Anton Hecht, who brought us Blinking Balet (a wonderful YouTube clip of old people dancing in the street to Prokofiev's Dance of the Knights posted before on Neatorama) is back. In his new clip, Anton interviewed the residents of an apartment tower in Newcastle, England ... in the form of a musical:

Five residents were interviewed and their words turned into a short song. Each resident was then filmed in their flat singing their words to camera with a small live band accompanying them. This was edited together to form the full song that moves between the flats of the singing residents with the band accompanying them.

The guys are delightfully off-key and seem very sincere. I wonder what my life would be like if it were a musical ... Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

The issue of monetizing a website (through ads, or in Neatorama's case both ads and e-commerce*) is something I continually think about. As many of you know, the blog started out with no ads whatsoever and throughout its growth (thanks, Neatoramanauts!) we've added text and banner ads to keep up with the hosting and bandwidth bills**.

So I really wasn't surprised to hear the news that SilkTricky, a Portland interactive studio behind the web hit The Outbreak (posted on Neatorama before here), had to shut down the popular website because of hosting bills.

Todd Denis of Jawbone.TV interviewed Lynn Lund of SilkTricky about the decision to pull the plug:

Put aside for a moment the internal costs that a boutique design studio or maddened creator racks up in producing original production of a consumable magnitude (for the Outbreak, figure three months full-time for the writer/director/producer team, plus a system admin, a Flash guy, and hard costs for actors, props, equipment, etc., and it’s easily into the hundreds of thousands of dollars). The real killer, as endless lines of bankrupt indie filmmakers will attest, is ‘out-of-pocket’ expenses.

“We've been spending anywhere from $500 per month to $4,500 per month, depending on the traffic,” claimed Lynn Lund, Producer at SilkTricky. “As you can imagine, it adds up. We've spent about $20,000 in hosting alone since we launched in September [2008]. Since we funded this project out of our own pockets, it's been tough to keep the site afloat.” [...]

For Lund, the equation was simple. “With the economy as it is and no means to monetize what we did with the Outbreak, we had to find a way to save some money so that we could put it towards a new project … we had to pull the plug.”

http://www.jawbone.tv/featured/2-featured/25-interactive-film-the-outbreak-punished-by-bandwidth-costs-youtube-still-best-bet-.html?limitstart=0 - Thanks Todd!

*Undoubtedly, many bloggers are familiar with instability of ad revenues for publishers, which forced some to be creative. Om Malik of the excellent tech blog Giga Om started a subscription-based Giga Om Pro, which features exclusive in-depth content geared toward IT professionals. We opted to open an ad-independent stream of revenue, the Neatorama Online Store.

**I've had many conversations with bloggers who don't understand why it's so expensive to run a large blog. After all, they could run theirs for a few dollars a month. Indeed, that's how this blog started, but as traffic grew, we got kicked out of our shared hosting plan, and had to upgrade to VPS, then a dedicated server, then multiple servers in a load-balanced environment with content delivery network to serve images. As you can imagine, the cost of hosting and bandwidth increase very rapidly. The cost of running this blog runs into the five figures every year, and growing.

Every now and then, there are calls for an international currency to diversify the current global currency system that is dominated by the US dollar. The current economic crisis has got Russia and China pushing for the concept, which was discussed at the G8 summit in Italy:

The Russian leader proudly displayed the coin, which bears the English words "United Future World Currency", to journalists after the summit wrapped up in the quake-hit Italian town of L'Aquila.

Medvedev said that although the coin, which resembled a euro and featured the image of five leaves, was just a gift given to leaders it showed that people were beginning to think seriously about a new global currency.

"In all likelihood something similar could appear and it could be held in your hand and used as a means of payment," he told reporters. "This is the international currency."

http://www.canada.com/news/Medvedev%2Bsees%2Bsingle%2Bcurrency%2Bdream%2Bcoin%2Bgift/1778961/story.html (Photo: Alexander Nemenov, AFP/Getty Images)

Do you think it's a good idea to have a global currency? Why or why not?

Moon Over Amtrak, an annual event in Laguna Niguel, California, where people expose their behinds to a passing Amtrak train, may be coming to and end. Tight-assed city officials are cracking down on the tradition:

The Saturday event, which local legend says began in 1979 when a patron at the Mugs Away Saloon offered to buy a drink for anyone who would moon a train from the Camino Capistrano road, brought between 8,000 to 10,000 people to the city's streets last year to drink alcohol and expose their rear ends to Amtrak trains, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

The city described its Amtrak mooning stance on its official Twitter feed by saying authorities are "saying 'NO' to crack."

To help discourage people from participating in the tradition, the City Council passed resolutions in March banning on-street parking in the area near the railroad tracks between Thursday and Sunday this week as well as public drinking and public urination. The city already has an ordinance banning public nudity.

Link (Photo via: Mooning Amtrak)

Natalie Jasmer was so good at hide-and-seek that her frantic family called the cops to help them look for the two-year-old toddler:

Natalie went missing Tuesday evening while playing the game with her brother and sisters and the best efforts of neighbors, police and firefighters called by her frantic parents weren’t enough to turn up the tot.

The terrifying ordeal for her parents ended happily after more than an hour of scouring the neighborhood around the 10th Street mobile home park where the Jasmers live.

In the end, it was the family dog that flushed her out.

“Copper found her,” Natalie’s brother Kenny Findley said, crediting the mutt with discovering the tiny girl asleep inside a drawer underneath the washing machine in the family’s home.

Link

People, meet your new grammar Nazi: a study by Harvard University linguist Ansgar Endress has revealed that monkeys can recognize poor grammar!

For their study, Endress and colleagues played recordings of made-up English words to a population of captive cotton-top tamarins for roughly 30 minutes a day.

Half of the tamarins were exposed to words with a varied stem but a constant suffix (such as bi-shoy, mo-shoy, and lu-shoy). The other half were exposed to a constant prefix followed by a varied stem (such as shoy-bi, shoy-mo, and shoy-lu). [...]

When tamarins were exposed to words that "broke" the rules they had learned, they looked toward the speaker in a startled manner, observers noted.

The finding is dramatic, Endress explained, because it reveals that our distant cousins seem to have the mental machinery to identify verbal structures like suffixes and prefixes.

Link

Photo: Gladstone Gallery

You're looking at Tower Snake, a spiral ramp built with bamboo and cast-aluminum snake skeleton by Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping, currently on display at the Gladstone Gallery in New York.

The Gallery describes Yong Ping's creation in amusing art-speak as "subtly transforming the cruciform symbol of Christian salvation into the tangled figure of Edenic tempation" (huh?) but I say it's pretty darn cool to imagine walking into the belly of a giant snake: Link | More photos at the Gladstone Gallery

When it comes to beauty pageants, we're so used to hearing about scandals that this news is rather unusual: Kristina Higgins, who was crowned Miss Georgia, turned down the prize and gave up her title after just hours of winning it because ... she'd rather teach middle school!

After winning the Miss Georgia title Saturday night at the RiverCenter’s Bill Heard Theatre, Miss Capital City Kristina Higgins told pageant officials Sunday morning she wanted to relinquish the crown.

“She just didn’t think that she could fulfill the duties,” said Billy Kendall, secretary for the Miss Georgia Board of Trustees. [...]

In a statement, 24-year-old Higgins suggested her duties as a middle school teacher could interfere with the time commitment that comes with being Miss Georgia.

“Due to my current job responsibilities as a middle school teacher and the responsibilities and time commitment as Miss Georgia, I have decided to not fulfill the duties of Miss Georgia 2009. I am grateful for the opportunity to have been chosen as Miss Georgia and fully support the system and wish Emily Cook the best of luck,” Higgins said in the statement.

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/story/762826.html (Photo: Kristina Higgins from her MySpace account)

A newly released recording from a British control room monitoring lunar activity in the late 1960s revealed that the Russian actually tried to beat the Americans in the race to the Moon: just hours before the Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, a Russian spacecraft Luna-15 crash-landed there:

Sir Bernard Lovell, the astronomer, was among the team listening to transmissions coming from the area of space and began tracking the unmanned Soviet spacecraft Luna 15, which was trying to collect samples of lunar soil and rock and then return to Earth before the US mission.

The recordings from Jodrell's Lovell radio telescope, which were hidden in archives until researchers found them, show the Russian craft orbited the Moon and crash-landed onto its surface at 15:50 on July 21 – just a few hours before the Americans lifted off. [...]

People in Jodrell's control room can then be heard shouting "it's landing" and "it's going down much too fast" as they track Luna 15's final moments before it crashes.

A voice is later heard saying: "I say, this has really been drama of the highest order."

Link - via 80beats

Meet DustCart, a real-life Wall-E, created by Italian scientist Paolo Dario and colleagues at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna University.

The robotic trash bin can revolutionize trash collection in small Italian towns with small and windy streets inaccessible to large garbage trucks:

Like a taxi answering a call, DustCart rode across the terrace to meet the caller.

Once the robot arrived, it asked for a personal ID number that both identifies the user and tracks the garbage. It also asked for the kind of trash being dumped — organic, recyclable or waste. DustCart then opened its belly bin, collected the trash and took it to a fake dumping site.

Fulvio Paolocci and Angelica Marin of GlobalPost has the story (and lots of photos!): Link

(Photo: Fulvio Paolocci/Global Post)

Sculptor Antony Gormley of One & Other's summer art project is loads of fun: he asks the people of London to occupy the empty Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, usually reserved for statues of kings and generals. Every hour, 24 hours a day for 100 days, a different person will become their own living sculptures on the Fourth Plinth.

This guy to the left is aquatic scientist Oliver Parsons-Baker, who came up dressed as a giant poo. He's trying to raise awareness and promote better sanitation around the world with Water Aid:

The 26-year-old, who works for Severn Trent Water, has teamed up with Water Aid to raise awareness of the billions of people trapped in the poverty cycle due to a lack of safe water and toilets.

His cumbersome costume meant he had to be hoisted onto the plinth, drawing laughter and applause from the crowd. The outfit was composed of brown foam and leather, with a sizeable housefly dangling from it.

Parsons-Baker got his message across via two placards which bore the message: "2.5bn people don't have a toilet" and "G8 leaders - take action on the sanitation crisis now".

You can view the live webstream of the shenanigans here: Link | Coverage at the Guardian | Poo-Man at The London Paper (photo: PA)

Does your boss insist that everybody in the office think of himself as a friend first, and a boss second? Do his attempts at humor often end up inappropriate or even downright offensive, yet without malice? You may be working for a "Michael Scott" - the kind of boss played by Steve Carell in the TV series The Office.

In the blog "My Boss Is Michael Scott," an office worker realizes that the company owner and boss is, in fact, so much like Michael Scott that working there is akin to living in the show (but with worse pay, I'm sure) and blogs about the experience:

After generously allowing us the right to work on the 3rd of July, Michael decided to celebrate by buying the whole office KFC. Never mind the two vegetarians in the company, they can make it on their own.

The sales people have no one to call because all the offices they would normally cold call are closed. The rest of the company slacks off excessively to meet with the sale’s peoples productivity levels.

Michael decides to give himself a pat on the back by allowing us an hour long lunch where we can watch a movie in the conference room with him. Naturally, he expects everyone to really love him for allowing us to work today, feeding us and giving us a longer lunch. Instead, I have chosen use the time to write about him on the internet.

Then with all of us sitting around wondering why we are even here, he leaves two hours early from work. Oh Michael, how does your mind work?

http://www.mybossismichaelscott.com/ - Thanks Anon! (Photo: Kumar Appaiah [Flickr])

Today's Neatorama and Hobotopia's Caption Monkey hails all the way from China - it's about a mountain that's laying an egg. First the story, via the always amusing Ananova's Quirkies section:

Officials at Gulu village, Guizhou province, claim a cliff of Gandeng Mountain has laid more than 100 eggs, reports Guizhou Metropolis News.

They claim the eggs, as big as car tyres, appear in 'sockets' in the cliff around every two years.

Yang Shengjia, director of the local tourism bureau, said: "Another mountain egg is expected to be laid soon.

"If people, like visitors, can have long enough patience, they may view the astonishing scene of the mountain laying an egg."

Funniest caption will win a black and white custom Monkey drawing, courtesty of Adam "Ape Lad" Koford. Contest rules are simple: place your caption in the comment section, one caption per comment, please. You can enter as many funny ones as you'd like.

Be sure to visit Adam's blog for inspiration. Good luck!

The map above, Universalis Cosmographia, drawn in 1507 by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller (and hence also called the Waldseemüller Map) made news recently when conservators at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. put it in a state of the art encasement. Sure it's old, but why go through all the trouble? Turns out, the Waldseemüller has an intriguing link to America:

A map thought lost for almost five centuries is found and is now on display. It's often called America's birth certificate.

Created in 1507, the Waldseemüller map is the first map to show a Pacific Ocean, the Western Hemisphere and a continent called America.

Science Daily has the story: Link (with video clip)

Are you dooming your children by giving them "bad" names? Maybe so, according to this interesting study by David Kalist of Shippensburg University about the problem of "feminine" names for boys:

... Shippensburg (Pa.) University professor David Kalist's report in Social Science Quarterly shows that "unpopular names are likely not the cause of crime," he explains that factors often associated with those names can "increase the tendency toward juvenile delinquency."

Boys with unpopular, girlish or uncommon names often are ridiculed by peers, come from families of low socioeconomic status and face discrimination in the workforce based on a preconceived bias about their names, according to the study, which analyzed more than 15,000 names.

Link

Oh, and the top 10 "bad-boy" names? Here they are: Alec, Ernest, Garland, Ivan, Kareem, Luke, Malcolm, Preston, Tyrell, and Walter.

Previously on Neatorama: 10 Strangest Names EVAR!