In this Pepsi ad, race car driver Jeff Gordon takes a Camaro out for a spin, with a hapless car salesman in the passenger seat, who supposedly doesn't know who is driving. Does it matter how "real" it is, when it's this funny? -via Viral Viral Videos
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Sometimes fame brings with it an inflated ego and exacting tastes, but you have to cater to the big names if you want them at your event. The Soup has "uncovered" a page of Grumpy Cat's agreement to appear at SXSW. Note this is one of fifty pages! Link -via Laughing Squid
The papal conclave has elected Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina, as the new pope. A few things about him: He
* is 76 years old.
* has a chemistry degree.
* rode the bus to work in Argentina.
* lost one lung to an infection as a youth.
* came in second when Benedict XVI was selected eight years ago.
* is the first Jesuit elected pope.
* is the first non-European elected for more than 1,000 years.
* will take the name Francis.
In his first appearance as pontiff, Francis I told the crowd,
"As you know the duty of the conclave is to give Rome a bishop. It seems that my brother cardinals went almost to the end of the world."
Link -via Fark
See a video of his first appearance at St. Peter's Square. Link
(Image: BBC video)
A thread at reddit posed the question, "If money wasn't an issue, what would you make sure to have in your dream house?" Thousands of comments held hundreds of great ideas. Movoto Blog took some of those ideas and designed a house. It appears that many people would live like a supervillain if they had the chance. Link -Thanks, Sally!
Antarctica has an abundance of abandoned structures for several reasons. No one stays there long, there are few (if any) looters, and while the environment might wreck buildings, they won't see mold, bacterial rot, or damage from plants. Shipping old equipment, ships, and buildings off the continent is usually more trouble than it's worth. And those abandoned camps and towns each have a fairly well documented history. Some even contain their original supplies! Take a little tour and see some of the more interesting abandoned places in Antarctica at Dark Roasted Blend. Link
(Image credit: Lyubomir Ivanov)
And now it's time for our collaborative contest with the always amusing What Is It? Blog! Do you know what the object in this picture is? You can win even if you don't know!
Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will each win a T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?
Check out the What Is It? Blog for another picture of the mystery object. Good luck!
Update: the contraption shown is a set of shepherd's crook crosscut saw set spiders or saw set gauges. That's a lots of words to describe a tool to check the amount of set (bend) in saw teeth. You can read more about it at the What Is It? blog. The first person to guess correctly was Steve Pauk, who wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! Among the many funny answers, the funniest came from pismonque, who said,
These are Victorian-era bustle stays, which prevented the embarrassing "sidecar effect" of an inadvertently rotated bustle. The device clamped onto the midline of the bustle, with the fin keying into the wearer's conveniently placed natural cleft, thus preventing lateral bustle drift.
That conjures up a picture, and also wins pismonque a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! Thanks to everyone who entered, and thanks to the What Is It? blog!
These LEGO Bionicles have rhythm! Giuseppe Acito linked them up with Arduino Uno, a MIDI sequencer app for iPad, a drum pad, and some xylophone keys. You can read more about it at his site, if you can read Italian. Link -via Design Taxi
This is supposedly a North Korean propaganda film showing how Americans live. It's too bad we have eaten all the birds, but there is plenty of snow to eat and make coffee with. We are thankful for the North Koreans, who donate fabric to the Red Cross so we can have walls and hand out cakes to our senior citizens. The watermark on the footage leads to the website v.ifeng.com. Any insights from those who can read Korean Chinese (if you can find any info on the website) will be appreciated. -via Digg
Update: Too funny to be true. I traced the takedown order to the original producer, Alun Hill, who titled this video North Korea Comedy Show. It is satire.
Where does Bigfoot come from? What does he do with his time? Ask a silly question… and someone will come up with an answer. For example:
4. Bigfoot is really an alien.
Two conspiracies for the price of one! In 1973, Pennsylvanian UFO researcher Stan Gordon said he noticed an increase in sightings of Sasquatches entering and exiting extraterrestrial vessels. Fascinated by the possibility that the mysterious primates may actually hail from another planet, Gordon quickly set up a "UFO-Bigfoot Hotline" that still runs to this day.5. Bigfoot is really a giant ground sloth.
While most "experts" believe the Sasquatch to be some form of shaggy primate, a few have opined that these beasts are actually surviving giant ground sloths. For more on these fascinating prehistoric mammals, do go here.
Possibly the craziest thing about these theories is that they all require the belief that Sasquatch is real. Read all 11 at The Week. Link
(Image credit: Nathan Mazur/The NeatoShop)
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
The Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville, were the first pilots to have a successful manned flight, when they flew their airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December of 1903. Although many believe the Wright brothers flew together in a plane that historic day, this is untrue. It was brother Orville who flew aloft for 12 seconds that day and proved that man, indeed, could fly. But Orville Wright holds another flying record. He was the pilot of the first flight in history where a passenger died.
Orville Wright demonstrates the plane over Fort Myer, Virginia.
By 1908, five years after the legendary flight, the Wright brothers were traveling all over the United States and Europe demonstrating their fabulous flying machine. Everything went well -until September of 1908. That was when Orville Wright was giving demonstrations of flight at Fort Myer, Virginia.
The U.S. Army was interested in purchasing the Wright brothers' aircraft and using it as a military plane. It was the job of the younger Wright brother to show how safe and practical their plane, "the Flyer," was. Orville Wright had done this before.
On September 10th, he took the first official passenger, Lieutenant Frank D. Lahm up successfully. Two days later, Orville flew Major George O. Squier around for nine minutes. If these first two flights went swimmingly, the next was to be a catastrophe.
Thomas Selfridge and Orville Wright before takeoff.
It was on September 17, 1908, that Orville Wright took 26-year-old Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge up for another demonstration. A cheering crowd of 2,000 gathered to witness the flight. Selfridge waved to the crowd as the plane took off. Selfridge was the heaviest passenger yet, weighing in at 175 pounds.
Photographer Fabian Oefner (previously at Neatorama) has a new series of works called Black Hole.
"Black Hole" is a series of images, which shows paint modeled by centripetal force. The setup is very simple: Various shades of acrylic paint are dripped onto a metallic rod, which is connected to a drill. When switched on, the paint starts to move away from the rod, creating these amazing looking structures.
The motion of the paint happens in a blink of an eye, the images you see are taken only millisecond after the drill was turned on.
This picture shows what it looks like from an angle. You can see the other images, plus a video of the process, at Oefner's Behance gallery. Link -via Twisted Sifter
This math equation has been passed around on Facebook precisely because people argue about it. Having not taken a math class in 40 years or so, I only got halfway through it before I became stuck. Sure, if it were a mortgage amortization or a sale on beans, I would be able to figure out what I want to know, but the way problems are presented in math class are beyond my long-term memory. The problem is in the way it is written. Tara Haelle at Slate explains:
Some of you are already insisting in your head that 6 ÷ 2(1+2) has only one right answer, but hear me out. The problem isn’t the mathematical operations. It’s knowing what operations the author of the problem wants you to do, and in what order. Simple, right? We use an “order of operations” rule we memorized in childhood: “Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally,” or PEMDAS, which stands for Parentheses Exponents Multiplication Division Addition Subtraction.* This handy acronym should settle any debate—except it doesn’t, because it’s not a rule at all. It’s a convention, a customary way of doing things we’ve developed only recently, and like other customs, it has evolved over time. (And even math teachers argue over order of operations.)
“In earlier times, the conventions didn’t seem as rigid and people were supposed to just figure it out if they were mathematically competent,” says Judy Grabiner, a historian of mathematics at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. Mathematicians generally began their written work with a list of the conventions they were using, but the rise of mass math education and the textbook industry, as well as the subsequent development of computer programming languages, required something more codified. That codification occurred somewhere around the turn of the last century. The first reference to PEMDAS is hard to pin down. Even a short list of what different early algebra texts taught reveals how inconsistently the order of operations was applied.
That cleared up nothing at all for me, because where I was stuck was in a much siller place. I had to read the entire article before I figured out what to do. See if you can come up with an answer before you read the rest. Link
(Image source: Matthew McKibbon)
In this installment of the ongoing series Epic Rap Battles of History, we have a matchup that we've discussed a few times here at Neatorama. Thomas Edison, the wizard of Menlo Park, ended up in the history books as the inventor of the light bulb and many other gadgets that make modern life what it is. Nikola Tesla's amazing research into electricity has only seeped into the general puclic' consciousness in the last couple of decades, and some folks are working hard to see that he eventually gets his due for the work he did. -via Viral Viral Videos
The A.V. Club discusses the new movie A Talking Cat!?! just released on video, featuring Eric Roberts as the voice of Duffy, a talking cat. The article first discusses the career arc of Roberts (Julia Roberts' older brother) who cranks out dozens of independent films every year. The review of the direct-to-video feature A Talking Cat!?! compares it to The Room for plain awfulness, which only makes me want to rent it to see how long I can watch it. The review is most likely more entertaining. Spoilers ahead.
It’s not enough for a character to say he’s driving somewhere. No, we need to follow a single boring car on an unexceptional road all the way from its start to its destination, with nothing remotely non-tedious occurring along the way. I suppose that I should just be happy this isn’t occurring in real time and that there isn’t a half hour of Whitaker driving cautiously on an empty road to his destination.
Then again, Cat has about 12 minutes’ worth of plot, so it has to dole it out sparingly. Duffy acts as something of a feline Amelie who uses his magical powers of speech and his gifts as a “human whisperer” to set up the pouty teenaged boy with the obnoxious girl he’s tutoring in English. A Talking Cat?!? inspires so little sympathy for its characters, human or otherwise, that when Duffy gets hit by a car in the third act, I was actually rooting for his death, and I say that as an inveterate cat lover. But astonishingly, the worst and craziest is yet to come.
After Duffy is hit by a car, he hovers close to death, Dannas conveniently remembers what Duffy told him about the magical collar under the magical tree in the magical forest. They slap the magical collar on Duffy and through the magic of terrible, terrible special effects, Duffy roars back to life in time for a film-wide happy ending. Reportedly, A Talking Cat?!? cost $1 million, which makes me wonder where the other $990,000 went. It sure as shit isn’t on the screen.
This sounds like it might be a contender for the Golden Turkey Awards, if it ever gets seen by anyone. The review has a couple of clips you do not want to miss. Link -via Metafilter
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