Tolly Moseley (aka Austin Eavesdropper), eats her way through an interesting nook in Austin called South Lamar. Anyone ever try any of these places? Personally, I'm looking forward to trying Lick at the next SXSW.

A wonderful, new exhibit has opened at The Peterson Museum in Los Angeles called Aerodynamics: From Art to Science. According to me and my 5-year-old, Jack, here are the highlights...

1. 1955 Streamline X "Gilda"

Built by the Italian coachbuilder, Ghia, in collaboration with aerodynamicist (is there such a profession?) and mathematician Giovanni Savonuzzi, the car nicknamed Gilda (pictured above) was inspired by Rita Hayworth's character of the same name from the movie Gilda. Sexist? Possibly. But don't forget this was 1955, folks.

2. 1937 Airomobile

This three-wheel automobile got more than 40 mpgs! However, Paul Lewish, who conceived of the vehicle, couldn't get financial backing and the beaut never made it out of prototype mode. Such a shame!

3. 1992 Oldsmobile Aerotech

The Aerotech was part of a series of experimental high-speed vehicles built by GM between 1987 and 1992. Indy 500 winner A.J. Foyt drove the first one, setting a closed-course speed record of 257 mph!

4. 1948 Davis Divan Sedan

Fact: You know those annoying corn silk/hairs? Well there is one strand for each kernel on an ear of corn.

Check out all of our illustrated facts here.

A couple weeks ago, I promised a couple interviews with members of the JPL Curiosity Rover team. Today we start with attitude control engineer Steve Collins, who’s been working for NASA for the last 20 years, starting with the failed Mars Observer orbiter, launched in 1992. Since that time, JPL has been responsible for numerous successful Mars missions, Curiosity, of course, the latest and greatest.

If you’ve been living under a rock the past couple months, here’s the quick recap: Late last November, Curiosity was set off on an 8 1/2-month, 354 million-mile journey to Mars. She’s the largest rover ever sent to the Red Planet, about the size of a Mini Cooper, plutonium powered and packed with all kinds of goodies to perform science experiments once landing safely on the surface of Mars. On August 5th, 2012 (Pacific Time), she successfully landed after completing the dangerous 7-minute entry, descent and landing which involved busting through the Mars atmosphere at about 13,000 MPH, a ginormous parachute to help slow it down and some down-firing booster rockets to bring the rover finally to a soft, safe landing.

Attitude control engineer Steve Collins was a key member of the team that flew the spacecraft to Mars and helped keep it pointed in the right direction, making small adjustments over the 8.5-month journey to make sure NASA hit their target, a spot close to the mountain range called Mount Sharp, which geologists on the team think will help them uncover more history about the water thought to have once flowed over the surface.

Steve was super generous with his time and gave the following interview over the course of about 30 minutes.

Name: Steve Collins

Grew up: in SoCal, watched the Apollo landing on TV with great interest and attended North Hollywood High School

While growing up: His parents fed him a regular diet of books about space

DI: Did you always know from an early age that you wanted to work with rockets?

SC: In high school I decided I’m pretty good at science but I wanted to diversify, so I took an acting class and a class in drama and started to get interested in that. When I was selecting colleges, I looked for places that had a theater department and an astronomy program because I was torn between astro physics or something like that and theater at that time.

[DI note: Steve attended UC Santa Cruz where he studied modern dance, acting, and Shakespeare in addition to physics.]

DI: So after college, did you go directly into rocket science or...?

SC: My father worked in the motion picture business (he was a cinematographer) so I worked in the industry for a while doing camera work and stuff like that. So after I graduated college, I went and did that for a while. I didn’t pursue acting professionally but have continued to do amaterur theater or underground theater my whole life.

I saw an ad in the newspaper for a position with a small aerospace company that I pursued. It turned out that I had taught myself the right computer programming languages on my Commodore 64 (6502 Assembler) just because I was curious about it but also I used it to do simulations for my Bachelor’s degree thesis in physics, which was around orbital mechanics and stuff. And so they needed someone to program an Apple II, which uses the same processor and they saw I was interested in physics and space stuff so they hired me. I worked there for 10 years.

There I learned how to do engineering and went to Colorado to support 13 GPS spacecraft launches and got a taste of spacecraft operations. So that became the right stuff on my resume to get a job at JPL doing an operations job.

DI: What was your first job at JPL?

SC: I flew the Mars Observer all the way to Mars but then we lost the spacecraft right at the end, which was a disappointment, but then I went on to a whole series of 6-8 projects here at JPL that were successful. I worked on the MER Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, I’ve done four or five different comet flyby missions which were interesting and fun.

DI: What was going through your mind when you knew you’d actually successfully landed Curiosity on Mars?

As previously posted on this blog, a brand new Webseries has launched called Hungry In (New York) (Los Angeles) (Austin) (Phildelphia) (etc). If the rest of the episodes are as good as the first, this YouTube premium channel show might just give traditional media a chomp for its money. Here's what Tubefilter had to say this morning:

The conceit of the show is simple: Six local food writers, each hailing from a different city, take you on a tour of their favorite places to eat. The foodie Wonder Team consists of New York’s Josh Ozersky, Los Angeles’ Adrianna Adarme, Philadelphia’s Brian Freedman, San Francisco’s Marcia Gagliardi, Austin’s Tolly Moseley, and Chicago’s Erica Bethe Levin. The show will thus profile not only the flavor profiles of various cities but also the differing attitudes of each critic. Each host is a member of Citysearch’s scout team...

Check out the premiere episode below and tell us what you think! And if you're craving even more bacon after taking a stroll through NYC's Hamburger Alley, be sure to visit our bacon store!

Hamburger Alley map created for Hungry In and used with permission by illustrator Brett Affrunti.

My son Jack, who just turned 5, has long been a geek of sorts, what with his own series of tech reviews over on the GeekDad blog and all. But the other day he outdid himself when I asked him what he wanted to be when he grows up. Give the soundcloud file a listen below and hear it for yourselves...

Note: Jack has not seen even a few seconds of ANY of the first 6 Star Wars films, but he can't get enough of the Legos, characters, etc. Should I break his heart and tell him who George Lucas is and how tightly THAT empire is controlled?

I recently took a trip to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in nearby Pasadena to interview a couple of the rocket scientists who successfully guided the Curiosity Rover to the surface of Mars. One of them is now involved with driving the rover around the Red Planet. I'll post those two interviews separately in the days to come, but I thought I'd whet your whistles with the shots in the gallery below. Most are of the mission control rooms that adjoin one another. These are the very same rooms that NASA used to control all the unmanned Apollo missions in the '60s, as well as practically every other unmanned flight to distant planets, commets, moons, infinity and beyond.

I have to say it was quite a rush being there and learning from the scientists first-hand. Of all the photos in the gallery below, my favorite is the close-up of one of the monitors you see in the mission control room. The screen tracks the position of every live mission to-date, including, of course, Curiosity, or MSL (Mars Science Laboratory). You can see that one down at the bottom of the list. Up at the top, at 35 years and still ticking, VGR2 - or Voyager 2, the first Voyager spacecraft to launch, and the only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune. It's the longest-operating NASA spacecraft ever. So enjoy these and stay tuned for the interviews to come...

Illustration by Maya Assad

Fact: An elephant can smell water 3 miles away.

Check out all of our illustrated facts here.

~Illustrated by: Chelsea Burdick~ 

Fact: An albatross can sleep while it cruises at 25 mph

Check out all our Drawn To Facts here.

We're launching a brand new feature tonight! Drawn To Facts will be published every Sunday night, featuring some of the best up-and-coming illustrators from around the world. Tonight's illustrated fact comes courtesy of artist Margo Murphy. Let us know what you think in the comments below!

Fact: More than 35 lives were lost between 1878 and 1890 during the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud, which stemmed from a dispute over the ownership of a pig.

As more and more of our time online is spent on our mobile devices, big companies like Facebook and YouTube are finally trying to monetize in the mobile space. I've been working with YouTube since it came out in 2005. You may recall that they never served ads up on the Web before videos for the first year or so. Even when Google bought YouTube, there was still a nice long period before we had to deal with ads. But if YouTube is to survive as a free platform, ads are inevitable, and so, today, I've finally seen my first ad on the mobile device before the video I wanted to watch started playing. 

Likewise, Facebook is starting to insert sponsored content into your mobile stream, which I first started noticing yesterday when I updated to their new (very fast and wonderful) iOS app. It's simple to skip past the ads, so they don't bother me too much yet, but if my stream becomes cluttered with these sponsored ads, I think I'd rather them offer a paid product that is ad-free.

How do you all feel about these changes? What's the best solution?

If this 5-year-old drummer doesn't blow your mind this morning, nothing will. The drum fill at the end, cued here, has to be John Bonham's ghost! Unreal. Rewind and watch the whole thing!

[update 8/27/12: this contest is now closed - catch us next time!]

This is going to be FUN for Pinterest members (established and new)! And maybe something we do pretty frequently, depending on how many of you get involved. So here's how it works:

1) Put together a wishlist board of items from the Neatoshop - stuff you really want, badly (minumum 5 items, but no max)

2) Be as creative as possible when coming up with a name for your board, or a theme for your wishlist

3) Add the hashtag #NeatoPinToWin to each and every item you pin to that board

4) Follow us on Pintererst!

5) Close your eyes and wish really hard for something on your wishlist! The Neatorama editors will get together over the weekend and pick a few items from a few boards and put them in the mail to you. Bonus points for funny or otherwise well-thought-out themes and creative board titles that make us smile. 

Here's a sample board we put together, just in case you're new to Pinterest and have no idea what we're talking about. Note that the Elmo backpack is pinned correctly, with #NeatoPinToWin, while the zombie foot dog toy is not.

Update 8/27/12: Here are the winners

This Irish Olympic commentary from a sailing event sounds like something produced by The Onion. Really really funny stuff here!

This morning we set a new record over on our Facebook page: 51 people liked, 12 people shared and 4 people commented on a photo of Earth, Jupiter and Venus, as seen from Mars. This, in and of itself, is no big deal. We've had status updates receive more than 10,000 likes on our Facebook page in the recent past. But the numbers I've just reported hit the status update within 1 minute and 27 seconds of posting it to the page! Very exciting!

So be sure to join the fun by LIKING our page. We've also got a Twitter, a Pinterest, and a G+ page, if you're so inclined, where we often have unique contests you won't find here on the blog. So come on over and say "hi!"