Move over, fish! There's a new roe on the dinner menu: snail caviar.
Being the first in the world to produce snail caviar shell-less and unpasteurized, the farm - founded by two former snail farmers - spent nearly four years perfecting the production and harvesting process, resulting in tiny, smooth cream-colored pearls that reportedly burst on the tongue with subtle autumn and woody flavors.
Being a food hipster ain't cheap: 50 gram (1.8 oz) of snail caviar retails for $115.
If the folks at Carlos Marreiros architecture firm have their ways, the Macau Pavillion at the Shanghai World Expo 2010 will be in the form this glorious giant rabbit:
... the pavilion will be wrapped with a double-layer glass membrane and feature fluorescent screens on its outer walls. Balloons will serve as the head and tail of the ‘rabbit’, which can be moved up and down to attract visitors. The building will be constructed with recyclable materials and consists of solar power panels and rain collection systems.
I can't believe we almost missed this: on January 12, 1967, University of California psychology professor James Bedford became the first man to be cryogenically frozen:
As the first man to be preserved, the bill was paid by the Life Extension Society. He also earned the awesome title of “cryonaut,” the term given to cryogenically preserved individuals. (Source: The Retro Blog)
Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a company that will freeze your body for a fee, has a fascinating account of the freezing of Dr. James Bedford:
The Cryonics Society of California "suspension team" was woefully unprepared. From testimony taken from Nelson and Robert Prehoda it appears that your "perfusion," so glowingly detailed to the news media, consisted of multiple injections with either pure DMSO or a DMSO-containing solution of a composition which was unknown to Nelson. (Prehoda recalls that pure DMSO from Matheson Scientific was employed). Attempts were made to introduce the cryoprotectant into your carotid arteries bilaterally and to circulate it by performing manual chest compressions coupled with bag-valve respirator ventilations. According to Nelson, within approximately two hours of your deanimation you were transferred to a foam-insulated box, still wrapped in the bed sheet on which you deanimated (with some crushed water ice still on you) and covered over with one-inch-thick slabs of dry ice.
Anthony Herman is fighting City Hall, and he's not shy about it: the used car salesman used all weapons at his disposal including his business signage which he used to call out the Mayor and the Polk City councilmen:
Herman contends Polk City for years has harassed him with zoning violations, tied him up with lawyers and sent squad cars to deliver letters to his Johnston home in a bid to embarrass him. Polk City, for its part, has alleged that Herman ran an illegal salvage operation from 300 Sandpiper Court and routinely dumped vehicle fluids into the city's storm sewers.
The dispute, which spills through five Polk County court files, turned nasty last fall, when the Mighty Good sign for three days described Polk City Mayor Gary Heuertz as "a lieing little Nazi turd."
The commentary returned last week, when Herman's sign began telling Polk City residents that "Our mayor and council sure are ass holes."
City leaders say Herman's messages have drawn complaints from some residents - mostly parents who came across them while transporting small, reading-age children - but insist that the city has no plans to try to interfere with his right to free speech.
"A lot of people are coming out of the woodwork to look at it," Heuertz said of the sign. "So tourism's not a problem ... .
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20090107/BUSINESS/901070375/1001/NEWS - via Arbroath
The age-old question, which is better: Mac or PC? is finally being settled mano-a-mano. Here's a short yet highly entertaining clip by Dan Chianelli and Nick Greenlee. The production quality is unbelievable!
Car dealers are desperate for business, and many are getting creative (like this free gun when you buy a car offer). Korean automobile maker Hyundai is trying a new approach. It'll take your car back (most of the time) if you have a "life changing event," like getting fired from your job:
Hyundai has begun to promote a new program that claims that “if you cannot make your payment because of a life changing event, we’ll allow you to return your vehicle and walk away from your loan obligation - and in most cases, we will cover most, if not all of the difference”. This program is good up to one year, post purchase, and at least two payments must be made in order for it to become effective. But is it a good deal?
This is a fantastic idea to build buzz in the blogosphere: the creators of Coraline, a movie inspired by the novella by Neil Gaiman, sent out 50 handmade boxes with items from movie to their favorite bloggers.
Super Punch tracked down 46 22 of the 50 boxes: Link | Coraline (the Book) at Amazon
Robert Birming, the author of GeekAlerts, has decided to close down his gadget blog (because it simply takes too much time, a luxury he doesn't have at the moment).
Robert, who is also an author on Neatorama and a rock star (he's the drummer of the Swedish rock band Eskobar) will continue to post on smidigt.se. It's a good thing that pictures are a big part of his blog, because it's in Swedish (well, there's an automatic translation to English here, but you know how that goes!)
Rob is now blogging on Neatorama as Smidigt, so say goodbye to GeekAlerts and hello (or "hej" in Swedish) to Smidigt.se!
It takes real talent to make test pattern cool, but film student André F. Chocron did just that. Here's a minute-long animation, titled Bars and Tones, set to Penguin Cafe Orchestra's Perpetuum Mobile.
Guys have been able to erhm, order, a mail order bride from Russia and Asia for quite some time now. But what about the ladies? Fulfilling an obviously under-served niche is this fantastic website, Mail Order Husbands.
This one to the left is "Steven"
I'm definitely a classic romantic. I like a candlelight dinner, some quiet background music, and a couple hits of ether. I prefer a woman that has insurance and a car would be great as I need to make the occassional trip to Mexico to pick up "souvenirs".
I'm sure this is the foremost questions your mind:
Q: What does it cost the parties involved?
Art: It all depends on the demand. We have an excellent variety of quality bachelors, and the highest demand is for men around 30 years old with lots of hair. For example if you want to order a 52 year old bald man who has bad psioriasis, well then maybe $600.. but say we had a candidate that looked like a young Erik Estrada, well that kind of product doesn't last long, we typically charge around $9,000.
I learned something new today: the ugly concrete building style of the 50s to the 70s, exemplified by Le Corbusier, has a name. It is called Brutalist Architecture (the term brutalist originates from the French béton brut or "raw concrete," but the name does fit the style well):
The movement was initiated by French architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, known more popularly as Le Corbusier. The Brutalist approach was marked by an unashamed display of building functions and construction using poured concrete in a way that did not disguise the rough materials with which buildings are made. Brutalism [sic] completely rejected the classical norms of beautification and decoration for hard angles, rough surfaces, and exposed plumbing and machinery.
From our pal mental_floss, here's a really fun post by Stacy about the origins of ... the Muppets! Here are two of my favorites:
12. You have to love Statler and Waldorf. I couldn’t find much on their particular inspiration, but I can tell you that they’ve been around since the 1975 Muppet Show pilot. They are named after popular New York City hotels (the Statler Hotel was renamed the Hotel Pennsylvania in 1992.) Guess what Waldorf’s wife name is? Yep… Astoria (she looks startlingly like Statler.) FYI, Waldorf is the one with the mustache and white hair. Statler has the grey hair. Apparently Waldorf has had a pacemaker for more than 30 years.
Here's a papercraft for all of you who have learned to stop worrying and love the New World Order: the Illuminati Pyramid Papercraft, by Paper Replika.
Just be careful where you place the papercraft, because it surely contains printed microcircuitry with hypersensitive cellulosic fiber antenna that will transmit whatever it is you say to Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Ever heard of Norman Borlaug? Most people haven't, yet he's credited with a truly amazing accomplishment: saving more life than anybody else in history.
THE POPULATION BOMB
In his 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb , author and biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote that "the battle to feed all of humanity is over." Ehrlich's chilling book predicted that a rapidly growing world population would soon lead to massive worldwide food shortages, especially in third-world countries. World population was just over 3.5 billion at the time and was increasing at a faster rate than food production. "In the 1970s and 1980s," Ehrlich wrote, "hundreds of millions of people will starve to death." Most experts agreed with Ehrlich's dire predictions ... but they hadn't anticipated Dr. Norman Borlaug.
Borlaug was born in 1914 and grew up on a farm in Saude, Iowa. In 1942 he graduated from the University of Minnesota with PhDs in plant pathology and genetics. In 1944 he was invited by the Rockefeller Foundation, a global charitable organization, and the Mexican government to head a project aimed at improving wheat production in Mexico. His assignment: to develop a more productive strain of wheat that was also resistant to stem rust, a fungal disease that was becoming a major problem in Latin America.
Borlaug chose two locations with an 8,500-foot altitude difference for his testing. He grew and crossbred thousands of different strains of wheat, and worked with the latest fertilizers, looking for plants that could grow in both environments. Reason: they had to be able to grow anywhere.
Over the next several years Borlaug was able to develop hardy, highly productive strains, but he found that the tall wheats he was using would not support the weight of the added grain. So he crossed the tall wheats with dwarf varieties that were not only shorter but had thicker, stronger stems. And that was his breakthrough: a semi-dwarf, disease-resistant, high-output wheat.
He worked incessantly to get the seeds distributed to small farmers throughout Mexico, and by 1963 Borlaug's wheat varieties made up 95 percent of the nation's total production, with a crop yield that was more than six times greater than when he'd arrived. Not only could Mexico stop importing wheat, they were now an exporter - a huge boost to any nation's nutritional and economic health, but especially to an underdeveloped one. And now Borlaug wanted to take his high-yield farming global. He wanted, he said, to secure "a temporary success in man's war against hunger and deprivation."
ANOTHER VICTORY
In 1963 the Rockefeller Foundation sent Borlaug to Pakistan and India, two nations with severe hunger and malnutrition problems. Borlaug's help was resisted at first; there was cultural opposition to new farming methods. But when acute famine struck in 1965 (1.5 million people would die by 1967), the barriers came down. And the results were incredible: by 1968 Pakistan, which just a few years earlier relied on massive grain imports, was entirely self-sufficient. By 1970 India's production had doubled ad it too was getting close to self-sufficiency.
At four o'clock in the morning one day in 1970, Margaret Borlaug got a phone call. She raced out to the fields and informed her husband, already hard at work, that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize.
"No, I haven't," he said. He thought it was a hoax. But he had indeed won it for having saved the lives of millions - perhaps hundreds of millions - of people in India and Pakistan and for the message it had sent to the world. "He has given us a well-founded hope," the Nobel committee said, "an alternative of peace and of life - the green revolution."
NOTHING ESCAPES CONTROVERSY
Borlaug had also been working on other grains, such as corn and rye, and in the 1980s began developing more productive strains of rice to increase production in China and Southeast Asia. He was setting up similar programs in Africa, but ran into a major hurdle: environmentalists opposed his methods. Among their charges: spreading the same few varieties of grains all over the planet is harming biodiversity; huge farms are benefiting from his high techniques and killing off the small farmer; inorganic fertilizers used in the Borlaug method are harmful to the environment; and genetically engineered food is unnatural and potentially dangerous.
"Some of the environmental lobbyist are the salt of the earth," Borlaug said," but many of them are elitists. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things." He admitted that he would rather his work benefited small farmers, but added, "Wheat isn't political. It doesn't know that it's supposed to be producing more for poor farmers than for rich farmers."
Supporters argue that Borlaug's high-yield method has actually been a boon for the environment, saving hundreds of millions of acres of wild land from being turned into farms. The controversy continues, but none of it has stopped Borlaug from his mission.
KEEP ON PLANTING
In 1984, with the help of Japanese philanthropist Ryoichi Sasakawa, Borlaug set up the Sasakawa Africa Association (SAA), training more than a million farmers throughout Africa. Result: using Borlaug seed and methods, cereal grain yields have increased from two- to four-fold. As of 2005 - at the age of 91 - Norman Borlaug is still at it. He continues to work with Mexico's International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, still heads the SAA, runs research programs, teaches young scientists, gives lectures, and of course, still works in the field. Over his 50-plus-year career he has been credited with saving as many as a billion people from starvation, and has received numerous international awards.
In May 2004, he was presented with another: at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in Borlaug's college town of Minneapolis, he was shown their new "Window of Peace." The Minneapolis Star Tribune described the event: "He gazed upward to see the sun shining through a 30-foot-tall stained glass window. There - along with depictions of Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, and other modern-day peacemakers - was a life-size likeness of Borlaug, holding a fistful of wheat."
The article above is reprinted with permission from The Best of the Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. The Bathroom Reader Institute handpicked the most eye-opening, rib-tickling, and mind-boggling articles from everything they have written over the last ten years and carefully crammed them into 576 pages of the book. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute.
Norman Borlaug was featured on Penn and Teller's BS on genetically modified food:
[YouTube Link]
The following is a guest blog by Kelsey Timmerman
of Travelin Light | Blog
During my research for my book Where
am I Wearing: A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People that
Make Our Clothes
I met a lot of garment workers. Allow me to introduce you to a few of
them:
Arifa holding her daughter Sadia
Arifa
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Quote: “Their father was a crook, and the government doesn’t
take care of my children. It’s not like the USA or the UK.”
Arifa is a single mother. She lives on the sixth floor of a crumbling
apartment building in Dhaka with her daughter Sadia, 4, and her son Abir,
11. She has another son, Arman, 18, who went to Saudi Arabia to work.
He sends half of his money home to help his mom and siblings Arifa works
at a nearby garment factory where she earns $24/month. A trip through
the market is enough to show that Arifa is well respected by all and feared
by merchants, who don’t dare bargain with her.
Nari (left) with roommates
Nari
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Quote: “The workers at beauty salons make less than garment
workers, but I will be an owner and make more.”
Nari works at a factory that makes blue jeans. She shares an 8’
X 12’ apartment with seven other girls. Four of the girls sleep
on a bamboo bed and the other four sleep on the concrete floor. Nari irons
jeans. It’s a job that she had to pay a $50 bribe – a month’s
wage – to get. Fifty dollars is probably enough for one person in
Cambodia to live on, but Nari, like many of the garment workers in Cambodia,
supports her family of six. She is attending beauty school and hopes to
open her own salon someday. She doesn’t like bowling.
Ai
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Quote: “I miss working and talking in the rice fields. At the
factory, we aren’t allowed to talk. The bosses want us to work as
quickly as possible.”
Ai shares an apartment with Nari and works at the same factory. She is
a checker, looking for flaws. Eighty-five people have a hand in sewing
together a single pair of blue jeans, and Ai makes sure that no one screwed
up. Like many garment workers, she lives far from her home village and
rarely visits; a six-day workweek won’t allow it. Ai doesn’t
have a contract with the factory, which means she doesn’t have the
same rights as other workers. She can be fired for absolutely no reason.
She supports six people on her wage of $55/month. She owns a Tweety Bird
shirt, but has no idea who Tweety Bird is.
Zhu Chun (left), Dewan (right)
Dewan and Zhu Chun
Guangzhou, China
Quote by Zhu Chun: “One thing is for sure. I don’t want
(my son) to come here to work in the factory. I just want him to study,
because people like us who don’t have knowledge have to work very
hard.”
Dewan and Zhu Chun moved from their village 600-miles away to Guangzhou
to get a job at a factory making shoes. They haven’t seen their
13 year-old-son in three years. The original plan was to work a few years
to pay off the home they built in their village, but Dewan’s mother
got sick and died. Now they have a house and expensive medical bills to
pay off. A few years have become a few more. The law limits their workweek
to 44 hours, but they often work more than a hundred. Neither one of them
has eaten cheese.
Debbie holding the author's favorite shorts
Debbie
Perry, New York
Quote: “They would have to push me out the door to get me to leave.”
Debbie’s job working for Champion was supposed to be a filler between
college and whatever she decided to do next. Twenty-eight years later
she is still working at the factory, which is no longer owned by Champion.
In 2002 Champion moved the factory’s work and hundreds of jobs to
Mexico. Lucky for Debbie the community of Perry pulled together and a
new company, American Classic Outfitters, was born from the ashes of Champion.
You’ve seen Debbie’s and ACO’s work. They make uniforms
for 16 of the 30 NBA teams, all of the WNBA, 73 colleges, and 3 NFL teams.
Kelsey
Timmerman is the author of Where
am I Wearing.
From the inside flap:
Ninety-seven percent of our clothes are made overseas. Yet globalization
makes it difficult to know much about the origin of the products we buy—beyond
the standard "Made in" label. So journalist and blogger Kelsey
Timmerman decided to visit each of the countries and factories where his
five favorite items of clothing were made and meet the workers. He knew
the basics of globalized labor—the forces, processes, economics,
and politics at work. But what was lost among all those facts and numbers
was an understanding of the lives, personalities, hopes, and dreams of
the people who made his clothes.
In Bangladesh, he went undercover as an under-wear buyer, witnessed
the child labor industry in action, and spent the day with a single mother
who was forced to send her eldest son to Saudi Arabia to help support
her family. In Cambodia, he learned the difference between those who wear
Levi's and those who make them. In China, he saw the costs of globalization
and the dark side of the Chinese economic miracle.
Oh, one more thing: his wife Annie just gave birth to the couple's first
child, Harper
Willow Timmerman, on January 6, 2009. She's very cute! (Congrats Kelsey!)
Are you an author and would like your books promoted on Neatorama? Let's talk about a possible guest blog post just like this one!
