Today's Neatorama and Hobotopia's Caption Monkey game is special ... it comes from my own garden!

A few weeks ago, my wife Tiffany planted a zucchini plant in our backyard ... and promptly forgot about it. Today, she discovered something strange about it. It has been very hot in Santa Clarita, California, so a lot of her plants didn't make it - but this one not only lived ... it also grew a humongous zucchini!

Just how big is it? Here's the Zuc posing with our son 7-month-old son Zach:

... and our 2-year-old daughter Maddy:

So, for today's Caption Monkey game, we have two prizes: One funny caption (chosen by Adam) will win an original comic by Adam "Ape Lad" Koford from the recent archive fo the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats, and another funny caption (chosen by me) will win a free Neatorama T-shirt.

Contest rules are darn simple: place your caption in the comment section. One caption per comment, please, but you can enter as many funny ones you can think of. Saying that my kids are cute will earn you good will, but won't necessarily win you the prize, mmkay?

Good luck!

Update 8/6/08 - A little prize confusion here (sorry, only one winner and the prize is the free shirt) - the winner is TripleX, with this caption:

Our plan to destroy all vegetables by peeing in the garden backfired terribly, my young brother…

Our pal Adam "Ape Lad" Koford of Hobotopia has a neat shirt for sale at shirt.woot.com - it's titled "Death Has Keen Eyesight" and it's yours for only $10 (including shipping - how do they do that? Must be volume!)

And it's only for today, so get it quick: Link - via Boing Boing

Check out Adam's designs on our own Neatorama online shop: http://shop.neatorama.com/store.php?design-Adam-Koford-pg1-cid39.html

Photo: Neven Mrgan [Flickr]

I suspect Neven Mrgan is a genius: he's turning some of the best tweets from famous twitterers (is that a word?) into fortune cookies! (Who wouldn't want Merlin Mann's tweets after some satisfying Chinese food for lunch?) - via Super Punch

This is pretty neat: the Australian company Lightwell created a 6 m (~ 20 ft) long interactive table exploring Australia's deadliest animals.

The largest and most ambitious multimedia element in the exhibition is a six-metre long interactive table exploring Australia’s deadliest top ten. The saltwater crocodile, funnel web spider, box jelly fish, brown snake – what happens if you encounter them and what should you do to survive? Scurrying across sand or lurking under rippling waters, the table’s inhabitants respond immediately to prying visitors in a scarily life-like way.

Created using custom software running on Mac OS X, visitors can interact directly with these ‘dangerous Australians’ and enjoy an immersive and informative experience. As well as risk being bitten or attacked, visitors can use a magnifying glass tool to get a closer look, or find out more about each creature’s habitat and behaviour, or first aid treatment. Multiple users can interact with the table at any one time, making the experience all the more fun and lively.

GeekAlerts has the video clip: Link

"There is still no cure for the common birthday" - John Glenn, astronaut & U.S. Senator

There may be nothing you can do about growing old, but that doesn't mean you can't laugh about it. PM Caregiver has a neat collection of humorous bumper stickers about growing old: Link - via Miss Cellania

What if major corporations were in charge to invent the stop sign? What would a stop sign created by committee look like?

Here's a funny video clip by: Link [embedded YouTube clip]

Add this to the thing I don't understand: why do film companies pull YouTube videos of their movie trailers?

I mean, if the clip is of the movie itself, then I understand - but movie trailers are teasers to make people want to see the movie. Basically, they are ads - and isn't the more people that see it the better?

I was excited to see a post about the newest in the Terminator series: Terminator Salvation starring Christian Bale and directed by McG at our pal Always Watching blog - but the video has been pulled by YouTube (surely at the request of the makers).

Anyway, if you're interested - you can still see the trailer at Yahoo! Movies - (I just hope the movie isn't done shakycam-style ...)

Meet the Senegal birchir aka the dinosaur eel. This amazing African fish has a unique scale physiology that teach scientists how to design better body armors:

Long and skinny and of ancient heritage, the 40-centimetre-long predator has multiple layers of scales that first dissipate the energy of a strike, then protect against any penetration to the soft tissues below and finally limit any damage to the shield to the immediate area surrounding the assault. [...]

COSMOS magazine has more: Link - via Scribal Terror

Part of the fun in writing for Neatorama is all the blogs I get to visit in search for posts. In three years of editing this blog, I've looked at and bookmarked quite a bit of blogs - but call it blogging fatigue, time-crunch or whatever, I realize that I've actually been regularly visiting only a small fraction of them. And I've come to realize how much I miss discovering new gems on the Web.

So, in the spirit of renewal, I'd like to ask you to introduce you and your blog: what it is all about and why we should all visit. I promise to visit (often if your blog is good!) ... and who knows, you'll probably see your blog featured on Neatorama!

Update 7/28/08 - Wow! That's great, you guys! It'll take me a while to go visit everybody's blogs but I definitely will. Please keep 'em coming (yes, shameless plugs are all right in this post). I noticed that some comments are caught by Neatorama's spam filters (Akismet and our secondary filter) - if your comment doesn't appear in several hours, please email me and I'll manually add your blogs to the ever-growing list.

Unicycling - a sport long relegated to clowns and weirdos - have gone hardcore: a small but growing cadre of unicyclists have "ruggidized" (is that a word? It is now!) the whimsical device and created the new sport of Mountain Unicycling or Muni.

Instead of blazing down a trail at top speed, a muni rider often moves a few feet at a time, pedaling hard, rolling and hopping from rock to trail, finding the “line,” or the ideal path down the trail.

Riders will often cover the same ground repeatedly, seeking to perfect their lines.

“Muni is a sport for minimalists and problem solvers — people that don’t mind working over and over at something until they succeed,” Holm wrote. “A trail that would be boring on a bike can be totally enthralling on a muni.”

All of which makes mountain unicycling a nearly contemplative exercise.

“Mountain bikers do it for adrenaline,” Aharoni said. “This is a more focused, technical sport. The amount of concentration it takes is akin to meditation.”

David Gelles of the New York Times has more: Link - via Metafilter

Apparently, art school made Rutger de Vries of Perongeluk decorate this destroyed building with paint and graffiti: http://www.perongeluk.com/?cat=5 - via

Necktie sales may be skyrocketing in the UK, but it's a bad time for tie makers in the good ol' USA.

Many American men have stopped wearing ties, and now, even the tie guys are calling it quits. The Men's Dress Furnishing Association, the trade group for American tie manufacturers, have, um, become untied:

According to a recent Gallup Poll, the number of men who wore ties every day to work last year dropped to a record low of 6%, down from 10% in 2002. U.S. sales have plummeted to $677.7 million in the 12 months ending March 31, from their peak of $1.3 billion in 1995, according to market researcher NPD Group. Although sales are expected to get a bump around Father's Day, June 15, the future of neckties is very much in doubt.

Some members of the neckwear association sensed the trend two years ago when, at the group's annual luncheon in New York, a number of people turned up tieless. Marty Staff, chief executive of men's clothing company JA Apparel Corp., which has a big neckwear business, was one of them.

"It was deliberate," explains Mr. Staff, who says he wanted to make a statement to his colleagues. "Historically, the guy wearing the navy suit, the white shirt and the burgundy tie would be the CEO. Now he's the accountant," Mr. Staff explains.

Link - via Blogging@New York Public Library

Flickr user roxydynamite went to an estate sale in a 60's modern house and found this gorgeous wall made from ... bricks of cork! I know that you can find thin sheets of cork to make your own corkboard, but this is something else entirely ...

Link - via re-nest

In the mid 1930s, the U.S. Government launched the Federal Writers' Project to support writers during the Great Depression.

As part of a project documenting American folklores, a guy named William Zimmerman told the story about "mysterious Chinese tunnels" (or "Shanghai tunnels") beneath cities in the Pacific Northwest, where kidnapped city dwellers would be smuggled to the docks and sold into slavery in Shanghai (hence the name).

The tunnels are clearly there - so it's interesting to see how whatever their original purpose was - in this classic urban myth, it has been nefariously subverted to be a malicious one:

Zimmerman claims that "mysterious" tunnels honeycombed the ground beneath the city of Tacoma, Washington. These would soon become known as "Shanghai tunnels," because city dwellers were allegedly kidnapped via these underground routes – which always led west to the docks – only to be shipped off to Shanghai, an impossibly other world across the ocean. There, they'd be sold into slavery.

In any case, because "construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad required large numbers of railroad laborers," Zimmerman's tale begins, "many Chinese coolies" had to be smuggled into the "rapidly growing city of Tacoma." They "arrive[d] mysteriously," he says, "smuggled in on ships, and even Indian canoes, from British Columbia."

At that point:

Several opium joints were known to be operating in Tacoma. And there was no question in the minds of many people that the narcotic was smuggled in through tunnels from their dens to cleverly hidden exits near the waterfront. They were also convinced that the tunnels were dug by Chinese, either as a personal enterprise or at the behest of white men of the underworld, as no white workmen would burrow the devious mole-like passageways and keep their labors secret.

Zimmerman adds that the Chinese "were forcibly expelled from Tacoma in 1885, but ever [sic] so often the story of the Chinese tunnels bobs up whenever workmen come across them in excavation work."

BLDGBLOG has more: Link (Image via The Portland Underground FAQ)

Photo: Steven Goodwin [Flickr]

Every kid knows that if you place a ruler over the edge of a desk and flick it, it'll "twang" - and by changing the amount of the overhang, you'll change the pitch.

Steven Goodwin of Blue Dust blog turned this basic idea into a fun (and cheap!) science project you can do with your kids: make a "Rule Organ" out of a set of rulers:

We start by determining the length of each overhang. By knowing how much is needed for the lowest note, C in our case, we can calculate the others mathematically. Finding the lowest note is done in typical school kid fashion by experimenting, unless you have a keyboard, guitar, or other musical instrument and an extra pair of hands, er, to hand.

You will notice that some lengths do not produce notes at all. Very short distances just produce a click, while very long ones make no sound at all. To make a complete octave, the overhang of the lowest note will need to be twice as long as the shortest (highest note), so if the rules you're using only make sounds between 5cm and 8cm you won't get a full octave.

TIP: Hold the rule to the desk as tightly as possible to produce the best audio fidelity (read: twang) possible.

Link - via Make