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BBQ Sword Cooking Fork and BBQ Sword Spatula ($27.95 ea.)
For your next BBQ, make like D’Artagnan and fearlessly grill hotdogs and hamburgers with your trusty BBQ Sword Cooking Fork and Spatula. Take a look at Neatorama’s neat grilling items that are sure to be the hit of the party: Link
Why do Aussies like to shorten words? That’s the research question that Nenagh Kemp of University of Tasmania (or Uni of Tassie) is asking:
"What we’d like to find out is how people feel when they’re listening to someone using those kinds of shortenings, compared to someone who’s not," doctor Nenagh Kemp told AFP from Hobart.
"It might tell us more about whether people think it makes you sound more friendly or more intelligent or more casual, and also differences."
Kemp said while abbreviations were present in all forms of English, they were more common in Australia, where tradesmen are "tradies", firemen are "firies", ambulance workers are "ambos" and service stations are "servos".
She believes that the shortenings are a way of conveying a sense of informality in a country known for its egalitarian ethos.
"I think it does set up a feeling of companionship or casualness and friendliness," she said.
"You might use that to say, ‘hey, I’m on the same level as you. I’m not being too pretentious."
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Camper English over at Alcademics was so inspired by the Double Rainbow Guy that he decided to create a cocktail to honor him.
Before you go crazy trying to figure out different densities of colored liquid required to get the desired rainbow effect, please note that Camper is much cleverer than that: he simply used rainbow-colored ice cubes.
Photo: RaboDirect Australia [Flickr]
Money doesn't grow on trees. Or does it? As a publicity stunt, RaboDirect of Australia sponsored a stunt where a tree in a park in Sydney is festooned with real $5 bills:
An Overview of Responses:
Lost Opportunity
In the early stages, almost 100 people passed the tree without noticing that anything was different. Even when a group of joggers noticed, they were too busy to stop. The first groups who eventually stopped to interact couldn’t believe it. They inspected the notes and took pictures, but left empty handed.Follow the Crowd
Only once one brave participant started taking the money, did momentum gather. Legitimised by the crowd, a wide spectrum of behaviour ensued.Frugality
Some took just one or two notes, satisfied by their modest and unexpected gains.Opportunist
Consumed by the fantasy, a group of braver participants made the most of the opportunity by filling their pockets.Employing Tools and Working Together
When the low hanging $5 notes were depleted, participants employed tools such as swinging coats and umbrellas, to help them reach higher branches. Teamwork also came into play as spectators formed human pyramids to reach the notes seemingly out of reach.Altruism
Perhaps the most comforting observation from the participants was that of altruism. Taller participants shared their earnings with shorter spectators, while one gentleman on identifying the undercover observation team, requested his money be donated to charity.
Link [with video clip] - via Marketing Alternatif
Remember going to summer camp when you’re young? Now imagine that place as your wedding destination. Yes, that’s right: camp wedding is the hot new trend!
Instead of bridesmaids and groomsmen, there will be "head counselors" when Serena Orgel, 35, and Josh Young, 36, get married this September at Lake Bryn Mawr Camp in Honesdale, Pa. During the weekend festivities, guests will sing songs in a talent show and roast marshmallows at a bonfire. The newlyweds plan to paddle away in a canoe with a "Just Married" sign. Guest attire? "Camp chic," says the bride-to-be.
Sleep-away camps—where kids swim in chilly lakes, make macramé bracelets and aim their arrows at archery targets—are finding a new life in the off-season as the host of weddings, bar mitzvahs, 40th birthday parties and other events. Many facilities are remote and more rustic than what many people think of as their ideal weekend away. Guests can expect to sleep in bunk-beds, stow dresses and bowties in cubbies, and spray on bug spray instead of perfume.
Katherine Rosman of the Wall Street Journal has the story: Link
Previously on Neatorama: Bowling Alley Wedding
Archaeologists have found something at Stonehenge that is so exceptional that they’re calling it the most exciting find there in fifty years: a second, Neolithic henge.
The new "henge" – which means a circular monument dating to Neolithic and Bronze Ages – is situated about 900m (2,950ft) from the giant stones on Salisbury Plain.
Images show it has two entrances on the north-east and south-west sides and inside the circle is a burial mound on top which appeared much later, Professor Gaffney said.
"You seem to have a large-ditched feature, but it seems to be made of individual scoops rather than just a straight trench," he said.
"When we looked a bit more closely, we then realised there was a ring of pits about a metre wide going all the way around the edge.
"When you see that as an archaeologist, you just looked at it and thought, ‘that’s a henge monument’ – it’s a timber equivalent to Stonehenge.
All you and I have to do to tell a fiction from a non-fiction is to read a piece of text – but how can a computer tell the difference? It’s tricky, but doable:
Joseph Stevanak and Lincoln Carr at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden have come up with a way to do it. They say that the key is to look at the networks that form when you examine how often words appear close together in each type of text.
The type of network they examined creates a graph in which each word in the text forms a vertex. A line connects two vertices if these words appear next to each other in the text. It is possible to explore longer range links by connecting vertices when they appear two or three or four words apart and so on.
Stevanak and Carr say that just two properties of this kind of network can help distinguish fiction from nonfiction stories. The first is the power law that describes the number of links to each vertex in the network. The second is the cluster coefficient which describes how well the vertices are connected to the rest of the network.
Measuring these two quantities alone can identify the type of story with remarkable accuracy. "Our analysis yielded a 73.8±5.15% accuracy for the correct classification of novels and 69.1 ± 1.22% for news stories," say Stevenak and Carr.
Photo: dragon dream [Flickr]
It takes a clever person to create good similes, but it takes a genius to create one as non-sensical as this one above! Well played, sir!
Somehow it fits that the long-hidden trove of never-published writings by Franz Kafka are trapped in a situation that can only be called "Kafkaesque":
Ten safety deposit boxes of never-published writings by Franz Kafka, their exact contents unknown, are trapped in courts and bureaucracy, much like one of the nightmarish visions created by the author himself.
The papers, retrieved from bank vaults where they have sat untouched and unread for decades, could shed new light on one of literature’s darkest figures.
In the past week, the pages have been pulled from safety deposit boxes in Tel Aviv and Zurich, Switzerland, on the order of an Israeli court over the objections of two elderly women who claim to have inherited them from their mother.
"Kafka could easily have written a story like this, where you try to do something and it all goes wrong and everything remains unresolved," said Sara Loeb, a Tel Aviv-based author of two books about the writer. "It’s really a case of life imitating art."
Whenever you feel the need to surf, but you’re too far away from the ocean, simply call a friend, get a hold on a giant blue tarp, grab your skateboard and start surfing.
Fingerstache – $4.95 | More Gag Gifts
What is it about the fingerstache that captured the fancy of the hip crowd of the web?
Of course, kids have been drawing mustaches on their fingers (or upper lips, much to the consternation of mom) with markers for ages, but the whole fingerstache phenomenon got jump started when a tattoo artist named Giovani of the High Street Tattoo in Columbus, Ohio, tattooed a mustache on a client’s finger as a joke back in 2003.
Fingerstaches started popping up everywhere, and soon enough it became a full-blown Internet meme. There are about 1,500 photos on Flickr tagged "finger mustache," Facebook fan page, and even a social networking site for "fingerstachers."
If you want the hip look without the pain and commitment of a tattoo, you can even get a temporary Fingerstache tattoo, made by our pal Gama-Go, over at the NeatoShop.
It’s a silly phenomenon, which is probably why it is so viral, but it’s not the silliest mustache we’ve ever seen on the web. That title, I believe, currently belongs to this guy:
This is a photograph of what is alleged to be the first American bookmobile. It was built in 1905 by the public library of Washington County, Maryland. Mary Titcomb, the librarian responsible for its creation, described its importance:
Would not a Library Wagon, the outward and visible signs of the service for which the Library stood, do much more in cementing friendship? Would the upkeep of the wagon after the first cost be much more than the present method? Is not Washington County with its good roads especially well adapted for testing an experiment of this kind, for the geography of the County is such that it could be comfortably covered by well planned routes? These and other aspects of the plan were laid before the Board of Trustees – who approved of the idea, and forthwith the librarian began interviewing wagon makers and trying to elucidate her ideas with pen and pencil. The first wagon, when finished with shelves on the outside and a place for storage of cases in the center resembled somewhat a cross between a grocer’s delivery wagon and the tin peddlers cart of by gone New England days. Filled with an attractive collection of books and drawn by two horses, with Mr. Thomas the janitor both holding the reins and dispensing the books, it started on its travels in April 1905.
No better method has ever been devised for reaching the dweller in the country. The book goes to the man, not waiting for the man to come to the book. Psychologically too the wagon is the thing. As well try to resist the pack of a peddler from the Orient as the shelf full of books when the doors of the wagon are opened by Miss Chrissinger at one’s gateway.
The original wagon was hit and destroyed by a train in 1910, and replaced with a motorized version two years later.
Link via Jessamyn West | Photo: Washington County Free Library
During the Apollo space program, astronauts were apparently ineligible for traditional life insurance. So they and NASA came up with an innovative solution.
The answer was provided by NASA in the form of ‘Insurance Covers’, as seen here, a number of which were given to every crew member and subsequently signed by every astronaut involved, as close to launch as possible. Its value would instantly be high, but would no doubt sky-rocket (no pun intended) should the astronauts never return; the deceased’s surviving family then at least safe in the knowledge that in future they could cash-in their makeshift insurance policy if required.
Link (with photos of two additional covers). Via Reddit.
If you have an immune system disorder called celiac disease or are allergic to gluten (or know that someone who is), then you know that eating the wrong thing can lead to severe pain.
Even though the role of gluten in celiac disease has been known for 60 years, researchers have just pinpointed the peptide sequence in gluten that cause the body’s immune system to wreak havoc in your tummy:
Bob Anderson, a celiac disease researcher at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Victoria, Australia, and fellow researchers recruited more than 200 celiac disease patients for their study. Participants ate servings of bread, rye muffins or boiled barley for three days. Six days after the experiment started, the researchers drew blood samples.
They tested the samples to see how strongly immune cells in the blood reacted to more than 2,700 different gluten peptides (relatively short chains of amino acids). Ninety of the peptides elicited some response, and three in particular generated the biggest reaction.
"The holy grail in celiac disease research has been to identify the toxic peptide components of gluten, and that’s what we’ve done," Anderson said in a statement. "These three components account for the majority of the immune response to gluten."
If you have a rabbit phobia, it’s best that you don’t teach high school. Here’s what happened to one teacher in Germany:
A German court on Tuesday threw out the case of a schoolteacher against a pupil who allegedly tormented her by scrawling pictures of rabbits on the blackboard to aggravate her rabbit phobia. [...]
Witnesses had told the judge that the teacher ran sobbing out of the classroom when she saw the image of a rabbit on the blackboard. The girl denied making the drawings.
Yes, according to the law – and we should all pause to think of the implication. After all, haven’t you ever clicked "I accept" without reading the pages and pages of legal fine prints? There may be a clause that there that you’re breaking:
Prosecutors in a New Jersey ticket scalping case are pushing the envelope on the federal computer hacking law, setting a precedent that could make it a felony to violate a website’s terms of service and fool a CAPTCHA, according to electronic civil rights groups intervening in the case.
At issue is a four-month-old criminal prosecution against the online ticket-reselling business Wiseguy Tickets, which allegedly used a network of shell companies, rented servers and automated scripts to snatch up more than 1 million premium tickets for coveted concerts and sporting events, which it resold for more than $25 million in profits.
The four Wiseguy defendants, who also operated other ticket-reselling businesses, allegedly used sophisticated programming and inside information to bypass technological measures — including CAPTCHA — at Ticketmaster and other sites that were intended to prevent such bulk automated purchases. This violated the sites’ terms of service, and according to prosecutors constituted unauthorized computer access under the anti-hacking Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA.
Naturally, civil liberty groups are alarmed:
“Under the government’s theory, anyone who disregards — or doesn’t read — the terms of service on any website could face computer crime charges,” said EFF civil liberties director Jennifer Granick in a press release. “Price-comparison services, social network aggregators, and users who skim a few years off their ages could all be criminals if the government prevails.”
Kim Zetter of Wired’s Threat LEvel explains: Link – Bruce Schneier
Fragment #3
Jaime Salmon is a contemporary sculptor specializing in photorealistic sculptures using silicone, pigment, fiberglass, acrylic and human hair.
This one above, titled Fragment #3 (2008), is so hauntingly real that if it weren’t for the unfinished fragments, I’d be fooled into guessing that it were real.
Link (note: some artwork NSFW) – via Book of Joe
Previously on Neatorama: Ron Mueck’s Exhibition at The Modern
London-based designer Chambers Judd modified the floppy disk drive pictured above. Normally it lies flat, but the moment that it comes in contact with a liquid, little legs raise it up out of danger. Video at the link.
Link via CrunchGear | Photo: Chambers Judd
Researchers led by Paul Crowther, professor of Astrophysics at the University of Sheffield, UK, have discovered a cluster of young stars that are about twice as big as the maximum size that astrophysicists thought could exist. Each is about 300 times the size of our sun:
In the study, the researchers estimated the maximum possible mass for stars within the two clusters, and the relative number of the most massive stars. Their findings have caused them to reevaluate current estimates for how large these stars can be.
“The smallest stars are limited to more than about 80 times more than Jupiter, below which they are ‘failed stars’ or brown dwarfs,” said Olivier Schnurr, a research team member from the Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam in Germany. “Our new finding supports the previous view that there is also an upper limit to how big stars can get, although it raises the limit by a factor of two, to about 300 solar masses.”
Link via Geekosystem | Photo of NGC 3603 courtesy of NASA
Ranger, a robot built by researchers at Cornell University, broke a walking record for an untethered robot when it walked more than fourteen miles in eleven hours without recharging:
Guided by students with a remote control, Ranger navigated 108.5 times around the Barton Hall indoor track, about 212 meters per lap, and made about 70,000 steps before it had to stop and recharge. The 14.3-mile record beats the former world record set by Boston Dynamics’ BigDog, which had claimed the record at 12.8 miles
What I find most impressive is the robot’s remarkably human appearance, as you can see from the photo provided by Cornell University.
Link via Geekologie
This short film is an instructional video on how to bathe a cat. It’s roughly based on Bud Herron’s essay “Cat Bathing as a Martial Art” and provides sound warnings on the dangers of wet, enraged cats.
Link via The Presurfer
Police in Argentina are on the lookout for two escaped prisoners. Due to a manpower shortage, only two of the fifteen guard towers at a prison were manned. One had a crudely-made dummy inside which did not fool the prisoners:
A prison source said: “We’ve made a dummy out of a football and a prison officer’s cap, so that the prisoner see its shadow and think they’re being watched.”
“We named him Wilson, like in the film Cast Away, and put him in one of the towers,” the man told the Diario Rio Negro newspaper, referring to the Tom Hanks film in which his character invents a volleyball character for company.
Link | Photo (unrelated) by Flickr user tm-tm used under Creative Commons license
Older readers of Neatorama will remember an era when Burma-Shave signs entertained drivers on the nation’s highways (the complete text of all the jingles has been assembled at Burma-Shave.org.)
The company also posted two promotional offers on their signs; the first one (“Free offer! Free offer! / Rip a fender off your car / mail it in / for a half-pound jar / Burma-Shave”) resulted in some actual fenders being mailed to the company, which made good on its promise. The second promotion (in the title of this post) stimulated the imagination of Arliss French in Appleton, Wisconsin.
French managed the town’s Red Owl supermarket and offered to pay customers 15 cents for every empty Burma Shave jar they brought in. He ran a full-page ad in the paper reading, “Send Frenchie to Mars.” As the empties accumulated in his store, he telegraphed the company, “Please advise where to ship the jars.”
The folks at Burma Shave scrambled to avoid embarrassment. Thinking he would decline, they offered to send him to the village of Moers, Germany (which they insisted was pronounced, “Mars”) if he would wear a space suit for the trip. He agreed.
French and his wife departed New York at the company’s expense on Dec. 2, 1958. He wore a football helmet and a silver costume emblazoned with the Red Owl logo. When he arrived in Moers two days later, all 78 residents turned out to greet him.
Link. Photo: Wisconsin Historical Society.
We’ve previously mentioned that engineers in various firms have been developing cars that can drive themselves. A group of Italian engineers is putting their automated car to a rather rigorous test: driving from Italy to Shanghai without direct human guidance.
Two bright orange vehicles, equipped with laser scanners and cameras that work in concert to detect and help avoid obstacles, are to brave the traffic of Moscow, the summer heat of Siberia and the bitter cold of the Gobi desert before the planned arrival in Shanghai at the end of October.
“What we are trying to do is stress our systems and see if they can work in a real environment, with real weather, real traffic and crazy people who cross the road in front of you and a vehicle that cuts you off,” said project leader Alberto Broggi.
The road trip consists of two pairs of vehicles, each with a driven lead van followed by a driverless vehicle occupied by two technicians, whose job is to fix glitches and take over the wheel in case of an emergency.
Link via Popular Science | Photo of unrelated Siberian road by Flickr user vladislav.bezrukov used under Creative Commons license
Robert Sosebee of Austell, Georgia came home to find he had been ticketed for keeping livestock in the city. But he doesn’t own any chickens, except for a couple of ceramic hens decorating his lawn.
Sosebee believes that one of his neighbors might have seen his ceramic chickens on the front lawn and called the county, thinking that the chickens were real.
“The code enforcement officers brought me a paper violation saying I had some chickens, but I didn’t,” said Sosebee.
The enforcement officer apparently relied on a complaint and had not looked for the chickens himself. Code enforcers later tore up the ticket. Link
(Image credit: WSB-TV)
Charles Jenkins of Indianapolis, Indiana was awakened from sleep Tuesday morning by a loud crash. He found an intruder climbing through the living room window.
Jenkins said he grabbed his cane and hit the intruder in the head. That seemed to stun the would-be burglar, who quickly jumped back outside through the window.
Jenkins said the suspect ran to a truck out back behind the house, where he believes another suspect was waiting to drive them away.
Jenkins is 70 years old. Police are looking through recordings on his security cameras for evidence against the burglar. Link (with video)
Gary Detro lost his high school class ring at a football game in Sherman, Texas during his senior year. That was in 1969, and he never found it. Until now.
Fast forward to July, 2010. Crews working on Bearcat Stadium’s drainage problems are putting in a new field. They removed about seven inches of dirt. That’s when the rains came and flattened out the soil.
“I just saw something shiny down there. I picked it up and I didn’t think a whole bunch about it. It was a ring,” said Jeff Hinton, a Sherman ISD employee.
Hinton and Matt Mitchusson found a 1969 yearbook and matched the initials engraved on the ring to Detro. They found a “Detro” in Sherman, Gary’s sister-in-law, who led them to Gary in Celina.
Detro had looked through the field for days after losing the ring, and then bought a replacement. Link
We’re reposting this to make sure everyone gets a chance to vote! Lightbulb Eating Guy has taken the lead! Will Star Wars Playing Unicycle Riding Guy nose him out? Will there be a dark horse? Cast your vote and help us pick the 2010 GTFO Winners now!
Take a look at all 14 videos and place your vote for the best. (“Best” being defined as however you see fit. The worst? The weirdest? The one that made you giggle the most?)
What’s at stake? An iPad and serious bragging rights for the winner, plus lots of fun runner-up prizes for 2nd-5th place.
Here’s two videos to get you started. The other 12, plus the poll to cast your vote, are found after the jump below.
This beat up piano doesn’t look like much but it was once played by the Beatles and Pink Floyd among others at the Abbey Road’s Studio 3. It goes on the auction block on August 15 and is expected to fetch £150,000.
“Studio three was the smallest. The Beatles regularly used it, and we know they recorded certain songs there using the piano.“It was also used by other bands, including Pink Floyd, and without its association with the studios it would be worth a very modest sum. It is a bit battered and is covered in stains and cigarette burns. It has been used and abused – but that gives it character.
“It still plays although it would perhaps benefit from a professional tuner having a listen.”
The 1984 film Ghostbusters starred Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, and Dan Akroyd as paranormal exterminators in New York City (later joined by Ernie Hudson). The script was written by Ramis and Akroyd. The movie was #1 for five weeks straight that summer, and became the most successful comedy of the 1980s. But you already knew all that, didn’t you? Here are ten things you might not know about Ghostbusters.
1. The story as Dan Akroyd originally envisioned it involved time travel and many more ghostbusters. He wrote the principle roles for John Belushi, Eddie Murphy, and John Candy. Belushi died before the movie was made, and Candy and Murphy weren’t interested. Harold Ramis changed most of the original plot to make the production affordable.
2. The film had no name through most of its development. One name that was considered was Ghoststoppers. After the producers settled on Ghostbusters, plans went ahead. Some time later, it was brought to their attention that a live action children’s show named The Ghost Busters had aired during the 1975-76 TV season. Columbia quickly pursued negotiations with Filmation, the owners of the series, to secure rights to the title they were already using. After the movie became a hit, Filmation went back and produced an animated series called Filmation’s Ghostbbusters, using the same characters from the earlier live-action series. A separate animated series from Columbia Pictures called The Real Ghostbusters based on the movie began in 1986.
3. The voice of the gatekeeper Zuul, the minion of Gozer, was that of Ivan Reitman, the film’s director, but he didn’t take a credit for it. Just another trick at a producer’s disposal for saving money -one more voiceover artist they didn’t have to pay!
4. The Proton Pack is the weapon of choice for the Ghostbusters. It is sort of a particle-beam weapon. We have some of those in real-life now, such as the Large Hadron Collider and other particle-acceleration laboratories, but you can’t carry something like that on your back. Columbia Pictures had the Proton Packs made by the prop department out of fiberglass with various gizmos added like pneumatic fittings, resistors, and anything else lying around that might look appropriate.
5. Adult film star Ron Jeremy appeared in a the crowd as the containment unit explodes. The scene is about an hour into the movie, and Jeremy is to the left, sporting his iconic mustache.
6. Harold Ramis, who played Dr. Egon Spengler, is better known as a director. Before writing and acting in Ghostbusters, he directed Caddyshack and National Lampoon’s Vacation. After Ghostbusters, he directed Bill Murray again in Groundhog Day.
7. The spirit/diety Gozer takes the form of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man because Dr. Raymond Stantz (Akroyd) thought of him as someone who would never hurt him. Stay Puft is a fictional company. The Marshmallow Man was only one of many oversized monsters in the original script -the rest were cut due to budget concerns.
8. The voracious green ghost that passes through walls and leaves slime behind is known as Slimer, although he was never referred to by name in the first Ghostbusters movie. Instead, the cast and crew called him “Onion Head”! Oh yes, the voice of the-ghost-to-be-later-known-as Slimer was also director Ivan Reitman.
9. “Who you gonna call?” The theme song “Ghostbusters” by Ray Parker, Jr. went to #1 on the Billboard singles chart and stayed there for three weeks. It was nominated for an Academy Award in the best original song category, and won a Grammy. But you won’t find the music video on the home video version of the movie Ghostbusters, due to a plagiarism suit brought by Huey Lewis in 1984. Lewis charged that the tune to “Ghostbusters” was essentially the same as “I Want a New Drug” by Huey Lewis and the News, which came out six months earlier. The suit was settled out of court in 1985, with one of the stipulations being that neither party would ever discuss the suit in public. Believe it or not, Huey Lewis was asked to come up with a theme song for Ghostbusters, but turned down the project, after which the producers approached Ray Parker, Jr.
10. Ghostbusters III has been in discussion for years. Dan Akroyd had a script ready long ago. Producer Ivan Reitman says the movie will begin filming this fall for a 2012 release. The principle characters will be played by younger actors, although the original cast may appear as well. Bill Murray is not interested in participating.
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