What to get your loved ones for Valentine's Day? Whatever you do, do not get them these gifts. Here's the 15 worst Valentine's Day gift, as compiled by our very own Jill Harness for InventorSpot:
Any fan of J. Geils Band, will certainly know "Love Stinks." Never before was this quite so perfectly illustrated before this wonderful message was delivered with fake poop. It may actually not stink like the real thing, but I'm sure your date will understand the underlying hate in your gift of "I love you" poop.
I like coffee - but not to the point that I need to grind my own roasted coffee beans (those Senseo coffee pods are just fine, thank you very much!) and certainly not to the point that I'd want to make my own coffee roaster! Not that I can anyhow ...
Well, here's Ed Bourgeois of eBlog Cafe describing his homemade coffee roaster contraption over at homeroasters.org (Now *these* people really love coffee!)
I don't post a lot of links to eBay auctions (the links expire too quickly) but this one by jdwildlifeartistry is too weird to pass up. Behold a gray squirrel soldier holding a rifle, mounted on a plaque!
Behold, the Atheist's Nightmare: The Babel
Fish!
From The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, one of my favorite
OMG-awesome-book-turned-into-an-okay-film, here is the atheist's
nightmare: the babel fish! Douglas Adams, RIP. Link
Insane Mexican Wrestling
Move over WWE, here comes lucha libre, the Mexican version of pro
wrestling! The guy spinning is Mascarita Dorada, and his unfortunate
opponent is Damian, in a CMLL (Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre, a
pro wrestling outfit in Medico City) match. Link
Volcano Erupts Underneath Ice
This is pretty awesome: a 2004 volcano erupting from under the ice
in Iceland (I guess that's why that country got the name). From
Earth
- The Biography,
starring Dr. Iain Stewart.
Gordon Ramsay's Perfect Scrambled Eggs
So. You think you can make scrambled eggs. Maybe you've been making
'em all your life. Well, here's Gordon Ramsay telling you that you're
wrong. This is how you make scrambled eggs! Link
Idiot's Guide to Releasing a Bobcat
Why, oh, why would you even think that shovels are adequate protection
against bobcats ... Here's what two doofus did when they tried to
free a bobcat from a snare trap.
Hello everyone! On New Year's Day, I wrote about a big surprise that's coming to Neatorama. Well, today's the big day. I'm very excited to introduce a new and very neat feature on the blog: the Neatorama Upcoming Queue.
You're Invited to Write a Blog Post on Neatorama
Like many blogs, Neatorama started with a single author (that's yours truly). Since then, the blog has expanded into many authors, each of whom bring his or her own unique contribution. I think Neatorama is ready to take the next logical step: to become an open blog in which everyone (yes, including you) can write their own posts.
Do you have a blog and would like it featured on Neatorama? Have you ever found something neat/funny/weird on the Web and would like to share it with all of Neatorama's readers? Now you can.
Of course, there needs to be a mechanism to separate good posts from bad ones (like spam, for instance). The Upcoming Queue makes this easy by letting you vote good posts up and bad ones down. Posts that gather a lot of positive votes will then be promoted to the blog's front page.
Neatorama Upcoming = Social Media + Blog Hybrid
The first thing that comes to many people's mind will undoubtedly be this: It's a social media thing, just like digg. And while we love digg, reddit, and other social media websites, the Upcoming Queue has a few differences (explained in greater length in the FAQ):
Your submission is a blog post Neatorama is a blog and will remain a blog. By writing a blog post instead of a link, you'll have more than just a few sentences to tell people what your pick is all about.
Equal chance to get promoted to front page Not a power user? Don't have a lot of friends that will vote for your submissions? No problem. Besides garnering upvotes, Neatorama editors will be on the look out for good posts to promote, regardless of the number of votes they garner. This will even out the playing field for everyone.
Credit is given where credit is due This is a personal pet peeve of mine: social networking posts don't give via or author credits. If you found an interesting item to post on Neatorama via a certain blog, please be neighborly and give it a via credit link.
Promoted posts will also have author credit - your posts will carry a link to your blog or website. (We do reserve the right to edit this in cases of spam or inappopriate content).
No burying Once a post is on the front page, it's on the front page. There's no burying or personal vendettas (though we do reserve the right to edit/delete in cases of spam, misformatted or inappropriate content).
Want Your Own Upcoming Queue?
The Upcoming Queue project is carried out in collaboration with Sift Partners, the people behind VideoSift, the best video community website on the Web today. The Queue is a specially customized version of Varo CMS (the engine of VideoSift), hooked up to the WordPress software that Neatorama uses.
I'd like to thank Rommel Santor, the genius behind VaroCMS, for writing such wonderful program and for putting up with me and my incessant nagging during the project. :)
If you'd like your own version of this Upcoming Queue or similar functionality for your blog, I highly recommend that you join the VaroCMS Interest List.
Rewarding, Not Penalizing, Top Users
To celebrate the launch of the Upcoming Queue, let's have a contest: the Top Submitter of the month of February 2009 will get a Free iPod Touch. The rest of the Top 10 Submitters will get a Free Neatorama T-shirt. Why February? That way, we all have a fresh start (the statistics will reset to zero so early testers don't have a head start). You all have a week to play around with the Queue before it's for keeps! :)
Lastly, the Upcoming Queue is technically still a "beta" feature - if you've found a bug, please let us know. And if you have a blog, I'd appreciate it if you would write a post about the Neatorama Upcoming Queue.
When I was a wee undergrad, I remember a professor in my class saying that in biology, "extinction is the name of the game."
Sadly, it seems that this rule of thumb also extends to language: linguists have argued that half of the world's 6,000 languages will be lost this century.
Our pal mental_floss has an intriguing post about such 10 languages that have gone extinct in the United States in the past few decades alone:
1. The Eyak language was spoken near the mouth of the Copper River in Alaska up until about two days ago. January 21 was the day that Marie Smith Jones died, the last known full-blooded Eyak and the only person known to be fluent in the language. She tried to help preserve it by creating a dictionary so others could learn it someday. Although Marie had nine children, none of them learned the language because it was considered improper to speak anything but English at the time.
2. Yana was last spoken in north-central California about 95 years ago by the Yahi people. The last native speaker went by the name Ishi, and, like Marie Smith Jones, was instrumental in preserving the language (with help from linguist-anthropologist Edward Sapir). Ishi and his family were around during the Three Knolls Massacre of 1865, which killed off about half of the remaining Yahi people. The rest of them slowly died off, and when Ishi (which means “man” in Yana) succumbed to tuberculosis in 1916, that was the end of the spoken language. Ishi’s story has been featured in several books and movies.
Inspired by the legendary "A Day at the Science Fair" (not a polite link, but very funny) thread at SomethingAweful, Travis Pitts of Zom-Bot made this quick and dirty (and very funny) image: Link - via The Zeray Gazette
And yes, I think that's probably Disaster Girl or her twin sister.
If you think that living in Penistone is tough, imagine if you live on a street named Butts Wynd (yes, a real one in St. Andrews, Scotland) or Dingleberry Road (in Iowa City, Iowa). This one to the left, Psycho Path (someone has a sense of humor) is in Traverse City, Michigan.
Baierman of YesButNoButYes blog has compiled some of the most awful street names in the world: Link - via Rue The Day
Sometimes the cleverest ideas are the simplest. The creative geniuses at the French design company Atypyk came up with this fan that looks like the Wi-Fi icon.
It won't identify Wi-Fi Hotspots for you, but it'll help you sweaty geeks cool off during the hot summer days: Link
Psst, guys. Have you ever been rejected by a woman and wonder what the real reason for the rejection was? Miss Cellania has Women are from Venus/Men are from Mars translations for us poor mooks:
8. I'm not attracted to you in 'that' way. (You are the ugliest dork I've ever laid eyes on.)
7. My life is too complicated right now. (I don't want you spending the whole night or else you may hear phone calls from all the other guys I'm seeing.)
6. I've got a boyfriend. (I prefer my male cat and a half gallon of Ben and Jerry's.) [...]
To bring attention to the destruction of rainforests worldwide, German environment conservation group OroVerde and ad agency Ogilvy came up with this tongue-in-cheek poster depicting the various of logging machinery "species" in the rainforest: http://acriacao.com/2009/01/19/diversity-of-species-in-the-rainforest/
This is the sort of thing that only government bureaucracy can come up with: Australian immigration authorities have decided that Rosabelle Glasby couldn't bring her identical twin sister into the country because ... they're not related!
Adopted by different families shortly after their birth in Malaysia, Mrs Glasby and Dorothy Loader were separated for almost 50 years before finally meeting last September.
But now Mrs Glasby, from Margaret River, is facing an uphill battle to be permanently reunited with her twin, who lives in Malaysia. In a letter to Mrs Glasby last month, DIAC state director Paul Farrell explained that despite the circumstances, the present laws meant Ms Loader would not be eligible for family migration.
"Under Migration Law where the legal relationship between a child and his/her birth parents has been severed by adoption, the legal relationship between the child and his/her birth siblings is also severed,'' he said.
"It therefore does not appear that your twin sister would be eligible for a permanent visa under the Family Stream of the Migration Program.''
Mrs Glasby said she was heartbroken that her long-lost twin did not qualify as family. "We're identical twin sisters _ we're the same egg,'' she said. ``Just because we got adopted into different families they say they don't consider us related. It's hard to get anyone more related to me.''
Just a pile of rubbish? Would you believe that it's actually a US Army HQ during World War II, disguised by architect Sir Basil Spence?
StrangeHarvest has a couple of interesting photos of such military deceptions from Masquerade: The amazing camouflage deceptions of World War II by Seymour Reit.
(If you're into this sort of things, definitely check out Jasper Maskelyne, a magician turned military camouflage genius who built fake tanks and even a fake city to trick German bombers during WWII)
