Forget Forrest Gump - this is the best ping pong match EVAR!!

Link [video clip] (via SkyKam)

(Photo Rick Loomis / LA Times)

Richard Moriarty bought this 1974 Lamborghini Countach 10 years ago. Now, sick and tired of having it towed due to stalled engine, he decided to hang it on his wall as art.

Because Home Depot doesn't sell kits to hang cars as artwork, Moriarty hired a 70-ton crane to lower the Italian sports car through a skylight in his living room. ...

Moriarty bought the car 10 years ago, paying a collector $60,000. But the upkeep was a nightmare. The gas tank had rust damage, and the engine kept stalling. "I got tired of having it towed," he said. ...

Then a five-man crew maneuvered the 1,000-pound, engineless vehicle through the skylight and hung it from a steel-reinforced wall with loops of half-inch-thick steel cable.

"It's a beautiful piece of art," Joiner said. But Moriarty, in flip-flops, shorts and a T-shirt, wasn't quite satisfied. "I want to stencil some tire marks on the wall," he said. "Seriously."

A very interesting article at the LA Times: Link

The Human Marvels blog has this interesting story about Myrtle Corbin aka the Four-Legged Woman:

While at a glance one could plainly see four legs dangling beyond the hem of her dress – only one pair belonged to her, the other set to her dipygus twin sister. Born in Cleburne, Texan in 1868 - her condition was incredibly rare. The tiny body of her twin was only fully developed from the waist down and even then it was malformed – tiny and possessing only three toes on each foot. Myrtle was able to control the limbs of her sister but was unable to use them for walking and she herself had a difficult time getting around as she was born with a clubbed foot. Technically, the ‘Four-Legged Woman’ only had one good, usable leg.

Myrtle was a popular attraction with P.T. Barnum, and later with Ringling Bros. and Coney Island. Her popularity was likely linked to her showmanship – she would often dress the extra limbs with socks and shoes matching her own and this gave her a truly surreal appearance. Myrtle was so popular that she was able to earn as much as $450 dollars a week.

At the age of 19 Myrtle married a doctor named Clinton Bicknell. It was then that other aspects of her bizarre anatomy became evident. It seems that her twin sister was also fully sexually formed – thus Myrtle possessed two vaginas. She had four daughters and a son and it has been rumored that three of her children were born from one set of organs and two from the other. Whether this is true or not; it is medically possible. In Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle it was observed that both vaginas menstruated – thus indicating both were possibly sexually functional.

Myrtle passed on May 6, 1928, surrounded by family and friends.

See: The Human Marvels

The tremendous volume of water never stops flowing, However, the falling water and mist create ice formations along the banks of the falls and river. This can result in mounds of ice as thick as fifty feet. If the Winter is cold for long enough, the ice will completely stretch across the river and form what is known as the "ice bridge". This ice bridge can extend for several miles down river until it reaches the area known as the lower rapids. Until 1912,visitors were allowed to actually walk out on the ice bridge and view the Falls from below. February 24th of 1888 the local newspaper reported that at least 20,000 people watched or tobogganed on the ice. Shanties selling liquor, photographs and curiosities abounded. On February 4th 1912 the ice bridge broke up and three tourists lives were lost. ...

HOWEVER.... The flow of water was stopped completely over both falls
on March 29th 1848 due to an ice jam in the upper river for several hours. This is the only known time to have occurred. The Falls did not actually freeze over, but the flow was stopped to the point where people actually walked out and recovered artifacts from the riverbed!

Link

Flickr user Baikinange has this neat pic of a Mexican man's ex voto (a votive offering to a diety, given for the fulfillment of a wish) to the Virgin of Guadalupe, for saving him from alien abduction.

Link (via BurkinaLoveFaso)

From the website:

It is possible to put together three hands of three players who want to indulge in thumb-wrestling. A nodal network is formed. In a game of three, the player holding tight the thumb which is furthest down is the winner. All other thumbs (further up) have a walk-over for the two thumbs furthest down are frozen already.

Since humans have two hands the left hand can be used to connect even more players to the network. Thus, various possibilities pop up.

Link (via DeepFun)

Take a look at Mr. Deckart's collection of very neat satellite photos of our planet. Link (via Milk and Cookies)

US and UK scientists have proposed an alternative to the Big Bang theory of the universe:

The new ideas, reported in the journal Science, may explain why the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, the researchers say.

"At present the conventional view is that all of space, time, matter and energy began at a single point, which then expanded and cooled, leaving the Universe as it is today," said Professor Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University, New Jersey.

"However, this new theory suggests that there's a continuous cycle of universes, with each a repeat of the last, but not an exact replica.

"It can be thought of as a child of the previous universe."

Link

A new trend in China: team buying - basically mob shopping:

... Ms. Li and her brother joined 15 strangers at the store to demand a group discount on a new television, refrigerator, and washing machine. Salespeople grumbled at the tactic, but the group refused to buckle. After two hours of haggling, and several walkouts by group members, the store manager agreed to a 10 percent markdown on the three items.

Li, a marketing assistant, went home with a smile on her face. "We wanted to save money, and finally we did it," she says. "It's in our nature, whether we're rich or poor, and if we can save money this way, why not?"

Welcome to China's newest shopping craze, tuangou, or team buying. By combining the power of the Internet to compare prices with the stealth tactics of the flash mob, team buyers are driving hard bargains in the world's hottest economy. Dozens of team-buying websites have sprung up to catch the trend, which first began in online forums and chat rooms.

http://search.csmonitor.com/search_content/0511/p01s01-woap.html

If you like Flash puzzles like Samorost, you'll probably like NFCTD's eye-candy collage Flash puzzle. (Hint: For the first one, click on a flower, another flower, the heart, and an owl's face.)

http://www.nfctd.com/home.html (via Ursi's Blog)

Scott Elder wrote a very useful review of the best locks for your bicycles:

... I always feel a twinge of fear when I leave my bike on the street, worried that upon my return, I'll find nothing more than a busted U-lock.

... —in the fall of 2004, bicyclists discovered that many round-key U-locks could be picked with the plastic barrel of a Bic pen. Kryptonite, which caught the most flak from the scandal, exchanged more than 380,000 locks for pen-proof, flat-key models free of charge, and lock competitor OnGuard, which had already phased out round keys, got a big sales boost. Today, flat keys are the norm.

... To find out which locks work best, I pitted nine locks against each other from Kryptonite, OnGuard, and Master Lock: five U-locks, two woven steel cable locks, and two heavy-duty chain locks.

We've actually featured this clip before, but it just seems so appropriate for Mother's Day! Hit play or visit the YouTube Link (Thanks Sahan!)

If only you can give your Mom this heart-shaped potato for Mother's Day ...

Ellen Anderson said when she opened a bag of potatoes she purchased from a stand on North Main Street, she found the heart-shaped spud at the bottom of the bag.

"Only one person could make this potato like this, and that's God," Anderson said.

Anderson said she does not plan to eat the potato.

Link

Meet Lola, who's at the top of her class of bomb-sniffing rats being trained to sniff out landmines in Colombia.

The smartest rat among the first six that the government is teaching to locate explosive devices planted by leftist rebels, she has a 90 per cent success rate in locating explosive material in her laboratory training maze.

Police animal trainers, tired of seeing their explosive-sniffing dogs blown up by stepping on mines, hope the white-furred, pink-eyed creature will lead her classmates through upcoming open field tests and then into the Andean country's live mine fields before the end of the year.

At about 220 grams Lola is too light to detonate landmines that guerillas set to protect crops used to make cocaine, which they sell to fund their four-decade-old revolution. It takes about 400 grams to detonate a mine.

Link (via Nutmeg)

Fire-retardant foam accidentally filled an empty hangar in Allegheny County Airport, Pennsylvania.

"Our foam system appears to have malfunctioned," said Craig McDivett of West Mifflin Emergency Management. "High expansion foam is really nothing more than glorified dish soap.”

The foam kept coming and coming.

Officials estimate a little less than a million cubic feet of foam filled up 150 x 150 foot Corporate Air hangar.

Link (via Cellar IotD, who has another set of interesting photos of foam accident, this time at Ellsworth AFB)