Photo: Shisberg [Flickr]

Residents of Sydney, Australia woke up today to find themselves in the middle of a bizarre dust storm that made the city look like it was on planet Mars! Dust storms are nothing new in Australia, but this one is the worst in decades ... but is it linked to climate change?

From Reuters:

Weather scientists are reluctant to directly link climate change with extreme weather events such as storms and droughts, saying these fluctuate according to atmospheric conditions, but green groups link the two in their calls for action to fight climate change.

Dust storms in Australia, the world's driest inhabited continent with a vast desert-like outback interior, are not uncommon. Central and eastern Australia is a major global source of atmospheric dust, say weather experts. But dust storms are usually restricted to the inland of Australia. Occasionally, during widespread drought they can affect coastal areas. Australia is battling one of its worst droughts and weather officials say an El Nino is slowly developing in the Pacific which will mean drier conditions for Australia's eastern states.

Before the Sydney dust storm, one of the most spectacular storms swept across Melbourne in February 1983, late in the severe El Nino drought of 1982/83. The extended dry period of the 1930s and 1940s generated many severe dust storms, culminating in the summer of 1944/45 when on several occasions dust in Adelaide was so thick that street lighting had to be turned on. Satellite images showed a 2002 dust storm, about 1,500 km (930 miles) long by 400 km (250 miles) wide and 2.5 km (1.5 miles) high, stretching across New South Wales and Queensland states.

Link | More photos of the Sydney Dust Storm at Flickr

Ever noticed that drunk people who cause accidents that kill others escape harm? Well, the secret of their luck may actually be the alcohol itself. Dr. Ali Salim and colleagues from the Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles found that head injury patients who were drunk were significantly less likely to die than sober ones:

The amount of alcohol consumed appears to be important - too little and there is no effect, too much and the beneficial effects are lost, studies on animals suggest.

Experts believe the right dose of alcohol, however, stops the cascade of swelling, inflammation and further destruction of brain cells, known as secondary brain injury.

The latest work, based on more than 38,000 moderate-to-severe head trauma patients, is the largest yet to look at the effects of alcohol on brain injury survival.

This led to an intriguing proposal of giving alcohol to those who just suffered brain injury - call it "booze therapy," if you will: Link

This Bizarro comic panel made me chuckle. I'm sure you can start a flamewar simply by mentioning the A-word (indeed, Dan Piraro's blog post on this comic panel has quite a bit of comments), so why don't we just laugh a bit and carry on?

Link - For more Bizarro, check out Dan Piraro's excellent website and blog.

Bacon Soap - $5.95 at the Neatorama Shop

Bacon - is there anything it can't do? Well, thanks to modern technology, we've got bacon belt to prop your pants up, bacon wallet to keep your money safe, bacon watch to tell time ... and now, we have bacon soap to get you clean!

Take a shower or wash your hands with the only soap that's infused with the sweet aroma of bacon, and see just how attractive it'll make you to the opposite sex! Well, maybe not, but at least you'll be smelling like your favorite breakfast, lunch, and dinner food ;)

http://shop.neatorama.com/product-info.php?bacon-soap-pid559.html | More Bacon stuff at the Neatorama Shop

W00t! It's time for this week's collaboration with the always awesome What is it? Blog. Can you tell us what this strange and menacing old timey batarang is used for?

Game rules are simple: place your guess in the comment section. Please post no URL or web links, let others play. No prize this week, so you're playing for bragging rights only.

For more clues, check out the What is it? Blog - good luck!

First it was factory work to China, then programming jobs to India, and now, it seems that revenge can also be outsourced. Here's the story of Alibis and Paybacks, an unusual service business started by Adrienne Ferguson and Michelle Duke - it offers paybacks both large and small:

Alibis & Paybacks also offers a "lies hotline" service for those who want an excuse to skip work, who need an alibi to give a spouse or who want to break a date "without looking like a flake." The "cuss-out line" service allows one to anonymously tell another person off. But the revenge flier service is the most popular.

Some involve consumer disputes, but others are more personal. A woman recently hired Alibis & Paybacks to publicly embarrass her ex-husband.

Duke said fliers -- placed around his work and new home -- demanded that the man spend money on his children "instead of strippers." She said she hopes their work will help the woman's efforts to receive more child support from her former husband.

Most of the time the leafleting is a quick-hit-and-get-out affair. Once, however, the distributors were still in the area when a man accused of cheating on his girlfriend discovered the fliers and frantically tried to retrieve them from car windshields and street poles outside the other woman's home. The leaflets suggested the man would be rushing home to his mother after leaving his new squeeze.

"The look on his face was priceless," Duke said. "He could have had a piece of paper taped to his back saying 'I'm humiliated.' "

Bob Pool of the LA Times has the story: Link (Photo: Wally Skalij / LA Times)

Was it a freak coincidence or proof of a vast lottery conspiracy? In Bulgaria, the set of 6 winning numbers were drawn twice in a row:

Sports Minister Svilen Neikov ordered an investigation after the numbers 4, 15, 23, 24, 35 and 42 were selected, in a different order, by a machine live on television on September 6 and 10. The results caused suspicions of manipulation.

An investigation found no wrongdoing in the draw or determining the winners, its chairman Konstantin Simeonov said.

"We cannot talk about any manipulation," he said.

The chance of the same six numbers coming up twice in two consecutive rounds was one in more than 4 million but was not impossible, respected mathematician Michail Konstantinov has said.

Link (Photo: Stoyan Nenov / Reuters)

First fool the humans with the cute kind of cats, and then when they're lulled into a false sense of security, the supercats will take over the world! Here's a story of the rise of a new breed of predator cats as pets in Britain:

The savannah, the most popular, is bred from a serval, a cheetah-like
wildcat found in Africa. It can grow three times larger than a domestic cat and can jump 7ft vertically.

Another breed to have arrived in Britain is the safari, produced by mating a domestic cat with a South American Geoffroy’s Cat. There are also plans by breeders to import the caracat, descended from a caracal, a lynx-like wildcat found in the Middle East and Africa. The savannah is banned in some US states and in Australia, where there were concerns it could kill koalas. [...]

Peter Neville, an expert in pet behaviour from the Feline Advisory Bureau (FAB), said: “Cats are predators. I wouldn’t be happy with a savannah around a small child, because of their genes and their size.

I, for one, welcome our new supercat overlords. Jasper Copping of the Telegraph bravely uncovered the supercat conspiracy: Link (Photo: BNPS)

Peter Jackson dug up a carrot from his home's garden, found that it was shaped like a hand, took a photo of it ... and ate it!

Peter's daughter Lindsay said:

'My dad just seemed to make some joke about it being 'handy', took a picture and then I think they just ate it. He played it all down, but that's just the way dad is.

"We've not had anything weird since - no arms or legs to go with it. I don't think his garden is trying to build a carrot man. Now that would really be unusual.

'It was just one of those one-off freak of nature occurrences - but isn't it funny?'

Apparently, he's never heard of the Internet wonder of eBay where something like this might've fetched hundreds or thousands of pounds: Link (Photo: newsteam.co.uk)

All right. So John Farrier has posted a couple of really cool pool tables. The first one is Deep Green, a pool-playing robot created by the robotics lab of Queen's University in Canada. The second one is the $200,000 Obscura CueLight Pool Table that creates an interactive image using an overhead projector.

Well, fie! The first two rounds belong to you, John. But in this game of Neatorama one upmanship, I'm compelled regain top dog status and post a pool table to beat 'em all.

Behold, the Snooker Sofa, created by Accrington upholsterer and UK pool table maker Riley in the 1970s.

Can your pool table transform into a sofa, John? Just look at that beauty and weep: Link

Note: And yes, you may have seen this one round the Net back a couple of months ago, and was on eBay (since then it's been out of eBay).

The following is a Neatorama Shop Story, a narrative starring the products carried in this blog’s very own online store.

Stardate: the future as conceived in September, 1962. Cars fly, robots do chores, and meals are reduced to a delicious and fully satisfying caplet, like Xanax in party colors.

Stardate: the future as I am living it. My Smart can’t fly, my Roomba refuses to do stairs, and that automat in Manhattan has disappeared like a coin in a vending machine slot made sticky by teriyaki sauce. But all is not lost, for now we have Cupcake Mints. My cryogenically suspended childhood faith in futuristic fare has unfrozen faster than Austin Powers catching a glimpse of Judy Jetson. With a tin the shape of a cupcake’s silhouette and a flavor that is clearly meant to be evocative of something, these candies deliver. The cupcake tin even has cute sprinkles in low relief (that may say “Paul is dead” in Braille…backwards, naturally.)

My supersensitive palate notes that each color carries its own distinct taste when consumed with my eyes open, due to complex neuropsychological triggers in the food dye of my youth, present in all colors of candy-shelled chocolates other than the light brown ones. Ah, Oompa Loompas, you tried to warn me! The white are vanilla frosting flavored, as advertised. Depending on the consumer’s age, the blue ones taste either like “blue raspberry” or a certain spooky breakfast cereal. Boo! Somehow the pink ones distinguish themselves from the other two by tasting like strawberry-banana even if my eyes are closed. Also, keep in mind that the term “mints” is applied loosely here to decidedly un-minty pastel pellets with the consistency of that candy classic, Stick-U-Lick. That being said, the tiny tin contains a generous 130 candies per pack, so you can be confident that you have brought enough to share with the entire class, unless, of course, you attend public school.

I must dash, for I have to go decant and marinate a Spam before the moving sidewalk deposits dinner guests Mark Hamill and Billy Dee Williams at my doorstep.

______

The story above is written by the dynamic duo Drs. Ernest and Convalescence Bidet-Wellville (hey, I didn’t name ‘em) of the University of Self-Conscious Consumerism in Olde Busytowne, Connecticut. I suspect they write cover stories for the CIA, so if I’m inexplicably missing the next few days, you know what happened.

Available from the Neatorama Shop: Cupcake Mints | See also our vast selection of other Offbeat Mints and Candies

Sometimes the best idea are the simplest! Marc of Wooster Collective posted this "carrot tree" in Antwerp, Belgium.

Sadly, no other detail is forthcoming - does anyone know what this is all about? A viral campaign to make people eat their carrots? Link

In her art series See Through, Swedish artist Helga Steppan arranged all her material belongings into separate piles based on color:

This way of working can be clearly seen in the series ‘See Through’ for which Steppan audited all of her belongings and divided them into a full spectrum of different colour groupings to photograph: White, Black, Yellow, Red, Miscellaneous, Blue, Orange, Green, Pink, Grey, Purple, and Brown.

The final images are visually seductive and ask the viewer to consider whether they can discover the artist’s persona reflected in the meticulously constructed installations of her material possessions.

Link

(L) Fire Tower home in western Montana,
photo: Heidi Long and Gravity Shots; More at Timber Home Living
(R) Fire lookout tower in western Poland. Image: Mohylek [Wikipedia]

Imagine a house in the forest - you're surrounded by trees and wildlife with no neighbors for miles. The view is simply stunning. The downside: bringing all those bags of groceries up the neverending flights of stairs!

Well, this may be the perfect house for some (very fit) people: old fire lookout towers converted into modern homes!

If location, location and location are what drive your visions of a dream tree house design or luxury hillside wood home then look no further: fire towers that once served vital protective services to natural forests are becoming increasingly used for new purposes including mountaintop homes with incredible views.

Link

Marcelo Bezos has been collecting pennies for the past 35 years, and when his father-in-law died from colorectal cancer, he decided to do something to raise awareness for the disease: building a record-breaking pyramid out of pennies!

Here's the video clip of the Penny Pyramid Project from 2006 - the structure contained some 280,000 pennies (Marcelo's most recent pyramid contains over 435,000 pennies):

[YouTube - turn your speakers down if you don't like O Fortuna from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, the techno version]

Thanks Marcelo!