Neatorama

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• Horde of Vikings Attack Los Angeles
• Bonehead Dinosaur Comb and Brush
• Who You Gonna Call? Turdbusters!
• Call Centers Return to US Homes
• Are Your Children Following "Mutant" Form of Christianity?
• This Bike Shop Sign Ain't Subtle
• The Exposing Grandfathers of China
• LEGO Ghostbusters Scene
• Meticulously Crafted Lightsaber
• Gundam Model Built out of Plastic Model Frames of Smaller Gundam Models
• Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" Played on the ISU Carillon
• 101 Places Not to See Before You Die
• Plaid Skirt Apron
• Turning an Empty Backyard Pool into an Urban Greenhouse
• Li Wei's Flying People
• Close Up, Insect Eggs Look Like They Came From Alien Worlds
• This Week at Neatorama
• Amputee ‘may get better’

Horde of Vikings Attack Los Angeles Posted: 29 Aug 2010 12:50 AM PDT Forget pirates and ninjas, there’s a new meme in town. Here’s the Norse Hollywood Dining Viking, a group of marauding vikings who raid local restaurants, other guests be damned! The leader of this roving band of meal-seeking marauders is Tony Swatton, who, by day, is a master blacksmith and the designer of custom-made weapons, armor and other props for television and film. [...] Swatton says it’s great fun watching the crowd’s reaction to a horde of costumed vikings showing up, but the reaction they will get in Oktoberfest will probably pale in comparison to the reaction they got from IKEA employees during a recent visit. "We got a group of nine vikings to go there for the Swedish meatballs," he said. "At one point, the security guards came up and asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ We said, ‘We’re from the home office in Sweden.’ They didn’t know how to react." The downside of dressing up as vikings? "Thanks to those Capital One ads, we can’t go anywhere without people yelling, ‘What’s in your wallet!’" he laughed. David Moye of Aol News has the story: Link

Bonehead Dinosaur Comb and Brush Posted: 29 Aug 2010 12:49 AM PDT Bonehead Dinosaur Comb and Brush – $5.95 Does your kid have messy hair? Make that a thing of the past with this fun Bonehead dinosaur folding comb and brush from the NeatoShop. There’s no better way to teach your young Neanderthals that unkempt hair deserves to be extinct: Link | More Fun Bath & Body Stuff

Who You Gonna Call? Turdbusters! Posted: 29 Aug 2010 12:48 AM PDT "Only the depth varies" Now that’s a motto! – via Bits and Pieces

Call Centers Return to US Homes Posted: 29 Aug 2010 12:47 AM PDT Remember those call center jobs that corporate America outsourced to the Philippines and India a few years ago? Well, they’re baaaack! For years, Americans have had their phone calls about credit card bills and broken cell phones handled by people in the Philippines or India. But American firms are starting to bring call centers back to the U.S. — and this time around, they are hiring more people to work in their own homes. Ten years ago, it made a lot of sense to outsource these jobs overseas. But that’s changing. Increasingly, companies that want to outsource their customer service jobs are happy with these domestic arrangements. High inflation and double-digit annual raises in some sectors are pushing up the cost of labor in India. At the same time wages in the U.S. are falling and companies are rethinking the trade-offs associated with outsourcing. Carolyn Beeler of NPR’s All Thing considered calls this one in: Link Previously on Neatorama: Chinese Companies are Finding US to be a Bargain!

Are Your Children Following "Mutant" Form of Christianity? Posted: 29 Aug 2010 12:46 AM PDT Dear Christian parents, Princeton professor and Minister Kenda Creasy Dean has issued a warning: your child may be following a "mutant" form of Christianity. Oh, and by the way, you’re to blame: Dean says more American teenagers are embracing what she calls "moralistic therapeutic deism." Translation: It’s a watered-down faith that portrays God as a "divine therapist" whose chief goal is to boost people’s self-esteem. Dean is a minister, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of "Almost Christian," a new book that argues that many parents and pastors are unwittingly passing on this self-serving strain of Christianity. She says this "imposter” faith is one reason teenagers abandon churches. "If this is the God they’re seeing in church, they are right to leave us in the dust," Dean says. "Churches don’t give them enough to be passionate about." CNN’s John Blake explains: Link

This Bike Shop Sign Ain't Subtle Posted: 29 Aug 2010 12:45 AM PDT Sign? This bicycle shop in Atlandsberg, Germany, needed no stinkin’ signs because they’ve got 120 bicycles mounted on the building’s wall – via Flavorwire

The Exposing Grandfathers of China Posted: 28 Aug 2010 04:43 PM PDT There’s an emerging fashion debate in China. It’s between older men who roll up their shirts over their bellies to cool off and younger men who find this action crude and embarrassing. They’ve started calling their elders bang ye or “exposing grandfathers”: “I don’t know, it just feels cooler,” says Hu, perched on a park bench on a sultry weekday morning, the temperatures already into the 90s, the humidity soaring. “Look, you just shake your shirt to create a breeze. I don’t see anyone laughing at me.” In the sports attire section of a nearby department store, Qi Tong scoffs at such reasoning. “It lowers Beijing’s standing as an international city,” the 21-year-old says. “I go without a shirt sometimes at home, but never in public. If my dad reaches for his shirt when I’m out with him, I threaten to go home. It’s just too embarrassing.” Link via Marginal Revolution | Photo: John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times

LEGO Ghostbusters Scene Posted: 28 Aug 2010 04:17 PM PDT LEGO artist Bill Ward built an enormous diorama of a scene from the movie Ghostbusters for the 2010 Bricks by the Bay LEGO exhibit. It won “Best Minifig Scene”. via Great White Snark | Bill Ward’s Flickr Photostream | Photo: Don Solo

Meticulously Crafted Lightsaber Posted: 28 Aug 2010 03:53 PM PDT Bradley W. Wilson builds excellent replicas of lightsabers. He also provides exhaustively detailed instructions on how you can, too, along with large, high-resolution photographs showing the process step by step. If you’ve ever wanted to make your own lightsaber, this is the place to start. Link via io9 | Photo: Sloth Furnace

Gundam Model Built out of Plastic Model Frames of Smaller Gundam Models Posted: 28 Aug 2010 03:38 PM PDT You know those plastic frames that model pieces come attached to in a kit? Apparently they’re called “runners”. These guys took a bunch of them left over from Gundam model kits and turned them into a 10-foot tall statue of a RX-78 Gundam. The project took 250 hours to complete. At the link, you can view more pictures, including some that show the construction process. Link (in Japanese) via technabob | Photo: Production Gandamuato

Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" Played on the ISU Carillon Posted: 28 Aug 2010 09:36 AM PDT (YouTube link) Ah, the power of Facebook. After some Iowa State University students started a Facebook campaign to get resident carillonneur Tin-Shi Tam to play Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” on the carillon, well, she did. This happened yesterday around noon.

101 Places Not to See Before You Die Posted: 28 Aug 2010 09:23 AM PDT Catherine Price’s new book 101 Places Not to See Before You Die is something like a reverse bucket list. It’s about the world’s most pointless or disgusting tourist traps that you should desperately avoid. One is the Karostas Cietums Prison Hotel in Lativa. It’s a prison that has been minimally converted into a hotel: “It’s not like they took the prison and tried to like spice it up and turn it into a luxury resort,” Price explains — it really looks like a prison. The hotel boasts that 150 people were shot there. “Ever since the first years of its existence it has been a place to break people’s lives and suppress their free will,” the hotel’s website explains. “Guests” of the prison sleep on iron beds or prison bunks. For an extra-special occasion, you can arrange to be abducted at your workplace and delivered to the hotel. What place would add to such a list? Link | Image: Catherine Price

Plaid Skirt Apron Posted: 28 Aug 2010 06:55 AM PDT Plaid Skirt Apron – $23.95 Mad about plaid? The Plaid Skirt Apron from the NeatoShop lets you cook in style. The skirt aprons come in 4 colors: Link See also Skeleton Apron

Turning an Empty Backyard Pool into an Urban Greenhouse Posted: 28 Aug 2010 06:54 AM PDT Got an old backyard swimming pool that’s sitting empty? Turn it into a self-sustaining garden! That’s what this Arizonan family did: When we purchased our first home in Mesa, AZ on October of 2009, it came with a large, empty, and run-down pool. Rather than spending thousands of dollars in fixing the pool or having it filled with fill dirt we decided to design an inexpensive & self-sufficient urban greenhouse. Initially, we had anticipated self-sufficiency by 2012 but we achieved our goal by mid-2010. Our family gets about 8 fresh eggs a day, unlimited tilapia fish, organic fruit, veggies, and herbs 365 days a year. Link – Thanks Tiffany!

Li Wei's Flying People Posted: 28 Aug 2010 06:53 AM PDT Beyond Gravity 7 by Li Wei Remember Li Wei, the artist who burst into the blogosphere’s consciousness a couple of years ago with his awesome photographs of people falling out of tall buildings? Well, he’s back. And this time, it’s all about people flying: Link

Close Up, Insect Eggs Look Like They Came From Alien Worlds Posted: 28 Aug 2010 06:52 AM PDT Micrograph by Martin Oeggerli Zebra longwing butterfly egg (Heliconius charithonia) The orange hue of this zebra longwing butterfly egg may warn predators: "Eat me if you dare." The threat would not be idle. The egg contains cyanide and other toxins ingested by adults from the plants they eat. We don’t have to look far to find alien-looking lifeforms, as the September 2010 issue of National Geographic shows. All you need is a microscope and a few insect eggs. Links: Article by Rob Dunn | Photo Gallery by Martin Oeggerli in cooperation with Prüftechnik Uri and School of Applied Sciences, FHNW

This Week at Neatorama Posted: 28 Aug 2010 06:06 AM PDT Even though I remind you of all our exclusive articles every weekend, there are times when you might say, “I wonder what Neatorama did before I started reading it.” Or you might say, “Hey, Neatorama did an article on that way back when -let me find it!” To make that easy for you, we have updated and revamped our “best of” page so you can browse by year and month and by pictures. Take a look! This week, we welcomed a new collaboration with the magazine Annals of Improbable Research by posting a classic article called How To Write A Scientific Paper. From Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, we got The Biggest Cult Movie of All Time. If you don’t know what movie that is, you obviously missed the article! We saw how four fast food companies changed logos without changing their recognition factor in The Evolution of Fast Food Logos. NeatoBambino scored an interview with Dallas Clayton, author of An Awesome Book and gave away three copies of the children’s book. David Israel interviewed Yael Hersonski about her critically acclaimed debut A Film Unfinished. The interview and clips from the movie are in the post Nazi Propaganda Footage Discovered. Mental-floss gave us fun facts about walruses in I Am the Walrus. Steven Johnson has some far-out ideas to share about Cocooning and Hiding at Home. This week we said goodbye to NeatoGeek. It was fun while it lasted. The good news is that John Farrier will continue to contribute his geeky sci-fi items here at the main blog. Meanwhile, you can check out the many items previously posted at NeatoGeek. Congratulations to schm3cky, who won a t-shirt from the NeatoShop in Mal and Chad’s Fill in the Bubble Frenzy! See the post for his clever speech bubble line. A spur-of-the-moment weekend competition asked you to caption the video entitled Birthday Cat is Unimpressed. Congratulations to to Nick who won a t-shirt from the NeatoShop with this gem: "I told them all i wanted was a cheezburger." Neatorama teamed up with mental_floss for another How Did You Know? contest which began Tuesday with the contest details. We already have some winners, but the contest won’t end until the ultimate challenge is presented and solved on Monday, so watch for that coming up at mental_floss! Over at Facebook, David runs random contests where you can win more prizes from Neatorama, like this one that only required you to pick a shirt. Just one more reason you’ll want to keep up with our social networking feed, at Facebook and a Twitter as well.

Amputee ‘may get better’ Posted: 28 Aug 2010 05:44 AM PDT Twenty-seven-year-old Johno Lee, a British veteran of the war in Afghanistan, applied for and was denied a disabled parking permit three times. Meanwhile, he racked up £800 in fines for parking in reserved spots so he could unload his wheelchair. Lance-corporal Lee, from Coddington, said when he first applied to Nottinghamshire County Council for a blue badge he was advised he was young and 'may get better.' His right leg was amputated below the knee after he was caught up in an explosion in Helmand Province in 2008. He said: "I replied that they possibly didn't quite understand the situation and that I thought it unlikely that my leg would grow back. After the local newspaper the Newark Advertiser heard of his story, a reporter contacted officials who are now looking into the matter. The fines already levied against Lee have been rescinded. Link -via Arbroath

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