Seventy-two-year-old Mohammed Bellazrak dropped his wife off at the airport on December 23rd with no problem, but became disoriented in the snow as he was driving home to Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England from Gatwick airport. He should have made it home in a couple of hours. When he didn't, his relatives contacted police. Sergeant Jo Spencer tells about the investigation.

"We contacted other forces with no success and then asked for the ANPR systems to be activated to see if anyone spotted the number plate CF53 BHE, the car in which Mr Bellazrak was known to have been when he left Gatwick for the 70 mile journey home.

"We were surprised to discover that ANPR cameras had recorded him in Bracknell, Wokingham, Burnham and High Wycombe - all presumably attempts at finding his way from Gatwick to Wiltshire.

"The last ANPR 'hit' we had showed him at about 6pm on Christmas eve in Hiugh Wycombe but then the trail went cold again," she added.

On Christmas day, a CCTV camera recorded his license plate number in Oxford, where police were able to flag him down. He was reunited with his family. It is not yet known whether Bellazrak drove around the clock or stopped at night. Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Flickr user Jeff Van Campen)

The "best" hangovers are, of course, fictional, since there are really no good hangovers. But witnessing the misery in this list may make you more cautious about overdoing the New Year partying and give you a laugh besides. Here's how Tom Wolfe described a hangover in Bonfire of the Vanities:

“The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membranous sac holding it intact. Ah! The membranous sac was his head, and the right side of his head was on the pillow, and the yolk was as heavy as mercury, and it rolled like mercury, and it was pressing down on his right temple… If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac, and his brains would fall out.” The fictional British journalist is reputed to be based on Christopher Hitchens

The slide show from The Guardian has more hangovers described poetically and painfully. Link -via Nag on the Lake

Doctors in Ipatinga, Brazil declared 88-year-old Maria das Dores dead when they found no vital signs. She was transferred from the hospital to a funeral home, where an official looked into her coffin and found her moving! Ms. Dores was immediately sent back to the hospital.

Custodia Amancio, daughter of the resuscitated Brazilian woman, said: "We are happy to know my mother is alive and unhappy with the lack of respect due her. We are still not sure if we will sue the municipality and hospital.

"She continues in the intensive ward treatment ward and we are praying that she will improve quickly."

Ms. Dores suffers from blocked arteries and Alzheimer's disease. Link -via Fark

George Seurat’s famous painting “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of LaGrande Jatte" shows a monkey at the feet of a woman. It could be that the model actually had a monkey at the beach, or it may symbolize that the woman was a prostitute! Minnesotastan put together a post exploring the monkey as a symbol of prostitution. Some images contain art nudes, which may be NSFW. Link

How few pixels can you use to make a portrait and still recognize the person? Not many, if you're illustrator Andy Rash. These extremely low resolution figures are called iotacons. Rash has made iotacons of the US Senate, all the US presidents, various movie and TV show casts, and even the Supreme Court! I'm sure you recognize the characters pictured here. See more at the iotacons site. Link -via Boing Boing

How researchers see a much looked- upon lady

by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff

Leonardo da Vinci's painted portrait of the Mona Lisa entices researchers of many kinds to spring into action of some sort. Alerted to the possible presence of a newsworthy mystery, quite a few people want to define and then solve it.

On December 15, 2005, the painting popped up in the news in the company of scientists -- again. An Associated Press report explained that Harro Stokman, Nicu Sebe, and colleagues had gotten the Mona Lisa's number. They did so with precision, though with little claim to accuracy:

The mysterious half-smile that has intrigued viewers of the Mona Lisa for centuries isn't really that difficult to interpret, Dutch researchers said Thursday.

She was smiling because she was happy -- 83 percent happy, to be exact, according to scientists from the University of Amsterdam.

In what they viewed as a fun demonstration of technology rather than a serious experiment, the researchers scanned a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece and subjected it to cutting-edge "emotion recognition'' software, developed in collaboration with the University of Illinois.

The result showed the painting's famous subject was 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful and 2 percent angry. She was less than 1 percent neutral, and not at all surprised.

The team has yet to publish a formal scientific report. If and when they do, it will join a growing heap of studies that are as difficult to categorize as the famous Mona Lisa smile. That smile, some scientists imply, may not really be a smile.

Here is a sampling of Mona Lisaean studies.

Mona, Ailing (1)

Much of the world celebrates Mona Lisa as an iconic perfect woman. But Dr. Joseph E. Borkowski of the Georgetown University School of Dentistry in Washington, D.C., put forth a disturbing conjecture. In his study "Mona Lisa: The Enigma of the Smile" (Journal of Forensic Sciences, vol. 37, no. 6, pp. 1706-11), he explains that:

The Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo da Vinci, 1503, pictures a smile that has been long the subject of conjecture. It is believed, however, that the Mona Lisa does not smile; she wears an expression common to people who have lost their front teeth. A close-up of the lip area shows a scar that is not unlike that left by the application of blunt force. The changes evident in the perioral area are such that occur when the anterior teeth are lost. The scar under the lower lip of the Mona Lisa is similar to that created, when, as a result of force, the incisal edges of the teeth have pierced the face with a penetrating wound.

(Thanks to Mark Benecke for bringing Dr. Borkowski to our attention.)

(Image credit: gilad at Worth1000)

Mona, Ailing (2)

K.K. Adour, at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Oakland, California, diagnoses a more debilitating ailment: Bell's palsy. Adour's study, "Mona Lisa Syndrome: Solving the Enigma of the Gioconda Smile" (Annals of Otology, Rhinology, and Laryngology, vol. 89, no. 3, March 1989, pp. 196-9) reports that:

The Mona Lisa smile is presented as a possible example of facial muscle contracture that develops after Bell's palsy when the facial nerve has undergone partial wallerian degeneration and has regenerated. The accompanying synkinesis would explain many of the known facts surrounding the painting and is a classic example of Leonardo da Vinci as the compulsive anatomist who combined art and science.

With six inches of snow on the roads and Christmas activities over, my kids are looking for distractions. One I found for them is Loops of Zen, which somewhat resembles the Light Up the Christmas Tree game, but with more curves. http://fstr.net/loops-of-zen -via Look At This

Robb Posch undertook an experiment in which he ate nothing but candy for a week. Oh, the things we do in the name of science! ...or blogging, as the case may be.

Since I am apparently going to eat peanut butter candy every day, I went with Reese's Peanut Butter Bells. Then after snacking on Nestle Crunch Bells, Gobstopper Snowballs, Christmas SweeTarts, and gummy reindeer, by night time it was becoming somewhat clear: candy isn't very filling.

It's filling enough to ruin your appetite for a meal, but it doesn't work that well as a meal replacement. I'm thinking the key is just to eat more of it. So I ate a giant plastic candy cane filled with Reese's Pieces. It was only about two hours later that I realized I had already eaten Reese's Pieces for breakfast. Maybe the candy was starting to affect my brain.

And that was only day three! By day seven Posch was afraid his brain was starving. But he still likes candy -about half as much as he did before the experiment. You can read each day's entry at Zug. Link -via J-Walk Blog

This creature is called the Flower Hat Jellyfish. The name alone draws a picture! It is found off the coasts of Japan, Argentina, and Brazil. Its tentacles coil up when not in use, which makes them look like bouquets of flowers. The Flower Hat Jellyfish is just one of 14 of the most beautiful jellyfish known to man in a list from Environmental Graffiti. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

(Image credit: Wikimedia user KENPEI)

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AFP, Neil Gaiman, and Team Chaos present a low-budget re-interpretation of a scene from the movie Labyrinth, starring Amanda Palmer. For comparison, see the theatrical version of the same scene at YouTube. -via Metafilter

Redditor keef2000 made a snow "man." That is all. Link -via Blame It On The Voices

The following is an article from Uncle John's Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader.

If you're a fan of cheesy films like Manos: The Hand of Fate, Plan 9 From Outer Space, and Troll 2, you'll love this one. Uncle John saw it last when our local Bad Film Society screened it, and as he was watching, it occurred to him that it actually gave new meaning to the word "bad." (But somehow he couldn't stop talking about how great it was.)

THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN

On June 2003, a film called The Room premiered in a handful of Los Angeles theaters. It's the story of a love triangle between Johnny, a banker; Lisa, his girlfriend; and Johnny's best friend Mark. The film was the brainchild of Tommy Wiseau, the actor who plays Johnny. Wiseau wrote, directed, produced, and distributed the film. He financed The Room, too, shelling out $6 million of his own money to make it, plus thousands more on print and TV ads and a single giant billboard overlooking busy Highland Avenue in Los Angeles.

The Room was Wiseau's first feature film. He hoped to use it to launch a Hollywood career... but all he succeeded in doing was blowing $6 million in record time. The Room played to nearly empty theaters for just two weeks before it was yanked from the screen; in that time it had grossed only $1,900, not enough to cover even one month's rent on the Highland Avenue billboard. Put another way, for every million Wiseau spent, The Room earned less than $320, making it one of the worst box-office flops in history.



CITIZEN PAIN

Is there anything about The Room that isn't bad? The acting is stunningly incompetent- none of the actors had ever had a major film role before, and Wiseau was incapable of providing decent direction. And the love scene between Johnny and Lisa is creepy (picture a Troll doll having its way with a seat cushion, except that Lisa is the cushion). Wiseau recycles the footage in a second love scene 20 minutes after the first, so you get to watch it twice.

As a screenwriter, Wiseau was even worse. New characters appear out of nowhere and aren't properly identified, so it's never clear who they are. A number of subplots -such as drug abuse, unrequited love, and bad real estate deals- are introduced, then quickly abandoned. ("I got the results of the test back. I definitely have breast cancer," Lisa's mother tells her, and the subject never comes up again.) And though the thickly-accented Wiseau refuses to this day to say where he comes from, English is clearly not his first language. The Room is full of clunky, confusing, and unintentionally funny dialog: When a (never-identified) character catches Lisa and Mark kissing at Johnny's birthday party, and confronts them, Mark yells, "Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!"

(YouTube link)

From the guys who brought you the Engineer's Guide to Cats and Christmas Laser Beam Cats, comes instructions for making festive mechanized holiday accessories for your cat. -via Laughing Squid

The Silver Snail featured a family of AT-ATs opening their gifts on Christmas morning in the storefront window. See more pictures at Star Wars: The Old Republic. http://www.swtorstrategies.com/2010/12/at-at-family-xmas.html -via Buzzfeed

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As told by the children of St Paul's Church of New Zealand, in adorable Kiwi accents that defy imitation. It ends with a party!