Toy Movies

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Toy Movies is a short film by Dan Meth. It's a compilation of trailers for faux movies based on toys from the 1980s, including The Smurfs by Peter Jackson, ALF by John Carpenter, and Cabbage Patch Kids by David Cronenberg. Run time: 2 minutes.

Via Topless Robot

40 years ago yesterday the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio caught on fire.  Again.

The 1969 Cuyahoga River fire was one of the seminal events in American environmental history, yet the conventional narrative about the fire is all wrong — including the famous picture that Time magazine published erroneously. News photographers failed to arrive in time to catch pictures of the quick blaze. The picture Time published was actually from 1952.

Although this river was particularly infamous for its flammibility, river fires were fairly common in Industrial Age America.  Now the river is again healthy and "fish-friendly".

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(Video Link)

I love a politician who has a sense of humor and can poke fun at himself -- like Robert Reich, U.S. Secretary of Labor under the Clinton Administration.  Here he is on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien as a hard-boiled street cop eager to bite crime in the shins.

Via Bits & Pieces

Ryan Deal of Top Cultured has a list of last meals given to condemned criminals, both real and fictional.  Here are a few:

Adolf Eichmann: He declined a special meal, preferring a bottle of Carmel, a dry red Israeli wine. He drank about half of it.

John Wayne Gacy: A dozen deep-fried shrimps, a bucket of original recipe chicken from KFC, French fries, and a pound of strawberries.

Timothy McVeigh: Two pints of mint chocolate-chip ice cream.

 Marv in Sin City: A “pretty decent” steak and a beer.

What do you plan on asking for?

Link [Link pointed to original source at Wikipedia - by Alex 6/17/09] - via Urlesque

The blog Daily Routines culls news services and books for information about the daily routines of famous people, such as Mr. Rogers, John Grisham, Winston Churchill, and Earnest Hemingway. Here's a selection from the John Grisham piece, citing a San Francisco Chronicle article:

When he first started writing, Grisham says, he had "these little rituals that were silly and brutal but very important."

"The alarm clock would go off at 5, and I'd jump in the shower. My office was 5 minutes away. And I had to be at my desk, at my office, with the first cup of coffee, a legal pad and write the first word at 5:30, five days a week."

His goal: to write a page every day. Sometimes that would take 10 minutes, sometimes an hour; ofttimes he would write for two hours before he had to turn to his job as a lawyer, which he never especially enjoyed. In the Mississippi Legislature, there were "enormous amounts of wasted time" that would give him the opportunity to write.

Featured people are categorized in the right-hand sidebar by occupation and habits.

Link via TigerHawk

image by flickr user Tony Newell used under creative commons license

I'm not really sure how to describe this website, but it is maddeningly addictive.  Click the link and then move your mouse around. There's automatic sound, so you may want to turn your speakers down a bit.

Maybe some Japanese-speaking Neatorama user can translate for us. Assuming that they're speaking Japanese.

Link via Radley Balko

image by flickr user Rufus Gefangenen used under creative commons license

George Orwell's classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was released sixty years ago this week.  It's doubleplusgood.  To say otherwise is crimethink and will result in being sent to a joycamp.

You can read the full text here.

Via Hit & Run

A Venn diagram showing the psychological forces at work among users of social networking tools -- a new shirt from the comedy geniuses at Despair, Inc.

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Admit that you've always wanted a dead squirrel mounted to your exact specifications, such as the special forces squirrel in the picture above. Rick Nadeau decorates his taxidermy projects with items from G.I. Joe figures.

This might be a good time to enter the Neatorama Mystery Sale.

Link via Double Plus Undead

Niagara Detroit is an American artist associated with the Lowbrow movement. She was the frontperson for the 80s punk band Destroy All Monsters, but now works primarily in the visual arts. Her dominant motif is portraits of sultry, dangerous women.

Link (kinda NSFWish at times. Also with self-starting audio)

(Video Link)

A wry look at art appreciation from Howcast, taking the form of a step-by-step guide on how to bluff your way through an art gallery conversation. Run time: 2 minutes.

Via Juxtapoz

Today is indeed a high holy day: National Doughnut Day. Its origins lie in the distribution of free doughnuts to American soldiers during the First World War, and then acquired greater fame with the sponsorship of the Salvation Army in 1938. Now it's mostly a marketing gimmick, but do we really need a reason to celebrate? Get thee to a bakery.

Link via J-Walk Blog

(YouTube Link)
This promotional video from the European Research Commission uses a dance party to explain how basic chemical compounds are formed.

Via The Presurfer

A pseudonymous (presumably) student named Kat Atreides responded to her school's ban on a large number of books by forming a secret library in her locker, and then loaning out banned books to students:

I go to a private school that is rather strict. Recently, the principal and school teacher council released a (very long) list of books we're not allowed to read. I was absolutely appalled, because a large number of the books were classics and others that are my favorites. One of my personal favorites, The Catcher in the Rye, was on the list, so I decided to bring it to school to see if I would really get in trouble. Well... I did but not too much. Then (surprise!) a boy in my English class asked if he could borrow the book, because he heard it was very good AND it was banned!

I hope that the school administrators were actually trying to trick students into reading, and weren't so foolish as to imagine that banning books would lead to teenagers not reading them.

Link via Jessamyn West

image by flickr user florian.b used under creative commons license

In addition to being Memorial Day in the United States, today is Towel Day — a day to honor Douglas Adams and the importance of carrying a towel around with you, as advised by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you - daft as a bush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough

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