Guangdong Enterprises is selling a coffee cup to commemorate "The Fairytale Romantic Union Of All The Centuries," the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. There's just one little problem....  http://www.guandongenterprisesltd.com/ -via Arbroath

A blessing is nice even if it isn't authentically Irish. However, a green tint and traditional syntax make this comic from Grant Snider perfect for St. Patrick's Day! Link -via J-Walk Blog

The world's first computer virus, Creeper, was unleashed on an unsuspecting world in 1971, only a couple of years after the first computers were linked in a network. Most of us have only heard about it, since few had computers at the time. But that was only the beginning. Read about the major virus attacks over the years, like the 2000 I Love You virus.

At the dawn of the XXIst century, I LOVE YOU worm infected tens of millions of computers. As a fairly simple worm, I LOVE YOU presented itself as an incoming email with “I love you” in its subject line and infected the machine of users who opened the attachment. It then mailed itself to all of the contacts found on the infected user’s system.

Intriguing feature: While the author’s motivation clearly wasn’t about money, the damages were: When the dust settled, I LOVE YOU had cost companies around the world between $5 and $10 billion. Much of that cost can be attributed to the time spent “cleaning” infected machines.

More of the history of viruses is posted at Help Net Security. Link -via the Presurfer

This photograph, titled "The Peeple vs. Scott Walker" was posted by @escapetochengdu with no comment as to its origin. With Peeps diorama contests taking entries at several newspapers, it might even win a prize! Link -via Everlasting Blort

Get your thinking caps on -it's time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog! Do you have any idea what this contraption is? Can you come up with an interesting guess?

Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. 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 more clues, check out the What Is It? Blog. Good luck!

Update: Once again, the very first comment had the correct answer! Berhard knew the device is a stanchion, to hold cattle still for milking or veterinary procedures. The funniest answer was from Stephen Bishop, who said it was an early prototype for a mammogram! However, he didn't select a t-shirt.

From Arkansas to the Caribbean to Japan, everybody's Irish on St. Patrick's Day! And there are celebrations all over the world. Smithsonian has some you might not be familiar with, like those on the island of Montserrat, where St. Patrick's Day is a national holiday and festivities go on all week long. Link

(Image credit: Jennifer Johnson/Montserrat Tourism)

(Break.com link)

And you thought your home wiring was weird! Caution -don't try this at home, or anywhere else. -via reddit

1913 The First T-Shirt Models

White cotton, crewneck T-shirts became regulation underwear for the U.S. Navy. Two decades later, at the University of Southern California, football players don similar shirts to prevent chafing from heavy shoulder pads. The tees became so fashionable that students start pilfering them for casual wear. In response, the school began stenciling "Property of USC" on its T-shirts as a crime-prevention tactic, not a statement of pride.

1951 An Undershirt Named Desire

Hollywood rebel Marlon Brando exudes animal magnetism in A Streetcar Named Desire when he wears a thin, white T-shirt. Teens dig the look, and by year's end, T-shirt sales total $180 million. But for Brando, the style is only a means to an end. A graduate of The Actors' Studio, he'd learned to use his body to show his character's inner turmoil. The T-shirt is only a thin veil, meant to cover not only his rippling physique, but also his character's bestial urges.

1969 Tie-Dyed Shirts Become Groovy

For decades, the only people using Rit dye were old women who wanted to color their drapes and linens. But in the mid-60s, advertising whiz Don Price markets the dye to hippies, who use it to tie-dye their tees. But Price's real stroke of genius comes in 1969, when he produces hundreds of the shirts and gives them away to performers at Woodstock. The multicolored tops are quickly adopted as part of the counterculture uniform.

1977 I ♥ NY

Throughout the 1970s, New York City gains a reputation as a tourists' nightmare -dirty, decadent, and crime-ridden. To revitalize the city's image, the Commerce Department hires designer Milton Glaser to fashion an eye-catching logo for the city. Over lunch one day, Glaser sketches "I ♥ NY" on a napkin. The logo spearheads a resurgence in New York tourism and becomes the most imitated T-shirt design in history. Glaser claims that the shirt's appeal comes from decoding the symbols: "You feel smart when you figure it out."

1984 Frankie Learns to Talk




BBC Radio bans song "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, claiming the lyrics are too explicitly sexual. Naturally, sales of the single skyrocket, and the song goes to No. 1. To flaunt the band's triumph over censorship, record label owner Paul Morley puts the song's words in big capital letters on T-shirts.

The "FRANKIE SAYS RELAX" tee turn millions of music fans into human billboards. Soon, Frankie knock-offs are everywhere. Although the band's popularity quickly dies, the T-shirt lives on, appearing on the torso of everyone from Jennifer Anniston to Homer Simpson.

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The article by Bill DeMain is reprinted from Scatterbrained section of the January-February 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Subscribe today to get it delivered to you!

Be sure to visit mental_floss' website and blog for more fun stuff!

Research into why Transylvanian naked neck chickens have naked necks reveals a complex balance between genes and chemicals that produce a bird's (not just chickens) feather pattern while it is still an embryo in an egg. Once the combination was discovered, Chunyan Mou from the University of Edinburgh found that bird necks are naturally more disposed to nakedness than the rest of their bodies. This may be no benefit to poultry, but chickens are related to birds that do benefit.

Mou thinks that similar genetic tweaks have happened time and again in the evolution of birds. Many groups have lost their neck feathers independently, including vultures, the marabou stork, and large flightless birds like ostriches and emus. Naked necks allow vultures to stuff their heads into carcasses without soiling any feathers; in other cases, a naked neck probably helps its owner to keep cool in hot climates.

Whatever the benefit, it seems that it’s particularly easy for birds to evolve a naked neck, rather than another part of their body. After all, Mou found that the necks of embryonic ducks, turkeys, quails and guinea fowl all have much higher levels of retinoic acid than the rest of the body. This pattern would normally be innocuous, completely hidden from natural selection. But it allows BMP-boosting mutations to denude the neck in one fell swoop, while keeping the rest of the body covered in feathers. As Mou writes, “An underlying map within the skin provides a one-step route to a bare neck.”

The post goes into detail about how the genes initiate the production of chemical activators and inhibitors, and ends with a parable from Alan Turing that explains the concept in layman's terms. Link

(Image credit: Demontux)

Amazing, indeed. The picture on the left is dated 3/11. The picture on the right is dated 3/15. Meanwhile, a stretch of highway near my home was repaved in only 18 months. If you can read this post in Japanese, maybe you could give us more details. Link -via reddit

An 11-month-old Tibetan mastiff named Hong Dong (Big Splash) broke the record for dog prices, going to a new home in China for 10 million RMB, which is £945,000 or about $1.5 million US.

Tibetan Mastiffs are huge and fierce guard dogs that have stood watch over nomad camps and monasteries on the Tibetan plateau for centuries.

They are thought to be one of the world's oldest breeds, and legend has it that both Genghis Khan and Lord Buddha kept them.

More recently, however, they have become highly-prized status symbols for China's new rich. The dogs are thought to be a pure "Chinese" breed and they are rarely found outside Tibet, giving them an exclusivity that other breeds cannot match.

Accordingly, prices have risen from around 5,000 yuan a puppy five years ago to the hundreds of thousands and even millions.

Hong Dong's new owner will command high stud fees, as much as 100,000 RMB and may earn his money back soon. Link -via The Daily What

An experiment shows how banana peels can be useful for other things besides slapstick comedy. They can also clean up dissolved metals left in water by industrial waste -better than other organic materials, and they are a safer alternative to chemicals currently used.

For the study, Castro and his team dried and ground banana peels, then combined them in flasks of water with known concentrations of metals. They also built water filters out of peels and pushed water through them.

In both scenarios, “the metal was removed from the water and remained bonded to the banana peels,” Castro said, adding that the extraction capacity of banana peels exceeded that of other materials used to remove heavy metals.

Link -via Look at This

(Image credit: Christina DiPaola)

A shopping center in Perth, Scotland was flooded with small red balls when a contest went awry. An Alfa Romeo was filled with balls for a "guess how many" contest at St. John’s Shopping Centre to benefit Comic Relief. However, the contest organizers failed to ensure that all the car doors were locked. A child, thought to be about three years old, opened the passenger door and released hundreds of balls.

Crowds gathered and cheered the farcical scene as several of the centre’s security team battled to gather up the balls, while many young children were seen making off with a few.

Siobhan McConnell, the shopping centre manager, said: “This was a bit more comic relief than we had originally planned.

Most of the balls were eventually retrieved, and the contest will resume this Friday. Link -via Arbroath

(YouTube link)

Take an Xbox Kinect to a convention and look what you get! This unnamed fan at Boston's PAX East gaming convention gives his all to the game Dance Central. Link -via Buzzfeed

Creative partners Oli Beale and Alex Holder posed to recreate several Mills & Boon romance novel covers in photographs. See the rest at their site. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Oli Kellett)