Sean A. Jennings wanted to get rid of his wife, but didn't want to go through all the hassles of divorce (plus that pesky alimony thing). So he devised a clever plan to kill her. Here's the bizarre story of the haunted house attempted murder:

On the 7th of October, 2007, Sean Jennings started building a haunted house in the garage for his two kids to enjoy on Halloween.

Sean told his wife, who uses a wheelchair on a regular basis, that he needed her to take a few steps up on a ladder and measure a rope he was planning to use to hang a plastic skeleton from a beam in the garage ceiling. Of course he couldn’t just let her walk into the garage, he needed her to go in blindfolded.

He said that it was going to be a surprise. [...]

She was a few steps up on the ladder, with the blindfold still on when Sean Jennings put handcuffs on her and slipped a noose around her neck.

People You'll See in Hell has the story: Link - via mentalfloss

Paul Preece's Desktop Tower Defense is an insanely addictive Flash game that inspired tons of clones (which is kind of funny, since DTD itself was a "remake" of StarCraft's Turret Defense).

Here's one funny clone: Bloons Tower Defense, the perfect combo of Bloons and DTD where you get to pop baloons along a maze. http://www.ninjakiwi.com/templates/gameajax.php?name=Bloons%20Tower%20Defense%203&game=http://www.ninjakiwi.com/images/stories/Games/bloonstd3.swf - via Waxy

Previously on Neatorama: Desktop Tower Defense and Desktop Tower Defense Strategies

Wide receiver Chad Johnson of the Cincinnati Bengals wanted to put his nickname Ocho Cinco (his jersey number "eight five" in Spanish) on the back of his uniform, but strict NFL rules only allow for real surnames.

So what did Chad do? He got his name legally changed to Chad Ocho Cinco! So the NFL now had no choice but to let him do it ... Link

Here's the best desktop organizer I've seen in years: the Desktop Butt Station:

It's a desktop organizer that looks like a fellow sitting on the john. Besides the spaces to hold pens and Post-it Notes, the figure holds adhesive tape in his hands as if it were a roll of toilet paper.

As a special touch, the toilet itself can hold paper clips. The colorful guy has a magnet in his butt so the paper clips stick to it when you lift him up!

http://www.stupid.com/fun/BUTT.html - via Presurfer

A friend of Jeanette Ordas sent her this 1970s ad made for CBC Radio. My how times have changed! http://www.canadiandesignresource.ca/officialgallery/?p=4012 - via Nag on the Lake

Ever had to hunt around for the keyboard combination for special characters like ½, ± or ©? Well, you won't have to with this nifty website.

Here's CopyPasteCharacter by Konst & Teknik and Martin Ström (hey, I used it just now to type his last name!): Link - via Quipsologies

If you're an Obama supporter, you can now put your skin where your mouth is: an Oklahoma tattoo artist is giving away free tattoos of the presidential hopeful!

Talk about a stinging endorsement! A tattoo shop in Moore, Oklahoma is giving Barack Obama tattoos for free.

"I don't have any extra money to donate to the cause," said Phillip Calfy, tattoo shop owner. "I'm a tattoo artist and a lot of people that are into the tattoo thing like free tattoos."

Link (with video clip) - Thanks Shana Chapman!

Playas beware: scientists have now isolated the gene for commitment and monogamy. And worse: they can transmit the gene through genetic engineering (at least in voles). Your roamin' days are numbered:

Scientists studying voles (mouse-like rodents) discovered that transferring a single gene, the vasopressin receptor, from the monogamous prairie vole into the brain's reward centre of a promiscuous meadow vole, would cause that meadow vole become monogamous.

Meanwhile, Swedish scientists have studied more than 500 twins and their spouses/domestic partners and have come to find that the vasopressin gene seems to have a similar effect on humans. “The researchers found that men with a particular variant of the AVPR1A gene (that codes for vasopressin in humans) scored lower on the bonding questions and were less likely to be married compared to men who did not have the variant…Also, men with two copies of the gene variant were twice as likely to report having had a relationship crisis with their marital spouse or partner in the last 12 months as men without the variant.”

Link - Thanks Dawn Govender!

Left to their own devices, zucchinis tend to grow and grow and grow ... Sometimes, even veteran gardeners like Apollonia Castitlione of Queens, New York, get shocked at how big they can grow:

Castitlione, 48, said she noticed the giant fruit was growing longer than usual last month when it suddenly shot up a couple of inches in as many days.

She then went on vacation to Boston for the weekend and returned to find it had shot up another 1.5 inches.

At last count, the zucchini was just over 6 feet - nearly 2 feet shy of the world-record 7-foot, 10-inch zucchini grown in India three years ago.

Link - Thanks Ros!

Matthew Moore wrote a really neat article for the Telegraph on 20 of the most viral Photoshopped photos on the Net. Like this famous photo of a shark lunging at a helicopter:

This striking fake was created by merging two separate images - a US Air Force helicopter on a training exercise in San Francisco, and a great white shark leaping out of the water off the cost of South Africa.

The hoax emerged in 2001, and was later circulated via email with a caption claiming it showed a shark attacking British Navy crew in South Africa, despite the fact that the Golden Gate Bridge is visible in the background.

See if you remember 'em all: Link - Thanks Andrew!

Photo: rubykhan [Flickr]

Inspired by Craig Robinson's minipop drawings, Ruby Khan of Pigeons Playing Roller Derby blog made her very own version ... in pixel art cross stich!

It contains 45 different figures; 99 individual people and one happy little tree accompanying Bob Ross. It took me about three months to finish, spread out over three years. There are a ton of tiny goofs, although the worst/funniest one is having made Andre the Giant (7' 4") roughly the same height as everyone in The Clash (normal sized people) next to him.

Link | See if you can identify 'em all: Flickr link with notes - via Craftzine, thanks Shana Chapman!

Japanese salarymen, the overworked and hard-drinking corporate warriors, are facing a new danger as they near retirement: divorce.

A change in Japanese law this year allows a wife who is filing for divorce to claim as much as half her husband's company pension. When the new law went into effect in April, divorce filings across Japan spiked 6.1 percent. Many more split-ups are in the pipeline, marriage counselors predict. They say wives -- hearts gone cold after decades of marital neglect -- are using calculators to ponder pension tables, the new law and the big D.

Skittishly aware of the trouble they're in, 18 salarymen, many of them nearing retirement, gathered at a restaurant here recently for beer, boiled pork and marital triage.

The evening began with a defiantly defeatist toast. Husbands reminded themselves of what their organization -- the improbably named National Chauvinistic Husbands Association -- preaches as a sound strategy for arguing with one's wife.

"I can't win. I won't win. I don't want to win," they bellowed in unison, before tippling from tall schooners of draft beer.

So, what does an old salaryman got to do to save the marriage? Some of them are trying to be nice to their old ladies:

When his wife told him eight years ago that she was "99 percent" certain she was going to dump him, Amano said, the only things he then knew how to do in the kitchen were to fry eggs and pour boiled water over noodles.

Since then, in addition to learning how to listen and talk to a wife he had ignored for two decades, Amano said, he has learned how to take out the trash, clean the house and cook.

Link (Really, the organization is named the National Chauvinistic Husbands Association)

(Photo: hiromy [Flickr])

In 1899, economist Thorstein Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class, where he referred to the rich, ruling class as lazy people who do leisurely work if at all.

Fast forward a hundred years or so, and the opposite is now true: rich people work longer hours than poor people do!

Here's an op-ed piece by economist Dalton Conley for The New York Times:

Perhaps for the first time since we’ve kept track of such things, higher-income folks work more hours than lower-wage earners do. Since 1980, the number of men in the bottom fifth of the income ladder who work long hours (over 49 hours per week) has dropped by half, according to a study by the economists Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano. But among the top fifth of earners, long weeks have increased by 80 percent.

This is a stunning moment in economic history: At one time we worked hard so that someday we (or our children) wouldn’t have to. Today, the more we earn, the more we work, since the opportunity cost of not working is all the greater (and since the higher we go, the more relatively deprived we feel).

In other words, when we get a raise, instead of using that hard-won money to buy “the good life,” we feel even more pressure to work since the shadow costs of not working are all the greater.

Link - via kottke

Now for something completely different: here's Flying Pizza Kitty, a blog solely made of 8-bit animated gifs by Ben Ross. Link - via Laughing Squid

We have so many typos on Neatorama that I've decided to call 'em features rather than errors. But as far as I can tell, we haven't made anyone physically ill with our typos.

Here's a story of a typo that actually sent people to the hospital:

On Thursday, a popular Swedish food magazine recalled 10,000 store copies after a mistake in one of its cake recipes left four people sick, dizzy and in pain.

"There was a mistake in a recipe for apple cake. Instead of calling for two pinches of nutmeg it said 20 nutmeg nuts were needed," Matmagasinet's chief editor Ulla Cocke told Agence France-Presse.

Link - via Freakonomics