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Our Muppet friend Grover is the Old Spice Guy in this charming parody. Did you know Grover has his own Facebook page? -via reddit
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
I hope you've had a great week! If you've been as busy as I have, maybe you can relax and catch up this weekend. To save you from having to click through pages and pages of Neatorama, here are links to our latest feature articles for your reading pleasure.
Jill Harness explained the nuts and bolts of donating blood in Drippy, Syrupy Donations of Life. This oh-so-important procedure seems really easy, especially when you contrast it with her 7 Weird and Disgusting Medical Procedures.
Neatolicious Fun Facts: Bluetooth was fun to write, and I hope it was fun to read.
We were tickled (so to speak) to find out that a science fiction sexual position has been named in honor of Neatorama. See it in Tron-O-Rama.
Steven M. Johnson's Museum of Possibilities gave us the strange idea of Pre-wrecked Autos for your convenience.
From the Annals of Improbable Research, we learned How to Write 85,000 Books.
We got a brief history of dogs from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader with A Breed Apart: Boning up on Man's Best Friend.
From mental_floss' Scatterbrained book, we reprinted Secret Romance Novelists.
In the Name That Weird Invention! contest, Congratulations to first place winner redfi5e who suggested we call this invention "Flures." Second place winners are Carolyn Bahm ("Dive-Thrus") and ernest ("Flap-jerks"). Carolyn was the only one who followed stated a t-shirt preference as per the contest rules, so she gets a t-shirt from the NeatoShop!
The artist, Steven Johnson, said, "I was blown away by the cleverness of many of the names. I also noticed that a well-conceived name made my art seem funnier!" So he wanted to recognize these entries as Honorable Mentions: The Flopcatch, Masterbaiters, Toe Tacklers, Self Contained Underwater Baiting Apparatus (SCUBA), Flipplures, Trollfins, FlipperDippers, SCUBait, Flip-o-bait, Flip Service, Kickbait, Flipping Hookers, Toe-Bait-O’s, and Stuck in pro-bait.
In Mal and Chad's Fill in the Bubble Frenzy, congratulations go out to Kay Truman, who filled in the bubble with "Okay, so this wasn't the best way to find my contact..." She wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop!
Neatorama collaborates with mental_floss to bring you the How Did You Know? contest series. Congratulations go out to recent HDYK winners Ryan Pelster, Bart J Geraci, Will MacGillivray, Francesca Lyon, and Corbin Byers! Keep an eye out for your chance to be a winner as well.
If you till need more fun and games, join Neatorama at Facebook and at Twitter. I don't want to give any secrets away, but there are giveaways at our social networking sites that don't appear here on the main blog (wink wink).
Jill Harness explained the nuts and bolts of donating blood in Drippy, Syrupy Donations of Life. This oh-so-important procedure seems really easy, especially when you contrast it with her 7 Weird and Disgusting Medical Procedures.
Neatolicious Fun Facts: Bluetooth was fun to write, and I hope it was fun to read.
We were tickled (so to speak) to find out that a science fiction sexual position has been named in honor of Neatorama. See it in Tron-O-Rama.
Steven M. Johnson's Museum of Possibilities gave us the strange idea of Pre-wrecked Autos for your convenience.
From the Annals of Improbable Research, we learned How to Write 85,000 Books.
We got a brief history of dogs from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader with A Breed Apart: Boning up on Man's Best Friend.
From mental_floss' Scatterbrained book, we reprinted Secret Romance Novelists.
In the Name That Weird Invention! contest, Congratulations to first place winner redfi5e who suggested we call this invention "Flures." Second place winners are Carolyn Bahm ("Dive-Thrus") and ernest ("Flap-jerks"). Carolyn was the only one who followed stated a t-shirt preference as per the contest rules, so she gets a t-shirt from the NeatoShop!
The artist, Steven Johnson, said, "I was blown away by the cleverness of many of the names. I also noticed that a well-conceived name made my art seem funnier!" So he wanted to recognize these entries as Honorable Mentions: The Flopcatch, Masterbaiters, Toe Tacklers, Self Contained Underwater Baiting Apparatus (SCUBA), Flipplures, Trollfins, FlipperDippers, SCUBait, Flip-o-bait, Flip Service, Kickbait, Flipping Hookers, Toe-Bait-O’s, and Stuck in pro-bait.
In Mal and Chad's Fill in the Bubble Frenzy, congratulations go out to Kay Truman, who filled in the bubble with "Okay, so this wasn't the best way to find my contact..." She wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop!
Neatorama collaborates with mental_floss to bring you the How Did You Know? contest series. Congratulations go out to recent HDYK winners Ryan Pelster, Bart J Geraci, Will MacGillivray, Francesca Lyon, and Corbin Byers! Keep an eye out for your chance to be a winner as well.
If you till need more fun and games, join Neatorama at Facebook and at Twitter. I don't want to give any secrets away, but there are giveaways at our social networking sites that don't appear here on the main blog (wink wink).
Steven M. Johnson comes up with all sorts of wacky inventions in his weekly Museum of Possibilities posts, but something's missing from his strange gadgets: names. Can you come up with a name for this one? The commenter suggesting the funniest and wittiest name win a free T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Contest rules: one entry per comment, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Please make a selection of the T-shirt you want (may we suggest the Science T-shirt, Funny T-shirt, and Artist-designed T-shirt categories?) alongside your entry. If you don't select a shirt, then you forfeit the prize. Good luck!
Update: 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!
This machine decorates cakes! No, it won't write "Happy Birthday", but it will rotate the cake while the icing falls in Spirograph-type patterns. Link -via Evil Mad Linkblog
Michael Salisbury made this time-lapse video of the 2010 Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The song is "Phoneme" by STS9. -via Laughing Squid
Previously: Panorama of the 2009 Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta and video of the Reno Balloon Race 2006
Previously: Panorama of the 2009 Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta and video of the Reno Balloon Race 2006
People dial wrong numbers all the time. What can really get you in trouble is printing the wrong phone number, especially on a product or advertisement or in a catalog. That mistake is compounded by the fact that so many toll-free long distance numbers are phone sex lines. The most recent case is Chad Ochocinco’s cereal boxes.
Stacy Conradt put together a list of the ten most notorious phone number mistakes for mental_floss. Link
1. Ochocinco meant well by printing a request for donations to a charity called Feed the Children on his new cereal, but people calling to hand over some money actually may have been “donating” to an organization of the not-so-charitable kind: a phone sex line. For the record, the number on the box was 1-800-HELP-FTC when it should have been 1-888. Whoops! Funnily enough, the day the cereal came out, Ochocinco Tweeted, “order my cereal OCHOCINCOS. Start your day with a lil suga!” Insert immature giggles here.
Stacy Conradt put together a list of the ten most notorious phone number mistakes for mental_floss. Link
Are you considering a night at the movies? Mombo can suggest what you should see, based on your Twitter feed and those of your Twitter connections (if you or those you follow ever talk about movies on Twitter). For example, they are pretty sure that the Neatorama Twitter gang should see The Social Network. Check yours by logging into Twitter. You can also find the most liked and most talked-about films, see trailers for upcoming films, and rate the movies you've seen. Link -Thanks, Peter!
Tetris, the game, is the star of a new action film coming to a theater not necessarily near you. Starring la barre! et la croix! It's in French, but from the looks of the trailer, you won't have to understand the language to enjoy the action! See the preview at Technabob. Link
Does the sex of your children have an effect on your marriage? Data drawn from US Census records of 3 million adults seems to say that having daughters is not great for marital bliss. But the raw numbers don't say why.
Researchers don't know the cause, but have proposed many possibilities, from the presence of daughters making a mother more likely to leave an abusive husband to the idea that a man is more likely to marry a woman who is pregnant with his son. In any case, the statistics do not necessarily reflect the odds for an individual marriage. Link
(Image source: Clipart for Free)
In the original 2003 research on the topic, economists Gordon Dahl, from the University of California-San Diego, and Enrico Moretti, at UC Berkeley, found that couples with a first-born girl were about 5 percent more likely to divorce than parents of a first-born boy. When there are as many as three daughters that difference spiked to 10 percent.
Researchers don't know the cause, but have proposed many possibilities, from the presence of daughters making a mother more likely to leave an abusive husband to the idea that a man is more likely to marry a woman who is pregnant with his son. In any case, the statistics do not necessarily reflect the odds for an individual marriage. Link
(Image source: Clipart for Free)
Bibliodyssey has some gorgeous printings derived around the year 1700 from woodcuts of the 16th century, called "Festival Books" that depict the pomp and pageantry of the Holy Roman Empire's royal celebrations. Some of these are concept pieces, created before the actual event, and so envision an idealized version of court festivals.
The Emperor Maximilian I (1459-1519, elected Emperor in 1508) commissioned two works of art which exerted a considerable influence on court festivals generally in the Empire: the set of 192 woodcuts commissioned from Dürer in 1515 which together make up the Triumphal Arch and the series of 136 woodcuts by Burgkmair, Altdorfer, Dürer and others which constitute the Triumphal Procession of 1517."
Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Peacay)
Show your house guests, family, or roommate how popular you are on Facebook with a poster showing all your Facebook friends! Have up to 2000 friends printed on a 20"x40" poster for just $20. Think that will impress Mom and Dad? Link
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Simon's Cat meets a porcupine (or is it a hedgehog?). Of course, he has his own self-serving agenda. -via The Daily What
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Wilson is a loyal dog -up to a point. This poignant yet funny ad is for the New Zealand Lottery. The song is "To Be By Your Side" by Nick Cave. -via Bits and Pieces
They obviously appreciate a little culture out in the pasture. -via Arbroath
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