Here are some speakers that any music worshippers need: the Midnight Mexico Minigod speakers by vinyl toy maker Marka27. Now the only things you need are a volcano speaker and a virgin (Barbie, maybe?) to throw down into the boiling lava: Link - via BB Gadgets

Cleaning the cage of a really hungry 12-foot, 126-lb tiger python. What could go wrong? Here's the story of one Renate Klosse, zoo owner, who just had an intimate tour of a python's mouth:

'The jaws of the snake opened so wide that, with one lunge, she was able to completely cover the woman’s face,' said a police spokeswoman. 'She feared that with a few more gulps her head would be inside.'

Renate instinctively stuck her thumbs into the jawbone of the snake to try to get it to relieve its pressure. Colleagues then sprayed water hoses on to it and it finally slithered off.

What happened next?

Renate needed hospital treatment for bites and shock. Antonia had to settle for a supper of live white rats instead.

Link

Despite the ballyhooed $700 billion (actually, with pork it's closer to $852 billion) bailout deal, for the first time in four years, the Dow falls below 10,000:

Investors around the world have come to the sobering realization that the Bush administration's $700 billion rescue plan won't work quickly to unfreeze the credit markets. Global banks, hobbled by wrong-way bets on mortgage securities, still remain starved for cash as credit has dried up.

That's caused stocks to plunge in the U.S., Europe and Asia, and drove investors to sink money into the relative safety of U.S. government debt. Fears about a global recession also caused oil to drop below $90 a barrel; and the benchmark index that gauges fear in the market jumped to the highest level in its 18-year history.

So. What do you think? Did we just spend $700 billion on nothing? Link

So with all the recent news about the Large Hadron Collider, many of you may have this nagging question: what, exactly, would happen if you stick your head in the particle accelerator?

Well, actually, we know the answer to that because someone did stick his head into a particle accelerator. Here's the story of Anatoli Bugorski:

Bugorski, a 36-year-old researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, was checking a piece of accelerator equipment that had malfunctioned - as had, apparently, the several safety mechanisms. Leaning over the piece of equipment, Bugorski stuck his head in the space through which the beam passes on its way from one part of the accelerator tube to the next and saw a flash brighter than a thousand suns. He felt no pain.

From what we know about radiation, about 500 to 600 rads is enough to kill a person (though we don't know of anyone else who has been exposed to radiation in the form of a proton beam moving at about the speed of sound). The left side of his face swollen beyond recognition, Bugorski was taken to a clinic in Moscow so that doctors could observe his death over the following two to three weeks.

Over the next few days, skin on the back of his head and on his face just next to his left nostril peeled away to reveal the path the beam had burned through the skin, the skull, and the brain tissue. The inside of his head continued to burn away: all the nerves on the left were gone in two years, paralyzing that side of his face. Still, not only did Bugorski not die, but he remained a normally functioning human being, capable even of continuing in science. For the first dozen years, the only real evidence that something had gone neurologically awry were occasional petit mal seizures; over the last few years Bugorski has also had six grand mals. The dividing line of his life goes down the middle of his face: the right side has aged, while the left froze 19 years ago. When he concentrates, he wrinkles only half his forehead.

Link - via Cliff Pickover's Reality Carnival

Previously on Neatorama: 10 Things About the Large Hadron Collider You Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask

Two design students dressed in Borat mankinis crashed the 20th celebration of Vietnam's technology and telecommunications company FTP:

Appearing semi-nude and dancing to a popular revolutionary song, these two have real golden balls to pull this off in the conservative Confucian nation of Viet Nam. Highlights included pulling fake pubic hair from their bodies and wrestling with each other.

According to the Telegraph, the Hanoi Cultural Inspectorate (apparently, there is such a thing in Vietnam) fined the college 4 million dong (about 240 dollar) and suspended the two students for 12 months.

Link (with photos of the two students in Borat-styled mankinis. It's rather disturbing. What has been seen cannot be unseen. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED - which, of course, made you want to look that much more, right?) - via Arbroath

Photo: jon|k [Flickr]

Bus drivers in Berkeley, California sure has a good sense of humor!

Very small array blog has really neat charts visualizing the genres of music that dominate the top record charts over the years. This one above shows how pop ruled the '60s (only to be replaced by rock in the '70s, '80s, and '90s - then you'll see the rise of urban music in the '90s and '00s): Link - via Cool Infographics

At first glance, this clever ad by Ridsect Roach Trap looks like it features a beautiful wallpaper pattern. Once you look closely though, you'll see that the dots are actually ... roaches! Yuck! Link

Previously on Neatorama: Ant Wallpaper

This went 'round the InterWeb a while ago, but as usual, I'm late to the party ;) If you've always wondered what those rappers in freestyle rap battles are rapping about, here's the plain English translation: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

I love this trompe-l'œil staircase inside the elevator ad for Becel margarine in Istanbul, Turkey!

Found at directdaily

That's artist Marc Quinn polishing his latest creation: a golden statue of Kate Moss, who he called a "modern day Aphrodite," in a particularly limber pose.

It is the largest gold statue made by man since ancient Egyptian times, weighing 50kg, around the same as its subject.

Artist Marc Quinn, whose previous works include the sculpture of a pregnant woman with no arms or legs on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, said Siren cost £1.5m to make, £1m of which was for the gold.

What does Kate Moss think about all of this?

"For Kate, she thinks it lifts her into a mythical level," he said. "I think she very much loved it because she understands the difference between her image and her self.

"The sculpture is really about whether we make images or they make us. It's about trying to live up to impossible dreams and immortality."

Link

If you think reading all of Neatorama is a big task (that quite a few of you have actually accomplished - yay, go you!) then take a look at this: Ammon Shea, 37, has just read the entire Oxford English Dictionary!

Ammon Shea, 37, who has been dissecting dictionaries since the age of 10, spent a year absorbing 59 million words, from A to Zyxt - the equivalent of reading a John Grisham novel every day.

Cooped up in the basement of his local library, the removal man from New York would devote up to 10 hours a day painstakingly making his way through all 20 volumes of the OED - helped by cup after cup of very strong coffee. [...]

By the time he reached the 400 pages devoted to words beginning with "un", he said he was "near catatonic, bored out of my mind, and so listless I can't remember why I wanted to read any of this in the first place.

"At this point, telling myself, 'You only have 351 pages of un-words to go', does not seem helpful. I don't quite feel as though I have lost my mind, but it often seems as though it is on vacation somewhere else, just east of sanity."

Link

It started as what is probably the most embarrassing moment of their lives, but something good came out of it. When a flight attendant approached Jan Coupe and her husband, she thought that the stewardess was going to check on their seatbelt. Instead, she told them that they were too heavy for the plane to take off!

That spurred the couple to go on a diet - between them, they have since lost 172 lb (78 kg):

Following the plane ordeal, and also to help with her MS, Mrs Coupe joined a Slimming World club. She persuaded her husband to attend and in the first week Mrs Coupe lost 8lb and Mr Coupe lost 9lb.

Instead of takeaways at night, the couple had pasta, vegetable curries or steak salads.

Now Mrs Coupe has lost 6st 5lb and her 54-year-old husband 5st 13lb. Mrs Coupe, who has also dropped six dress sizes to a 14, said: 'I don't feel embarrassed about getting on a plane anymore - we all feel so great we could fly around the world now without a hitch.'

Link

Good grief! Bill Teer lost something from his front yard. Something large. Very, very large: his prized 450 lb. pumpkin!

Teer thinks a group of three teenagers drove up on Halsey Road and managed to roll the pumpkin into the back of their pickup truck. The reward is now up to $200.

"I think they absolutely planned it," said neighbor Don Simons. Simons pitched in half the reward money. "We hope we catch these people," he said. "There was a prior attack on the pumpkin a year or two ago. Somebody jumped out with a hammer and punched some holes in one of them."

Meanwhile, police are baffled. "Who knows what they want with it or what they did with it," Simons said.

Maybe it's for a really, really big pumpkin pie! http://abclocal.go.com/wjrt/story?section=news/local&id=6428242

The 2008 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded last night, and Steve Nadis of the science journal Nature was there to blog about it. Here's his report on some of the most dubious achievements in science:

7:55 p.m. At last, the first 2008 Ig Nobel Prize is handed out, recognizing the field of nutrition. The award goes to a pair of researchers who showed that manipulating the sound made by eating Pringles crisps can fool people into thinking a stale crisp is perfectly fresh.

8:21 p.m. Dan Ariely of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, accepts the Medicine Prize for research showing that expensive fake medicine works better than cheap fake medicine. Which makes a lot of sense, in a warped way. Twelve years ago, Ariely vowed "to be on this stage". Now that he's reached "this peak", he says, he's not sure where to go next — thereby summing up the dilemma of many an Ig Nobel prizewinner.

8:30 p.m. Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, tells aspiring young male scientists exactly what they've always wanted to hear: "Research scientists can learn a lot from lap dancers." Jordan knows what he's talking about, as the co-author of a paper exploring how a lap dancer's ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings — work deemed good enough to earn him a share of this year's Economics Prize. One of his co-authors, Geoffrey Miller, dashes the hopes of some enthusiasts by saying he's not taking on any more research assistants in his lab.

Other winners include the findings that Coke explodes sperms, dog fleas jump farther than cat fleas, and the mathematical proof that hair or a ball of string will inevitably tangle itself in knots.

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081003/full/news.2008.1150.html | Ig Nobels official website