What's 36 feet tall, made of straw, and peers over the Nantwich horizon? A meerkat, of course! Snugburys Ice Cream Farm of Hurleston in England erects a big straw statue every summer.
The concept started in 1998 with a huge Millennium Dome sculpture and has also seen a straw replica of the Lovell telescope, London Eye as well as last year’s Big Ben standing beside the A51 near Chester.
Director Chris Sadler and his wife Cheryl come up with the ideas and the creations are made by Mike Harper, who builds a steel skeleton which is then stuffed with hay.
Speaking about this year’s design, Mr Harper, 57, said: ‘Everyone loves meerkats, especially my wife, so we thought it would be a good idea.
The colossal meerkat has eyes that light up. Link -via Arbroath
Several original posts this past week at Neatorama had to do with the Disney company in one way or another. Stacy Conradt stepped back in from her maternity leave and wrote Toy Story Movie Trivia. Jill Harness went to Disneyland and then gave us Neatorama Facts: Haunted Mansion. Then Alex posted some vintage photographs from The Early Days of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.
The Museum of Possibilities has a couple of new exhibits with If I Were an Architect and Possibilities for Mutation in Necktie Design.
You'll want to check out three new artists at the Art Blog: printmaker Julia Wolfson, sillkscreen printer Byung Kim, and illustrator Laura Barnard.
T-shirts from the NeatoShop are up for grabs in the What is it? game. As soon as I get the winners' names, I'll add them here. Congratulations to cynric, who won a t-shirt in NeatoGeek's weekly Caption Contest -his caption is now in the post. Also, stay tuned for a special announcement in the GTFO competition!
Don't forget, there's more fun and nonsense happening every day on our Facebook page, and you'll certainly want to follow your favorite site on Twitter.
Police in Larkspur, Colorado investigated a complaint of a car with the horn blaring for 45 minutes in the middle of the night. They found the car, with a bear inside it. What's more, the bear had taken the car where the police found it! Ben Story had parked his car the night before and did not lock it. What's more, there was a sandwich inside, which bears find hard to resist.
Ben's father, Ralph, said the bear hit the shifter and the car rolled backward about 125 feet, off the driveway, down an embankment and into some trees on Eagle Road near Tenderfoot Drive.
"So this bear opened the door on his own. Somehow the door closed behind him. He panicked and started thrashing around, hit the shifter and put the car, took it out of park," Ralph said. "It rolled back, down over the hill, and down into here, and stopped. The four way flashers were on. It's like he knew what was going on, and kept hitting the horn."
Police declined to open the car door, and finally freed the bear by tying a rope to the door handle so they could open it from further away. The bear wandered off, leaving the vehicle's interior shredded. http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/24364913/detail.html#
If you decide to be cremated when the time comes, your choice of final resting places will be much greater than if you were to be buried. Mental_floss takes a look at some of the more, hmm ...imaginative ways people have stored, scattered, reused, or disposed of their ashes.
The name Fredric Baur may not ring any bells, but you know his most famous creation. In 1966 Baur invented the Pringles can so Procter & Gamble could ship its new chips without using bags. Baur was so proud of the achievement that he told his children he wanted to be buried in the iconic can. When he died in 2008 at 89, they honored his wishes by placing his ashes in a Pringles can before burying them. According to his son Larry, Baur’s children briefly debated what flavor canister to use before settling on original.
Yellow-bellied marmots in Colorado are gaining weight and producing more offspring compared to thirty years ago. The difference is attributed to climate change.
In the Rocky Mountains, these marmots usually hibernate for seven to eight months of the year, which make the summer months "a very busy time for them," Arpat Ozgul, of the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London and lead author of the new paper, said in a prepared statement. "They have to eat and gain weight, get pregnant, produce offspring and get ready to hibernate again."
But as the Colorado summers have grown longer, so too has the time the marmots have to do all of these things—and do them better. This extra preparation (and reproduction) time means that "they are more likely to succeed and survive," said Ozgul, whose results were published online July 21 in the journal Nature (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group).
As the marmots grow bigger, other species are not doing as well. The number of tall bluebells and tenacious wolverines has declined. Link -via Dave Barry's Blog
The Valencia Club in Penryn, California had been closed for a year when 29-year-old Travis Kevie helped himself to the business. He broke in and posted a sign that the bar was open. Kevie sold drinks for four days until a newspaper article mentioned that Valencia had re-opened, which interested county detective Jim Hudson.
Not only had Detective Hudson had previous run-ins with Kevie, he knew the Valencia Club's liquor license had been surrendered.
When Detective Hudson went to the bar to investigate, he found it open for business and customers at the bar. Kevie quickly went from behind the bar to behind bars.
Kevie is being held on charges of selling liquor without a license and, of course, burglary. Link -via Arbroath
The Kleptones mashed up the Beatles song "Come Together" with a lot of other songs, and Crumbs Chief pieced together a video for it as part of the Videotones project. How many of these dance scenes do you recall from the original movies? -via mental_floss
This guy dropped some food on his iPad and came up with the idea of the iDish. Nothing revolutionary; he's just using his iPad as a dish, often with some appetizing food or fancy dishes displayed on the screen to make the meal look better. However, I got more and more tickled as his photographs just kept coming. The poor fellow had to buy sushi at 50% off because it was about to expire -probably because all his money went for an iPad! Link -via Metafilter
Lifehacker often shares a look inside interesting workplaces, and today featured the headquarters of Etsy, the website at which crafters can sell their homemade treasures. In a series of pictures, you can see that the place looks exactly as you might expect -very crafty! Link
Watch Russian military tanks maneuvering as if they were dancing, as they perform in a precision drill called The Invincible and the Legendary.
Andrei Melanyin, seated with his legs crossed, watches the tanks practice from inside a beige tent in the bleachers. As the director of The Invincible and the Legendary, he's looking for mistakes with a practiced eye. Melanyin is the head of the State Academic Bolshoi Theater of Russia, which includes the world-famous Bolshoi Theater, and a professor at the Institute of Modern Art. "They asked me to come in and do something theatrical," he says of the government organizers of the event. "They wanted something more than just a technical demonstration." The show he produced skips like a fake gemstone across Russian history, from the violent founding of the nation out of the Kiev city-state in the 12th century to demonstrations of hand-to-hand combat, set to the music of Ravel's Bolero, by modern paratroopers. The program also includes a reenactment of a raid on a terrorist camp by attack helicopters, a display by combat dogs and a parade of heavy vehicles running obstacles. And the tanks—not just jumping ramps, but choreographed in a synchronized dance routine.
It's part of the Russian Arms Expo going on this week. Read more about the tank ballet at Popular Mechanics. Link -via Boing Boing
I can't think of too many things more unappetizing than brushing your teeth with black or brown toothpaste. Several such pastes are in this list of Ten Strange Toothpastes, as they contain charcoal or chocolate. The French Email Diamant Rouge toothpaste seem quite intriguing, as it turns everything but your teeth bright red. See all kinds of odd teeth cleaners at Oddee. Link -via Unique Daily
Turn your handwriting into a font! Pilot Pens asks you to use your ink pen at least once more to write out your letters, then feed them into their font generator. Download your personal font, and then you can type with your own handwriting! Link -via Core77-Thanks, Senor Mysterioso!
For my book, The Year of Living Biblically, I spent 12 months trying to follow every rule in the Old Testament. Even the obscure one-like stoning adulterers (I used pebbles) and never shaving your beard (I did a lot of itching). My challenge: to reconcile the Bible's easy-to-grasp wisdom with some of its seemingly baffling laws. The following are a few of the more arcane rules I found along the way, with possible reasons behind them.
1. THE RULE:"...she shall put the rainment of her capitivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month; and after that thou shalt go in unto her and be her husband..." (from Deuteronomy 21:10-14)
THE TRANSLATION: If you capture a beautiful woman during war, and you want to marry her, you must first have her shave her head and trim her nails. Then you must live with her for a month without touching her. After that, she's all yours.
POSSIBLE EXPLANATION: Think of it like gun control-it's a mandatory waiting period. If you still want to marry a bald, short-nailed woman after a month of no sex, then maybe it truly is love.
2. THE RULE:"Even these of them ye may eat: the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind. / But all other flying creeping things, which have four feet, shall be an abomination unto you." (Leviticus 11:22-23)
THE TRANSLATION: You can't eat bugs. Well, except for locusts, beetles, and grasshoppers-those you can eat all you want.
POSSIBLE EXPLANATION: A ban on eating bugs isn't all that hard to argue with, but why the loophole for locusts et al.? It's believed that this is actually an example of the Bible's pragmatism. If locusts swarmed and devoured all the crops, the Israelites would have nothing left to eat-except the locusts themselves.
3. THE RULE:"...thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed; neither shall a garment of mingled linen and woolen come upon thee." (Leviticus 19:19)
THE TRANSLATION: Don't wear clothes made of mixed fibers. Wool-and-linen blends are particularly bad. Polycotton is probably OK.
POSSIBLE EXPLANATION: The Old Testament was obsessed with separating things. (Don't wear mixed fibers; don't mix milk and meat.) According to many biblical scholars, the idea was to drill the notion of separation into the ancient Israelite mind. This way, they would remain separate from the pagans and not intermarry-a sin even worse than mixing wool and linen.
4. THE RULE: "And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days; and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even." (Leviticus 15: 19)
THE TRANSLATION: Stay away from a woman if she's menstruating. She's impure, and if you touch her, you'll become impure, too.
POSSIBLE EXPLANATION: While many people say this rule is misogynistic (kind of like the theological equivalent of cooties), some scholars and devout Jews defend the practice. They say it has to do with reverence for life. When a woman has her period, it's like a small death. A potential life has vanished, and this is a way of paying your respects.
5. THE RULE: "A naughty person, a wicked man, walketh with a froward mouth. He winketh with his eyes..." (Proverbs 6: 12-13)
THE TRANSLATION: No winking. This is just one example, but the Bible contains no less than four anti-winking passages.
POSSIBLE EXPLANATION: Many believe that the Bible's "wink" referred to a tacit approval of evil. As in "I saw what you did, but I won't tell." But let's face it; the wink is a creepy gesture, no matter how you cut it.
[Editor's note:] All Old testament verses are taken from the King James translation of the Bible. They are presented here solely for the purpose of historic investigation and in no way reflect the religious views of the magazine.
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The above article was written by A.J. Jacobs. It is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the November-December 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss' entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
You can spice up your Twitter feed by following characters from movies, TV, and literature! Twitter is full of people who don't exist, but have plenty to say anyway. Buzzfeed searched for the most entertaining of those feeds and listed them for your convenience. Link
One tree + four mirrors = an entire forest! Step into a small booth and experience an infinite number of trees. This installation by DUS Architects was shown to folks in Oosterdokskade, Amsterdam last month. http://www.dusarchitects.com/nieuws.php?taal=english&nieuwsid=118 -via Metafilter
