Neatorama

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• Super Deformed Star Wars Plush
• Post-It War
• The End: Flash Game About Death
• Rubik's Companion Cube
• Cork Mosaics
• Lobster Motorcycle
• 200 Rounds When You Need Them
• J.R.R. Tolkien's Silmarillion as an Illuminated Manuscript
• Harold Pinter's Duck Hunt
• Playing with the Moon
• Dolphin Conch Fishing
• 22 Fascinating and Bizarre Classes Offered This Semester
• The Underground River Beneath The Amazon River
• Indiana Jones Traveling Exhibit
• Hurricane Irene as Seen from Space
• Secret Power of Middle Children
• My Little Pop Icons
• Axe-Wielding Bird
• Memorial Bandit Caught in the Act
• Zombie's Day Out
• World War II Vets Gather in St. Louis for Final Reunion
• BBQ Rockin' Fork

Super Deformed Star Wars Plush Posted: 26 Aug 2011 08:33 PM PDT Super Deformed Star Wars Plush – $9.95 Do you long to cuddle up with your favorite Star Wars vehicle? Now you can with the Super Deformed Plush from the NeatoShop.  The Super Deformed Star Wars Plush are available in: X-Wing Fighter (shown) Millenium Falcon and At-At Star Wars vehicles have never been so cute and cuddly. Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fantastic Star Wars items. Link

Post-It War Posted: 26 Aug 2011 06:48 PM PDT Love Post-Its art? Neatoramanaut toenail told us about Post'It War, a website dedicated to chronicling the ongoing war of window art that's been going on in skyscrapers of France. Can you say office workers vs. office workers? Oh, won't someone think of the office supply budget! Link The best yet, however, is this secret Project Lune: a multi-story recreation of Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin: Destination Moon.

The End: Flash Game About Death Posted: 26 Aug 2011 06:47 PM PDT Before Alice Taylor of Wonderland blog quit her day job to work on a startup, she worked for Britain's Channel 4 Education to create public service games with social lessons. This one above deserves a particular note: The End is a Flash game about death, belief and science. The game about death & philosophy I commissioned from lovely Preloaded, to have a look at death and all the things around it. It's something as a society we report on a lot, and fetishise/agonise over, but we never really talk about how to handle it when it happens. Kids (in the UK) are predominantly atheist or agnostic these days (large numbers of adults, too), and religion usually has quite a lot of ritual and support ideas around death, but the secular world, not so much. Us atheists are on our own, a bit. This game was commissioned around wanting to help out with that, a bit. It's a platformer, and a quiz, and a 2-player card game, and a bunch of thought-provoking, open ended questions. Oh, and collectibles. Dig in. Link | Alice's blog post about The End - via Boing Boing

Rubik's Companion Cube Posted: 26 Aug 2011 06:17 PM PDT Prop maker Chris Myles, the man behind those marvelous lemon grenades, devised several functional Rubik’s Cubes that look like Weighted Companion Cubes. Lambert Varias of Technabob asks “What's next Chris? A GLaDOS Speak & Spell?” Yes, please! Link -via Technabob

Cork Mosaics Posted: 26 Aug 2011 05:55 PM PDT Scott Gundersen makes enormous portraits out of used wine corks. If I understand it correctly, Gundersen doesn’t paint the corks at all, but arranges them by their pre-existing colors. Pictured above is Grace, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who, Gundersen states, “came to fully embody her name, shared her story and regained her smile.” Link -via Dude Craft

Lobster Motorcycle Posted: 26 Aug 2011 05:36 PM PDT Chefs at an exhibition hosted by the Fuzhou Hotel in Fuzhou, China, made motorcycle sculptures out of pieces of lobster. Warning: not street-legal in the US. Link -via Geekologie | Image: Xinhua/Zheng Shuai

200 Rounds When You Need Them Posted: 26 Aug 2011 05:27 PM PDT The unnamed gentlemen in this video are concerned about running out of ammunition during a major zombie attack. So they devised this ingenious solution: two 100-round magazines for an AK-47 strapped together. When you empty one side, flip it over. Video Link -via Everyday, No Days Off

J.R.R. Tolkien's Silmarillion as an Illuminated Manuscript Posted: 26 Aug 2011 05:07 PM PDT Benjamin Harff, a German art student, spent a year creating a copy of The Silmarillion in the tradition of medieval European illuminated manuscripts. Most of the text itself is typed, but the elaborate calligraphy is Harff’s own work. Click on the link to see some amazing works of calligraphy. Link -via Nerdcore | Photo: Tolkien Library

Harold Pinter's Duck Hunt Posted: 26 Aug 2011 04:01 PM PDT (Video Link) Oh, sure, the Nintendo classic Duck Hunt was a fine game. But what’s not widely known is that it was based on a one-act play by Harold Pinter. Thankfully, Piper McKenzie Productions has revived this and other stage presentations of Donkey Kong, Pitfall and Pac-Man. In the above recording of Duck Hunt, two hunters plan to enjoy a day of duck hunting in the woods. But dark, unspoken secrets between them begin to surface. Link -via Nerd Bastards

Playing with the Moon Posted: 26 Aug 2011 03:30 PM PDT French artist Laurent Laveder has shared a couple dozen beautiful images of the moon used as a prop. His other night- and sky-themed works include 3D starscapes, which can be found in his PixHeaven gallery. Link, PixHeaven Gallery via Mighty Optical Illusions

Dolphin Conch Fishing Posted: 26 Aug 2011 03:28 PM PDT Researchers from Murdoch University have been watching bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia develop an ingenious way to fish. First witnessed by researchers in 2007, a dolphin will use a conch shell to trap and scoop up fish. The dolphin will then proceed to pour the fishies into its mouth as if they were the bottoms of a chip bag. The remarkable part is that this behavior seems to be becoming more widespread, marking it as a trend learned. “Conching" is a method by which Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins are trapping small fish in conch shells, bringing the shells to the surface, and then shaking them with their rostrums to clear out the water and dump the fish into their mouths. More remarkably, the trend appears to be spreading throughout an entire population of dolphins, and fast. The first isolated instances of conching were recorded in 2007 and 2009 among a small group of Shark Bay’s dolphins. But other dolphins seem to be observing that behavior and learning the method for themselves–in the last four months alone, researchers have documented the behavior six or seven times–marking a very rapid horizontal spread of behavior. Link via Popular Science

22 Fascinating and Bizarre Classes Offered This Semester Posted: 26 Aug 2011 02:52 PM PDT These classes were found in college catalog listings of courses that are offered this fall at a campus near you. Well, maybe not near you, but some you’d be willing to travel for! Here’s a sample: 16. How to Watch Television Montclair State Has that big screen in your living room always perplexed you? Flummoxed by the little rectangle that seems to control its every image and sound? Sorry to say, this class isn't going to help. Despite its title, "How to Watch Television" is really about analyzing the medium and evaluating TV's impact on our lives. 17. Invented Languages: Klingon and Beyond University of Texas at Austin The class explores the Star Trek language and Esperanto, among others. I'm willing to bet there's a bit of Elvish thrown in there, too. 18. The Phallus Occidental College I feel like this one speaks for itself, but just in case you need it spelled out for you, here's an excerpt from the syllabus: Topics include the signification of the phallus, the relation of the phallus to masculinity, femininity, genital organs and the fetish, the whiteness of the phallus, and the lesbian phallus. Find all 22 of them at mental_floss. Link

The Underground River Beneath The Amazon River Posted: 26 Aug 2011 12:25 PM PDT Add this to the long list of amazing things that is the Amazon River: Brazilian scientists have found a new river that runs underneath it! The Rio Hamza, named after the head of the team of researchers who found the groundwater flow, appears to be as long as the Amazon river but up to hundreds of times wider. Both the Amazon and Hamza flow from west to east and are around the same length, at 6,000km. But whereas the Amazon ranges from 1km to 100km in width, the Hamza ranges from 200km to 400km. Link (Photo: Shutterstock)

Indiana Jones Traveling Exhibit Posted: 26 Aug 2011 11:24 AM PDT Lovers of Professor of Archaeology Henry Walton Jones, Jr., Ph.D. rejoice! (Who? You probably know him as "Indiana Jones"). To mark the 30th anniversary of "Raiders of the Los Ark," known here in the NeatoHQ as "the best movie ever," Lucasfilm, National Geographic and Canada's X3 PRoductions are teaming up to bring priceless artifacts (or movie props for you nonbelievers) in a touring exhibit. (Real) Archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert of National Geographic has this to say about the Indiana Jones movie franchise and its importance to archaeology: Let me tell you the perspective from National Geographic’s in-house archaeologists, because that’s what I am, and it’s a very special hat to wear, to use an Indiana Jones idiom. I normally deal with what I call the Indiana Joneses who come to National Geographic to do real research, and it’s an amazing group of scholars that we have …. A great number of them have been inspired by the films of Indiana Jones. It’s like a whole generation. I used to teach at the university where in Intro to Archaeology — Archaeology 101 — one of the first questions that I always ask is, “How many of you were inspired by Indiana Jones?” What’s amazing is that this is the 30th anniversary of the first Indiana Jones film, and these students are like 20 years old, and 70% of them raise their hands, saying they were inspired by the films. That is one of the world’s most awesome inspirations that could happen. It’s almost like Indiana Jones is the world’s most famous archaeologist. Even now. He’s not a real person, but he’s had an incredible, incredible impact on the field of professional archaeology, both at the university, and here, now, that I have the great honor to sit at National Geographic …. We are all inner Indiana Joneses. Every archaeologist has a little bit of that adventure in them. The Los Angeles Times' Hero Complex blog has more details: Link (and sadly, no US tour dates have been announced) See also: Indiana Jones items over at the NeatoShop

Hurricane Irene as Seen from Space Posted: 26 Aug 2011 10:54 AM PDT This whole-earth image was taken Friday morning by the NASA/NOAA GOES-13 satellite. It shows Hurricane Irene to be about 510 miles wide. NASA has more information and images at the website. Link -via Boing Boing (Image credit: Flickr user NASA Goddard Photo and Video)

Secret Power of Middle Children Posted: 26 Aug 2011 10:24 AM PDT I grew up oldest of two siblings and before my own children were born, my only knowledge of the middle child came from the TV series Malcolm in the Middle. So I was quite surprised to hear that people view middle children as confused underachievers who are often overlooked by their parents (in the TV series, Malcolm was the genius of the siblings). Thankfully, a new book by Catherine Salmon and Katrin Schumann set the record straight: there are actually a lot of benefits to being born in the middle. In this interview with NPR's Rebecca Robertsm, the authors explain: Salmon: "If you grow up in a family and the firstborn tends to have a certain amount of authority that's given to them by the parents, and they're physically larger, they tend to get what they want or get their way through physical force or the authority parents have given them. While for the last-born, as anyone who's had to deal with a lot of last-borns often knows, they tend to whine to the parents or get very upset if they don't get their way. And so that's their particular strategy for working out what needs to be worked out. "For the middle child, neither of those strategies are available. So they often get very good at negotiating, figuring out what the other person wants and needs, and then managing to get them what they want and what the middle child themselves want at the same time. And, of course, one of the things that middle children often want is peace and calm and quiet and for everybody to get along. And so those traits then serve them well when they leave the family and go on to form their own families, and in the workplace." Link

My Little Pop Icons Posted: 26 Aug 2011 07:58 AM PDT Photo link We’ve seen Finnish artist Mari Kasurinen’s work on Neatorama before. She’s at it again with her My Little Pony mods, now going after pop icons from Lady Gaga to Thriller-era Michael Jackson. My favorites are the Mad Hatter (pictured) and Edward Scissorhands. Link via Design.org

Axe-Wielding Bird Posted: 26 Aug 2011 07:55 AM PDT (YouTube link) Watch out for this angry bird! He’s got an AXE and he knows how to use it! Will nothing stop him? -via Buzzfeed

Memorial Bandit Caught in the Act Posted: 26 Aug 2011 07:45 AM PDT A series of thefts has been solved at the Toledo Police Memorial Garden. Officers had noticed small flags went missing over several days, but found no clue as to the identity of the perpetrator. On Wednesday, two policemen saw who was doing it. One of them snapped a picture of a squirrel in the act of grabbing a flag and a pink flower from the garden! The squirrel fled the scene and took the loot to his nest, which was discovered to be already festooned with stolen flags. No arrest were made, and the suspect is still at large. Link -via Arbroath (Image credit: Toledo Police Lieutenant James Brown)

Zombie's Day Out Posted: 26 Aug 2011 07:07 AM PDT (YouTube link) Even zombies need some carefree down time! A short film by Travis Betz. -via The Daily What

World War II Vets Gather in St. Louis for Final Reunion Posted: 26 Aug 2011 06:34 AM PDT Members of the Army’s 84th Infantry Division who served together in World War II have been meeting annually for 66 consecutive years. Every year there are fewer survivors among the veterans, who are mostly in their late 80s. Marie McDonald, who attends each year with 85-year-old veteran Brownlee Bush, says traveling has become difficult for many, and the final reunion comes as a relief. The 84th Division’s 16,000 men began basic training in January 1943. They entered combat on Nov. 18, 1944, with an attack on Geilenkirchen, Germany, fought in the Battle of the Bulge and crossed the Rhine River on April 1, 1945. Within two weeks, the unit had reached the Elbe River, where it halted its advance and patrolled the banks until the war’s end. The men spent 170 days in combat and earned seven distinguished unit citations. “These guys fought a war,” McDonald said. “We won a war in four years, when now the area they’re fighting in is no bigger than Texas, and they’ve been there 10 years, and it’s sad. We had a reason to fight. We wanted to be free.” The group held its first stateside reunion in Cincinnati in July 1946, just months after returning home. About 700 showed up. Last year, only about 100 veterans attended, quite a few of them in wheelchairs. That’s when they decided that this year’s reunion will be the last one. Link -via Fark (Image credit: David Carson)

BBQ Rockin' Fork Posted: 26 Aug 2011 06:26 AM PDT BBQ Rockin’ Fork – $19.95 Do you know someone who makes some rockin’ food on the grill? Get them the BBQ Rockin’ Fork from the NeatoShop and let them know their foods rocks! This fantastic stainless steel grilling fork pairs great with the BBQ Guitar Spatula. Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more cool Cooking Gadgets! Link

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