(Live Leak link)
Maybe the tow truck driver wanted to be paid up front and wasn’t. Spotted in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. -via Arbroath

Why should Wheaties boxes only showcase football, basketball, and Olympics stars when there are so many other sports? In an article from mental_floss magazine, you’ll find the fascinating stories of ten sports heroes who gave their all in sports that don’t make the headlines, such as sumo wrestling, elephant polo, bullfighting, and tug-of-war. Then you’re invited to leave a comment to sign a petition to get these athletes on a box of Wheaties. Link

Someone sent a letter to the parents of students at Lincoln High School in Portand, Oregon, urging them to provide alcohol on prom night.

Recipients of the missive were urged to consider opening their homes this Saturday for parties as "a safe, secure place for students to have fun," adding if adults "provide the alcohol, you can have peace of mind knowing that they did not acquire it illegally. Condoms were included with the letters--which were written on Portland Public Schools stationery--since "STD epidemics have spread through other high school communities and we want to prevent such an outbreak as best we can." The letter was purportedly written by "The Lincoln High School Faculty and Administration."

Parts of the letter are ridiculous, such as the statement that a fifth of cognac will serve eight adults or four teenagers. School official want police to find out who was responsible for sending the letter, which was copied on the limited-access school letterhead. The Smoking Gun has a copy of the letter. Link -via Fark

Wired contacted a chef, a food development consultant, and a food scientist to investigate the difference between pizza in New York and in San Francisco. The differences are in the ovens and in the water. Consultant David Tisi explained the oven.

"As you cook, some ingredients vaporize, and these volatilized particles can attach themselves to the walls of the baking cavity," Tisi says. "The next time you use the oven, these bits get caught up in the convection currents and deposited on the food, which adds flavor." Over time, he says, more particles join the mix and mingle with the savory soot from burned wood or coal — the only fuels worth using — to create a flavor that you can't grow in a garden: gestalt, if you will.

Author Joe Brown is partial to the New York style, and describes how he brings home six pies every time he visits. Link -via Digg

(image credit: David Owen)

(YouTube link)
Turn the switch on, and the hand comes out to turn it off. That’s all this machine does! And you can have one of your very own. Link -via Boing Boing

(YouTube link)
Yes, there were videos taken at the world record Mentos/Diet Coke demonstration in Leuven, Belgium. There are several on YouTube already, but none that give you a great overall view (yet).

Svetlana Singh is 7 feet 2 inches tall. She s the tallest woman in India. Her husband, Sanjay, is 6 feet 6 inches. Their ten-month-old son Karan is already 3 feet 2 inches tall! His mother says he eats twenty times a day.

"He just doesn't stop eating and never stops growing," she said.

"He is only ten-months-old and wears clothes designed for five-year-olds.

"Karan has never fitted into baby clothes, even when he was first born he was 2ft 2in tall and was the same size as a normal two-year-old."

The Singhs are proud of their son and hope he may become a basketball player and attend college in America some day. Link -via Arbroath

I've always been curious about stuffed animals that sing, dance, light up, or talk back. There must be a fascinating robot underneath the fur and fluff, right? Surely the robot hiding in the bear's clothing, vestimentis ursum, is impressive. So: armed with my childish curiousity and the spurious excuse of 'product design research,' I set out to discover what, exactly, these creatures are hiding.

There are lots of pictures of the unfamiliar inner workings of some familiar toys. http://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.mattkirkland.com/ursum.html#2 -via the Presurfer

Mathematician Michael S. Schneider saw a wave form of the well-known drum sequence known as the Amen Break. It’s a drum 5.2 second sequence performed by Gregory Cylvester Coleman of The Winstons and has been sampled and used by countless artists since it was recorded in the 60s. Schneider, seeing the waveform through the eyes of a math professor, recognized a pattern, a relationship called the Golden Ratio. So he began to analyze the drum sequence and its deeper meaning.

For more exact visual analysis I examined the wave image in my computer, in which I have a palatte of geometric forms and proportions for quickly identifying an object's ratios. Sure enough, Golden Ratio relationships were indicated among the different peaks. Am I seeing things? You decide. But the appearance of the Golden Ratio may help explain its popularity.

To appreciate this relationship between the Golden Ratio and sound, it's worthwhile to consider some of the ideal, eternal, unchanging principles of Golden relationships which can only be approximated in nature, and byartists, architects and musicians.

Link -via the Presurfer

If you have an extra USB port on your computer, someone will sell you something to plug into it. Cracked has a list of ten real products that are good for a laugh, if nothing else! Pictured is the USB Eye Massager. Link -via Digg

About 1,500 students participated in a Mentos/Diet Coke demonstration in Leuven, Belgium. Each wore a blue poncho and added Mentos mints to a bottle of Diet Coke for a simultaneous explosion! A new world record has been set. See more picture in The Telegraph. Link -via Fark

Anagram time! In today’s lunchtime quiz at mental_floss, you’re given a made-up name, and you try to rearrange one word in that name to match the other word in that name. You don't know which word is scrambled, and you don't know what order they are supposed to be in. I scored 80%, just because I’m impatient and I don’t spell so good. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/14337

If you watch many of the big-budget superhero movies, you’ll begin to notice how many stylistic and plot devices they have in common, especially when there are sequels and more sequels. With millions of dollars on the line, Hollywood isn’t about to take any chances! If you haven't seen that many of the movies, Cracked has a guide to the eight rules comic book movie series must follow. Link -via Digg

Don’t try to make friends with a cassowary! The Guinness Book of World Records named it the world’s most dangerous bird.

The Cassowary lives in the rain forests of Australia and New Guinea and are actually pretty shy animals if undisturbed, but if you get to close and it thinks you’re a threat you could receive a bone-breaking kick or get sliced by its dagger-like sharp claws. During WWII, soldiers stationed in New Guinea were warned to stay away from these birds, but some of them still became victims.

Zookeepers who take care of the endangered species are in danger themselves from the threat of job-related injuries. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

The Museum of Unworkable Devices is one of those sites everyone on the internet should visit at least once.

This museum is a celebration of fascinating devices that don't work. It houses diverse examples of the perverse genius of inventors who refused to let their thinking be intimidated by the laws of nature, remaining optimistic in the face of repeated failures. Watch and be amazed as we bring to life eccentric and even intricate perpetual motion machines that have remained steadfastly unmoving since their inception. Marvel at the ingenuity of the human mind, as it reinvents the square wheel in all of its possible variations. Exercise your mind to puzzle out exactly why they don't work as the inventors intended.

There’s a special emphasis on the Holy Grail of engineering, the perpetual motion machine. Alex has posted about the museum before, but that was in 2005 when Neatorama was very young. Link -via the Presurfer