If the facility looks more like a train station than an art gallery, it's because the temporary and improvised art gallery is in a train station. This photo by Sara Scanlan is one of many displaying the artistic scene on BART, the public train system in San Francisco. These happy, creative people joined together for two hours on Saturday for BART Basil 2021, an unauthorized art celebration. Here's how participant and all-around Renaissance woman Danielle Baskin describes it:

Italian artist Giulia Bernardelli is becoming famous around the internet for her striking images made with spilled tea and coffee. After tipping over a cup of what is presumably the best drink available (she is Italian), she uses her fingers, brushes, and styluses to shape the liquids into famous or even original works of art.

Those are not the most common ingredients to use in beer brewing, but brewmaster Valgeir Valgeirsson is no stranger to strange beers. From his facility in Iceland, Valgeirsson has also brewed beer with seaweed, algae, Christmas tree stumps, and fish. For this Christmas season, AFP reports that he decided to make a beer with a traditional Icelandic Christmas dish--green peas and stewed cabbage.

The brewery made this beer, named Ora Jolabjor, in cooperation with Ora, Iceland's largest food production company. The can design resembles the cans of peas and cabbage that Ora sells in grocery stores.

Valgeirsson made just over 7,200 gallons, which sold out only very quickly. Consumers report that the smell and flavor definitely reflects the main ingredients.

-via Oddity Central | Photo: RVK Brewing

Military pilots may have to stay airborne and ready for action for long periods of time--long enough that they desperately need to urinate. One unfortunately common response for this need has been for pilots to intentionally dehydrate themselves to reduce their need to pee. But this also impairs their physical endurance and mental concentration.

The US Air Force recently announced a new type of urinal that may alleviate this problem. The Skydrate by Omni Defense Tech is major innovation in airborne toileting. The male version cups around the pilot's penis and sucks excreted urine into a bag.

The female version resembles a huge plastic maxi pad that, when wedged into the user's groin, likewise pulls away urine and collects it into a bag attached to the flightsuit.

This brilliant invention could also be implemented at other workplaces. Just imagine how much more blogging could get done at Neatorama if authors no longer had to go to the restroom during their shifts.

-via Core 77 | Photos: Omni Defense Tech

A few years ago, I accidentally turned on the subtitles on Netflix and, well, never turned them off. Now I watch everything, including shows in English, with subtitles on.

Pen Pearson, a critic at Slashfilm (/Film), does likewise. That's because he's noticed that it's increasingly hard for him to understand what actors are saying. It's not because he's suffered hearing loss. Movies are intentionally made this way now.

In his deep dive into the issue, Pearson discovered that some filmmakers choose a sound design that makes the dialogue difficult to follow beecause they often want to show hard, difficult situations for characters--the sorts of situations that might make it difficult to hear what's going on. If the audience can't understand the actors, they can empathize with the challenges of the character in that given situation.

Futhermore, actors vocalize differently these days. If I understand Pearson correctly, he means that actors aren't trained to speak clearly on an open stage, but to talk, or even mumble, into a microphone. This is a popular acting style that makes a sound engineer's work difficult. And because the modern visual style of movies calls for wide shots, it's not always possible to simply lower a boom mic over an actor.

Other trends contribute to this problem, such as the transition from sound design for theaters to online streaming video. Read about them at /Film.

-via Kottke | Image: Warner Bros.

Henry Kissinger was National Security Advisor to President Nixon, then Nixon's and President Ford's Secretary of State. He's most famous for negotiating the opening of diplomatic relations with Communist China, the US withdrawal from Vietnam, and nuclear weapons reductions with the Soviet Union. Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, so he's accomplished a lot in his career.

But, Kissinger once claimed, what he really wanted to do was to work as a weatherman.

He got his chance on Tuesday, May 21, 1991. Kissinger appeared on the show CBS This Morning. Coached by regular weatherman Mike McEwen, he described the weather across the continental United States, referring to regions of the US by towns named after famous cities, such as Paris, Kentucky and Athens, Georgia.

Source:

Rosenberg, Howard. "Forecast: A Trivializing of America Television: Henry Kissinger's Stint as a CBS Weather Forecaster is just the Latest Outrage as a Tabloid Mentality Sweeps Across the Airwaves during the May Ratings Sweeps." Los Angeles Times , May 24, 1991.

-via Weird Universe

Этому шедевру немого кинематографа я ставлю 10 из 10! pic.twitter.com/Z5oKNj8pQA

— Артём Дерягин (@DerArto) November 26, 2021

It's only one minute and six seconds long. In those 66 seconds, a lot happens. This plot is all over the place and moving constantly.

Allegedly, the events take place in Russia. This immediately rings true, but I'm at a loss to explain why I think that. I don't think that it's just the Russian text in the tweet where I first saw the sequence.

Whether this is real or just a slice of security camera footage, I can't wait to see the sequel, preferably directed by Michael Bay

-via Richard Chapman

Kudos to this creator.
The comedy is 🧑‍🍳💋! pic.twitter.com/V7kuURJghz

— Rebecca (@RebeccaReadsWLW) November 21, 2021

Literary TikToker (I'm going to just assume that's a thing for the kids these days, just like wearing an onion on your belt is for my generation) Lizzy imagines a scenario in which different incarnated fiction genres meet for their regular bookclub. They have decidedly firm opinions about the relative quality of themselves.

Notably absent is Alternate History, who was probably too busy accusing competitors of using Alien Space Bats, and Science Fiction, who is still world building instead of plot writing. Western's kids took the car keys away and can't get to the meetings anymore.

-via Rebecca Reads WLW

A Soju Bomb is a cocktail which mixes beer with soju, a Korean grain-based liquor with a very high alcohol content. Simply stirring the liquor into the beer is totally inadequate. The real Soju Bomb experiece begins with balancing the shot of soju over the beer glass on a pair of chopsticks. Knock hard on the table on which it sits to jar the shot loose. To fully prepare your brain for this experience, use something heavy, like your skull. Get your head nicely tenderized so that the booze has pain to numb.

If your shot does not fall in, try again and again, as many times as necessary, to mix the drink. The more times that you hit, the more motivation you gain to complete the drink.

Henry Temmermans has his priorities straight. 

The tabloid Daily Star tells us about this Dutch driver who noticed that another driver on the highway had passed out while still at the wheel. Her car continued to roll forward, more or less straight. It had done some damage, but she probably would have been seriously hurt if the car hit a solid object head-on.

So Temmermans guided his own car directly in front of the wayward Volkswagen and slowed until it hit him at a fairly low rate of comparative speed. He brought both vehicles to a halt. Once they stopped, he immediately ran to check on the woman.

-via Born in Space

This isn’t some children’s game. These aren’t friends killing time at a slumber party. These fighters are playing for keeps. They want to win. That’s why you can expect the upcoming Pillow Fight Championship pay-per-view event in January to be intense.

Steve Williams, the CEO and founder of the PFC organization, tells Reuters that most of his competitors come from combat sports and will act accordingly. They are using specialized pillows that won’t hurt their opponents, but nonetheless will be swung with skill and ferocity.

Embedded below is a video of one such fight. The action starts at the 0:41 mark.

I don't know the rules of PFC, but I could see how it could work with a point sparring system.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Fight PFC

Let us not doubt that the gentleman in this video was, in his best Samuel L. Jackson voice, expressing his exasperation at the number of snakes on the road. Who he is and where he is remain a mystery, but not his reckless courage.

Some people on the Internet are saying that this man picked up hundreds of snakes to toss them off the road. I think that dozens is a more likely count, although a number higher than zero is too many snakes to pick up without absolute certainty that they are nonvenomous.

Why does the do this? Let me speculate:

1. To rescue the snakes from getting run over by cars.
2. To impress his friends with his bravery.
3. To impress the ladies with his bravery.

-via Dave Barry

City of cable cars: the ups and downs of life with Wellington’s private incline lifts https://t.co/ZFIzRRnGDd

— The Guardian (@guardian) November 19, 2021

Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand, is built on a rocky coastline, so there's not a lot of flat land available for real estate development. Many luxury homes are built on steep cliffsides, which makes them difficult to access. To help, some of these wealthy owners have constructed private incline cable cars. The Guardian reports that the city of 215,000 people has an impressive 152 such private lifts.

There used to be more such cable cars--300, in fact. Then safety regulations required demolishing many of them. For some homeowners who kept their cable cars, they're indispensible because their homes are otherwise inaccessible.

-via Messy Nessy Chic

On the fourth date with my now-wife, we reached the point in the evening in which it was time for me to give my impression of the braying of a donkey.

What was the result? Well, let's just say that there was a fifth date after that.

I accomplished this despite not being a vocal artist, let alone one as masterfully skilled as Rudi Rok. This Finnish actor and director can deliver the goods on so many animals in precise detail. His thirsty dog even has the subtle clicking sound of a dog in need of water. His physical acting skills greatly contribute to these impressions.

-via Laughing Squid

Here at Neatorama, we seek to not only entertain our readers, but also inform them. The pursuit of scientific knowledge is a worthy goal for its own sake. Therefore let us pause from our usual fare of cat videos and oddly-cooked burritos to examine the dynamic field of biomechanics. Specifically, let's look at how breasts move about while women run on treadmills.

In a 2018 article in the Journal of Biomechanics, Elisa s. Arch and her colleagues noticed that previous studies of breast movement during athletic activity focused on the movement of the nipple. This is understandable, as the nipple is easy to track. But it is inadequate if one wishes to examine the flow and sway of breasts in three dimensions. Their research required six women to run on treadmills wearing tracking bras, such as the one you see photographed above. As a result, the researchers noticed that larger breasts tended to move more than smaller breasts and that most motion did not occur at the nipples, but at other areas of the breasts.

But clearly, as Deidre E. McGhee and Julie R. Steele argue in their 2020 article "Breast Mechanics: What Do We Really Know?", there is a great need for futher research and observation. Let the march of scientific progress continue.

Image: Human Kinetics