Writer William Safire collected contradictory grammar rules from various sources and published 36 of them in his New York Times column in 1979. Eighteen more were added when he published the 2002 book Fumblerules: A Lighthearted Guide to Grammar and Good Usage. Here's a sample:
8. Do not put statements in the negative form. 9. Verbs has to agree with their subjects. 10. No sentence fragments. 11. Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
You've probably received these in an email forward at one time or another, so now you know where they come from and how old they are. Read the rest at Lists of Note. Link -via the Presurfer
Oscura Day, a day to explore the world around you, is coming up April 28th. Check out the schedule of events at the Oscura Day website -there may be something wonderful scheduled in your area! But check back often, because new events are being added every day. Link
What if you wanted to time-travel just a little bit, just enough so that you can catch that bus? It helps if you are wearing a time machine on your wrist. This video stars Dave Packer of Sheep Films (previously at Neatorama) as Max X, a character in a continuing YouTube series. Link-Thanks, Ant!
The Jewish feast of Passover, or Pesach, began last night, and will last until sundown on April 14th. The Christian Holy Week continues with Easter tomorrow. The fact that the holidays often land so close together on the calendar is not coincidence if you know the events of the Bible. You may be enjoying your holiday weekend in religious contemplation, joyous celebration, or just relaxing with family. Then again, if you are Mom, you may be busy preparing Seder dishes, dying eggs, getting the family's clothing ready, and all those other traditional preparations that make holidays special. At least you can make some time to catch up on the wonderful things we've brought you this week at Neatorama.
In the What Is It? game this week, the unidentified object is now identified as a billiards pocket (found on eBay). The first correct answer came from Berhard, who wins a t-shirt! Of many funny answers, the funniest was from Lord_Dissident, who said,
It is actually the iron mask that was used to hide the face of the man in the iron mask. The front was opened only at feeding time, food was placed into the bowl, and it was slammed shut again. That is why he never ate soup again after he got out of that mask.
That certainly deserves a t-shirt! Find out the purposes of all this week’s mystery items at the What Is It? blog.
The Decipher the Doodle contest at NeatoBambino has wrapped up, and you can get the complete story of what the doodle was all about in the followup post. Congratulations to Cana, whose answer was closest to correct, and to KatieJ, who had the funniest wrong answer. They win t-shirts from the NeatoShop!
NeatoBambino will certainly have more contests when the young artists come up with appropriate doodles, but meanwhile, check out Neatorama's auxiliary site for fun stuff to do with your kids, neat stuff to read about babies and children, and adorable yet entertaining videos!
The author of the Tumblr blog Text From Dog posts screenshots of the conversations with his dog. There's no need to explain to me that dogs can't text. You can explain that to the guy at the blog. I'll just enjoy them. Some NSFW text. Link -via reddit
MorpHex is a six-legged robot that can change its size, shape, and dance steps. It is a creation of Norwegian engineer Kåre Halvorsen. Read more about this project at his site, Zenta Robotic Creations. Link -via Laughing Squid
The New York Times has a photo gallery in their Easter weekend magazine featuring a peep inside the Peeps factory. See the parade of marshmallow chicks on their way to a store near you!
It takes six minutes to make a Peep. Ingredients are mixed, air is injected and the emerging Peep is blasted with a sugar shower and decorated with two tiny eyes made of edible wax. But for such an innocent marshmallow-and-sugar pastel candy, the Peep is surprisingly polarizing. Peeps hater Web sites show pictures of Peeps dipped in liquid nitrogen and smashed with hammers. Admirers dress them in costumes and arm them with plastic swords. Matthew Beals, director of the 2009 documentary ‘‘The Power of the Peep,’’ said their appeal endures because ‘‘they coexist as both cute and horrible.’’
Thousands of soldiers were wounded during the Battle of Shiloh on April 6, 1862 -150 years ago today. Medics on both sides were overwhelmed, and some of those wounded had to wait quite some time for treatment.
Some of the Shiloh soldiers sat in the mud for two rainy days and nights waiting for the medics to get around to them. As dusk fell the first night, some of them noticed something very strange: their wounds were glowing, casting a faint light into the darkness of the battlefield. Even stranger, when the troops were eventually moved to field hospitals, those whose wounds glowed had a better survival rate and had their wounds heal more quickly and cleanly than their unilluminated brothers-in-arms. The seemingly protective effect of the mysterious light earned it the nickname “Angel’s Glow.”
In 2001, almost one hundred and forty years after the battle, seventeen-year-old Bill Martin was visiting the Shiloh battlefield with his family. When he heard about the glowing wounds, he asked his mom – a microbiologist at the USDA Agricultural Research Service who had studied luminescent bacteria that lived in soil – about it.
“So you know, he comes home and, ‘Mom, you’re working with a glowing bacteria. Could that have caused the glowing wounds?’” Martin told Science Netlinks. “And so, being a scientist, of course I said, ‘Well, you can do an experiment to find out.’”
And that’s just what Bill did.
Martin and a friend worked on the question and their research eventually won a science fair competition. Read about their findings at mental_floss. Link
It's easy to make death-defying leaps when you're only skating in a video game. You can slam your body in the strangest ways and see no blood at all -but you will see some weird graphic generation going on. In this compilation of 50 clips, they get stranger and funnier as the mayhem continues. You get all the fun of a fail compilation without the pain! -via b3ta
When Encyclopedia Britannica announced they would end the production of print encyclopedias, it spurred a flurry of sales. Of the 4,000 sets of the 2010 edition they had in stock, all but 800 have been purchased.
"We were averaging about 60 sets a week and the next thing we knew, we were selling 1,050 a week," Britannica spokesman Peter Duckler said Thursday. "When people thought they were going to be around forever there was no rush to buy one and then suddenly, boom, and now there is a scarcity and it's a collector's item."
Company officials estimate that the remaining encyclopedias will be sold by the end of this month. Link -via Consumerist
James Cameron's dive to the deepest part of the Mariana Trench took him seven miles below sea level. Why is this abyss so deep? There are at least three contributing reasons that come together.
One reason the Mariana Trench is so deep, he added, is because the western Pacific is home to some of the oldest seafloor in the world—about 180 million years old.
Seafloor is formed as lava at mid-ocean ridges. When it's fresh, lava is comparatively warm and buoyant, riding high on the underlying mantle.
But as lava ages and spreads away from its source, it slowly cools and becomes increasingly dense, causing it to settle ever lower—as is the case with the Mariana Trench.
One street in the city of Timisoara, Romania, has two automatic teller machines that are all but unusable. One is in a wall six feet off the ground, requiring customers to bring their own step stools in order to use it. The other, just across the street, is so low that customers must kneel on the sidewalk to use it. A consumer group representative said,
"The high one was supposed to have a staircase leading to it but the bank forgot to get planning permission. And the bank with the low ATM say it had to go there because they are in a listed building and the only access point was a basement window.
"These are just excuses for treating their customers without respect," said one.
The oddities may be blamed on bureaucracy and architecture, but it boils down to bad planning on the part of the banks. Link -via Arbroath
It's Friday, so how about a little game? Time 4 More Cat only requires your mouse. You are the cat, and just like all cats, your goal is to eat food and avoid being stepped on. Plus, there are force field powers you can pick up and portals to take you somewhere else. Link
