The blog Women, Snakes and Stalkers features South Asian book covers from the University of Chicago's Regenstein library. This commercial art is very much worth preserving and sharing! http://www.womensnakesandstalkers.com/ -via A Journey Round My Skull

Television programmers have to take chances in order to find the Next Big Thing. Sometimes those leaps of faith fail miserably -and expensively! Personally, I've never seen any of these shows except for The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, but that wasn't so much a flop as it was an expensive mistake. Among the rest are some truly weird ideas. Remember Cop Rock?

A police procedural musical would be one of the weirder ideas in television history, but if ABC hadn’t marketed the show and spent so heavily on the production I imagine Cop Rock would be looked at as just another weird flop, one of the probably hundreds in television history. Instead ABC seemed really, truly convinced that a musical cop show was going to work.

The show actually made it 11 episodes, which is still 11 more than I would have expected. I mean really, just for emphasis, this was a musical drama about our nation’s legal system, and it cost $2 million per episode in 1990 dollars.

Link -via reddit

The Museum of Unintended Use chronicles the way people use things for purposes other than what they were designed for. Some uses are silly, some are stretching the definition of common sense, and some are downright clever, such as this trick to keep cats from bothering houseplants. Link -via the Presurfer

(image credit: Flickr user Anne-Sophie Leens)

Fifty-nine years ago today was the first time a television audience got to watch an atomic blast broadcast live as it happened. KTLA in Los Angeles hid a crew on the roof of a hotel in Las Vegas, waiting for the top secret Ranger Easy bomb test in Frenchman Flats, Nevada. The blast went off at 5:30AM on February 1st, 1951. Viewers got up early to see their TV screens go white.

We stayed on the air, they waited for the right time, and all of a sudden there was the flash. The people watched it, Gil described it, Lane talked about it, and that was our telecast. That one flash. You just see this blinding white light. It didn’t seem real. We didn’t have videotape. You couldn’t say, “Let’s look at it again.”

A year later, all the networks carried live coverage of nuclear tests. Link

Wired also has a collection of nuclear bomb videos. Link

I collect links to bizarre niche blogs. This one takes the cake for sheer randomness. Selleck Waterfall Sandwich delivers exactly what it says -a collection of images all combining actor Tom Selleck and a sandwich on a background featuring a waterfall. The site even has a theme song, if you can call it a song. The picture here stars a Spam sandwich. Link -via mental_floss

Hayley is a Golden Retriever who lives in Mankato, Minnesota. Her master is Max DeMars of DeMars Construction. Hayley likes to be with Max and his crew, so much that she will climb a ladder to join them on upper floors and roofs under construction!

Since she was a pup, Hayley, now 10 years old, follows the crew wherever they go.

"One day we were up on the roof and there she was," explained DeMars. "Saying what about me."

After hundreds of jobs over the years, she's got a pretty good handle on climbing up the ladder, even when nobody else is up on the roof.

Hayley's fame has spread since a neighbor called police about a dog on a roof. Link -via Arbroath

I don't know what's really going on in this picture, but "turtle wax" was my first reaction. http://blackandwtf.tumblr.com/post/358465343/thanks-joao-paulo -via Buzzfeed

It was three years ago today that Boston officials panicked over a guerilla advertising stunt in Boston featuring Mooninites.

Authorities have arrested two men in connection with electronic light boards depicting a middle-finger-waving moon man that triggered repeated bomb scares around Boston on Wednesday and prompted the closure of bridges and a stretch of the Charles River.

Meanwhile, police and prosecutors vented their anger at Turner Broadcasting System Inc., the parent company of CNN, which said the battery-operated light boards were aimed at promoting the late-night Adult Swim cartoon "Aqua Teen Hunger Force."

Relive the silliness as Neatorama and others covered it.

1-31-2007 Cartoon Ads Cause Bomb Scare in Boston

2-1-2007 Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens pleaded not guilty then held a press conference

2-4-2007 Jack Bauer Interrogates the Mooninites

5-11-2007 Community service for defendants in Cartoon Network case

5-13-2007 Mooninite LED vs. Fake Pipe Bomb: a Tale of Two Hoax Devices

-via Cynical-C

Authorities responded to reports of a bear seen near the village of Chorzow in Poland. A ranger shot the animal with a tranquilizer gun, but it either didn't work or the bear was immune.

Unfortunately for the rangers tasked with capturing the animal, it woke up from its apparent slumber as they came near and gave chase to the man who had shot it.

Thanks to the efforts of both men, the bear was eventually brought under control. Reports said authorities plan to take it to a local zoo.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7107266/Bear-chases-man-after-being-shot-with-tranquilliser-dart.html -via Arbroath

(YouTube link)

Music by Serge Chubinski-Orlov, with vocals by Linda Ganzin. The beautiful time lapse video is a collaboration between the Innerlife Project and TimeLapseHD. Link -via Nag on the Lake

The Westboro Baptist Church {wiki} held a demonstration in front of the Twitter office in San Francisco on Thursday. Even more people showed up for a counter protest, featuring the best protest signs I've ever seen. See more signs at Laughing Squid. Link

(image credit: Rubin Starset)

This is just one of 5 Science Fair Projects for the Internet, brought to you by College Humor. Other subjects are Facebook, Google search, comment thread eruptions, and how to build a great website. http://www.collegehumor.com/article:1799611 -via Digg

The Chaos is a poem often used to demonstrate how difficult it is to pronounce words in English, as the spelling and pronunciation varies so. It was written by Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité, who first published it in 1909, then revised and lengthened it several times before his death in 1946. More lines were added posthumously. The Spelling Society published The Chaos in its entirety. Here are the first few (and the easiest) lines:

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,

I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;

Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!

The poem is now 274 lines long, meant to be read out loud. How much of it can you manage before mispronouncing something? http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j17/caos.php -via Geeks Are Sexy

How well do you know your computers, operating systems, and peripherals? Find out with this Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. They'll give you a question, and you decide whether they're talking about an Apple computer, or an IBM clone type computer that uses Windows. Or neither. I scored 80%! Link

The authors of an article in Focus magazine, a BBC publication, took a look at statistics in 35 countries to rank those nations according to their tendency towards the seven deadly sins. Australia was found to be the most "sin-prone" nation, with the US coming in second. Canada, Finland, and Spain rounded out the most "sin-prone" rankings.

Topping each of the sin categories were South Korea (lust), the US (gluttony), Mexico (greed), Iceland (sloth and pride), South Africa (wrath) and Australia (envy).

Of course, some question the research methods and the results. http://www.news.com.au/national/australia-ranked-world-number-one-for-sinning/story-e6frfkvr-1225824525361 -via Simply Left Behind