It's A Wonderful Life, the internet edition: Link

Alan Dean got upset when he took a closer look at the free Virgin Mobile wrapping paper his 12-year-old daughter got from Canada's cinema chains Famous Players.

The wrapping paper, part of an advertising campaign by Virgin Mobile Canada, depicts stylized angels kissing and sexually touching each other. The male angel is touching the female's breast, while the female angel has her hand on the male's genitals.

Famous Players has since pulled the wrapping paper from its promotion. http://www.canada.com/ottawa/story.html?id=c1806e52-9ced-4cb6-8486-7cb2d887a2ca&k=53824

For more of Scott Greene's obsession, er... artwork with parabolic dishes, see: http://www.scottmgreene.com/index.html

Shannon Goff made this helicopter from cardboard! http://www.telegraphart.com/sg.htm (don't miss the piano!)

Jack "The Matchstick Man" Hall made violin, acoustic guitar, ukulele, and other musical instruments out of matchsticks!

According to his son Tony's website:

This one-of-a- kind 1984 ukulele was made entirely from used wooden matchsticks...10,000 of them painstakingly glued together with 2 lbs of hide glue.

Link to Tony Hall's website | Another Link

Rutge's William Brown and Robert Trivers led a study in which they measured the degree of body symmetry in children and its correlation in their lives.

They found out several interesting things:

- Jamaican girls and women are more likely to cradle dolls and babies, respectively, on their left side of the body if their ears are symmetrical.

We interpret these results as making sense because information going into the left ear (and left visual field) go immediately to the right half of the brain, which is specialized for interpreting emotional information (such as is conveyed in a baby?s voice and actions).

- Girls that are more symmetric are more attractive

- Lower dermatoglyphic asymmetry (whatever it is) tracks with academic achievement

And, this just in:

- Symmetric people are better dancers!

The new study involved 183 Jamaican teenagers, ranging between 14-19 years old, who danced while their movements were captured using motion-capture cameras similar to those used in video games and movies to give computer-generated characters fluid movements.

Women watching the recordings preferred the dances of men who were more symmetrical, while men were more impressed by the dances of more symmetric females.

Link to Triver's website | Live Science Article

Bill Powers of Anchorage, Alaska, built this 16-foot hand-packed snow man called "Snowzilla". http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/12/20/national/a043949S25.DTL

I can't say it any better than this news article:

A group of 40 people dressed in Santa Claus outfits, many of them drunk, went on a rampage through Auckland, New Zealand's largest city, robbing stores, assaulting security guards and urinating from highway overpasses, police said Sunday.

Alex Dyer, the organizer of the "event" (if you can call it that, downplayed the riot: http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3515997a10,00.html

Also checkout Santarchy | Wikipedia entry

Texas A&M University psychologist Gerianne Alexander and colleagues discovered that just like little boys and girls, male and female monkeys like to play with different toys.

Like little boys, some male monkeys moved a toy car along the ground. Like little girls, female monkeys closely inspected a doll. Males also preferred balls while females fancied cooking pots. Both were equally interested in neutral objects such as a picture book and a stuffed dog.

Link (via J-Walk Blog)

Can you spot all 27 creatures?

Ryan and Dave, two identical twins, have a very weird idea of extreme body modifications. Here's what they say in an interview with Body Modification Ezine:

RYAN: After discussing and thinking about it very seriously for about a year, we decided to take the big step. To put it simply, Dave had his entire right arm (since we're left handed) amputated at the shoulder and we surgically reattached it immediately behind my right pectoral muscle.

Link

UPDATE: It's an April Fools Joke, everybody - Please don't propagate story as true (like I did).

Clarence Olberding caught a very unusual fish out of Holmes Lake, Nebraska.

This fish didn't have a chance. A rainbow trout pulled out of Holmes Lake last weekend had double the chance to get hooked: It had two mouths.

Link

What? Ya didn't know that Mr. T is such an awesome dancer?

I pity the fool that doesn't check this out: Link

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin initiated a program in the early 1920s to create a horde of half-man half-ape super soldier with no feeling of pain or fear.

The Soviets drafted their top animal-breeding expert into the program. Ilya Ivanov, who previously had set up the world's first centre for the artificial insemination of racehorses, set off for West Africa to conduct his first experiments in inseminating chimpanzees.

Meeting little success, Ivanov turned his efforts around, setting up a facility in Stalin's home republic of Georgia to fertilise human volunteers with monkey and ape sperm. Not surprisingly, the efforts were a total failure.

For his expensive failure, he was sentenced to five years' jail, later commuted to five years' exile in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,17630955-13762,00.html | Another Link