Happy New Year! Let me make a prediction: 2011 is going to be the best year ever! I'm no skilled prognosticator, I just think optimism is a great way to start anything new. But first, let's look back at what you might have missed during this past week at Neatorama.
Jill took a look at the year gone by with 12 Tips From The Stupidest Criminals of 2010.
Jill also introduced us to 7 Celebrities Who Made It Big Thanks To Soul Train, with video evidence.
Alex brought us a rare weekend feature the day after Christmas, so you might have missed 4 Unusual Treadmills. Don't miss this chance to read it!
Have you seen The Room? Uncle John's Bathroom Reader asks if it may be The Worst Movie of All Time?
From the Annals of Improbable Research, we got Mona Lisa: All Things to Some Researchers.
Mental_floss magazine filled us in on The Secret Life of the Banjo. And just to see if you're reading this at all, here's a bonus link.
In the Name That Weird Invention! contest, winning names came from Madam Atom, who named the boots Ankle Biters, and Carolyn Bahm, who called them Moc Martens. Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop!
The What Is It? game came up on Thursday. Just a guess had the right answer pretty quickly: this object is a fire starter. Soak it in kerosene, then place the business end under the logs and light. The funniest answer came from pismonque, who said, “It’s a 2-in-1 Ant Annihilator Toy. The ring at one end originally held a magnifier for frying individual ants, while the other end was used to steamroll dozens at a time. Kids loved ‘em!” Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop!
And if you didn't work it on Tuesday, you can still try Neato-Puzzle #12.
Still looking for something to amuse you on a holiday weekend? Check out original fiction at BitLit, cute kids at NeatoBambino, and awesome artists at the Art Blog. And join us at Twitter and Facebook!
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
A volcano in Antarctica called Erebus is home to a network of ice caves. Hot gasses from the volcano carves through the thick ice to leave channels where ice crystals then grow. Dr. Kayla Iacovino wrote about visiting one of them called Warren Cave, and included more photographs. http://www.sciencefriday.com/blog/2010/12/the-ice-caves-of-mt-erebus-antarctica/ -via The Dystenium Science Daily
Previously: Ice Fumarole in Antarctica
(YouTube link)
It's already 2011 in Australia. They know how to celebrate Down Under! -via The Daily What
Of course you know about the big ball of crystal in New York City that drops in Times Square to ring in the New Year, but there are plenty of other cities and towns that took that tradition and made it their own. You'll find peaches, 'possums, and Peeps dropping as well. A Peep? Yes, in Pennsylvania.
Read about a half dozen non-Times Square New Year drops at mental_floss. Link
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania’s New Year’s Eve tradition is fairly young, just like the 25 lb. illuminated Fiberglas baby Peep they’ve been lowering from a crane since 2005. If a Peep seems more in keeping with Easter, keep in mind that Just Born Inc., the company that makes the confection, is headquartered in Bethlehem and is one of the city’s major employers outside of the health care industry. A freshly-emerged baby chick is certainly a happier and more optimistic symbol of all things new than, say, a papier-mâché aspirin.
Read about a half dozen non-Times Square New Year drops at mental_floss. Link
The big shiny dog that guards the entrance to the Sonoma Humane Society is called the Airstream Dog. It was created by sculptors Patrick Amiot and Brigitte Laurent, who've done lots of whimsical urban installations. http://www.patrickamiot.com/urban/animals/html/airstreamdog.html -via Laughing Squid
(Image credit: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)
A good set of dentures came in handy for 92-year-old Lester Matteson. The Washington state man endured was tied up by two men who came to his door claiming car trouble.
The robbers got away with about $400 cash and Matteson's Ford Ranger. Link -via Arbroath
The men taped Lester's legs to his kitchen chair.
But after the thieves snatched his money and his truck, Lester chewed through the tape with his false teeth!
"It took me about two hours," Lester said with a grin. "Boy, it was sticky!"
Lester was then able to call the police.
The robbers got away with about $400 cash and Matteson's Ford Ranger. Link -via Arbroath
After 75 years, the color film Kodachrome is neither sold nor processed. The last place that developed Kodachrome photographs was Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas. Over the past year, photographers from all over the world have brought film to Dwayne's for developing before it's too late.
Among the recent visitors was Steve McCurry, a photographer whose work has appeared for decades in National Geographic including his well-known cover portrait, shot in Kodachrome, of a Afghan girl that highlights what he describes as the “sublime quality” of the film. When Kodak stopped producing the film last year, the company gave him the last roll, which he hand-delivered to Parsons. “I wasn’t going to take any chances,” he explained.
At the peak, there were about 25 labs worldwide that processed Kodachrome, but the last Kodak-run facility in the United States closed several years ago, then the one in Japan and then the one in Switzerland. Since then, all that was left has been Dwayne’s Photo. Last year, Kodak stopped producing the chemicals needed to develop the film, providing the business with enough to continue processing through the end of 2010. And last week, right on schedule, the lab opened up the last canister of blue dye.
Today was the final day for Kodachrome processing. So many people wanted the honor of being the last Kodachrome customer that it was decided that the photo shop proprietor Dwayne Steinle himself would shoot the roll of film to be processed last. Link
(Image credit: Steve Hebert for The New York Times)
While some complain about the snow, this little guy dances for joy! Or maybe he just really likes the song "Auld Lang Syne." It's a Happy Feet New Year! -Thanks, özi!
(YouTube link)
AT&T produced this documentary about what happens when overconfident drivers think they can multitask -sending text messages while driving. It's not worth it. -via Metafilter
What happens in war when an enemy rescues endangered civilians? In 1942, a German U-boat sunk a ship carrying 400 Allied troops, dozens of civilians, and (unknown to the Germans) 1800 Italian POWs. The attack left a couple of thousand survivors floating in lifeboats or treading water in the ocean.
A U-boat cannot accommodate so many people. What happened to the survivors of the RMS Laconia is the subject of discussion even today. Read the whole story at Kuriositas. Link -via the Presurfer
The survivors faced a certain and protracted watery death.
Then, the U-Boat commander Werner Hartenstein (left), made an extraordinary decision that went beyond all protocol.
He ordered the U-boat to surface he ordered his submariners to save as many of the marooned survivors as possible.
This act of humanity would save the lives of many hundreds of people. Yet the tragedy of the Laconia was not over yet.
A U-boat cannot accommodate so many people. What happened to the survivors of the RMS Laconia is the subject of discussion even today. Read the whole story at Kuriositas. Link -via the Presurfer
(YouTube link)
The only safe way to film polar bears is by remote control cameras, but curious bears are onto the trick! The BBC aired footage of the mayhem last night. Link -via reddit
The author of Catsparella sifted through a year of Maru's blog and excerpted some of the best photographs and videos of 2010. Each entry has a link to the original blog post. I particularly liked Maru's response to YouTube in gratitude for another trophy. But of course, nothing beats Maru's love of boxes! Link -via Buzzfeed
(YouTube link)
Man in a Blizzard, also possibly at one time called Idiot with a Tripod, is Jamie Stuart's observations during the blizzard that hit New York City. It was filmed on Saturday, edited in almost no time, uploaded to YouTube Sunday, and earned a great review from Roger Ebert.
This film deserves to win the Academy Award for best live-action short subject.
(1) Because of its wonderful quality. (2) Because of its role as homage. It is directly inspired by Dziga Vertov's 1929 silent classic "Man With a Movie Camera." (3) Because it represents an almost unbelievable technical proficiency.
-via The Daily What
One of our New Year traditions is to kiss someone at midnight. No pressure there, right? A kiss is a great way to start out a new year on a high note, and there is a biological basis for the urge. A kiss works toward three things: sex, romantic love, and bonding.
Sheril Kirshenbaum, who wrote the book The Science of Kissing, tells us how great kisses kick start our chemicals and hormones, and how a kiss' effects on our brains and bodies promote relationships. Link -via The Intersection
Humans have evolved to use a number of signals - including taste, smell and possibly silent chemical messengers called pheromones - to help us figure out whether someone is a suitable partner and a good person to reproduce with. A kiss means getting close to someone - close enough to suss out important clues about chemistry and genetics. At this range, our noses can detect valuable information about another person's health and perhaps even his or her DNA. Biologist Claus Wedekind has found, for instance, that women are most attracted to the scents of men with a different set of genetic coding for immunity than their own. This is probably because when there is greater genetic diversity between parents in this area, their children will have more versatile immune systems.
Sheril Kirshenbaum, who wrote the book The Science of Kissing, tells us how great kisses kick start our chemicals and hormones, and how a kiss' effects on our brains and bodies promote relationships. Link -via The Intersection
If you're like most Americans, you probably picture one of two things when you hear the banjo -Kermit the Frog strumming away in the swamp or the inbred boy from Deliverance. How can one instrument conjure up images both so sweet and so repugnant? The answer lies in the history of the banjo, which stretches from Africa to Hollywood, with an extended stop in Appalachia.
Centuries ago, somewhere in West Africa, the banjo was born on the knee of griots -storytellers who improvised their lyrics as they performed. Almost like forerunners to today's hip-hop artists, griots interacted with their audiences using call-and-response patterns to liven up the crowd. Their instruments -strings and animal skins tacked across hollowed-out gourds- are considered the first banjos.
The earliest versions were easy to make and easily portable, so when Africans were forced aboard slave ships, they brought their banjos with them. Once in America, slaves had no trouble recreating the instruments wherever they went. The banjo spread across Appalachia, but it was quickly pigeonholed as a black instrument.
THE JIM CROW SHOW
Big changes were in store for the banjo, though. In the mid-19th century, the newest and most popular form of entertainment was the minstrel show. White men and women toured the nation dressed in blackface while singing and dancing in a manner that mocked black people. And because they were lampooning all aspects of African-American culture -particularly African dance and music- the banjo was at center stage.
Minstrel shows also meant change for the instrument itself. The early "minstrel banjo" was a fretless, four-string instrument with strings crafted from animal intestines. But metal strings soon replaced those, and then a minstrel named Joel Walker Sweeney (aka the Banjo King) popularized the fifth string, which became the defining characteristic of the modern instrument.
During the next 50 years or so, a strange thing happened to the banjo. Although minstrel shows poked fun at black people, they made the banjo immensely popular among white people in the process. In turn, African-Americans increasingly wanted to distance themselves from an instrument that had come to represent oppression and bigotry. In the early 1900s, the banjo only played a small part in new forms of African-American music, such as blues, gospel, and jazz. Meanwhile, it was becoming all the rage in white communities, especially in Appalachia.
HILLBILLY HILARITY
The 1930s saw the rise of the banjo in Appalachian country music, thanks to the Grand Ole Opry. A Saturday night variety show performed in Nashville and broadcast live on the radio, the Opry spread "hillbilly" culture over the airwaves. The banjo played a central role in this, accompanying the antics of comedians such as David "Stringbean" Akeman and Louis Marshall "Grandpa" Jones, both of whom became even more famous later on the TV hit Hee-Haw.
The banjo might have remained an instrument of redneck comedy forever if it hadn't been for one man -Earl Scruggs. Born in 1924 in rural North Carolina, Scruggs grew up listening to the Opry and became convinced that the instrument could do more than accompany stage acts. By inventing the jangly, three-finger technique of banjo-picking -the trademark of today's bluegrass music- Scruggs used his fast-paced twangy style to prove beyond a doubt that banjo pickers could be virtuoso musicians. Of course, the trend has lived on. Modern-day banjo masters like Bela Fleck, Tony Trischka, and Bill Keith all play with as much technical precision as concert violinists.
Ironically, Scruggs also recorded the soundtracks for Bonnie and Clyde (ever wonder why high-speed getaway music is always played on the banjo?) and TV's The Beverly Hillbillies. Both projects probably maligned the banjo's image as much as Scruggs earlier work had innovated it, though not everyone in the music industry agrees. In fact, Julliard-trained banjo legend Eric Weissberg thinks the soundtracks brought bluegrass into the lives of many people who would have otherwise never heard it.
Until the 1960s, bluegrass wasn't really played outside of Appalachia. And because it was considered regional music, record companies didn't distribute it nationally. But in 1963, Weissberg recorded an album with his friend Marshall Brickman called New Dimensions in Banjo & Bluegrass. The record didn't generate much attention at first, but five years later, the hills came alive with the sound of banjos when director John Borman wanted the song "Dueling Banjos" for his new movie Deliverance. Weissberg happily recorded a new version with musician Steve Mandell, and it turns out the song shouldn't have been called "Dueling Banjos" at all. It's actually a duet between a banjo and a guitar, but listeners didn't seem to care. The new cut was played as the background music in the movie's radio ad, and all of the sudden, all over the country, disc jockeys were answering phone calls from people who wanted to know where they cold get their hands on the song. In lieu of a soundtrack album, Warner Brothers added two Deliverance songs to the material from New Dimensions and released it in 1973 as Dueling Banjos. Weissberg, Brickman, and Mandell became rich overnight, and Deliverance's depiction of rural Appalachian life -with that foreboding, nine-note banjo melody -was burned forever into the American psyche.
SIX DEGREES OF MARSHALL BRICKMAN
By the time Marshall Brickman received his $160,000 royalty check for Dueling Banjos, he'd already left the musician life to write scripts for The Tonight Show and Candid Camera. He began working alongside up-and-coming filmmaker Woody Allen, and together they wrote he Academy Award winning screenplay for Annie Hall in 1977. In Hollywood, Brickman became the missing link in the "Dueling Banjos"-to-Kermit-the-Frog axis of American pop culture. With his buddy Jim Henson, he wrote the script to a TV special that was later fine-tuned into The Muppet Show. In Brickman's opinion, Kermit just wouldn't have been Kermit without the banjo. "I try to picture it quickly -Kermit with another instrument- and I can't," Brickman says. "Not only figuratively, but literally, that banjo is nailed to his hand."
Be sure to visit mental_floss' entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
Centuries ago, somewhere in West Africa, the banjo was born on the knee of griots -storytellers who improvised their lyrics as they performed. Almost like forerunners to today's hip-hop artists, griots interacted with their audiences using call-and-response patterns to liven up the crowd. Their instruments -strings and animal skins tacked across hollowed-out gourds- are considered the first banjos.
The earliest versions were easy to make and easily portable, so when Africans were forced aboard slave ships, they brought their banjos with them. Once in America, slaves had no trouble recreating the instruments wherever they went. The banjo spread across Appalachia, but it was quickly pigeonholed as a black instrument.
THE JIM CROW SHOW
Big changes were in store for the banjo, though. In the mid-19th century, the newest and most popular form of entertainment was the minstrel show. White men and women toured the nation dressed in blackface while singing and dancing in a manner that mocked black people. And because they were lampooning all aspects of African-American culture -particularly African dance and music- the banjo was at center stage.
Minstrel shows also meant change for the instrument itself. The early "minstrel banjo" was a fretless, four-string instrument with strings crafted from animal intestines. But metal strings soon replaced those, and then a minstrel named Joel Walker Sweeney (aka the Banjo King) popularized the fifth string, which became the defining characteristic of the modern instrument.
During the next 50 years or so, a strange thing happened to the banjo. Although minstrel shows poked fun at black people, they made the banjo immensely popular among white people in the process. In turn, African-Americans increasingly wanted to distance themselves from an instrument that had come to represent oppression and bigotry. In the early 1900s, the banjo only played a small part in new forms of African-American music, such as blues, gospel, and jazz. Meanwhile, it was becoming all the rage in white communities, especially in Appalachia.
HILLBILLY HILARITY
The 1930s saw the rise of the banjo in Appalachian country music, thanks to the Grand Ole Opry. A Saturday night variety show performed in Nashville and broadcast live on the radio, the Opry spread "hillbilly" culture over the airwaves. The banjo played a central role in this, accompanying the antics of comedians such as David "Stringbean" Akeman and Louis Marshall "Grandpa" Jones, both of whom became even more famous later on the TV hit Hee-Haw.
The banjo might have remained an instrument of redneck comedy forever if it hadn't been for one man -Earl Scruggs. Born in 1924 in rural North Carolina, Scruggs grew up listening to the Opry and became convinced that the instrument could do more than accompany stage acts. By inventing the jangly, three-finger technique of banjo-picking -the trademark of today's bluegrass music- Scruggs used his fast-paced twangy style to prove beyond a doubt that banjo pickers could be virtuoso musicians. Of course, the trend has lived on. Modern-day banjo masters like Bela Fleck, Tony Trischka, and Bill Keith all play with as much technical precision as concert violinists.
Ironically, Scruggs also recorded the soundtracks for Bonnie and Clyde (ever wonder why high-speed getaway music is always played on the banjo?) and TV's The Beverly Hillbillies. Both projects probably maligned the banjo's image as much as Scruggs earlier work had innovated it, though not everyone in the music industry agrees. In fact, Julliard-trained banjo legend Eric Weissberg thinks the soundtracks brought bluegrass into the lives of many people who would have otherwise never heard it.
Until the 1960s, bluegrass wasn't really played outside of Appalachia. And because it was considered regional music, record companies didn't distribute it nationally. But in 1963, Weissberg recorded an album with his friend Marshall Brickman called New Dimensions in Banjo & Bluegrass. The record didn't generate much attention at first, but five years later, the hills came alive with the sound of banjos when director John Borman wanted the song "Dueling Banjos" for his new movie Deliverance. Weissberg happily recorded a new version with musician Steve Mandell, and it turns out the song shouldn't have been called "Dueling Banjos" at all. It's actually a duet between a banjo and a guitar, but listeners didn't seem to care. The new cut was played as the background music in the movie's radio ad, and all of the sudden, all over the country, disc jockeys were answering phone calls from people who wanted to know where they cold get their hands on the song. In lieu of a soundtrack album, Warner Brothers added two Deliverance songs to the material from New Dimensions and released it in 1973 as Dueling Banjos. Weissberg, Brickman, and Mandell became rich overnight, and Deliverance's depiction of rural Appalachian life -with that foreboding, nine-note banjo melody -was burned forever into the American psyche.
SIX DEGREES OF MARSHALL BRICKMAN
By the time Marshall Brickman received his $160,000 royalty check for Dueling Banjos, he'd already left the musician life to write scripts for The Tonight Show and Candid Camera. He began working alongside up-and-coming filmmaker Woody Allen, and together they wrote he Academy Award winning screenplay for Annie Hall in 1977. In Hollywood, Brickman became the missing link in the "Dueling Banjos"-to-Kermit-the-Frog axis of American pop culture. With his buddy Jim Henson, he wrote the script to a TV special that was later fine-tuned into The Muppet Show. In Brickman's opinion, Kermit just wouldn't have been Kermit without the banjo. "I try to picture it quickly -Kermit with another instrument- and I can't," Brickman says. "Not only figuratively, but literally, that banjo is nailed to his hand."
__________________________
The above article was written by Robbie Whelan. 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!
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