We've posted about the "magical" power of the pig bladder powder to regrow finger a couple of months ago - and now, the BBC has an interview with the man who regrew his finger, Lee Spievak.
Link (BBC Media Player/Flash Video, complete with some gruesome images of Lee's finger) - Thanks Jonathan Beaton, Lasse Bang, and Louise!
To foster a fun and creative work environment, more and more companies are having "take your pet to work" day. But Jim Harding, CEO of a Seattle start-up tech company Cirqe went a step further: he took his yak to work!
Weighing in at over 1,000 pounds, Harding's long-haired bovine just hung around the office on Tuesday. The conference room was unavailable.
"As you can see, he's pretty calm, he's cool, he's collected," Harding said.
But what about the cleanup? Nothing a shovel couldn't solve. "Yeah, he does tend to do that, about eight times a day," Harding said.
Employees said Harding tries to foster a fun and creative work environment. "It's an unusual office, but it's really fun," said software engineer Raul Raja. "You can't say much when the boss brings in a yak."
UK postman Adam Williamson got suspended from his job at the Royal Mail and was even escorted home by the police because he showed up at work wearing non-regulation shorts:
When postman Adam Williamson found he could no longer squeeze into his standard issue Royal Mail trousers, he turned up at work in shorts.
But the solution didn't go down well with bosses, who suspended him and had him escorted from the sorting depot by police.
Mr Williamson says he has fallen foul of rules because the navy blue shorts have a Nike logo. But he claims they are virtually identical to ill-fitting ones supplied by his employers and he has used them on rounds during the summer for several years.
Depot chiefs are refusing to back down until he finds a non-branded pair of shorts that fit, however.
The dispute got heated and other postal workers threatened to walk off the job in protest of management's treatment: Link
According to an Army study, recruits with criminal, bad driving or drug record (therefore require special waivers to enlist) have more discipline problems and are more likely to drop out because of alcohol problems than those with a spotless record.
No surprise there, but this is interesting: those bad soldiers also earn more medals for valor, stay longer, and get promoted faster!
Gen. William Wallace, commander of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Va., dismisses the notion that waivers are creating more disciplinary problems in today's Army.
Instead, he said, when the Army brings in a young person who made a mistake and got past it, most likely "they will be a better person for having made that mistake and learned from it, than perhaps somebody who didn't make the mistake and didn't have the opportunity to learn."
We've featured many stupid criminals on Neatorama, but I think this guy may just be the dumbest one yet. Meet Charles Ray Fuller, who was arrested for forgery when he tried to pass a check for ... $360 billion! (Yes, that's $360,000,000,000).
He claimed that it was given to him by his girlfriend's mother to start a record business.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/050108dnmetbillion.b623795f.html - via reddit
Photo: Te Papa Blog
That's Dr. Steve O'Shea and Dr. Tsunemi Kubodera of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, preparing to preserve their colossal squid specimen, caught in the Ross Sea in February 2007 and kept frozen until now.
Everyone's enthralled with the squid's eyes, which are the size of dinner plates. But I was more amazed at the tentacle hooks:
The arm hooks are set in fleshy, very muscular sheaths and are strongly attached to the arms. They are likely to assist in holding and immobilising struggling prey as it is being killed and eaten. Most of the arm hooks have the main strong ‘claw’ (visible below), and also two smaller auxiliary cusps closer to the hook’s base, making them three-pointed and maximising their ability to hold and dig in. The base of each hook also has a complex structure that is set deep into the surrounding musculature. (Source)
Photo: Kat Bolstad
The Te Papa's Blog has the entire story: http://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/ - Thanks Geekazoid!
This week's collaboration with What is it? Blog brings us this strange apparatus. The first person who guessed what it is for correctly and incorrect but funniest guess will each win a free Neatorama T-shirt (so two winners this week).
Contest rules are simple: place your guess in the comment section. One guess per comment, please. You can submit as many guesses as you'd like. Please don't post any URL (let others play!).
For more clues, check out What is it? Blog. Good luck!
Update 5/2/08 - the right answer is dental lab gas burner, but no one got it right. So two "funniest caption" winners: congratulations to Mr. Binky ("goldfish themepark") and tigergal39 ("mutant cow milker")!The Library of Congress had just acquired the original 1962 drawings from Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's "Amazing Fantasy #15" - complete with Ditko's pencil erasures and white-out opaquing fluid - in which Spider-Man made its first appearance in print!
Matt Raymond of the Library of Congress Blog wrote:
People who are more familiar with Amazing Fantasy #15 than I are probably not surprised by this fact, but I got a good chuckle from the disclaimer that appeared at the top of the first page (pictured at left). It almost seems to be begging skeptical readers to give Spider-Man a chance, completely unaware of the phenomenon that was about to be unleashed on the world.
The excessively exclamatory paragraph reads: “Like costume heroes? Confidentially, we in the comic mag business refer to them as ‘long underwear characters’! And, as you know, they’re a dime a dozen! But, we think you may find our SPIDER-MAN just a bit … different!”
The good folks at the LOC promises to digitize the collection forthwith! Link - Thanks Matt!
The guys at CoffinCouches.com sells sofas made from recycled coffins (coffins that are not used for burial because of cosmetic defects):
Our niche happens to be 18 gauge steel coffins which we collected from local funeral homes primarily in Southern California. It is a health and safety law that funeral homes cannot resell used coffins to the general public. We approached funeral directors with the attitude of recycling. These coffins are not used for burial due to slight cosmetic inconsistencies. They are reconfigured and modified resulting in a finished product - a unique one a kind coffin couch.
If you notice (although it may be too small) the six cast iron heavy duty legs are embossed with the universal biohazard insignia. The reason we utilized this sign was because safety was our utmost concern. If you are not aware, once a human body is placed in a coffin it is considered biohazard tissue. The legs have the embossed insignia for
precautionary reasons in the event body fluids are exchanged on these coffins. Perhaps you would feel safe knowing that you are in designated biohazard scene! Ha!!
Link - Thanks Piper Kinison!
Eight years ago, Siobhán Kilfeather, who was suffering from a deadly cancer, went to Lourdes to pray to the Virgin Mary not for survival, but for more time to allow her young children to remember her.
When she returned to London, her doctors were amazed at her recovery:
Siobhán and Peter clung to each other as the radiologist continued. "Back in December we spotted a small lesion on the lungs. One month later the abnormality was the size of a walnut. By now we expected to be examining irregular cells the size of a grapefruit.
"Instead, there's nothing to be seen. The abnormalities have disappeared."
Siobhán's cancer returned seven years later, and this is her story as told by her mother-in-law Ellen Jameson in an upcoming book Siobhán's Miracle:
"I finally managed: 'How long do you think I've got?'He turned his face away from me and didn't answer. My head is so full of clutter I can't think straight.
"I should write to old friends I've lost touch with. Tell them I'm going to die. I can't seem to get things into proportion. The most important considerations are obviously my children and my husband, but also my work is important to me.
"My writing, my book, my students. Should I spend the last 12 hours of my life reading Jane Austen or writing an essay or singing nursery rhymes to my children?"
The water holding frog can go without a drink for a whole year.
Thirsty? Consider this: when it rains in the arid floodplains of Australia, the water holding frog absorbs water through its skin and then burrows into the soil. It then sheds a layer of its skin which harden into a cocoon to keep it from drying out. The frog then enters a deep resting stage and stays there until the next rainy season, which can be a full year away or longer.
The Aborigines sometime dig up the water holding frog from its burrow and squeeze it for a sip of water.
Are lice art? A group of young artists from Berlin think so - and they're willing to go the distance to prove it: by living in an Israeli museum for three weeks with lice in their hair!
"The idea is that we live in the museum as their guests, and at the same time we are hosting lice on our heads," said artist Vincent Grunwald, 23, wearing a plastic shower cap to prevent the lice from spreading. [...]
"Art is no longer just a painting on the wall," Milana Gitzin-Adiram, chief curator of the Museum of Bat Yam near Tel Aviv, told Reuters. "Art is life, life is art."
The exhibition has caused controversy -- unintended, the artists say -- in a country where the mention of lice may revive memories of Nazi propaganda that described Jews as "parasites."
The artists, who sleep, eat and bathe in the gallery, said the exhibition toyed with ideas about hosts and guests in line with a theme set by the museum and aimed to blur the boundaries between art and reality.
For years, neighbors in Pikesville, a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland, had been distrubed by a big boom and a flash of light in the middle of the night:
"The bedroom actually lights up like day," says Elaine O'Mansky, who lives in the Stevenson Commons condominium building near Beth Tfiloh. "It's instantaneous and wakes us up out of a very deep sleep."
She isn't alone. Barbara Friedman is Homeowner's Association president for the area. She was up late one night sweeping her back patio when she heard the boom. "I hit the deck," Friedman explained. "It was so loud, I thought I was being shot. I literally hit the deck."
After she realized she hadn't been shot, she started emailing other homeowners to see if they heard it too. "Then my email got flooded because hundreds of people were hearing these noises and thought it was their imagination," she said. (Source)
Turns out, it was a disgruntled man who decided to piss of his neighbors by setting off fireworks at 2 a.m. in the morning! The police caught him after setting up a video camera to record the bang:
Derek Valcourt of WJZ reports: Link - via reddit"After actually evaluating this videotape, the bomb unit technician was almost able to pinpoint the exact condominium where this was actually coming from," said Cpl Mike Hill with Baltimore County Police.
That's how police met Mackler, who apparently confessed to creating the disturbance. Inside his home, investigators found quantities of drugs, guns and fireworks. Police say he had been having problems with neighbors in the building.
"He would get up in the middle of the morning, around 2 a.m., fire one of these pyrotechnic devices and be done," Hill said.
"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer."
- Paul Ehrlich, scientist
and Nobel laureate- Thanks Fred!
