Archaeologists excavating a 2,200-year old tomb in Turpan, China, have found a unique prosthetic leg design. It was used by man who appeared to have a deformed leg. He was unable to straighten the knee joint, which rested in the socket of the prosthesis. The base isn't shaped like a human foot, but a horse's hoof. Live Science quotes the journal Chinese Archaeology:
The prosthetic leg was "made of poplar wood; it has seven holes along the two sides with leather tapes for attaching it to the deformed leg," the archaeologists wrote. "The lower part of the prosthetic leg is rendered into a cylindrical shape, wrapped with a scrapped ox horn and tipped with a horsehoof, which is meant to augment its adhesion and abrasion."
"The severe wear of the top implies that it has been in use for a long time," they added.
"The zinnia plant is very different from lettuce," Veggie project manager Trent Smith said. "It is more sensitive to environmental parameters and light characteristics. It has a longer growth duration between 60 and 80 days. Thus, it is a more difficult plant to grow, and allowing it to flower, along with the longer growth duration, makes it a good precursor to a tomato plant."
There's no such thing as bad publicity, right? When you're trying to break into the music business, never miss a chance to get someone to listen to your rhymes. Perhaps that's why a man in Delray Beach, Florida handed police officers his homemade rap CD when they pulled him over for speeding through a school zone. Kate Jacobson writes for the Sun Sentinel:
Officers in a golf cart followed the cars, pulled into the center of the road and forced the three cars to stop. When they walked up to [redacted--ed.]'s car, they asked him for his driver's license.
He pulled out his new CD. One of the other people in another car yelled out to the officer that they were just at the school to pick up a friend.
The problem: after trudging through the snow, your boots have gotten wet and muddy. You want to take them off, but you don't want to get your hands dirty.
The solution: wedge your partner's boots between yours, then lift up. Just take turns to get both pairs of boots off cleanly and quickly.
When its batteries are fully charged, her arm lasts about 8-10 hours. Her charger is apparently compatible with an outlet available at mobile device charging stations--a feature that recently came in handy.
It is a thing of beauty. Oh, we've seen the old rock-inside-a-washing-machine-trick before. But YouTube user bootsowen takes the destructive magnificence of that experience to a whole new level by putting the halpess victim on a trampoline before starting the execution.
Except for Neatorama, of course, because it has readers that are remarkably intelligent, kind, and good-looking. Otherwise, I'll spend the rest of my day at Cat Cosplay, which dresses up cats in highly realistic costumes of pop culture characters, such as Spock from Star Trek, Harry Potter, and Marty McFly.
During the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944, German forces surrounded and cut off the US Army's 101st Airborne Division under the command of Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe. The Americans were vastly outnumbered and outgunned. The Germans appeared to be in a position to annihilate them.
General Heinrich Freiherr von Lüttwitz sent a message under a flag of truce, urging McAuliffe to surrender. McAuliffe's legendary reply was simple: "Nuts!"
And with that, the great orator and general Anthony McAuliffe became a symbol of American grit. Now you can read the full story of this incident as related by Kenneth J. McAuliffe, Jr., General McAuliffe's nephew.
He explains that General McAuliffe was initially confused by the message. He thought that the Germans wanted to surrender to him, not the other way around:
Pastafarians are members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, an organization that mocks people for having religious beliefs. Some of them wear colanders on their heads as a way to make fun of personal religious practices. As we've noted in the past, sometimes they try to get their driver's license photos taken while wearing their colanders, leading to legal battles with governments.
That's backfired for Andrei Filin of Russia. Government officials permitted him to wear a knitted colander on his head while having his photo taken. But there's a catch: if he's caught driving without his devotional headgear, he'll lose his license. 7 News reports:
The deputy chief of Moscow’s State Traffic inspectorate, Vladimir Kuzin, told Russian that Mr Filin’s victory for the satirical Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster comes with a catch.
“The next time he is stopped by the traffic police, if he doesn’t have a pasta strainer on his head, his licence will be taken from him,” Mr Kuzin said.
Last Sunday, the US Air Force dropped two 2,000-pound bombs on a building in ISIS-controlled Mosul, Iraq. This was where that terrorist organization kept a large amount of its money necessary to fund current operations. The strike hit perfectly, obliterating the target.
The Department of Defense recently released video footage of the air strike. What you see fluttering around are countless pieces of cash forming swirling clouds of money.
After the debris settled, surveillance footage found many pieces of money on nearby rooftops. You can read more at CNN (auto-start video).
But he hasn't forgotten the people who loved him before he was famous. For 3 years, his best friend has been a koi. Oh, he's polite to all of the koi in the pond. But the grey one always gets special attention.
In 1820, a farmer dug up a mysterious Greek statue on the island of Melos. He found a remarkably well-preserved statue of what is probably Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of beauty—or Venus, as the Romans called her. This amazing find became known as the Venus de Milo.
She arrived at just the right time. The Academic art movement venerated the majesty of the human body, as well as gave men a good excuse to look at pictures of naked women. The Venus de Milo came to epitomize a neoclassical vision of female beauty.
In the United States, the idealization of this beauty standard led to contests in which men searched for women who had Venus’s precise measurements. Thousands of women were measured in this effort, particularly college students, such as this young lady at Wellesley College. Atlas Obscura traces the history of this movement. One leader was Dr. Dudley Allen Sargent, the gym director at Harvard University:
These measurement cards did not require just height, weight, bust, waist, and hips. There were 60 required measurements per person, including instep, wrist, forearm, armspan, and “ninth rib.” And all this data was being put toward new and novel applications. In 1893, Sargent used composite figures from female students' measurements to sculpt a statue and exhibit it at that year's Chicago World's Fair. This figure came to be known as the "Harvard Venus." Visitors to the fair were invited to examine it, reflect on how their own bodies compared, and submit themselves to be measured for Sargent's data collection project. [...]
By this time, Sargent had collected the measurements of over 10,000 female students, yet he claimed he had still not encountered the ideal woman. “Among the many thousands who have been measured at the gymnasium, not one has fulfilled every requirement,” he told the Times. The closest was Annette Kellerman, an Australian swimmer and vaudeville star who stood five-foot-four-and-a-half and sported a 35.2-inch bust, 26.2-inch waist, and 37.8-inch hips. Sargent called her the "perfect woman" for publicity purposes, but he was rounding up.
The movement petered out during the 1920s as new beauty standards took hold of American popular culture. It never did find its truly perfect example of the female form, which is reasonable, as my wife would not be born for a few more decades.
This is pretty much daily life down here in paradise. But it's exotic for those of you who are not fortunate enough to live in Texas. So check out what you're missing.
Sherrod Greeson and his friends are students at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. They're also members of the school's championship winning ranch horse team. A few years ago, while they were in class, 2 cows got loose and ran up and down the streets of the city. So Sherrod and his friends got their horses and lassos and captured the cows.
They described the experience to a local reporter, who can't help but laugh and say to them, "I want to be all of your friends."
Without Artoo's timely, brave, and skilled intervention on 19 separate occasions, our heroes would have been killed and all hope for a galaxy free from the Sith menace would have been over.
What did he get for it? Well, Amidala thanked him and gave him a cleaning, which is nice.
Artoo may get a better offer from the dark side. At least the Empire pays its soldiers.
.jpg){kind=link}