Comedian Todd Lamb often posts odd signs from a fictitious person named Chris on lamp posts in New York City. They form an ongoing story about the life of an eccentric man who wants to meet other people like him. The Village Voice interviewed Lamb about the project:
Tell me about the Chris character.
I feel like a lot of New Yorkers are in their own little world, whatever that world is. I wanted to see if I could break them out of that. For Chris, all he wants to do is meet up with people, because he’s not busy. He’s the opposite of all these New Yorkers who are booked solid throughout the day, and even if they had free time, they wouldn’t want to meet up with you.
Chris has lots of time and is wiling to meet you for the most mundane things. And no one wants to do those things except Chris. Like, Chris wants to eat some Fritos and move a mattress. He just wants soda, snacks, and your time.
I know the skeptics among you probably think that this is a bad idea, but you also scoffed when they made a robot that could feed off human flesh. And that’s turned out okay so far, right?
So: no worries. The Punching Pro is designed to help human users learn how to box. That’s all.
Veronica Knight made a full-length crocheted Viking costume. It served as her entry into tomorrow’s mustache and beard competition in Detroit. We ought to do something similar among Neatoramanauts, but with an original twist. Perhaps a back hair competition.
Gerhard Mayer makes enormous mosaics using old jigsaw puzzle pieces as his building material. Some are abstract and fanciful — fairytale castles and space epic scenes — but I found this skyscape to be especially captivating.
Does your kitchen table need more energy? You should get the Salt Power Salt & Pepper Battery Shakers from the NeatoShop! With these little beauties your kitchen table will feel instantly recharged.
In the past few decades, Shaolin Temple has become famous. Indeed, for many it is synonymous with kung fu. The temple has become an international business empire - it has built martial arts academies, funded touring kung fu troupes, shot film and TV projects.
But as it is gaining in fame, is Shaolin Temple losing its soul? Peter Gwin of National Geographic writes this fascinating article about the lives of a couple of Shaolin disciples:
On the last morning I spend at his retreat, Dejian shows me his private quarters, a tiny stone cupola perched on the tip of a sheer cliff. He leads the way out to a terrace with a view of the deep, bowl-shaped valley carpeted with thick pine forests. A weather front is blowing in, and his thick wool cape flutters behind him.
Without warning he jumps up onto the low wall bordering the lip of the cliff, the wind filling his cape so that it flows out over the void. I suddenly feel guilty, that I somehow prodded him onto the ledge, like a morbid voyeur. I hadn't consciously considered it before, but of course that's why many people come up to see Shi Dejian, to watch him challenge death. Maybe this time death wins. But standing on the ledge, he smiles at me. "You are afraid?" he asks, seeing the look on my face. "Kung fu is not only training the body; it is also about controlling fear." He hops lightly from one foot to the other, lunging, punching, spinning, each step inches from a horrifying fall. His eyes widen as he concentrates. The cape billows and snaps in the cold wind.
"You cannot defeat death," he says, his voice rising over the wind. He kicks a foot out over the abyss, balancing on one of his tree-trunk legs. "But you can defeat your fear of death."
Just like humans, whales also have "pop songs," complete with music mania that sweeps across the ocean:
The findings are based on 11 years of recordings from underwater microphones slung over the sides of boats, which were collected by marine biologist Ellen Garland of the University of Queensland in Australia and colleagues. Picking out the patterns took a while; the team had to listen to 745 songs in total from six whale populations across the South Pacific over the 11-year period. The researchers identified 11 distinctly different styles (audio). Sometimes the "hit song" contained snippets from previous seasons, sometimes it was entirely revolutionary. But at any given time and place, there was only one song. What’s more, the popular song switched incredibly rapidly; it took only 2 to 3 months for whales in a given region to entirely change their tune, the team reports online today in Current Biology.
For male whales, singing is known to be a mating behavior, and Garland calls the results a "weird interaction of constrained novelty" where each whale wants to one-up the whale next to it but still feels pressure to conform enough that it doesn’t stand out as an oddball. But whether a whale primarily intends its song to impress females or to intimidate other males with its swanky style remains unclear.
Punt guns were enormous shotguns used to hunt waterfowl in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. They were so heavy that they were normally attached to small boats called punts and the boats were then pointed as birds resting on the water’s surface:
Punt guns were usually custom-designed and so varied widely, but could have bore diameters exceeding 2 inches (51 mm) and fire over a pound (0.5 kilos) of shot at a time.
A single shot could kill over 50 waterfowl resting on the water’s surface. They were too big to hold and the recoil so large that they were mounted directly on the punts used for hunting, hence their name. Hunters would maneuver their punts quietly into line and range of the flock using poles or oars to avoid startling them.
Generally the gun was fixed to the punt; thus the hunter would maneuver the entire boat in order to aim the gun. The guns were sufficiently powerful, and the punts themselves sufficiently small, that firing the gun often propelled the punt backwards several inches or more. To improve efficiency, hunters could work in fleets of up to around ten punts.
The practice faded as wild waterfowl stocks were depleted. It was eventually banned in the United States, though I gather it is still legal in the United Kingdom.
I’m not sure whether the Hamburglar put her up to this, but a 64-year-old woman refused to stop when pulled over by police. Instead, she got herself into a McDonald’s drive-thru lane and ordered lunch:
Officer Courtney Vassell pulled up behind Spen in the drive-thru lane, and got out of the patrol car. With police lights flashing behind him, he told her to pull out into the parking lot for a traffic stop, according to a police report.
Spen, though, completed her food order, paid the bill, and then drove her bronze 2001 Chevrolet out of the parking lot and onto Northwest Sixth Court, Vassell said.
Vassell again flipped on his siren and stopped Spen outside the McDonald’s, where he said she "rolled her window down one inch and said she was not speeding and she would not roll her window down."
Meet Father Jose Francisco Syquia. He’s a Roman Catholic priest in Manila, Philippines, with a rather unusual job: he’s head of the Manila Archdiocese’s Office of Exorcism.
A blood-curdling scream echoes through the Roman Catholic chapel in Manila as Father Jose Francisco Syquia says a prayer of exorcism over a Satanic cult member believed to be possessed by the devil.
"It’s very painful," the woman cries in an unearthly voice, her body contorting in an attempt to break free from the tight grasp of Syquia’s assistants. After a few minutes she falls silent, her limp body exhausted.
The case is among hundreds documented on video and kept by Syquia, who heads the Manila Archdiocese’s Office of Exorcism — the only one that exists in the Catholic nation of 94 million people.
"She would have levitated had she not been restrained," Syquia said of the woman in the video, portions of which were shown to AFP during a rare interview at his office in the basement of a seminary in Manila.
Syquia believes he is in the frontline of the battle between good and evil on earth. "There is a great dramatic increase of possessions right now," said the 44-year-old priest. "More and more the demons are gaining a foothold into this society."
Talkin’ bout the devil – here’s a picture of the Satanic Leaf-Tailed Gecko (previously on Neatorama):
The satanic leaf-tailed gecko (Uroplatus phantasticus) is the smallest of 12 species of bizarre-looking leaf-tailed geckos. The nocturnal creature has extremely cryptic camouflage so it can hide out in forests in Madagascar. This group of geckos is found only in primary, undisturbed forests, so their populations are very sensitive to habitat destruction. Large Uroplatus species have more teeth than any other living terrestrial vertebrate species.
The gecko species was discovered in Mantadia-Zahamena corridor of Madagascar in 1998 during one of the Conservation International (CI) "Rapid Assessment Program" (RAP) surveys.
Thinking of grilling a steak this weekend? Well, don’t read this, then: a disturbing new study revealed that about a quarter of all meat and poultry sampled from around the United States have drug-resitant strains of Staphylococcus aureus.
About half — 47% of the samples — contained S. aureus, the researchers reported Friday in Clinical Infectious Diseases. Of those bacteria, 52% were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics. DNA testing suggested the animals were the source of contamination. The research was funded by the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming.
"The fact that drug-resistant S. aureus was so prevalent, and likely came from the food animals themselves, is troubling, and demands attention to how antibiotics are used in food-animal production today," said Lance Price, lead author of the study and director of TGen’s Center for Food Microbiology and Environmental Health, said in a news release.
We’ve known that ants are social animals like us, but a new study by Noa Pinter-Wollman of Stanford University and colleagues show just how similar they are to humans. Heck, they’ve even got the an social networking system similar to Facebook!
On average, each ant had around 40 interactions. However, around 10 percent of the ants made more than 100 contacts with other ants. Further research is examining just what makes these more social ants different than the others within the colonies.
The researchers compare this type of socialization to that seen on sites like Facebook. While most people have a relatively small number of Facebook friends, there are some with a friends list in the thousands. It is these friends that act as a sort of information hub, spreading information out to a large number of readers. These particular ants are functioning as a large social hub of information.
How did Congresswoman Donna Edwards (D-Maryland) send a message to her Republican colleagues on the House floor about the government shutdown debacle? With White Stripes, of course!
Tired of rustlers stealing his flock of sheep, English farmer John Heard decided to … dye his sheep orange!
The 48-year-old has put his flock of 250 blackface ewes through a harmless dip of orange dye making them so highly visible wary thieves are giving them a wide berth. Mr Heard, who runs his livestock farm near Okehampton, Devon had lost 200 sheep over the past few years but says the orange dye is working wonders.
He explained:"Sheep rustling has become a big problem with ewes worth around £140 each. My flock roams Dartmoor and I was getting mighty fed-up with losing so many.
"My son James suggested the orange dye and although it produces some strange looking sheep it has done the trick and I haven’t lost one this year.
"It works because they are so easy to distinguish making it easier for me and my neighbours to keep a wary eye out for them. Plus the rustlers are obviously nervouse about stealing such easily distinguished animals."
That’s a tiny sea mollusk called a chiton, that lives about 50 feet below the water’s surface. It’s a pretty darned weird animal, but scientists have found something that makes it even more remarkable: it has eyes made of rocks.
"Turns out they can see objects, though probably not well," said study researcher Daniel Speiser, who recently became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. [...]
The team realized in a lab experiment that the animal’s lenses were made of aragonite (calcium carbonate), rather than proteins like other biological lenses.
This little Pig Matryoshka went to the NeatoShop! That little piggy, that little piggy, that little piggy, that piggy, that little piggy, and that piggy went to the NeatoShop too! This was all so that you could shop from home in your underwear. Yippee, yippee, yippee! Isn’t online shopping grand!
We showed you 13 Hilarious Peeps Candy Easter Dioramas and led you to Sci-Fi Peeps Dioramas, but since it’s the season for Peeps, there are always more! Check out a roundup of Peeps dioramas that aspire to what we call high culture: scenes of artists, art galleries, famous artworks, and literary references, and a symphony as well, in this collection of pictures from the Chicago Tribune’s competitions at mental_floss. Shown here is a marshmallow version of Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles. Link
Ever wondered what bears consider worth their hard-earned money? You probably could have guessed this one, but Pleated Jeans has also charted how bats, cats, kangaroos, snails, rabbits, bluejays, anteaters, and more animals are spending their tax refunds. Link to part one. Link to part two.
Just in case you’d rather have one large Gummi Bear instead of the 1400 regular-sized candies that would be the equivalent, you can buy one from Vat19. There are seven flavors to choose from. Each contains 12,600 calories and will set you back $30. Good luck keeping people from touching it. Link -via Boing Boing
Billed as “the ultimate stiletto,” this pair of shoes is made of gold or platinum (your choice) and encrusted with 2,200 handset diamonds, over 30 karats total. It also features “the exquisite Stamen Fluted Heal” (sic). It also comes with extra soles, so it will never wear out. The price? £100,000. That’s $163,500 US. Got that in a size 6E? Link -via J-Walk Blog
U.S. income tax returns must be in the mail by Monday, but most people who did not have to pay more into the system have already filed. Many folks who expect refunds got the money faster by getting refund anticipation loans, or RALs. Mother Jones explains how refund anticipation loans work, by looking how John Hewitt, founder of Jackson-Hewitt, got into the loan business. The RAL was invented by Ross Longfield in 1987.
Ultimately, Longfield persuaded H&R Block to sign up. But no one was as smitten as John Hewitt—who understood that people earning $15,000 or $20,000 or $25,000 a year live in a perpetual state of financial turmoil. Hewitt began opening outposts in the inner cities, Rust Belt towns, depressed rural areas—anywhere the misery index was high. “That was the low-hanging fruit,” he says. “Going into lower-income areas and delivering refunds quicker was where the opportunity was.”
Customers wanting a RAL paid Jackson Hewitt a $24 application fee, a $25 processing fee, and a $2 electronic-filing fee, plus 4 percent of the loan amount. On a $2,000 refund, that meant $131 in charges—equivalent to an annual interest rate of about 170 percent—not to mention the few hundred bucks you might spend for tax preparation. “Essentially, they’re charging people triple-digit interest rates to borrow their own money,” says Chi Chi Wu, a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center.
A few hundred bucks for tax preparation? Really?
“These businesses are in this neighborhood for one reason: They see they can make a killing here,” says Ramon Dalmasi, an accountant with a front-row seat on the growth of the instant tax business. Dalmasi opened a bookkeeping business in the Bronx in 1997 and watched as chain after tax-prep chain popped up on commercial strips in his community. A few years ago, he relocated to Yonkers, an aging suburb just north of New York City, and found the same chains there as well. “They don’t see people struggling to put food on the table,” he says. “They just see people who can make them millions.” Even without a RAL, a working parent who qualifies for the EITC often pays $300 or more at a tax mill. Dalmasi, a CPA who teaches accounting at nearby Lehman College, charges that same client $75 or $100. “Why should I charge anything more than that,” he asks, “when it’s taking me 20 minutes?”
I have four different types of income from many small sources and a family of six, but my CPA only charges $100. The article points out how the poor are being taken advantage of, but as some have said elsewhere, this type of loan is still preferable to organized crime loans. Link -via Metafilter, where there’s a lively discussion on this article.
We’ve posted about the tiny Australian Peacock Spider before, but now you can see its amazing mating dance. A couple of minutes into this video, you’ll understand how it got its name. Read more about this spider at Catalyst. Link -via The Daily What
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Just like humans, whales also have "pop songs," complete with music mania that sweeps across the ocean:
I’m not sure whether the Hamburglar put her up to this, but a 64-year-old woman refused to stop when pulled over by police. Instead, she got herself into a McDonald’s drive-thru lane and ordered lunch:
Meet Father Jose Francisco Syquia. He’s a Roman Catholic priest in Manila, Philippines, with a rather unusual job: he’s head of the Manila Archdiocese’s Office of Exorcism.
Thinking of grilling a steak this weekend? Well, don’t read this, then: a disturbing new study revealed that about a quarter of all meat and poultry sampled from around the United States have drug-resitant strains of Staphylococcus aureus.
We’ve known that ants are social animals like us, but a new study by Noa Pinter-Wollman of Stanford University and colleagues show just how similar they are to humans. Heck, they’ve even got the an social networking system similar to Facebook!
Tired of rustlers stealing his flock of sheep, English farmer John Heard decided to … dye his sheep orange!
U.S. income tax returns must be in the mail by Monday, but most people who did not have to pay more into the system have already filed. Many folks who expect refunds got the money faster by getting refund anticipation loans, or RALs. Mother Jones explains how refund anticipation loans work, by looking how John Hewitt, founder of Jackson-Hewitt, got into the loan business. The RAL was invented by Ross Longfield in 1987.
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