Alex Santoso's Blog Posts
58-year-old Miss Ruth is tailor to one of the world's most hateful (and hated) group, the Ku Klux Klan:
Coming from five generations of Ku Klux Klan members, 58-year-old "Ms. Ruth" sews hoods and robes for Klan members seven days a week, blessing each one when it's done. A red satin outfit for an Exalted Cyclops, the head of a local chapter, costs about $140.
I didn't realize there are so many steps in making a KKK robe! I thought it was simply:
1. Take bedsheet
2. Cut eyeholes
3. ???
4. Profit!
Here's a photo essay by Anthony Karen for Mother Jones: Link - via Liberal Avenger
Handsome Dan is the bulldog mascot of Yale's football team.
Princeton had a tiger as a mascot and Harvard had the "Orange Man," a stand-in for Puritan John Harvard. So, in 1889, Yale undergraduate student Andrew Graves bought a bulldog and named him "Handsome Dan".
This is what the Hartford Courant had to say about it:
"In personal appearance, he seemed like a cross between an alligator and a horned frog, and he was called handsome by the metaphysicians under the law of compensation. The title came to him, he never sought it. He was always taken to games on a leash, and the Harvard football team for years owed its continued existence to the fact that the rope held." (Source)
I'm loving these ads for Evil Dead: The Musical, which use iconic images from other famous musicals ... but with a zombie twist! The tagline "It's like the musicals you love, only evil" is golden!
Via Ads of the World
In video games, final bosses get all the glory. I mean you probably remember Bowser and Mother Brain ... but what about those mini bosses, "the assistant managers of evil"?
Crave Online has a neat run down of 10 of the Most Memorable NES Minibosses. Take, for example, Abobo from Double Dragon:
Abobo may just be the most unfortunate looking thug to ever appear in a fighting game to this day. With a head like a giant meatball, accented by a truly bitchen handlebar mustache, Abobo looks like a grotesquely muscled leather daddy in purple capris. His comical appearance won’t stop him from kicking the sh-t out of Billy and Jimmy Lee, so be sure to attack first and laugh later when confronted by Abobo.
http://www.craveonline.com/articles/gaming/04650355/top_10_most_memorable_nes_minibosses.html
You're looking at an impulse generator at the National Grid High Voltage Laboratory at the University of Manchester.
No, it's not a part of a Star Trek spaceship, but it does something pretty cool: it lets researchers study how materials react to lightning.
Ian Cotton, a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, says: "We do a lot of lightning protection work here."
Electricity is taken straight from the mains, at the UK's standard 240 volts, but a towering impulse generator then ramps it up to a massive two million volts - creating a voltage that can be used to see how lightning attaches to objects.
Link - via Blue's News
Here's the story, from a Sun-Sentinel article in 2005 ... it's just like what it said on the headline:
A man reported missing from a Florida hospital was found in North Carolina dressed like a doctor and driving a stolen ambulance with a dead deer wedged in the back, authorities said.
Leon Holliman Jr., 37, was reported missing from a River Region Human Services facility in Jacksonville last month. The North Carolina State Highway Patrol found him driving the ambulance with the deer on Sunday. ``I don't know how the man got it up in there,'' said Sgt. Robert Pearson. ``It was a six point buck.''
It wasn't known where Holliman got the deer, which had been dead for some time, Pearson said.
Only in Florida, folks: http://cms.firehouse.com/web/online/News/Missing-Man-Found-Dressed-Like-Doctor-With-Dead-Dear-In-Stolen-Ambulance/46$44999 (Photo: WFMY) - Thanks Becky!
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. . .Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. . . Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."
- Helen Keller, deafblind American author, activist and lecturer
Gabe Fidanque, owner of Wagon Wheel Liquors in Durango, Colorado, was tired of losing as much as $1000 a month to shoplifters, so he instituted his own punishment: he told those caught shoplifting to give him one of their shoes or he'll call the cops!
But that turns in itself turns out to be robbery - so the police told him to stop or risk running afoul of the law:
"I give them the choice - I say 'I'm either going to call the cops or you give me one of your shoes,'" Fidanque said Thursday, a day before he decided to abandon his plan on advice from the Durango Police Department.
He said he started looking at alternatives about two years ago because he was frustrated that people he caught shoplifting and reported to the police frequently returned to the store within hours of their arrest.
But Durango Police Department Capt. Micki Browning said Fidanque's punishment puts him in serious jeopardy by substituting a felony offense for a misdemeanor.
"I would suggest that he find a different option that doesn't involve giving up property," Browning said. She said that because Fidanque requires the offender to surrender property through intimidation, the shoe penalty is tantamount to felony robbery under state law. Shoplifting is a misdemeanor.
"What's the difference between him saying, 'give me $20 and I won't call the police' or 'give me your shoe?'" Browning asked.
The queue to enter the Hindu Temple is long, people from all over the world sometimes wait for hours to enter a shrine created by Mrs. Sushila Karia and her husband Dhirajlal.
This may not be a strange sight for a temple in India, but the shrine is located in a spare bedroom of the Karias' house in Essex, England!
It has proved so popular that for the last 29 years, the house has attracted worshippers and visitors from all over Britain and across the world - 50,000 of them at the last count, and still arriving by the coachload. On particularly busy days they might wait hours in the queue for the chance to spend ten minutes in private prayer in the 9ft by 6ft spare bedroom, used as a humble study before Mr Karia came up with his brainwave.
Seventeen gods and goddesses central to the Hindu religion are represented in statue form, strategically placed in the room. They were blessed by five priests from India in a 13-day inauguration ceremony that involved carrying the statues to the nearby beach and bathing them in the sea. The blessing is designed to bring the statues alive and make them worthy of prayer.
Thus, everything a Hindu pilgrim might want is available here - peace, prayer, friendship and happiness - and of course, Mrs Karia's tea. Since suffering a bout of pneumonia, the 67-year-old part time teacher can no longer cope with preparing food and treats for everyone but guests are welcome to bring their own.
The couple created the temple because none was available locally when they moved in the 1970s from North London, where they ran a newsagents. In those days Mr Karia, an electronics engineer from Uganda, and his wife, from India, had to make a 90-mile round trip to the capital to the nearest temple. So instead, they made their own.
Paul Harris of the Daily Mail has the story: Link (Photo: Peter Lawson / Eastnews)
Previously on Neatorama: 10 Most Amazing Temples in the World
This is weird, but in a sad way: a man grieving over the death of his girlfriend tried to kill himself by climbing into a morgue freezer to be with her!
The 41-year-old man was discovered on Monday when workers detected an unusually high temperature in the freezer and realized the hatch was not securely fastened.
"A morgue manager opened the hatch, saw two people lying inside, felt scared enough to yell out and then even cried," the Liberty Times reported. "She didn't stabilize for a long time."
Link (Photo: Stringer/Reuters)
Today's Neatorama and Hobotopia's Caption Monkey has a little twist: your task is to do your best to provide the funniest commentary on the recent toilet problem at the International Space Station.
But first, the story. Here's what John Schwartz of The New York Times wrote:
Four words you don’t want to hear in space:
“The toilet is broken.”
The crew aboard the International Space Station is working on a problem with the system for collecting solid and liquid waste, which is a trickier proposition without gravity than it is on the Earth. Space toilets use jets of fan-propelled air to guide waste into the proper container.
A NASA status report noted that last week, while using the toilet system in the Russian-built service module, “the crew heard a loud noise and the fan stopped working.” The solid waste collector is functioning properly, but the system for collecting liquid waste was not.
The crew tried replacing one device, an air/water separator, and then a filter, but nothing seemed to bring the toilet back to full operation. Russian mission control told the crew — Russian Cosmonauts Sergey Volkov and Oleg Kononenko, and Garrett Reisman, a NASA astronaut, to use the toilet on the Soyuz capsule that is attached to the station as a lifeboat. But that system has very limited capacity, and so repairing the system has become an increasingly urgent issue.
As so often happens when there’s a plumbing problem, house guests are on the way: the space shuttle Discovery is scheduled to launch on Saturday, with seven astronauts aboard. The shuttle, however, has its own toilet.
You can simply come up with a new caption for the speech bubble above (yes, that's my attempt at humor), or imagine a conversation between ISS and ground control, or whatever. Funniest one will win a free drawing by Adam "Ape Lad" Koford (a monkey drawing or any other critter ... your imagination is the limit!).
Good luck!
Update 5/29/08 - Congratulations to trestleboy, who came up with the winning caption of "No. You misheard. The ship didn't hit the fan."
Ouch! A poor bird got nailed when it flew into the path of a baseball pitch: hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
Baker extraordinaire Duff Goldman of the Food Network TV series "Ace of Cakes" turned out to be quite the Trekker. He created this excellent (though flawed - what's Scotty doing in the navigator's seat?) Star Trek cake.
Previously on Neatorama: Star Wars Cake, also by Duff Goldman
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