Wayne Daniels delivered mail for the British Royal Mail service -until March, when it was discovered that he had dumped 420 letters instead of delivering them. The 25-year-old man pleaded guilty to theft and delaying the mail on Monday. Daniels' defense lawyer explained why he did it.
Fran Tyler, defending, said: “He suffers from dyslexia and he was struggling to read the addresses.
“He said it was an impulsive action born out of frustration and said it was a disgrace to himself and to the Royal Mail. He had not discussed the problem with colleagues because of a mixture of pride and embarrassment.”
Daniels was ordered to pay a fine and perform community service. Link -via Arbroath
What, did you think face-stretching and skin-piercing were modern fads? Not by a long shot! People have been undergoing painful procedure to modify their bodies (and their looks) for thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of years.
Lip stretching is a body modification that goes back 10,000 years and had been practiced all over the world, from Siberia to South America, from the Middle East to Europe, although there is no evidence that the custom traveled from one area to another. The procedure survives only in Africa and among some Amazonian tribes in South America. The practice is seen among women in the Mursi and Surma tribes of Ethiopia. The lower lip is pierced and a peg is inserted, to be replaced with a larger peg as the skin stretches. A plate or labret is inserted when the piercing is large enough. Traditionally, this is done as a young woman prepares to marry, but is now a personal decision rather than an obligation.
Skull binding has been practiced at various points in history in widespread parts of the world, with some evidence of Neanderthal skulls that had been shaped around 45,000 BCE in Iraq. The custom of head shaping has been most notable among skulls excavated in Peru, where the practice dates back 9,000 years. The skull can only be shaped during infancy. The bones eventually harden to the point that skull modification would only break the cranial bones. An infant's skull would be wrapped with cloth (sometimes with wooden boards added) to restrict its expansion sideways, causing the head to grow long and tall instead. This practice was usually restricted to the wealthier classes. Reproductions of such skulls can be purchased online.
Isaiah Mustafa, the Old Spice spokesman, has been busy at YouTube today responding to messages on reddit, Digg, and Twitter. His response to Matthew Sinclair made me laugh out loud! You can see more personal messages at the Old Spice YouTube channel. Link
Neatorama is giving away an iPad in conjunction with reddit in the Great Talent, Fantastic or Otherwise (GTFO) video contest! Get your talent recorded on video as soon as possible, as the deadline for entry is July 18th. That's Sunday!
What kind of talent will win? Who knows! Use your imagination and impress us with something we would never think of. Remember, if it isn't "fantastic", it could well be "otherwise"!
Grand Prize: 1 Apple iPad (or monetary equivalent if you’re outside the USA)
Runner-Up Prizes: 5 reddit Alien 4GB flash drives, 5 reddit evolution posters signed by the entire reddit staff, 5 $50 shopping sprees from the NeatoShop.
For contest details, visit our YouTube page, but don't put off entering any longer! http://www.youtube.com/neatorama
Adolek Kohn's dance at Auschwitz was a powerful and joyful statement, but it wasn't the first of its kind. Groucho Marx visited his mother's home town of Dornum, Germany in 1958. He found that the Nazis had destroyed Jewish graves and the records of Jewish residents. Marx then hired a car to take his travel group to Berlin.
It was surprisingly easy to get there. The car slipped through a checkpoint into a devastated gray and brown city of people in solemn clothing. Marx told the chauffer to drive to the bunker where Hitler was said to have committed suicide, where he was supposedly still buried.
The rubble at the site was about 20 feet high. Wearing his characteristic beret but without the trademark cigar, Marx alone climbed the side of the debris. When he reached the top, he stood still for a moment. Then he launched himself, unsmiling, into a frenetic Charleston. The dance on Hitler's grave lasted a minute or two.
There was no joy in the dance, but the statement was clear. Link -via The Atlantic
Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss is a continuation of the popular Typeface/Off series. We've tried to guess movies and TV shows by their title fonts; now we can try to figure out what magazines and newspapers are represented by their typefaces. I scored 7 of 10, which would have been 8 out of 10 if I typed decently. You can do better! Link
Take a walk down the uncanny valley with Bina48, a robot designed to be a "friend" with conversational skills. New York Times reporter Amy Harmon interviewed the robot itself (or is it "herself"?) to see how conversational it really is. Whatever you think of its skills, the talking head comes across as creepy.
Part high-tech portrait, part low-tech bid for immortality, Bina48 has no body. But her skin is made of a material called “frubber” that, with the help of 30 motors underneath it, allows her to frown, smile and look a bit confused. (“I guess it’s short for face rubber, or flesh rubber maybe, or fancy rubber,” she said.) From where I was seated, beneath the skylight in the restored Victorian she calls home, I couldn’t see the wires spilling out of the back of her head.
Many roboticists believe that trying to simulate human appearance and behavior is a recipe for disappointment, because it raises unrealistic expectations. But Bina48’s creator, David Hanson of Hanson Robotics, argues that humanoid robots — even with obvious flaws — can make for genuine emotional companions. “The perception of identity,” he said, “is so intimately bound up with the perception of the human form.”
This car is called the T25. Designed by Formula One engineer Gordon Murray, it weighs only 1,200 pounds and can seat three people (although one or two would be more comfortable). It is expected to get 74 miles to the gallon and cost around $9,000, thanks to the highly-efficient iStream manufacturing technology.
The cars are built using an efficient process that first attaches most of the car's parts to the chassis, and then adds a pre-painted body as a last step, similar to the way Formula One vehicles are built.
Look at the gallery below, and you'll see that the car is so tiny that three of them can fit into a single parallel parking space. If all cars were this size, we'd live in a utopian energy-saving world.
The T25 should be available in two years, with an all-electric version, the T27, following later. Link
You might recognize this face, but it's only a small part of the picture in NeatoGeek's Caption Contest. Take a look, put on your thinking cap, select a t-shirt you'd like to win from the NeatoShop, and leave a comment at NeatoGeek! Link
But it's a good kind of weird. Neatorama made the list of Metro.co.uk's "Top 10 Weird blogs", along with Asylum UK, Dark Roasted Blend, Anorak, Oddville Daily, I have seen the whole of the internet, Urlesque, Weird Worm, Unique Daily, and Nothing to do with Arbroath. So we're in good company! Link -Thanks, Jesse Netherland!
Jane Korman's 89-year-old father Adolek Kohn arrived at Auschwitz in a cattle car over 65 years ago. In 2009, he returned to Auschwitz and other locations in Poland associated with the Holocaust and did a victory dance with his daughter and several of his grandchildren. See parts two and three of this project as well. When Korman first exhibited the videos in Australia, she received quite a bit of criticism:
Many Jewish survivors have reacted gravely to the video, accusing her of disrespect. Yet Korman told Australian daily The Jewish News that “it might be disrespectful, but he [her father] is saying ‘we’re dancing, we should be dancing, we’re celebrating our survival and the generations after me,’ - the generation he’s created. We are affirming our existence.”
This mounted Hello Kitty trophy is for sale from Etsy artist datamafia. It is one of 12 Bizarre Hello Kitty Products That Sign The Coming Apocalypse collected by our own Jill Harness at Inventor's Spot.
I love the motto on the poster for this year's Jell-O Mold Competition from the Gowanus Studio Space: "Keep Calm and Wobble On." The 2010 winners have been selected! The grand prize was awarded to sculptor Shelly Sabel for her creation Aspic Ascension--Tastes Like Heaven. See all the winners at the contest site. Link -via Nag on the Lake
There are a lot of houses under foreclosure in Fresno, California, and many have cement ponds swimming pools that are currently empty. Instead of letting all that surface go to waste, skateboarders use the pools to test their skills, as we see in the short documentary Cannonball: Skating the Recession Pools by vimeo user California is a place. NSFW language. Link
