Photo: hatayanaorg favorite blog on all things LEGO (here's one reason why), has a really neat post about the piece of Peace exhibit in Japan. It features UNESCO World Heritage sites built out of LEGO bricks by Kazuyoshi Naoe.
This one above is the Sagrada Familia cathedral, which looks just as impressive in real life.
Previously on Neatorama: 10 Divinely Designed Churches
Photo: Ben Ray at Environmental Graffiti (more there, and on Flickr)
Downtown Atlanta was hit with a giant EF-2 tornado with winds up to 130 mph on Friday. And if that's not enough, today the city is hit with a massive supercell thunderstorm (with another tornado warning).
I hope all of you over there are okay.
Be still, my heart! Swedish designer Måns Salomonsen created this awesome bookshelf shaped like a heartbeat in an electrocardiogram.
http://www.steneby.se/showPage.asp?PID=1175675264&Temp=0 - via Freshome (See also Freshome's neat 30 Most Creative Bookshelves Designs we blogged about a while ago) - Thanks Julia A.!
"When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it stays split."
- Raymond Chandler, author
This two-faced baby, born in a small rural village in Northern India just a couple of days ago, has already attracted a lot of worshippers:
Word spread quickly among villagers about the newborn baby girl.
The baby is seen as an incarnation of God and people make offerings and ask for the baby's blessing.
Link (with video clip) - Thanks Emperor and Holly Schroeder!
Two pygmy sperm whales had repeatedly beached themselves on Mahia beach in New Zealand and conservationists had trouble trying to get them back out to sea.
That is, until Moko the bottlenosed dolphin, who is well known locally for playing with swimmers in the bay, stepped in (swam in?):
Mr Smith said that just when his team was flagging, the dolphin showed up and made straight for them.
"I don't speak whale and I don't speak dolphin," Mr Smith told the BBC, "but there was obviously something that went on because the two whales changed their attitude from being quite distressed to following the dolphin quite willingly and directly along the beach and straight out to sea."
He added: "The dolphin did what we had failed to do. It was all over in a matter of minutes."
Link - Thanks kyax!
Need a job? Jacob Share of JobMob posted a compilation of 36 beautiful resumes that stand out from the boring ol' black-and-white ones job seekers everywhere make by the millions.
This one to the left is the resume of graphic designer and illustrator Kenji Enos.
I'm curious if they work: do beautiful resumes help you get the job, or are employers wary of people that stand out? Link - Thanks Jacob!
Helen and Jerry Stathatos got a beautiful garden and they know that they've got the bees to thank for it. So, for 20 years, they've tolerated a colony of bees that live in the walls of their house!
The situation at the Stathatos house on Virginia Road is getting sticky. So many bees live in the walls of the stately Tudor home that honey drips out of the walls, discoloring the wallpaper in the dining room.
The bees had been good tenants, peacefully coexisting for years with the home's human residents, Helen and Jerry Stathatos.
But lately the house has become a hive of activity, with bees buzzing around an upstairs bedroom, said Dustin Mackey, a bee removal expert with Bee Specialist. Mackey made a house call in late February to vacuum the busy insects from a window frame and seal the floor in the bedroom. "You walk into the house and it smells sweet," Mackey said. "I felt like I was in a jar of honey." [...]
Mackey said Stathatos decided against removing the bees because it might require them to pull down several interior walls, where "thousands, maybe millions" of bees have taken up residence.
Link - Thanks Preston Pittman!
If you like to go on vacations, move to Italy. The average number of vacation days every year there is 42 days.
In the United States, on the other hand, employees only get an average of 13 days of vacation each year.
The pic of Marvel Comics superhero The Thing of Fantastic Four is definitely one of the best examples of trompe l'oeil I've seen. It was drawn by Justen Ladda in 1981 at PS 37 in the Bronx, New York. Link
(click on the "Side View" to see how it was done)In 2007, Oklahoma made watermelon its official state vegetable.
Yes, you read that right: on April 17, 2007, the Oklahoma State Senate passed a bill declaring that not only is watermelon a vegetable (related to cucumbers, they said), it's also the state's official vegetable. (Source)
Other states have official vegetables are:
Arkansas - South Arkansas vine ripe tomato
Georgia - Vidalia sweet onion
Idaho - potato (what else?)
Louisiana - sweet potato
New Mexico - chile and pinto bean
North Carolina - sweet potato
Texas - sweet onion
Utah - Spanish sweet onion
Washington - Walla Walla sweet onion
Given how many horrendous karaoke performances we've been subjected to, we weren't at all surprised to learn that the guy who invented the karaoke machine can't sing, can't read music, and plays the keyboards about as well as your average third-grader. Songs in the Off-Key of Life We were, however, surprised to learn that poor Daisuke Inoue has made almost no money from his invention, and that he didn't even give it a try himself until 1999, his 59th birthday. (Photo: lvhrd.org) Inoue's happy-go-lucky ineptitude has been pretty much the driving force of his entire life. In high school he picked up the drums, which he chose as an instrument because, hey, all you had to do was hit them. Eventually, he took his limited talent and started playing with a Hawaiian band that frequented old dance halls from the days of the American World War II occupation. Inoue, shall we say, marched to the beat of a different drummer. Noticing this, the other band members quickly, and somewhat mercifully, realized that he'd be of better use on the business side, and he started acting as the band's manager. But he still served as occasional drummer, particularly on amateur nights playing backup for rich Japanese businessmen. Because Inoue can't read musical notation, he had to reply on watching the singer's lips in order to strike the right beat. One of his clients apparently found his drum technique flattering and asked Inoue to accompany him to a hot springs resort as his personal drummer. But Inoue couldn't go. Time Asia tells what happened next: "[Inoue] obliged by providing him with a tape of his accompaniment. The boss delivered an emotional rendition of Frank Nagai's 'Leaving Haneda Airport on a 7:50 Flight,' Inoue collected his money in absentia and karaoke (a term long used in the industry for house musicians – it literally means 'empty orchestra') was born." Inoue quickly realized he was on to something. With some help from his buddies, he built 11 prototype machines, kitted them out with amplifiers and background music, and then leased them to bars in Kobe. They were an immediate hit. But Inoue made one crucial mistake: He didn't patent his invention. Big companies quickly realized they could make a mint on machines and tapes and made their own. Inoue only went so far as to patent two things: a type of plastic-covered songbook for wannabe Frank Sinatras, and a concoction he claimed could ward off rats and cockroaches in more downscale karaoke joints. But hey, give the poor guy credit: He certainly did things His Way. |
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The article above was reprinted with permission from mental_floss' book In the Beginning. From Big Hair to the Big Bang, here's a Mouthwatering Guide to the Origins of Everything by our friends at mental_floss. Did you know that paper clips started out as Nazi-fighting warriors? Or that cruise control was invented by a blind genius? Read it all in the book! |
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The $7.2 million check used to pay for Alaska (Source: Wikipedia)
In March 1867, the Russian Empire sold Russian America, the territory that would later become the State of Alaska, to the US Government for $7.2 million or about 1.9¢ per acre.
Tsar Alexander II was fearful that he was going to lose the Alaskan territory (including the Aleutian islands) to the British in a future conflict. The colony was never profitable anyway, so he told the Russian minister to the United States to negotiate the sale.
Secretary of State William Seward sealed the deal and was promptly derided for spending so much money on a land so far away. Newspapers labelled the deal "Seward's folly", "Seward's icebox", "Andrew Johnson's polar bear garden", and our favorite: "icebergia."
In 1890s, gold was discovered in Alaska, and in 1968, oil, so Seward
had the last laugh. Today, the last monday of March is celebrated in Alaska as "Seward's Day."
Deputies in Ness City, Kansas, responded to a call from a man that said that there was something wrong with his girlfriend. This is what they found in the guy's bathroom:
Update 3/19/08: So how did the woman's butt get fused to the toilet seat? Discover magazine has the answer: Link - Thanks Chasey!Deputies said a woman in western Kansas sat on her boyfriend's toilet for two years, and they're investigating whether she was mistreated.
Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said a man called his office last month to report that something was wrong with his girlfriend.
Whipple said it appeared the 35-year-old Ness City woman’s
skin had grown around the seat. She initially refused emergency medical services but was finally convinced by responders and her boyfriend that she needed to be checked out at a hospital.“We pried the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital,” Whipple said. “The hospital removed it.” [...]
“She was not glued. She was not tied. She was just physically stuck by her body,” Whipple said. “It is hard to imagine. ... I still have a hard time imagining it myself.”
He told investigators he brought his girlfriend food and water, and asked her every day to come out of the bathroom.
“And her reply would be, ‘Maybe tomorrow,”’ Whipple said. “According to him, she did not want to leave the bathroom.”
