Oh the irony! Thousands of the Snow Lion Flag or the "Free Tibet" flags turned out to be ... made in China!
Police in southern China have discovered a factory manufacturing Free Tibet flags, media reports say. The factory in Guangdong had been completing overseas orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning. But then some of them saw TV images of protesters holding the emblem and they alerted the authorities, according to Hong Kong's Ming Pao newspaper.
What do you get when you cross tetris with arm wrestling? Behold the next revolution in video game by Tom Gerhardt: Tresling!
They said it couldn't be done. Mixing Tetris and arm wrestling... not possible. But just like Stallone in "Over the Top," the impossible happened, dreams came true, tears were shed. I give you Tresling: Not just a two-player version of best game on earth, not just a fist-pumping, back ally arm wrestling match to end all matches... but a mash-up so heroic Zeus himself could not imagine it.
A little search brought me to Keetwonen, a student housing project in Amsterdam by a company called TempoHousing:
Keetwonen, a student housing project in Amsterdam, turns shipping containers into 1000 units and provides all the amenities a student could ever want. And aside from the obvious green usage of surplus shipping containers, Keetwonen has integrated a rooftop to accommodate efficient rainwater drainage while providing heat dispersal and insulation for the containers beneath. [...]
Containers are home to not only the 1000 units that each have a private balcony, but a cafe, supermarket, office space, and even a sports area. Units are arranged in “blocks,” each block containing a service unit with centralized electricity, internet, and networking systems.
A controversy had erupted over the photo of the 15-year-old teen superstar Miley Cyrus (better known as Hannah Montana):
One photo shows Cyrus topless but clutching a sheet to her chest, her bare back exposed, looking toward the camera over one shoulder.
A caption alongside the photo reads: "Um, was Cyrus -- or Disney -- at all anxious about this shot?" It then quotes Cyrus as saying: "No, I mean I had a blanket on. And I thought, 'This looks pretty, and really natural.' I think it's really artsy."
The photos were taken by Annie Leibovitz, a renowned photographer known for her portraits of celebrities.
The magazine refers to the "topless but demure portrait" as Leibovitz's idea and quotes Cyrus as saying, "It wasn't in a skanky way ... And you can't say no to Annie. She's so cute. She gets this puppy dog look and you're like, 'O.K.'"
A Disney Channel spokesman, Patti McTeague, said in a statement on Sunday that the photos were meant to sell magazines.
"Unfortunately, as the article suggests, a situation was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines," her statement said.
My respect for Annie Leibovitz, an accomplished photographer known for her portraits of celebrities, had just gone to zero. I've never had any respect for Vanity Fair. Ugh.
Link | DListed has the controversial pic (I think it was yanked off the Vanity Fair website) - Thanks Geekazoid!
Wouldn't you know it, the conveyor belt sushi is 50 years old this month!
Yoshiaki Shiraishi (1914-2001) opened the first conveyor belt sushi Mawaru Genroku Sushi in Osaka in 1958. The concept has revolutionised the Japanese food culture, with thousands of conveyor belt sushi restaurants operating around the world.
According to Wikipedia, Yoshiaki was inspired to invent the conveyor belt sushi after watching beer bottles on a conveyor belt in an Asahi brewery.
In honor of the upcoming Iron Man movie and the new monthly comic series by writer Matt Fraction and artist Salvador Larroca, Project: Rooftop and Westfield Comics held the Iron Man: Invincible Upgrade fan-art contest.
They've just chosen the Grand Prize Winner: the artwork to the left, drawn Daniel Krall.
What Daniel’s done here is not simply show off a neat alternate version of the character. With this one illustration, he’s rebuilt him, including character traits and building a story that informs the design. This Iron Man is the Howard Hughes-inspired Tony Stark. He’s proud of his work. He’s bringing us into the future. The actual design goes far beyond the fun of this magazine ad illo, though. It looks functional. It’s stainless steel and rivets.
Find out more about Daniel's winning design and the rest of the winners: Link - via Super Punch
University of Michigan researchers have just discovered the reason why married women always have so much housework to do: their husbands!
A new study from the University of Michigan shows that having a husband creates an extra seven hours of extra housework a week for women. But a wife saves her husband from an hour of chores around the house each week.
"It's a well-known pattern. There's still a significant reallocation of labor that occurs at marriage -- men tend to work more outside the home, while women take on more of the household labor," said Frank Stafford, of the university's Institute for Social Research (ISR), who directed the study.
"And the situation gets worse for women when they have children," he added in a statement.
Y'know, it's only after I became a father that I truly - and I mean truly - appreciate a baby's laughter. There's nothing like it in the world.
I'd say that a baby's laugh is proof that God exists and that he loves us, except that Benjamin Franklin had already used the phrase for beer.
Say No to Crack blog has a pretty neat compilation of 7 YouTube clips of babies laughing - some we've seen before on Neatorama, and some we haven't: Link
Last month, Julia Di Sieno of the Animal Rescue Team in California noticed a dead sharp-shinned hawk while driving.
But it was no ordinary dead hawk: it had a small bird claw protruding out of its chest, a small songbird that perhaps wasn't too happy to be eaten and decided to fight back! (Yes, maybe it had nothing to do with the hawk's death at all, but that's boring ...)
This summer, over 50 movies are slated to be released - and keeping track of them all is a big chore. Fortunately, the good folks at Always Watching have put out a guide on which movies to watch and which to skip.
I'm looking forward to this one (oh, do I love silly comedy) : Tropic Thunder, Directed by Ben Stiller, Starring: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey, Jr.
Synopsis: A group of actors shooting a big-budget war movie are captured by enemy forces and find themselves needing to become the soldiers they're portraying.
What to Expect: Robert Downey Jr. as a black man. That alone has guaranteed my ticket bought. The fact that the rest of the film looks great as well is just a bonus. It really seems like they've worked out the perfect combination of action, comedy, parody, and shit blowing up. And I gotta admit, it's nice to see Ben Stiller taking another temporary break from playing the whiny, awkward dork we always see him as.
To combat prostitution, many massage parlors in Indonesia are requiring masseuses to wear ... chastity belts!
Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times wrote this interesting report:
Chastity belts, which went out of fashion with knights in shining armor and damsels in distress, are making a comeback in the massage parlors of East Java.
In a bid to prevent any hanky-panky between masseuses and their clients, several massage parlors in the hill resort town of Batu are insisting that the women wear padlocks across the zippers of their work pants.
Franky Setiawan, owner of Doghado Massage Parlor, says he came up with the idea when men "bombarded" his staff with demands for sex after local authorities shut down the town's brothels. In recent years, conservative Islamic values have gained influence in a society that has long enjoyed liberal freedoms, such as easy access to alcohol, gambling and the sex trade.
"We had a hard time rejecting this kind of client because they try over and over and over again, persuading our workers with their dangerously sweet words," Setiawan said by phone this month from Batu, explaining that he wanted his 14 masseuses to feel safe and morally upstanding, while protecting the massage industry's image.
Not everyone's happy about it, though:
But Meutia Fardia Hatta Swasono, minister for women's empowerment in the world's most populous Muslim nation, calls the return of the chastity belt an affront to all women.
"It is not the right way to prevent promiscuity. It insults women as if they are the ones in the wrong," she told reporters this month. "It is not that we oppose the administration's effort to uphold morality, but the problem is their way of treating masseuses as if they're all committing prostitution."
Ace Kim of From Bricks to Bothans (The LEGO Star Wars Experience) and Mike Crowley of CountBlockula went to the private Collectors Party at the LEGO 2008 Toy Fair.
Between the both of them, they snapped hundreds of photos of new products and minifigs.
So. How racist are you? That's the question asked by an online psychology test by the University of Chicago. The test involves showing you a series of photographs of 100 black or white men, either holding guns or cellphones. You have to decide - in a split second - whether to shoot them or to holster your gun.
Nicholas D. Kristof, a (white) columnist of The New York Times took the test. And discovered this:
I shot armed blacks in an average of 0.679 seconds, while I waited slightly longer — .694 seconds — to shoot armed whites. Conversely, I holstered my gun more quickly when encountering unarmed whites than unarmed blacks.
Take the test yourself and you’ll probably find that you show bias as well. Most whites and many blacks are more quick to shoot blacks, no matter how egalitarian they profess to be.
Eric L. Hinton of Diversity Inc, who is black, also took the test, and found out the same thing:
But what concerns me is that, armed or not, I "shot" Black targets faster than I shot white targets. I shot Black armed targets at an average of 0.631 seconds versus white armed targets at 0.662. Even more disturbing - I shot Black unarmed targets at an average of 0.783 seconds versus white unarmed targets at 0.792.
Fractions of seconds? Yes, but still unsettling when you consider the real life implications of armed police officers who make these life and death decisions in real life situations as they encounter Black men on the street.
So, how would you do? Just how racist are you? Take the test and find out! http://backhand.uchicago.edu/Center/ShooterEffect/
(I did horribly on the test - I shot practically everyone, black or white! Then I got nervous, and got shot by everyone else!)
Odynophobia is the most common fear in the world. It's the fear of pain.
Most people don't like feeling pain - but being able to feel pain is actually a good thing. Consider the opposite: about 17 people in the United States are born with "congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis" - basically, they feel absolutely no pain. Far from being a wonderful thing, living without pain is actually hell.
Here's a story of (then) 4-year-old Roberto Salazar, who was born without the ability to feel any pain:
When you first meet 4-year-old Roberto Salazar, you can't help but notice his unwavering smile and constant laughter. By all accounts, he's a very happy boy.
It is only when he rams his head violently into walls or plays a little too roughly with a schoolmate, all the while smiling, that you are reminded that he suffers from an incredibly rare genetic disorder. [...]
His family was shocked when Roberto started teething. He gnawed on his own tongue, lips and fingers to the point of mutilation. "If you could imagine when you bite your tongue how bad it hurts. At one point, you couldn't even distinguish that his tongue was his tongue," Stingley-Salazar said.
Doctor Felicia Axelrod of the New York University, who specializes in this rare disease, said:
"For some children it's a mild degree such as breaking a leg, they'll get up and walk on the leg. They feel that something is uncomfortable but they keep on moving," she said. "For other children, the pain loss is so severe that they can injure themselves repetitively and actually mutilate themselves because they don't know when to stop." (Source)
Flickr user petraalsbach took a series of photos of the construction, as well as interior shots, of the Shipping Container House in Wellington, New Zealand.
The home is "built" using 3 shipping containers stacked on top of each other.
