These aren't real body parts -they're chocolate candy! Emmylou Cakehead is preparing for her Eat Your Heart Out Halloween pop up cake shop in London. This year's theme is "Feed the Beast."

We just had to share a few previews of these jaw dropping incredible life-sized The Kraken Rum flavored chocolate (purposefully dead looking) body parts. We’re pretty confident in laying down the gauntlet and saying that these will be the best liqueur chocolates you will ever see, plus of course being made with a dark spiced rum means they taste amazing.

Taste amazing, but looks simply gruesome! These body parts are from All Mine Patisserie. See more at Eat Your Heart Out. Link -Thanks, Miss Cakehead!

The Food and Drug Administration knows from experience that if terms are not strictly defined, manufacturers will push the boundaries of regulations as far as they can. That's why commonsense words that everyone sort of knows are defined with utmost precision when it comes to food labeling. Surprisingly, this doesn't always mean the standards for food are all that strict. Just strictly-defined. For example, the word "free":

If it’s free of fat, or sugar, or salt, it doesn’t mean that not one trace of those things is to be found in it. The FDA evaluates certain terms with reference to a typical portion size known as an RACC (reference amounts customarily consumed per eating occasion). An RACC of eggnog, for example, is ½ cup. For croutons, it’s 7 grams, and for scrambled eggs, 100 grams. To be labeled “free” of calories, the food must have less than 5 per RACC. For fat and sugar, less than .5 grams. For sodium, less than 5 milligrams. Also, the food must somehow be processed to be “free” of those things in order to get the simple “free” label. You can’t have “fat free lettuce,” only “lettuce, a fat free food.”

Other words defined are "light," "natural," and "more," among others. Learn what those really mean in your food at mental_floss. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Enokson)

(College Humor Link)

Bronies have become so ubiquitous that they've entered the My Little Pony toy market! Great for engaging young imaginations… but adults can have fun with them, too! For ages 8 and up. Way up.

This is actually the caterpillar form of the Chinese Bush Brown butterfly (Mycalesis gotama), but that face is familiar all over the world as Hello Kitty.

As you can probably imagine, these cute caterpillars are quite the hit in Japan, the caterpillars native region. I have no idea what the caption above says (please tell me in the comments if you do) but I’m hoping it says OMGWHYISTHISSOCUTE because that’s what I’m saying to myself.

No, I don't know why it was named the Chinese Bush Brown butterfly if its native region is Japan. Life is full of mysteries. See more pictures of this caterpillar and some of the art it inspired at The Featured Creature. Link

(Image source: Meiwa Suisan)

(YouTube link)

Remember that time an apple fell on Sir Isaac Newton's head and he discovered gravity? This video compilation pays tribute to the concept. To celebrate Gravity Day (which was Monday), General Electric invited Vine users to record an apple drop, and then they string the best of them together. Pay no attention to the fact that the apple changes color often. This is also a bit like the story of the loaves and fishes from the Bible in that dozens of people take a bite out of the apple, yet it still appears whole. Or was that the story of Adam and Eve? Anyway, the apple keeps falling until it can fall no more. Watch and find out why. -via Laughing Squid   

Now I'm wondering what book it is. This kind of recommendation should be a jacket blurb! Comic by Josh Devine. Link -via Pleated-Jeans

Cake Wrecks has a collection of cakes on which someone's name was just plain wrong. This one stood out to me. What do you think it was supposed to be? Surely someone didn't name their new baby Felony! The rest of the cakes are almost as funny. Link

Just another Saturday night? Not this time, because it was a real feral pig that had too many beers at a camping area near Port Hedland in the Pilbara.

The animal was seen stealing three six-packs of beer from campers before ransacking rubbish bags for food.

One camper reported seeing the pig guzzling the beer before getting involved in an altercation with a cow.

"In the middle of the night these people camping opposite us heard a noise, so they got their torch out and shone it on the pig and there he was, scrunching away at their cans," said the visitor, who estimated that the pig had consumed 18 beers.

"Then he went and raided all the rubbish bags. There were some other people camped right on the river and they saw him being chased around their vehicle by a cow."

The pig was last seen under a tree nursing a hangover. All this story needs is a video with a Yakety Sax sound track. Link -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: AAP/Main roads WA)

It's the kind of thing you heard about all the time now, but back in the 1960s, a scheme to build houses out of beer bottles on a large scale was way out there. Heineken had a real plan, though, which never got far off the ground.

It was called the Heineken World Bottle (or WOBO), designed by architect John Habraken after then-CEO "Freddy" Heineken had an epiphany. While visiting the island of Curaçao, Heineken was bothered by the mass amounts of trash--including his own bottles--and the lack of housing. His solution? Make a beer bottle that could serve as a brick when it’s finished.

Habraken came up with several designs, one of which was actually manufactured, but never made it to market. Read about the design and marketing troubles for the WOBO at Fact Co Design. Link -via the Presurfer

(YouTube link)

Everything has a name, although many aren't used in everyday life. You, as a Neatoramanaut, probably know some of these names, but you can still learn some new ones in the latest mental_floss video. I'm going to remember "lawn mullet." That's relevant to my interests. -via mental_floss

Don't click the link thinking you'll see a scholarly article that you can pick apart and argue about. These are differences that almost anyone can spot, but if you play, you'll nod knowingly while chuckling. A sample:

Fiddle
The Bluegrass fiddler paid $10,000 for his fiddle at the Violin Shop in Nashville. The Celtic fiddler inherited his fiddle from his mothers 2nd cousin in County Clare. The Old Time fiddler got theirs for $15 at a yard sale. Celtic and Bluegrass fiddles are tuned GDAE. An Old Time fiddle can be in a hundred different tunings. Old Time fiddlers seldom use more than two fingers of their left hand, and use tunings that maximize the number of open strings played. Celtic and Bluegrass fiddlers study 7th position fingering patterns with Isaac Stern, and take pride in never playing an open string. An Old Time fiddle player can make dogs howl & incapacitate people suffering from sciatic nerve damage. An Old Time fiddle player only uses 1/8 of his bow. The rest is just there for show.

Personalities and Stage Presence
Bluegrass band members wear uniforms, such as blue polyester suits with gray Stetson hats. Old Time bands wear jeans, sandals, work shirts and caps from seed companies. Celtic bands wear tour tee-shirts with plaid touring caps. All this head wear covers bald spots. Women in Bluegrass bands have big hair and Kevlar undergarments. Women in Old Time bands jiggle nicely under their overalls. There are no Women in Celtic bands, only Lassies with long skirts and lacy, high collars and Wenches in apple-dumplings-on-a-shelf bodices and leather mini-skirts. A Bluegrass band tells terrible jokes while tuning. An Old Time band tells terrible jokes without bothering to tune. Bluegrass band members never smile. Old Time band members will smile if you give them a drink. A Celtic band is too busy drinking to smile, tune or tell jokes. Celtic musicians eat fish and chips, Bluegrass musicians eat barbecue ribs, and Old Time musicians eat tofu and miso soup. Bluegrass musicians have mild high frequency hearing loss from standing near the banjo player. Old Time musicians have moderate high frequency hearing loss from sitting near the fiddler. Celtic musicians have advanced hearing loss from playing in small pubs with all those fiddles, banjos, tin whistles and bodhrans.

There's plenty more, which you can read at Bluegrass Nation. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Flickr user George Bremer)

My favorite costume was this one I wore to our local elementary school's Halloween Fun Run. I got many double takes as I ran my 3 miles dressed as Forrest Gump.

Deirdre Wingell made this costume for her son. He's a fan!

Okay, so it's not *my* costume from when I was little. Though I had some fabulous ones, I don't think there are any remaining photos of them.  I have fond memories of my mom catering to bizarre whims though so when my fan-obsessed three year old wanted desperately to be a "fan" for Halloween, we made it happen.

It was definitely a group effort.  My son is now 11, but from the time he was an infant he was completely obsessed with fans for some reason.  We don't know why.  It ended shortly around age 4.  This was all he wanted for that Halloween.  The costume is a margarine dish for the front, a Cool-whip container for the back, foam core for the blades and my husband the engineer made sure everything was angled perfectly.    We couldn't figure out how to get them to stick on so we ran to the store to get velcro tape and I made a harness out of it.  Just cut slits in the plastic tubs and threaded it through, hung them over his shoulders and stabilized it around his back.  It didn't look quite finished, so we sent the pics to my mother in law and she said, "It needs a thing like those old fashioned fans" and she was right - so I went to home depot and found a pull chain and THAT made it.  The pull chain in the front made all the difference in the world.

It was the hit of the neighborhood and it took us about two hours to trick or treat that year.  People were taking pictures, going in for full sized candy bars - you know you have a hit on your hands when that happens.

Thanks, Deidre!

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.

(Image credit: Flickr user Quinn Dombrowski)

by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, AIR staff

There are many dying arts. Reading in general may be one of them, but I don’t know how you’d go about truly assessing that. I do know about reading textbooks for leisure. No one would call it a dying art. The practice of reading textbooks for leisure is just as lively now as it has ever been.

More people buy textbooks -- actually spend their own money to do it -- now than ever before. And in deciding what to buy, they -- we -- are kids in a candy store. There’s an ever-growing number of specialized subjects for which textbooks exist, and so the variety of textbooks on offer is always increasing. Even if you somehow manage to exhaust the cream of one genre, you can easily find another genre to sample.

There is much to be gained, potentially, from trying a textbook from a world that’s new to you, especially one that hasn’t yet been hyped by the critics and lit-blogs and talk shows. It’s fun to get in on something while it still has cult status.

Let me make three suggestions off the top of my head. Ferziger and Peric’s Computational Methods for Fluid Dynamics is packed with ideas and language you’ll seldom find in anything by Charles Dickens or Virginia Woolf or in most of the Harlequin romances. Correctional Administration: Integrating Theory and Practice, by Richard P. Seiter, is bursting with plangent metaphors. And cozying up with a hematology textbook, if you’re not a hematologist, is more of an adventure than many people realize.

An un-timid reader can find lots of other good, meaty reads packed with traditional literary merit. Like the best novels, many of the textbooks in forestry management and ergodic theory and multinational auditing and thousands of other genres try to fill a reader’s mind with ideas and words that, at first read, really do feel completely novel.

But that’s not the best part. Used textbooks offer one thing more to beguile the leisure-time reader.

WTF Visualizations is a blog that archives charts and graphs that make no sense. Oh yeah, they may be pretty, or shall we say, "visually appealing," but they don't communicate the information in any coherent way. Link -via Metafilter