And I'm Not Lying blog has not one but two strange video clips about '80s music.
The first is a YouTube video clip of Japanese impersonators singing "We Are The World" (the Stevie Wonder and Cyndi Lauper impersonators were hilarious! I think that it actually was Michael Jackson himself ...)
The second is Lionel Ritchie singing "Hello" while inhaling helium from a balloon. Positively bizarre!
Link [embedded YouTube clips] - Thanks Jeff Simmermon!
This game, created by This is Pop for Adult Swim, starts off with this little note:
In the beginning, there was a contest of strength amongst the most prominent figures in scripture to determine the mightiest. The role of this great rivalry was thought to be lost forever. Until now. Let there be Bible Fight!
You can choose Jesus, Eve, Mary, Moses, Noah, and Satan (with a mystery 7th player once you've beaten everyone) and fight in various biblical locales.
http://www.adultswim.com/games/game/index.html?game=biblefight [Flash Game] - via Vectorvault (who's running a little contest, highest score wins a premium collection of vector art) - Thanks Adam Jarvis!
"The next time I want to send an idiot on some errand, I'll go myself."
- Sam Goldwyn, movie producer and founder of Paramount and MGM movie studios (that 'G' in MGM stands for Goldwyn)
The following is an article from Uncle John's Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader Ever heard of Prince Philip? He's the Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II of England. About the only time he makes headline is when he, as one newspaper puts it, "uses his royal status to insult and belittle people." His public gaffes are so frequent that they've earned him the title "The Duke of Hazard." (Photo: NASA/Paul E. Alers [Wikipedia]) To a driving instructor in Scotland: "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?" To a Nigerian diplomat in traditional Nigerian garb: "You look as if you're ready for bed." On seeing a fuse box filled with wires, during a visit to an electronics company: "This looks like it was put in by an Indian." To a chubby 13-year-old boy at a space exploration exhibit, pointing to a space capsule: "You'll have to lose weight if you want to go in that." To a smoke-detector activist who lost two of her children in a house fire: "My smoke alarm is a damn nuisance. Every time I run my bath, the steam sets it off and I've got firefighters at my door." To members of the British Deaf Association, while pointing to a loudspeaker playing Caribbean music: "No wonder you are deaf." To a tourist, during a state visit to Hungary: "You can't have been here long, you've not potbelly." Speaking to British students studying in China: "If you stay here much longer, you'll all be slitty-eyed." On the "key problem" facing Brazil: "Brazilians live there." On his daughter Princess Anne: "If it doesn't fart or eat hay, she isn't interested." On seeing a picture once owned by England's King Charles I in the Louvre in Paris: "So I said to the Queen, 'Shall we take it back?'" |
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| The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out! | |
Illustration: Matthew Hurst
Last year, Discover magazine has a very neat post on how Matthew Hurst of Data Mining figured out what blog linked to whom and made this nifty "map of the blogosphere":
The blogosphere is the most explosive social network you’ll never see. Recent studies suggest that nearly 60 million blogs exist online, and about 175,000 more crop up daily (that’s about 2 every second). Even though the vast majority of blogs are either abandoned or isolated, many bloggers like to link to other Web sites. These links allow analysts to track trends in blogs and identify the most popular topics of data exchange. Social media expert Matthew Hurst recently collected link data for six weeks and produced this plot of the most active and interconnected parts of the blogosphere.
Some interesting observations:
2 THE GOSSIP OF GADGET HOUNDS
The bright spot here represents the popular site Boingboing, a “Directory of Wonderful Things” that links to oddly compelling online news from the fringes of the real world but mostly offers gossip about gadgets and all things high-tech.3 SHOW ME YOUR FRIENDS
This isolated, close-knit online community of bloggers uses LiveJournal, an online host that primarily serves as a social networking site. This blogging island is just barely in touch with the rest of the blogworld.4 I’LL SHOW YOU MINE. . .
This blue blob represents a balanced sociopolitical discourse. The prevalence of blue in this area shows that most of these links are reciprocal, suggesting a sort of metadialogue between bloggers who hurl headlines at one another. The brightest light belongs to syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin.
Link | More Blogosphere maps at Matthew Hurst's blog
H. Ross Perot Jr. (yes, the son of Ross Perot) piloted the first ever helicopter round the world flight.
On September 1, 1982, H. Ross Perot Jr. and Jay Coburn left Fort Worth, Texas, on a Bell 206 L-1 Long Ranger II and returned 28 days later. They flew on average of eight and a half hours a day, refueled 56 times and flew over 26 countries. (Source)
These are Skywalker Tallbikes, 12-foot-tall bikes built by Brad Graham. Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo asked him the obvious question: how in the world do you get on top of one to ride it?
JD: OK, and now the really OMFG part: how the heck do you ride this thing?
BG: The bike is very easy to ride if you trust it. Climbing the ladder while it is in motion takes some time to get used to, but after a few tries, I was able to get to the top with a coffee in one hand. Many people tried SkyWalker, and had no problem at all riding it.
Link (with photo gallery)
Mickey Feio blog is a Brazilian blog dedicated to showcasing ugly Mickeys. For no reason at all.
It mostly has Mickey Mouse, but Mickey Rooney made it a couple of times.... This one to the left is by Alair Souza.
Link - via Information Nation
The town of Nogales is split down the middle of the US/Mexico border (Arizona in the US and Sonora on the Mexican side). Think or Thwim blog has a neat compilation of photos of Nogales in 1898, when you can simply cross the border anywhere, and 2008 (with a 15-foot tall fence and border patrol agents every 50 yards.)
Link - via Incoming Signals
"Men who have pierced ear are better prepared for marriage - they've experienced pain and bought jewellery."
- Rita Rudner, comedian
There are things that you think you should be able to do with your body. But if you're like 99.9999% of people in the world, no matter how hard you try, you just can't quite manage to do it.
Here is a list of things that are impossible to do with your body, and the few mutants who can do 'em:
I can raise both of my eyebrows in bewilderment on how some people can raise just one. In fact, I know only one person in my life who can do this: my mother-in-law, who said that her ability just came to her during the pain of childbirth - and that this superpower was very useful in raising kids. Well, her and of course Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock: "Fascinating, Captain"), Sean Connery, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and Stephen Colbert.
Some people call this the eyebrow cock, and it is known as the universal sign of O RLY ... I mean, skepticism. The ability to raising eyebrows may be an evolutionary trait: baboons, mandrills and cebus monkeys raise their eyebrows as a threat gesture. (Source: David Givens / Center for Nonverbal Studies).
For all of you who want to do this (and yes, geeks who want to imitate Mr. Spock: I'm talkin' to you), it turns out that you can learn to raise one eyebrow. Here's the trick, according to wikiHow:
1. Start by keeping one eyebrow down with one hand and holding one up with the other. Keep practicing this in the mirror so you can detect the correct muscle movement to obtain one eyebrow up.
2. Once you are familiar with this and can do it quite well, try it with out using your hands.
3. Practice this in the mirror intil you get it just right
4. Scare and thrill people with your new talent!
Didn't work for you? Try the methods in this Ask MetaFilter thread or this Yahoo! Answer.
Photo: Gussy (Luke) [Flickr]
I once read a trivia that said it's impossible to lick your own elbow. And that 75% of the people told this immediately tried to lick their elbows.
Well! It's obviously not so impossible for some people. Supposedly, Guinness World Records get about 5 claims a day from people who think that they are special just because they can lick their elbows (Source).
Okay, it is kind of gross but it's fascinating. Gleeking (or gleeting / glicking) is like spitting - but not quite: the term means projecting saliva from the submandibular gland upon compression by the tongue.
Interestingly, the word gleek appears in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, where a character named Bottom says "Nay, I can gleek upon occasion." (The Bard meant it as "joke," though, not spit like a camel)
Y'know, twitch your nose like the witch Samantha Stephens of Bewitched.
Elizabeth Montgomery, the actress that played Samantha, actually got sick and tired of being asked to twitch her nose by her fans that she refused to do it after the series was over.
They should bring back Bewitched. I missed that show.
Your cat can do it. And so can the hippo and Jeff Goldblum. But only few other people in the world can wiggle their ears. It turned out that in 2006, scientists determined exactly why most people couldn't wiggle their own ears:
"The mechanism behind ear movements is sophisticated," says Bastiaan ter Meulen, who led the ear wiggling study, accepted for publication in the journal Clinical Neurophysiology.
Unlike other facial muscles, ear muscles have their own accessory nucleus, a control area for muscle function, in the brainstem, says ter Meulen, a researcher at Erasmus MC, a university medical centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
"Compared to animals, especially bats and cats, this nucleus is rather small in humans," he says. (Source)
But fear not, non-ear wiggling people! You can train yourself to do it. WikiHow explains:
Isolate your ear-wiggling muscles. You may be able to wiggle your ears, but it won't be that impressive if you have to raise your eyebrows or look awfully surprised every time. You may not be able to move your ears without moving your scalp, but you should be able to learn to move them without moving your eyebrows. Practice wiggling your ears without moving any other parts of your face.
I betcha Gene Simmons of the rock band KISS could do both easily, but most people can't touch the tip of their nose or their chin with their tongue. Rumor was Gene had a cow's tongue grafted onto his own. But Snopes, ever the party pooper, set the record straight:
But, as Simmons wrote in his autobiography, his unusual tongue was indeed the work of Mother Nature alone, a feature whose distinctiveness (and value) he first realized in his early teens:
I was oblivious, for the first thirteen years of my life, that I was endowed with a large oral appendage, my superlong tongue. It really was longer than everyone else's, and I was soon to find out that having a long tongue came in handy with the girls.
While we're still on the subject of tongues, there are a few tricks that most people can't do (just don't get a tongue cramp trying to do all these, mmkay?):
Just go ahead and try to to the last one, the smiley face, like YouTube user a51a did [YouTube Link, shaky video but still!]
Nope, you can't sneeze with your eyes open (well, without forcing 'em open with your hands, anyhow). Why? Because when you sneeze, the "sneeze center" in the brain "sends coordinated motor impulses along nerves controlling muscles of the abdomen, chest, diaphragm, neck, face, eyelids and various sphincters, as well as the mucus glands and blood vessels of the nose. All this happens automatically." (Source) You can't help it.
Now, if you did force open your eyes, would your eyeballs pop out when you sneeze? Adam Savage of The Mythbuster risked his eyes doing the experiment:
The Mythbuster: Will Your Eyes Fall Out From Sneezing? episode [YouTube]
We all have a ticklish spot or two, which are never a secret from the ones we love. Gentle tickling is fun - so one can be tempted to "auto-tickle" to amuse oneself. But alas, you can't tickle yourself, and scientists actually know why.
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London explains:
The answer lies at the back of the brain in an area called the cerebellum, which is involved in monitoring movements. Our studies at University College London have shown that the cerebellum can predict sensations when your own movement causes them but not when someone else does. When you try to tickle yourself, the cerebellum predicts the sensation and this prediction is used to cancel the response of other brain areas to the tickle. (Source)
I'm going to let Will Ferrell in the famous SNL yoga skit explain this one ("Look, I've done yoga everyday for three years ... now I've finally reached my goal"). Or if you prefer something more literary: There once was a man from Nantucket ...
All right, all right, this one's only for the guys: Why do dogs lick their balls? Because they can. And apparently, so can 2 to 3 out of 1,000 men in the world, according to sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. (Source)
As stand-up comedian Bill Hicks once famously quipped:
"A woman one night yelled out, 'Yeah, you ever try it?' I said, yeah. Almost broke my back. It's that one vertebrae, I swear to God, it's that close. I think that vertebrae is going to be the thing to go in our next evolutionary step. Just a theory and a fervent prayer. Yeah, now all the guys are going, 'Honey, I have no idea what he's talking about. I think he's a devil-child.' That may be true, but guys, yoooo u know what I'm talking about. I can speak for every guy in this room here tonight, guys, if you could blow yourselves, ladies, you'd be in this room alone right now. Watching an empty stage." (Source)
Because Neatorama is a nice blog, I'm just going to let you read all about autofellatio over on Wikipedia (warning: NSFW, obviously).
Okay, give this one a try: bend your middle finger like the picture on the left shows and put your hand on the table. Then lift your thumb, index finger, and pinkie. No problem, right? Now try the ring finger.
Stepanie Weaver of Science Made Simple explains why you can't:
The tendons in your fingers are independent from one another apart from the ones in your middle and ring finger. These tendons are connected, so that when your middle finger is folded down you cannot move your ring finger. It feels like your ring finger is stuck!
Think you can multitask? Try this: while sitting on a chair, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles. Then, while doing that, draw the number 6 with your right hand. You can't help it: your foot will change direction.
Similarly: move your right leg in anti-clockwise circles and simultaneously draw the number 8 with your right hand.
Another tricky thing to do: simultaneously rotate the index fingers of both hands clockwise. Do it slowly at first, but then pick up speed. Try to go faster and faster, and pretty soon your two fingers will be going in opposite directions!
Well, the steps are easy enough: 1. Make a fist, and 2. Insert into mouth - but most people can't do it, except the few (all women it seems) who have a) small fists and b) big mouths!
If you've got more things that seemingly easy to do but are actually impossible, I'd love to hear them - please add them to the comment section.
"Michael Jackson was a poor black boy who grew up to be a rich white woman."
- Molly Ivins, American newspaper columnist and author
Before anti-smoking groups had their way, Mr. Potato Head's favorite accessory was a smoking pipe.
The pipe was discontinued by Hasbro in 1987. (Image: wm.edu)
The original Mr. Potato Head was an actual potato. In the early 1950s, as a young boy in a poor farming family, George Lerner took potatoes from his mother's garden and used grapes as eyes and a carrot as a nose to make a doll for his younger sister.
Hooray! Here is this week's collaboration with What it it? blog: can you guess what this gruesome claw-like object is for?
Place your guess in the comment section. Please post no URL, let others play ... No prize this week, so you're playing for fun and bragging rights only.
For more clues, see: What is it? Blog. Good luck!
Update 3/14/08 0 - the answer is:A coal lifting device, used when adding coal to a fire, it protects the hand from flames and also from contact with the coal, patented in 1896, number 567,087.
