Behold the Electroman Surge Protector, that not only quadruples your electrical
outlet, but also has an indicator light where his heart is located that shows your electrical applicances are protected against evil electricity surges.

It takes a certain kind of mad genius to make a surge protector cool. Electroman doesn't come cheap though, it's $24.95, but what is the price of coolness?

(Plus, you can customize 'im with a sharpie!) Link - via CraziestGadgets

Sad as it is, doping is so prevalent in sports that it comes to no surprise when an athlete is busted ... but chess? CHESS? Yes, folks, here's the Great Chess Doping Scandal of grandmaster Vassily Ivanchuk, ranked third of the world:

Who knows what was going through Ivanchuk's head when, on Nov. 25 in Dresden, the last day of the Chess Olympiad, he lost to Gata Kamsky? What we do know, however, is that when the game against the American ended, a judge asked Ivanchuk to submit to a drug test. Instead, he stormed out of the room in the conference center, kicked a concrete pillar in the lobby, pounded a countertop in the cafeteria with his fists and then vanished into the coatroom. Throughout this performance, he was followed by a handful of officials.

No one could convince Ivanchuk to provide a small amount of urine for the test. And because refusal is treated as a positive test result, he is now considered guilty of doping and could be barred from professional chess for two years.

Link - via Znaniye

Photo: erral [Flickr]

W00t! It's time for our collaboration with What is it? Blog. This week's mysterious object is pictured to the left: can you guess what it is for?

Place your guess in the comment section. One guess per comment, please, but you can enter as many as you can think of. Post no URLs, let others play. The first person who guesses right (or gives the funniest guess, if no one gets it right) wins a Free Neatorama T-Shirt.

For more clues, check out the What is it? Blog. Good luck!

The Art of Manliness blog has a nifty post about 25 self-made men in American history, people who came from unpromising circumstances but pulled themselves by the bootstraps to become successful.

Many of the men listed are the usual suspect, but it included someone I'd never thought of before:

Puff, Puff Daddy, P. Diddy-whatever you want to call him, the name Sean Combs most deserves is that of self-made man. Mr. Combs claims to work harder than anyone else in the entertainment business, and he has the success to show for it. Born in public housing projects in Harlem, Sean’s father was shot to death when Sean was only 2. At age 12, Combs, who was too young to officially have his own paper route, found a way around the rule by taking over the routes of several older boys and giving them 50% of his earnings. He was soon making over $700 a week as a paperboy. After high school, Mr. Combs interned at Uptown Records while he attended Howard University. He dropped out and took an executive position with the company. Fired from the label in 1993, Combs formed his own company-Bad Boy Records.

In addition to producing hit artists like the Notorious B.I.G., P. Diddy started putting out his own successful rap records and diversifying his business interests. His enterprises now include the Sean John clothing line, a cologne, the Making the Band television series, and a restaurant in Atlanta. With a net worth estimated to be around $324 million, Combs has taken full ownership of his life and done it with style.

Link - Thanks Mu!

Why do some people have all the luck while others are perpetually unlucky? Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire was determined to get to the scientific bottom of the phenomenon of luck, and what he discovered may surprise you:

I placed advertisements in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me.

Hundreds of extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research and over the years, have been interviewed by me. I have monitored their lives and had them take part in experiments. The results reveal that although these people have almost no insight into the causes of their luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their good and bad fortune. Take the case of seemingly chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not.

I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities. I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. I had secretly placed a large message halfway through the newspaper saying: 'Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $50'.

This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

Unlucky people are generally more tense than lucky people, and this anxiety disrupts their ability to notice the unexpected.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/3896391.cms | Richard Wiseman's official website | His book: The Luck Factor

Thingamababy blog has a viral video clip - the original has over 1 million views - of a young girl named Arianna dancing to Beyoncé's Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It). She (Arianna) has the moves down pat, but is it cute or disturbing (or a little of both) to let your toddler watch MTV for its, um, videos of scantily clad pop stars dancing?

Link [embedded YouTube clip]

The Los Angeles Times has been running a series of articles about Mexico's drug cartels and the government's (so far ineffective) war against drugs.

Past articles have included the gruesome tale of drug boss dissolving the bodies of his enemies in vats of lye and the tale of a legendary kingpin who picks up the tab of everyone dining at the restaurant he happens to eat in.

In the latest article of the series, Tracy Wilkinson writes about Yudit del Rincon, an anti-drug crusader and state legislator from Sinaloa, who had a brilliant idea:

Yudit del Rincon, a 44-year-old lawmaker, went before the state legislature this year with a proposition: Let's require lawmakers to take drug tests to prove they are clean.

Her colleagues greeted the idea with applause. Then she sprang a surprise on them: Two lab technicians waited in the audience to administer drug tests to every state lawmaker. We should set the example, she said.

They nearly trampled one another in the stampede to the door, Del Rincon recalled.

Link

(Photo: Don Bartletti/LA Times)

For the past 40 years, Ashleigh Brilliant has been making these wonderful "Pot-Shots," combining his marvelous wit with brevity (all are 17 words or less). He has over 10,000 illustrated epigrams that you can view on his website or buy as postcards or CD

Go check it out - they're wonderful! Link - Thanks Strange de Jim!

You and I may be facing an economic collapse, but one Russian professor is having the time of his life. For over a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin had been predicing the US to fall apart and most people ignored him ... until now. He's been the darling of Russia's news media with his dire prediction of the future of the United States:

Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control. [...]

California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.

Link

Israeli energy company Innowattech has created a new type of road that generates electricity as cars drive on it:

The supercharged surface is embedded with piezoelectric crystals, which transform kinetic energy from passing vehicles into an electrical current. With widespread adoption, the technology could feed energy back into the nation’s burgeoning electric vehicle grid, transforming congested roadways into a clean green source of energy.

The amount of electricity produced isn't that much (400 kilowatts per kilometer or 645/mi), and there's no mention on how cost effective it would be. But given the sheer amount of roadways we have (the US has over 4 million miles of roads and streets in its highway system alone), it's an interesting albeit niche approach to generate electricity.

Link

Blbar Singh, a Sikh man in Bakersfield, California, was looking up a package that he sent to his son's home on the UPS website. He was surprised to see that the delivery was signed by "terrorist":

Anant Singh, Blbar’s son said, “All of my community who wears a turban and belongs to the Sikh faith are not terrorists. We are a peace-loving people and are part of the community.”

Teg Sidhu, Singh’s friend, said, “Most people may not understand the difference between Sikhs and Muslims, but at least they don’t label every turban-wearing person a terrorist.”

UPS is looking into the matter: Link - Thanks Tiff!

Neatorama reader Mark Schuette told us of his invention: a new mode of transportation powered by ... dogs!

Though dog mushing is an old sport, Mark's new twist lets you have your own urban Iditarod on a dog-powered scooter, trike, or skateboard.

Link - Thanks Mark!

Hey, it's a win-win scenario. It's exercise for the dogs and fun for you (Better than this form of doggie exercise!)

There's an intriguing trend afoot: men - both gay and straight - are turning to surrogacy to become single dads.

Surrogacy experts say because the practice is not regulated, many surrogacy arrangements are handled privately by individuals. Precise figures are hard to come by, but experts say there's no doubt the United States is experiencing a surrogacy baby boom. [...]

Surrogacy experts say gestational surrogacy has increased steadily since the advent of in vitro fertilization in the early 1980s, because it provides an extra layer of emotional and legal protection for the client. The egg donor usually does not even know the client, and unlike the legally contentious "Baby M" case from the 1980s, the surrogate is not giving birth to her genetic child.

"It rises as an issue far less frequently with gestational surrogacy, because women never see it as their child to begin with," said John Weltman, president of Circle Surrogacy. [...]

Although most of their single male clients are gay, surrogacy providers say a smaller but growing number are straight. Steven Harris, a New York malpractice and personal-injury attorney, says he gave up trying to get married when he realized his primary motive was to start a family.
advertisement

Harris, 54, says he knew he made the right decision after 21-month old Ben was born. "I thought getting married was the only way to go, because I did want a family. But having Ben, I feel complete now," Harris says.

It's fatherhood without all the hassles of a marriage - is that a good thing? Ronni Berke of CNN has the story: Link - Thanks Tiff!

Just how do sumo wrestlers bulk up for their sport? Turns out, it's by eating soup!

Here's a neat article by Tania Kadokura of Saveur magazine about chanko-nabe, a hearty, protein-rich one-pot meal that has been the staple of sumo warriors for over a century:

Today's wrestlers train and live at heya (stables) run by former sumo champions, where everything from their grooming to their diet is carefully controlled. Because strength and size are factors key to success in sumo, what and how much a wrestler eats are of particular importance. No wonder, then, that the staple dish of the sumo world is a hearty, filling one-pot meal, consisting of broth, vegetables, and meat or seafood, called nabemono, or nabe for short. (Nabe, pronounced nah-bay, means pot; nabemono means things in a pot.) The dish likely dates to the Jomons, who inhabited Japan a dozen millennia ago. The inventors of pottery, they were apparently the first people to cook food in pots.

When nabe is prepared by sumo wrestlers, it's called chanko-nabe, a name whose origin is unclear - although since chan means father and ko means child, some believe the term refers to a stable , master and his apprentices. The tradition of sumo wrestlers' eating nabe supposedly began in the early 1900s, when star wrestler ~ turned stable master Hitachiyama ~ (sumo wrestlers traditionally go by a single ring name) made a batch for his charges one day. He quickly realized that the meal ~ usually cooked over a gas burner set on the table with diners gathered around-was not only nutritious and inexpensive but also easy to prepare and eaten in a way that reinforced the communal aspect of the stable. It wasn't long before other stable masters were serving chanko-nabe, too.

Link - via grow-a-brain

(Photo: Christopher Hirsheimer)

At first I thought this was a tongue-in-cheek photoshopped book cover, but How to Profit From the Coming Rapture: Getting Ahead When You're Left Behind is actually a real book.

Well, actually make that a fake real book. It's a made up, satirical how-to book by Steve and Evie Levy, who wrote:

Are the end times near? Is the Rapture really just around the corner? Could Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson possibly be right? About 1 billion people among us believe, yes, absolutely.

And that means one thing: investment opportunities!

For those who are not as expertly versed in the Book of Revelation, Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman, authors of the bestselling Yiddish with Dick and Jane, helpfully offer both illumination and advice: What exactly is the Rapture, anyway? How is it different from the Tribulation? Who are the Antichrist, the Four Horsemen, and the 144,000 male virgins, and what do they want? And, most important, how can I make money during the 7 years of societal breakdown before Armaggedon?

Taking the familiar form of a how-to investment guide, HOW TO PROFIT FROM THE COMING RAPTURE instructs those readers who will certainly be left behind (Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, less ardent Protestants, and many more) on how to exploit the inevitable demise of the world in order to make a tidy profit. Sure, the rivers and seas will run with blood, locusts will swarm, mountains will move all over the place, and famine will strike. But for the five billion of us left behind, the post-Rapture world will be a time of even more unique investment opportunities.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316017302?ie=UTF8&tag=neatorama-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0316017302 - via Information Junk