Photo: Bill Eichenlaub / National Park Service

That's the o'opu hue spotted puffer (Arothron meleagris), a fiash in the Kaloko-Honokohau National Historical Park in beautiful Hawaii.

Yay! It's time for Neatorama and Hobotopia's Caption Monkey game! Funniest caption will win a free monkey (or any other critter) drawing of your choice by Adam "Ape Lad" Koford.

Contest rules are easy: place your caption in the comment section below. One caption per comment, please. You can enter as many funny ones as you can think of. Good luck!

Move over fat and obnoxious American tourists ... according to a new survey by Expedia.fr, the most obnoxious tourists from the Western world are ... the French!

... the study also describes the voyageur français as often unwilling or unable to communicate in foreign languages, and particularly disinclined to spend money when they don't have to — including those non compris tips. Overall, French travelers landed 19th out of 21 nations worldwide, far behind the first-place Japanese, considered the most polite, quiet and tidy. Following the Japanese as most-liked tourists were the Germans, British and Canadians. Americans finished in 11th place alongside the Thais.

Link - Thanks Geekazoid!

This is pretty neat: a kinetic sculpture (of steel balls on strings) at the BMW museum. Worth a look-see (it gets good at around 0:50): Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - Thanks Renata Foucre!

Officials in Musiri, a remote town in Tamil Nadu, India, came up with a novel scheme to get people to stop urinating on the street: pay them to use the public toilet!

Dozens of people are queuing up to use toilets in Musiri, a remote town in Tamil Nadu state, where authorities are succeeding in keeping street corners clean with the new scheme. [...]

The poor of Musiri, are earning upto a dollar a month and very happy to keep the street corners clean.

Link - Thanks Phil!

Photo: weegeebored [Flickr]

This sign in the streets of Lambeth, London, UK warns iPod users of giant street robbers targeting their music player!

What is it about bacon that is so awesome and why do Americans love bacon?

Sarah Hepola wrote this interesting Salon article about some possible reasons for bacon mania:

Sarah Katherine Lewis recently wrote a book called "Sex and Bacon: Why I Love Things That Are Very, Very Bad for Me." It's a series of funny, outré personal essays, with a title meant to transmit a kind of wanton lustiness. Bacon is the perfect food with which to do so. "Sex and Lamb Patties," after all, doesn't quite have the frisson.

To love bacon is to sink your teeth into life, to refuse to nibble at the side salad or sip on the seltzer with a twist of lime. "Nobody wants to be wholesome, boring Betty when they could be sexy, hot-to-trot Veronica," Sarah Katherine Lewis says. "Pour me a drink, light me a smoke, fry me up a pan of bacon, and let's get it on."

A recent Taco Bell commercial has played up this idea of bacon as an aphrodisiac. In order to lure male attention at a bar, a woman hides the new Bacon Club Chalupa in her purse. It's absurd; no one with hair that glossy would suffer the indignity of diced chicken in her handbag. But the spot has prompted at least one male viewer to suggest bacon perfume. And why not? It's probably a more seductive scent than lilacs and roses.

"Bacon is sex in a skillet," says Dan Philips of the Grateful Palate. "It's the ultimate aphrodisiac for all living things. Except pigs, of course."

Link - Thanks Judy!

We've seen examples of people putting Wiimote in unusual places (like the WiiSpray), but this is different: Ausome Candies [pdf] has put a candy dispenser into a Wiimote!

Okay, okay, it's a candy dispenser that looks like a Wiimote, but that's close enough: Link - Thanks Damon!

All those hundreds of TV channels may lead you that there's a true diversity and variety in today's television ... but you'd be wrong. A handful of large companies control what you see, hear, and read every day.

Let's take a look at who owns what on television - here are the TV channels owned by 6 of the largest companies in media, as depicted by their logos:

Hey, any publicity is good as long as they spell your name correctly, right? Well, maybe not so much with this one:

From the very funny Fail Blog - via Miss Cellania

An aboriginal man ... in Japan? The 1920s photo to the left is that of a chief of the Ainu, an indigenous people of the island of Hokkaido, whose tradition and culture was completely different from that of the Japanese.

The Ainu was virtually destroyed during the Meiji Period in an attempt to (forcibly) assimilate their people into the rest of Japan.

Scribal Terror blog has a neat synopsis about the Ainu People:

The Ainu inhabited an island called Ainu Mosir before the Japanese colonized it, changed its name to Hokkaido, and "decimated" the population. The origins of the Ainu were a subject of speculation until genetic studies determined that they were “the descendants of Japan’s ancient Jomon inhabitants, mixed with Korean genes of Yayoi colonists and of the modern Japanese.”

The New York Times reports (via Japundit )that just this year, Japan has finally recognized the rights of the indigenous Ainu. This recognition was apparently timed to coincide with Japan's hosting of an international conference of indigenous peoples on the island of Hokkaido (formerly the home of the Ainu) but it comes a little late for this rapidly disappearing culture.

Link | Photo: Old Photos of Japan

Photo: origami madness [Flickr]

Flickr user origami_madness created that awesomely simple yet brilliant "crumpled" paper origami titled "Frustration" - I wonder how many pieces of paper got tossed before just-the-right expression was successfully folded?

Link | Origami_madness' blog - via Super Punch

Photo: brantastic [Flickr]

Somewhere in Nova Scotia, in the front lawn of a nondescript house are these cutouts of characters from The Simpsons congratulating a family member's graduation. Flickr user brantastic has the story:

It turns out she'd made all of these wooden simpsons cutouts herself, from scratch, as a surprise for her son who was graduating from high school. she told us that he'd worked really hard and only took breaks to watch The Simpsons.

Link - Thanks lara!

Ah, India ... the land that brought us Bollywood also brought us this strange and disturbing video clip. Watch as a baby wrestles with a cobra (a cobra!) that either has been defanged or whose mouthseem to have been sewn shut - while adults chatter on in the background (anyone here know what they're saying?)

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

Polls Boutique is running a poll to see whether you think "poor baby" or "poor snake" (maybe a little of both!) - Thanks Eran!

Psst! Wanna send your name to the moon? NASA is setting up a website where you can enter your name, which will then be entered in a database on a microchip that will be integrated onto the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The deadline for submitting your name is July 25, 2008 - and the LRO is scheduled to launch in late 2008: Link - Thanks Kays Kadar!

Photo: huaxia.com

My, that's a lot of foot massages! Taiwan has set a new Guinness World Record for having the "most people receiving foot massage (reflexology) simultaneously": 1008 reflexologists and 1008 tourists joined in the fun.

Link - Thanks Jee!