(YouTube link)
"For every zombie who's ever wanted their brains served with a side of cowbell"! Fans of the the AMC series The Walking Dead and fans of Christopher Walken will both love this parody. -via Dangerous Minds
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
What you are looking at here is a cross-section of a blade of marram grass, which is used to stabilize coastal dunes. Fluorescent dye has been added to highlight the internal structures. Those internal structures look happy to see us! Read more about it at Beyond the Human Eye. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend
Yeah, I'd almost gotten over them until I unthinkingly used the hand sanitizer. This Twaggie was illustrated from a Tweet by @rodney_at_large. Purell is not to be trifled with! Link
Some movies just seem to naturally mesh with board games. See a collection of 14 such mashups rendered in movie posters gleaned from the Something Awful forums at Unreality magazine. Link
There was a huge turnout of cosplayers at new York's Comic-Con, and photographer Michael Tapp was there to document them. See a gallery of 43 photographs of the best costumes to be seen at the convention at Geeks Are Sexy. Link
(Live Leak link)
Bouncy kittens all around, and this dog remains ever calm and serene. -via Arbroath
French photographer Michel Watson, along with other photographers, tried to shoot penguins on South Georgia Island in the Falklands, but a photobombing elephant seal wanted to be the star of the show.
See more pictures at the Daily Mail. Link -via Fark
(Image credit: Michel Watson/Caters News Agency
Mr Watson, 64, from Alsace said: 'I was about to take a picture of the penguins when suddenly from the other side of the dune appeared a young elephant seal.
'It stood for about six seconds just staring at us before going back down and disappearing.
'A few seconds later he was standing again and he did this at least 15 times. The whole thing was very bizarre and lasted a good five minutes.
'Soon everyone was trying to get the timing right to get good pictures of the seal rather than the penguins.'
See more pictures at the Daily Mail. Link -via Fark
(Image credit: Michel Watson/Caters News Agency
(YouTube link)
Sid Russell, the Jack Russell terrier, plays fetch with himself. This is cute because he can do it, but sad because no one is playing with him. -via The Daily What
Figure 1A
Sam Shuster
Emeritus Professor,
University of Newcastle Upon Tyne
Newcastle Upon Tyne, U.K.
Whether you enjoy classical sculpture or just pass it by when visiting stately homes and gardens, you must have noticed that there are many broken-off pieces. You may have further noticed that, if you exclude the commonplace loss of limbs and fingers, the penis fronts the list of lost sculptural properties (see example in Figure 1A and close-up in Figure1B). We all know the penile organ often goes astray socially, but why does its stone version go missing?
As a clinical researcher, I’ve spent a life wondering, a habit too strong to be undone by retirement; and this particular item of sculptural pathology has long idled listlessly on my list of wonderments. Then last year, during a touristic gawp at classical Rome, the enormity of the city’s sculpture population and that population’s inescapable depenilation gave me no option (I felt) but to study the problem. This is the curious story of how that happened.
Penises In, or Not In, The Vatican
My first, simplistic explanation of the missing penises was their deliberate removal, presumably because of distaste for the public showing of a private organ. That would explain the great frequency of their loss from both classical and later pieces on display in public places throughout Europe, where their removal could be executed in silence.
But what about Vatican City? There, surely, sculptures are less likely to be struck by vandalism in the gardens, or for concealment of sexual embarrassment in the great Vatican halls. After all, they were commissioned for their naked appearance, and the many paintings close by are just as revealing. Of course the oldest sculptures would have been exposed before reaching the safety of the Vatican, but the more contemporary pieces were always in safe hands. So my first experimental question about sculptural penis loss (SPL) was whether it was less in Vatican City than elsewhere.
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Sam Shuster
Emeritus Professor,
University of Newcastle Upon Tyne
Newcastle Upon Tyne, U.K.
Whether you enjoy classical sculpture or just pass it by when visiting stately homes and gardens, you must have noticed that there are many broken-off pieces. You may have further noticed that, if you exclude the commonplace loss of limbs and fingers, the penis fronts the list of lost sculptural properties (see example in Figure 1A and close-up in Figure1B). We all know the penile organ often goes astray socially, but why does its stone version go missing?
As a clinical researcher, I’ve spent a life wondering, a habit too strong to be undone by retirement; and this particular item of sculptural pathology has long idled listlessly on my list of wonderments. Then last year, during a touristic gawp at classical Rome, the enormity of the city’s sculpture population and that population’s inescapable depenilation gave me no option (I felt) but to study the problem. This is the curious story of how that happened.
Penises In, or Not In, The Vatican
My first, simplistic explanation of the missing penises was their deliberate removal, presumably because of distaste for the public showing of a private organ. That would explain the great frequency of their loss from both classical and later pieces on display in public places throughout Europe, where their removal could be executed in silence.
But what about Vatican City? There, surely, sculptures are less likely to be struck by vandalism in the gardens, or for concealment of sexual embarrassment in the great Vatican halls. After all, they were commissioned for their naked appearance, and the many paintings close by are just as revealing. Of course the oldest sculptures would have been exposed before reaching the safety of the Vatican, but the more contemporary pieces were always in safe hands. So my first experimental question about sculptural penis loss (SPL) was whether it was less in Vatican City than elsewhere.
Photographer Senen Llanos took portraits of cosplayers attending New York's Comic-Con this weekend. He highlighted the subject by separating the character from the "busy background" that you're familiar with in convention photos. See 39 cosplay portraits at his site. http://www.senencito.com/my-blog/2011/10/15/faces-of-new-york-comic-con-2011-saturday.html
The latest in unhealthy food innovations is available at the Bank of America 500 Nascar Sprint Cup in Charlotte, North Carolina. A "funnel bacakonator" is a funnel cake with chocolate and strawberry sauces topped with a generous topping of crumbled bacon. Link -via Breakfast Links
(Image credit: Charlotte Motor Speedway)
There are 22 different Beatles songs in this medley. Can you catch them all? And even more remarkable, they are all performed by one guy -Grant Woolard, who brought us the National Anthem Mashup last month. -Thanks, Grant!
The pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) is an American animal that is often called a pronghorn antelope, but it not an antelope. In fact, the pronghorn is as more closely related to giraffes than it is to antelopes! The taxonomy of the pronghorn classifies it as the only member of the family Antilocapridae. Oh, there used to be several species in the family, but that was way back before humans arrived in the New World. Read more about this unique species at The Ark in Space. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Tony Case)
Neatorama is experimenting with a new kind of post where your participation leads to constructive (and often fun) debates. Adrienne Crezo rounds up current controversial topics, with links to news stories and opinions from others around the web. And we want your viewpoint! Subjects we've tackled this week include taking school attendance by fingerprints, the definition of a sandwich, teens having plastic surgery as a defense against bullying, and whether ancient krakens were intelligent enough to create art.
Another new feature at Neatorama helps you to find the current active discussions. Check the right sidebar, just below the NeatoBambino posts, for the Most Commented list. They're hot!
Then we have plenty of exclusive articles from the past week you'll want to catch up on.
Jill Harness wrote about The 10 Weirdest Things You Can Do With Your Ashes.
She also gave us a look at The 15 Cutest Geeky Baby Costumes over at NeatoBambino.
We took a good look at the newly-translated book Crafting With Cat Hair.
Mental_floss magazine explained How Tourism is Taking Cuba Out of the Red.
Ghost Hosts of the UK and the US is a list of "haunted" places from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
Head on Brain in Brain came to us from The Annals of Improbable Research. It will start to make sense when you read it. Or maybe not.
In this week's What Is It? game, the mystery item is, indeed, a boat anchor. Maybe the background image of a ship helped! From the What Is It? blog: “A killick type anchor that was used on a small river freight boat in the 1800s, rocks were placed in the center of it to weigh it down.” David Kirkpatrick had the correct answer before many other people did. Sarah Reede had an intriguing funny-but-wrong answer: “It’s a 17th Century tic-tac-toe placer. (Fits in the X’s and the O’s!) Used for sanitary purposes.” Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop!
You'll find extra content and discussions at our Facebook page, and make sure you are following Neatorama on Twitter, too, because you never know when you'll see something like this!
A reminder: Halloween is only two weeks from Monday, and you've probably got parties and other stuff going on even before then. Get your orders in now for Halloween costumes, decorations, and party supplies from the NeatoShop!
Another new feature at Neatorama helps you to find the current active discussions. Check the right sidebar, just below the NeatoBambino posts, for the Most Commented list. They're hot!
Then we have plenty of exclusive articles from the past week you'll want to catch up on.
Jill Harness wrote about The 10 Weirdest Things You Can Do With Your Ashes.
She also gave us a look at The 15 Cutest Geeky Baby Costumes over at NeatoBambino.
We took a good look at the newly-translated book Crafting With Cat Hair.
Mental_floss magazine explained How Tourism is Taking Cuba Out of the Red.
Ghost Hosts of the UK and the US is a list of "haunted" places from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
Head on Brain in Brain came to us from The Annals of Improbable Research. It will start to make sense when you read it. Or maybe not.
In this week's What Is It? game, the mystery item is, indeed, a boat anchor. Maybe the background image of a ship helped! From the What Is It? blog: “A killick type anchor that was used on a small river freight boat in the 1800s, rocks were placed in the center of it to weigh it down.” David Kirkpatrick had the correct answer before many other people did. Sarah Reede had an intriguing funny-but-wrong answer: “It’s a 17th Century tic-tac-toe placer. (Fits in the X’s and the O’s!) Used for sanitary purposes.” Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop!
You'll find extra content and discussions at our Facebook page, and make sure you are following Neatorama on Twitter, too, because you never know when you'll see something like this!
A reminder: Halloween is only two weeks from Monday, and you've probably got parties and other stuff going on even before then. Get your orders in now for Halloween costumes, decorations, and party supplies from the NeatoShop!
If you grew up playing the game Oregon Trail, you know how easy it is to die along the way, from dysentery, cholera, diphtheria, typhoid, or the measles. Hey, at least you learned about the diseases, right? Mental_floss takes a look at how bad those diseases really were at the time the West was being settled, and how far we've come in the treatment, prevention, and eradication of them today. Isn't medical science great? Link
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