You see pictures of misspelled or otherwise wrong road marking on the internet all the time, but you don’t know how old they are or whether they are altered, and you rarely find out where they are. But this lane marking in Florida is well-documented. You’ll find it on the John F. Kennedy Causeway in Miami, Florida -at least until they fix it. Or fix them. Joe Petrone couldn’t believe his eyes when he drove through the newly-painted causeway.

''I pulled in the right lane and I saw it,'' Petrone said of the stretch between Harbor Island and Pelican Harbor Park. ``Then I saw another one and another one. . . .''

The mistake -- still there -- is repeated not once, not twice, but four times.

http://www.miamiherald.com/460/story/572680.html -via Fark

(YouTube link)
The Trons are a band of robots from New Zealand. They had a MySpace page earlier but the link isn't working right now. -via Viral Video Chart

Update 6/18/08 by Alex - here's an interview with The Trons, by David Farrier of TV3 Nightline: Link [YouTube] - Thanks David!

(YouTube link)
Recorded at the 2008 Star Wars Weekend Hyperspace Hoopla show at Disney's Hollywood Studios. (via Everlasting Blort)

Make your own silly receipts online with the Custom Receipt Maker! Link -via The Generator Blog

(YouTube link)
A puppy in Evansville, Indiana was smashed in a cardboard compactor! The female lab-pit bull mix may have been compacted more than once. The crew who found her at the recycling company is looking for a permanent home for her. Link -via Arbroath

Wouldn’t you love controlling the Empire playing games or even (gasp) working in this workstation from the Dark Side Novelquest? Available in July. Link -via Gizmodo

If you watch sports on TV, you should breeze through this. Today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss asks you to identify theme songs for sports shows. I only knew two of the themes, but I managed to get three of the questions right for a dismal score of 38%. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/15693

There are often countries that you automatically discount when planning a vacation because, like, there’s a WAR or something going on there! (Unless you’re Bono, who will go anywhere anytime.) Then when the situation improves, you don’t think about them again. Pro Traveller takes a look at six nations you might want to reconsider as travel destinations. Pictured is Indonesia, birthplace of Neatorama’s webmaster. Link -Thanks, Andy!

On June 12th, 1942, a young girl in the Netherlands named Anne Frank turned 13 years old. She received a cloth-bound blank book that she had requested for a birthday gift. Anne intended to use it for a diary, although she didn’t think anyone would ever be interested in reading it.

For someone like me, it is a very strange habit to write in a diary. Not only that I have never written before, but it strikes me that later I, nor anyone else, will care for the outpouring of a thirteen year old schoolgirl.

Anne wrote about her life and how she and her family went into hiding in 1940 to avoid the Nazi death camps.

The little autograph book/diary that Anne had received less than a month before going into hiding, became a mirror into the soul of the teenager. As the world around her was increasingly crumbling, she began to pour out her heart and soul in her diary. She also used several other notebooks and individual pieces of paper when the book was filled.

The entries in her diary record the thoughts of the girl. She records the growing tensions in their hideout, and even despises her mother, although later she chastises herself for having such thoughts. She records her first kiss, from a 16-year-old boy whose family was in the hideout with them, but then squelches any possible romance. All in all, she records the ups and downs of budding womanhood, under the most adverse of situations.

She continued to write until their hiding place was discovered in 1944. Anne died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Her father found the diary after the war was over. Millions of people have been touched by Anne’s writing in the years since. Anne Frank would have turned 79 today. Link -via the Presurfer

(College Humor link)
It’s an in-game version of the Discovery Channel promo featured previously at Neatorama. For those who live in a different world. -via Gorilla Mask

Maybe the owner of these shoes should consider some charcoal insoles. Found at Omg OWNED. Link -via Digg

Before Photoshop, before Snopes, before YouTube, there was Jonathon Newhouse. Or rather, there wasn’t, but he became famous anyway.

In 1874, one man; an inventor of considerable genius, was reported to have completely reversed the effect of the sun. In the scorching heat of the mid-summer Nevada desert, he was found frozen stiff by Indians - his beard covered in frost and an icicle over a foot in length hanging from his nose. That man was Jonathon Newhouse, the genius inventor of solar armor.

The story spread like a virus.

First printed in the Territorial Enterprise on July 2, 1874, the story soon appeared in other publications including Scientific American, The New York Times and The Daily Telegraph, which at the time had the largest circulation in the world.

It took a while before any newspaper asked for corroboration. Then the real story came out. Link -via Digg

(image credit: waytoocrowded)

(Dayrobber link)
A couple of months ago, I posted a “suggestion box” here on Neatorama and hinted that a new project was in the works. I didn’t want to explain what the new project was, since I didn’t know if it would happen, or how long it would take. That project is a video series, a collaboration between Neatorama and Dayrobber, a site where you can see video reports from all kinds of websites. This pilot episode is an experimental prototype. If you think this is an idea worth pursuing, please let us know what kind of subject matter you’d like to see in The Neatorama Show.

Featured links:
The Tattooed Banana
Monk-E-Mail

Shigeo Obara, a farmer in Japan’s Iwate prefecture discovered a clover last week with an amazing 21 leaves! The current world record is an 18-leaf clover, which Obara himself grew in 2002.

Obara, a former food crop researcher, has been conducting independent research on clovers in his garden for over 50 years. He first became interested in clover mutations after discovering an unusual patch of 4-leaf clovers in 1951. Since then, Obara has been crossbreeding the plants in his garden to research the genes associated with leaf count, color, pattern and size.

Obara plans to file a new application with Guinness, although he is considering waiting a while. “We are likely to find clovers with more leaves,” he says. Last month, a family member claimed to have found a 27-leaf clover, but the discovery was not confirmed.

Link

Firefighters in Dunbar, Scotland used a vacuum cleaner to extract a newborn kitten from a drain it had fallen into!

It is thought its mother had climbed behind the kitchen sink to give birth.

Rescuers used a vibrascope camera to locate the kitten, owned by Claire Coutts, before using the vacuum cleaner to pull it to safety.

They covered the end of the appliance with a sock to prevent sucking the kitten into the vacuum. Link (with video) -via Arbroath