Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Cats are very good with body language. And they operate on the premise that it's always fine to ask for, or rather demand, what you want. -via Buzzfeed
Is there any parent who hadn't tried this trick? Only my kids gave up long before the niece in this Twaggie. Wobbly Goggy illustrated a Tweet by Sixth Form Poet to create it. You'll find a new illustrated Tweet every day at Twaggies! Link
Aha! It's finally autumn! Or it will be at 10:49 AM Eastern time this morning. Your equinox may vary. I'm not sorry to say goodbye to the summer of 2012, as hot and dry as it's been. There were weeks at a time when no one went outside all day except to dash to the car because the 100+ degree heat would weigh you down like a brick. But I love fall. This one will be glorious!
Did you notice the new green button at the top of the page here? That's your direct link to the new Neatorama blog called On the Origin of Success, shortened to just "Origin" for the button. Alex rolled it out last weekend with an introduction and the first featured origin involves, appropriately, the man who wrote On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin. "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family" We'll be adding new stories on the beginnings of great careers, popular products, familiar customs, pop culture icons, and successful companies as we go along. What origin story would you like to see? Tell us what you're curious about, and we'll see what we can dig up and present on the new blog On the Origin of Success.
Another new feature I hope you're enjoying is Drawn to Facts, in which artists put their spin on a piece of trivia for your amusement and edification. Drawn to Facts appears every Sunday evening.
We had a great batch of exclusive feature articles for you this past week. Tuesday was National Cheeseburger Day, so Jill Harness found us 11 of The Weirdest Burgers Ever.
Jill also marked a special occasion on Friday with Happy Birthday to Bill Murray!
Eddie Deezen looked into food history for 14 Memorable Meals and Menus.
David Israel brought back some great photos from his trip to The Jet Propulsion Lab: Up-Close & Personal. He also promises interviews to come with the rocket scientists who are controlling the Mars Curiosity rover.
I was pleased to tell you about The Medical Book: From Witch Doctors to Robot Surgeons, the latest book by Clifford A. Pickover.
The Great Seattle Windshield Epidemic was a contribution from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
The Annals of Improbable Research gave us the geekiest wedding post ever: Finding an Optimal Seating Chart.
It's Good to Be King: 5 Monarchs Who Tipped the Scales came from a mental_floss book.
Over at our Halloween blog, things are heating up. We brought out a couple of interesting articles from our archives: I Was a Teenage Monster Movie and The 10 Most Fascinating Tombs in the World. There will be more feature articles, both old and new, coming your way on Neatorama's Halloween blog!
In the What Is It? game this week, the object in question is an electrical connecting device for neon signs for connecting the luminous tube electrode to an electrical conductor, patent number 2,072,042. The first person who knew that was Tofui, who wins a t-shirt! Although I suppose it could also make a good egg separator. The funniest answer came from ColShorts, who declared it to be The "One Cup At A Time" moonshine still. (Good to the last drop) ;). That's good for a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! Thanks to everyone who played, and thanks to the What Is It blog, where you can find quite a few mystery items every week and the answers on Friday.
At NeatoBambino, we had posts about childhood gambling, geeky flash cards, and a cool Halloween costume for a visibly pregnant belly.
The post with the most comments of the week was Should We Ban Father-Daughter Dances Because of Gender Discrimination? Nothing else came close. Here are the results of the poll attached to that post, which may change because you can still place your vote.
If you're not already, we'd love for you to connect to Neatorama's social networking spots. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest for even more fun!
What's coming up next week? Let's see, there's Yom Kippur, my birthday, and lots more great stuff here at Neatorama!
The White House has been operating for about 200 years now, with an impressive staff. You know there are a lot of stories to tell, but mostly workers are restricted to sharing their expertise. Fanny Lemira Gillette and Hugo Ziemann wrote a book in 1887 to share their household tips. Here's a small excerpt:
1. Rooms get stuffy, probably more so when air-conditioning hasn’t been invented yet. To clear the air in a room that needs some refreshing, Gillette advises pouring a healthy sprinkling of ground coffee onto a shovelful of hot coals. If no coffee is available or if you’d prefer to leave the house smelling like something different than a malfunctioning Keurig, try a cupful of sugar instead.
2. To keep your milk from curdling, grate a tablespoon of horseradish right into the pitcher. “It will keep it sweet for days.”
Read more of these at mental_floss. Link
ModPrimate and Whitney adopted a American Pit Bull Terrier/Boxer mix. The new puppy is pretty happy to have a home and a family and lots of toys to play with. Ecstatic, actually. He's four months old in the video. By next year, he'll be the size of a house! -via I Have Seen The Whole Of The Internet
Right before elections is the usual time to toss people off the voting lists. The Texas Secretary of State sent out of list of dead voters generated by cross-referencing federal Social Security deaths with state voting records. The only problem with this was that those dead voters didn't like it one bit.
At least one county registrar (Don Sumners of Harris County) refused to comply with instructions to delete thousands of names, based on his belief that the Social Security database is unreliable and/or that other mistakes were made.
He apparently believed this because, after getting notices informing them that they would not be allowed to vote, hundreds of the presumably dead contacted him to complain.
The state responded to Sumners' information calmly and rationally by changing its plans. What? No it didn't, it cut off Harris County's election funds in an effort to force it to purge the dead voters, whether the dead voters liked it or not. After some haggling, Sumners said he would purge voters whose families confirmed their deaths before the election, and the state agreed to restore funding (essentially backing down).
The four not-dead plaintiffs argue that there is no state-law authority for the purge and that because Texas has a history of voting-rights violations (not against the undead, but still), it was required by the federal Voting Rights Act to get pre-approval for the relevant rule change.
Who will speak for the undead? For at least four of them, lawyers. Link -via Breakfast Links
Our old friend Brian Kidd, known as the Unipiper, has a new video, and this time he channels Mario! Watch him play the Overworld theme from Super Mario World on bagpipes while riding his unicycle in Portland. -Thanks, Brian!
Previously: More from the Unipiper.
I keep my wallet in my front pocket, and still, tragedy strikes. #fallingmattresses
— Jesse Scott Owen (@JesseScottOwen) September 19, 2012
Jesse Scott Owen was new to New York City, but the 18-year-old got a big city experience Tuesday when a mattress fell off the roof of a building and landed on him. Owen was walking along Broad Street when the falling futon knocked him out cold.
“This was the most absurd thing that ever happened to me,” he told the Daily News.
Owen, who moved to the city three weeks ago from Florida to attend King’s College in lower Manhattan, said he was on his way to a class when he suddenly lost consciousness.
“I woke up and people were putting me on the mattress,” he said. “I asked where the mattress came from and they said, ‘You were knocked out by it.’ ”
Passers-by tended to him until emergency workers arrived. Owen was taken to a hospital with a sprained neck and a possible herniated disc. But he managed to Tweet about the experience. The mattress had fallen from the rooftop spa of the Setai Wall Street, about 30 stories up. Link -via Arbroath
An unnamed British military gunner gave birth to a boy Tuesday in a field hospital at Camp Bastion, in Helmand province, one of the more dangerous parts of Afghanistan.
Britain's Ministry of Defence does not allow troops to deploy on operations if they are pregnant, but the ministry didn't know the woman was expecting.
It refused to confirm reports in the British media that the soldier didn't know she was pregnant.
The mother and baby at Camp Bastion are both in stable condition in a field hospital, the ministry said.
A team from John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England, is prepared to go to the base to care for mother and child, and they will be brought back to England. The baby was born only four days after a raid on the base by insurgents disguised as U.S. military. Link -via Fark
(Unrelated Camp Bastion image credit: Flickr user isafmedia)
Are you in the Halloween mood yet? Take a look at Neatorama's Halloween blog to get into the spirit! Today we are featuring one of Neatorama's most popular articles ever, in which Alex takes us on a tour of the 10 Most Fascinating Tombs in the World. Explore the world of the dead and the various burial practices of the living over at our Halloween blog, and check back every day for more and more tips, stories, and entertainment for the holiday! Link
(Image credit: Flickr use B10m)
The Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded last night in a ceremony at Harvard's Sanders Theater. One of the awards was a wedding gift for the researchers! The Psychology Prize went to Dutch researchers Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan, along with their colleague Tulio Guadalupe, for their study "Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller." Eerland and Zwaan's wedding is tomorrow. Some of the other winners:
PEACE PRIZE: The SKN Company [RUSSIA], for converting old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.
ACOUSTICS PRIZE: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada [JAPAN] for creating the SpeechJammer — a machine that disrupts a person's speech, by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay.
NEUROSCIENCE PRIZE: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford [USA], for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon.
LITERATURE PRIZE: The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.
PHYSICS PRIZE: Joseph Keller [USA], and Raymond Goldstein [USA and UK], Patrick Warren, and Robin Ball [UK], for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.
FLUID DYNAMICS PRIZE: Rouslan Krechetnikov [USA, RUSSIA, CANADA] and Hans Mayer [USA] for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.
MEDICINE PRIZE: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti [FRANCE] for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode.
But that's just a few of the awards. You can read the entire list at Improbable Research. Pictured above are the winners of the Physics Prize. Link
You can also see a video of the entire ceremony. Link
The most important performance of an actor's career is the Emmy Awards acceptance speech. So of course you must take lessons to get it right. Parker Posey stars in this short from the Emmy Awards, which will be broadcast Sunday. -via Irene's Internet
It's been 19 years since Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar was killed in a shootout with police. His property was seized by the government, and while some has been repurposed, many of Escobar's holdings are abandoned and falling into disrepair. Now, thanks to urbex photographer Stefaan Beernaert, we get to take a trip to his formerly private island and look at the crumbling paradise. Link
(Image credit: Stefaan Beernaert)
Three New Zealand soldiers, Corporal Luke Tamatea, Lance Corporal Jacinda Baker, and Private Richard Harris were killed by an IED (improvised explosive device) in Afghanistan in August. When their bodies were returned to Burnham Military Camp in New Zealand, they were greeted by fellow Kiwi soldiers in dress uniform who performed a tradition Maori Haka for their fallen comrades. Link
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