Michele Howarth makes and sells rings and other colorful jewelry made of duct tape through her Etsy store Quiet Mischief and Company. She also has a tutorial for sale in case you want to make your own! Link -via Laughing Squid

Mike Russell's comic The Sabertooth Vampire centers around a vampire with fangs that constantly get him into trouble. He has a couple of year's worth of gags to see! Link -via Buzzfeed

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Two chimps gibbons cross a rope bridge with balletic synchronized moves. Meanwhile, the narrators sound a bit synchronized themselves. -via Arbroath

Here's a collection of 50 Hollywood films that were retitled for foreign release, and then re-translated into English for our amusement. That means that there may be some mistranslation going on, but the results are priceless. Some new titles are exquisite, like Spain releasing Die Hard as The Crystal Jungle. Makes sense to me, because the most striking memory I have of the film is hero John McClane walking through broken glass barefoot. Some are spoilers, as when Portugal retitled Psycho as The Man Who Killed His Mother. And Hong Kong tries to be over-descriptive, with some titles so explicit I cannot put them here. One fairly safe example is the film Babe, about a pig who herds sheep, which was released in Hong Kong as The Happy Dumpling-To-Be Who Talks and Solves Agricultural Problem. See all 50 titles at Ranker. Link

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A solar flare erupted on Tuesday (March 6) that sent a storm of particles toward Earth. As they arrive today, the storm may affect satellite transmissions and power grids. They may also produce extreme Auroras, so keep your camera handy. This video was made from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Images were captured once every 12 seconds. Link

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Now, isn't this a delicious-looking recipe! Fresh Guacamole is another of Showtime's new animated shorts, produced by PES. It's a followup to his 2008 production Western Spaghetti. Link -via Metafilter

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Cobwebs is an animation sequence full of spiders that Cyrak Harris made for Showtime. Be warned this has seriously creepy imagery, but you would expect nothing less from Cyriak. -via The Daily What

Disney kept its theme parks open 24 hours straight on February 29th, a promotion they called One More Disney Day. Upper management estimated that Disneyland in California would see about 44,000 visitors that day, and planned accordingly. When Leap Day came, twice that many showed up, and when you add those who first entered Disney California Adventure, the total number was around 106,000!

The event moved from unique to legendary very quickly in the early evening when hordes of the 900,000+ Annual Passholders started getting off work and headed for Disneyland. By mid-evening the southbound lanes of the Santa Ana Freeway were backed up for several miles and all surface streets around the Resort were nearing gridlock. But unlike at Christmastime when Disneyland faces these types of crowds with massive armies of Cast Members and an executive team that has hourly conference calls on the status of all Resort departments, the entire Resort was only staffed for a 44,000 day and the executive conference calls weren’t on the radar.

It was mid-evening when things really began to come apart at the seams, and anyone above middle-management had already gone home and the CM’s left in Anaheim were going to be on their own for the next 10 hours. Not that anyone could have come in to help if they wanted to, as by 9:00PM all the major streets around Disneyland were entirely gridlocked, and even the Cast Member shuttle buses were taking up to 45 minutes to drive the 7 blocks from the employee parking lot on Katella to the drop off area on Harbor Blvd. The reinforcement Cast Members who had been called in to work earlier that evening in a panic were stuck in the traffic like everyone else, and literally couldn’t get on to property after parking their cars.

Walt Disney World in Florida saw increased crowds, but they weren't as overwhelmed as the California parks. Read the whole story at MiceAge. Link -via Waxy

(Image credit: Flickr user Lucy Lang)

I told my kids that their friends preferred texting to talking because they want to speak without having to listen in return. My kids reported that statement to their friends, who shamelessly agreed that was exactly the case. This Twaggie was illustrated from a Tweet by @oinkflap. See a new Twaggie every day at GoComics. Link

Astronomers are keeping an eye on a moving body called asteroid 2011 AG5, which is scheduled to pass by Earth twice in the next few decades. As its trajectory is known so far, the odds of it hitting us are about 1 in 625.

When AG5 passes us in February 2023, the Earth’s gravity will bend its orbit a little bit, changing the path the rock takes. If it passes close to the Earth the orbit changes a lot; if it’s too far the orbit changes only a little. But if AG5 passes us at just the right distance, the orbit will change just the right amount to put it on a collision course with Earth. This region of space is called a “keyhole”, and in this case, should AG5 slip through it, it will hit us 17 years later, in 2040. That collision, though not global in scope, would be catastrophic: equal to about a 100 megaton explosion, twice that of the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated.

The problem is, we don’t know the orbit of AG5 well enough to know if it will travel through the keyhole or not. As I pointed out in the article about the asteroid 2012 DA14, it can be tricky to try to predict asteroid orbits too far into the future. The orbit of an asteroid is determined by making measurements of its position over time, and because of various effects (like blurring due to our atmosphere) it is impossible to get exactly precise positions. They can be good enough to get an accurate orbit for the next few years, but the farther into the future you look, the fuzzier that path gets.

So what do we do about it? NASA asteroid expert Don Yeomans says we should wait until 2013 and observe the asteroids trajectory. Apollo 9 astronaut and astronomer Rusty Schweikart says we should start planning now to intervene and deflect the asteroid if it becomes a threat. You can read all about the asteroid and the debate over intervention at Bad Astronomy. Link

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Freddie Wong and friends try the old "bucket of water against the ceiling" trick, which doesn't turn out the way they imagined at all. -via The Daily What

Those of a certain age may have studied the Cold War in your schools' history classes (not me, they weren't "history" yet). If so, you may have learned some things that were blown out of proportion or passed along because it made a good story, like the speech John F. Kennedy made in West Berlin in 1963. You've heard that he spoke a little German and accidentally referred to himself as a jelly doughnut. The truth is that no one thought that at the time.

The pedantic jack offs who still repeat this anecdote claim the use of the word "ein" is what screwed Kennedy. They point out that "Ich bin Berliner" means "I am from Berlin," and that adding the "ein" changes the meaning. Both facts are true. A rough English equivalent of what Kennedy said was "I am a New Yorker," whereas the phrase the pedantic jack offs claim he should have said translates to "I am from New York." The jelly doughnut myth is like claiming that an audience in Manhattan heard a politician say "I am a New Yorker" and took him to mean "I am a New Yorker magazine." Saying "I am a New Yorker" makes more sense as a symbolic statement of solidarity, and it's the same in German. Which is why people who speak German generally compliment Kennedy's choice as being the more nuanced, conversational phrasing.

So where did the doughnut story come from? Cracked has the answer, and other Cold War myths. Insert here the usual language warning for all Cracked articles. Link

This Photoshop Disaster looks like a paper doll cutout! Not that there's anything wrong with that -if you're a little girl playing with paper. But this is an item in an online bridal catalogue. I can imagine that the editor was working late into the night combining a mannequin and a model and was so tired he/she didn't even notice the job wasn't finished. I've been there. Link

It's time for our collaboration with the always fascinating What Is It? Blog. Can you guess what the pictured item is?

Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many guesses as you'd like in separate comments. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.

Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?

For another photo of the object (and more items to guess), check out the What Is It? Blog. Good luck!

Update: the mystery device is a billiard cue trimmer and tip fastener. The first one to know the answer was Doug D, but unfortunately he did not select a shirt. The funniest answer came from The Professor, who called it a Genie Shovebackinner, you know, for getting the genie back into the bottle. That's worth a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! You can find out the answers to all the mystery items of the week at the What Is It? blog. Thanks to everyone who played, and we'll do this again soon!

This graph from the New York Times shows how much tuition has gone up, way more than other costs. They offer several reasons, but since they are focusing mainly on state schools, public funding cutbacks appears to explain a lot of it. Link -via TYWKIWDBI