Joanne Smith bought an abandoned house in Saginaw, Michigan, on eBay. Her winning bid? $1.75!
"I am going to try and sell it," she told the newspaper. "I don't have any plans to move to Saginaw."
Smith said she hasn't seen the property or visited Saginaw, which has been hard-hit by economic troubles in recent years.
There's a notice on the door of the home saying a foreclosure hearing is pending, the newspaper said. She must pay about $850 in back taxes and yard cleanup costs.
Fat Man Defies the Laws of Physics
UNBELIEVABLE! Millenia of the laws of physics tossed out the window
as this fat man accomplished what should be impossible ...
Racer Can't Defy the Call of Nature
The laws of physics may be broken, but not the call of nature. See
what Valentino Rossi had to do during a motorcycle race ...
Awesome Save by ... Wait a Minute! Who??
In the 2001 Dutch Cup, soccer team De Treffers was playing Nijmegen
Eendracht Combinatie when something very unusual happened:
An assistant (not a player) for De Treffers named Jan Maas decided
to um, play a little defense and prevented a goal against his team.
His expression (what? what did I do?) later on was priceless! Link
The Woman Whisperer
Picture this: a man was enjoying his beer in a bar when his lady
came up to him and said that it was time to go home.
What would happen if the man tried to stay a little while longer
... and what happened when a mysterious "woman whisperer"
walked in the door?
I know that we have a lot of regular daily readers here on the blog, but I've always wondered how many of you actually have read all of Neatorama. You know, click on the "Next Page" link on the end of the page until you've reached the blog's very first post.
It's a daunting task - we have over 16,370 posts as of the time I wrote this entry. At Neatorama's long page of 30 posts, that's nearly 550 pages full of goodness!
Well, it turned out that at least one of you did. Here's an email sent to us by Neatorama reader Mitch Wilson of Hungry Hollow Art (That's Mitch and the missus on there yonder photo):
My name is mitch and stumbled upon your site by accident while reading a story on my yahoo home page, I think it was about hoaxes. Anyhoo, I found your archives on the web and worked my way through all 546 pages. It has taken me a little over 2 months in my spare time to complete, sometimes as much as five or six hours in a sitting. A very addicting site indeed! I am now registered and get updates when you post them, just to see what you dig up next. An awesome site that my two sons and myself have really enjoyed, well except for my sore backside from hours of scanning hypnotizing post in my chair.
Thanks for letting us know and sorry about the backside, Mitch!
PS. What should we call such a schlep anyways? Neatoramaddiction? NeatoramAtoZ?
Have you always wanted to star in your own bodice-ripper romance novel?
Now you can: simply enter some details like heroine and hero's names and characteristics (like eye color, hair color, etc) at Romance By You, pay your 40 bucks and voilà - your very own romance novel!
For example, here's Pirates of Desire:
Our heroine is a stunning aristocrat who yearns to be a swashbuckling pirate buccaneer. Until, that is, she and her best friend find themselves captured by our hero, a scoundrel and handsome pirate rogue, with a price on his head.
Our leading lady becomes his willing prisoner of passion... or is it the lure of the sea that holds her heart captive?
My wife actually found this website while looking for children's book that can be personalized - Link, Thanks sweetpea!
Many kids throw a fit or temper tantrum when they're upset, but this one went over the line. Waaaay over:
A 7-year-old boy broke into a popular Outback zoo, fed a string of animals to the resident crocodile and bashed several lizards to death with a rock, the zoo's director said Friday.
The 30-minute rampage, caught on the zoo's security camera, happened early Wednesday after the boy jumped a security fence at the Alice Springs Reptile Center in central Australia, said zoo director Rex Neindorf.
The child then went on a killing spree, bashing three lizards to death with a rock, including the zoo's beloved, 20-year-old goanna, which he then fed to "Terry," an 11-foot, 440-pound saltwater crocodile, said Neindorf.
The boy also fed several live animals to Terry by throwing them over the two fences surrounding the crocodile's enclosure, at one point climbing over the outer fence to get closer to the giant reptile.
In the footage, the boy's face remains largely blank, Neindorf said, adding: "It was like he was playing a game."
That is one angry kid who needs professional help, pronto: http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/10/03/australia.zoo.carnage.ap/index.html - Thanks Tiffany!
Chef Ljubomir Erovic of Serbia has published the world's first cookbook on cooking with balls.
No, he didn't mean that figuratively (like how to cook boldly or anything like that). He meant cooking testicles!
The Testicle Cookbook - Cooking With Balls includes author Ljubomir Erovic's favourite dishes, like testicle pizza and battered testicles.
The e-book, available for download, comes with handy video guides showing the Serb peeling the skin off testicles and slicing them up into bite-size chunks.
The ingredients for his testicle pizza recipe include cheese, onion, pepper, bacon and bull's testicles. "It's Italian pizza with Serbian balls", explains Erovic. The book also contains more cordon bleu recipes, such as calf testicles in wine and testicles with bourgignon sauce.
"The tastiest testicles in my opinion probably come from bulls, stallions or ostriches, although other people have their own favourites," he said. "All testicles can be eaten - except human, of course."
Reviving an ancient organism is a story worthy of a science fiction epic. But in this case, forget Jurassic Park. Instead, think Jurassic Brewery.
Here's the story of California Polytechnic State University scientist Raul Cano who extracted yeast that has laid dormant for 45 million years, trapped inside a Lebanese weevil covered in ancient Burmese amber:
A decade ago Raul Cano, now a scientist at the California Polytechnic State University, drilled a tiny hole into the amber and extracted more than 2,000 different kinds of microscopic creatures.
Activating the ancient yeast, Cano now brews barrels (not bottles) of pale ale and German wheat beer through the Fossil Fuels Brewing Company.
So, how does the beer taste? Suprisingly good:
The beer has received good reviews at the Russian River Beer Festival and from other reviewers. The Oakland Tribune beer critic, William Brand, says the beer has "a wierd spiciness at the finish," and The Washington Post said the beer was "smooth and spicy."
Part of that taste comes from the yeast's unique metabolism. "The ancient yeast is restricted to a narrow band of carbohydrates, unlike more modern yeasts, which can consume just about any kind of sugar," said Cano.
What should people who lost their cushy jobs on Wall Street do? According to this one guy who's been through it before, the answer is pretty simple: become a monk!
Hristo Mishkov had a successful career as a broker on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York until he decided to give it all up to return to his native Bulgaria. His radical change of circumstances may start to look appealing to the tens of thousands of finance sector employees who face the bleak prospect of losing their jobs.
Exchanging tailored suits and expensive shoes for a cassock and sandals, Brother Nikanor, as he is now known, believes Wall Street and the City deserve all they get as the credit crunch bites deeper and the global financial system goes into meltdown. [...]
His colleagues were stunned when he decided to become a monk, but he had made up his mind to seek spiritual well-being rather than material wealth.
"Everybody can be a good broker but this does not bring much benefit for the world," he said.
"We always search for happiness in the outside world, in material things, which makes us constantly unsatisfied, angry with ourselves and the world."
National Geographic has a neat article about how the Right Whale (Eubalaena glacialis), the "good, or true, whale of ice" is making a comeback. Ironically, the Right Whale's name was given by whalers who thought that their habit of swimming slowly in the shallow coastal waters make them the "right" whales to kill!
"Omigod. That one right there is the fattest young whale I have ever seen." (When judging the condition of northern rights, the scientists pay special attention to the area just behind the blowhole, where the chubbier animals develop a bulge of blubber. Its size has proved to be an accurate predictor of survival.) "We don't even have a category for a whale with a fat roll that big."
Note: Glynnis McPhee interviewed National Geographic photographer Brian Skerry about his adventure with the Right Whale:
Q: It must have been pretty nerve-racking having such a large animal swim up to you.
A: It was amazing. I mean, I have to tell you there were days when I was at the bottom at 70 feet, and here comes this bus swimming down. I’m standing on the bottom, and as it comes down, I get on my knees, lean over backwards—my scuba tank is now digging into the sand. And of course their eyes are on the side of their heads, so it had to turn and look at me. It came within inches. Here’s this softball-size whale eye looking at me. But then it stops—stops on a dime. It’s just hovering there, and literally one flick of its tail, and it would have crushed me like a bug. But it doesn’t. It was just highly curious. (Source)
The whole thing reminds me of Chris Moore's book "Fluke: or I know Why the Winged Whale Sings" - I'm half waiting for the whale to ask for a pastrami on rye with mustard!
The marriage (or relationship, in this case) may be over, but the custody battle has just begun. Kids? Nope ... pets!
Who gets the dog, cat, horse or boa constrictor when the relationship ends?
That question has sparked some human catfights; pet custody disputes in divorce are a growing area of the law. In a 2006 survey of 1,600 members of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, a quarter said they had noticed an anecdotal uptick in pet-custody cases in the past five years.
You don't have to be married to get mired in a pet tug-of-war. Adam Karp, an animal rights lawyer in Bellingham, Washington, says most of the calls he fields are from singles in their 20s and 30s.
Even among the unmarried set, these battles can carry high stakes and high drama. Take, for instance, a Washington state case in 2004, when Karp represented Ashley Wilson, the music director of a Seattle rock station and the owner of a boxer named Marley.
When Wilson, who was in her mid-20s, broke up with her live-in boyfriend, Todd Templeton, the couple agreed on a joint-custody arrangement for the dog. Everything was fine until Wilson met someone else. Templeton "accused her of destroying the family and retaliated by hiding Marley," Karp says.
The case went to court and, although Wilson and Templeton were technically co-owners, the judge awarded custody to Wilson.
We covered the shadowy game of "squirt-gun assassin" before on Neatorama, but this news is rather disturbing: the game is blamed for car crashes as players try really hard to kill each other!
"They keep knocking people out and the last man standing wins the game," she said. "They were playing Assassin, it got really serious. There were squirt guns and a truck drove into someone's house and they ended up in the hospital."
Wethersfield Police Chief James Cetran said that in all, three crashes have been associated with the game. He said his department has responded to half-a-dozen calls this week because of Assasin, and in one case a teen was attempting to get away from his water gun attacker.
"They cut in front of a poor unsuspecting motorist and two people were taken to the hospital, including a student. At least one of those accidents they drove in front of a poor unsuspecting woman and two people were taken to the hospital, including the woman," he said.
Scientists studying decades-old tissue samples from African hospital samples have found a preserved specimen of HIV that let them estimate when the virus first evolved:
Using a technique called molecular clock analysis, they were able to plot the two viral sequences' evolutionary path back in time to determine when they diverged.
They concluded the strains evolved from a common ancestor that emerged in Africa near the beginning of the twentieth century around 80 years before the disease appeared in western populations.
