Maymo the lemon beagle (previously at Neatorama) got a lovely surprise for his fourth birthday: a ball pit right in his own home!
Imagine being suddenly presented with a thousand brightly-colored balls. He doesn’t know where to start! Now, that’s a happy dog. -via Tastefully Offensive
The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Perpetually Pleasing Bathroom Reader.
If you put a large seashell to your ear, you can hear the ocean! Not really. What you hear is the shell amplifying the ambient noise around you. But it’s a wonderful thing to believe when you’re a kid. Here are some other fascinating facts about nature’s most curious— and beautiful—“ living houses.”
REMAINS OF THE DAY
Seashells come in a vast array of shapes, colors, and sizes, but they all have one basic (and creepy) thing in common: They’re the partial remains of dead animals. Finding a seashell is the equivalent, in a way, of finding a human skeleton on the beach. But seashells are the outer skeletons (technically, exo-skeletons) of their deceased inhabitants. Their soft remains have either been eaten or rotted away.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of animal species that grow and leave behind seashells, ranging in size from microscopic to sofa size. Most of what we think of as classic seashells were made by marine mollusks. That’s because they make the sturdiest, longest-lasting shells. Marine mollusks include gastropods— which include an enormous variety of sea snails; bivalves— such as clams, oysters, and scallops; scaphopods— that make tusk-shaped shells; and some cephalopods— such as the nautilus and spirula. (There are many types of mollusks that make no shells at all, including sea slugs and octopuses.)
BUILDING BLOCKS
All mollusks have the same basic body form: They have a head, which holds the sense organs; a visceral mass, or the internal organs; and a foot. And all mollusks— even ones that don’t create shells— have an organ known as a mantle, which comes from the Latin mantellum, meaning “cloak” or “cape,” so named because it sort of looks like a cape draped over the animal’s back. The mantle has the crucial job of containing the mollusk’s visceral mass. On mollusks that produce shells, it has another job: Build and maintain the shell.
Seashells are made up almost completely of the calcium-based mineral calcium carbonate. Animals that create these shells acquire the ingredients needed to make it— calcium, carbon, and oxygen— from their food sources and even from the water around them. Those ingredients are collected from the mollusk’s bloodstream by specialized cells in the mantle. They are then combined with different proteins made just for the job and secreted out of the mantle surface. The resulting material quickly hardens into shell.
CONEHEADS
You’ve probably seen seashells that have a coiled, spiral end (sort of like a soft-serve ice-cream cone) with an opening at the other end. These are the shells of gastropods— the snails and slugs of the world.
The following is a Whodunit by Hy Conrad. These mysteries are from The Little Giant® Book of Whodunits by Hy Conrad and Matt LaFleur. Can you solve the mystery before you read the solution?
(Image credit: Flickr user Michael B.)
"The trouble with hypochondriacs is you never know when they're sick." Such were the thoughts running through Ethel Evans's mind as she dialed the two cellular numbers, one for Dr. Mills and the other for her brother, Bertie. "Come immediately," she told them both. "Daddy just took a turn for the worse."
The hypochondriac in question, J. P. Evans, began the morning feeling well. Dr. Mills had been there for his daily examination, leaving the usual row of pills at JP's bedside. Bertie fed his father breakfast, then left for his regular day at the horse track. At 11 A.M. Ethel fed JP the first batch of pills. It was shortly after that when he began gasping for air and Ethel made her calls.
Ethel hung up and listened to the wail of a freighter as it chugged by. That was the problem with living on a residential island. Even though they were connected to the rest of the city by a drawbridge, there were times when she felt so isolated.
The following is a Whodunit by Hy Conrad. These mysteries are from The Little Giant® Book of Whodunits by Hy Conrad and Matt LaFleur. Can you solve the mystery before you read the solution?
(Image credit: Flickr user John Lloyd)
Star Cars had seemed like a great idea. Beau and Irving Plimpton would translate their passion into a business. The brothers would rent out vintage automobiles to Los Angeles film companies and production houses for background and atmosphere. Beau took care of the contracts and customers while Irving kept the cars in pristine shape, refusing to even drive them on the street.
But the Plimpton boys hadn't had a rental in weeks and were facing bankruptcy. One afternoon, an attendant spotted Beau's sports car driving into the basement garage at Beau's apartment building. An hour later, Beau's live-in girlfriend drove in and found his car occupying her spot. Peering through the dark tinted glass, Pauline could see her fiancé’s hulking silhouette squeezed inside. She opened the driver's door. There, strapped into his safety belt was the body of Beau Plimpton. He'd been shot once in the left temple, the revolver still in his left hand. An apparent suicide.
The following is a Whodunit by Hy Conrad. These mysteries are from The Little Giant® Book of Whodunits by Hy Conrad and Matt LaFleur. Can you solve the mystery before you read the solution?
(Image credit: Flickr user Ann Lockley)
Last year's Pretenders' Ball had ended in the tragic assassination of the Grand Duke. Despite that disaster, the prime minister insisted on going ahead with this year's festivities. One new concession was made to security. The ball would be held during the day, giving the secret police a clearer view of the proceedings.
A bright, sunny sky greeted the costumed revelers. As usual, they were searched. The rubber daggers piercing Julius Caesar's toga were allowed in, but only after a long argument. The cowboy handed over his plastic six-shooter but got to keep his rope. And Joan of Arc was permitted to keep her stake, as long as she remained firmly tied to it.
Security agents surrounded the new Grand Duke as he mingled with his guests in the festively decorated gardens. The orchestra was in top form and the ball proceeded without a hitch—until fire broke out in the royal archives.
The following is a Whodunit by Hy Conrad. These mysteries are from The Little Giant® Book of Whodunits by Hy Conrad and Matt LaFleur. Can you solve the mystery before you read the solution?
(Image credit: Flickr user Shawn Clover)
It was 8:50 P.M. and Jules Marigold was closing up shop. The antique dealer wound all the clocks while his employees tallied up the receipts. When Marigold tried setting the alarm, he was annoyed to find it out of order. "Oh, well," he sighed. "I suppose one night without an alarm won't kill me." He was wrong.
Around midnight, when the Downtown Citizens' Patrol shone their flashlights through the storefront window, they saw a chaotic mess. Lying in the middle of the mess was the bludgeoned body of Jules Marigold.
Marigold lived above his shop. The police theorized that he'd heard a burglar breaking in and that the two men had fought. Among the wreckage was a toppled, broken grandfather clock. The hands had stopped at 11:09. "I guess that sets the time of the murder."
The following is a Whodunit by Hy Conrad. These mysteries are from The Little Giant® Book of Whodunits by Hy Conrad and Matt LaFleur. Can you solve the mystery before you read the solution?
(Star Trek Cookie Jar from the NeatoShop)
Valerie stretched her six-foot frame to the top shelf, looking for a hiding place. Taking down an old cookie jar, she slipped in the roll of hundred-dollar bills, then lifted it back up to its spot above the kitchen cabinets. Valerie flipped aside a lock of golden hair. It was a shame to have to hide things in her own house, but with this bunch of sorry losers visiting for the weekend, it was better safe than—well—sorry.
It was a horrible thing to think about her best friend. Sometimes she didn't know what she saw in Glenda. Glenda was strikingly homely, dumpy, and of dubious moral character. But she seemed to admire Valerie and made her laugh.
It was even worse to think about her own twin brother, but Valerie had to be honest. Ever since childhood, Victor had regularly stolen from any purse that happened to be lying around.
The third guest, Morton Flyer, had been a basketball star in the NBA. Caught red-handed in a betting scandal, Morton had been thrown out of the sport. He and Victor were now best buddies sharing their mutual hobbies of gambling and drinking.
The following is a Whodunit by Hy Conrad. These mysteries are from The Little Giant® Book of Whodunits by Hy Conrad and Matt LaFleur. Can you solve the mystery before you read the solution?
(Image credit: Editor at Large)
The newspapers dubbed him that, the nutty strangler, although there was nothing funny about him. Five times he'd struck, each time leaving nut shells—piles of nut shells. On the first occasion the body of a businessman was found in an alley. The police barely noticed the walnut shells among the midtown litter.
The second time it was a suburban housewife and peanut shells. On the third strangulation (a secretary and pecans) the homicide squad started looking at photos of the previous cases. That's when they made the connection.
"Maybe he likes nuts," a rookie suggested. "Maybe cracking shells calms this psycho down while he waits for the right victim to come by."
On the sixth murder, the police caught a break. It was late. Four officers were just coming off their shift when they heard a strangled scream. They arrived too late to save the young college student. But one glance at the piles of red pistachio shells told them who they were dealing with. The officers fanned out, detaining the only three men they could find in the surrounding streets.
An interactive map by Andrew Kahn shows the origins and destinations of ships that transported slaves from Africa to the New World (and some other countries) between 1540 and 1860. Nothing much happens at first, but soon the action becomes a flurry and then a flood.
The dots—which represent individual slave ships—also correspond to the size of each voyage. The larger the dot, the more enslaved people on board. And if you pause the map and click on a dot, you’ll learn about the ship’s flag—was it British? Portuguese? French?—its origin point, its destination, and its history in the slave trade. The interactive animates more than 20,000 voyages cataloged in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. (We excluded voyages for which there is incomplete or vague information in the database.) The graph at the bottom accumulates statistics based on the raw data used in the interactive and, again, only represents a portion of the actual slave trade—about one-half of the number of enslaved Africans who actually were transported away from the continent.
If you learned about slavery from American history classes and TV, you might be surprised to see how many slave ships actually went to the U.S. as compared to other destinations. The number of transports to America is dwarfed by those sent to the Caribbean and to Brazil. Watch the map in action at Slate. -via Digg
New Zealander Jordan Watson has a baby, and has classified 17 different ways to hold her. He’s glad to share them with you in this instructional video. He must be doing it right- the baby never hit the ground and never started wailing in terror. My favorite is the Superman. -via Tastefully Offensive
Admiral Ackbar from the Rebel Alliance is known for one thing and one thing only. But there’s more to him that that. A comic from AC Stuart at College Humor shows the Admiral on a typical day in his suburban everyday life. But this is just the first page. There’s plenty more, and just when you think you know where it’s going -and you think you know already- it still manages to surprise you. -via Geeks Are Sexy
On the surface, they look just like any other couple their age. And just like any other couple, you can’t know what astonishing forces shaped their lives until you ask. Helena and Szczepan Wojtak were born only 35 miles apart in Poland, but did not meet each other until they were refugees in England after World War II.
Their lives weren’t easy, but they obviously love each other very much. This is a sweet story about happy people with amazing pasts, and I’m sure you will enjoy it as much as I did. -via the Presurfer
Frankly, American history classes in public schools are lucky if they have time to touch on anything more recent than World War II. Even if they do, there probably wouldn’t be more than a day or two devoted to the entire space race. The story of space exploration is a long and rich one, with occasionally bizarre incidents that we can laugh about, now that we know no one died because of them. This tidbit is bizarre because of the difference in the American and Soviet space programs. Cosmonauts carried a weapon into space that was basically a sawed-off shotgun.
The TP-82 pistol was developed specifically for cosmonauts and packed enough punch to take out a half-ton grizzly bear. That specification is not an accident, either -- despite our sincerest hopes that the Ruskies had armed their cosmonauts with a hand cannon to fight off aliens or in the event they got into a space-train robbery gunfight with the Americans, the gun was actually intended as a survival measure once they were back on Earth. Why? Because unlike the stupid Americans, who directed their spacecraft into the Pacific Ocean, the Soviets cleverly pointed their returning capsules to the nice, soft rock of Siberia. And, as is wont to happen, capsules occasionally went off course, landing somewhere else in the vast, inhospitable wasteland.
In one such instance, two cosmonauts ended up stranded in the middle of the woods in the Urals, 600 miles from their intended landing site, with only a 9 mm pistol to deal with the bears and wolves that lurked in the woods around them. Despite the fact they never encountered either, they managed to convince their bosses that future crews should be packing more heat.
Other stories in a list from Cracked are about American astronauts, and some involve embarrassing bodily functions, told in the colorful language you expect from Cracked.
(Image credit: One half 3544)
The Jurassic Period was a long time ago, and it had dinosaurs, which made for an exciting movie in Jurassic Park. But if you can resurrect DNA from that geologic period in fiction, then the other geologic periods of earth’s history wouldn’t be off limits, either. That could give us a lot of sequels!
That is, if they could find any creatures from those other periods that might cause fear and conflict among humans. Or even be the least bit familiar to audiences. College Humor looks at what might have been. -via Tastefully Offensive
You’ve heard of bridges in various parts of the world that have become dangerous because lovers attach locks to the scaffolding to cement their love. The historic Pont des Arts bridge in Paris recently had to be “de-locked” to prevent further damage. But there are many bridges in the world, and many superstitions and traditions about them. Some expect a greeting, others expect you to kiss someone. The Harvard Bridge has a particularly great story behind a rather strange tradition.
Oliver Smoot enjoys the unusual honor of having his own body used as a unit of measurement. In October 1958, members of MIT's Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity devised a pledge prank in which they used Smoot to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge. (Smoot was supposedly chosen because he was the shortest pledge, and his last name sounded kind of scientific.) The obliging Smoot lay down and got back up repeatedly across the bridge while his pledge brothers painted marks every ten "Smoots" (one Smoot is about 5 foot 7 inches). According to their final calculations, which were painted onto the pavement, the bridge was 364.4 Smoots, "plus or minus an ear." The ear was intended to provide a margin of error, since the fraternity brothers knew their methods weren't precise. The Smoot marks have survived, and are re-painted by incoming members of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity each year. They've been preserved through renovations on the bridge, and were celebrated during a Smoot Day bash on October 4, 2008, the 50th anniversary of the original measurement. Incidentally, Oliver Smoot went on to have a career in measurement, eventually becoming chair of the American National Standards Institute and serving as president of the International Organization for Standardization.
That’s just one of ten stories about bridges and the traditions that have grown up around them that you can read about at mental_floss.
(Image credit: Denimadept)
