The Three Twins Ice Cream shop in the Oxbow Public Market in Napa is selling the World's Most Expensive Ice Cream Sundae for $3,333.33 (a banana split made with syrups from three rare dessert wines, served with an ice cream spoon from the 1850s. If you order a day ahead, they'll have a cellist perform while you eat).
But if the World's Most Expensive Ice Cream Sundae is not glam enough, you should try their "The World's More Expensive Most Expensive Ice Cream Sundae". For $60,000, you'll get ice cream made from the disappearing glacier from Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa!
Last weekend, the 6th Annual Grilled Cheese Invitational was held in Griffith Park, Los Angeles.
The event was the Olympics of grilled cheese making: 140 competing teams, hundreds of cheese-hungry judges (those lucky people who got in to eat free sammiches), and thousands of free grilled cheese sandwiches (and one grilled cheese wedding cake!)
Here's an excellent stop-motion video, called "Human Snake" by Get Out and Play. Yes, a viral ad by N-Gage for Nokia, but still neat nonetheless - check out the "making of" in their website:
1,000 people. No effects. Snake is a mobile gaming classic - in fact it is the most played computer game of all time. So why not get out and play the snake for real?
And no, we are not using any special effects or computer graphics. It is just 1000 people moving in the street - frame by frame and step by step.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - Thanks Christophe and Badjuk!
The Spoon Museum has a wonderful entry on "Monkey Spoons," a type of unusual spoon used by the Dutch settler in the New York/Hudson River area to commemorate birth, marriage, and death:
The English and some continental societies placed a great emphasis on births. The occasion of a birth was a blessed event and parties and gatherings were held. Prosperous citizens would often give an apostle spoon to new born babies at the time of their christening. The silver spoons bore the image of an apostle as the finial. The hope was that the baby would observe this finial every time it was fed. One spoon was often used by a person for their entire life. The phrase to "be born with a silver spoon" stems from this practice.
But the Dutch settlers of the Hudson Valley region were not as religious as other groups and they did not place the same emphasis on births. Instead they place greater emphasis on marriage and a very heavy emphasis on death. They did, however, adapt the concept of using a spoon to symbolize these important life transitions.
But where did the term "Monkey Spoon" comes from?
That is a good question, and no one knows for sure. Several hypotheses have been made and you are free to accept the one that suits you.
1. Since the monkey spoons all have a hook on the stem and they hang by that hook, it would "look like a monkey hanging by its tail" (my favorite).
2. Most monkey spoons have a small figural emblem on the high part of the curve. I haven't seen any that look like a monkey (Some later reproductions supposedly had a monkey as a word play on the name), but there is one style that is very hard to figure out. Some people see a "monkey" in this figure.
3. When people drink too much they often act strangely. In Dutch the term "zuiging the monkey" is a reference to drunkeness.
Remember the Cat Death Camp in China posted previously on Neatorama? Here's something along the same line, for baby seals in Arkhangelsk, Russia:
Seal hunting is controversial, and there's a lot of propaganda coming from both sides. One says that there's nothing special with it, it's traditional and profitable, no big deal. The other claims it's particularly cruel, citing independent studies that show that almost 80% of sealers don't check if the seal is dead before skinning it, and that half of them get skinned alive. But regardless of where the truth lies, we think most people would minimally agree that the unnecessary suffering of sentient mammals with nervous systems similar to ours is bad, and that people who purchase products made from seals should know what their money buys so they can make an informed choice.
GPS is a nifty and useful tool - I have a TomTom GPS navigation for Christmas that really helped me get around (I get lost easily).
But apparently, there are some really weird GPS tools out there, like this one: the Micro GPS Mail Logger, a GPS tracking device to track your mail as it makes its way through the snail mail system! The device is for "evaluating your delivery service's reliability and efficiency"
The product costs $695.95, which of course, you risk losing every time you use it. Link - Thanks Greg Bryant!
Woo-hoo! Neatorama is selected as today's cool site by Cool Site of the Day. CSotD has featured a unique site every day since August of 1994, making it the original (and for many, the best) website of its kind.
Please visit Cool Site of the Day and kindly vote for Neatorama: Link (Today only, Friday 4/25/08, and hopefully you'll give it a good score though you should vote your conscience ;) ) - Thanks Greg Smith!
Update 4/26/08: Thanks guys! Neatorama got over 7.9, making it the highest rated website in April and amongst the top rated sites of all time. You can check it out in the CSotD archive here: Link)
LiveJournal user evendym snapped some really nifty photos of emerald-green auroras in the desolate Siberian outpost. Link [in Russian] - Thanks collin douma!
Stick Figures in Peril is a Flickr pool about photos of real warning signs showing stick figures in dangerous - often life-threatening - and sometimes ... odd situations. Like this "no strutting" sign, by Flickr user J&DP, for instance.
What a neat idea: the Eurostar departure lounge at the St. Pancras International Train Station in London has a new interactive digital art gallery that lets travelers view art masterpieces while waiting for their train:
The project, which launched earlier today, is a collaboration between Eurostar and the National Gallery which offers travelers the chance to explore a database of 100 highlights from the National Gallery’s collection of Western European painting – including masterpieces by Caravaggio, Constable, Leonardo da Vinci, Money, Rubens, Titian and Van Gogh.
Six tailor-made, touch-screen coffee tables provide the interface with which users can scroll through the database of images. Once an image has been selected, it is then displayed on one of six free-standing plasma screens situated within the brick archways running along the eastern wall of the departure lounge.
http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/interactive-art-gallery-for-international-train-travellers/ - Thanks Patrick Burgoyne!
When Chad Pugh was commissioned to do a redesign of an illustration for Vimeo login, he decided to take a screenshot every five seconds. Here's a mesmerizing time lapse video of a process spanning 40 hours of drawing condensed into under 7 minutes.
Link (Vimeo video, a little jerky b/c of zooming/panning of drawing on Adobe Illustrator) - Thanks Chad!
Ed Price, who covers the New York Yankees for New Jersey's The Star Ledger, noticed that there's an odd sign in the dugout of the White Sox's stadium: "NO BOTTLED WATER ON THE BENCH." (Even in the humid Chicago summers!)
Gatorade is Major League Baseball's "official sports drink." So instructions were sent that no player could be seen drinking anything but Gatorade in the dugout. Not even Aquafina, which is the "official water" of MLB. Not even bottles of water with the labels removed.
White Sox clubhouse personnel said if players take bottled water onto the bench, all the bottled water will be removed from the clubhouse as punishment.
The Mosquito is an electronic "anti-teen loitering" device that emits an annoying sound akin to a mosquito buzzing in your ear that can only be heard by teenagers and people in their 20s (who still have sensitive hair cells in their inner ear).
After selling 1,000 units in the United States, the company that sells the device is now being criticized for torturing teens!
"It's horrible, loud and irritating," said Eddie Holder, 15, who sprinted from his apartment for school one morning covering one ear with his hand to block out the noise. The device was installed outside the building to drive away loiterers. "I have to hurry out of the building because it's so annoying. It's this screeching sound that you have to get away from or it will drive you crazy."
The device has roiled civil liberties groups in countries where it's in use, including England, Australia and Scotland. England's government-appointed Children's Commission proposed a ban. That group describes it as a weapon that infringes on the basic rights of young people and claims that it could have unknown long-term health effects.
The $1,500 device has also been challenged in some American cities and towns that have proposed installing it, with some criticizing the tactic as needlessly cruel.
Others, however, have praised the Mosquito:
"We'd have crowds gather in parking lots, and there'd be the usual trash talk, then you'd have fights," said Rick McGee, the school district's emergency services manager. "Now, there's no confrontation at all; they just get aggravated and leave within a few minutes."
No words on the effectiveness of the original anti-teen loitering devices, Mozart and Kenny G, as compared to the newfangled device: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/23/teen.be.gone.ap/index.html - via Boing Boing
