When is a zebra not a zebra? When it's a zebra crossing, but that's only part of the story. A public safety advertising campaign in Russia hopes to draw motorists' attention to pedestrians crossing the road by using zebras.
Only, police in the Russian capital could not get any zebras - so they painted black stripes on white horses instead.
They paraded the horses over crossings, forcing motorists to slow down and read road safety messages.
Thousands of pedestrians die in road accidents in Russia every year.
Perhaps they got the idea from a zoo in Gaza. Link to story. Link to video. -via Arbroath
This morning I cooked a pound of bacon for breakfast. I'm glad I didn't go with the sausage instead, because it was only later that I found out that today is International Bacon Day!
International Bacon Day or Bacon Day is an unofficial observance, often celebrated on the Saturday before US Labor Day (the first Monday of September). Some cultures, however, celebrate on December 30th, while others celebrate the day on the first Saturday in January after the new year.
Bacon day celebrations typically include social gatherings during which participants create and consume dishes containing bacon, including bacon-themed breakfasts, lunches, dinners, desserts, and drinks. Bacon Day gatherings may also include the consumption of soy bacon or turkey bacon.
How will you celebrate this auspicious occasion? Link-Thanks, Clarabelle!
Bacon mania is nothing new -bacon skates were in use in 1931!
So, yes, this photo was taken in November 1931 in Chehalis, Washington at the town's Egg Festival. The occasion was a try to break the world record for largest omelette. Two women tied bacon to their feet and skated around the warming skillet to grease it. Then a team of chefs cracked and beat 7,200 eggs and made a breakfast delight.
Two goats were stranded for two days when they wandered onto the supports beneath a 60-foot-high train bridge connecting the Signal Peak coal mine to Broadview, Montana. Sandy Church of the Rimrock Humane Society answered the call to rescue the goats.
“We have absolutely no idea how or why these little critters would go out on this bridge,” Church said. “The only thing we can figure is it happened at night and they were unsure of their surroundings. Once morning came, they were too scared to walk back where they came from.”
Church called associates and brainstormed how to get the animals down. Freeman kept watch over the animals, while the deputy handled traffic.
Byron Kinn, surface superintendent for Signal Peak Energy, came to the bridge, checked out the situation and said the mine had equipment that could reach the animals. Mine boss John DeMichiei signed off on the plan and the goats were rescued by about 1 p.m., Church said.
http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/montana/article_de41e93c-b62c-11df-8fb3-001cc4c03286.html -via J-Walk Blog
The Rimrock Humane Society posted a video of the rescue. Link
Happy Labor Day Weekend! If you've been busy getting ready for relaxing holiday, you might have missed some of our exclusive offerings this week, so here they are again.
We learned some Animal Name Origins, courtesy of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
From the Museum of Possibilities, Steven Johnson expounded on our habit of dining in our cars in Driven to Eat.
At the Neatorama Facebook page, you'll find a lot more than just links. For example, dozens of people shared fond and not-so-fond memories of their first car.
Unspoken social rules make normal interaction with other people difficult -especially with someone you really don't want to interact with in the first place. Or if you like the other person, but have nothing to say. And there are other situations that can become painfully awkward. You've been there. I certainly have. Link
People (and cats) love Roombas, but they were always better at entertaining us than cleaning our floors. Two new competitors, the Neato (for carpets) and the Evolution Mint (for bare floors) clean in a way far different from the Roomba's random movements.
Eventually it cleans every part of the room—but the anti-Roomba crowd claims that it does so unevenly, going over some parts of a room many times while cleaning other spots just once. A more systematic approach could yield greater efficiency: If a robot cleaned each part of the floor just once, it would have a lot more battery power to clean more forcefully and could clean more quickly, to boot.
That's the theory behind both the Neato and the Mint. "We clean your floor the way a Zamboni would, or the way you would," says Max Safai, the CEO of Neato Robotics. The Neato uses several different sensors to create an internal map of a room. Based on this map, it will first clean the room's perimeter before going back and forth within the perimeter in a systematic way.
See videos of both the Neato and the Mint in action at Slate. Link
Margarine is a substitute for butter, which makes it a fighting word for the dairy industry. Butter producers and margarine producers battled back and forth for the better part of a century to capture the market for spreading our bread.
Butter was big business, and the notion that a cheaper substitute, even one made in part with milk, might storm the market terrified dairy farmers. They didn’t take the threat lying down, though, and convinced legislators to tax margarine at a rate of two cents per pound—no small sum in the late 19th century. Dairy farmers also successfully lobbied for restrictions that banned the use of yellow dyes to make margarine look more appetizing. By 1900, artificially colored butter was contraband in 30 U.S. states.
Several states took even more extreme measures to turn consumers away from margarine—they required the product to be dyed an unappealing pink color.
The margarine industry fought back, however. Read the whole sordid story at mental_floss. Link
New York artist Sally Davies bought a plain hamburger Happy Meal from McDonalds. She didn't eat it, but took pictures of it every day -for 137 days so far. The project will likely continue at least until the meal starts to look different. Link -via Cynical-C
I know some people who would rather rebuild something ten time than read the directions! Of course, putting something like a deck chair together is infinitely easier when the directions are written by someone who is fluent in your language. This video is the latest from SheepFilms. -via b3ta
BrickExpo 2010 will be held in Cincinnati the weekend of September 11-12. One of the displays will be a recreation of the 2009 plane crash in New York in which an airliner safely landed in the middle of the Hudson River, which became known as "the Miracle on the Hudson" as all passengers and crew were rescued from the water. Ken Osbon of Goshen Township, Ohio created the Lego version of the incident. Osbon, one of the event's organizers, said other Lego displays will depict a farm, a city with a train running through it, a pirate tableau, and even one recreating a scene from the TV show The Deadliest Catch. Link -via Fark
Aaron "Wheelz" Fotheringham {wiki} has spina bifida and began using a wheelchair when he was three yers old. He has been confined to a wheelchair since the age of eight. Fotheringham achieved the double backflip last weekend. -via the Daily What
Restroom signs say much the same thing all over the world, but the way they say it says a lot about how view the differences between men and women. Why are women so often depicted as wearing skirts? And why do we have to use separate bathrooms anyway?
Women’s and men’s washrooms: we encounter them nearly every time we venture into public space. To many people the separation of the two, and the signs used to distinguish them, may seem innocuous and necessary. Trans people know that this is not the case, and that public battles have been waged over who is allowed to use which washroom. The segregation of public washrooms is one of the most basic ways that the male-female binary is upheld and reinforced.
As such, washroom signs are very telling of the way societies construct gender. They identify the male as the universal and the female as the variation. They express expectations of gender performance. And they conflate gender with sex.
For the HELP! photo shoot, photographer Robert Freeman warmed up by shooting publicity stills of the band playing around in the Austrian snow. In the process, he realized that their arm motions reminded him of semaphore, a system of emergency naval communications using waving flags. Because the album title was conveniently four characters long, the photographer had each member of the group spell out a letter using the code. However, Freeman found that the arm motions for H-E-L-P were much less aesthetically pleasing than the positions for N-U-J-V, so he decided to use those letters instead.
SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND
The Beatles spared no expense for this 1967 cover, shelling out more than $60,000 to produce, arrange, and shoot dozens of cutouts and images. Among the celebrities included on the album cover were Marilyn Monroe, boxing champ Sonny Liston, and wax models of the Beatles borrowed from Madame Tussaud's collection. They even commissioned images of Jesus, Hitler, and Gandhi, but decided to leave them out for fear of offending fans.
THE BEATLES
After the circus that was the Sgt. Pepper album cover, the Beatles wanted to simplify things for their next record. The following year, they collaborated with pop artist Richard Hamilton to create what's now known as The White Album-a completely white surface embossed with the Beatles stamp. To add a layer of irony, Hamilton suggested that each copy be individually numbered, even though it was hardly a limited edition. (At least 600,000 U.K. copies were numbered.) McCartney remembers that Lennon grabbed No. 0000001. Typical.
ABBEY ROAD
The iconic crosswalk scene was shot in just minutes outside the Beatles' recording studio in 1969. The cover is a darling of conspiracy theorists, who claim that Paul McCartney died prior to the shoot and that he was replaced by a look-alike. Supposedly, the band dropped clues on the cover by dressing up as a funeral procession.: Lennon in white as the preacher, Starr in black as the undertaker, Harrison in jeans as the gravedigger, and McCartney shoeless, with the wrong foot forward, as the corpse.
However, the person who's truly out of step in the photo isn't Paul McCartney but Paul Cole, a visiting Floridian who was captured in the background. Cole didn't find out about the picture until months later, when his wife brought the album home from the store.
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The above article is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the September-October 2010 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss' entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
