower, he claimed the country for Spain. In 1533, he did away with Atahuallpa, the Incan king, and formally made Peru a Spanish colony. The Spanish remained in control for the next 300 years. When independence came in 1821, the Peruvians suddenly realized that they had to look out for themselves. One of their main problems was how to make money. Peru wasn't overly blessed with natural resources, but it did have a lot of birds. And where there are birds there's usually a whole lot of bird crap.
It's true what they say: birds of a feather really do flock together. And the area where all discerning South American cormorants love to flock to is a group of three unimpressive-looking lumps of Pacific rock just off the coast of Peru called the Chincha Islands. Maybe it's the fishing; these seabirds just love to hang out en masse there. And what do cormorants do after they've gorged themselves on the poor, unsuspecting anchovies that swim in the waters thereabouts? Well, they relieve themselves. In fact, they've been doing it there for centuries. So, by the early 1800s, the Chincha Islands were coated in a very deep and very smelly layer of cormorant crud. Don't ask who discovered that bird poop, or guano, was an excellent fertilizer, but it's true that few things will help your roses bloom better than a good dollop of cormorant droppings. So, starting in the 1840s, citizens of Peru, under the control of a military strongman called General Castilla, realized that there was white gold in the hills. And that all that waste was too good to, well, waste. The general dished out licenses to highest bidders (or bribers) to "mine" guano. And he set himself and his cronies up in prime positions to exploit the amazing profits that were expected from guano sales to the United States and Europe.
CHINESE TAKE-OUT
The only problem was, who in his or her right mind would want to spend days working on what are possibly the smelliest islands on Earth, knee-deep in guano, while being dive-bombed by incontinent cormorants? The people of Peru were poor and desperate, but they weren't that desperate. The usual solution to this sort of problem is obvious: oppress your local minority. Castilla tried this, but there just weren't enough natives to go around. Fortunately, one of the important businessmen controlling the guano trade, Domingo Elias, knew where he could get his hands on some really cheap labor: namely, China. The Taiping Rebellion in China was a civil war that drove hundreds of thousands of Chinese out of the country. Many were desperate to leave and would go anywhere: the United States to build the railroads, England to work in sweatshops - or the Chincha Islands to mine guano. The first coolies (from the Hindi word kuli, which refers to an unskilled laborer, usually from the Far East, hired for low or subsistence wages) arrived in 1820. Soon, they were probably wishing they'd stayed home. They were kept in conditions of near slavery and were flogged if they didn't meet their quota of two to five tons of guano - each! - per day. Needless to say, they were paid terrible wages. The only avenues of escape were suicide or opium, both of which were rife on the islands.
CLEANING UP THEIR ACTS
Castilla and his bunch of guano gangsters did very well. During the 1850s, there was so much guano waiting to be shipped out that vessels would commonly have to wait at the dock for 30 to 80 days to load up. Between 1840 and 1875, the value of Peru's exports rose from 6 million pesos to 32 million pesos ($43,351 to $231,226). Unfortunately for the rest of Peru, Castillo and company didn't get around to plowing the profits they made back into the economy. In fact, on the rare occasions they did, the results were disastrous. Again using coolie labor, Peru built over 770 miles of railroads around the country in the 1860s, at a cost much higher than the profits yielded by the guano trade. In just a few years Peru leaped from last to first place as the biggest borrower on the London money markets.
OH, POOP!
By the 1860s, new and cheaper forms of fertilizer were being developed. Guano's big rival was salitre, or nitrate of soda. As most of the salitre trade was conducted through neighboring Chile, Peru began to lose out. Then, in 1866, Spain tried to recapture the Chincha Islands from Peru. Although Peru won that little skirmish, the financial cost of the war was crippling. In 1879, Peru went to war with Chile in an attempt to wrestle control of the salitre trade. Peru lost the war in 1881 and was occupied by Chilean soldiers, who went on an orgy of looting and destruction. The Golden Age of Guano was well and truly over.
ENOUGH OF THIS POOP
By the time Peru got back on an even keel in the early 1900s, it had learned not to place all its cormorant eggs in one basket. It diversified into agriculture, copper mining, oil production - in fact, anything that didn't involve guano. And today? Well, those hungry cormorants are still creating one almighty mess on the Chincha Islands. But fortunately for all involved, there are no Chinese laborers to clean up after them.
The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again. The book is a compendium of entertaining information chock-full of facts on a plethora of history topics. Uncle John's first plunge into history was a smash hit - over half a million copies sold! And this sequel gives you more colorful characters, cultural milestones, historical hindsight, groundbreaking events, and scintillating sagas. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute
(L) Frozen in Time by United Visual Artists. UVA recreates the WWF panda in ice, then allowed it to melt in their studio. (R) Surrogate, an "android" panda by Troika, symbolizes mankind's capacity to destory nature with technology.
Last month, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) UK launched a project called Pandamonium, where they asked artists to "reinvent" the iconic panda logo of the organization, to be auctioned off October 12.
Various pandas are being displayed at Selfridges on London's Oxford Street, though if you can't make it there you can always visit WWF-UK's Pandamonium Flickr set.
Asylum blog brought to our attention not one, but two strangely awesome fundraising efforts benefiting cancer foundations. All you've got to do is grow a mustache (which is sadly one of those things I can't do to save my life - darn these Asian genes!) and get people to donate:
Would you like to participate? You've got two choices:
1. Mustaches vs. Cancer starts October 5 and lasts for 56 days. Proceeds go to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
All you have to do is register with your charity of choice and ask friends and family to donate money to see pictures of you looking increasingly more awesome. If you decide to participate in either charity, check back in at Asylum later this month for free swag and contests. Also, whether or not you participate, you're invited to the Stache Bash.
Congratulations to Liz Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for winning the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine:
Molecular biologist Elizabeth H. Blackburn, PhD, 60, of the University of California, San Francisco, today was named to receive the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Blackburn shares the award with Carol W. Greider of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Jack W. Szostak of Harvard Medical School.
The scientists discovered an enzyme that plays a key role in normal cell function, as well as in cell aging and most cancers. The enzyme is called telomerase and it produces tiny units of DNA that seal off the ends of chromosomes, which contain the body’s genes. These DNA units – named telomeres – protect the integrity of the genes and maintain chromosomal stability and accurate cell division. They also determine the number of times a cell divides—and thus determine the lifespan of cells.
I remember taking Liz Blackburn's class when I was a graduate student in UCSF and she was actually one of the professors in my thesis defense - you'd be hard pressed to find a nicer and smarter person. A well deserved prize for Liz. Congrats!
