First, you collect everyone's favorite game features, then you fix all the complaints you hear on the internet about existing games. What you then have is the ultimate game, which even I would play! Someone need to develop this right now. Comic by Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
The puppy Mocha sees a new friend, with predictable but oh-so-adorable results. -via Daily PIcks and Flicks
Discovery News has a gallery of photographs of the Earth, taken from various distances, from the 1946 film shot at 65 miles up to Voyager's 1990 image from 4 billion miles away. The image here of the Earth rising over the moon's horizon was taken from around 250,000 miles away, during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. It just happens to be my favorite. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science
(Image credit: NASA)
A kitten hiding in the front wheel well of an Airbus flew from Athens to Zurich on Friday. The ground crew in Greece had spotted the kitten and searched for it, delaying the plane for two hours. But when a search of the plane's wheel wells turned up no kitten, the plane was cleared for takeoff. Upon landing, the kitten was finally found in the undercarriage. The kitten's survival was amazing as temperatures at flying altitude can reach 50 below zero, and there isn't much oxygen.
Blick said an animal rescue service had taken charge of the cat, which had not had to be taken into quarantine.
“It’s now being nursed back to health,” it quoted Zurich health service spokeswoman Franziska Egli as saying.
The Blick newspaper said airline staff had taken the cat to their hearts, christening it Oscar Fox after the last two letters of the airbus’s identifier.
The airline sent the kitten off with a plush plane as a souvenir. Link -via Arbroath
(Image credit: Swiss International Airlines)
Before Steven Spielberg became Hollywood royalty, he was just another young director with a giant shark problem.
It was July 1974, and 27-year-old Steven Spielberg was sure his career was over. He’d been on location in Martha’s Vineyard for three months, waiting for the overdue star of his new movie Jaws. And now, as he watched the first lunges of the $250,000 mechanical shark in action, Spielberg’s heart sank. The beast was anything but menacing. His eyes crossed. His teeth were too white. His jaws didn’t close properly. And he had a big dimple that made him look like Kirk Douglas.
The shark was just the latest of Spielberg’s setbacks.
Before Jaws, movies weren't shot on the ocean. Hollywood studios simply tossed a boat in a tank and projected moving scenery behind it. But Spielberg wanted realism. And he paid for it. Boating mishaps and near drownings had almost killed several cast and crew members.
Rough waters and drifting tides made for chaotic filming. Most days, once the crew had anchored the 12 tons of rigging into place and waited out unwanted boats on the horizon, Spielberg was left with just two hours of afternoon light to shoot. As Spielberg burned through his $4 million budget and 55-day shooting schedule, the cast and crew turned mutinous. Angry locals left dead sharks on the production office’s porch. Studio execs worried the film wouldn’t deliver. And Spielberg lived in constant fear of having the plug pulled. Word in Hollywood was that the young director was finished. But Spielberg, who felt “like Captain Bligh” on a sinking ship, was determined to complete his movie, shark or no shark.
A Picture Book of Fears
When a Long Island fisherman caught a 4,500-pound great white in 1964, author Peter Benchley took notice. “What would happen if one of those things came around and wouldn’t go away?” he asked. Ten years later he turned the idea into the bestselling novel Jaws. Benchley’s book sparked an immediate bidding war in Hollywood, with Universal coming out on top—all before it even hit shelves.
Spielberg wasn’t the studio’s first choice as director. Universal initially approached Dick Richards, but when Richards kept referring to the story’s predator as “a whale,” the producers lost patience. Enter the young and ambitious Steven Spielberg. His résumé included more TV movies and episodes of Columbo than feature films. And his one stab at the big screen, The Sugarland Express, had drawn critical raves but tanked at the box office. Still, the suits were impressed by his confidence. Spielberg’s vision for Jaws was part high adventure, part horror: “a picture book of fears, phobias and anxieties.”
The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.
(Image credit: Flickr user Ken Bondy)
Built-in lights, field detectors, flotation devices: Sharks have mastered the evolutionary tricks of a killing trade.
Hit men from the mob have nothing on sharks. Over the past 400 million years, sharks have evolved into nature's perfect predators. They can attack silently and with great bursts of speed. Their jaws can snap a sea lion in half, and their enormous gullet can swallow both pieces whole.
THEY'RE EVERYWHERE!
(Image credit: Alfonso González)
If limb-crunching, man-eating sharks haunt your nightmares, you won't enjoy knowing that there are nearly 400 species, ranging from about six inches to 50 feet long (15cm to 15m), inhabiting every oceanic corner of the globe. The good news is that most of them don't have the least interest in you. Some, like the polka-dotted whale shark (weighing in at 13 tons), are perfectly happy with plankton and schools of small fish. The most common shark, the dogfish, lives mainly on fish, crabs, octopus, and squid. In fact, instead of eating people, the reverse is true. These sharks, among others, actually appear on our dinner tables.
ARMORED AND DANGEROUS
When Country Day School in Largo, Florida, named their summer camp The Hunger Games, they thought it would be a fun theme that was popular with kids. Instead, adults were chagrined by the excited, violent talk among the participants. Campers practiced for the big Friday tournament with flags representing their "life." But they talked about killing each other, just like in the movie The Hunger Games.
On Wednesday morning, the camp's head counselor, Lindsey Gillette, told the campers there would be a rule change to Friday's Hunger Games tournament. Instead of "killing" each other by taking flags, the campers would instead "collect lives." Whoever had the most flags would win.
Gillette told the campers she changed the rules so that no one would get out early and have to sit on the sidelines. But privately, she said the violence the kids had expressed was off-putting. She wanted the camp to focus on team-building activities.
And there were team-building activities, but the kids also learned strategy, conspiracy, and the art of the double-cross. You have to wonder what the camp officials were thinking when they announced the theme for this year's camp.
Susan Toler, a clinical psychologist specializing in children's issues and an assistant dean at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, called the camp idea "unthinkable."
When children read books or watch movies, they're observers, removed from the killing. "But when they start thinking and owning and adopting and assuming the roles, it becomes closer to them," Toler said. "The violence becomes less egregious."
Read more about the camp at the Tampa Bay Times. Link -via Hypervocal
(Image credit: Douglas R. Clifford/Tampa Bay Times)
English Springer Spaniels Hope and Rosie dance for their dinner! You can imagine that the dance came first, and the song was a natural addition to the routine. -via Arbroath
Jules Vernon was a vaudeville ventriloquist. In this "family" portrait, he shows off his characters. His wife is turned away from the camera, though. You have to wonder why -there's no way on earth she could be any uglier than the dummies! In fact, you can see more pictures of all of them in the Vent Haven Museum archives. Link -via Weird Vintage
Before you watch this, if you don't live in a big city, you should know that subway commuters are used to panhandlers who take advantage of a captive audience to tell a tale of woe and collect donations. It happens all the time. So these people were not expecting what they got in this incident from College Humor. -via Viral Viral Videos
Civil War photographer Matthew Brady began taking photographs years before the war, and made a good living taking portraits. In one upstate New York town, he was only approached by one reluctant customer after the man's son died. He was desperate for an image of the boy to remember him by.
The tale is retold by Robert Wilson, the editor of The American Scholar, in “Mathew Brady,” his patient and painstaking new biography of the portraitist and Civil War photographer. Brady wasn’t one to overlook a sales tool. “You cannot tell how soon it may be too late,” he warned in an 1856 ad that ran in The New York Daily Tribune, advising readers to come sit for a portrait while they still could. When the Civil War began in 1861, thousands of new soldiers and their families became acutely aware that it might soon be too late. They were willing to pay a dollar apiece for tintypes, and Wilson reports that at Brady’s Washington studio, “the wait was sometimes hours long.”
Brady's portrait studio was even decorated somewhat like a funeral parlor. But he had several tricks up his sleeve to drum up business even before the war. Read more about Brady and the new book about him at the New York Times. Link -via 3 Quarks Daily
(Image credit: Matthew Brady/Library of Congress)
Shown on this map (which is interactive at the link) are companies that make up the Goldman Sachs group, which comprises thousands of business entities based all over the world. You recognize the shape of the United States and the UK, but you may have to check the drop-down menu to identify the others. The area highlighted in yellow here is the Cayman Islands, where the corporation has 739 subsidiaries. That big red blob in Europe? That's Luxembourg. You can mouse around to see each company and the other companies that it owns or is owned by. It can get confusing fast. There are also visualizations for Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Wells Fargo, at OpenCorporates. Link -via Metafilter
Tama the cat jumps when her favorite TV show comes on! She knows exactly what she's going to see, because the show intro is the same for every episode. One of these days she'll catch that bird! In fact, there are several videos of Tama watching TV at Daily Picks and Flicks. Link
School begins Monday for the last four daughters in the family. We have a senior, a junior, and two sophomores in high school, and my niece will be a freshman, although at a different school. We've already had the great sisterly clothing swap, and this year I am no longer doing their laundry, because I have no idea what belongs to who anyway. One kid has a political science paper due the first day, and another has three advanced placement classes in the first term. This year is going to be an adventure. Wish me luck. Here's what's been going on this past week at Neatorama.
Zeon Santos introduced us to 11 Independent Artists at San Diego Comic Con 2013.
Jill Harness told us about 5 Sitcoms You Might Not Know Were Based on Real People or Events.
Eddie Deezen contributed A Few Facts You May Not Know About William Shatner.
Alex posted some really neat illustrations on the Spotlight blog in A Book Can Change Your Life.
Die-Hard Chicken, the story of Mike the Headless Chicken came from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
The Annals of Improbable Research gave us Experiments in Yawning.
The Perfect Record: 19-0. Harriet Tubman's tips for taking slaves to freedom was from mental_floss magazine.
Hy Conrad brought us another Whodunit: Bell, Booke, or Kendal?
David Israel posed another edition of Questions In Need of Answers. We got a lot of information about the good things in life: pizza and videos games! If there's a nagging question you'd like other Neatoramanauts to answer, let us know, and we might use it.
Hey! Have you heard about the NeatoShop's Dream Picnic Pin to Win Contest? It's a great way to practice using Pinterest if you're new to that social site, and you could win all kinds of neat stuff from the NeatoShop! If you're not on Pinterest already, this gives you a great excuse to jump in and start. You've got plenty of time, because the contest will be open until August 25th, but you'll want to get started as soon as you can.
In the What Is It? game, the mystery tool is a probe for testing corn. It was thrust into a corn crib or other container and then rotated to scrape some kernels off the ears, which were then tested for temperature, moisture, quality, etc., similar to patent number 2,184,472. The first person who guessed that was Craig Clayton, who wins a t-shirt for his efforts! The funniest answer this week came from Jeff Snider, who guessed it was a hypodermic needle for whale doctors (now, that's what you call a veterinary specialty)! Unfortunately, he did not select a t-shirt. See the other mystery items of the week and the answers at the What Is It? blog.
Last week I neglected to mention a new feature you should know about. Over on the right sidebar, we now have a list of the five Most Popular posts, which you can click and switch to the five Most Commented posts. That way you can find out what other people are reading right now and where the conversations are happening, so you can jump in with your two cents! Better check often, because they'll change before you know it.
The post with the most comments for the whole week was Questions In Need of Answers. No surprise there. That was followed by The Camp Gyno and The Endurance of Science Fiction.
The comment of the week came from Barking Bud, who pulled up the perfect video to go with the post Russian 1916 Wooden Aircraft Carrier? You'll just have to go see it.
The most popular post was 5 Sitcoms You Might Not Know Were Based on Real People or Events. In second place was LEGO Librarians, followed by A Few Facts You May Not Know About William Shatner.
The post that earned the most ♥s was What Bears Do in the Woods, followed by American Officer Writes a Letter to His Son on Hitler's Personal Stationery. We had a bunch of mostly animal-related posts tied for third place.
The most emailed post was What Bears Do in the Woods. Because everyone knows at least one librarian, LEGO Librarians was second, and Life-Size TIE Fighter was third.
Looking ahead to next week: It's SHARK WEEK! The shark hat on the left is from the NeatoShop, where you'll find more sharks. To get youself in the mood, may I suggest reading the article The Ten Weirdest Sharks Ever. We've got some neat shark things planned for the coming week, too, plus our regular roundup of the the neatest things on the internet, so be here!
The Tom Hanks movie Saving Mr. Banks is about Walt Disney and his campaign to secure the film rights to Mary Poppins from its author, P.L. Travers. The film comes out in December, but we know something about the true story behind the movie. Travers was dead set against her character being "Disneyfied."
Since Saving Mr. Banks is a Disney production, of course, I’m guessing that the movie will end with P.L. Travers and Disney agreeing to disagree goodnaturedly. But nothing could be further from the truth. Despite the picture above of Ms. Travers smiling with Walt and Julie Andrews at the movie premiere, she was actually miserable. She cried when it was over, feeling her characters and ideas had been butchered.
Mary Poppins, Travers said, was “already beloved for what she was—plain, vain and incorruptible—(and now) transmogrified into a soubrette. ... And how was it that Mary Poppins herself, the image of propriety, came to dance a can-can on the roof-top displaying all her underwear? A child wrote, after seeing the film, ‘I think Mary Poppins behaved in a very indecorous manner.’ Indecorous indeed!”
Mental_floss has a list of objections Travers had to the finished film, and the steps she took to make sure it never happened again. Link
(Image credit: Zannaland.com)
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