A sign on Highway 51 in Wisconsin points to exit 185. There are four words on the sign, and three are misspelled. "Exit" was correctly spelled.

David Vieth, director of the bureau of highway operations for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, said the mistake was made by Decker Supply Company of Madison, which printed the sign.

The sign for exit 185 on southbound Highway 51 reads “Buisness 51 Rothschield Schofeild.”

Link -via Fark

By Sunday morning, the sign had been replaced. Link

(image credit: Corey Schjoth/Wausau Daily Herald)

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Simon's Cat tries to catch a fly. From the drawing board of Simon Tofield. -via Metafilter

Previously: Cat Man Do, Let Me In, and TV Dinner.

It's an old trope in comedy that someone commits a sin and God gets their attention with a bolt of lightning. The real life version played out in the woods near Wert, Germany. Jens Gottlieb and his girlfriend Lisa Gruhn were feeling frisky, pulled off the highway, headed into the forest, and stripped naked. A bolt of lightning struck the ground near them! They started running as a torrential downpour began.

They lost their way and were spotted blundering around in the dark by another motorist in a parking space who called police.

Officers who arrived a short while later managed to find the naked and shivering pair and help them into dry clothes and took them home.

Bet they won't do that again. Link -via Buzzfeed

(image credit: Flickr user kainet)

You would be forgiven if you thought this picture was a soap bubble in front of an astronomical picture. This is a picture of a planetary nebula that was overlooked until this month. Astronomers say it is either spherical or column-shaped, in which case the camera is looking down the barrel of the column. Records indicate that the nebula, officially named PN G75.5+1.7 and nicknamed the "Cygnus Bubble", was recorded sixteen years ago during the second Palomar Sky Survey, but was overlooked at the time because it was so faint. Link -Thanks, healthylivinggal83!

(image credit: Travis A. Rector/U of Alaska Anchorage/Heidi Schweiker/NOAO)

37-year old Louise Bawn of Bristol, England was out for a night on the town and had changed her high heels for flats to relieve her aching feet. At home, she realized one shoe was missing from her purse. The £400 pair of Christian Louboutin shoes had been a gift from her husband. Brawn said she would go to any lengths to get the shoe back, and has retraced her steps, handed out flyers, and offered a reward for the safe return of the missing shoe. She has even places a classified ad with a picture of the shoe’s mate.

"When I realised that I had lost my shoe I was devastated, totally inconsolable.

"I've called Louboutin and they don't make that fabric any more, so they're irreplaceable.

"I suppose it's rather like Cinderella, only I've already got my Prince Charming, it's just my shoe that I'm after."

Link -via Arbroath

A later story revealed that Bawn owns over 100 pairs of shoes! Link

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I thought I was going overboard by painting my kids' furniture weird colors. This guy built a Star Wars AT-AT Imperial Walker for his son to sleep in! The interior is accessible by ladder and by the 'escape hatch". -via Boing Boing

48-year old Viorel Firoiu of Orlea, Romania, admits he was drunk when he tried to cure his constipation by sticking a hammer in his rectum. He went to a hospital where x-rays revealed not one, but two hammerheads inside!

Dr Cristina Bontescu, spokeswoman for the local hospital where he turned up at the emergency unit, said: "He was a bit drunk and said he had been eating cherries that had left him badly constipated. He said he had a few drinks to dull the pain and then came up with the idea of poking a hammerhead up his backside in the hope of sorting out the constipation.

"But the hammerhead got stuck and then he came up with the idea of using a second hammerhead in order to try and get out the first - but then he lost the second one as well."

The hammerheads had to be removed surgically. http://www.austriantimes.at/image/7802/news/Around_the_World/2009-07-22/14921/Heavy_metal_cure_for_constipation

We all love Spongebob Squarepants! Even when he is (or maybe because he is) ridiculously annoying. Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss will test your knowledge of Bikini Bottom trivia. I only scored 50%, but my kids aced it. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/29579

John William Finn {wiki} of Pine Valley, California reached the age of 100 on Thursday. He was honored on the occasion by a biography in the Ramona Sentinel newspaper.

John William Finn is our nation’s oldest living recipient of its highest award for valor, the Medal of Honor (MoH). He is also the last surviving MoH recipient who earned his medal on Dec. 7, 1941, the last living recipient of the Navy’s MoH from World War II, and the only MoH recipient having his Navy rating, that of an Aviation Ordinanceman, to ever be awarded the MoH in the history of the United States Navy.

...when the attack came on that first Sunday morning in December, Chief Finn single-handedly mounted a 50-caliber machine gun on a stand on the base’s aircraft parking ramp and began firing on any attacking enemy aircraft that he could bear on.
John’s position was totally exposed to enemy strafing and bombing attacks, but he kept it up for more than two hours while under attack, despite being wounded five times and in severe pain. Fellow sailors implored him to seek medical care for his wounds, but John steadfastly refused to vacate his firing position until he received a direct order to do so from a superior officer.
Twenty pieces of shrapnel were removed from John’s body by the base’s medical staff

Finn was honored by local civic organizations last month. He is spending his birthday as a guest of George W. Bush and his wife in Crawford, Texas. Link -via Fark

Here's a blog that collects and displays cat ladders from all over the world -and there are plenty, with a variety of useful designs. The ladder shown was found in France. Link -via Metafilter (image credit: Lara Craft)

Barry Shell of Brampton, Ontario could call it his lucky day -or his unlucky day. He won $4.4 million dollars in the Canadian Lotto drawing July 18th. Monday, he went to pick up his winnings at the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, and was photographed with the check.

Then Shell strolled out of the building and into the hands of Peel Regional Police officers.

He was wanted on a six-year-old warrant for failing to appear, theft under $5,000 and possession of property obtained by crime.

According to a spokesman for the OLG, every lottery winner undergoes a security check, and if anything is turned up during the course of the investigation the matter is turned over to the Ontario Provincial Police.

At least he was able to raise the bail. http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2009/07/22/lottery-winner.html -via Arbroath

Keep your dogs off the charcoal in style with this Cthulhu hot dog roaster from Roast My Weenie. Only $35, a bargain for diehard Cthulhu fans. http://www.shop.roastmyweenie.com/product.sc;jsessionid=72496F1DA0788681339D1539A8D10B85.qscstrfrnt01?categoryId=1&productId=3 -via Foolish Gadgets

You've read the stories about eating contests, and you've wondered how in the world can people stuff that much food into themselves. Now you can see how its done, with ten videos of various food contests, including glimpses of Joey Chestnut and Takeru Kobayashi doing what they do best. Jalapeno, anyone? Link

Payday loans can have a annual interest rate of 400%, but people who take them don't look it it that way when they borrow $100 and pay back $115 in two weeks. Many fall into the trap of taking a second, third, or more loans to cover the shortfalls caused by the previous loans. University of Chicago economists Marianne Bertrand and Adaire Morse ran an experiment in which they explained the terms of payday loans in detail, and gave statistics on how the average borrower must continue getting loans.

In a nationwide experiment, Bertrand and Morse found that providing a clear and tangible description of a loan's cost reduced the number of applicants choosing to take payday loans by as much as 10 percent. Better information, it turns out, may dissuade borrowers vulnerable to the lure of quick cash while maintaining the option of immediate financing for those truly in need.

Among the other 90%, some won't change their behavior no matter what, but many have no other credit options available. Link

NASA managed to put a man on the moon and broadcast the event live to half a billion people on earth. The footage wasn't great, but we were glad to see it anyway. It turns out that the images from the moon to the earth were pretty good, but when they were relayed to NASA and then to broadcast TV, the quality degraded. However, the earth receiving station in Australia recorded the signal in rather good quality. But where is that tape? Stan Lebar, who was in charge of the original broadcast in 1969, and Apollo video engineer Dick Nafzger went searching.

After schmoozing his way into the stacks and sifting through boxes for months, Lebar found evidence that more than 140,000 tapes from the Apollo era had been checked out of the Records Center between 1979 and 1985 and sent back to the Goddard Space Flight Center. But from there, Lebar fell straight into a black hole. At Goddard, there was no record of where the footage had gone. So the tape hunters hit the phones and the Net, scouring the globe for Goddard retirees who might recall the boxes. It didn't go well. "We're dealing with memories here," Nafzger says, "and those are pretty frail."

Personally, I think they should look in the big warehouse next to crate that holds the Ark of the Covenant. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

(image credit: Flickr user evalin)

Update: We may see those original tapes yet. -Thanks, Ivan!