It's a classic prank some people refer to as "pulling a Bart Simpson", as that cartoon character similarly pranked Moe Szyslak.
Henrico County Public Schools in Virginia held a board meeting and invited public comment. Many people signed up, but did not show up to speak. The first was Phil McCracken, followed by other names that are racy when read out loud.
-via David Burge
食べたスイカの種を発芽させて、ここまで来たけど、身が割れてしまったので収穫。
— サンノジ（sannoji） (@sannoji30) August 30, 2021
直径は5センチ弱。
味はしっかり甘くて美味しかった👍
そして種までちゃんとあることに感動。
また、来年やってみよう。 pic.twitter.com/kGmtVfEWEZ
Twitter user @sannoji30 nurtured some watermelon seeds to life and produced an impressive pair of melons. Although they measure only 2 inches across, they are at least sweet.
TikTok user spacecaptainz should prepare his pet rat for a life of fame and fortune. With his tiny harmonica, this rat can entertain millions, drawing in ticket and MP3 sales. All he needs is a bass as accompaniment.
-via Nag on the Lake
Sometimes, when you have two problems, they cancel each other out. This is not an endorsement of the Molotov cocktail solution by Jason from The Good Place. It is unusual for two problems to eliminate each other, but surfer Shannon Ainslie experienced just that.
Ainslie writes in The Guardian about a surfing trip in South Africa. A Great White Shark bit him in the hand and dragged him under. Then a different shark tried to bite him:
Under the water, another shark swiped for my head and my shoulders, but missed, because the other had got me first.
That second shark ended up saving my life. Perhaps startled by the competition, the first shark lost its grip on me. I thought I was dreaming; everything seemed to slow down. I started to feel pain and the next thing I knew I was staring a shark straight in the face. I think the shark was confused because it stared back at me for a few moments as if in awe. Its mouth was wide open; I could see a huge set of teeth and a dark black eye. It bolted past me and I felt a shove from behind – it must have brushed along my back, but thankfully it had not bitten me. After it passed, I swam to the surface as fast as I could.
-via Nag on the Lake | Photo: Hermanus Backpackers
Each one of Marisa Stratton's classmates appears in oil paint on panels measuring 1 by 2 inches. It's part of a series of painting collections inspired by the pandemic-induced Zoom lifestyle, including a virtual infant baptism and an online birthday party.
Stratton comments that after she painted the set, she invited her classmates to critique her portraits of them.
-via Super Punch
Stefani's powerfully rhythmic "Hollaback Girl" rocked us in 2005. YouTube's greatest gift to humanity, There, I Ruined It has adapted it for the ragtime tunes of a century ago. The song speeds up so that Stefani is putting her audience back in their place at a faster pace. It's a wonderful way to enter and take control of the speakeasy.
Content warning: foul language.
For 32 years, actor Peter Falk played the role of Frank Colombo, a LAPD detective who could intuitively know who had committed murders that he investigated. In 69 television movies, Colombo gradually ensnared each murderer who thought that he was far too clever for the seemingly erratic, dim-witted detective.
Falk played other roles, including the grandfather in The Princess Bride. But he best known as Colombo.
Yet Falk did far more than just act. He was also an artist. A tweet by Diane Doniol-Valcroze alerted me to his self-portraits as Colombo. Pictured above is one sold by the Bonham's action house.
Don't just bring a bag. Bring a roll of bags. You need a backup plan in case your dog is backed up. Listen to your dog's warnings.
Oreo's new ad campaign suggests that new packages could help protect your packages of cookies from thieving kids. What kid (or adult) would actually want to eat cauliflower and rice? Yes, you might see it in the refrigerator, but you won't actually pull it out. Thus the cookies inside are safe.
Motor World introduces us to the Kurogane Model 1 Fire Trike, a Japanese-built firefighting vehicle designed in response the devastation of the region of Kanto in 1923 by an earthquake that triggered a tsunami, then a massive fire. Over 100,000 people died. This tragedy inspired a more systematic firefighting system, including emergency response vehicles that could navigate the often narrow confines of cities.
At the time, the Japanese motorcycle industry was booming. In 1941, the Kurogane company unveiled this design. Very few such trikes survived World War II, but a Russian museum came into possession of one in Malaysia. With an 1100-cc engine and leaf spring suspension, it was fully capable of hauling heavy equipment over difficult terrain.
-via Stuff | Photo: Motor World
I was impressed with not only Smac McCreanor's creative idea, but her masterful execution of the premise. It turns out that she's a professional dancer and actor, so it's no wonder that she was able to physically demonstrate the crushing of each object displayed in the Hydraulic Press Channel's emotionally soothing TikTok page.
-via Born in Space
Ddangerous Ddave loves hard rides on his Norco Sight C7. Here he is on a forested mountain trail, going at high speeds through bone-breaking obstacles. He never falls, but he does have the sense to look at one jump and say, "That's not solo ride material." Yet, at another, seemingly more challenging jump, he takes his bike airborne.
Watch it all, if for nothing more than hearing his joyful laughter.
-via The Awesomer
Political historian Robert Justin Goldstein writes about an extraordinary incident in 19th Century Sweden:
In another case of press repression which succeeded only in creating a martyr, the editor of the Swedish newspaper Stockholms Posten, Captain Anders Lindeberg, was convicted of treason in 1834 for implying that King Karl Johan should be deposed. He was sentenced to death by decapitation, under a medieval treason law. When the King mitigated the sentence to three years in prison, Lindeberg decided to highlight the King’s repressive press policy by insisting upon his right to be beheaded and refusing to take advantage of the government’s attempts to encourage him to escape. Finally, in desperation, the King issued a general amnesty to ‘all political prisoners awaiting execution’, which applied only to Lindeberg. When the editor stubbornly insisted upon his right to execution, the government solved the problem by locking him out of his cell while he was walking in the prison courtyard and then refusing him re-entry.
I encountered this story in the wonderful blog Futility Closet and decided to post about it here at Neatorama. But my efforts at verifying the story (which sounds too good to be true) came to nothing.
So I ordered Goldstein's book through interlibrary loan to check his source. Goldstein's source is a 1940s book series on Scandinavian historian by Swedish author B.J. Hovde. I don't have access to Hovde's book and am thus unable to track his sources. But given the contemporary scholarly book reviews of his work that I have found, I'd say that the likelihood that the story of how Lindeberg escaped is true is, on a scale of 1 to 10, about a 6.
Photo: Der Vollstrecker
Ayhan Tomak, a Turkish sculptor who specializes in wood, has many fascinating pieces on his website, his Instagram page, and his DeviantArt page. But I'm particularly struck by his mirror backings. They exhibit incredible fluidity--like they encapsulate shimmering pools of water in constant motion.
To be more precise, Madeleine Ravier referred to her invention as a "bicycle for animals." She did not restrict the design in her 1907 patent to horses.
Ravier concluded that, as human locomotion is more efficient on a bicycle, animals likewise benefit by an appropriately adapted vehicle. Weird Universe quotes a translation of her patent:
What man did for himself he can do it for animals, or at least for some of them; There is a way to increase the efficiency of their limbs by the intercalation, between these limbs and the field of motion, of mechanical devices receiving the reciprocating motion of the limbs, transforming it into continuous rotary motion, and ending in rotating parts; and the result obtained can be used to make animals move man faster and farther than has hitherto been done by using them.
