(YouTube link)

Isaiah Mustafa, the Old Spice spokesman, has been busy at YouTube today responding to messages on reddit, Digg, and Twitter. His response to Matthew Sinclair made me laugh out loud! You can see more personal messages at the Old Spice YouTube channel. Link

Neatorama is giving away an iPad in conjunction with reddit in the Great Talent, Fantastic or Otherwise (GTFO) video contest! Get your talent recorded on video as soon as possible, as the deadline for entry is July 18th. That's Sunday!

What kind of talent will win? Who knows! Use your imagination and impress us with something we would never think of. Remember, if it isn't "fantastic", it could well be "otherwise"!

Grand Prize: 1 Apple iPad (or monetary equivalent if you’re outside the USA)


Runner-Up Prizes: 5 reddit Alien 4GB flash drives, 5 reddit evolution posters signed by the entire reddit staff, 5 $50 shopping sprees from the NeatoShop.

For contest details, visit our YouTube page, but don't put off entering any longer! http://www.youtube.com/neatorama

Adolek Kohn's dance at Auschwitz was a powerful and joyful statement, but it wasn't the first of its kind. Groucho Marx visited his mother's home town of Dornum, Germany in 1958. He found that the Nazis had destroyed Jewish graves and the records of Jewish residents. Marx then hired a car to take his travel group to Berlin.

It was surprisingly easy to get there. The car slipped through a checkpoint into a devastated gray and brown city of people in solemn clothing. Marx told the chauffer to drive to the bunker where Hitler was said to have committed suicide, where he was supposedly still buried.

The rubble at the site was about 20 feet high. Wearing his characteristic beret but without the trademark cigar, Marx alone climbed the side of the debris. When he reached the top, he stood still for a moment. Then he launched himself, unsmiling, into a frenetic Charleston. The dance on Hitler's grave lasted a minute or two.

There was no joy in the dance, but the statement was clear. Link -via The Atlantic

Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss is a continuation of the popular Typeface/Off series. We've tried to guess movies and TV shows by their title fonts; now we can try to figure out what magazines and newspapers are represented by their typefaces. I scored 7 of 10, which would have been 8 out of 10 if I typed decently. You can do better! Link

Take a walk down the uncanny valley with Bina48, a robot designed to be a "friend" with conversational skills. New York Times reporter Amy Harmon interviewed the robot itself (or is it "herself"?) to see how conversational it really is. Whatever you think of its skills, the talking head comes across as creepy.

Part high-tech portrait, part low-tech bid for immortality, Bina48 has no body. But her skin is made of a material called “frubber” that, with the help of 30 motors underneath it, allows her to frown, smile and look a bit confused. (“I guess it’s short for face rubber, or flesh rubber maybe, or fancy rubber,” she said.) From where I was seated, beneath the skylight in the restored Victorian she calls home, I couldn’t see the wires spilling out of the back of her head.

Many roboticists believe that trying to simulate human appearance and behavior is a recipe for disappointment, because it raises unrealistic expectations. But Bina48’s creator, David Hanson of Hanson Robotics, argues that humanoid robots — even with obvious flaws — can make for genuine emotional companions. “The perception of identity,” he said, “is so intimately bound up with the perception of the human form.”

Link to story. Link to video. -Thanks, Carl!

This car is called the T25. Designed by Formula One engineer Gordon Murray, it weighs only 1,200 pounds and can seat three people (although one or two would be more comfortable). It is expected to get 74 miles to the gallon and cost around $9,000, thanks to the highly-efficient iStream manufacturing technology.

The cars are built using an efficient process that first attaches most of the car's parts to the chassis, and then adds a pre-painted body as a last step, similar to the way Formula One vehicles are built.

Look at the gallery below, and you'll see that the car is so tiny that three of them can fit into a single parallel parking space. If all cars were this size, we'd live in a utopian energy-saving world.

The T25 should be available in two years, with an all-electric version, the T27, following later. Link

You might recognize this face, but it's only a small part of the picture in NeatoGeek's Caption Contest. Take a look, put on your thinking cap, select a t-shirt you'd like to win from the NeatoShop, and leave a comment at NeatoGeek! Link

But it's a good kind of weird. Neatorama made the list of Metro.co.uk's "Top 10 Weird blogs", along with Asylum UK, Dark Roasted Blend, Anorak, Oddville Daily, I have seen the whole of the internet, Urlesque, Weird Worm, Unique Daily, and Nothing to do with Arbroath. So we're in good company! Link -Thanks, Jesse Netherland!

(YouTube link)

Jane Korman's 89-year-old father Adolek Kohn arrived at Auschwitz in a cattle car over 65 years ago. In 2009, he returned to Auschwitz and other locations in Poland associated with the Holocaust and did a victory dance with his daughter and several of his grandchildren. See parts two and three of this project as well. When Korman first exhibited the videos in Australia, she received quite a bit of criticism:

Many Jewish survivors have reacted gravely to the video, accusing her of disrespect. Yet Korman told Australian daily The Jewish News that “it might be disrespectful, but he [her father] is saying ‘we’re dancing, we should be dancing, we’re celebrating our survival and the generations after me,’ - the generation he’s created. We are affirming our existence.”

What do you think: affirmation or disrespect? -via Buzzfeed and Metafilter

This mounted Hello Kitty trophy is for sale from Etsy artist datamafia. It is one of 12 Bizarre Hello Kitty Products That Sign The Coming Apocalypse collected by our own Jill Harness at Inventor's Spot.

Link

I love the motto on the poster for this year's Jell-O Mold Competition from the Gowanus Studio Space: "Keep Calm and Wobble On." The 2010 winners have been selected! The grand prize was awarded to sculptor Shelly Sabel for her creation Aspic Ascension--Tastes Like Heaven. See all the winners at the contest site. Link -via Nag on the Lake

There are a lot of houses under foreclosure in Fresno, California, and many have cement ponds swimming pools that are currently empty. Instead of letting all that surface go to waste, skateboarders use the pools to test their skills, as we see in the short documentary Cannonball: Skating the Recession Pools by vimeo user California is a place. NSFW language. Link

A military fort, out in the ocean, with a moat! Fort Jefferson is a part of Dry Tortugas National Park in the waters off of Key West, Florida. Construction on the "fort in the middle of nowhere" was started in 1846. It was originally meant for the defense of the US, but during the 30 years of construction, some design features became obsolete for that purpose.

During and after the Civil War the fort began to be used as a prison for deserters and other criminals. In 1874 the army completely abandoned the fort after several hurricanes and a yellow fever epidemic, and it wasn't until 1898 that the military returned in the form of the navy, which used the facilities during the Spanish-American War. The fort was also used from 1888 through 1900 as a quarantine station, and was garrisoned again briefly during World War I.

Link -via TYWKIWDBI

(Image credit: National Park Service)

The following is an article from Uncle John's Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader.

Just when you think you've heard it all... someone comes up with something like this. It's from a little book called It's A Gas, by Eugene Silverman, MD, and Eric Rabkni, PhD. It's required reading for BRI history buffs.

In all fairness to the farters of the world, the greatest of them all was not by his passing of gas also passing a judgment. His completely conscious control of his abilities was confirmed by numerous chemical examinations, including two in published form. This man, a hero at bottom, was a gentle and loving father, a noble and steadfast friend, a successful and generous businessman, and a great stage entertainer. This unique individual, a phenomenon among phenomena, this explosive personality and credit to our subject, was christened Joseph Pujol, but invented for himself the name by which all history knows him: Le Petomane!

THE ART OF THE FART

Le Petomane could fart as often and as frequently as he wished. His farts were odorless. As other people use their mouths, Le Petomane had learned to use his anus. Furthermore, by constricting or loosening his anus he could vary the pitch of the air he expelled and by controlling the force of abdominal contractions he could control its loudness. With these two fundamental tools, simple enough but rarely seen, Le Petomane contrived not only to imitate a variety of farts, but also to make music.

He headlined at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, the most famous nightclub in the world at that time, and brought in box office receipts more than twice as high as those of the angelic Sarah Bernhardt. He was one of the greatest comedians of the turn of the century The manager of the Moulin Rouge kept nurses in the theater to tend to female customers whose uncontrolled laughter in tight corsets often caused them to pass out as Le Petomane passed gas. Here was not a court fool at all, but the toast of civilized society.

DISCOVERING HIS GIFT

As a boy, Joseph had had a frightening experience in the sea. Holding his breath and ducking under water, he suddenly felt a rush of cold water enter his bowels. He went to find his mother but was embarrassed to see water running out of himself. Although he recounted this in later years, apparently as a child he tried to keep his terrifying experience a secret.

Early in his married life he was called to military service and in the all-male atmosphere of the barracks he recounted for the first time his strange experience in the sea. When asked for a demonstration, he agreed to try again. On their next furlough, he and his unit went to the sea. He did succeed in taking water in and then letting it out. This might have been viewed as mere freakishness, but combined with Joseph's gentleness and good humor, it struck the soldiers as a delightful feat.

Pujol, using a basin, practiced this art in private with water and, once able to control the intake and outflow by combined exertions of his anal and abdominal muscles, he soon began to practice with air as well. This, of course, was only for his own amusement and the occasional amusement of his fellow soldiers.

(National Film Board link)

The English title is From the Big Bang to Tuesday Morning, a 2000 film by Quebec animator Claude Cloutier. -via Everlasting Blort