I drove my own car to the prom, but it’s been so long I don’t remember if I bothered to wash it. In this century, high school students want to make the ride to the prom something they -and their friends- will always remember.

Parade Float

(image credit: World’s Best Prom)
12 promgoers in Racine, Wisconsin rode on a homemade parade float to the Park High School prom in 2004. The float was built onto a flatbed trailer, highlighted by 1,500 twinkling lights powered by a generator. The teens and their families designed, built, and painted the float.

Horse-Drawn Carriage

It’s hard to beat a romantic leisurely ride behind horses. Bee Tree Trail Horse and Wagon Tours transports students to proms in horse-drawn wagons in Pennsylvania. This picture from their website is of a 2007 prom in Fogelsburg, Pennsylvania.

Armored Military Vehicle

A group of year 11 students from Abbey College in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, arranged to ride to their prom in an armored vehicle from Commando Elite Paintball Games of Monkswood.

“The journey was really exciting with all of us allowed to take turns in the two gun turrets of the vehicle. Inside it was more comfortable than we had imagined. We certainly got plenty of attention en route and when we arrived at the hall.”

Tank

Gary called Tank Limo to hire a tank for his son and his friends to ride to the prom in Dorset, England.

Fire Truck

(image credit: LT MA Byard)
Firefighter Mike Shultz and his date Amy Cochran traveled to the North High prom in 2006 aboard a Long Meadow (Maryland) Volunteer Fire Department truck, chauffeured by Deputy Chief Eckstine (scroll down to the bottom of the linked page for the story). Yes, it helps if you or your date is a firefighter! But there are commercial fire trucks you can rent. Renting a fire truck is easy in Britain, with many resources like Casey’s Cars, where you can rent a red or pink fire truck as well as an ambulance. There are a few rentals available in the US, such a Hire a Fire Truck.

Helicopter

(image credit: George Austin)
Nikki Kennedy was delivered to the Muhlenberg South (Kentucky) High School prom in 2006 in a helicopter! But you won’t want to earn the ride the same way she did. In 2005, Nikki was seriously injured in a traffic accident that left her in a coma for two weeks. She was pronounced dead at the scene, but recovered and finished her senior year as a homebound student. The Air Evac Lifeteam later voted her as a “miracle patient” and awarded her a ride to the prom in the air ambulance.

Heavy Equipment

MacKenzie Stevens and Cally Hardy from Moncton, New Brunswick went to the 2007 JMA Armstrong High School prom in the bucket of a front-end loader!

Movie and TV Vehicles

You can rent a limo, or a bus, or a hearse, but if you really want to make an impressive entrance at your prom, you can rent a replica of a famous vehicle from TV or the movies. If you live in the UK, there are quite a few places you can hire such vehicles. We’ve featured the A-Team Van on Neatorama before. Star Car Hire in Britain has replicas of the General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard, the Delorean from Back to the Future, James Bond cars, and more movie and TV cars available for your prom. If you want a particular movie car in the United States, check out Star Car Central, a database for movie and TV cars. These are privately owned, and only a few are available for hire. Some that are (if you are in the right area) include the ‘66 Batmobile, the Mad Max Interceptor, and the Scooby-Doo Mystery Machine. If you do, please send us a picture!

An Iranian bear was adopted by Polish troops in World War II. Named Voytek, the bear was enlisted as a soldier in order to be transferred to Italy with his unit.

"He was just like a dog - nobody was scared of him," said Polish veteran Augustyn Karolewski, who still lives near the site of the camp.

"He liked a cigarette, he liked a bottle of beer - he drank a bottle of beer like any man."

Voytek even helped load ammunition and supplies at the Battle of Monte Cassino. After the war, Voytek spent the rest of his days in Scotland at the Edinburgh Zoo. Now a campaign has been launched to build a permanent memorial for the “the Soldier Bear” in Scotland. Link -via Fark

Bonus: Link to Voytek’s story. Link to more pictures of Voytek

(image credit: Imperial War Museum)

Check out this collection of 13 very different pool designs. This picture looks like a family underwater, which they are, but not really. The pool above them is contained by a glass bottom! Be sure to check out the Four Seasons Resort in Bali -I would’ve used that picture, except that you should see it full size. Link -via J-Walk Blog

(YouTube link)
Alaska also knows that if she argues enough, she’ll get what she wants. -via Arbroath

Here’s a handy collection of infographics to help new parents with caring for their baby. Link -via J-Walk Blog

Update 1/24/08 by Alex - It's from the book Safe Baby Handling Tips by David and Kelly Sopp | Their website - Thanks Christopher!

Don't Miss This New Article on Neatorama: The Wonderful World of Early Computing

19-year-old Rebecca Strachan from England and 18-year-old Sharon Schilperoord from the Netherlands met on an online forum and discovered they shared a love of singing -in Korean! They recorded a popular Korean song together via email and posted it on YouTube.

Since it went live in November, the video has received more than 130,000 hits and led to record executives offering the pair the chance to go to the South Korean capital Seoul for a series of gigs.

Rebecca will now fly out next month to receive expert singing and dancing tuition and is set to play her first gig at a festival in May.

Strachan taught herself Korean after studying Japanese in college. Schilperoord passed on the trip to Korea in order to finish her college education. Link to story. Link to video.

This Flickr set of 44 famous works of art from paulthewineguy includes additions of html, emoticons, and other computer-based elements to explain them to geeks. Pictured is Oath of the Horatii by Jacques-Louis David. I especially enjoyed the Garden of Earthly Delights and Andy Warhol’s 100 Cans. http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulthewineguy/sets/72157603619920398 -via Dump Trumpet

You think you’re cold? One day in Snag, Yukon, Canada the temperature dropped so low that you could follow where someone went by the puffs of ice they left behind 15 minutes ago! In Yakutsk, Yakutia, Russia, you are warned not to wear glasses outside because they will freeze to your face. Read about the coldest spots thermometers have been (and the people who live there) at mental_floss. Link

(disclaimer: I wrote this)

An $11,000 coffeemaker that brews one cup at a time! There are only about 200 Clovers in existance so far, but their popularity is taking off at coffeehouses around the US.

Designed by three Stanford graduates, it lets the user program every feature of the brewing process, including temperature, water dose and extraction time. (It even has an Ethernet connection that can feed a complete record of its configurations to a Web database.) Not only is each cup brewed to order, but the way each cup is brewed can be tailored to a particular bean — light or dark roast, acidic or sweet, and so on.

The Clover works something like an inverted French press: coffee grounds go into a brew chamber, hot water shoots in and a powerful piston slowly lifts and plunges a filter, forcing the coffee out through a nozzle in the front. The final step, when a cake of spent grounds rises majestically to the top, is so titillating to coffee fanatics that one of them posted a clip of it on YouTube.

If that’s not enough, the first $20,000 siphon coffeemaker was recently imported from Japan for the Blue Bottle Café in San Francisco. Read about both these new brewing methods in this article from the New York Times. Link -via Geek Like Me

(image credit: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times)

With super big high-definition flatscreen monitors available, people are reliving the movie theater experience in their homes. Some have taken the opportunity to create home theaters designed around their favorite movie! We’ve featured the Indiana Jones Theater and a different Batcave Theater here, but there are plenty more. deputydog lists ten of the most extravagant. Note that Star Trek outnumbers Star Wars 3 to 1 in this collection. http://deputy-dog.com/2008/01/23/10-stunning-ultra-geeky-home-cinemas/

The super-secret Area 51 has a new name: Homey Airport. I am not making this up.

Capt. Jessica Martin, a spokeswoman for Nellis Air Force Base, which sits 85 miles south of Homey Airport and is responsible for the airspace and any ground facilities, said that “we already know about the designation, but it doesn’t have any effect on operations at the base.”

Martin said she didn’t know the origin of the name “Homey Airport.”

No word yet on what the aliens think of the name change. Link -via Boing Boing

Wired celebrates the Macintosh’s 24th anniversary with a gallery of Apple's worst products. Remember the Newton and the Pippin? I don’t, either, but I’ve owned The Cube and the hockey puck mouse. http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/multimedia/2008/01/gallery_apple_flops

(YouTube link)
From eggs til the time they leave the nest. I am astounded to think of how many trips the tiny mother bird must've made to feed two growing babies! -via Ursi’s Blog

Rob Carter of Fort Worth, Texas arrived home from Chicago and collected his luggage at the airport -but picked up the wrong suitcase. He realized his error when he opened it at home.

Irked at his "own idiocy," Carter leaned over to zip it shut when a kitten popped its head out of a corner of the suitcase. The wide-eyed cat took one look at Carter and bolted under the bed. "I must have jumped six feet into the air and screamed like a girl," said Carter.

The next morning, he got close enough to see a phone number on the cat's collar and called Kelly Levy in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, who was frantic over her missing cat. When her husband Seth left for the airport, Gracie Mae had apparently stowed way in the suitcase. The ten-month-old cat still had stitches from being spayed a few days earlier. Carter delivered the cat to Seth Levy, who took her home with a proper airline ticket.

Carter said that he considered keeping the cat before he knew she had a home.

"If I couldn't have found a good home, I would have kept it," he said. "We were going to name it Suitcase."

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-flpcat0123pnjan23,0,6910342.story to Carter's story. http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-flpcat0122pnjan22,0,6320516.story to the Levys' story. -via Arbroath

(image credit: Sun-Sentinel/Rhonda Vanover)

Imagine drinking from a “cup” shaped like a corkscrew made up of ribbon. It doesn’t sound easy, but it could make drinking much easier in space. In microgravity conditions, liquid breaks up into globules which tend to float around and cause problems. Brian Lowry and Heather-Jean May of the University of New Brunswick have tested helix containers, which keep liquids in line by surface tension.

These forms should function much better as containers for holding fluids in microgravity, they say surface tension holds liquid inside the coil and the properties of the shape's surface allow fluid to be sucked out in one go.

When liquid is drawn out of these helical containers, the remaining fluid redistributes along the spiralling support. So, you can keep sucking until there is only a very thin ribbon of liquid lining the structure. An astronaut could drain a helix holding a drink in a single draught.

This type of container would be useful for applications besides drinking. Engineers must often transfer liquids in space for mechanical and experimental purposes. Lowry said:

"At the micro and nano scale, gravity becomes relatively insignificant, so this approach could help engineers working with tiny amounts of fluid on earth too."

Link -via BB Spot