Photo: Ian Nichols
A team of National Geographic photographers went to the Bioko Island in Equitorial Guinea for two weeks to record the island's diverse (and threatened) wildlife. Along the way, they encountered this friendly chameleon!
Here's a neat photo gallery of the flora and fauna: Link - Thanks Marilyn Terrell!
The New York Times has a very interesting article by Mattathias Schwartz about Internet trolls: what they've done and what made 'em tick:
“Lulz” is how trolls keep score. A corruption of “LOL” or “laugh out loud,” “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium. “Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh,” said one ex-troll who, like many people I contacted, refused to disclose his legal identity.
Another troll explained the lulz as a quasi-thermodynamic exchange between the sensitive and the cruel: “You look for someone who is full of it, a real blowhard. Then you exploit their insecurities to get an insane amount of drama, laughs and lulz. Rules would be simple: 1. Do whatever it takes to get lulz. 2. Make sure the lulz is widely distributed. This will allow for more lulz to be made. 3. The game is never over until all the lulz have been had.”
In life, there's always been mean people and the Web is no exception: Link - via Metafilter | Weev's response in LiveJournal
Photo: Jason Fortuny (of the Lori Drew "Megan Had It Coming" hoax fame), by Robbie Cooper for The New York Times
Writers agree that pens are mightier than swords. And apparently, tyrants and despots agree that jails are mightier than pens. The following are a few of the writers, poets, and playwrights who ended up behind bars just when their writing started to get interesting. 1. OvidIn 8 BCE the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, better known to us as Ovid, was banished from Rome by the emperor Augustus. Why? Tradition says the cause was the immorality of his verses. That might be, since Ovid was a very accomplished erotic poet - although his erotic poems are seldom if ever pornographic. But Augustus was a bit of a prude, and (alas for Ovid) the most powerful person in the world. He also had been a friend and supporter of Ovid's, in the days when Ovid was writing the Metamorphoses and other works based on myth and more "moral" stuff. So, this is the story not just of a political punishment but also of the breakdown of a friendship. In fact, we're not even sure why he was banished, but banished Ovid was - to the town of Tomi on the Black Sea. Ovid desperately tried to change his ways, tried to produce poetry that was less, er, racy, but in fact, he never saw Rome again. 2. John Milton (1608-1674)It's hard to imagine that the author of Paradise Lost was ever anything but saintly and studious. But in fact, he had a tumultuous life. Milton was a convinced, aggressive Puritan. And the Puritans weren't exactly fond of the Church of England or the king. With Milton as one of their main firebrands in print, they fomented a revolution that led to the beheading of Charles I in 1649. When the Puritans took power, Milton was appointed Latin secretary to the ruling Council of State. But the rule of the Puritans lasted a scant decade. When their government collapsed in 1659, so did Milton's fortunes. He was imprisoned between October and December 1660, and his works burned in public bonfires. After his release, he lived under modified house arrest for the rest of his life. What to do? He kept himself occupied by penning Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671). 3. The Marquis de Sade (1740 - 1814)How great would it be to have sadism named after you? Of course, you'd have to go certain lengths, as this fellow did. His family married him off to a woman for the money, and he immediately began to busy himself (quite publicly) with prostitutes and with a sister-in-law. His mother-in-law didn't like that, and she had him imprisoned. So he spent 14 years in jail, including being condemned to death in the town of Aix for his sexual practices. yet somehow he got out of that one. Then he was again imprisoned in 1777, and again for six years at the Bastille in Paris in 1784. Imprisonment gave him lots of time to keep churning out the vigorous pornography that made him famous. In fact, the marquis spent his last 12 years in the insane asylum at Charenton, where he wrote and directed plays starring the staff and inmates. 4. Václav Havel (1936 - )This brave poet and playwright was jailed repeated in the 1970s for works critical of the communist government in then-Czechoslovakia. With civil unrest rising, he was jailed in February 1989 but kept turning out influential plays, poems, and essays, and even winning literary awards. Set free in May, he helped stoke a peaceful resistance movement known as the Velvet Revolution. Havel became the focal point of a largely peaceful revolution, where large crowds of nonviolent demonstrators showed their disapproval of the ruling communists. Havel addressed crowds that sometimes numbered almost a million. By the end of the year, the communist government was out and Havel had been elected president. He served as president of Czechoslovakia - and later, when the country split in to, of the Czech Republic - for 13 years, retiring in 2003. The tally? Poetry 1, communism 0! 5. Salman Rushdie (1947 - )A lot of people think that literature is just, well, a particularly brainy sort of fun, not dangerous at all. But woe to those who step out of line. In 1989 Indian novelist Salman Rushdie published a novel titled The Satanic Verses. On October 14, 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, theocratic ruler of Iran, published a hukm against Rushdie for his novel because some parts were considered blasphemous against certain tenets of Islam. The text of the hukm was pretty serious: "I call on all zealous Muslims to execute [Rushdie and all those involved in publishing the book] quickly, wherever they may be found, so that no one else will dare to insult the Muslim sanctities." Rushdie was forced to go into hiding for several years, but he continued to publish. The bounty on his head was raised to more than $5 million. With the death of Khomeini and comparative relaxation of Iranian politics, however, Rushdie's begun to make public appearances again. 6. María Elena Cruz Varela (1953 - )A Cuban poet, Varela was self-taught, a true flower of the countryside. She won Cuba's National Award for Poetry in 1989. In May 1991, however, she and nine other writers wrote a letter to Fidel Castro, calling for greater openness in Cuba, direct elections, and the release of political prisoners. State-run newspapers attacked these writers as agents of the CIA. Then a state security brigade broke into her apartment, where she lived with her husband, daughter, and son. She was dragged by her hair into the street and made to eat some of her published work. Then she was thrown in jail, beaten, and starved. She was released in 1994 and went into exile in Puerto Rico. (Photo: Liberal International) |
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From mental_floss' book Condensed Knowledge: A deliciously Irreverent Guide to Feeling Smart Again, published in Neatorama with permission. Original article written by John Timpane. Be sure to visit mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog! |
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It's Friday and so it's time for our weekly Bizarro feature - for those who are going to college soon, congrats! (And to their parents, our sympathies). And yes, it should've been Roma, but why be picky?
For more Bizarro, check out Dan Piraro's website and blog.
Previously on Neatorama: Latin You Should Know
Gail posted about whale flatulence before on Neatorama, and there's just no way I can top that bubble. So here's something else: a Beluga whale blowing bubbles!
Link - thanks Zella Panossian!A beluga whale blows bubbles at an aquarium in Japan to the delight of visitors who have come by the thousands to view the spectacle.
The whale is one of three that learned the trick from scuba divers, who give the whales breaths from regulators to enable the whales to blow the bubbles.
(Photo: Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty Images)
To illustrate just how much automated translators still have to go, Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped used Google and Babelfish to translate Garfield from English to Chinese and then back to English. The results are fantastically non-sensical, and in some cases, probably funnier than what Jim Davis originally drew!
The Mona Leia by Jim Hance
Jim Hance of Strangely Drawn wrote to us about his pop-culture and parody art (a lot of Star Wars, Tarantino, and other movie-inspired paintings). This one above, titled the Mona Leia, is currently for sale for $1225.
http://www.strangelydrawn.com/blog/ - thanks Jim!
MyNeighbourhood is a Google Map-styled website that identify assaults, muggings, and burglaries in towns and villages in England and Wales.
The UK Home Office said that the website will give citizens the details of every crime in every quarters, while some are concerned that neighborhoods would be stigmatized and victims' rights to privacy would be breached:
In West Yorkshire, one of the leading forces in the scheme, categories include anti-social behaviour and "youth nuisance" - such as street drinking, skateboarding, shouting & swearing, letting off fireworks, climbing on buildings, false 999 calls, graffiti and dropping litter.
Offences are identified using dots on maps.
In the West Midlands, householders can enter their postcodes and zoom into the map to a street level, where the different crime types would be represented in coloured zones, showing levels of monthly crime and how much they have increased in the past 12 months.
Links: MyNeighborhood website | Telegraph Article - Thanks daveroy!
Photo: Kerry-Ann Lecky Hepburn
This amazing photo of the Milky Way over Binbrook, Ontario, Canada, was taken by Kerry-Ann Lecky Hepburn of Weather and Sky Photography:
I was really lucky that the the water was beautiful and still enough so that the stars casted a nice reflection in the water. In this shot you can also see Jupiter, various nebulas in the MilkyWay, Rho Ophiuchus and the light dome from a distant town.
A little photoshoppery is involved, but the photo is outright gorgeous: http://www.weatherandsky.com/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=1720&g2_enterAlbum=0 (Don't forget to check out the rest of her work!) - via APOD
Yay! It's time for our collaboration with the What is it? blog. Can you guess what this gruesome tool is used for?
Place your guess in the comment section - No prize (that's next week!) you're playing for fame and glory today.
For bigger picture, check out What is it? blog.
Update 8/1/08 - it's a muskrat den spear! No one got it exactly right, but I think LizPaul is the closest first guess.Jill Harness of Rue the Day blog went to Comic Con in San Diego last weekend (I'm so jealous! Maybe next year ...), and took lots and lots of photos of people in costumes. This brave guy above even showed up in stilts! (Do you know what he's supposed to be?)
Photo: The Hep [Flickr]
The Namibians are dead serious against you peeing on the quayside at Walvis Bay ... Thanks Karan!
Pic: Gladiator (of course), from 4th "B"
Johnny Wright of our pal YesButNoButYes blog suggests that some movies should really be made into musicals. He's given a lot of thought about it, and has written a post about Ten Films That Should Be Broadway Musicals (including potential songs for each of them). For example:
10. Gladiator - I think the song Are You Not Entertained? could be a potential showstopper. There should be a page taken out of the Lion King's book with the way they have dancers as animals. That way, when Clay Aiken as Maximus is in the arena, he can battle the dancing tigers and bears and no actual tigers and bears will be hurt. I look forward to the ballad, On My Signal, Unleash Hell.
Other potential songs:
Busy Little Bee
I Like The Blood
I Can't Wait For the Afterlife!
Link - Thanks Johnny!
Photo: bixwastaken [Flickr]
Neatorama reader Chris Marshall aka Bix got married on July 12th (Congrats, Bix!) and got this awesome re-creation of an old school NES controller as a groom's cake.
The cake was made by Anika Kline from "Cakes by Anita" and the photo was taken by Maria from IQFoto.
Thanks Bix!
Scienceray has a pretty neat article comparing the "ugly duckling" caterpillar that morphed into beautiful butterflies. These photos above are of the Common Nawab. The caterpillar stage is freakishly fascinating!
Link - thanks Jon Jason!
Previously on Neatorama: World's Weirdest Moths
