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Wrinkly Aardvark Baby Posted: 29 Dec 2008 08:34 PM PST I’ve seen a lot of cute baby critters in my time, but this is the first time I’ve seen a newborn aardvark. He’s so weird looking, he looks like Alf’s hairless baby. If you live near the Detroit zoo, check out this “hideously cute” babe. Link

Snail Sweater: Adorable & Cuddly Posted: 29 Dec 2008 08:23 PM PST If your snails are getting too cold this winter, just get them a cute little sweater like this guy has. I can’t begin to say how strangely cute I think this is. Link Via Cute Overload

Celebrities are Clowns… No, Really Posted: 29 Dec 2008 08:12 PM PST I am horribly, terribly scared of clowns (and people dressed up in costumes or masks that obscure their faces, for that matter), but even I find this contest on Worth 1000 interesting. The contest lets people with wicked Photoshop skills put their techniques to the test with regular challenges. This one is to give the celebrity of their choice a Ringling-style makeover. The one here is by Worth1000 submitter SassyDeb, and in case the grease paint threw you, it’s Hugh Laurie from House. Here’s the whole gallery, but you can also find previous incarnations of this particular challenge here.

Real Superheroes Are A Little Crazy Posted: 29 Dec 2008 06:52 PM PST While I was on vacation this Christmas, I was lucky enough to grab the newest article of Rolling Stone and read “The Legend of Master Legend.” I haven’t read anything so funny in a long time. I highly recommend reading this brilliant article that details the exploits of real life superheroes. Their main focus is on the man on the right in the photo, his name is Master Legend and he makes his own weapons to fight crime. And he give socks to homeless people to help fight staph infections. While their hearts are in the right place, I have to believe there’s less insane ways to save the world. Still, it’s hard to resist adoring their great stories: There was the time Master Legend and the Ace shut down a crack den; the drug kingpin they put out of business; the money Master Legend forcibly retrieved from a thief who stole from a handicapped Vietnam vet; and the recent mission when the Justice Force had to “put the stomp on a child molester and his gang of crackheads.” They had a plan, but things went awry when Master Legend’s brother was captured in the thick of battle by the child molester, whom they call Tree Man Roy. Link

New Car Feature Alerts Drivers When They Fall Asleep Posted: 29 Dec 2008 06:43 PM PST I can think of a couple of times when I’ve nodded off while driving. This feature would’ve come in handy. Special sensors in the steering wheels of new Mercedes E-Class cars will detect inattentiveness by the driver and sound an alarm. Link via Geekologie

Plastic Surgeon Runs Car on Fat Posted: 29 Dec 2008 05:50 PM PST This is a story too gross to make up. A plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills is in trouble for modifying his engine to run on liposuctioned fat. Several ex-patients are suing Dr. Craig Bittner because they did not agree to having their excess used for his benefit. Apparently this isn’t the first time something like this has happened or else California wouldn’t already have a law on the books banning people from using human medical waste to power vehicles. Whatever happened to appreciating the search for alternate fuel sources? Link Via Consumerist, Photo by dotbenjamin [Flickr]

Relationships Between 10 Classic Authors Posted: 29 Dec 2008 05:12 PM PST Lots of people know about the relationship between fantasy writers C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, but who know Bram Stoker stole Oscar Wilde’s true love out from under his nose? I didn’t, at least, so I think these relationships between classic authors are terribly interesting. I included Lewis and Tolkien for those who didn’t know about their friendship. There are a lot more where this came from - I might make this a two-parter. 1. Bram Stoker was a frequent guest at Oscar Wilde's parents' house. Oscar's mom, Lady Jane, was a poet who liked to keep literary company. Bram found himself in Lady Jane's circle, and eventually met Florence Balcombe, who had previously been Lady Jane's daughter-in-law to be. Yep, Florence was once engaged to Oscar Wilde. At least, by some accounts. Other accounts say they dated seriously and Oscar merely wanted to marry her. At any rate, Florence ended up marrying Bram Stoker instead. When Oscar heard she was engaged, he wrote her a letter and said that he was leaving Ireland and would never come back. He mostly stayed true to his word – he only came back twice for a brief visits. 2. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were good friends since they first met at Oxford and belonged to the Inklings group together. But they hated one another's books. When Tolkien was writing a new character for Lord of the Rings and tried to describe the character to Lewis, Lewis famously responded, "Not another frigging dwarf!" Except, you know, he actually swore. But this is a family blog. 3. Louisa May Alcott loved Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Really loved them. Like Alcott, they were residents of Concord, Massachusetts, so she had friendships with both. She and Thoreau used to exchange ideas and he would play his flute for her. The Emerson infatuation may have started when Ralph Waldo gave her the book Goethe's Correspondence with a Child, which involves a young girl in love with a horny old poet. You can see why Louisa may have been flattered and sort of started stalking him – she would leave flowers on his doorstep, write him love letters but never send them, and sit outside of his window and sing him songs in German. He was married and had a daughter just six years younger than Louisa and never returned her affections. 4. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were just three years apart in age. They met at the Dingo Bar in Paris in 1925, when Hemingway was 25 and Fitzgerald was 28. The Great Gatsby had just been published and looked to be a big hit; Hemingway, on the other hand, was a relatively unknown author. They were close friends for a while – Fitzgerald was notoriously insecure about himself in almost every aspect, and when his wife once insulted the size of his manhood, Fitz actually dropped trou and asked Hemingway if everything looked normal to him. Hemingway assured his friend that things appeared to be up to par. But the friendship quickly deteriorated. As Fitzgerald's career fell and he descended further into alcoholism, Hemingway's work started picking up. Hemingway started making fun of Fitzgerald to newspapers and magazines, to the point that Fitzgerald actually pleaded with his old friend to stop. The reason for the sudden cold shoulder? Hemingway was said to have been disgusted by Fitzgerald's alcoholism, because he would make huge public scenes and embarrass himself and everyone around him when he was drunk. 5. And, speaking of Hemingway, he was also once very good friends with Gertrude Stein. He met her in Paris as well, at the introduction of their mutual friend, writer Sherwood Anderson (Anderson also introduced Hemingway to Ezra Pound). She reminded him of his mother both physically and otherwise. He even openly used Gertrude to try to work out some of his issues with his mother. She ended up introducing him to bullfighting, Spain, and prose. He used her as his sounding board and would completely rewrite something at her suggestion. He even made her the Godmother of his first son, Jack.

New Year’s Champagne Recommendations Posted: 29 Dec 2008 05:03 PM PST I know next to nothing about champagne, but I do know I’d like to have a bottle that costs more than $3.99 for my little gathering. But not much more than that. Luckily, Slashfood has my back. They have rated eight brands of bubbly of varying tastes and low price points, so if you are as clueless as I am, you should find this helpful. They even have a bottle of champagne that tastes decent and costs, yes, $4.

Top 5 Viral Videos of 2008 Posted: 29 Dec 2008 03:38 PM PST The ABC World News Webcast has announced their picks for the biggest viral videos of 2008, with a little help from Yours Truly. Link

Sparebots Posted: 29 Dec 2008 12:23 PM PST Lenny&Meriel make these delightful figures they call Sparebots out of resistors, caps, pots, chips, sockets, and other electronic parts! Some are arranged into little scenes, and some are animals. Link to Flickr set. Link to Lenny’s blog. -Thanks, Joe!

Sean Combs and Other Self-Made Americans Posted: 29 Dec 2008 12:23 PM PST The Art of Manliness blog has a nifty post about 25 self-made men in American history, people who came from unpromising circumstances but pulled themselves by the bootstraps to become successful. Many of the men listed are the usual suspect, but it included someone I’d never thought of before: Puff, Puff Daddy, P. Diddy-whatever you want to call him, the name Sean Combs most deserves is that of self-made man. Mr. Combs claims to work harder than anyone else in the entertainment business, and he has the success to show for it. Born in public housing projects in Harlem, Sean’s father was shot to death when Sean was only 2. At age 12, Combs, who was too young to officially have his own paper route, found a way around the rule by taking over the routes of several older boys and giving them 50% of his earnings. He was soon making over $700 a week as a paperboy. After high school, Mr. Combs interned at Uptown Records while he attended Howard University. He dropped out and took an executive position with the company. Fired from the label in 1993, Combs formed his own company-Bad Boy Records. In addition to producing hit artists like the Notorious B.I.G., P. Diddy started putting out his own successful rap records and diversifying his business interests. His enterprises now include the Sean John clothing line, a cologne, the Making the Band television series, and a restaurant in Atlanta. With a net worth estimated to be around $324 million, Combs has taken full ownership of his life and done it with style. Link - Thanks Mu!

The 13 Most Famous Numbers and Their Stories Posted: 29 Dec 2008 12:21 PM PST When I saw the title, I thought this might be a comedy posting, but it really is the stories of famous numbers. The pictured number is called the “golden section”. This number [represented by the symbol at left] is also known as the golden section and is commonly accepted as an expression that describes the perfect proportions in architecture or anatomy. In mathematics and the arts, two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio between the sum of those quantities and the larger one is the same as the ratio between the larger one and the smaller. The golden ratio is a mathematical constant, approximately 1.6180339887. Of course, not all of them are this serious, but they are fascinating. Link -via the Presurfer

The Secret of Luck: Why Some People Have All the Luck Posted: 29 Dec 2008 11:26 AM PST Why do some people have all the luck while others are perpetually unlucky? Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire was determined to get to the scientific bottom of the phenomenon of luck, and what he discovered may surprise you: I placed advertisements in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me. Hundreds of extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research and over the years, have been interviewed by me. I have monitored their lives and had them take part in experiments. The results reveal that although these people have almost no insight into the causes of their luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their good and bad fortune. Take the case of seemingly chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities. I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. I had secretly placed a large message halfway through the newspaper saying: ‘Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $50′. This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it. Unlucky people are generally more tense than lucky people, and this anxiety disrupts their ability to notice the unexpected. Link | Richard Wiseman’s official website | His book: The Luck Factor

Toddler Dancing to Beyoncé: Cute or Disturbing? Posted: 29 Dec 2008 11:25 AM PST Thingamababy blog has a viral video clip - the original has over 1 million views - of a young girl named Arianna dancing to Beyoncé’s Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It). She (Arianna) has the moves down pat, but is it cute or disturbing (or a little of both) to let your toddler watch MTV for its, um, videos of scantily clad pop stars dancing? Link [embedded YouTube clip]

Lawmakers Ran for the Door as Anti-Drug Crusader Proposed Drug Testing Posted: 29 Dec 2008 11:23 AM PST The Los Angeles Times has been running a series of articles about Mexico’s drug cartels and the government’s (so far ineffective) war against drugs. Past articles have included the gruesome tale of drug boss dissolving the bodies of his enemies in vats of lye and the tale of a legendary kingpin who picks up the tab of everyone dining at the restaurant he happens to eat in. In the latest article of the series, Tracy Wilkinson writes about Yudit del Rincon, an anti-drug crusader and state legislator from Sinaloa, who had a brilliant idea: Yudit del Rincon, a 44-year-old lawmaker, went before the state legislature this year with a proposition: Let’s require lawmakers to take drug tests to prove they are clean. Her colleagues greeted the idea with applause. Then she sprang a surprise on them: Two lab technicians waited in the audience to administer drug tests to every state lawmaker. We should set the example, she said. They nearly trampled one another in the stampede to the door, Del Rincon recalled. Link (Photo: Don Bartletti/LA Times)

Ashleigh Brilliant’s Pot-Shots Posted: 29 Dec 2008 11:21 AM PST For the past 40 years, Ashleigh Brilliant has been making these wonderful "Pot-Shots," combining his marvelous wit with brevity (all are 17 words or less). He has over 10,000 illustrated epigrams that you can view on his website or buy as postcards or CD Go check it out - they’re wonderful! Link - Thanks Strange de Jim!

The Coming Collapse of the United States Posted: 29 Dec 2008 11:20 AM PST You and I may be facing an economic collapse, but one Russian professor is having the time of his life. For over a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin had been predicing the US to fall apart and most people ignored him … until now. He’s been the darling of Russia’s news media with his dire prediction of the future of the United States: Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces — with Alaska reverting to Russian control. [...] California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia. Link

Electricity-Generating Roadways Posted: 29 Dec 2008 11:18 AM PST Israeli energy company Innowattech has created a new type of road that generates electricity as cars drive on it: The supercharged surface is embedded with piezoelectric crystals, which transform kinetic energy from passing vehicles into an electrical current. With widespread adoption, the technology could feed energy back into the nation’s burgeoning electric vehicle grid, transforming congested roadways into a clean green source of energy. The amount of electricity produced isn’t that much (400 kilowatts per kilometer or 645/mi), and there’s no mention on how cost effective it would be. But given the sheer amount of roadways we have (the US has over 4 million miles of roads and streets in its highway system alone), it’s an interesting albeit niche approach to generate electricity. Link

5 Creepy Beach Sculptures To Scare Off Sunbathers Posted: 29 Dec 2008 11:02 AM PST If you saw this on the beach, you’d probably want to set up camp some distance away. But this beached sperm whale is made of wood, aluminum and polyester! The sculpture is at Scheveningen Beach in The Netherlands. See this and four other creepy beach installations. Link -via Geek Like Me

Did Andy Rooney Really Say That? Posted: 29 Dec 2008 11:00 AM PST Today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss tests whether you can tell a real Andy Rooney quote from the many attributed to him over the years. I scored 68%, a bit better than average. Link

One year in 40 seconds Posted: 29 Dec 2008 08:17 AM PST Vimeo user Eirik Solheim captured a year’s passage through four seasons with photos taken at regular intervals and assembled them into this stunning video. I suggest clicking through to the full-sized video.

The Fairest Domino of Them All Posted: 29 Dec 2008 08:10 AM PST Alex posted the new world record for domino toppling not too long ago. I don’t think this one breaks any records, but it is quite original - it tells the story of Snow White in domino form.

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