If you've read Neatorama for a long time, you've heard of the Wife Carrying Contest and the World Beard and Moustache Championships, but did you know about the Gumboot Throwing Festival? And who knew there was a thing called competitive sauna? Listverse has a rundown of 8 Crazy Championships. Who knows, you might want to enter one someday! Link -via the Presurfer
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Chuck Norris is the baddest video game character ever! And he has the weapons to prove it. I'm surprised this wasn't created years ago. (via Unique Daily)
11-year-old Savannah Haworth was riding her bike home when a car ran over her arm, shoulder and head! She was taken to a hospital, but suffered only minor scrapes and bruises.
Link -via Unique Daily
The helmet she was wearing bore the brunt of the impact and shattered into pieces.
Savannah's parents Harvey and Gillian believe if their daughter had not been wearing the protective head gear, she would now be dead.
Accounts manager Harvey said: 'Without her helmet Savannah would have sustained serious head injuries or would have been killed. She's been a very, very lucky girl.'
Link -via Unique Daily
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In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it.
Directed by Josh Raskin with illustrations by James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina. -via Viral Video Chart
(YouTube link)
This dog is singing along to Gwen Stephani's Sweet Escape. He's not that good, but he puts his heart into it! -via Arbroath
Volkswagen's new microcar will seat two people and get a stunning 235 miles per gallon!
Volkswagen's had its super-thrifty One-Liter Car concept vehicle -- so named because that's how much fuel it needs to go 100 kilometers -- stashed away for six years. The body's made of carbon fiber to minimize weight (the entire car weighs just 660 pounds) and company execs didn't expect the material to become cheap enough to produce the car until 2012.
But VW's decided to build the car two years ahead of schedule.
A limited number of cars will be produced in 2010. The car will use a two-cylinder diesel hybrid engine, and will automatically shut off at stoplights -and (we hope) automatically restart when you hit the gas pedal. http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/07/laugh-at-high-g.html -via the Presurfer
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A Star Wars nerd opens a gym for like-minded individuals. Just when you start to think this is too long, unexpected events make it something very different. -via Metafilter
Calorie Lab's Fattest States rankings for 2008 are out, and Mississippi is number one for the third year in a row. Colorado has the smallest percentage of obese people.
West Virginia passed Alabama to become the second fattest state in 2008. The four states of Mississippi, West Virginia, Alabama, and Louisiana have obese populations that exceed 30 percent over a three-year average and two-thirds of the citizens of Mississippi and West Virginia were either overweight or obese by CDC standards in 2007.
Link -via Digg
Excavations at Ferry Farm in Virginia have turned up the foundation of George Washington's boyhood home. Half a million artifacts have been uncovered and are being studied for clues about Washington's early life.
Washington first lived in the house at Ferry Farm in 1738, when he was six years old. After seven years of work, the team has identified the floor plan, despite the fact that stones were recycled when the home was altered and remodeled over time. Link
(image credit: L.H.Barker (c) 2008. All rights reserved.)
"When you look at the normal biographies of Washington, they start when he's 23," said David Muraca, who oversaw the excavation as director of archaeology at the George Washington Foundation, which owns Ferry Farm.
"This piece of the story is very difficult for historians to get their hands around," he said. "This dig will let us start our stories much earlier."
Washington first lived in the house at Ferry Farm in 1738, when he was six years old. After seven years of work, the team has identified the floor plan, despite the fact that stones were recycled when the home was altered and remodeled over time. Link
(image credit: L.H.Barker (c) 2008. All rights reserved.)
Many of the Muppet characters were inspired by real people or other fictional characters. Some Muppets changed over time as they became viewer favorites. Read the stories behind ten of them at mental_floss. Link
Worth1000 challenged Photoshop users to hide an elephant! Some of the entries are ingenious. http://www.worth1000.com/contest.asp?contest_id=19677&display=photoshop#entries -via Geek Like Me
Satellites take pictures of the earth for mapping, weather, science, and security. Art is a low priority when you've spend this much money to launch the camera! But the earth is a beautiful place, and the pictures sometimes are works of art. See Environmental Graffiti's 30 Most Incredible Abstract Satellite Images of Earth.
The images you see below were taken at the turn of the Millennium, when NASA’s scientists had a brilliant idea: to scan through 400,000 images taken by the Landsat 7 satellite and display only the most the most beautiful. A handful of the best were painstakingly chosen and then displayed at the Library of Congress in 2000.
Pictured are underwater sand dunes in the Bahamas. Link -Thanks, Tom!
Shahar Peleg designed this Tic Tac Toe game played on a a mirror. The Xs and Os are only half a letter, but seem whole when placed on the mirror board. It makes a way-too-simple game seem almost cool! Link -via Unique Daily
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