Bike riding is very popular in Norway, especially in the city of Trondheim. But there's a steep hill in that city called the Brubakken that most bicyclists won't try to climb. It's just too steep.
So in 1993, the city built a bicycle escalator. It recently upgraded the escalator into the one you see pictured here. It's a lift that moves at about 3.4 miles per hour up a 427-foot hill with a gradient of about 10-18º.
Push a button on the control panel at the bottom, and a small metal plate moves up the hill. Bicyclists can brace a foot against this plate and ride it up to the top of the hill.
The lift is called the Trampe or CycloCable. The inventor, Jarle Wanvik, hopes to market his design across the world.
How did the writers come up with the name "Indiana"? That was the name of George Lucas's dog. The lovely Willie Scott was also named after a dog--Steven Spielberg's. These are just 2 of 53 fascinating facts about the Indiana Jones movies rounded up by BuzzFeed's Keely Flaherty. Here are some more:
5. Lucas originally didn’t want to cast Harrison Ford since he’d already been in two of Lucas’ films.
6. Tom Selleck was originally offered the role of Indiana, but CBS prevented him from taking the role because of his involvement in Magnum, P.I. Spielberg later wrote Selleck a “wonderful letter” saying Selleck could work for him anytime.
21. The club owned by the villainous Lao Che in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is called Club Obi Wan, a nod to Star Wars.
48. In the scene when Indiana and his father are sitting at a table on the zeppelin, neither Ford nor Connery is wearing pants. Connery thought he’d sweat too much if he wore pants, and Ford decided to join him.
There are good movies. There are even great movies. But every moive--and I do mean every movie--can be improved simply by adding Batman as a character. The blog It's Better with Batman is dedicated to proving that by photoshopping the Dark Knight into famous scenes.
But all of us at Neatorama promote an open exchange of ideas, even heretical ones. So if you wish to argue that a movie could not be improved by adding Batman, please state your case in the comments.
Kevin Whitney is a farmer in Chickasa, Oklahoma. One day last October, he leaned over a grain elevator while inspecting its interior. His cell phone fell out of his shirt pocket and into a silo containing 280,000 bushels of grain.
Whitney assumed that it was lost. But it wasn't. The phone was going on a long journey down the Arkansas and then Mississippi Rivers until it arrived at a depot in Convent, Louisiana. Then it was loaded onto a ship that passed through the Panama Canal until it arrived in northern Japan.
There, another man found the phone and tried to locate its owner. KFOR News reports:
“The man on the other end said, ‘is this Kevin Whitney?’ I said yeah this is Kevin. He said, ‘did you lose a cell phone?’ I said yeah I lost a cell phone last fall.”
A worker at a grain mill in Japan mailed the phone back to Louisiana and from there it was sent to Kevin in Chickasha.
“It’s crazy I can’t believe it. What really shocked me about it all was what a small world it is. There a lot of a lot of meaningful pictures on it so we are real glad to get the phone back,” said Whitney.
The chef behind the food blog Oh, Bite It! thinks that these confections "might be my all-time craziest, mind-blowing mash up EVER!" They're brilliant! She took Twinkies, wrapped them in spring roll pastry sheets, then deep fried them. A bit off powdered sugar added to the visual appeal and texture. May I suggest dipping them in Nutella?
It's always adventure time when you have a library card! And with your library card barcode number on the back, you can access from your treehouse many digital resources from before the Mushroom War.
The Burbank Public Library of Burbank, California is celebrating its one hundredth anniversary. To mark the occasion, it's issuing library cards showing characters from popular children's television shows, including Regular Show and Dora the Explorer.
Hey, Ice King! We've already talked with you about searching for, uh, "princesses" on the public access computers! You're now banned from the building.
Bethany Townsend has had Crohn's Disease since the age of 3. When she was 11, she had 16 inches of her intestines taken out. 4 years ago, her intestines ruptured. She had an MRSA infection that almost killed her.
Now Townsend has to wear two colostomy bags. Her stool collects in these bags, which she must regularly empty and clean.
Some people who have had colostomies prefer to hide their medical appliances. They feel embarrassed by them. But Townsend is not one of those people. She explains that "Finally after three and a half years, I decided that my colostomy bags shouldn't control my life."
Twins Alexandra and Evgenia made this marvelous X-Men helmet that gives a bit of realism to any Magneto cosplay. It's made of foam coated with glass fiber and putty. There are neodymium magnets embedded in the top.
The helmet may not block telepathy, but it could help you escape from prison if your guard has too much iron in his blood.
Any idiot can cut a tree down. A skilled woodcutter can choose the general direction in which it falls. But a master lumberjack can move a tree with surgical precision.
The roofs of the two buildings were about 4 feet apart. The tree had to fall through the middle of this narrow channel. Arranging this drop required precise planning:
This is not a "Lucky Shot". This had been planned and the ground prepared out there in the distance so the tree would not fish tail or twist when it hit the ground. The tree was perfectly straight and limb balanced. The falling cuts were gunned to the exact spot half way between the buildings. An appropriate face cut was used.
It worked perfectly:
No, the buildings were not slated for demo. I have insurance. The Service line was down and coiled on the deck to make room for the trees that were behind the location of the camera.
The deck was rotten and replaced by owner after we logged the lot. I talked to him about that ahead of time and he gave us the go ahead to dent the deck if we had to. The steps were the only damage.
I hung plumb bobs from the eaves of each roof line to the ground and drove stakes there. Then I measured between the stakes and drove a third stake half way between the two.
From this stake, I measured to each corner of my falling cut on the stump the exact same distance to each corner.
I used a birdsmouth cut on the face so as to keep the tree on the hinge and stump all the way to the ground.
The most important factor was that the tree was the straightest tree on the lot and the limbs were well balanced. By that I mean the limbs were the same size and weight all the way around the tree top, so when the tree began to fall, they didn't influence the cast or drift of the tree.
The owner took the money from the log sale and remodeled with a new nicer deck, and the most awesome living room I have ever seen in an old mobile home.
Watching a skilled craftsman at work is a wonderful experience.
In the above video, the tree starts to fall at about 1:05. Be sure to watch Scott's reaction at 1:20.
The Mueller family consists of Bob and Dareda and their three grown sons. They used to live in a luxurious house and horse ranch in Missouri until the recession wiped them out. They still live in an opulent home. But it doesn't belong to them and they now work at a McDonald's. That's because in addition to flipping burgers, they are showhome managers.
The house they now live in is owned by a wealthy woman who wants to sell it. Her realtor wants the house always ready to be shown to prospective buyers.
The Muellers pay a mere $1,200 per month to rent this mansion. To get that rate, they have to keep the house in pristine condition, ready to be shown at a moment's notice. They also must be prepared to move out immediately if the house sells.
It's a demanding lifestyle because the realtor has specific and detailed standards for how everything in the home is arranged. Drew Harwell of the Tampa Bay Times reports:
When the Mueller family sits for dinner, the leftover broccoli and crepes are already wrapped in plastic, the kitchen is beyond spotless, and the rest of the home is so tucked-away tidy it looks like they just moved in. In a way, they have: Every inch of furnishing, every little trinket and votive candle, sits precisely as designers placed it five months ago. [...]
The home must remain meticulously cleaned and preserved: the temperature precisely pleasant, the mirrors crystalline clear. If a prospective buyer wants to see the home, they must quickly disappear. And when the home sells, they must be gone for good, off to the next perfect place.
Why does this market exist? Because a lived-in home sells faster than an empty home:
That they do everything an owner would do — sleeping, making memories, learning the home's quirks and secrets — imbues an otherwise-empty home with an unmistakable energy, say executives with Showhomes Tampa, the home-staging firm that moves them in. It also helps the homes sell faster, and for more money.
"They have to live a very different, very difficult life," said Kim Magnuson, a sales director. Added franchise owner Linda Saavedra, "The home managers act like human props … and (with buyers) it's like magic. It works phenomenally well."
A showhome manager can live in an opulent home for the same price as a much smaller apartment. But it can be hard to enjoy that house because everything that the manager does inside of it is regulated and inspected:
All surfaces must be regularly cleaned; weeds eradicated, car oil spots removed. Clothes in closets are to be organized by color, and contestable items — heavily religious books, personal photos — must be removed or neutralized. Every item has a rule, and everything must be exact: the rotation of pillows, the fold of towels, the positioning of toothbrushes. Even the stacks of novels casually left on the bookshelf are placed and angled with pinpoint detail.
Gatherings of more than 10 people require approval, and managers must always be prepared for surprises. Dareda has raced across town to get the home "show ready": lights on, soft music playing, Febreze Fluffy Vanilla subtly spritzed. She said, "You just think … by golly, we're going to just go do what it takes." A training manual states, "Our motto is 'A SHOWING IS NEVER REFUSED.' "
Now if you're asking yourself, "What did I just read?!" take comfort in that you're not alone.
.@maxwellarm That article is my new favorite thing. It's like a Tom Wolfe novel masquerading as a Tampa Bay newspaper feature.
Jörg Peitzker calls his invention Paleo Barefoots. They’re chainmail running shoes designed specifically for trail use.
His argument is that sneakers isolate the runner from the path, providing no feedback and thus increasing the likelihood of joint injury. Running barefoot provides complete feedback, but also puts the runner at risk of stepping on something sharp and painful. Additionally, running barefoot on mud can get slippery.
Peitzker thinks that his chainmail shoes provide the right balance between feeling the road and getting injured by it. Chainmail also provides excellent traction. And if you run through mud or water, it’s easy to wash and dry off.
Additionally, these shoes provide a +5 armor bonus.
To the best of his knowledge, Officer Joel Zwicky of the Green Bay Police Department in Wisconsin is the only skateboard cop in the world.
Many other officers ride skateboards for fun. Zwicky does, too. But this custom skateboard with flashing red and blue lights in the front and back is his official patrol vehicle.
It's his tool to connect with people in the skateboarding community and in parks. The skateboard is a great way to start conversations and form relationships.
So far, Zwicky has pulled over only one person from his skateboard. He once saw a man riding a motorcycle on a park path. So he made a traffic stop from his skateboard and gave the rider a citation.
The project, which measures about 12 by 14 inches, took about 95 hours of work. That's intense! On reddit, she expresses a sentiment familiar to all crafters:
I can see some flaws, of course, and some things I would have done differently if I had more time. I really wanted to get it done in time for my kid's birthday. And I was really ready to be DONE at that point.
You can see more pictures of her crafting work on Flickr.
The prisoners, ages 11-14, were kept in Djanogly City Academy under the watchful eye of head teacher Elaine Crookes, the toughest commandant in all of Nottingham, UK. But the students were mindful of their duty to escape and rejoin their national forces. So they discreetly swiped spoons from the mess hall and hid along the 12-foot tall metal fence that surrounded the camp. Unfortunately, they had to abandon their attempt before getting caught.
Guards found their tunnel and equipment, so they'll have to use a different method in the future. BBC News reports:
The hole has been filled in and the fence reinforced, the school said.
In an email sent to staff, teachers were warned to be on the lookout after a large quantity of cutlery was found near a hole at the bottom of the fence. […]
The email added that the hole has been filled in and a metal bar placed across the section of the fence to prevent a repeat attempt.
