Alex Santoso's Blog Posts
Photo: fotoburra [Flickr]
That's Johan Lorbeer just hanging out and interacting with his viewers during his "Still Life Performance" (this particular pose is called "Tarzan" - don't ask us why ...).
Is it magic or does Johan really have superhuman ability? Ah Boon has more photos and Johan's little secret: Link | Johan Lorbeer's website (in German, click on the HTTP link, then Projekte, and then Still-Life-Performance) - Thanks Johnhow!
Yexel of Las Pinas, the Philippines, is a hardcore toy collector. He has so many toys and statues of superheroes and other cartoon characters that he practically had to build his house around his collection!
Here's an interview with the guy at Mechazilla (complete with a photo of "Yexel's Toy Museum", of course): Link - Thanks Celeste!
Photo: Cristiano Nogueira / Conservation International
Scientists from the Conservation International and Brazilian universities found 14 new species in the protected wooded grassland of Brazil's Cerrado. Amongst the new species is this legless lizard of the genus Bachia:
This species of lizard of the genus Bachia is one of the new species discovered during the expedition. Although there are other species of the genus in the Cerrado (almost all discovered and described only recently), this new species has only been recorded in the Ecological Station. The absence of legs and the sharply pointed snout help in locomotion over the surface layer of sandy soil, predominating in all the Jalapao, formed by the natural erosion of the escarpments of the Serra Geral plateaus.
Link | View the new species at CI's gallery - Thanks Lindsay Walter-Cox!
Photo: Tambako the Jaguar [Flickr]
Yay! Today's the day for Neatorama and Hobotopia's Caption Monkey contest. Your mission, should you accept it, is to caption this funny-looking ringtail lemur from the Knie Kinderzoo in Rapperswil, Switzerland.
Whoever submits the funniest caption will win a free copy of Meet the Laugh-Out-Loud Cat by Adam "Ape Lad" Koford of Hobotopia. Adam's book is a nifty compilation of 250 comic panels of the adventures of Kitteh and Pip (including some never-before-published comics).
Contest rules are simple: place your caption in the comment section - one caption per comment, please. You can submit as many funny ones as you can think of. (Congrats to inkedgal who won last week's game. Maybe today is YOUR lucky day!)
Good luck! (and if you don't win, you can still buy Adam's book at Lulu)
Update 4/30/08 - Congrats to Aby, who won with this caption: "It's not my fault my mom was a squirrel & my dad was a skunk"Inspired by the amazing infographics of Stephanie Posavec's "On The Map," David Sparks of The Arbitrarian blog put together his own set of sentence diagrams, focusing on the State of the Union Addresses given by President Bush over his 8 years in office:
In eight State of the Union Addresses, President George W. Bush spoke almost 50,000 words. People around the world were listening, and his words were chosen with care, conveying precisely the right message. These sentence diagrams are in attempt to relate some of the substance of the words President Bush used. Starting at the black dot (and ending at the red), each line segment represents the length of each sentence spoken. Each sentence is in turn colored according to its subject: our nation in general (American, nation, citizen, etc.), national ideals (freedom, hope, liberty, etc.), fiscal/economy (budget, economy, funding, etc.), domestic policy (health, reform, insurance, etc.), security/foreign policy (terror, Iraq, troops, etc.), and everything else. From these rough outlines a short list of President Bush's most frequently used uncommon words, one can get a general idea of the nature of each Address, and we can begin to envision the legacy established by Mr. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States of America.
Link | Link to the infographics [png image file] - Thanks D. Sparks!
Previously on Neatorama: State of the Union Address Analyzer
In the 11th and 12th century, a Christian sect known as the Cathars swept through France. Amongst other things, they believed that matter was intrinsically evil and that Jesus could not have been both incarnate in the (sinful) flesh and still be the son of God (they believed that he was a prophet and mortal who died on the cross).
The Catholic Church saw the Cathars as dangerously heretical and in 1209, Pope Innocent III launched the Albigensian Crusade to wipe out the Cathars (in which about 1 million people were killed).
Legend has it that four Cathar priests escaped with a sacred scroll, believed to have been written by Jesus himself, and hid pieces of the scroll around the world for safekeeping. They encoded the locations of these scrolls by weaving codes into cloths (Weaving was big for the Cathars - they even called themselves The Weavers).
And now, according to conspiracy theorists, the surviving Cathars/Weavers have initiated a sinister plan that will change the future of mankind....
Here's a short clip at History of the Cathars, which you'll probably find quite entertaining if you like The Da Vinci Code sort of thing: http://www.history-of-the-cathars.com/ [Flash video] - Thanks Sam Alexander!
Over the weekend, there was the "crying sumo" contest for babies:
In crying sumo the babies are held up by amateur sumo wrestlers in a ring, and the baby who cries first is the winner. If both babies cry, then the one that cries loudest wins. A total of 84 babies born last year participated in the contest at the temple.
Link | Photo Gallery at Xinhua - via Arbroath
If you think your commute is horrendous, check out what Liu Suozhu of Henan Province, China, had to drive on:
A Chinese man performed a breathtaking stunt by driving a car across two steel cables suspended 150ft above a river.
Liu Suozhu, 48, of Henan province, completed the 750ft journey over Miluo River in Pingjiang city, Hunan province. Liu, who is nicknamed the Car King in China, drove the motor from a platform in front of tens of thousands of cheering spectators.
You've probably heard of this incredibly bizarre and sad story when it broke a couple of days ago: Josef Fritzl is an Austrian man who locked his daughter Elizabeth in a cellar beneath his house for 24 years and fathered 7 children with her.
All this time, Josef's wife (and Elizabeth's mom) lives upstairs not knowing that her daughter, whom she was told ran away to join a religious cult, was held captive.
What's even more bizarre is that three of Elizabeth (and Josef's) children were allowed to live in the house (they told the wife that Elizabeth couldn't keep the kids at the cult) and lived normal lives. Three more children (1 died shortly after birth) spent all of their lives in the cellar - and had never seen daylight before the police freed them.
Josef's crime was uncovered when one of his "dungeon" child was deathly ill and had to be taken to the hospital:
Psychiatrists believe he was obsessed with power and must have been insane to have kept them incarcerated for so long and to have managed to keep it a secret.
Elisabeth is said to be white-haired, mentally and physically frail and traumatised, while Kerstin, 19, is fighting for her life. It was Kerstin's collapse that prompted the discovery of the dungeon in the basement of Fritzl's home in Amstetten.
The teenager is in critical condition and in an artifically-induced coma after suffering from cramping fits caused by lack of oxygen. Like her mother, and her siblings, she had been forced to live in the windowless cellar for years.
Because she and two of her brothers were kept there their whole lives, they had never seen sunlight until they were released. [...]
Three other children - Lisa, 16, Monika, 14, and Alexander, 12 - were adopted and brought up by Josef and his wife Rosemarie, 78.
Leopold Etz, a regional police official, says Fritzl apparently chose which of the children would live upstairs with him and his wife according to whether they were "crybabies."
Photo: Club.chinaren.com
There was an anti-France/anti-Carrefour/anti-Tibetan independence protest in China over the weekend (Carrefour is a large supermarket chain based out of France), and this taxi driver was quick to capitalize on the anti-French mood! Maybe it's just because the French don't tip well ...
If you think that running the marathon is tough, that's cakewalk as compared to this: Marathon Des Sables, or Marathon of the Sand, 156 miles over 7 days (that's like running 6 marathons back to back) ... across the Sahara Desert!
Here's a very interesting report by Clarissa Ward of the ABC World News Webcast: Link
Meet Mondex, a 5-year-old chihuahua that just won a dog fashion show in the Philippines ... by dressing up as a scuba diver!
Five-year-old Mondex wore a four-legged wetsuit, air bottle, four little flippers and goggles for the day.
Mondex was joined by other pampered pooches in the pet fashion show held in a mall in suburban Manila.
He faced stiff competition from Tucker, another five-year-old chihuahua, who was dressed as a cowboy but eventually emerged victorious.
Don't smoke your cigarettes ... drink 'em! Here's an idea so crazy it's brilliant: Cigarettea by Schnaider.
Cigarettea are tea bags that look like cigarettes. All you have to do is dip one in a cup of hot water and let it steep (the "filter" will act as a fluotation device). Instead of tobacco, the cigarettes have tea leaves! http://idealist.blinkr.net/cigarettea/ - via GearFuse
Think that gas prices are high? According to Dan Dorfman of The New York Sun, we may be seeing much higher gas prices in just three years. How high? Try $10 a gallon.
The forecasts calling for a jump to between $7 and $10 a gallon are based on the view that the price of crude is on its way to $200 in two to three years. [...]
Early last year, with a barrel of oil trading in the low $50s and gasoline nationally selling in a range of $2.30 to $2.50 a gallon, Mr. Gaines — in an impressive display of crystal ball gazing — accurately predicted oil was $100-bound and that gasoline would follow suit by reaching $4 a gallon.
His latest prediction of $200 oil is open to question, since it would undoubtedly create considerable global economic distress. Further, just about every energy expert I talk to cautions me to expect a sizable pullback in oil prices, maybe to between $50 and $70 a barrel, especially if there's a global economic slowdown.
While Mr. Gaines thinks there could be a temporary decline in the oil price, he's convinced an overall uptrend is unstoppable. In fact, he thinks his $200 forecast could be conservative, and that perhaps $250 could be reached. His reasoning: a combination of shrinking supply and increasing demand, especially from China, India, and America.
http://www2.nysun.com/article/75363 - via Boing Boing
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