Old Jay held up a Bathroom Reader and said, "I'll bet you I can place this book on the floor and none of you will be able to jump over it."
Brian replied, "I'll take your bet, but you're not allowed to put the book underneath anything like a desk or a chair."
Jay agreed to the terms. He placed the book on the floor -not under anything- and still won the bet. How?
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
The town of Contamana, Peru, has a hospital, but it has no emergency equipment. It also has an airstrip, but it doesn't operate a night because there are no lights. But Wednesday night, a woman and her newborn baby needed emergency medical help. So did a teenager with a tropical disease. How could the medevac plane take off in the dark? A plea for help went out over the local radio station.
Their lights blaring in the night, hundreds of taxis lined an unlit airstrip in a jungle region of Peru so an emergency medevac plane with three very sick patients could take off.
All three survived after the 300-odd drivers of motorcycles fashioned into small taxis with compartments for passengers heeded a call Wednesday night from a radio station to race to the 800-meter airstrip in Contamana, in one of Peru's poorest regions, Peruvian media reported Thursday.
Link -via Arbroath
(Image credit: BBC News Video)
A little girl wants a hoverboard like those in the 1989 movie Back to the Future Part II, but building one is difficult. So she finds a workaround. This film by Sydney Freeland was part of the PBS 2013 Online Film Festival. -via Laughing Squid
Last Monday, Alex posted a rant about how difficult blogging is on April Fool's Day. Is he ever right! You can look all over the internet, and everything you see is either false or suspect. Original content creators were saving their good stuff for April 2. And I learned a lesson. See, I was fascinated by a great story from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader about the guys on the ISS building a satellite out of a space suit, a ham radio transmitter, and garbage. So I posted it. And nobody read it, linked it, or shared it. Well, a lot fewer people than expected. I couldn't figure out why, because it was a neat story. I posted a link to the story elsewhere, and Tuesday night received a comment telling me that was no April Fool, that it really happened. Well, I knew that, but then it dawned on me that no one took the story seriously just because it was posted on April Fools Day! Next year, I'll make our feature story a list of cat pictures on April first. Here's what else happened this past week at Neatorama.
Jill Harness brought us 27 Fantastic Photos of Cosplay At WonderCon 2013.
Eddie Deezen told us about Blazing Saddles: Mel Brooks' Western Laugh Riot.
How to Get Girls Interested in Science came to us from the Annals of Improbable Research.
Mental_floss magazine contributed The Tunnel That Saved Bosnia.
Oh yeah, that story that no one read? SuitSat-1: The Garbage Satellite, came from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
We only had two brainteasers this week: Nightclub Password and Seven-letter Word. I was really impressed with the alternate answers you guys came up with for the latter!
Congratulations to the Choose Your Own Doctor Who Giveaway Winners, LisaL, Morgenstern, and Jospeh Cuffe! That's what you get for subscribing to NeatoMail, as the contest was exclusively for subscribers.
In the What Is It? game this week, the mystery tool is a mechanical pry tool that was used to free people who were trapped in cars before the jaws of life were invented. After studying the comments and collaborating with the powers that be, we decided to award two prizes for the correct answer. Craig Clayton said it is a automotive tool to force open body panels. That's sort of right. Then The Jaws of Life for [ pick your favorite Kardashian ]'s pantyhose." That's sort of right, and funny, too! So both Craig and Jonnette win t-shirts from the NeatoShop! The prize for the funniest answer goes to The Professor, who said, "It's the remote control for a North Korean TV set." Alrighty then, that's good for a t-shirt as well! Thanks to everyone who played, and see the answers to the other mystery items of the week at the What Is It? blog.
Oh, you better believe there are more giveaways coming! Alex even asked for your suggestions on what we should give away next. Don't know? Then you should look around the NeatoShop and see what you'd like to have.
The post with the most comments this week was What Should the Choose Your Own Prize Next Week Be? but we should probably eliminate that along with the contest posts for this purpose. In that case, the most commented-on post was Students Fight to Integrate Prom. Others with a good discussion were High School Student Bitterly Responds to College Rejections and Men: Can You Deal With It If Your Wife Wore the Pants in the Family? It's not too late to put your two cents worth in!
The most popular post of the week was How Indiana Jones Was Born, followed by Brainteaser: Nightclub Password and Houdini Octopus. Those were all from earlier in the week and may eventually be eclipsed by the WonderCon or the Blazing Saddles features.
I finally got around to counting the ♥s that folks leave at the top of each post this week, and it turns out that's the way y'all show love to cute things. The most ♥s went to Micro Piglet in Sweater Vest, The Best Easter Cake of 2013, Houdini Octopus, and Cute Alert! Easter Photo Shoot with Pit Bull, Chick, and Bunnies. Just about all the other posts with lots of ♥s were cute animals, too.
Usability tip of the week: With the new Neatorama design, we have expanded the ways you can interact with others on the site. Registered users can leave comments on the posts AND on other user's profiles -including the authors profiles. But if you don't have time or don't know what to say, you can simply leave a ♥ on the top of a post you like, or beside comments you like or agree with.
And if that isn't enough Neatorama for you, we have extra content and fun at our Facebook page, Twitter feed, and Pinterest pinboard. For mobile users, Flipboard makes it easy to keep up with Neatorama. Oh yeah -look for Neatorama on Instagram, too!
Stargate Studios shows off some of the visual effects from season three of The Walking Dead. Contains spoilers for season three only. For those who haven't watched the show at all -it's really gory. We get to see how some of the effects were done, but it's mostly bloody zombie-killing. Link
Your nightmare, explained. This comic is from the Toronto artist who calls himself Lunarbaboon. Link -via Sofa Pizza
Can a ferret have any better toy than a kiddie pool full of foam packing peanuts? Try to count how many ferrets there are -they move so fast I can't count them. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
The tiny town of Ocumicho in the Mexican state of Michoacán is the source for the increasingly popular ceramic diablitos, or devils, in peculiar and even ridiculous scenes. They can be traced back to one artist who designed many of them in the 1960s.
The women of Ocumicho built molds of various base shapes, which were then differentiated with smaller clay embellishments, like spouts or handles, and finished with colorful glazes. By the 1950s, Ocumicho craftswomen mostly produced bird-shaped whistles and figurine banks, which they would sell at the local markets.
“But there was this one pivotal character named Marcelino Vicente,” says Orr. “Marcelino was the last of 11 or 12 children, all boys,” she continues, “and many townspeople claim that his mother wanted a baby girl, so she dressed him in girl’s clothing. Growing up, he was also really interested in what was considered ‘women’s work,’ which was making pottery, and was totally mocked by the men for doing this. He was a little bit of a renegade.”
Ocumicho was an extremely poor and isolated village, so it was highly unusual for individuals to step out of the prescribed gender roles. Claudia B. Isaac, who analyzed the gender division in Ocumicho in 1996, wrote that, “Although no one I spoke with directly verified that Marcelino was gay, many talked disparagingly of his reluctance to fulfill traditional male roles.”
Despite their prejudices, the town’s female potters recognized Vicente’s gift for working with clay, and he progressed from small whistles and banks to larger sculptural pieces featuring the devil characters he grew so fond of. These diablitos were an unlikely icon in such a conservative religious community; most locals associate the devil with bad luck, and are reluctant to bring diablitos into their homes. Yet when Vicente finally took his wares to the tianguis, and spread them out on a blanket for sale, the wacky diablitos were a hit.
Vicente's story did not end happily, but his assistants and fans continued making the diablitos. They became his legacy, and the signature artworks of the village of Ocumicho. Read the whole story and see more diablitos at Collector's Weekly. Link
What do you know -we finally get a Simon Tofield video featuring Simon Tofield! In this animation, Tofield shows us how to draw his new kitten, which he obviously adores. The kitten is featured in Tofield's latest book, Simon's Cat in Kitten Chaos. Link -via Tastefully Offensive
April 5th is the day celebrated as the day that humans first contacted aliens -except that won't happen until 50 years from now, and then only in the Star Trek universe. Maybe.
According to Star Trek lore, April 5, 2063 was the day that washed-up, cantankerous old nutter Zefram Cochrane proved he wasn’t so washed-up after all, though he was exactly as cantankerous as he seemed. Cochrane (with a little help from the time-displaced crew of the Enterprise-D) piloted the first warp flight from Earth, attracting the attention of a passing Vulcan ship and alerting human beings to life on other planets for the first time.
The greeting of the day: Live long, and prosper! Link
Learn more at Memory Alpha. Link
What do paleontologists think about the movie Jurassic Park? Like most professionals seeing a movie that's close to home, they spot a lot of inaccuracies, but are overall pleased to have a movie about their subject. Paleontologists can deal with the fantasy of viable dino DNA, and they can forgive the dinosaurs without feathers, but what really makes them cringe is the odd depiction of what they actually do.
In the most outrageous scene in the story, a field crew quickly brushes sand off a Deinonychus skeleton as if the dinosaur were a dusty curio.
I wish that digging dinosaurs were as easy as Jurassic Park made it look. I really do. The “raptor” fossil—called Velociraptor in the film, but really a Deinonychus to paleo pedants such as myself—that Grant and Sattler’s team exposes is buried under the thinnest coating of sand. And the complete, articulated skeleton is so sturdy that one of the field assistants can stick his grubby hands right into the dinosaur’s nasal cavity and flick out the sand. Watch the scene carefully. It’s the only time I know of that someone picking a dinosaur’s nose has ever been shown in a feature film.
Recovering dinosaur bones from the earth is an exacting, painstaking (yet rewarding) process. Brian Switek tells us what it's really like at Slate. Link
Yes, there was life before the internet. And us old geezers did the same things; we just used old-fashioned 3D objects to help us do them. John Atkinson of the webcomic Wrong Hands shows us the real-world analogs to the social networking sites you use online. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
In 1973, 15 college basketball players were honored with a Hershberger Award from the National Association of Collegiate Basketball Writers. Some of those players went on to further college glory and the NBA (one now coaches the Harlem Globetrotters). But the awards were not given in 1974, or any other year, because the award was a hoax, cooked up by four students at College of William & Mary. Steven Noll, Paul Pavlich, Reed Bohne, and Tom Duncan selected the players, sent certificates to their colleges, and issued a press release that the AP circulated.
The pranksters went to great lengths to make the award believable. They spent hours at the library, paging through newspaper box scores to help them select recipients. They designed stationery with a spinning basketball and the official-sounding slogan: "Serving the Sport." They sent correspondence from Mr. Noll's parents' address in Garden City, N.Y., for big-city authority.
"My mother thought we'd go to prison for mail fraud," Mr. Noll said.
Paul Pavlich, a co-conspirator, said that plotting the scam was as painstaking as an ascent of Mount Everest. "We tried to figure out everything that could go wrong," he said.
Their preparation paid off. Newspapers printed their fabricated details. An article in the Miami Herald published March 27, 1973, announced the all-rookie team as "selected by the nation's college basketball writers." The Hartford (Conn.) Courant noted that North Carolina State's David Thompson was "the only unanimous choice." News of the award also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Constitution, New York Daily News and elsewhere.
The players who won those awards only recently found out it was a hoax. Forty years on, most think it was a pretty good joke. Read the full story at the Wall Street Journal. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Steven Noll)
A border collie named Harley went missing for six freezing nights in the countryside near Aberdeen, Scotland, during a visit to Grandpa's farm. Her owner Leyonee Donald contacted police and made appeals online for the dog's return, but was almost resigned to the fact that Harley was lost forever. Then on Tuesday, her father called and asked her to come pick up her dog at the farm.
“So we rushed back, and there she was. She’d got herself on top of a large stack of hay bales and fallen through a hole which had taken her right down to the bottom and she was trapped.
“My dad had found her while he was seeing his cows on Tuesday morning. They were really restless and mooing a lot.
“Animals have amazing instincts and they were all pointing towards the hay bales so my dad thought Harley might be around there and started shouting for her.
“He heard this tiny little bark and he then realised Harley was trapped between the bales.
Harley was retrieved from the hay and checked out by a vet, who declared the dog in good shape.
Link -via Arbroath
(Image credit: SWNS)
Norwegian artist Ida Skivenes puts art on toast! Every piece of toast is completely edible (and she eats them). All are photographed by phone and enshrined at Instagram. The Andrew Wyeth scene above was made with cheddar cheese, cream cheese, figs, dried strawberry, and dried blueberry. There are more famous artworks on toast, but Skivenes also loads toast with pop culture characters and other scenes. Continue reading to see some more of them.
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