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Now that all the miners and rescue workers are safely out of the collapsed copper mine in Chile, The Brothers McLeod turn their thoughts to bringing up whoever else might happen to be deep below the surface of the earth. -Thanks, Myles!

I just flew in from Vegas, and boy, are my arms tired! I've been at Blog World Expo 2010, a trade convention of sorts for bloggers this weekend, which you will hear more about when I collect my wits. Meanwhile, that's why this weekend roundup is late. We apologize for any inconvenience. Here's what happened at Neatorama this week.

I looked up some Neatolicious Fun Facts on Giant Pumpkin Contests, and found a world I never knew existed.

David Israel snagged an interesting interview with Spacevidcast.com's Benjamin Higginbotham.

Learn some interesting tidbits about the original Star Trek TV series in Neatolicious Fun Facts: Red Shirts.

New at the Museum of Possibilities: Covert Exercise Furniture, so you won't have unused equipment out where all can see.

This week's offering from the Annals of Improbable Research was Artificae Plantae: The Taxonomy, Ecology, and Ethnobotany of Simulacraceae. That means artificial plants.

From mental_floss magazine, we got The No-Budget Diner's Guide for help in eating things that cost nothing (but may make you feel a bit queasy).

There's nothing better to get you into the Halloween spirit than a movie! Enjoy I Was a Teenage Monster Movie from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

If you haven't tried our Neato-Puzzles yet, just click the link and give it at try!

The winner in this week's Mal and Chad's Fill in the Bubble Frenzy is Coolpersob who said, "I wonder how many licks it will take to get to the center?"

Steven Johnson brought us the Name That Weird Invention competition. We have winners! First place goes to Craig, who suggested the name "Glockets", and the second place name is "The Smitten", suggested by Abby. Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop!

For more distractions, check out the Best Of Neatorama archives and the NeatoHub!

How did the sport of competitive giant pumpkin-growing get so big? I mean, it's really big!




1. Chris Stevens of New Richmond, Wisconsin grew a pumpkin in 2010 that weighed in at 1,810.5 pounds -considerably bigger than the previous world-record pumpkin that weighed 1,725 pounds. The big pumpkin was weighed at the Stillwater Harvest Fest in Stillwater, Minnesota. How did he grow a pumpkin that big? Stevens has a 10,000-square-foot pumpkin patch, in which he grows only one pumpkin per vine. He shades the fruit from the sun, and feeds the vines cow manure, fish emulsion and seaweed.

Update: In 2012, we finally achieved the Holy Grail of giant pumpkin competition, the One-Ton Pumpkin.

2. Competitive pumpkin growing really began with William Warnock of Ontario. He grew the Rennie's Mammoth variety of pumpkins, which were billed as capable of growing to over a hundred pounds. However, Warnock's pumpkins were much bigger. In 1900 and 1904 he produced fruits that weighed over 400 pounds! His 403 pound world record set in 1904 stood for 76 years. See Warnock's pumpkins here.

3. The most common variety of pumpkin grown for world-record competitions is the Atlantic Giant, which produces the largest fruit of any plant in the world. The variety was first cultivated by Nova Scotia farmer Howard Dill in 1976. It was Dill who finally broke Warnock's big pumpkin record in 1979, and grew record-setting pumpkins for several consecutive years afterward. The Dill family still sells the record-breaking seeds.

4. During the last few years of the 20th century, the competitive pumpkin community was rocked by cheating, scandals, and infighting -enough to power a soap opera. The main governing body of the competitions was the World Pumpkin Confederation. A split in the membership led to the creation of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, which now oversees official weigh-ins.

5. The first pumpkin that weighed over a thousand pounds was grown in 1996 by Paula and Nathan Zehr of Lowville, New York. Their record-breaking pumpkin weighed an astounding 1,061 pounds, which won the couple a $50,000 prize for reaching the 1,000-pound milestone. Since then, half-ton pumpkins have become "common". The world record for large pumpkins has been broken every year this decade, except for 2008.

From WebUrbanist, we have a list of cemeteries that made chills go up our spines while watching the movies. Some are purely fictional, some were filmed at real cemeteries, and some were based on real stories of cemeteries. Shown is a cemetery scene from National Treasure. Link

How many different ways can you have your Rubik's cube? How about gigantic, minuscule, tasty, expensive, monochrome, round, electronic... and many more variations on the '80s puzzle. See them at Dark Roasted Blend. Link

October 13th is National Fossil Day! In commemoration, Wired Science has a gallery of recent discoveries that show how, no matter how much we dig, there's always something new to learn about our past. Shown is a mysterious organism that lived about 2.1 billion years ago. Scientists haven't determined whether the five-inch-wide life form was a colony of cells or an early animal. Link

(Image credit: Abderrazak El Albani and Arnaud Mazurier)

Put your your thinking caps on -time for the Fill in the Bubble Frenzy with boy genius Mal and his talking dog Chad! Tell us what he is saying and win any T-shirt available in the NeatoShop -take a look around, pick one out and tell us what shirt you’d like with your submission in the comments. If you don't specify a t-shirt with your entry, you forfeit the prize. Enter as many times as you like (text only, please), but leave only one entry per comment. For inspiration, check out Mal and Chad’s comic strip adventures by Stephen McCranie at malandchad.com. Good luck!

Update: The winner this week is Coolpersob who said, “I wonder how many licks it will take to get to the center?” Congratulations!

As the economy sputters, everyone's looking for new ways to save on food. So, we've collected a whole bunch of no-budget meal ideas for those of you daring enough to scrimp.

1. Tree Bark

A classic meal of human desperation, tree bark has become a must-have meal during periods of scarcity. But you don't have to eat it al dente the way termites and beavers do. Inhabitants of the Lapland in Finland, for example, are known to make bread with ground tree bark during cruel winter months, and several Native American groups use tree bark as a dietary supplement. In fact, the Adirondack Mountains derive their name from a derisive term for the Algonquin Indians that means "tree eaters".

Not all bark is equally edible, so you'll have to experiment with your neighborhood flora. Some popular favorites include aspen, birch, willow, maple, and pine -trees common in cities and forests alike. So sharpen your teeth and dig in!

How to Prepare

For the choicest strips of bark, be sure to go for the nutritious, tender inner layer known as the cambium. (Eating the outer bark would be no more pleasant than chomping into your bookshelf.) If some resin or gum oozes out as you pry off the main course, be sure to lap it up for quick energy. Here are a few fun ways to serve tree bark:

Raw. Shred finely and chew thoroughly.

Slice it into strips and boil it to make a rustic pasta. Top with sap, dandelion greens, or insect parts (see entry #2). Alternatively, you can add the noodles to a stew.

Dry and grind into flour. The ground bark is pretty versatile and can be mixed with water into a breakfast gruel, baked into bread, added to soup for extra body, or even guzzled straight like a Pixy Stick.

2. Bugs

With more than 10 quintillion of these creepy crawlies infesting the planet, bugs are a virtually limitless source of protein and flavor. Bug eating exists in nearly every culture; in fact, approximately 10 percent of the protein consumed around the world comes from bugs! There are grasshopper tacos, steamed ant eggs, and even fried tarantulas. In the United States, the FDA permits a limited number of insect parts in commercial foods, such as five fly maggots per pound of pizza sauce. While most of our big eating in this country is unintentional, it doesn't have to be.

How to Prepare

In general, avoid brightly colored bugs, which tend to be poisonous, and always be sure to remove any shells, wings, or other textural offenses. Also, cook them before eating to kill off the inevitable parasites. Beyond that, each bug has its own qualities to consider. Here are a few of the more traditional cooking methods.

Crickets and grasshoppers: First, pluck off the barbed legs, because they can chafe your digestive tract. Then, roast the body for a snack that's both crunchy and nutritious.

Ants: Boil for six minutes to neutralize the formic acid of the stingers. After that, inhale them by the handful.

Caterpillars: They can give you a mouthful of tiny hairs, like licking a kiwi, so bite off the heads and then squeeze the insides into a pot. Boil and serve warm.

Worms: The dirt from the insides must be removed before they can be eaten. This can be done by starving them for one day, or squeezing out the dirt by hand.

3. Leather

Transforming your wardrobe into your pantry is simple. Shoes, jackets, and biker pants make meals both fashionable and filling. In fact, in every era, leather has been enjoyed by the starving masses. Indomitable explorers, stranded pirates, famine-stricken peasants, and even emaciated prisoners have downed a shoe or two. Just two years ago, when Chinese miners in Beijing were trapped underground for nearly a week, they survived on nothing but pieces of paper and a leather belt.

How to Prepare

Before cooking, rinse and dice the (preferably undyed) leather, then pound the pieces between stones to tenderize. For a satisfying soup, you can boil the leather until relatively tender, then add seasonings such as dried worms and nettles. Leather can also be chopped up and roasted to make nutritious chips. And remember to drink plenty of water; leather's generally as dry as a bone.

4. Dirt

No matter how bad the economy gets, there will always be enough dirt to go around. Soil can provide essential minerals. Think of it as a no-budget replacement for your expensive multivitamin supplements. In fact, dirt eating, known as geophagy, is so prevalent in some parts of the world that scientists and anthropologists think that nutritional deficits may bring on the craving. Even in the modern United States, reports persist that poor and rural Southerners still indulge in select soils by the spoonful, a custom that may have been brought over from West Africa.

How to Prepare

The secret to good dirt eating is simply to choose wisely. Soil that is rich in clay tastes the best, and it can be enhanced by adding salt and vinegar. When you find a good source, save some in a plastic bag so you can snack on it all day long. Of course, if you're looking to enjoy the original mud pie, garnishing the meal with a few worms never hurts.

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The No-Budget Diner's Guide was written by David Clark and appeared in the Scatterbrained section of the September-October 2009 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission.

Don't forget to feed your brain by subscribing to the magazine and visiting mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog today for more!

Ransom Riggs collects old snapshots, and particularly likes pictures on which someone has written something personal.

One thing I’ve found a lot of is photos where people have written deprecating things — usually about themselves — on the back. “I look so fat here!” is a shockingly common theme; I guess people were as concerned with their weight (and as self-conscious about pictures of themselves) fifty and sixty years ago as they are today. I want to share some of these with you, not so much to laugh at (although they are funny) but to demonstrate how little our attitudes about ourselves have changed over the years.

In case you can't read it, the note on this picture says, "I’m not as fat as I look here, it’s the terrycloth pajamas over my bathing skirt plus wind." See lots more pictures at mental_floss. Link

The Twilight Zone was more than just a science fiction television show. It was theater that made you think, a showcase for Rod Serling's vision for television, and it was a proving ground for talented but relatively unknown actors, like William Shatner.

The Twilight Zone featured some of Hollywood’s most famous faces… or at least faces that would eventually become famous. Looking back at the original series and seeing such star power, most of whom were just budding actors and actresses at the time, is actually quite interesting. Many of these celebrities may not be familiar to younger readers. However, others should certainly be easily recognizable. One such celeb was William Shatner (a man synonymous with sci-fi) who six years prior to “boldly going where no man had gone before” appeared as a newlywed obsessed with a small diner’s spooky fortune-telling machine.

Shatner, as we all know, went on to star in another classic Twilight Zone episode entitled Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, where he played a man slowly driven insane by a creature only he was able to see prancing about on the wing of his plane.

Read about more Twilight Zone actors who went on to stardom afterward, and other reasons that made The Twilight Zone a masterpiece. Link

I can talk pretty fast, but years of producing radio ads taught me that if you talk faster than people can listen, you may as well shut up. Still, there are some fast-talkers we love to listen to even if we can't follow what they are saying. Take a look at a few of these on video and marvel at the rate of words coming out. For example, New Yorker Fran Capo once blurted out 603 words in 54 seconds, which broke her own world record as the fastest-talking woman ever! Link -via the Presurfer

There are happy dogs that expect a good thing to happen, and then there are others who seem to have a case of the gloomies. Dogs can be classified as optimists or pessimists the same as humans, according to research from a team led by Michael Mendl.

Mendl, who is head of the Animal Welfare and Behavior research group at Bristol University's School of Clinical Veterinary Science, and his team came to this conclusion after putting 24 male and female dogs, representing different ages, through a few tests.

For the first test, each dog was taken to a room where a researcher interacted with it for 20 minutes. The next day, the researcher did the same thing, but left after just five minutes of interaction. The scientists documented how the dog, when left alone, acted. Some dogs, for example, happily awaited the person's return, while others barked and became anxious.

Next, the researchers trained the dogs to understand that a bowl on one side of a room was full of yummy food, while a bowl on the other side was empty. The researchers then placed bowls at ambiguous places and observed how quickly the dogs would go to the bowls.

"Dogs that ran fast to these ambiguous locations, as if expecting the positive food reward, were classed as making relatively optimistic decisions," explained Mendl. "Interestingly, these dogs tended to be the ones who also showed least anxiety-like behavior when left alone for a short time."

Pessimistic dogs are more likely to be destructive and display other behavior problems. Link -via J-Walk Blog

One of our favorite characters from Star Trek had a face that changed every episode. Here are five fun facts about Red Shirts.

  1. In the original Star Trek TV series, wearing a uniform with a red shirt meant that someone was in operations, which included the security department (gold or green meant command, and blue was worn by the science department). It made sense to take an extra security person on an expedition to a new planet. The landing party would consist of the show's stars, plus one unknown in a red shirt. This unknown security guard is often killed immediately after beaming down to the planet of the week, which conveniently displays how dangerous the residents of the planet are, and what strange powers they have. This device was used so often that the term "Red Shirt" came to signify an obviously expendable character who will die early in the show. 

2. Did red shirts died more often than characters wearing other colors, or did it just seem that way? After all, Captain Kirk had a reputation for finding a girl in every episode, but an analysis of episodes show only seven romances in 79 episodes. Matt Bailey compiled statistics on deaths among the Enterprise crew in Star Trek: TOS. He found that 73% of those who died were wearing red shirts, compared to 10% for yellow shirts and 8% for blue shirts (the rest were wearing other uniforms). The majority of red shirt deaths happened on an alien planet. The trope was not our imagination, however the "red" part may have escaped the notice of many who didn't have color TVs in the mid-'60s.

3. Mythbusters once dressed their crash test dummy Buster in a red shirt when they tested the Gorn Cannon myth, which was based on a Star Trek episode. You can see the destruction in this video.

4. The episode of Star Trek: TOS that had the most red shirt deaths was Where no Man has Gone Before, in which twelve red shirts kicked the bucket. In second place was The Changeling, which saw six red shirt deaths.

5. Forget the debate about whether Star Trek or Star Wars is a better science fiction universe- the real conundrum is among the minor characters. You know red shirts are always killed. You also know that Storm Troopers shoot and shoot and can't hit anything. If the two groups were to meet, we would have The Redshirt v. Stormtrooper Paradox. The question feeds many forum threads to this day.

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Imagine landing at the airport and finding that hungry rabbits have eaten your car. Well, not the entire car, just the parts that make it run. That's happening more and more at the Denver International Airport.

A vacationer returned after a nine day holiday only to find that his brand new VW Jetta would hardly crank. When he got it started he sought the help of the dealer, as anyone would, knowing that it is covered under the bumper to bumper warranty.

The service representative quizzed the owner if he had just picked up the Jetta from DIA and the gentleman responded, “Well as a matter of fact I did.” The culprit, according to the dealer, are rabbits who have combined exercise and a healthy diet to ensure against early onset cardio vascular disease.

The bunnies are feasting on rubber coated wires and other delicacies that may be infused with soy oil during the manufacturing process.

In the case of the VW Jetta, the warranty does not cover damage caused by hungry rabbits. Link -via reddit

(Image credit: Flickr users Carly Lesser & Art Drauglis)

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The folks at Improv Everywhere used 3,000 participants for their latest mission. Each had an MP3 player that received simultaneous instructions (and music). That had to appear really strange to anyone not in on the plan! It all culminated in a flashmob at Bryant Park. Link -via The Daily What