Apparently Neatorama reader Jason Sanders never heeded his parents advice of not playing with his food. That turned out to be somewhat of a good thing, because we now can watch this: Pacarrotman, a 35-second Pac-Man stop-motion parody made with a camera, a plate, some veggies and a strawberry.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - Thanks Jason!
Most people aren't aware of this, but the ocean is actually a noisy place, because its inhabitants are a noisy bunch:
For most fish, the sonic mechanism is a muscle that vibrates a swim bladder not unlike our vocal cord. The bladder is a gas-filled sac used for buoyancy, but it can also be used as a sort of drum. The Gulf toadfish contracts its sonic muscle against its swim bladder thousands of times a minute to generate a loud drone. At nearly three times the average wingbeat of a hummingbird, toadfish have the fastest known muscle of any vertebrate. Cusk eel rattle bones against their bladder, but clownfish have a sonic ligament they use to “chirp.”
Link | Listen to the fishies (don't miss the wonderful humming of the toad fish!)
Heh! This Bizarro's comic panel, titled Rorschach's Parents, made me chuckle. For more Bizarro, check out Dan Piraro's excellent website and blog.
By the way, Hermann Rorschach, the inventor of the psychological inkblot test named after him actually liked making inkblots as a child. In high school, his nickname was "Klex" (meaning inkblot). His favorite game was Klecksography, a Swiss childhood game where an ink blot was spotted on a paper which was then folded to make a butterfly or a bird (sounds familiar?) (source)
An eight-year-old Yemeni was granted a divorce after her father forced her into an arranged marriage:
"I am happy that I am divorced now. I will be able to go back to school," Nojud Mohammed Ali said, after a public hearing in Sanaa's court of first instance.
Her former husband, 28-year-old Faez Ali Thameur, said he married the child "with her consent and that of her parents" but that he did not object to her divorce petition.
In response to a question from Judge Mohammed al-Qadhi, he acknowledged that the "marriage was consummated, but I did not beat her."
Yemen, one of the world's poorest countries, has no law governing the minimum age of marriage.
http://www.metimes.com/Politics/2008/04/15/yemeni_girl_8_gets_divorce_after_forced_marriage/afp/ (Photo: AFP Khaled Fazaa) - via Arbroath
"The reason the pro tells you to keep your head down is so you can't see him laughing."
- Phyllis Diller, comedienne, on golf
The Art of Manliness blog has a post about How to Break Down a Door ... Here it is, just in case you need to (like a burning building or something like that):
Now, from my experience, it's virtually impossible to kick open a properly installed exterior door with deadbolt locks and heavy duty hinges. If the door and frames are metal, it is impossible to kick open.
Link - via The Evangelical Outpost
Whatever you do, just don't do it like this:
Woot! Be still my heart! Here's the Megaman stained glass project by Flickr user Gary in Cleveland.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/garyandliz/sets/72157603800105693/ (complete with some making of photos, too!) - via Ihatealex
Tea-Over-Ice from Tea Forté is a set of two pitchers: the smaller one, used to brew the hot tea sits on top of the larger one, which holds ice.
The idea is that after your tea is brewed, you can simply flash chill it by pouring it over the ice for a glass of iced tea (the pitchers are made from heat-resistant glass)
Photo: eliz.avery [Flickr]
Flickr user eliz.avery found this strange children book from 1974: the Mime Alphabet Book by Nina and Cathy Gasiorowicz - via Quiddity
Here are a couple of the letters:
D is for dying
N is for nobody
T is for trapped
X is for xenophobia (fear of strange things)
Blackboard chalk is made of gypsum, not chalk.
Chalk is a type of limestone composed of the mineral calcite. Blackboard chalk used to be made from natural chalk, but it has since been replaced by compressed gypsum (calcium sulfate).
In 2003, Kyle Van Horn of Three Bunny Press decided to send a cameramail: a disposable camera attached to an oversized postcard with instructions asking the postal carrier to take photos!
On November 30th, 2003, an oversized postcard holding one disposable camera and a roll of 800 ASA, 27 exposure film was mailed from Lafayette, IN to Santa Monica, CA. A few days later, the postman knocked on the door of my friend and found him answering in his underwear. He did not understand the statement: "The Post Master wants to know why you are mailing cameras." as he had no prior knowlege of this delivery. Approximately 14 of the 27 shots arrived intact, all of which were taken at the Lafayette post office.
http://kvh.threebunnypress.com/projects/cameramail.html - via 11111001111
Not all the bandits in Sin City are one-armed. Here are a few different ways people have tried to beat the odds: 1. A Little Off The Top Here's how it worked. In the 1970s, the Mob coerced the Teamsters Union into making loans to a San Diego businessman buying four casinos in Vegas. As hidden partners, Mob bosses then "skimmed" millions of dollars from the joints by rigging slots so they showed winners when there were none, or by fixing scales so they underweighed coins. One estimate had the wise guys swiping $7 million in quarters in just one 18-month period. In the end, though, federal wiretaps and informants broke the scam. The Feds even tapped conversations between mobsters in the visitors room at Leavenworth Penitentiary, and in 1986, a dozen bosses from gangs in Chicago, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Cleveland were convicted in the biggest Mob-Vegas case ever. 2. Playing Your Cards Right Blackjack is a beatable game - that is, if you can count cards well enough to know when the deck favors the player, not the house. And while solitary card counters are relatively easy to spot for most casino security outfits, it took them six years during the 1990s to tumble to the strategy used by a group of MIT students. Using card-counting teams, complete with diversionary players - the cavalier math-letes raked in millions. One player recounted walking from one casino to another carrying a paper hat stuffed with $180,000 in cash. Amazingly, the MIT ring was never actually caught in the act. Some members retired. A few others were ratted out by a team traitor and banned from the casinos, which learned a lesson about the concept of team play. 3. The Genius Like a football quarterback, Dennis Nikrasch needed his blockers. In Nickrasch's case, however, they were blocking surveillance cameras while he worked his sweet computer magic on slot machines. Once the machines were rigged, the clever hacker vacated the premises, leaving it to confederates to win the jackpots. Cops have reported that the Nikrasch gang raked in at least $16 million between 1976 and 1998, even with a 10-year time-out while NIkrasch spent in federal prison and on parole. When he was caught again in 1998, Nikrasch indicated that he'd share his secrets in return for a lighter sentence. He got seven years - and apparently refused to talk. "I have no desire to explain anything to the public," he wrote to an Internet magazine in 1999 from jail. "Never smarted up a chump." (Photo: gaming.nv.gov) 4. The Mechanic Starting in 1980 in the back of his TV repair shop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Tommy Glenn Carmichael invented, refined, then manufactured devices for cheating slot machines. Tommy's bag of tricks ranged from coins on strings to light wands that blinded machine sensors, fooling them into dropping their coins. For most of two decades, Carmichael and his partners raked in millions of dollars. But his luck finally ran out when federal agents tapped his phone and heard him discussing a new device that would rack up hundreds of credits per minute on slot machines. In 2001, Carmichael was sentenced to about a year in jail, and was ordered to stay out of casinos. In 2003, he told an Associated Press reporter he was developing a new gadget, called "the Protector." It was designed to stop slot cheaters. (Photo: gaming.nv.gov) 5. And If All Else Fails ... Jose Vigoa was one cocky crook. After doing a five-year stint from 1991 to 1996 for drug dealing, Vigoa decided to change career paths in 1998. Well, only slightly. As the mastermind of a string of armed robberies over two years that rocked the Vegas Strip, Vigoa armed his outfit with high-tech weapons, body armor, and sophisticated planning. In fact, the Vigoa gang hit up the MGM Grand, the Desert Inn, the Mandalay Bay, and the Bellagio. Not looking to slack off, they even robbed an armored car in between gigs, and killed the two guards. Vigoa was tripped up, however, when video cameras at the Bellagio caught him without a mask during a robbery. He was sentenced in 2002 to life without parole, proving crime doesn't pay, even in Vegas. |
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From mental_floss' book Forbidden Knowledge: A Wickedly Smart Guide to History's Naughtiest Bits, published in Neatorama with permission. Be sure to visit mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog! |
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Young Me Now Me is a brainchild of Ze Frank (the man himself is an Internet phenomenon!). Basically, you can submit photographs of the "now" you imitating an old childhood photograph.
Here's the gallery: Link - via Boing Boing
It's only natural that the best-selling game of the 80s is being made into a movie. That's right. Here's a trailer for ... Tetris, the Movie!
Link [embedded YouTube] - via Blue's News
(It's a making of a blockbuster! Get it? Okay, I know. I'm sorry but I couldn't help it.)
