Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo created this spiffy Spider-Pig and Homer Simpson desktop out of Finder folders and document icons.

Bigger picture here: Link

We posted about Dede Koswara, dubbed the "Tree Man of Java," whose hands and feet were covered in bark-like tissues, before on Neatorama.

Doctors operated on Dede back in January and have now removed growths from his hands and feet:

Dede's ordeal began when he was 15 and cut his knee in an accident. A small wart developed on his lower leg and spread uncontrollably.

Eventually he had to give up work as a builder and fisherman, and scratch a living in a traveling freak show.

The documentary team took American dermatology expert Dr Anthony Gaspari to Indonesia to see if he could find a cure. Dr Gaspari, of the University of Maryland, concluded Dede's affliction was caused by the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a fairly common infection usually causing only small warts.

Dede's problem was that he has an extremely rare immune system deficiency, leaving his body unable to contain the warts.

The virus was therefore able to "hijack the cellular machinery of his skin cells", ordering them to produce massive amounts of
the substance causing tree-like growths known as "cutaneous horns".

Link - Thanks özi

We've posed about Nicholas Jones' book sculptures before, but it's worth another mention. Here's an interview with Nick at The Design Files (with lots of photos): Link - via The J-Walk Blog

To celebrate the coming of the longer and milder days of Spring, the Swiss city of Zurich burns a 43-feet tall bonfire called "Böögg".

And to make it more interesting, they pack the Böögg with explosives ... Ursi has more on the story and a time lapse video: Link

Photo: Jack Anthony

Kudzu is a climbing vine introduced into the United States from Japan in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Expo as a forage crop and ornamental plan. In the early 1950s, US Department of Agriculture encouraged farmers to plant kudzu to reduce soil erosion.

Fast forward a couple of decades later, kudzu is a fast growing weed that has infested about 11,000 square miles of the southeastern United States. It costs around $500 million every year in lost cropland and control costs.

Jack Anthony has a photo gallery of abandoned houses in Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina that have been taken over by kudzu, noting that they make "interesting natural sculptures": Link - via Cynical-C

The D.U.C.K.man, a website created by Sigvald Grøsfjeld jr. and dedicated to Donald Duck illustrator Don Rosa, has a neat scan of the Donald Duck Family Tree.

If you've ever wanted to know how Scrooge McDuck is related to "Dirty" Dingus McDuck, here's your chance: http://duckman.pettho.com/tree/american.html - via AQFL

BTW, most Don Rosa comics have the letters D.U.C.K. (for Dedicated to Unca Carl from Keno) hidden somewhere in the first panel. This is because Disney does not allow personal signatures in the comics.

When HP released upgrades to its high-end workstations, a company official released a statement praising the product that is so chockful of inane corporatespeak that someone just has to do something about it.

So Rob Beschizza of BB Gadgets created a game called Super Blockquote, based on the popular arcade game Breakout, where instead of bricks you get to destroy words:

HP released upgrades to its swanky high-end workstations, aimed at animators and other top productivity bananas. More dreadful than the specifications, however, were the words of John Thompson, vice president and general manager, Workstations, Personal Systems Group, HP.

Boing Boing Gadgets has deemed the standard HTML blockquote insufficient to reveal the expressive power of his business English. Hence, Super Blockquote, which arms you against the marketroid oppression of Thompson's prose.

Play it here: Link [Flash game]

Next time you think that a cloud looks like a company logo, it may not be simply your imagination.

Inventors Francisco Guerra and Brian Glover created a process to make "clouds" (basically soap based foams mixed with helium) in practically any shape you'd like (like the Mickey Mouse ears to the left).

They named their creation floating logo clouds "flogos": Link

A statue recently installed on the German bordertown of Simbach is causing a stirr in the neighboring town of Braunau, Austria.

Why? Because the statue is of a naked man riding a giant fish, symbolizing the personification of the Inn River, which marks the border between Germany and Austria. That's all fine and good, except Braunau noticed that the naked man is "mooning" their town!

Deputy Mayor Helmut Bogner, said: "This creature has his butt straight in our face. We, the people of Braunau, don't appreciate this gesture and we want it moved."

And the statue's name? "Aenus" the Latin name for the River (suuuuuree!): Link [translated from German, with larger photo] | Ananova article

In his project "Excelsior 1968", John Martz of Robot Johnny turned the photographs of every single person in his mother's 1968 Toronto High School yearbook into cartoons:

Last year I redrew my mother’s entire high school yearbook from 1968—over a thousand heads. Good cartooning, to me, is all about simplification, and this was a fun experiment in distilling each person’s likeness down to a simple cartoon version and learning to draw efficiently, with both speed and as few details as possible.

Link: Flickr Gallery | You can also buy the project in book form - via Laughing Squid

Hooray! It's time for this week's collaboration with What is it? blog: can you guess what this pistol is for?

Place your guess in the comment section - you're playing for fun and fame this week. No t-shirt prize. More clues (size, date, and close-up photos) at the What is it? blog.

A gunpowder tester, photographed at the Frasier International History Museum.

Because gunpowder varied in explosive power, gunsmiths needed devices to test particular batches. By the 1500's, elaborate powder testers were available. This one resembles contemporary military pistols and may have belonged to a military gunsmith. Pulling the trigger ignited a measured amount of powder in the tube atop the tester, turning and locking a spring-loaded, numbered wheel. The number at which the wheel stopped indicated the powder's strength. The development of self-contained cartridges during the 1800's made powder testers obsolete.

Here's a typical day in Brazoria, Texas, according to its sheriff:

When William Johnson made a couple of suspicious U-Turns at the intersection of Texas 35 and 288 early Sunday a state trooper pulled him over.

Then the trooper noticed a 6-foot alligator contentedly riding next to the back window of Johnson's car. Johnson said he found the gator on the side of a road.

But it was allegations that Johnson had been taking things out of a mobile home in the nearby town of Brazoria that sent him to jail on a burglary charge. Investigators found a hair trimmer and video game controller in his pockets. [...]

Early Sunday a resident of a local mobile home park said Johnson knocked on his door and asked for help hauling a big television out of a mobile home, Longbotham said.

"The neighbor told him that's not your house," the chief said. [...] "Just a typical day in Brazoria," the chief sighed.

Link - via Arbroath

Legendary gunfighter and lawman James Butler (Wild Bill) Hickok had a brother, nicknamed Tame Bill.

His brother's name was Lorenzo Butler Hickok. The origin of the nickname "Wild Bill" was unclear. One popular story told of how Hickok saw a man about to be beaten by a group of thugs and intervened. He drew his revolvers and threatened to shoot the first man to move. As nobody wanted to be shot, the crowd disperesed. (Source)

In 1876, Hickok was killed while playing poker in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. He was holding a pair of aces and a pair of eights, a hand that got to be called the "Dead Man's Hand."

Meet Orazi, the real life Garfield. The portly cat weighs 35 lb. (16 kg) - so heavy that its owner Laura Santarelli of Eupilio, Italy, had trouble picking it up! Link

Previously on Neatorama: Top 15 Amazingly Fat Cats (Orazio is skinny compared to these cats - it would've only come in at #10).

Opossums aren't the only animals that play dead - turns out that fire ants do it too:

When threatened by danger, the young insects will play dead to fake out an attacker.

"No one has ever reported this before, and it was a big shock to me," said Deby Cassill, an evolutionary biologist at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. "Ants from an attacking colony will come up to inspect them, and they'll be curled up just like a dead ant. Then moments later they uncurl and walk away."

Cassill and her students also noticed that as the ants age — some live six months to a year — they grow out of the curious behavior. Middle-aged ants tend to flee, while the eldest are aggressive and attack furiously.

"All worker ants are sterile females, so it's the cranky old ladies who are the ones fighting to the death," Cassill said.

We all should know better than messing with cranky old ladies: Link (photo: Scott Bauer)