Jude practices his faceplants instead of taking a nap. His parents watch by a baby-monitoring app. And laugh! -via Daily Picks and Flicks
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Little Kayla is very excited about seeing the moon, but she can't reach it! -via Viral Viral Videos
Yeah, the Harlem Shake in LEGO might be a neat thing to watch! From the team at Bold Choice, here's a lesson in what can happen when you spend too much time and effort on your video projects in the era of 15-minute memes. -via The Daily What
Well, that's what the caption says, but it doesn't look like any puma I've ever seen. This picture is supposedly from 1935 Russia. The cat looks more like a jaguar, but aren't they deadly enough without firearms? Redditor Ayatrolla gives the caption of the photo as he found it.
Puma Calls For Food By Firing A Cannon
Though most animals are gun-shy, a wild puma kept at a laboratory in Moscow, Russia, deliberately fires a cannon to signify that it is hungry. Laboratory workers trained the animal, in accordance with the theories of Dr. Ivan Pavlov, noted physiologist, by firing the piece and giving the puma a piece of meat after each shot. Soon it overcame its natural dislike for the sound and learned to get its meals by climbing upon a platform and pulling the firing cord.
Looks more like a circus act to me. What do you think? Link
The Civil War was the first American war to be documented on film, but those photographs are in black and white. John C. Guntzelman wants to change our perception of those scenes with his book The Civil War in Color: A Photographic Reenactment of the War Between the States, featuring dozens of photographed meticulously colored in Photoshop. Guntzelman talks about how he did it, and why he did it.
The purpose of this is to show that people 150 years ago were not very different from us today. It will hopefully bring forth an era that’s only two long lifetimes ago. This is 150 years not 1,500 years. It was just as colorful then. People were just as real then. I hope that people will look at these photographs and get a more realistic feeling of what happened at that time.
Smithsonian has more on the book, plus an interactive feature that lets you switch back and forth and compare several images in their original black and white and color versions. Link
(Image credit: Prints & Photographs, Library of Congress)
Southwest of Buenos Aires, Argentina, lies a salt lake called Lago Epecuen. Like many mineral springs, a spa industry grew up and and the nearby village boomed into a thriving community called Villa Epecuen.
The town’s population peaked in the 1970s with more than 5,000. Nearly 300 businesses thrived, including hotels, hostels, spas, shops, and museums.
Around the same time, a long-term weather event was delivering far more rain than usual to the surrounding hills for years, and Lago Epecuen began to swell. On 10 November 1985 the enormous volume of water broke through the rock and earth dam and inundated much of the town under four feet of water. By 1993, the slow-growing flood consumed the town until it was covered in 10 meters of water.
Nearly 25 years later, in 2009, the wet weather reversed and the waters began to recede. Villa Epecuen started coming back to the surface.
What emerged from the water looks like a post-apocalyptic movie set. The streets and blocks are there, and buildings, furniture, and carefully-planted trees are quite visible, even in their wrecked condition. See lots of pictures at Amusing Planet. Link -via mental_floss
(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons contributor Santiago Matamoro)
The tulips are starting to sprout up through the fallen leaves in my flower garden. I'll wait until the first of March at least to pull the leaf cover off, but just the sight of those little green shoots excites me! Meanwhile, the Academy Awards will finally be given out tomorrow night …after an exceedingly long promotional period in which I learned enough about the nominated films to pretend I actually saw them. The only ones I really saw were the animated shorts, thanks to the internet. And thanks to the internet, I won't have to actually watch the awards show, as the results will be posted as they happen, and I can indulge in my Sunday night ritual of watching The Walking Dead (while still simultaneously surfing the internet, of course). Here's what happened this past week here at Neatorama.
Don't miss our exclusive features! You still have time to catch up on them. The White House: Keeping Up Appearances came from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
The Annals of Improbable Research gave us Notes From an Expedition to the Cellfoan People.
Alex posted a gallery of Surreal Landscapes by Jim Kazanjian at the Neatorama Spotlight blog.
10 Foods That (Thankfully) Flopped was from mental_floss magazine.
"Madman" Newman's Brainteasers from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader gave us all plenty to argue about.
In this week's What Is It? game, the pictured object is a homemade hammer. Berhard was first in with the correct answer, and wins a t-shirt! The funniest answer came from Algomeysa, who said, "If you're feeling left out because the Russian meteor didn't break your windows, you can alleviate the problem with this!" That deserves a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! See the answers to all this week's mystery items at the What Is It? blog.
You'd expect the most comments to come from the What Is It? game and the Brainteasers, so discounting those, the posts with the most comments this week were Office Depot and OfficeMax to Merge, followed by A Truck Carrying a Truck Carrying a Truck Carrying a Car and STD Frisbee.
The comment of the week came from wonky donky, who had a better term for the Truck Carrying a Truck Carrying a Truck Carrying a Car:
This is nothing more than the traditional Polish Thanksgiving stunt they pull every year called, "Truckducken".
The most popular post of the week was the picture collection You Had One Job. That was followed by Hotel Het Arresthuis: Jail Turned Into Luxury Hotel and Clever Students Use Game Theory to Get Perfect Scores on an Exam.
Usability Tip of the Week: Did you know you can embed images and videos in your comments? Look at this.
When you click to open a comment window, look to the upper right. Click on "image," and an upload field will open. Click on "video" and you'll see a field in which you can enter a vimeo or YouTube link. You can switch back and forth from video or image to text, to add an explanation for your image or video. These will work even in replies to other comments, as you can see in the Rollin' Safari comments. Note: newly registered members and those who haven't left many comments may not be able to access this feature. So leave more comments!
March starts this coming Friday. The NeatoShop doesn't have a dedicated "shop" for St. Patricks Day, but there is a section for St. Patricks day T-shirts, and you can find hats and other accessories as well. Order now so you'll have the cleverest shirt at the party!
And if that isn't enough Neatorama for you, we have extra content and fun at our Facebook page, Twitter feed, Instagram, and Pinterest. And mobile users: Flipboard makes it easy to keep up with Neatorama.
Grant Snider of Incidental Comics gives us not only a comic but a poem within it.
I don't advocate drug use - unless it leads to great works of literature.
Link -via Laughing Squid
Someone once theorized that new "reality" TV shows are created by pulling words out of hats, one word from the adjective hat and one from the noun hat. That's the only way you can explain Cupcake Wars or Amish Mafia. -via mental_floss
Berrge Tattoo in Istanbul, Turkey, has a clever job application process that weeds out totally incompetent tattoo artists right away. You can only access the application process by using a QR code, but you'll have to fill in the ink yourself to make the code legible to your device. Either that, or it's just a great ad for the parlor itself. -via 22 Words
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is staging the 30th annual Insect Fear Film Festival on Saturday, February 23rd. All films will feature insects, spiders, or scorpions. They aren't necessarily new movies, and they aren't necessarily great movies. They aren't even necessarily movies, because at least one feature this year is a TV episode (“War of the Coprophages” from season 3 of The X-Files). National Geographic's Pop Omnivore Blog talked with the founder of the festival, Department of Entomology head May Berenbaum.
I imagine most insect films meet the criteria of non-excellence. Is there anything above a grade B film in the genre?
The granddaddy of them all is Them! A 1954 film about an encounter with a race of giant ants. It was nominated for an Oscar and was Warner Brothers’ biggest grossing film that year. Angels and Insects (1995) won an Academy Award for costumes. Many big actors got their start in bug films. Clint Eastwood appeared as the jet pilot in Tarantula (1955). Leonard Nimoy appears in Braineaters (1958).
Are there trends in insect films?
In the 1950s big bug films were popular—oversized insects made so by radiation. What causes the mutation differs with the era. Genetically engineered big bugs came in the 1990s. In the 1970s, swarms were popular.
Read the rest of the interview at Nat Geo. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
Shane Koyczan eloquently describes how childhood bullying leaves lifetime scars in this spoken word poem. A huge numbers of artists helped with this project, you can see who they are at the To This Day Project site. Link -via reddit
James ‘Jimmy’ McConnell, a former Royal Marine, died with no surviving family members. The staff at the nursing home in Southsea, Portsmouth, England, where he lived knew little about McConnell and were concerned that no one would be there for McConnell's funeral.
So a call went out across social media websites for anyone from the armed forces family who could turn up to give him a send-off.
And almost 300 people turned up at Milton Cemetery this morning in the bitter cold to say farewell to the man they had never met.
A small procession through the cemetery was led by Royal British Legion standard bearers.
The hearse was accompanied in a procession by flag-bearing motorcyclists from the Royal British Legion Riders Branch.
From Shag Point, New Zealand, to Humptulips, Washington state, this map fills you in on rude-sounding place names. Quite a few of them are due to language differences, and others are due to the changing meanings of words over time. Still fun to know! I personally think Newfoundland and Nova Scotia are under-represented, considering the many great place names in those provinces. Click on a flag at the link to bring up information on each place. May be NSFW. Link -via b3ta
People will make a tournament bracket out of anything, and the process of selecting the next Pope is just too tempting to resist -especially as it will be held in March. This bracket is divided into four regions, including the tri-state regional, which contains four men not actually considered "papabili" (two are deceased). The rounds have wonderful names, the best being the Sweet Sistine. Each candidate comes with Vegas odds, so get your office pools ready! Link -via Metafilter
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