I never knew lobster diving was a thing. It’s a bit like noodling -you catch them with your hands! Rick Coleman is an experienced lobster diver, but his wife Susie had never done it before. In this video, she gets a lesson in how quick and slippery lobsters are -after all, they’ve lived in the ocean their entire lives! And I see now why commercial fishermen use traps. The sound effects make it even goofier. Don’t feel bad, Susie, like I tell my kids, anything is hard if you’ve never done it before. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
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When you don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground, they can get mixed up. In Pratteln, Switzerland, that is exactly what happened when a 13-year-old donkey named Nilo fell down a manhole early Saturday morning. It was definitely a manhole -and not an asshole- because it was too small for the donkey to maneuver in, and he was stuck. Passerby Bruno Schneider saw the donkey’s predicament and called the local fire brigade, who came and saved his ass extracted the donkey from the manhole. Except for some cuts and bruises “at the rear of him” (as Google Translate puts it), the donkey is fine. Nilo is back at home at the petting zoo from which he escaped Friday night. However, a photograph handed out by the Basel Landschaft police department has gone viral globally, with the expected puns and comparisons to Donkey from the movie Shrek. -via Buzzfeed
(Image credit: Basel Landschaft Police)
You know it's true. Your cat has high standards that you'll never live up to. But take comfort in the fact that every other house cat is judging their person the same way. -via Tastefully Offensive
Not every website lives up to your expectations. Actually, none do, because websites live on hype to get people to visit. So lower your expectations and enjoy them for what they are. That said, I’m glad that MercWorks and Andrew Bridgman of Dorkly didn’t poke Neatorama’s soft underbelly for their latest comic. Scroll down on the picture above to see it all.
Neill Blomkamp, the filmmaker who brought us District 9 and Elysium, has a new feature film coming out next year. Chappie is a robot who can learn to think on his own, and he becomes the kind of robot that everyone loves, except, of course, for the bad guys. The story seems to be a touching modern combination of Pinocchio and Short Circuit. Chappie stars Hugh Jackman, Sigourney Weaver, and Die Antwoord’s Ninja and Yolandi Visser. It is scheduled to hits theaters in March. -via The A.V. Club
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Elvis Presley's favorite ice cream flavor was vanilla.
John Lennon's favorite room service snack was corn flakes with cream. He grew up during the war, when cream was rationed and was a rare luxury.
Jerry Lewis is crazy about Wendy's burgers.
Wilt Chamberlain's favorite sandwich was peanut butter and mayo on white bread.
In 2011, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made a pledge that he would only eat meat from animals he has slaughtered himself. He once sliced the throat of a goat. He also killed a chicken and ate it's heart. The pledge lasted over a year. At his wedding, Zuckerberg, his bride, and their guests dined on a mouse-shaped chocolates, a snack the couple both love and had shared on their first date.
George Reeves loved snacking on chocolate doughnuts he'd buy at the local farmer's market.
Michael Jordan's favorite fast food is Taco Bell.
Sarah Palin's favorite food is moose stew.
George Clooney's favorite food is Chaya steak. He is also a beer drinker. He had a keg of Guinness installed in his dressing room during the filming of Ocean's Eleven.
When babies and little kids feel joy, they move. They can’t help it! This evolves into dancing, and if we didn’t become so self-conscious as adults, we’d all be dancing to show happiness. That’s why we feel so great watching kids dance: because they radiate the joy of movement. Robert Jones edited this series of clips, some you’ve seen before, into a supercut set to Taylor Swift’s song “Shake It Off.” -Thanks, Robert!
The Milwaukee Recreation Department shared this photograph of some enterprising young men who figured out how to ride their bikes on ice -just replace to front wheel with a skate blade. What could possibly go wrong? The photo is uncaptioned, but appears to be from the 1930s. And here’s a snippet of film:
We don’t know for sure, but we imagine a good time was had by all ...but only until someone loses an eye! -Thanks, Brian Hoffer!
It would be magnificent to see the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta in person, but a video of this year’s event is the next best thing. Watch hundreds of colorful balloon take off into the clear blue sky! This time-lapse video by Knate Myers combines a spectator’s point of view with footage taken from a balloon in the air.
Each morning begins very early as a group of 6-12 hot air balloons known as Dawn Patrol, ascent into the deep blue sky before sunrise. These skilled pilots test wind and weather conditions as other pilots and crew begin to lay out hundreds of balloons across the field.
Just as dawn breaks, the next wave of balloons begin to lift off. When the sun rises above the Sandia Mountains it simultaneously fills the morning with beautiful light as the balloons fill the sky with color. The next 60-90 minutes are a great mix of fun and chaos as several hundred more balloons lift off, wave after wave.
This is only a small part of the footage he recorded, so there will be more to come. -via Laughing Squid
See also: Previous posts on the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta.
Are you going to grow your beard out this month? Movember is an annual exercise in raising awareness of testicular cancer and other men’s health issues, when men are encouraged to join together by growing out their whiskers for a month -and some keep that beard for good afterward. If you need a little inspiration to get you started and keep you away from the razor, listen to this parody of “Let It Go” performed by Jesse Hawkins. -via Time
Back in March we introduced you to storyboard artist Marty Cooper and his delightful Sharpie and White-Out doodles that add a little something extra to real-life scenes. He gave us a video of them in May. Now we have even more, with volume two of his Aug(De)Mented Reality. Enjoy! -via Tastefully Offensive
2001: A Space Odyssey was a book by Arthur C. Clarke and a movie by Stanley Kubrick in 1968 (adapted from a short story Clarke wrote in 1948). The sequel 2010: Odyssey Two was made into a movie in 1984. The third book, 2061: Odyssey Three, was published in 1987 and was never adapted for the screen. The final volume of Clarke’s series, 3001: The Final Odyssey, was published in 1997. That book will be adapted onscreen as a mini-series for Syfy, produced by Ridley Scott and David W. Zucker.
"I have always been a fan of Clarke's extraordinary 'Odyssey' series, and certainly Kubrick's adaptation of '2001,'" Scott wrote in a statement. "I am thrilled to be bringing that legacy to audiences and continuing the great cinematic tradition that this story and its creators deserve."
Read more about the project at the L.A. Times. -via Digg
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
A look back at twisting approaches to treating mental ailments
by Nan Swift, Improbable Research staff
Medical professionals, some of them, have tried using centrifugal force to treat and possibly cure their mental patients. Here are glances at a few of those attempts.
Halloran’s Spinning Swing
“Hallaran’s Circulating Swing,” Caoimhghín S. Breathnach, History of Psychiatry, vol. 21, no. 1, 2010, pp. 79–84. The author, at University College Dublin, explains:
William Saunders Hallaran (c.1765–1825) was physician superintendent at the County and City of Cork Lunatic Asylum for 40 years, where he distinguished between mental insanity and organic (systemic) delirium. In treatment he used emetics and purgatives, digitalis and opium, the shower bath and exercise, and argued that patients should be saved from “unavoidable sloth” by mental as well as manual occupation. However, it is as an exponent of the circulating swing, proposed by Erasmus Darwin and used by Joseph Cox, that he is remembered. His best results were achieved, as he recorded in An Enquiry [into… the Number of Insane {and} the Cure of Insanity] in 1810, by inducing sleep in mania of recent onset, but perhaps his most enduring observation was that some of his patients enjoyed the rotatory experience, and he had enough sense to allow the use of the swing as a mode of amusement.
Ninteenth Century Patient-Spinning
Detail from Victor Harsch’s treatise on old German methods of using centrifugal force to treat mental patients.
Two years after a simple picture made her a smash internet meme, Grumpy Cat is a bona fide movie star. Well, she’s the subject of an upcoming Lifetime movie, Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever. Now, how can you star in a movie when your only talent is frowning? Grumpy Cat doesn’t actually do anything! Well, there are obviously some workarounds. She communicates telepathically with the voice of Aubrey Plaza. It appears that they also used both stunt cats and puppets for action scenes. Kids will probably love it. -via Viral Viral Videos
The results are in, and the winner of the 7th annual Dance Your PhD competition is Uma Nagendra of the University of Georgia.
Nagendra's own home city of New Orleans, Louisiana, was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As the human residents put their lives back together, she became curious about how the natural world recovers from disasters. After she became a biology Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia in 2011, she realized that she could answer this question herself by gathering data out in the field. But destructive events like Hurricane Katrina are rare on the timescale of a Ph.D. So Nagendra focused on a natural disaster that occurs far more frequently and does more localized damage: tornadoes.
Negendra is not only a scientist -she’s also a circus aerialist, so she recruited her circus friends to perform with her in the video that explains her dissertation. You might say she had a leg up in that department. Nagendra was the overall winner and the winner of the Biology category. Continue reading to see the winners in the Physics, Chemustry, and Social Sciences categories.
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