Neatorama

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• 10 Animals with the Longest Lifespans
• Ninja Skirt Transforms User Into a Coke Machine
• Sink the Bismark! Germany and Britain in Fierce Competition for World's Strongest Beer
• The Chewing Dead
• Thriller Finger Dance
• Epic Koala Fight
• Coffee Splash!
• Where Does Your Taco Come From?
• God is Dead ... but Yearbook Censorship Is Alive and Well
• The World's Strangest Married Couple
• Fat Birds Have More Sex
• OMG Laser Guns Pew Pew Pew

10 Animals with the Longest Lifespans Posted: 20 Feb 2010 06:07 PM PST Mother Nature Network has a photo gallery of ten animals with very long lifespans, including the red sea urchin: The red sea urchin or Strongylocentrotus franciscanus is found only in the Pacific Ocean, primarily along the West Coast of North America. It lives in shallow, sometimes rocky, waters from the low-tide line down to to 90 meters, but they stay out of extremely wavy areas. They crawl along the ocean floor using their spines as stilts. If you discover one, remember to respect your elders — some specimens are more than 200 years old. Link via Digg | Photo: Kirt L. Onthank, Wiki Commons.

Ninja Skirt Transforms User Into a Coke Machine Posted: 20 Feb 2010 05:57 PM PST It looks like a Coke machine, right? It’s not. This is a picture of a woman wearing a special dress. Designer Aya Tsukioka’s made this dress for women who fear being attacked in public places: By unfolding the sheet and stepping to the side of the street, she showed how a woman walking alone could hide behind it to outfox a potential attacker. Aya Tsukioka unveils her design in Tokyo. She hopes it will help ease women’s fear of crime At the link, you can see step-by-step photos of the dress transforming into a disguise. Link via reddit | Photo: New York Times

Sink the Bismark! Germany and Britain in Fierce Competition for World's Strongest Beer Posted: 20 Feb 2010 05:34 PM PST We’ve previously mentioned the fine work of the Scottish brewery BrewDog, which sells the world’s strongest beer at 32% alcohol content. The German brewery Schorschbrau responded by releasing Schorschbock, which is 40% alcohol. This challenge lit the patriotic fires beneath the people at BrewDog, who created a beer named “Sink the Bismark!” for the expressed purpose of taking down their German rival. It is 41% alcohol, and the name refers to enormous German battleship sunk in 1941 by the British Royal Navy. Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Official Website | Photo: US Navy

The Chewing Dead Posted: 20 Feb 2010 11:55 AM PST National Geographic shows us a 330-year-old book that describes the fear of what we would call zombies or vampires. De Masticatione Mortuorum, Latin for “The Chewing Dead”, discusses the customs of the time for preventing corpses from rising up and eating the living. A portion is translated to English: Our Common People attempt to avert the danger of chewing by placing under the chins of the dead a portion of recently excavated earth, lest they perhaps open their mouths and chew on the attached bands… Others, who do not consider this a sufficiently safe measure, before the mouth of the dead is closed, also place a stone and a coin in the mouth, so that in the event that it begins to chew within the grave, it would find the stone and coin and would abstain from chewing. Which fact was witnessed in its time in a multitude of places in Saxonia by Gabriel Rollenhagen: Book IV Mirab. Peregrinat chapter 20, n. 5 in Kornmann. The book is part of this Tuesday’s episode of National Geographic Explorer called Vampire Forensics. Link -via Buzzfeed

Thriller Finger Dance Posted: 20 Feb 2010 10:57 AM PST Those who can dance, those who can’t … finger dance! Behold Michael Jackson’s Thriller finger-danced. Complete with hand costumes, of course. Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

Epic Koala Fight Posted: 20 Feb 2010 10:56 AM PST While the web is buzzin’ with the Epic Beard Man’s fight on an Oakland bus, (which is unshowable on Neatorama for obvious reasons if you’ve ever seen it), I prefer this one: when koalas fight, as seen on Robert Gale’s A Welsh View blog. What – you think that koalas are cuddly and cute all the time? Link [embedded YouTube]

Coffee Splash! Posted: 20 Feb 2010 10:56 AM PST Photo: *Cencula* [Flickr] When Siebe Warmoeskerken of VTPN (Flickr user siebe) started taking photos of cookies splashing into a cup of coffee, little did he know that he was about to spark a little Flickr meme. Behold the Coffee Splash! Photo Pool on Flickr, where photographers do their own take of the coffee splash … Link – via Doobybrain

Where Does Your Taco Come From? Posted: 20 Feb 2010 10:55 AM PST The next time you munch on a taco, ponder this: Where does it come from? (And "the kitchen" or "Taco Bell" instantly pop up in your thoughts, stop reading here). Landscape architect David Fletcher teamed up with art studio REBAR and students from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco to "explore the ingredients of your local taco, from pinto beans to the aluminum foil it all comes wrapped in." BLDGBLOG explains: Our premise was that a seemingly simple, familiar food like the taco truck taco could provide visceral insight into the connections between the systems we were exploring [in our studio's investigation of the city]. By thoroughly learning the process of formation and lifecycle for what it takes to make a taco, we would be better able to propose and design a speculative model of a holistic and sustainable urban future. What resulted was a richly complex network of systems, flows and ecologies that we call the global Tacoshed. Link

God is Dead ... but Yearbook Censorship Is Alive and Well Posted: 20 Feb 2010 10:54 AM PST Arlington High School junior and debate club president Justin Surber likes to wear his black T-shirt featuring Friedrich Nietzche’s famous words "God is Dead." He wears it to provoke debate, he says, believing that his right to free speech is protected. The school’s yearbook, however, apparently disagreed. Gale Fiege of HearldNet has the story: Nobody has told him he can’t wear the shirt to school. He wears it to provoke debate, he says, and that’s why he wore the shirt the day the debate club photo was taken for the yearbook. Now Surber believes his T-shirt prompted the school’s yearbook adviser to ask for a retake of the photo, without the T-shirt. “I feel I am a victim of censorship,” Surber said. When a student yearbook staff member came to take a second photo of the debate club a few weeks ago, Surber’s friend Reed Summerlin asked for an explanation. The yearbook staffer indicated she had been asked by the yearbook adviser not to tell Surber the reason for the retake, Summerlin said. “She said it was about Justin’s shirt.” Link (Photo: Dan Bates / The Herald) – via Unique Daily What do you think? Was that a case of censorship, reasonable yearbook policy, or just a tempest-in-a-teapot indignation of a teenager?

The World's Strangest Married Couple Posted: 20 Feb 2010 10:51 AM PST True love, as J. Tithonus Pednaud of The Human Marvels blog said, knows no bound. Here’s the story Al and Jeanie Tomaini, The World’s Strangest Married Couple: He was shy, gentle and sweet inside and out – from the top of his towering head to the bottom of his size 27 shoes. During the Great Lakes Exposition in 1936, one special young lady took a particular interest in the gentle giant with the coy smile. Her name was Jeanie (Berniece Evelyn Smith) and she was born on August 23rd in 1916 in Blufton, Indiana with twisted arms and without legs. She ‘stood’ just over two feet in height but, in personality, Jeanie was a giant in her own right. Jeanie had been performing in exhibitions since the age of three and was known for her acrobatic dexterity and the nimble way she ran about on her mildly deformed hands. Originally exhibited by her biological mother, Jeanie had been under the abusive care of an adoptive mother since 1931. The pretty but resilient 19 year old endured the psychological abuse with little hope of escape but, when the sincere flames of romance sparked between her and Al Tomaini, she found a gargantuan protector who would forever lift her out of harm’s way. Read the rest here: Link

Fat Birds Have More Sex Posted: 20 Feb 2010 10:50 AM PST Researcher Wolfgang Goymann and colleagues were studying the migrations of the garden warblers (Sylvia borin) when they discovered an interesting nugget of information: While pockets of flab accumulated over the winter months may be a source of frustration for some, it can be a cause of joy for others … The researchers fitted ten fat birds and ten lean birds on the Italian island of Ventotene with temporary adhesive radio transmitters. [...] Monitoring their test subjects using the stick-on surveillance bugs, the German boffins found that the more rotund ones had sex sooner and generally slept only one night in any given location. Plumpness led to sexual success for the wobblebottomed group, while their spindly counterparts took longer to get any action – and tended to make longer stays of more than one night, too. Link

OMG Laser Guns Pew Pew Pew Posted: 20 Feb 2010 10:48 AM PST If you like Babies With Laser Eyes (via Boing Boing), you’ll like OMG Laser Guns Pew Pew Pew. Or not.

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