Well, it's kind of true! For more Bizarro, check out Dan Piraro's website and blog.

Kamariah Ali, a 57-year-old former teacher in Malaysia was arrested under the strict Islamic Sharia law and jailed for joining a "heretical" Sky Kingdom cult.

Two fascinating things about this report at Telegraph:
1) A Muslim born in Malaysia can't switch religion
2) The Sky Kingdom cult worshiped a giant teapot, which had since been demolished.

Link - Thanks Emperor! (More Info: Malaysiakini.com)

Bobby S. of Kitsune Noir blog wrote to us about his new Desktop Wallpaper Project:

Basically what I've done is contact all of my favorite artists and designers to see if they'd create desktop background which I'll be giving away to the readers of my blog. I really liked this idea because it's not only cool to have a desktop wallpaper by your favorite artists, but that it's also free and accessible by anyone with a computer.

So far there are over 60 contributors with names big and small, but all of them are amazing talented. This week to start the project off I've got Tim Biskup, fine art painter and Gama-Go mastermind, Mcbess, an amazing French illustrator who's going to be very big very soon, and IMAKETHINGS, a British designer with a knack for awesome monsters and colorful environments.

http://kitsunenoir.com/blog/2008/03/05/the-desktop-wallpaper-project/ - Thanks Bobby! (This one to the top is from Tim Biskup)

ZOMG! This is the funniest newspaper advice column I've read in a while. It's from the 15 June 2005 installment of "Ask Leslie," an advice column written by librarian Leslie Potter for the Hays Daily News in Northwest Kansas.

The concerned reader sent in this question:

"I hope you can help me with a problem I have with my godson. ... I found an unfinished correspondence to a chum of his in his hometown. In it he says he [is] going to to our local pool to "scout out some camel toads." ... I'm concerned he is doing drugs.

I tried to look for camel toads in a drug book, and I didn't find them, but I found references to some type of frog or toads that people in another country lick to hallucinate."

Snopes had a little more about the authenticity of the column (whether it was a real question or whether Potter made it up):

"There were several staff members at the library's front desk the morning the "camel toads" letter arrived. When I opened and read it, I was thoroughly puzzled, as I had never heard of either camel toads or camel toes. But when I read it aloud to the staff, they practically started rolling on the floor. And their explanation is almost word-for-word what I used in my answer. I kept the original letter as a memento - and to show people who didn't believe it could be real!"

Contrariwise blog has the larger scan: Link - Thanks Contrariwise!

More than 300,000 gallons of water per second was released from the Glen Canyon Dam into the Grand Canyon today.

This man-made flood is made to simulate natural ones that used to nourish the Grand Canyon's ecosystem:

"This gives you a glimpse of what nature has been doing for millions of years, cutting through and creating this magnificent canyon," Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne said after he pulled the lever releasing the water from the Glen Canyon Dam.

More than 300,000 gallons of water per second were being released from Lake Powell above the dam near the Arizona-Utah border, enough water to fill the Empire State Building in 20 minutes, Kempthorne said.

Link - Thanks kyax!

That's Israeli fisherman Novon Mashiah, who thought that it would be a good idea to pose with a 12-foot crocodile. Here's what happened:

The crocodile had swum towards the boat hoping to be fed fish. "I was shocked, the animal clearly wanted to kill me," said 27-year-old Mr Mashiah.

"One minute I was leaning over the boat teasing it for a picture. The next minute it burst out of the water with incredible speed.

"I jumped back and the croc landed on the boat and then slapped into the water. I was shaking."

Mr Mashiah's friend Doron Aviguy, 22, took the photograph from a bigger boat nearby. The two Israelis are working as fishermen on the South Alligator River in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Mr Mashiah said: "They come near the boat all the time, probably because we are fishing. I was laughing, but it wasn't funny in the end. I didn't realise that crocs were so aggressive."

Link (with much better, bigger pics)

That ugly fish has an air bladder (swim bladder or fish maw) worth its weight in gold (because it is used in Chinese medicine.)

Meet the Chinese Bahaba fish (Bahaba flavolabiata), which hasn't been seen in the coast of Zhejiang province for 50 years:

"It is dark brown all over, 1.2-meter long and 15-kg in weight," said the veteran fisherman Li who has already frozen the fish. "It's my first time to see this kind of fish."

A fellow 60-year-old fisherman who came with others to Li to get a glance of the fish told him in great surprise that it is Bahaba flavolabiata (Chinese bahaba) which have disappeared from the site for at least 50 years.

Due to its extreme scarcity, the air bladder of Chinese bahaba is said to be as expensive as gold in weight. More than a decade ago, another fisherman of the same county caught a Chinese bahaba of less than 3.5 kg but fetched for more than 100,000. Therefore, fishermen on the scene urged Li to ask for at least 1 million for his.

http://mathaba.net/news/?x=584202 - Thanks Rob!

Jodie Carey created this fearsome looking "bone" wedding cake out of plaster, steel, wire, and sugarpaste icing. Link | Her homepage - via Who Killed Bambi?

One theory is that the word "testify" was derived from the ancient Roman custom of men holding their testicles with their right hands before giving testimony in court.

And why did the Romans have to hold their balls before they could testify in court? It was so that eunuchs and women were excluded.

We should say that etymologists aren't unified on this: some say that the origin of testify came from the latin "testis" which means "third person standing by" or "witness." But that's boring. (Source: American Heirtage Dictionary of the English Language)

Martin Wattenberg and Marek Walczak's Thinking Machine 4 is not your usual computer chess. When you move your piece, the computer's thought process is then sketched on the screen as it ponders its move:

A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.

The orange lines are potential moves by black (computer) and the green is white (player).

Go ahead, just give it a try and watch the computer think: Link - via Cliff Pickover's Reality Carnival

The Force is strong with Sandra of Socake blog. Here's how she made the Yoda birthday cake:

I wrote the birthday message on the cake board the way Yoda would speek...."30 you are" but If I had more room I would have written "Happy Birthday you must have" (I forgot to take a photo after I added the writing)

Link (with a build log, of course) - via Star Wars Blog

We've all been told that we should "keep all our options open," but is that really the right thing to do? Not according to Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at the MIT:

In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish, even though it was obviously a dumb strategy (and they weren’t even asked to burn anything).

The experiments involved a game that eliminated the excuses we usually have for refusing to let go. In the real world, we can always tell ourselves that it’s good to keep options open.

And the scientists learned something new about human behavior: it's not about keeping the doors open. It's about avoiding the pain of watching one close:

Apparently they did not care so much about maintaining flexibility in the future. What really motivated them was the desire to avoid the immediate pain of watching a door close.

“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says. In the experiment, the price was easy to measure in lost cash. In life, the costs are less obvious — wasted time, missed opportunities. If you are afraid to drop any project at the office, you pay for it at home.

The experiment is kind of tricky, and would take a long time to explain here, so just read about it at this The New York Times report by John Tierney: Link (Photo: Viktor Koen) - via swissmiss

I'm loving this ad of a skeleton made from helmets and Craftsman socket wrenches and spanners! It was made by Y&R Chicago advertising agency, directed by Ken Erke and photographed by Mark La Favor.

Ads of the World has two more: organ and muscles - via Street Anatomy

If y'all remember the ill-fated Arby's self-service touchscreen ordering, here's something like it, but for expensive wine.

Andrew Blum of Wired Magazine writes about a trip to Adour, a restaurant at New York's St. Regis Hotel where ordering a glass of wine is like something out of Minority Report:

Choose a type and a bottle — hand and finger movements reveal its details (grape, origin, tasting notes, cost). The info unfolds with an animated flourish out of a flower icon; think Minority Report meets Sideways. Behind the alcohol-enabling magic is a lot of technology: Cameras and object-recognition software track your hand gestures — and ignore stuff like glassware — following the motion with a trail of projected white pixel dust. And all that vino data stays safe on a dedicated Web server.

Link - via AndrewBlum.net