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Heavy rains in St. Petersburg flooded the streets. What's a woman to do? This act of chivalry not only kept them dry, but also made the women recording the video squeal with delight. There's also a bonus surprise that passes by. -via Arbroath

During this holiday weekend in the USA, you may be looking for something to read in between picnics and parades. We've posted a lot of links for you this week, so just in case you've found it hard to keep up, here are the original features posted this week at Neatorama.

From Steven M. Johnson's Museum of Possibilities, we saw some strange and wonderful ideas in Inflatable Swimwear for Summer and It’s Time to Design Slow, Colorful and Asymmetrical Cars.

Jill Harness took her geekery to new heights with two articles at NeatoGeek this week: 12 Hacked Nintendo Controllers and 10 Ways to Cook Up Some Star Wars Fun.

The biggest post of the week was also at NeatoGeek, when Alex gave us 10 Neat Facts About Tron to refresh our memories of the 1982 film before we see the new Tron: Legacy coming in December.

I posted a list of strange cases of people sneaking around with contraband in 10 Weird Items People Tried to Smuggle.

TV fans won't want to miss David Israel's interview with Stacey Abbott, editor of The Cult TV Book. Congratulations to Neatoramanauts Kelly Kirkpatrick and Bob Penick, who won copies of the book!

Did you guess what the object was in the What Is It game?

David has been running a Tom Swifty contest on our Facebook page, then he posted the finalists here for your voting. Congratulations to book winner Derek Walsh!

Over at mental_floss, Neatorama is collaborating on another How Did You Know? contest. The winners do far this week are Sarah Blask, Jimmy Luth, kkirkpat, and Sharon and Keith, who all won prizes from the NeatoShop. The contest continues on Monday, with another chance for you to win!

Entries will be taken in our Great Talent, Fantastic or Otherwise (GTFO) video contest in collaboration with reddit until July 18th. We posted the first entry, a contestant playing Star Wars on bagpipes while riding a unicycle, but don't let the competition discourage you from entering your special talent!

At NeatoBambino, Tiffany saw the unicycle video and ran with it, bringing us resources so that you can teach your child to imitate the stunt. However, bagpipes can cause problems at bedtime!



Three new artists were added to the Neatorama Art Blog: painter Kristin Kwan, shoe artist Ken Turner, and multi-media artist Claire Hardman.

From Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, we strolled back in time to find out how The Little Rascals shot to stardom in the 1920s and 30s, and are still a hit today.

From mental_floss magazine, we had A Brief and Incomplete History of Chinatowns Across America.

To set the mood for the Fourth of July, read today's feature 5 Neat Facts About The Declaration of Independence. Happy Independence Day!

You've heard the story of the Pied Piper, who lured away all the children of Hamelin because the town wouldn't pay him for getting rid of the rats. There's a real story behind the legend, and the town of Hamelin, Germany lives with the events of June 26th, 1284. Contemporary accounts are lost, but writings from the 14th century apparently reference early reports. What really happened to the children of Hamelin? Were they recruited for some crusade? Did they die of the plague? Did they just run away? Or could they have been victims of mass hysteria?

Another episode that shares features with the Pied Piper events took place in 1237 in the town of Erfurt, 271km south-east of Hamelin. A group of children marched in a dancing procession towards Arnstadt, 15km to the south, where they were said to have collapsed with exhaustion. Unlike the children of Hamelin, the Erfurt youngsters were rescued by their parents, who took them back to their homes. Still, some of them were said either to have died or remained afflicted with a permanent tremor.

The events at Erfurt are considered to be one of the first manifestations of the mediæval phenomenon known as the Dancing Mania (see FT:203:30–34), usually interpreted as a form of mass hysteria related to religious fervour. Dancing Mania was reportedly spread by “the sight of sufferers, like a demoniacal epidemic, over the whole of Germany and the neighbouring countries to the northwest”. [2] Those affected were described as unable to control their movements, or to stop their endless dance, and many were said to have died of exhaustion. As with Hamelin, we have an image of a crowd of children led away by music, perhaps to their deaths.

An article at Fortean Times lays out several possibilities for the disappearance of 130 children from Hamelin. Link

Would you recognize that someone is drowning if you saw them? Real-life drowning looks nothing like the way Hollywood depicts drowning: the yelling, the arm-waving, the violent panic.

The Instinctive Drowning Response – so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D., is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind. To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents) – of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening (source: CDC).

gCaptain has a list of signs that indicate the instinctive drowning response. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

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Or maybe it's just popcorn; who can tell? Now with oh-so-helpful captions!

A poll of 238 presidential experts at the Siena Research Institute has ranked the USA's presidents. This is the fifth time they have published such a list; the last one was in 2002. For the first time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt came in at number one. The top five are:

1. Franklin D. Roosevelt

2. Theodore Roosevelt

3. Abraham Lincoln

4. George Washington

5. Thomas Jefferson

President Obama ranks #15. You can see the complete rankings in .pdf form. Link -via J-Walk Blog

It's time once again to cast your  vote for America's Best Restroom! Will it be the toilets at Bryant Park in New York City, the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City, or maybe the Santa Monica Pier in California? Ten finalists are going for the title. You can take a virtual tour of each convenience facility and rank your picks accordingly. Pictured is last year's winner, the The Shoji Tabuchi Theater in Branson, Missouri. Link -via Metafilter

Today is the 30th anniversary of the release of the film Airplane! Surely, we can't let that go by without some kind of celebration, like, hmm,  ...a quiz. How well do you know the jokes in the classic 1980 movie? Find out in today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. I scored 64%, despite not having seen the movie in at least twenty years. Link

See also: Airplane! is a Remake of an Old Fifties Flick

The ScienceBlogs network had "Zombie Day" on Thursday. Just about all of the scientists who blog there posted at least one article about zombies, most of them somehow pertaining to their normal field of expertise. Some just had fun with it! To accompany the madness, Joseph Hewitt of Ataraxia Theatre created two dozen zombie portraits of the scientists. Click on portrait at the main page to go to a zombie post by that author. Link

Can you live to be 100 years old? Your genes might tell the story.

A newly discovered suite of 150 "long life" variants in about 70 genes allows scientists to guess, with 77 percent accuracy, whether a person can live into their late 90s or longer, a new study says.

These long-life gene variants, the authors speculate, may suppress genes associated with ailments often linked to aging, such as dementia and heart problems.

"This is just a genetic predisposition," cautioned study leader Paola Sebastiani, a biostatistician at the Boston University School of Public Health. "It doesn't mean that you're going to live to be a hundred. Many things can happen in life."

The research may lead to longer lives, but that would be so far in the future that our best bet is still a healthy lifestyle. Link

When film critic Roger Ebert declared that video games can never be art, he set off an internet firestorm.

At this moment, 4,547 comments have rained down upon me for that blog entry. I'm informed by Wayne Hepner, who turned them into a text file: "It's more than Anna Karenina, David Copperfield and The Brothers Karamazov." I would rather have reread all three than vet that thread. Still, they were a good set of comments for the most part. Perhaps 300 supported my position. The rest were united in opposition.

Today he reversed his position. NeatoGeek has more. http://www.neatorama.com/neatogeek/2010/07/01/roger-ebert-admits-that-he-was-partially-wrong-about-video-games/

(Image credit: Taylor Evans)

It was on this date in 1867 that Canada was officially born when the Constitution Act joined three provinces into one country: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the Canada province, which then split into Ontario and Quebec. It took a long time for the holiday to be recognized nationwide, first as Dominion Day and now as Canada Day. Many Canada Day events are planned in Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, Victoria, and communities all over the country. Even Queen Elizabeth showed up for the party! For more information, see the official Canada Day website. Link -Thanks, Lauren!

(Image credit: Flickr user Lone Primate)

(Image credit: Flickr user Thomas Hawk)

STAGED FRIGHT

Back in the 1930s, Chinatowns had acquired a reputation for drugs, prostitution, and gang violence that was largely undeserved. Tired of trying to fight for their good name, many residents decided to play into the stereotypes and make some money. In San Francisco, Chinatown tour guides spun tales of underground tunnels filled with opium dens and sex slaves. They even set up a few fake dens and leper colonies. Meanwhile, tour guides in New York went so far as to hire locals to put on knife fights between opium-crazed men over ownership of prostitutes. Suddenly, visitors who had "seen it firsthand" were spreading legends about Chinatowns' debauchery. Ironically, violence and crime rates were on the decline in Chinatowns during this same period.

CLEANING UP



In the early days of San Francisco, wealthy residents would ship their dirty laundry to Hawaii because there were no cleaning services in California. But that changed in 1851, when a Chinatown resident named Wah Lee opened the first Chinese laundry in the United States. It flourished, and so did the many others like it that followed. In fact, the success of Chinese laundries allowed immigrants to move east, establishing new Chinatowns across America.

Frank Mickadeit, a columnist for the OC Register, is staying in a monkey cage at the Santa Ana Zoo in California. He's been there three days, and is scheduled to come out at 4PM PDT (7PM EDT) today. Mickadeit joined the monkeys as a human exhibit. The sign attached labeled his species as Columnist horribilis. While they observed him, Mickadeit in turn observed the zoo visitors.

For seven hours, I was entertained and, I hope, moderately entertaining, as a parade of moms with strollers, grandparents with charges, art students from Santa Ana College, biology students from Fullerton College, friends, regular readers and media types wandered up.

If they had no idea a human being was on loan from the Register, the look on their faces said, "What the ..." If they did know, they wanted to know, "Why the ..."

"Three days, and you're getting paid?" one woman asked, as I regaled onlookers with a variety of tricks that included blowing smoke rings and figuring out how to extract tiny bits of papaya from a hollow ball my keeper tossed at me.

"Well, uh, yeah, I guess I am getting paid," I replied indignantly.

"Paid just to sit in a cage three days a week," she said, shaking her head.

"Oh, no!" I said, finally realizing where she was going. "I'm not here three days every week!"

The zoo has a live webcam trained on their "human exhibit." Link

(Image credit: Paul Bersebach, OC Register)

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Woot, the discount website that sells one item a day, has been bought by Amazon, which they are quite happy about. In addition to the above video posted at their blog, CEO Matt Rutledge wrote the most awesome memo ever announcing the acquisition to Woot employees.

We are excited about doing this for all sorts of reasons. One, our business model is so vague that there’s no way Amazon can possibly change what it is we’re truly doing: preparing the way for the rise of the Lava Men in 2012. Also, our deal means that Jason Toon will finally be released from that Mexican jail owned by Zappos honcho Tony Hsieh. No, don’t lie, Tony, we’ve seen the paperwork. And we need a powerful ally in case Steve Jobs finally breaks down and comes after us for all our Apple jokes over the years. Don’t think of it as a buyout; think of it as NATO!

Link -via Metafilter and Holy Kaw!