Neatorama

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• Pat-a-Cake Cats
• A Famous Filched Ford
• Vocal Version of the Star Wars Theme
• Punch-Out!! Collages Made from Nintendo Magazines
• Assassin Bug Carries the Exoskeletons of Its Victims on Its Back
• Meet Claude the Tasmanian Giant Crab
• Yoda Yodeling
• Most People Are Actually Below Average
• Greatest Business Ever: Drive-A-Tank
• Your Brain Knows The Difference Between Metaphors and Similes, Even if You Don’t
• Airport Cheerleaders
• Texas: If You Find Bigfoot, You Can Legally Kill Him
• Extremely High Waisted Pants
• Modified Social Benches
• Things We Forget
• Hemingway in Cuba
• LEGO Lunch Box
• Farting on the Moon
• The Secret Restroom
• Chinese Lottery Winners in Silly Masks
• Horse Plays Guitar
• Tom Swifty Contest
• This Week at Neatorama

Pat-a-Cake Cats Posted: 06 May 2012 05:00 AM PDT (YouTube link) It’s not the first time you’ve seen cats play pat-a-cake, but these two do it so well! They must be litter mates.  -via The Daily What

A Famous Filched Ford Posted: 06 May 2012 04:47 AM PDT Ruth and Jesse Warren of Topeka, Kansas, bought a 1934 Ford Fordor Deluxe Sedan. They hadn’t owned it very long when on April 29th, 1934, Ruth noticed the car was missing. A month later the Warrens were informed the car was in Louisiana, with 160 bullet holes in it after Texas lawmen shot and killed Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. The Warrens had to go to federal court to take back possession of their car, as the sheriff wanted to keep it for his trouble. Even then, they had to pay a $70 storage fee! The Warren car became more famous every year after that, as people flocked to see a part of history. You can follow its story through lots of links to tons of pages full of photographs and newspaper clippings. Link -via Everlasting Blort

Vocal Version of the Star Wars Theme Posted: 05 May 2012 08:01 PM PDT (Video Link) After creating more than 90 tracks, vocal performer Nick McKaig was able to duplicate the Star Wars main title theme. He merged the tracks, but insists that the sound is “100% vocals and 100% my own voice.” -via American Digest

Punch-Out!! Collages Made from Nintendo Magazines Posted: 05 May 2012 07:01 PM PDT Chris Lange’s collages show characters from the classic boxing video game Punch-Out!! Appropriately, his source material is torn-up copies of Nintendo Power magazine. Link -via Technabob

Assassin Bug Carries the Exoskeletons of Its Victims on Its Back Posted: 05 May 2012 07:00 PM PDT Photo: rizalis/Flickr Meet the world's most gruesome killer. The assassin bug proudly displays the exoskeleton of its kills (after it sucked out the innards as dinner) on its back! But there's logic to that macabre madness: ... the assassin bug’s width means it can pile them high, creating a mound of over twenty ‘shells’. The exoskeleton of ants is made of chitin, a particularly sturdy substance which can provide cover for the assassin bug for weeks. The heap is stuck together by a sticky secretion. As it is usually larger than the bug itself, should another insect decide that the assassin would be good for its next meal it serves as a readymade getaway plan. The attacker goes for the larger part (the hollow exoskeletons) which are then simply shed, allowing the assassin bug to beat a hasty retreat. Ark in Space has more pics: Link

Meet Claude the Tasmanian Giant Crab Posted: 05 May 2012 06:00 PM PDT Meet Claude the Tasmanian giant crab, who was saved from boiling death when a British aquarium bought him: Catch of the day: Held up by Sealife aquarist Jemma Battric, Claude weighs a mighty 15lbs and measures 15 inches wide - when he is fully grown he will weigh a whopping 30lbs and gain an extra three inches [...] He is the biggest crab on display in the UK and weighs a mighty 15lb with a 15-inch shell – enough to make 160 crab cakes. The Daily Mail has more: Link - via Geekologie

Yoda Yodeling Posted: 05 May 2012 05:01 PM PDT (Video Link) Yodeling is retro-cool on Dagobah now. Still, I suspect that this is not the real Yoda and that someone has manipulated the video. -via The Presurfer

Most People Are Actually Below Average Posted: 05 May 2012 05:00 PM PDT Reach back into the deep recesses of your mind and recall the bell curve from that statistics class. That Gaussian distribution is what most people think when they measure human performance (be it a school test or athletic performance). The bell curve posits that most of us are average, with a few extremely good and a few extremely bad people. It turns out, however, that is wrong: most of us are actually well below average: The bell curve powerfully shapes how we think of human performance: If lots of students or employees happen to show up as extreme outliers — they're either very good or very bad — we assume they must represent a skewed sample, because only a few people in a truly random sample are supposed to be outliers. New research suggests, however, that rather than describe how humans perform, the bell curve may actually be constraining how people perform. Minus such constraints, a new paper argues, lots of people are actually outliers. Human performance, by this account, does not often fit the bell curve or what scientists call a normal distribution. Rather, it is more likely to fit what scientists call a power distribution. NPR's Morning Edition explains: Link Image: Remember Half the People You Know Are Below Average T-Shirt from the NeatoShop

Greatest Business Ever: Drive-A-Tank Posted: 05 May 2012 04:01 PM PDT Do you need to drive a tank? Call Drive-A-Tank, a company that lets you drive a tank. When do you need to drive a tank? The correct answer is ‘yes’. For as low as $399 a day, you can drive a tank through the woods near Kasota, Minnesota. Link (warning: auto-sound) -via DVICE | Image: KARE

Your Brain Knows The Difference Between Metaphors and Similes, Even if You Don’t Posted: 05 May 2012 04:00 PM PDT Much to the chagrin of my high school English teacher, my classmates and I always got our metaphors and similes mixed up. But take heart, Mrs. Potter! It turns out that our brains did understand that there are differences between the two: Midori Shibata and colleagues at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, asked 24 men and women to indicate, while in an functional MRI scanner, whether they could understand a series of metaphors or similes. In keeping with previous fMRI research, participants' brains were active in the left inferior frontal gyrus. But Shibata's team also found that, when processing similes, there was an increase in activity in the medial frontal region, which may be linked to processes of inference. The right inferior frontal gyrus was more active for metaphors. Link

Airport Cheerleaders Posted: 05 May 2012 03:00 PM PDT To lessen the stress of modern air travel, China's Dalian International Airport decided to enlist the help of ... cheerleaders! To entertain waiting passengers, Dalian International Airport recently recruited a squad of cheerleaders to perform kicks, jumps and splits in the airport's main hall. During massive fog-related delays in Dalian last week, the cheerleaders' pom-pom routines "soothed emotion and alleviated fatigue" for more than 5,000 stranded fliers, according to the Dalian Evening News. Hey, it works for grumpy sport fans: Link

Texas: If You Find Bigfoot, You Can Legally Kill Him Posted: 05 May 2012 02:46 PM PDT This news changes my plans for the weekend. John Lloyd Scharf wrote to the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department, asking if it would be legal to hunt Bigfoot. State official L. David Sinclair wrote back that as long as you have a hunting license, you can kill Bigfoot: The statute that you cite (Section 61.021) refers only to game birds, game animals, fish, marine animals or other aquatic life. Generally speaking, other nongame wildlife is listed in Chapter 67 (nongame and threatened species) and Chapter 68 (nongame endangered species). “Nongame” means those species of vertebrate and invertebrate wildlife indigenous to Texas that are not classified as game animals, game birds, game fish, fur-bearing animals, endangered species, alligators, marine penaeid shrimp, or oysters. The Parks and Wildlife Commission may adopt regulations to allow a person to take, possess, buy, sell, transport, import, export or propagate nongame wildlife. If the Commission does not specifically list an indigenous, nongame species, then the species is considered non-protected nongame wildlife, e.g., coyote, bobcat, mountain lion, cotton-tailed rabbit, etc. A non-protected nongame animal may be hunted on private property with landowner consent by any means, at any time and there is no bag limit or possession limit. An exotic animal is an animal that is non-indigenous to Texas. Unless the exotic is an endangered species then exotics may be hunted on private property with landowner consent. A hunting license is required. This does not include the dangerous wild animals that have been held in captivity and released for the purpose of hunting, which is commonly referred to as a “canned hunt”. That settles it. So, which caliber do you recommend for Bigfoot? Link -via io9

Extremely High Waisted Pants Posted: 05 May 2012 02:00 PM PDT If you think about it, wearing tops and pants are totally inefficient. I mean, why wear two pieces of clothings when one would do? Yes, women have been wearing one-piece dresses forever but it's high time that someone give poor ol' pants the recognition they deserve. Enter couturier Viktor & Rolf, with their creation: the Top Belt Jumpsuit AKA Extremely High-Waisted Pants :) Link - via Rusty Blazenhoff It reminded me of one of my favorite childhood characters.

Modified Social Benches Posted: 05 May 2012 01:00 PM PDT Photo: Artshooter/Flickr Photo: Artshooter/Flickr Tired? Why don't you sit down on this ... whaaaa?! Actually, you're looking at Modified Social Benches by artist Jeppe Hein, which are located throughout the city of De Haan in Belgium, for the contemporary art event Beaufort04. Kuriositas has the gallery: Link

Things We Forget Posted: 05 May 2012 12:00 PM PDT Things We Forget is a blogger who left Post-It Notes filled with inspiring messages in random places in Singapore. So far, he (or perhaps she) has left over 800 messages: Link - via Visual News

Hemingway in Cuba Posted: 05 May 2012 11:00 AM PDT In 1953, Ernest Hemingway won his only Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Old Man and the Sea, which was published in its entirety in LIFE magazine in September of 1952. The magazine sent photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt to Cuba to take pictures of Hemingway for the issue. "He was," Eisenstaedt once said of Hemingway, "the most difficult person I ever photographed." Coming from a man who was a professional photographer across seven decades — someone who photographed presidents, emperors, socially awkward scientists, testy athletes, egomaniac actors, insecure actresses and once, famously, a scowling and goblin-like Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels — coming from Eisenstaedt, that bald assertion about Hemingway is striking, and sadly revealing. And it's especially sad in light of the effort that Eisenstaedt evidently put into trying to like Hemingway. Sixty years later, LIFE has posted a gallery of the photographs Eisenstaedt took on that mission, many which have never been published before. Link (Image credit: Alfred Eisenstaedt)

LEGO Lunch Box Posted: 05 May 2012 10:28 AM PDT LEGO Lunch Box – $14.95 Are you brown bagging it to work? Build up your reputation as the cool kid coworker with the Lego Lunch Box from the NeatoShop. This great Lego shaped storage box is food and dishwasher safe. It is the perfect gift for LEGO lovers. The LEGO Lunch Box comes in Red and Blue. Make it a set and buy 2. Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Lunch Boxes and LEGO items! Link

Farting on the Moon Posted: 05 May 2012 10:00 AM PDT (YouTube link) Astronaut John Young, commander of Apollo 16, tells a story during the April 1972 mission. Contains NSFW language that you won’t hear in any museum exhibit I know of. -via Metafilter

The Secret Restroom Posted: 05 May 2012 09:00 AM PDT There’s an entire website about the “Secret Restroom” located to the side of Carnation Plaza at Disneyland. It’s not so much a secret anymore, but it is a fully-accessible one-holer tucked away as to not be noticeable. It’s also cleaned every half-hour. From the FAQs: Why is the Secret Restroom better than other Disneyland restrooms? For a variety of reasons. For example, it is the only restroom in the entire park that is entirely handicapped accessible, full of cutting-edge technology, and against park policy for discussion by any cast member. When was the location of the Secret Restroom first publicly revealed? Although Disneyland goes out of its way to avoid publicizing the Hidden Restroom, a photograph of it (seen at right) was printed in a “Disneyland Secrets” article in the Orange County Register in 1986. The site has full pages dedicated to every amenity and fixture of the restroom. Link -via Boing Boing

Chinese Lottery Winners in Silly Masks Posted: 05 May 2012 08:00 AM PDT Common advice on what to do when you win the lottery is to not tell anyone. That’s especially hard to do in states where you are required to make a public appearance or have your name published. In China, lottery winners are required to appear on camera accepting the prize, so they have developed the custom of wearing masks or full head coverings while doing so. Some of these disguises are better than others, as you’ll see in a photo collection at EgoTV. Link -via the Presurfer

Horse Plays Guitar Posted: 05 May 2012 07:00 AM PDT (YouTube link) The first thing I thought of when I saw this video was El Kabong, the alter ego of the cartoon character Quick Draw McGraw. El Kabong made about the same sounds when he beaned a bad guy with his guitar. -via Arbroath

Tom Swifty Contest Posted: 05 May 2012 06:25 AM PDT More Awesome Than a Double Rainbow T-Shirt – $11.95 Of course you all know about our Facebook and Twitter accounts. But did you know we also are ramping up our presence over on Google+? If you’re not yet on there, now’s a good time because we’re running a fun Tom Swifty contest this weekend. Go write a funny one for your chance to win any t-shirt in the neatoshop! The Swifty with the most +1s wins the shirt! Oh, and if you don’t know what a Tom Swifty is, they are puns that follow this formula: ”We just struck oil!” Tom gushed, or ”I might as well be dead,” Tom croaked.

This Week at Neatorama Posted: 05 May 2012 06:00 AM PDT Even if you had no other obvious clues (such as kids with spring fever), you certainly know summer is near when Hollywood releases its big-budget action movies. You may have seen The Avengers already. Dark Shadows opens next week, with Battleship a week later. Then there’s Men in Black II, Prometheus, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter all to follow. Of course, we at Neatorama love to geek out on all of them because the anticipation is often more fun than the movie itself. Right now, we have a giveaway in progress in connection with the movie Battleship, so go enter while you still can. And we ask that you devote at least a little of your weekend to catching up on anything you might have missed here over the past week. Jill Harness looked at how a group of super heroes went From Comics to Film With The Avengers. Eddie Deezen had the lowdown on some classic TV in The Story of I Dream of Jeannie. Alex gave us a glimpse into his office space and what he calls The Messy Desk of Neatorama. Plus he teased us about new items soon to be unveiled at the NeatoShop. We read up on The Lost Continent of Atlantis, courtesy of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader. The Annals of Improbable Research gave us Quantum Gravity Treatment of the Angel Density Problem. And we learned about Going Viral: The First PC Virus from mental_floss magazine. In the What Is It? game this week, the object is indeed a jailer's key pistol. The very first comment had the correct answer, so Craig Clayton wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! Almost every funny answer said it was a key to something or other, and then Michael S. Gatlin ran way into left field and said, "it's a fart machine!" That was honestly the funniest answer, but he did not include a t-shirt selection. Thanks to everyone who played along. You can find the answers to all the mystery items of the week at the What is It? blog. At NeatoBambino, we saw a his-and-her pregnancy photo shoot, a toddler battle Darth Maul, and a lion trying to eat a baby. Check it out regularly so you won’t miss a thing! The non-giveaway post with the most comments this week was Family Locked in Restaurant for Refusing to Pay Tip. Not surprising at all, because tipping is something everyone has an opinion on. The second-most commented-on post was Mom Arrested for Taking 6-Year-Old Daughter Tanning. Her appearance drew more attention than her crime. If you need more fine reading material from Neatorama, check out the Best of Neatorama for feature articles from each year back to 2006. But first, order your Mothers Day gifts from the NeatoShop, because there’s only eight days left until the finest holiday of the month.

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