Sometimes it helps to know whether the bakery person writing down your instructions for cake decoration will be the same person that actually decorates it. But then again, that might not help at all! Cake Wrecks has other examples in a post of cake instructions that ended upon the cake itself. The next time the kids ask me to put sprinkles on a cake I'm baking, I'm going to do just this. Link
 

The cover of the New Yorker has an illustration titled "Undeterred" by Adrian Tomine that imagines the voting difficulties caused by the aftermath of hurricane Sandy.   

New York magazine, on the right, features an aerial shot of partially-powerless Manhattan by Iwan Baan.

-via Laughing Squid

(vimeo link)

What does this Viking bar patron really want? Watch and find out in a very short film by by Brazilian 3D artist Pedro Conti.  -via the Presurfer

Curiously, we covered just this subject a few days ago.

The following article is from the Bathroom Reader Institute's newest book: Uncle John's Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader.

One of the hallmarks of the work of 19th-century author Charles Dickens is his oddball characters and their fanciful names: Uriah Heep, Martin Chuzzlewit, Lady Honorie Dedlock, Pip Pirrip, Abel Magwich, Miss LaCreevy, and Bardle the Beedle, to name a few. Perhaps Dickens' best-known character is Ebenezer Scrooge, from A Christmas Carol -who, it turns out, was inspired by a real person.

THE MISER

John Elwes (1714-1789) was born John Meggot. He was orphaned at an early age. His father, a wealthy London brewer named Robert Meggot, died when the boy was only four. His mother, Amy Elwes, followed not too long afterward. When she died, the family fortune, an estimated £100,000 (about $29 million today), passed to her son.

John was educated the the Westminster School, an exclusive boarding school in Westminster Abbey in London. He spent more than a decade there, then lived in Switzerland for a few years before returning to England. When he was in his twenties and thirties, Meggot gave little hint of the man he would become. He dressed well, spent money freely, and moved among London's most fashionable circles. He developed a taste for French wines and fine dining. He was a skilled horseman and fox hunter, and he had a passion for gambling -he bet, and often lost, thousands of pounds in card games.

THE FAMILY WAY

Unfortunately for Meggot, hoarding money seems to have run in the family, at least on his mother's side. If contemporary accounts are to be believed, Amy Elwes went to her early grave because she refused to dip into the family fortune to buy food, and literally starved herself to death. Her brother, Harvey, was a miser in his own right. He lived on a country estate inherited from his father's side of the family, and though he would grow his inheritance to more than £250,000 ($72 million), he allowed the estate itself to fall into ruin. The manor house's roof leaked, and rainwater stained the crumbling, mildewed walls. Broken windows were "repaired" with paper, and the furniture was infested with worms.

Rather than buy his own clothes, Uncle Harvey wore the old clothes of the dead relative who left him his fortune. And like his sister, he hated buying food; he spend his days wandering the estate hunting partridges and small game that he could eat for free. On cold evenings he kept warm by pacing back and forth in the great hall of his drafty mansion, rather than waste wood in a fire. Too cheap to marry, he lived like a hermit for more than 50 years "to avoid the expense of company." Not surprisingly, he produced no heirs.

DINNERS WITH UNCLE HARVEY

Since Harvey had no children, John hoped to inherit his uncle's fortune. That's why, in 1751, he changed his last name from Meggot to to Elwes -to assure his uncle that the family name would survive him. That's also why Elwes visited his uncle regularly and pretended to share his miserly ways. Before arriving at his uncle's estate -where the meals were certain to be meager- he'd drop in on friends and fill up on their food. Then he'd stop at a roadside inn to change out of his fashionable clothes and into the tattered garments he kept for that purpose, and continued to his uncle's.

The One Laptop Per Child project started several years ago with the idea that inexpensive, solar-powered computers could help bring children in Third World countries into the information age. So far it's worked really well. To push the limits of the project, volunteers tried an experiment: they gave laptops to two Ethiopian villages where the literacy rate is near zero, and there are no schools, no printed signs, and no books. They didn't show the kids how to use the tablets. They just delivered a box with enough for every child in each village.  

"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."

What's more, the children were using the computers to teach their parents! The One Laptop Per Child program may eventually do an end run around the prohibitive expense of building schools and hiring teachers for some places. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science

Before you look up the answer, see if you can figure out this puzzle:

Shown above are four men buried up to their necks in the ground. They cannot move, so they can only look forward. Between A and B is a brick wall which cannot be seen through.

They all know that between them they are wearing four hats--two black and two white--but they do not know what color they are wearing. Each of them know where the other three men are buried.

In order to avoid being shot, one of them must call out to the executioner the color of their hat. If they get it wrong, everyone will be shot. They are not allowed to talk to each other and have 10 minutes to fathom it out.

After one minute, one of them calls out.

Question: Which one of them calls out? Why is he 100% certain of the color of his hat?

There's no trick; just a logical answer -if you can put yourself into these guys' place. Which is, after all, a very bad place to be. Link -via Boing Boing

Jody Enders wrote in 1998 about a 1878 French account of a play performed in 1549, in which the dramatic onstage execution was no special effect, but used a condemned prisoner whose head was cut off onstage. Considering how many times the story must have been told between those written accounts, it is probably an urban legend. Probably. Read Enders' full account or the short version at TYWKIWDBI. Link

Would you eat more salad if you could hold the whole thing in one hand? Nick at DudeFoods found a way to make salad as easy to eat as an ice cream cone!

What you see here is a cone stuffed with Cobb salad. It isn’t just any cone however, it’s a cone made out of crushed up croutons! It actually took me a few tries to make my crouton cone and I considered throwing in the towel before my final attempt at it, but I decided to give it one more shot and it turned out wonderfully!

Find out how to make one of these yourself -and you might end up making more than one. Link -via Daily of the Day

Whew! What a week this has been! We started it out by watching hurricane Sandy move in and batter New York, New Jersey, and other heavily-populated coastal states. Those folks were left with broken and burned homes, flooded subways, power outages, and even worse, some who did not survive. Almost a week later, they are still in dire need of help because of disrupted transportation, making relief efforts all the more difficult. To donate or volunteer, see this list of websites for information. 

Then there was all the gloriously fun stuff that circulates on the internet just before Halloween, plus the beginning of November, which brings us Christmas advertising, men growing mustaches, and the last big presidential campaign push before Election Day on Tuesday. We may be tired of the politicking, but when the time comes, I hope everyone goes to the polls to participate. Meanwhile, we had what may be a record number of original features here at Neatorama.

Zeon Santos brought us some Halloween fun with A Worldwide Celebration Of Halloween and An Old Fashioned Halloween. With plenty of wonderful pictures! Also, our Halloween blog is still being updated with reports of amazing costumes from this year, so we can have a complete archive of Halloween 2012.

David Israel treated us to Now That’s Rocket Science: An Interview with JPL’s Erisa Hines.

Jill Harness contributed the post 7 Abandoned Amusement Parks.

John Farrier gave us 10 Beautiful Tattoos Inspired by Watership Down. Literary ink, indeed!

Eddie Deezen helped answer some of life's burning questions in the posts What is the "7" in 7UP? and Why Do They Put Umbrellas in Your Drink?

There Once was a Man Who was a Dwarf and Later a Giant was a guest post from the blog Today I Found Out. We look forward to more guest articles from them!

Uncle John's Bathroom Reader gave us The Curse of the Werewolf.

Dracula’s Pellagra and Lois Lane’s Lungs: Further Gleanings From the Medical Literature came from the Annals of Improbable Research.

And mental_floss magazine brought us 10 Moms Who Went the Extra Mile.

In the What Is It? game this week, the object in question is a machine for making rope from binder twine or other cord. You can see a video of it being used at the What Is It? blog. The first commenter who knew that was Craig Clayton, who wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! The funniest answer came from Alan...yes THAT Alan, who said "After 4 years, the professor built this to keep Gilligan entertained. It doesn't do much, but it kept Gilligan occupied while the rest of the castaways simply fixed the hole in the boat." This intriguing idea deserves a t-shirt, too! Thanks to everyone who played this week, and thanks to the What Is It blog, too!

The most-commented-on post was Potential Employer Critiques Applicant's Cover Letter. That was followed by Area Code, Bambi Chairs, and Is It Time to Ban Gangnam Style? (so far, ya'll say yes).

Tonight: remember to set your clocks back, because Daylight Saving Time ends at 2AM Sunday in the US.

Looking ahead to next week, we'll be giving away a whole bunch of the newest edition of Uncle John's Bathroom Readers, and if you are a registered American voter, don't miss your opportunity to go to the polls and cast your ballot!

A mall started playing Christmas music on November first. A baker at the cookie store decided to express her opinion on the mall's music selection by baking a cookie. A big cookie with a big message. Redditor MundaneHymn, who also works at the mall, thought it was worth sharing. Link

Buzzfeed rounded up some cute and clever "expectancy" announcements that tell more in pictures than in words. There's 23 of them, and it was hard to pick an example, but I was drawn to this math-based photograph. Go see the rest! Link

As hurricane Sandy approached New York City, mayor Michael Bloomberg talked to New Yorkers -and everyone else- through televised press conferences. Lydia Callis stood beside him and translated his storm instructions into American Sign language. She quickly became an internet star for her animated signing and facial expressions. What most of us did not realize is that those expressions are part of the language. Read more about what they mean at mental_floss. Link

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.

That pretty little umbrella in your bar drink might seem like a fruity thing for a macho guy to quickly throw away. A cheap, meaningless little decoration. Nothing more than a frivolous garnish for your pina colada or mai tai. But it once served a more meaningful purpose.

Back in the early barroom days, hanging out at the neighborhood bar was pretty much a "guys only" activity. Okay, there were always saloon girls in the Old West, and cocktail waitresses did deliver drinks to the guys in the more affluent watering holes. And of course, in many bars, the occasional women of ill repute hovered the joint. But no "nice" or respectable women were ever seen at the corner bar.

What? Bars with no women? Where in the world were men able to use their cheesy pick-up lines?  

Bartenders, being businessmen, must one day have realized that they had a business with a potential of serving 100% of adult customers and they were only patronized by 50%. Believe it or not, cocktail umbrellas help take care of that conundrum.

In the early 1930s, bartenders at swanky watering holes like Trader Vic's and Don the Beachcomber thought up a clever way to draw in the ladies. They concocted all sorts of fancy cocktails and garnished them with cute, colored paper sunshades.

A marketing ploy? Sure -but it worked! As the local bars became more "lady friendly," more lady patrons started showing up. By the 1950s and 1960s, exotic decorated drinks and Polynesian-themed restaurants and clubs became part of the whole tiki-culture craze. From that moment on, the ladies -and the umbrellas- were at the bar to stay.

There are plenty of guys who enjoy refreshing fruity umbrella drinks from time to time, too. In an effort to defend their manhood, they may come up with more "technical" reasons for covering their lava flows or zombies with colorful canopies. Some maintain that cocktail umbrellas shade their icy, frothy frappes from the melting effects of solar radiation. Other suggest that the cocktail umbrellas prevent volatile alcohol molecule in their drinks from evaporating too quickly.

Is this just a bunch of pure hogwash, or do cocktail umbrellas have a bit of science on their side? Perhaps a little bit of science -but it's more likely that these colorful umbrellas simply evoke a more sunny state of mind.

Come on, let's face it: every once in a while, we all need to ditch "reality" for that white sandy beach, where coconuts and pineapples and maraschino cherries are ingredients in flavorful libations that smell like suntan lotion -and somehow still taste really good.

Sorry, I don't drink, myself. Make mine a Coca-Cola with a root beer chaser.

It took 80 years of protests and campaigning before women achieved the right to vote in the United States, and it finally happened in 1920. That was less than 100 years ago! Along the way, the anti-suffrage movement used some nasty and ridiculous arguments to deny women the vote, a lot of which is enshrined in printed material, such as political postcards popular in the the early 20th century. June Purvis, a professor of women’s and gender history at the University of Porstmouth, talks about the suffrage movement and the propaganda postcards that flew through the mail.  

The messages you find on anti-suffrage postcards from the 1910s are not dissimilar from what you might hear from Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly today in the 2010s. Suffragettes were drawn as conniving coquettes, ugly, mean spinsters or, worse, ugly, mean wives who left their families helpless as they attended town-hall meetings. Scenes of women politicians showed them hatching diabolical plots to undermine and emasculate men further. In England, particularly offensive cards took sadomasochistic delight in the force-feeding, while sympathetic cards depicted women as beat-up cats, referring to the Cat and Mouse Act.

“Suffragettes were depicted nagging wives, that was a common one, and the wife was always big, and the husband tiny and puny,” Purvis says. “Or they were depicted as very ugly women with big feet, protruding teeth, hair pulled back in a bun, and glasses. They were depicted as quite mannish and unattractive so that no man would want to marry them.”

It is estimated that there were 4500 different anti-suffrage postcard designs! See more and read about the fight for the right to vote -plus how the current political atmosphere recalls those days, at Collector's Weekly. Link

Comic artist Pablo Stanley illustrates what so many were thinking when they heard about the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm. Link -via Breakfast Links

But to give credit where it is due, George Lucas said that the majority of the money he gets from Disney will go to a charitable foundation to fund education efforts. Link