6-year-old Mihir Kumar of Ranchi, India was celebrating Holi when he slipped and fell off the roof he was dancing on. He fell on an iron rod, which pierced his body through the ribs from one side to the other! Mihir was rushed to the Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences, where he underwent three hours of surgery to remove the rod.
He is now recovering in hospital.
Dr Sandeep Agarwal, one of the three surgeons to operate on the boy, said he had miraculously escaped major internal injuries.
Those of you who are sick of Daft Punk can skip to the next item. Those who aren't can try mixing your own version of "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" with the iDaft Console. I spent way too much time playing with this! Link -via Metafilter
Georgia Max Coffee chose to redesign the toilets of a number of key ski resorts in Japan. The cubicles were fully wrapped on all sides, so that the person caught short would have a ski jumper’s view when they were sitting on the loo. The person could look down at their skis (simply printed on the floor of the cubicle) and see the steep ski jump slope ahead of them.
People who see Shorty on the banks of the river Test in Redbridge, Southampton, England tend to call emergency services because they are convinced the poor pony is stuck in the mud. Four times Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service’s animal rescue team has responded to find that the pony was fine.
Animal rescue expert Anton Phillips was one of no less than 12 rescuers dispatched to help the animal before realising the pony was not in any distress.
He said: “This was the fourth time we have been called out by members of the public who have seen this pony on the salt marsh.
“It’s basically a cross between a Shetland pony and a New Forest pony and has definitely inherited features from both its mother and its father – it has short legs like a Shetland but a long body like a New Forest pony.
“From 200 yards away it does look like the pony is trapped in the mud, especially when it is stood next to other ponies.
Dark Roasted Blend takes a look at the history of the Wall of Death, a staple of amusement parks in the age before television.
Roll Up, Roll Up, It's Thrills, It's Spills - It's the Amazing "Wall of Death"!
Derived from normal wood board motordromes the America's Original Extreme Motorcycle Thrill Show became one of the most daring acts at fairgrounds and carnivals in the early 1910s, achieving peak popularity during motorcycle-crazed 1930s....
In 2003, Leonardo Notarbartolo and his associates broke through ten layers of security and helped themselves to a stash of diamonds in a vault below the Antwerp Diamond Center. The estimated value of the diamonds taken ranges from 12 million to over 100 million dollars. The loot has never been found, but Notarbartolo served a prison sentence in Belgium. He tells how he pulled off the heist, in an exclusive article that reads like a Hollywood film.
The guys took turns yanking the contents out. Since they had memorized the layout of the vault in the replica, they worked in the dark, turning on their flashlights only for split seconds—enough to position the drill over the next box.
But in those muffled flashes, they could glimpse their duffel bags overflowing with gold bars, millions in Israeli, Swiss, American, European, and British currencies, and leather satchels that contained the mother lode: rough and polished diamonds. They resisted the urge to examine their haul; they were running out of time.
Edith Zimmerman has a blog featuring whimsical things she's created from food. I particularly like this radish red ant. http://www.edithzimmerman.com/blog/ -via Buzzfeed
Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss is another music quiz to promote the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame giveaway, where you could win a trip for two to the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies in Cleveland. The RIAA certifies an album as "diamond" when 10 million copies are sold in the US. 104 albums by 69 artists have been certified as diamond. Can you name those 69 artists in 5 minutes? I don't think so. I got 22 and I felt like kicking myself when I saw the answers! http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/23510
The Hanshin Tigers baseball club won the Japan Series for the first and (so far) only time in 1985. Fans in Dotonbori celebrated by jumping into the local river. The story goes that the crowd called out the names of the players, and a fan who most resembled each player jumped in. However, no one looked like star player and Oklahoma native Randy Bass {wiki}. So the crowd tossed in a life-size statue of Colonel Sanders taken from a KFC outlet. The statue was lost in the river, and the Hanshin Tigers sunk into a slump. Urban lore says the Tigers performance is due to the lost statue.
Fast forward to 2009. Divers looking for unexploded bombs found the Colonel Tuesday night.
The upper body of the statue was discovered at around 4 p.m. about 200 meters away from where it plunged into the water in 1985. When the figure was being pulled up by the crane on a salvage barge, construction workers could be heard to say, "It looks like a corpse." However, when Tigers fans such as the riverside project foreman saw the statue, they exclaimed, "It's the Colonel!" Passersby also stopped in their tracks to take in the scene.
With the media and locals looking on, divers began their search for the lower body at around 8:50 Wednesday morning, and discovered the right hand some minutes later. About 10 minutes after that, the diver's voice burst from a speaker on the salvage barge, saying, "It's the lower body. There's no mistake about it," bringing on a cheer from reporters and workers alike.
Is the "Curse of the Colonel" over for the Tigers? Link -via Fark
This extensive collection of photographs of New York City starts at around 120 years ago and includes aerial mapping shots, news photos, and work by many acclaimed photographers. This picture shows Times Square as it was in 1922. Link -via the Presurfer
The 1978 brainstorming sessions among George Lucas, Lawrence Kasdan, and Steven Spielberg that led to Raiders of the Lost Ark are now available for your reading pleasure. 45 hours of discussion are transcribed in a 125-page .pdf, but you can see the highlights before downloading the whole thing. Here's Spielberg (S) and Lucas (G) discussing the backstory of Indy and Marion:
G — I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.
L — And he was forty-two.
G — He hasn't seen her in twelve years. Now she's twenty-two. It's a real strange relationship.
S — She had better be older than twenty-two.
G — He's thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve. It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.
S — And promiscuous. She came onto him.
G — Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it's an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she's sixteen or seventeen it's not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he...
Fashion photographer Greg Kessler takes pictures of runway models before and after makeup. The Moment, the New York Times fashion blog, posts these together so you can slide back and forth from one image to the other. Scroll down at the site to see models from various fashion shows. Am I the only one who thinks they look better without makeup? Link -via Everlasting Blort
Placebos are medicines or procedures that don't have any active medical ingredients. Their effects are all in your mind, but the brain has wonderful ways of making us feel better. eMedExpert Blog looks at the latest research on the placebo effect. Did you know there's such a thing as placebo surgery?
In the 1950s, many physicians treated angina with ligation of the internal mammary artery. Despite claims of up to a 91% success rate, in the late 1950s, two skeptics conducted separate double-blind tests in which half the patients received skin incision, but not artery ligation12-13. In both studies, the placebo surgery proved equally effective as the ligation. And the overall rate of improvement with the placebo was 37%.
A 2002 study of arthroscopic knee surgery found that the outcomes for a placebo procedure were as good as those of the “real” surgery14.
Do you know what a pluot is? It's a hybrid cross between a plum and an apricot. Sounds yummy! The pluot pictured is just one of seven hybrid or genetically modified food items detailed at WebEcoist. Link -via the Presurfer
