In the game Furiosity, the object is apparently to click and turn all the blocks into a different color for each level. It only begins to get difficult about level four, and then it gets very difficult for further levels. Good luck! Link -via the Presurfer
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
This dog spotted in Edinburgh, Scotland, is helping his busker buddy by patiently holding the hat and accepting cash and pats on the head. That's a good dog!
Meanwhile, this puppy will steal the money right out of your wallet! That's a bad dog!
-via Arbroath
The prequel everyone's been waiting for: Gotham City's super heroes and villains in high school! Which future Dark Knight Trilogy character will get the girl in this teen romance? -via Geeks Are Sexy
Neatorama is growing bigger and bigger, and today we are proud to announce three, count 'em, THREE new sub-blogs for your entertainment! In the coming weeks, these sub-blogs will start to have plenty of new content that you won't find on the main page, so check them out, and bookmark your favorites so you won't miss anything.
Lifestyles of the Cute and Cuddly is a blog about animals. That's where you want to get your daily dose of adorable pets, learn news from the world of animals, and also meet different species you might not be familiar with. We once tried to keep the number of cute cat videos down because of the famous comment "There are too many cats on Neatorama!"* but now we have the Cute and Cuddly blog, so there are no limits to the squee anymore! Not all the animals will be cute and cuddly, but they will all be animals.
Neatolicious is about food. And drink. And news about food and drink. And the history of food and drink. At least some of it is delicious, but all of it is neat! Come join us at Neatolicious for recipes, clever and awesome decorations, funny food, culinary news, and more.
Mad Skills is a place to highlight people who amaze us with the things they do. People all over the world excel in entertainment, sports, jobs, science, exploration, and some activities we wouldn't even consider trying ourselves, but we can see them at Mad Skills. Warning: jaws may drop.
Sooner or later, we will have buttons at the top of the main page for easy access to al these sub-blogs, but meanwhile, get your bookmarks set. Be aware that our Halloween blog is still going strong, and will continue to bring us Halloween-type news, tips, and entertainment all year long. And check in every day at NeatoBambino, our oldest continuously-running sub-blog, for neat posts about babies, kids, and parents!
It's been a great week for exclusive feature articles here at Neatorama. Last Sunday, Jill Harness brought us God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut, in honor of the late author's 90th birthday.
Eddie Deezen contributed The Most Misunderstand Political Campaign Song in History and The Marx Brothers' Biggest Flop: Duck Soup.
Helen Keller: Vaudeville Star was an article from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
Mental_floss magazine brought us The Who's Tommy.
Esther the Cold War Kitty came from the Annals of Improbable Research.
As part of our Neatorama Book Excerpt series, we gave you A Little History of Science: Uncovering the Human Body from the book A Little History of Science by William Bynum.
In another book excerpt, Adrienne Crezo asked the question Can You Blow a Doughnut-Shaped Soap Bubble? It's from the book Why Are Orangutans Orange? by Mick O’Hare. We also gave away two copies of the book! Congratulations to our winners, kkirkpat and Kaethe Douglas, who won just by leaving a comment!
We also had a couple of notable posts that are examples of new forms of Neatorama articles. Jill posted Who Has The Cutest Bottom in the Animal Kingdom? with a poll attached for your votes. We had over 2400 people vote! And the winner is …the bunny rabbit!
Over at NeatoBambino, a video list grew out of one funny video post called PSY's Infancy. This is specifically for people who love to see babies dance and aren't too tired of "Gangnam Style" yet -all in one post.
In the What Is It? game this week, the mystery item is experimental XM75 40mm grenade launcher, probably made by S.A. in the late 1960s. The first person to guess grenade launcher was Berhard, who wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! The funniest answer of the week came from Colshorts, who said these were $250,000 Military Pencil Sharpeners. That's also good for a t-shirt! Find the answers to all the mystery items of the week at the What Is It? blog.
The non-giveaway post with the most comments this week was Top 10 Most Read Books In The World followed by Woman Ran Over Husband for Not Voting. In third place we had a tie between Who Has The Cutest Bottom in the Animal Kingdom? and Dad Pulls The Long Troll. All those discussion threads are open for your contributions.
What's coming up next week? Oh yeah!
Hope you have a wonderful holiday! Stay safe if you're traveling, and come back to us well fed, well rested, and in one piece!
*That comment is not something we obsess on, but we like to joke about it.
This is more of a true story than it appears. In 1939, Franklin Roosevelt changed Thanksgiving from the last Thursday in November to the next-to-the-last Thursday, in order to give retailers a longer Christmas shopping season. It was only in December of 1941 that congress set the date of Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday in November, which can occur as early as the 22nd (like this year) or as late as November 28th. Link
Seventy-two year old Liu Xianping was just trying to help out his granddaughter and her clothing store, Yuekou. He posed wearing the shop's fashions, and has become an internet sensation in China. You have to admit he's got the legs for it!
"Why unacceptable (for someone like me to wear women’s clothes? Modelling for the store is helping my granddaughter and I have nothing to lose. We were very happy on the day of the shooting. I’m very old and all that I care about is to be happy."
People love seeing Liu. The store's business has increased fivefold since Liu's pictured appeared on its website. Link -via reddit
Light detected by the Hubble telescope and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope is believed to have come from the most distant galaxy yet. The galaxy is called MACS0647-JD, and from our perspective, is seen between the Big and Little Dippers.
Scientists combined data from the Hubble space telescope with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to make the discovery. MACS0647-JD would have existed about 13.3 billion years ago, or roughly 420 million years after the Big Bang. This would place it around 200 million years earlier than previous candidates for most distance object ever spotted.
The galaxy cluster in front of MACS0647-JD helped scientists to see it, since the gargantuan gravitational pull of the cluster bends light around it. This creates a gravitational lens that makes distant objects appear much brighter than they otherwise would. If the existence of MACS0647-JD is confirmed, it would help scientists understand how the universe appeared when the first stars and galaxies formed.
Astronomers will have to crunch some serious numbers before the distance is confirmed. Read more about the findings at Wired. Link -via Geekologie
See a video of the zoom at the Hubble site. Link
(Image credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Postman and D. Coe (Space Telescope Science Institute), and the CLASH team)
If you don't know sign language, you might not realize that it's far more than translating spoken or written words. Sign language has its own grammar and rules, and it employs more than just hands. And it's different in different countries. See the picture?
This is the sign for the word “math” in two different sign languages—American Sign Language on the left, and Japanese Sign Language on the right. Why should there be more than one sign language? Doesn’t that just complicate things? This question would make sense if sign language was a system invented and then handed over to the deaf community as an assistive device. But sign languages, like spoken languages, developed naturally out of groups of people interacting with each other. We know this because we have observed it happen in real time.
Read more about sign language at mental_floss. Link
(Image source: YouTube)
You'd be surprised at how many artworks and installations either use exit signs or are inspired by them.
About a year and a half ago, Daniela and I popped into the Charles Bank Gallery on the Bowery and were welcomed by Allen Grubesic’s modified Exit sign reading “EXCITING”. We both found the sculpture very clever. Since that day, when perusing gallery and artists’ websites online, I’ve run into many other sculptures and installations that repurpose old exit signs or are simply influenced by them.
So, the bloggers at CollabCubed rounded up those artworks and exhibited them in a post for your pleasure. Shown here is an untitled work by Nicholas Consuegra. There are plenty more! Link -via Breakfast Links
This too-cute public service announcement is an ad for Metro Trains Melbourne. They eventually include some warnings about the danger of trains. Stay safe. -via Pleated-Jeans
You've probably heard by now that Hostess, the company that manufactures Twinkies, HoHos, and Wonder Bread is going out of business. They filed for bankruptcy in January, and filed a court request for liquidation this week. The loss of Twinkles is a particularly hard blow for junk food junkies, and folks across the internet wasted no time in sharing their grief. Ranker has gathered the best reaction Tweets, image macros, and videos for your sharing pleasure. Link
Every time you bite into an orange, you are tasting the results of the sunshine that went into the plant. The same sensation comes with other fresh ripe fruits and vegetables. In the orange battery, citric acid reacts with the zinc in nails inserted in an orange to release light energy. But the glow you see is not all that bright -photographer Caleb Charland, who made the battery, said the photograph required 14 hours of exposure! Still, this beautiful picture was worth it. Link -via Colossal
There are around 10,000 species of millipedes, but the one with the most legs of all is Illacme plenipes. It was thought to be extinct, but 17 living specimens were discovered in the past seven years ago in San Benito County, California, by Paul Marek of the University of Arizona and his team.
The rareness of the millipede meant that from 1928 until 2005—when Marek, then a Ph.D. student, found a few specimens in the woods near San Juan Bautista—most scientists had simply assumed the species had gone extinct. Over the past seven years, Marek and his colleagues have taken several trips to the area, typically searching for hours before finding a single specimen clinging to the side of a boulder or tunneling four to six inches down into the ground.
In studying these specimens under a microscope, Marek has discovered a number of surprising characteristics that go beyond its legs. ”It basically looks like a thread,” Marek told LiveScience. “It has an uninteresting outward appearance, but when we looked at it with SEM [scanning electron microscopes] and compound microscopes, we found a huge, amazingly complex anatomy.”
Complex anatomy, indeed, as the millipede has no eyes and produces silk! See closeups of the unusual features and read about the strange bug at Smithsonian's Surprising Science blog. Link
Science fiction shows that feature time travel love to get famous people from history to make appearances. And actors love to play famous historical figures that are out of their element. Flavorwire ranked the top ten such shows to feature famous authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Agatha Christie, William Shakespeare, and more, all with video evidence. Link
Friskies cat food held a competition for the best cat videos on the internet. Over 1400 videos were submitted, and the grand prize was awarded in a ceremony Wednesday night in Los Angeles, featuring cat music and a ballet dancer portraying Nyan Cat. But you won't be surprised by who won.
And the winner of the first-ever Friskies award was Mick Szydlowski for his video, "Oskar's First Toys." Oskar is a cat born without eyes, and Mick and his girlfriend, Bethany, captured video of the newborn cat playing with a toy ball.
Szydlowski received a year's supply of cat food and a check for $15,000, which he says will be used to buy toys for Oskar and to help pay for their upcoming move from Omaha, Neb., to Seattle.
"It's an incredible feeling," Szydlowski told Yahoo News. "Cats deserve a show like this. And Oskar deserves some of the winnings, maybe all of the winnings.
"Oskar is completely blind, but he doesn't let that slow him down one bit," Szydlowski said. "He's healthy, he's happy, he does everything a regular cat would do."
Szydlowski says he hopes all the attention his Oskar videos have received will help convince people that cats with disabilities can still make great pets. "A lot of people assume it's a death sentence, which is not the case," he said.
Friskies also donated 250,000 cans of cat food to shelters in conjunction with the award. Read more about the competition and the ceremony at Yahoo News. Link
See the videos that made it to the final round. Link
See Oskar's First Toys. Link
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