The following article is republished from Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader

You've probably never heard of Gunpei Yokoi, but if you've ever played a Game Boy, a Color Game Boy, Donkey Kong, or just about any other Nintendo product made between 1970 and 1996, you have him to thank for it. Here's his story.

IN THE CARDS

In the mid-1960s, an electronics student named Gunpei Yokoi graduated from Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, and got a job as a maintenance engineer with the Nintendo company, a manufacturer of playing cards.

Keeping the playing card printing machines in good working order must have been boring work, because Yokoi started passing the time building toys -with company materials, using company machines and equipment, on company time.

That didn't exactly fit into his job description, so when Nintendo's president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, found out what he's been up to and called him into his office, Yokoi figured that he'd soon be looking for a new job.

Not quite- Nintendo was making so much money selling children's playing cards that it had decided to create an entire games division. Yamauchi transferred Yokoi to the new division, and told him to come up with a game that Nintendo could manufacture in time to sell for Christmas.

Yokoi went home and got one of the toys he'd already made: an extendable grabbing "hand" that he made out of crisscrossing pieces of wooden latticework. When you squeezed its handles together like a pair of scissors, the latticework extended and the hand closed its grip.

YOU'VE GOT TO HAND IT TO HIM

Yamauchi was impressed, and production on the Ultra Hand, as they named it, began right away. The company ended up selling more than 1.2 million of the hands at a price of about $6 apiece- the game division's first toy was also its first big hit.  

Several high-profile projects focused a global spotlight on the work of Belgian artist Laurent Durieux in the past year: a series featuring the Japanese manga robot Gigantor, screen prints for the movies The Iron Giant and King Kong, and a re-imagining of the poster for Jaws, which Stephen Spielberg liked so much he bought 25 prints. Read about Durieux's retro-futuristic work and see plenty of examples at Collector's Weekly. Link

The blizzard that the Weather Channel referred to as winter storm Nemo has headed out to sea, after dumping up to 30 inches of snow on parts of New England, causing thousand of flights to be cancelled, and leaving over half a million people without power. Here are some of the most popular images of the snow submitted to reddit today. Shown here is a scene spotted by Phineas_and_fap. Continue reading for more.

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We've seen wild animals caught on camera traps, and we've seen kittens see their first mirror image. But now we've got a pair of curious young leopards encountering a large mirror on the side of an empty road near Nyonié in Gabon. This sequence was edited down from a 20-minute encounter. French videographer Xavier HUBERT-BRIERRE set up 29 camera traps, but unfortunately is having a hard time getting repair work done on those the animals have damaged. Metafilter has links to his other wildlife videos. Link

After earthbound humans fell in love with the Mars explorers Spirit and Phoenix, NASA knew Curiosity could be a star. Curiosity's Twitter feed is curated by Veronica McGregor, Courtney O'Connor, and Stephanie L. Smith of the public information office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. McGregor tells how even she was in tears when Phoenix stopped transmitting.

That experience convinced her that she and her media team had hit upon a great way to get people engaged in the science of the Mars missions. By turning the robot rovers into characters, they emphasized the way these missions are just another version of the Moon landing — it's just that we're landing people on Mars via remote. Still, for all intents and purposes the robots are extensions of the NASA science teams. They are our eyes, ears, hands, and science equipment on another world.

When you read what Curiosity is doing in the first person, McGregor said, you're also more forgiving when things go wrong. You realize that this is basically a lone creature on another world, doing things that nobody has ever done before, and things are bound to go wrong. It's hard to drill a rock on another world when you have no idea how the lower gravity will affect your instruments — drilling might cause a kickback that could toss the rover on its side. Hearing on Twitter that the rover is feeling cautious and worried, just the way its scientist drivers are right now, helps people understand better how science is done. It's just a bunch of people trying the very best they can, in an utterly new situation on an alien world.

It's no wonder that Curiosity's Twitter feed has 1.2 million followers. Read how these three women create Curiosity's distinctive voice at io9. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science

The biggest weather events have names that seem quite innocuous, considering the destruction. Hurricane Sandy reminded us of the Olivia Newton-John character from Grease. Winter storm Nemo brings up a cute little Disney fish. "Snowpocalypse" was good, but it wasn't official. Happy Place came up with a list of names that inspire a more appropriate level of dread, including YouTube Commenter, Facebook is Down, and others that are frankly quite internet-centric. I think we can do better. How about winter storm Lucifer? Winter storm Zuul? Of course, a medium-sized storm could be something like Nellie Olson or Biff Tannen. Can you come up with others? Link

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Might as well skip all the "getting to know you" rigamarole and go ahead and negotiate how many children you'll have. Ha! My kids will tell you that it was love at first sight when I met my husband, because they were there and saw it. I correct them to say it was "attraction" at first sight, but luckily events transpired that made it necessary for him to get my phone number. -Thanks, Jared!

This may be the weirdest story of British bureaucracy gone wild yet. Occasionally, disabled people must go to court to prove their disabilities or face losing benefits. However, someone decided to put the disability tribunal on the fourth floor of the Acorn House building in Basildon, England. Therefore, health and safety officials barred people in wheelchairs from attending because exit would be difficult in the event of a fire.

Sylvia Middleton, from Wickford Place in Pitsea, was turned away last Wednesday.

She said: “They said they couldn’t guarantee my safety and they didn’t let wheelchairs upstairs.

“Why are they holding disability tribunals in a building disabled people aren’t allowed in?”

The 65-year-old has been told she has to wait two months for a new hearing 12 miles away at Southend.

Officials had originally ordered she attend the court or risk losing her disability benefits.

Court officials claim the ruling is in error and are trying to work out a policy in which no one will be turned away. Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Mark Cleveland)  

Happy Chinese New Year! The year of the snake starts tomorrow. But that's just the beginning of a week with a maximum number of holidays for its load-bearing capabilities. Besides Chinese New Year, we have Lincoln's Birthday on Tuesday, which used to be a holiday to make paper hats in school before they folded it into Washington's Birthday. Also, Tuesday is Mardi Gras (also called Shrovetide or Pancake Day), which of course means that Ash Wednesday follows. Then Thursday is Valentines Day. Are you ready for all this? Maybe not, but hardly anyone celebrates all these dates. The big event in my household will be the return of The Walking Dead -at least for the adults. Anyway, before we look forward, let's take a look back and make sure you didn't miss out on anything important that happened this week at Neatorama.  

Our feature articles of the week started out with Cold War Tales: Operation Paul Bunyan, from our friends at Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. The massacre in Korea happened as I was preparing to go to college, which is probably why I didn't remember it.

The Annals of Improbable Research gave us The Gentle Art of Political Taxidermy: Charles Waterton, Squire of Walton Hall. It had to be be quite embarrassing to recognize your own face on an artwork made of dead animals.

Over at our wide-format Spotlight Blog, Alex posted Gorgeous Moleskine Illustrations by Mattias Adolfsson.

Yoga on Trial came from mental_floss magazine.

We had a couple of shorties from the Bathroom Reader series: Jay Newman's Brainteasers and Warning Labels.

In this week's What Is It? game, these are are tusk covers for Indian battle elephants. They look pretty dangerous, too. Paul D got it right with the first comment, so he wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! Among many funny answers, the prize for the funniest gives to Samantha Simons, who said, "It's Captain Hooks tooth pick! All he has to do is have Shmee take off the hook and put on the tooth pick. Even pirates can have good dental hygiene!" That wins her a t-shirt, too! Thanks to everyone who played, and thanks to the What Is It blog, too! 

The most comments came in to the post Should We Carry 3XL to 6XL Shirts in the NeatoShop? A lot of people think that's a good idea! That was followed by Jay Newman's Brainteasers. The most popular post of the week was Cold War Tales: Operation Paul Bunyan, followed by Jay Newman's Brainteasers. I guess we should print bigger shirts and post more quizzes.

Over at the NeatoShop, Tiffany is always keen to show you what's new, but I like to remind folks of old favorites that shouldn't be forgotten. There are special collections for fans, like gifts relating to Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Wizard of Oz.  And in addition to the hot new t-shirt designs, don't overlook the classic Neatorama t-shirts.

Usability tip of the week: If you aren't a registered user, you should be. I became logged out for a brief time and was surprised at how much advertising a non-registered user sees. You can log in with Facebook and Twitter if you like, but if you register with Twitter, please add an email address to your Neatorama account. We won't share it with anyone, but if you win a prize, we'll need it to contact you.

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.

So have a happy bunch of holidays, but don't neglect to check in with us every day!

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Bianca Giaever made a film by asking six-year-old Asa Baker-Rouse for a story. The story is about a bear and a mouse, but then Asa gets philosophical about dealing with nervousness and fear.

We all get a little scared sometimes. Scared of graduating school without a plan; scared of monsters. One six year old has a remedy: think of something else until the "nervous has gone out of you." Think of juice, pizza, and a piano shaped chocolate chip cookie. In other words, he says, "when the scared feeling comes into you, the scared is scared of things you like."

There aren't many situations that couldn't be improved by pizza and a cookie. Link

You probably thought that elephants are gray -except sometimes in a Disney movie they may be pink. But this elephant is red! No, it's not Photoshop. Plenty of elephants in Tsavo National Park in Kenya are red. Find out why at Ark in Space. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Fagasam)

Most languages cannot be translated word-by-word because context, shading, and usage vary, and even those change over time. This can give us a laugh when using mechanical translations such as Babelfish, but are oh-so-important in contracts, treaties, science, and politics. You might end up conveying something you did not intend, like Khrushchev in 1956.

At the height of the cold war, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech in which he uttered a phrase that interpreted from Russian as "we will bury you." It was taken as chilling threat to bury the U.S. with a nuclear attack and escalated the tension between the U.S. and Russia. However, the translation was a bit too literal. The sense of the Russian phrase was more that "we will live to see you buried" or "we will outlast you." Still not exactly friendly, but not quite so threatening.

That puts a totally different light on one of the boogeymen from my childhood. Read eight other examples of mistranslations that caused problems at mental_floss. Link

StoryCorps brings us another wonderful story of family love, from Bonnie Brown and her teenage daughter Myra.

Bonnie is intellectually disabled with a low IQ. For the past 18 years she’s worked at the same Wendy’s.

Here, her daughter asks her about being a mom.

Myra is enrolled in gifted and talented classes at her high school. She hopes to attend Cambridge University when she graduates.

Go listen to Bonnie and Myra tell their story (it's not long), and bring a hankie. Link

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The car was small, but the road was tiny. A motorist in Naples, Italy, tried to turn around and avoid parked cars on both sides, but became stuck sideways in the street. Cars wanted to pass both ways. Then a motorcycle gang showed up. Then a church procession. Then the police. Then everyone in the neighborhood, all laughing and loudly offering their opinions. A good time was had by all -except for the driver stuck sideways. Link

A punch during bar brawl in 2011 caused John Huttick to lose his left eye. Huttick sued Matthew Brunelli in Philadelphia over the incident. Then he lost the eye -again!

Huttick, 48, was on the witness stand Wednesday, weeping as he told the Common Pleas Court jury about the impact of losing an eye when he literally lost his eye.

Two jurors, seated feet away, gasped and started to rise as if they wanted to leave. Huttick caught the $3,000 prosthetic blue eye and cried out.

The judge immediately declared a mistrial due to the incident. He said it was an "unfortunate, unforeseen incident," and set a new trial date for March 4th. Link -via Arbroath