A while ago, we posted about Yves Rossy, a former Swiss military pilot that jumps out of airplanes with a jetpack.
But this clip that is making its round on the InterWeb is so darned cool that we have to feature it again. Behold, the "Fusion Man's" latest jump:
Rossy, 48, had stepped out of the Swiss-built Pilatus Porter aircraft at 7,500 feet and unfolded the rigid eight-foot wings strapped to his back before jumping.
Passing from free fall to a gentle glide, Rossy then triggered four jet turbines and accelerated to 186 miles per hour, about 65 miles per hour faster than the typical falling skydiver. A plane that flew at some distance beside him measured his speed. [...]
Steering with his body, Rossy dived, turned and soared again, performing what appeared to be effortless loops from one side of the Rhone valley to the other. At times he rose 2,600 feet before descending again.
After one last wave to the crowd the rocket man tipped his wings, flipped onto his back and leveled out again, executing a perfect 360-degree roll.
"That was to impress the girls," he later admitted.
Link - Thanks Yinan Chen! Photo: (Anja Niedringhaus / AP) | BBC News has the video clip of the flight: Link - Thanks moronic50!
Meet Jennifer Sharpe, a 15-year-old girl scout who sold an astonishing 17,328 boxes of cookies by setting up shop on a street corner:
"Make a goal, and don't give up on it. Keep working for it, and one of these days, you'll hit it," she advised aspiring sellers.
"When I was in third grade, the top seller was 10,176. ... I turned to my mother and said, 'That's going to be me one day,' and it took me seven years," she said.
Jennifer, a fan of the Thin Mints, used a retail-inspired strategy. She set up shop in the parking lot of Cherry Hill Presbyterian Church in Dearborn. She manned that booth 3-7 p.m. Monday through Saturday. On Sundays, she sold cookies outside a local auto parts store from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Many writers seek extreme experiences, including getting drunk / high / ecstatic / wasted / buzzed. And while we're not exactly advocating altered states here, it did seem to take the edge off their writer's block.
So, who says drugs and alcohol aren't useful? For one thing, they're responsible for some of the world's greatest literature. Here are 5 classics written under the influence.
1. Collected Poetry, Li Po (701 - 762)
One of the best of the T'ang dynasty poets in seventh-century China, Li Po wrote many poems about drinking. In his poems and in many poems of the classic era of Chinese poetry, alcohol has two functions. First of all, it brings friends together to sing, to reminisce, to have great little parties at which everyone gets tight and starts having poetry contests. Well, great!
Second, it acts as a muse, a way to relax and release the poet into fantasies and meditations that are good for the creation of poetry. See? Nothing new. Artists have been saying for centuries that if you take drugs, you make better art. They've often felt that the perceptual expansion offered by drugs lets them have better, more suprising insights. Or at least they think they do!
Li Po and his pals obviously felt that wine helped you be a better poet. Of course, being continuously sozzled comes with its own problems. Legend has it that Li died when, in a drunken state, he tried to embrace the reflection of the moon in a lake and fell in.
2. "Kubla Khan," Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834)
After smoking opium, Coleridge fell asleep, and when he awoke he was on fire with images. He set to writing at a white-hot pace - until he was interrupted. When he returned to the poem an hour later, the vision was gone. He'd lost the moment. The result is one of the wildest, most puzzling poems of all time.
A lot of people like the fact that it was written under the influence: it had a period of great popularity in the 1960s. And back when it was published (1816), people took it as the quintessential Romantic poem: passionate, spontaneous, beyond conscious control. They also liked how "he had it all there - and then lost it," which is a nice little fable about how fleeting inspiration is.
3. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961)
Like many famous writers, Hemingway battled alcoholism all his life. In The Sun Also Rises, one of his best novels, almost every character drinks continually. They're trying to ignore the realities of life after World War I, trying to ignore their hangovers, and, often, just having a great party.
War has torn apart the old ways, and the new ways - ways of nation building, ways of writing, ways of love, ways of being men and women - are full of pain and uncertainty. And these people, though they're adults, in many ways are incomplete, crippled. Jake Barnes, the protagonist, has suffered a war wound greatly compromising his sexual function (how's that for a delicate way to put it?), and the wound becomes a metaphor for the incompleteness that everyone's drinking to forget.
4. Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980)
Sartre apparently was a big ingester of mescaline to get him, er, up to speed. He also took downers to let him sleep. These facts create a big question for the history of philosophy, don't they?
Now, many readers have felt that despite his fame as the inventor of existentialism and despite his importance in many fields of literature, thought, and politics, he's completely unreadable.
Being and Nothingness, is supposed to be Sartre's great investigation of the experience of the absurdity and lack of intrinsic meaning in existence. When you discover nothingness, it's like a huge turning point, and there's no turning back.
Sure wish the book was better. This thing is a twisty-turny, pompous, sloppy, contradictory mess, written in a celebratedly bad prose, whether French or English. It may be a brilliant book, but it's not a good one. Maybe, applying the Li Po principle above, Sartre should have taken more drugs.
5. Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs (1914 - 1997)
Burroughs was a Beat writer and a heroin addict. His surrealistic novel influenced poets, musicians, and other addicts for the rest of the 20th century. This may be the ultimate in underground cult novels. You'll find its influence in everything from the art of Keith Haring to the poetry of Jack Kerouac to the lyrics of Steely Dan.
One thing that's very impressive (besides the amount of drugs Burroughs reputedly took while compiling Naked Lunch) is how Burroughs uses addiction as a key metaphor for human existence. Everyone is a junkie for something - and everyone is also a narc, an agent of judgment and punishment.
It's a brilliant insight, and it emerges from the jumble of this novel like a flash of drug-induced wisdom. Now, how many films have you seen that explore this theme? Naked Lunch is often called a novel, but it's really a collection of scenes and characters held together by the aforementioned methaphor. In fact, it doesn't hold together. Its existence is more important than its actual worth as literature. But its impact, which continues today in artists, writers, and filmmakers all over the world, is, well, psychedelic.
Bonus: Writers Are the Craziest People
While living in a hotel room in Brussels, Belgium, French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867) captured a bat in a nearby graveyard, brought it back to his room, and kept it as a pet, feeding it bread and milk.
Russian playwright and fiction writer Anton Chekhov (1860 - 1904) didn't have long to live. His doctor bought a bottle of Champagne and poured Chekhov a glass. He drank it down with great appreciation and remarked: "It has been so long since I've had Champagne." Then he rolled over, and Chekhov checked out.
One of the strangest novels ever written may be Gates of Paradise by Polish writer Jerzy Andrzejewski (1909 - 1983). It is one-sentence long, unpunctuated, 40,000 words.
Speaking of strange, how about Pugna Porcorum ("Battle of the Pigs"), published by the Dominican monk Léon Plaisant (Placentius) in 1530(?). The poem extends to more than 250 verses, and every word begins with the letter P! Talk about pig Latin, Playful priest produces porky poetry!
French poet Gérard de Nerval (1808 - 1855) had a pet lobster that he took for walks, guiding it through the parks of the Palais Royal on a pale blue ribbon.
Irish novelist James Joyce (1882 - 1942) wore five wristwatches on his arm, each set to a different time.
Meet John Hammons, a 19-year-old college freshman at the University of Oklahoma. He was just elected mayor of Muskogee, a city of 38,000 in northeastern part of the state!
Hammons, who will be sworn in next week, said he plans to continue his college education but expects to transfer to a school closer to Muskogee.
"Being elected does not change my desire to continue my education," he said. "We will schedule our time in an appropriate fashion so that I can be mayor and stay in school."
In 2005, Aaron Koblin took all of the air traffic over United States data, as seen by the FAA, and visualized it in a beautiful animation. Aaron's work was originally developed as a series of experiments for the "Celestial Mechanics" project (eye candy!) by Scott HEsels and Gabriel Dunne at UCLA.
The video clip above tracks all flights over the United States over a few days in March 2005, which brings this question to my mind: "where are all those people going?" Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] | Flight Patterns website
Pablo Picasso was commissioned by the Spanish government to commemorate the Nazi Germany bombing of Guernica, Spain, during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. The result is Guernica, a black and white painting that depicts the suffering and brutality of war.
Fast forward to 2008, where Lena Gieseke turned Picasso's Guernica mural into 3-D for her degree in computer animation from the University of Georgia.
Don't miss it: http://www.lena-gieseke.com/guernica/movie.html [Flash movie]
MUTO is a new short film by Blu: it's a time-lapse "wall animation" made in Buenos Aires and Baden, guaranteed to be the best graffiti you'll see today.
Yay! Today's the day for our collaboration with What is it? Blog. Can you guess what this strange tool is used for?
Place your guess in the comment section - one guess per comment, please, but you can submit as many as you can think of. Two prizes this week, folks, a free Neatorama T-shirt of your choosing: one for the first correct guess and one for the funniest but incorrect guess.
For more clues, check out the What is it? blog. Good luck (but if you don't win, you can still get Neatorama and artist-designed shirts in our online store!)
Update 5/19/08 - the answer is:
A roller type cement jointer, also called a sidewalk groover, sidewalk creaser, or center knife; it's used to smooth the joint between two concrete surfaces.
Congratulations to CMart who got it right first, and to Mel Phistopheles for the funny but ultimately incorrect guess of butt crack creaser!
The following is reprinted from Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History AgainDid you know that the word "cubicle" used to mean sleeping quarters (actually, it still is for some people), "suit" came
from the uniforms of stable servants, and "team" used to mean beasts of burden? Here are the origin of words you hear a lot in the office ... and after you read this, get back to work!Boss
This word came from the Dutch word baas, meaning "master." But early americans didn't like using master - it was too aristocratic to survive as a general term. So they started using "baas" in the late 18th century. It caught on (against the objections of some word snobs) and eventually became "boss."
Cubicle
Dating back to the 1400s, this word stemmed from the Latin cubiculum, meaning "sleeping area" (completely apropos). It became obsolete after the 16th century, but it was revived in the 19th century as a word for "dormitory sleeping compartments." Its use as any partitioned space didn't surface until the 1920s.
Getting Fired
The phrase "fired out," meaning to throw out or eject someone from a place, was first used in 1871. When the "out" was dropped a few years later, the phrase was narrowed to mean "dismissal of an employee." There's a consensus among etymologists that both "fired" and "fired out" refer to the firing of a gun.
Learning the Ropes
Before an old-time apprentice sailor could really help out on a big ship, he had to learn which ropes had what effect on which sails. Before he did, he wasn't much use to anyone. After he "learned the ropes,"
he could finally hoist the right mast - and avoid being flogged.
Logging On
This phrase's predecessor was "logging in" (sometimes still used interchangeably). Back when mainframe computer operators used to go on shifts, they'd have to write everything they did in a paper log, beginning when they arrived. So when you log on to a computer today, you're signing in.
Memorandum
From the Latin word "to be remembered," it was originally a word written at the top of a note. But by 1542, it became the word for the note itself.
Rank and File
This phrase that refers to an organization's mass of low-ranking peons has military origins: soldiers in formation marched side by side (rank) and one behind the other (file). Its first known usage was in 1598. Later, it became generalized to mean common soldiers and then further generalized to refer to common people.
Suit
The word dates back to the 1200s, to the funky English-French word siwte, referring to the uniform worn by the royal court's stable servants. It came to mean a more general set of clothes to be worn together in the 14th century. As a derisive term for a businessman, it dates from 1979, possibly from the hippie term for an FBI agent, circa the late 1960s. The term "empty suit," meaning a person of small intellect or personality, evolved in the 1980s.
Teamwork
The original Middle English meaning of team was applied to a group of draft animals yoked together. Around 1828, someone thought of combining the word "team" with the word "work" - probably hoping to spur sluggish workers into action. So "teamwork" really mean working like one of many beasts of burden. Depressing, huh?
The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again.
The book is a compendium of entertaining information chock-full of facts on a plethora of history topics. Uncle John's first plunge into history was a smash hit - over half a million copies sold! And this sequel gives you more colorful characters, cultural milestones, historical hindsight, groundbreaking events, and scintillating sagas.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute
Italian comic artist Donald Soffritti drew very funny cartoons of what super heroes and villains would look like in old age! Doc Ock above doesn't seem too thrilled having all those arms to carry grocery bags home.
Tons of other excellent drawings of super heroes as fat, middle aged men and women: Link - Thanks Haendel Dantas!
The Art of Manliness blog has a huge archive of the manly things manly man should do, like How to Break Down a Door, or How to Hug like a Man, so it's refreshing to see something different.
Here's a neat list of the 100 must-read books, the essential man's library, by Jason Lankow, Ross Crooks, Joshua Ritchie, and Brett McKay:
There are the books you read, and then there are the books that change your life. We can all look back on the books that have shaped our perspective on politics, religion, money, and love. Some will even become a source of inspiration for the rest of your life. From a seemingly infinite list of books of anecdotal or literal merit, we have narrowed down the top 100 books that have shaped the lives of individual men while also helping define broader cultural ideas of what it means to be a man.
Good to see some of my favorite books listed, (yes, they're not *just* for guys). Link
Adam Buxton of the British TV comedy show "Adam and Joe" showed us why you don't need a Bollywood song for funny song lyrics subtitle.
Here's one that he did for Songs of Praise ("translations of popular hymns for the hard of hearing, by the hard of hearing"): Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - Thanks Robert Rezabek!
(Okay, okay, that was just all in good fun. No offense meant and no hate mails, please!)
Some people collect stamps, others collect comic books. The people on this list, however, collect things that are far, far stranger. Behold, Neatorama's guide to the 25 Strangest Collections on the Web:
1. Graham Barker's Navel Fluff Collection
Graham Barker's Navel Fluff Collection
Some people see navel fluff or bellybutton lint as life's little annoyances. Not Graham Barker: he began collecting them since 1984, and now has the world's largest collection of navel fluff according to Guiness Book of World Records:
It was on the 17th of January 1984 that I found myself under-occupied in a youth hostel in Brisbane. The night was steamy and stormy - too wet outside and too hot inside to do very much, and my attention drifted to my belly button. There it was ... fluff! I must have seen it before that night, but this occasion was the first time I ever picked it out and wondered about it. I became curious about how much navel fluff one person could generate (enough to stuff a cushion, maybe?), and the only way to find for sure was to collect it and see. My first piece of navel fluff was stored in an empty film canister, and the collection had begun.
Like its name implies, the Air Sickness Bag Virtual Museum is all about vomit bags. Indeed, it catalogs more than 2,000 photos of air sickness bags from all over the world.
In addition to airplane air sickness bags, the website also has a collection of bus sickness, sea sickness, and even space sickness bags!
Though most are underwhelming in terms of design, some are actually quite artistic. Virgin Atlantic airlines even held a "Design for Chunks" project in 2004, where artists submit their designs to be put as a limited edition barf bags!
Before you check out the website, I'll leave you with a few of the more unusual bags from the Visitor's Favorite section:
From left to right: Brooklyn Artist Sarah Nicole Phillip's Little Brown Barf Bag, a parody of Bloomingdale's Little Brown Bag; The Space Shuttle Sickness ("Emesis") Bag; Barf Bag One, unfortunately only a gag gift and not the real thing.
If you want to collect handcuffs, then Joseph W. Lauher is your man, and handcuffs.org is the website to see. Indeed, Joseph has the largest collection of handcuffs (with focus on vintage ones), leg irons, nippers, and thumbcuffs on the Web: Link
What's a nipper and a thumbcuff? Well, a nipper is a handcuff that locks only one hand, but has a handle for keeping the cuffed person under control (Photo to the left is a 1888 nipper made by Thomas & Smith).
A thumbcuff, like its name implies, cuffs both of the person's thumbs.
4. Bob Toelle's Fish Posters
Bob Toelle collects posters - but not any poster, just the ones about fish - and he's got a lot of it. Currently, Bob has more than 700 fish posters from around the world: Link
5. Medical Antiques by Douglas Arbittier, M.D.
Amputation set by Ferris & Co., Bristol (c. 1885)
Dr. Douglas Arbittier collects old medical equipments, and specializes in cased surgical sets. His collection includes a lot of amputation saws, and bloodletting artifacts (leech jar, anyone?).
When you visit his website, keep what Dr. Arbittier said in mind: "be thankful you live in today's medical world ...": Link
6. Barney Smith's Toilet Seat Art
Texan artist Barney Smith has an unusual choice of art medium: toilet seats! For the past 30 years, Barney had created over 700 artistically decorated toilet seat lids. Check it out here: http://www.unusualmuseums.org/toilet/
7. Sergei Frolov's Soviet Calculators
W.T. Odhner Arithmometer (1890)
Sergei Frolov has a fantastic collection of over 150 Soviet-made calculators, as well as vintage computers, watches and slide rules. I'm particularly fond of the old mechanical arithmometers, as shown above: Link
8. Phil Miller's Sugar Packets
Phil Miller is a sucrologist - meaning that he collects sugar packets and sugar cube wrappers. Indeed, Phil has been collecting since 1978 when he started with the Presidents of the United States sugar packets, and he hasn't looked back since. Life must be sweet if you collect sugar packets ... Link
9. The Asphalt Museum
The Asphalt Museum is actually a real museum in a real building in Sacramento, California, but it's weird enough that we'll just have to include it on this list. It has a large collection of (you guessed it) everything asphalt.
The museum was founded by Scott Gordon and Marie Vans in 1991, while both attended Colorado State University.
In addition to asphalt "samples" from famous (like Route 66, Highway I, and the ancient Roman road Appian Way) and not-so-famous roads, the museum also has a recipe on how to make your own asphalt: Link
10. Gideon Weiss' Back Scratchers
Gideon Weiss must've had one really itchy back when he started collecting back scratchers. His online collection has grown to include 236 of the strangest back scratchers I've ever seen: Link
11. Michael Lewis' Moist Towelettes
Michael Lewis welcomes visitors to his website with these warm words: "Welcome to the exciting world of Moist Towelette Collecting."
Though I'm not sure just how wet naps would rank in the excitement scale, Michael's collection sure is something: Link
What is a mangle? You'll be forgiven if you don't know what it is: a mangle is a cast iron contraption with two wooden rollers, a spring, and a side wheel with handle. Its function is to wring clothes dry after you wash them, so obviously it's now obsolete with the invention dryers and all ...
A few years ago, Nancy Alford was in a local department store when she saw, and fell in love with, a mangle. For her sixteenth wedding anniversary, Nancy wanted (and got) - you guessed it, a mangle. Her husband thought she was mad.
Since then, she has collected so many of them that they had to build a new house (which she aptly named Mangleten) to fit all her mangles. http://users.pipeline.com.au/%7Ealford/default.htm
13. Victor Paul Taylor's Scratchcard Collection
Victor Taylor is a lotologist (yes, a made up word meaning someone who collects lottery tickets). He has a particular interest in "Instants" Scratchcards, produced by Camelot for the UK National Lottery. As far as I can tell, none of the scratchcards have been scratched, so he's sitting on a potential goldmine worth bazillions!
Check out his incredibly detailed collection, which starts with the 1995 issues: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/victaylor/ScratchIndex.html
14. Lydia's AOL CDs
Younger Neatorama readers may not be familiar with AOL CDs, but the rest of us surely remember getting spammed with tons of these discs from America Online.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, AOL produced over a billion CDs (with over 1,000 distinct designs) for its direct mail campaign. The strategy was a huge success: AOL became the largest dial-up Internet Service Provider in the world (for a while anyway). After its fateful merger with Time Warner and the decline of dial-up as a mean of accessing the web, the company stopped producing the discs in 2006.
But fear not. Lydia of Lydia's AOL Disks shares with us her collection of over 2,500 unique AOL diskettes and CDs. Check it out here: Link
15. Museum of Burnt Food
The Museum of Burnt Food is dedicated to accidentally burnt food, er ... carbonized culinary masterpieces (no intentionally burned artwork there!). The museum was founded by harpist Deborah Henson Conant, who recounted this tale:
The museum was founded in the late 1980's one night when Deborah put on a small pot of Hot Apple Cider to heat, then received an unexpected . . . fascinating . . . and very long phone call. By the time Deborah returned to the kitchen, the Cider had become a "Cinder" and thus the first, and perhaps still the most impressive, exhibit: "Free Standing Hot Apple Cider" was born.
SINCE THEN, countless other works have entered the museum, such as "Thrice Baked Potato," "Why Sure, You Can Bake Quiche in the Microwave," the indestructible "Mmmm……Soy Pups," and the lovely matching set of Pizza Toast.
Deborah has a tip on kitchen decorating, which I think everyone should heed: "Never scrimp on fire extinguishers and smoke alarms." She would know now: Link
16. Steve Salcedo's Street Sign and Traffic Light Collection
From left to right: Auto Club of Southern California Stop Sign (c. 1940); Children "Wanted Alive" sign, the equivalent of "Slow - Children at Play" sign (c. 1950); "T" Intersection with Marble Reflector (c. 1940); Eagle 4-way 12" Beacons (c. 1930)
Steve Salcedo's fascination with street signs and traffic lights began when he received a bulletin board about traffic signs when he was just a small boy. Two years later, his collection was well under way.
Currently, Steve has over 350 street signs in his collection - all legal (rescued from street departments before they were scrapped, purchased from antique stores, flea markets, etc.): Link
17. The Chocolate Wrappers Museum
In 1996, Martin Mihál's began collecting empty chocolate wrappers from around the world with a sizeable collection of 674 wrappers. A decade later, his collection grew to an astounding 38,579 wrappers! Martin has over 8,700 wrappers from Germany alone and even a few wrappers from far-flung countries like Oman and Uzbekistan.
So, the next time you eat a chocolate, think of Martin before you throw away the wrapper! Link
18. Becky Martz's Banana Labels
In 1991, Becky Martz first noticed banana labels when she put two bunches of bananas in the fruit bowl together. She noticed that the "Dole" labels actually weren't quite the same: one said Guatemala and the other said Honduras. Later that year, she noticed a particularly festive Chiquita label and decided that she wanted to collect banana labels.
Today, Becky has more than 7,000 different banana labels and even branched out to collect asparagus and broccoli bands.
If you think that this is a strange hobby, well, ... it is. But Becky isn't alone: there are others like her in the world, and they even have their own Banana Sticker Collector Convention. Check out Becky's collection here: Link
Date Nail is exactly that: a marked nail hammered into poles and bridge timbers to identify or date them.
Scott Weed of Nailhunter, who has a huge collection of these nails, wrote that "unlike most collectibles, Date Nails can still be found in the wild. With a couple of tools, some spare time and transportation, the world of Date Nail is open to everyone."
Indeed, but for now, I presume all of you will just satisfy yourself with visiting his website: Link
21. Dr. Val Kolpakov's Toothpaste Collection
Dr. Val Kolpakov is a practicing dentist in Saginaw, Michigan, so it's only natural that he has an unnatural affinity to toothpaste.
Starting in 2002, Dr. Val began collecting toothpaste from around the world. His website, Toothpaste World, categorizes toothpastes according to location, brand name, and year of production. Right now, he has over 1,400 items: Link
I'd be remiss if I didn't share with you a toothpaste trivia from Dr. Val's website. Here's the world's oldest known formula for toothpaste:
The world's oldest-known formula for toothpaste, used more than 1,500 years before Colgate began marketing the first commercial brand in 1873, has been discovered on a piece of dusty papyrus in the basement of a Viennese museum.
In faded black ink made of soot and gum arabic mixed with water, an ancient Egyptian scribe has carefully described what he calls a "powder for white and perfect teeth".
When mixed with saliva in the mouth, it forms a "clean tooth paste".
According to the document, written in the fourth century AD, the ingredients needed for the perfect smile are one drachma of rock salt - a measure equal to one hundredth of an ounce - two drachmas of mint, one drachma of dried iris flower and 20 grains of pepper, all of them crushed and mixed together.
The result is a pungent paste which one Austrian dentist who tried it said made his gums bleed but was a "big improvement" on some toothpaste formulae used as recently as a century ago.
22. Weird Fortune Cookie Collection
Ever got a strange fortune from a fortune cookie? Well, it belongs in the ever-growing collection at Weird Fortune Cookie Collection. Seriously, head on over there and browse their gallery (preferably after a nice little Kung Pao Chicken meal): http://weirdfortunecookies.com/
23. British Lawnmower Museum
British Anzani Lawnrider (c. 1960)
The tireless curators of the British Lawnmower Museum, Brian and Sue Radam, dedicate their lives to preserving the best example of British engineering prowess: the lawnmower!
The lawnmower was invented in 1827 by English engineer Edwin Beard Budding, who wanted a superior alternative to the scythe. He took a machine designed to cut the knap off cloth and used it to cut grass instead. At the time, people thought that he was mad, so he tested his invention in the middle of the night so no one could see him!
The British Lawnmower Museum's now has over 200 vintage lawnmowers and part of 400 others: Link
24. Helena Vnouckova's Napkins
Napkins: you use and throw them away, but Helena Vnouckova collects them. A lot of them - in fact, she has over 16,000 napkins from around the world (with sets of Christmas themed napkins, company napkins, and even airline napkins): http://napkins.czi.cz/
25. Museum of Hoaxes
I'm going to end this long list with Neatorama pal Alex Boese's excellent website: Museum of Hoaxes.
Alex Boese probably has the strangest collection of them all: he collects stories about and examples of scams and hoaxes! In 1997, Alex created the Museum of Hoaxes as research notes for his doctoral dissertation, and the website quickly became popular. So much so that Alex the "hoaxpert" wrote three books which we have featured on Neatorama before: The Museum of Hoaxes, Hippo Eats Dwarf, and Elephants on Acid And Other Bizarre Experiments.
If you haven't seen it before (perhaps you've been living under a rock), then definitely check out the Museum of Hoaxes: Link - you won't be disappointed!
We've posted about Loic Jean Albert skydiving with a wingsuit a while ago, but this YouTube clip still took my breath away.
Behold Loic and a couple of his colleagues BASE jumping with the wingsuit - they got so close to the side of the mountain they could practically touch it!
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - Thanks Tyler Henderson!
