Neatorama

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• Tweet Like One Of The Mad Men
• Extremely Realistic Hand-Drawn Portraits
• Prisoner Makes Final Fantasy Weapons Out Of Matchsticks
• Siri Vs. Furby
• Cleaner "Destroys" Work Of Art - By Cleaning It
• Towards Thee I Roll, Thou All-Destroying But Unconquering Whale
• Tie Sandwich
• 3D LEGO Chalk Drawing
• Lumpy Space Princess Baby Costume
• Ukraine's School of Underwater Painting
• Stop-Motion Music Video Made with Jelly Beans
• The Twisted History of Twister
• Text Message Novels
• Tiny Slow Electric Bus
• Honey Badger Don’t Care But We Do!
• Steve Jobs Cakes
• Screaming Monkey Slingshot
• Un-Dammed
• Invasive Bugs Eat Invasive Plant
• The Power of a Press Release
• Your Own Worst Enemy: Getting Over Impostor Syndrome

Tweet Like One Of The Mad Men Posted: 05 Nov 2011 12:05 AM PDT File this device under unique and useless, perfect fodder for blog posts! The device is the one and only analog Twitter client, Tweephone, and you must use the rotary dial to enter the letters, one turn at a time just like the old days. If you have money to burn and love to Tweet then your house needs this decorative device. The rest of us will be more than happy just reading about it, i’m quite sure of that. Link

Extremely Realistic Hand-Drawn Portraits Posted: 04 Nov 2011 11:54 PM PDT These amazingly realistic portraits were rendered in chalk and graphite by Scottish artist Paul Cadden. Apparently, he specializes in faces with lots of wrinkles personality. Shades of gray never looked so good! Link –via BuzzFeed

Prisoner Makes Final Fantasy Weapons Out Of Matchsticks Posted: 04 Nov 2011 11:46 PM PDT A prisoner/geek in Wales had his secret stash of matchstick weapons, including the Buster Sword and Squall’s Gunblade from the Final Fantasy video game series, confiscated because: “…the realism of the swords presented a threat to staff safety, not because they could be used to send the staff back to the Lifestream, but because they look real from afar and could be used to threaten people.” This guy will have a sweet job waiting for him when he gets out-making replica weapons out of balsa wood. Link

Siri Vs. Furby Posted: 04 Nov 2011 11:29 PM PDT (YouTube Link) Siri, the virtual voice assistant from the Iphone 4S, gets to the bottom of what Furby is really saying. Furby laughs in Siri’s faceplate as she tries to solve the furry little creep’s problems. Finally there’s proof that Furby is up to no good. –via Ology

Cleaner "Destroys" Work Of Art - By Cleaning It Posted: 04 Nov 2011 09:21 PM PDT A cleaner working in a museum in Dortmund, Germany, has “destroyed” a valuable piece of art. Entitled "When It Starts Dripping From The Ceilings" the piece comprised a tower of wooden slats with a plastic bowl at the bottom painted brown to give the impression of discolouration caused by water. The cleaner took the paint to be an actual stain and scrubbed the bowl till it looked new. The piece of art (shown above) by Martin Klippenberger was valued by the museum at £690,000. There may be some who would argue that the cleaning person didn’t destroy a piece of art, but rather created a new art work (which might be entitled “It Has Stopped Dripping From the Ceilings.”) Relevant video:  “How To Distinguish Art from Trash.” Link.  Photo: EPA.

Towards Thee I Roll, Thou All-Destroying But Unconquering Whale Posted: 04 Nov 2011 06:45 PM PDT (Video Link) Kayakers and a surfer were enjoying a leisurely day off Santa Cruz, California when a humpback whale suddenly surfaced in pursuit of a school of anchovies. Barb Roettger caught this amazing scene on camera. -via Boing Boing

Tie Sandwich Posted: 04 Nov 2011 06:26 PM PDT Next Father’s Day, don’t get Pop a tie. He’s got a closet full of them anyway. Make him a tie sandwich! Adrian Fiorino of Insanewiches invented a tie-shaped steak sandwich. He has an instructional video at the link. Link -via That’s Nerdalicious!

3D LEGO Chalk Drawing Posted: 04 Nov 2011 06:17 PM PDT This week, Sarasota, Florida is hosting a festival of outdoor chalk art. Artists are welcome to come on Sunday to exhibit their abilities on a section of pavement. Registration and materials are free. The minifigs in this amazing image made by an artist who is so far unknown to me look like they’re about to walk off. Link and Festival Website -via Nerd Approved

Lumpy Space Princess Baby Costume Posted: 04 Nov 2011 06:08 PM PDT Lumpy Space Princess is, like, this character on the TV show Adventure Time or whatever. Kimmy Bruehl had the right idea by dressing up her daughter Suzanne as the little bundle of soft, floating, sarcastic lumpiness. Link -via The Uniblog

Ukraine's School of Underwater Painting Posted: 04 Nov 2011 05:57 PM PDT A group of artists in the Ukraine dive into the water of the Black Sea to compose paintings. With scuba gear, they can stay underwater for up to 40 minutes. During that time, they apply paint to canvases under challenging conditions. Watch the video at the link to see the artists at work. They’re all seascapes. Can’t they get a model down there for some figure studies? Or maybe some good horse pictures. Those always look good in a home. Link -via Geekosystem

Stop-Motion Music Video Made with Jelly Beans Posted: 04 Nov 2011 05:42 PM PDT (Video Link) It took a crew of 30 people 1,357 hours to move 288,000 jelly beans and produce this cute animated music video for Kina Grannis’s “In Your Arms.” The song itself is quite lovely. If her name is familiar to you, it may be because we featured her break-out video, a tribute to Digg, back in 2007. -via Blame It on the Voices | Grannis’s Website

The Twisted History of Twister Posted: 04 Nov 2011 05:35 PM PDT Of course you remember the game Twister. Everyone wanted to play it at parties just to get close to someone of the opposite sex. And win or lose, you ended up looking so ridiculous everyone had to laugh! But how did this ingenious idea come about? "The game that ties you up in knots" sprang from the imagination of a St. Paul-based ad man / inventor named Reyn Guyer in 1965. Guyer's firm, the Reynolds Guyer Agency of Design, was hired to do a local back-to-school promotional display for Johnson brand shoe polish. As Guyer tinkered with a colored polka dot paper mat to highlight kids' shoes, he realized he might be onto something bigger – a game where people acted as the game pieces. Guyer first called his invention King's Footsie, testing it out on some fellow artists and designers. The fun that four people were having while crammed into provocative shapes onto a 4 x 6 mat was all Guyer needed to see. But that’s just the beginning of the story. Twister didn’t sell well at first, but eventually became a classic board game without a board. Link

Text Message Novels Posted: 04 Nov 2011 05:20 PM PDT This literary genre has apparently been developing for a few years, but I’ve just learned about it today. In 2007, Japanese romance novel writer who goes by the name Yume-Hotaru published one of his stories in short bits — small enough to fit into text messages. And that’s how they spread across the country. Now the keitai shosetsu or cell phone novel is a literary sensation in Japan. Here’s a CNN story on the subject from 2009: As the name suggests, cell phone novels are written entirely on handsets and posted on sites like Maho no i-rando (Magic Island), the first and largest mobile novel portal in Japan. The site has a million titles, 3.5 billion monthly visitors and six million registered users, according to the company. Mobile readers instantly see new chapters as they are added, often adding comments about the direction they think a novel should take. The diary-like stories are written and read mostly by young women in their teens and 20’s. Many authors use pen names and claim their stories are at least partially autobiographical. The novels often center on themes that are rarely discussed aloud in Japanese society — drugs, sex, pregnancy, abortion, rape and disease. Link – Thanks, Norma! | Photo: Flickr user .curt

Tiny Slow Electric Bus Posted: 04 Nov 2011 09:41 AM PDT The city of Kiryu, Japan employs the the E-KomiBus, a tiny electric vehicle that carries solar panels to charge the batteries during sunny weather. The E-KomiBus (which, for reasons unknown, bears the nickname "MAYU") is a totally electric and tiny little bus. It's only 173" long (shorter than a 2012 Honda Civic), and runs on lithium ion batteries, which have a range of about 25 miles after charging 8 hours. With a top speed of 12mph, it's ideally suited for driving through the narrow back streets not covered by conventional bus routes. The university hopes that senior citizens and tourists (the two groups least likely to own driver's licenses in Gunma) will use the E-KomiBus, which seats 10. Link (Image source: Yomiuri Online)

Honey Badger Don’t Care But We Do! Posted: 04 Nov 2011 09:29 AM PDT If you’ve heard someone say “honey badger don’t care” and you haven’t seen the viral video it comes from, you might be wondering about the origin of the catchphrase. You can see that video at National Geographic News, with all its NSFW language. The original honey badger video, without the hilarious replacement commentary, is from a NatGeo wildlife program. Colleen Begg, the researcher who shot the footage, clears up some questions about the honey badger. Do honey badgers have bad attitudes? Absolutely! But they need to, because they're often surprised. Honey badgers are very vulnerable. Often they're digging—they're quite small [weighing 10 to 20 pounds), they don't see very well, their noses are in the ground—and they're completely oblivious to what's going on around them. When they eventually realize that the leopard is standing right behind them, they just put on this incredible show to try to protect themselves. They do the same in reaction to humans. So that is where the bad attitude comes from. It's a protective mechanism. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!

Steve Jobs Cakes Posted: 04 Nov 2011 08:32 AM PDT These Apple-themed cake pops will be part of the Steve Jobs Inspired Cake Shop, a fundraiser in London next Wednesday for the organization Pancreatic Cancer UK. It’s part of series of events called Internet Week Europe. Oh yes, they’ll have candied apples, too! Find out more at Cakehead Loves Evil. Link

Screaming Monkey Slingshot Posted: 04 Nov 2011 08:21 AM PDT Screaming Monkey Slingshot – $5.95 Has workday stress got you down? Is it time to unleash the flying monkeys? You need the Screaming Monkey Slingshot from the NeatoShop. This hilarious plush monkey screams as he zooms through the air. Hey, don’t knock it till you try it. Letting loose the flying monkeys certainly seemed to make the Wicked Witch of the West feel better. Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fantastic Cubicle Toys and awesome Wizard of Oz items! Link

Un-Dammed Posted: 04 Nov 2011 08:11 AM PDT (YouTube link) On October 26th, explosives opened the Condit Dam in Washington State to allow the free flow of the White Salmon River after 98 years. The reservoir took about two hours to drain, shown here in time-lapse. Read about the dam dismantling project at National Geographic. Link -via the Presurfer

Invasive Bugs Eat Invasive Plant Posted: 04 Nov 2011 08:09 AM PDT For 50 years, farmers, scientists, and homeowners have looked for a way to get rid of kudzu. The invasive plant native to Japan grows at such an astounding rate that people in the southern U.S. joke about closing their windows at night to keep it out of the house. Another invasive species should teach us to be careful what we wish for. Megacopta cribraria, an insect that hitched a ride to Atlanta on a plane from Asia in 2009, eats kudzu. The kudzu bug could eat away a third of the kudzu covering several states within a decade. “I’m all for it,” says Keith Brouillard, owner of Raleigh, N.C.’s Carolina Forestry, a consulting group that helps manage timber land for private owners. “Kudzu is a nuisance and almost impossible to get rid of.” The vine is virtually impervious to herbicides, chain saws and even fire. Its roots can weigh 300 pounds and run 12 feet deep. But the bug is also chewing up soybean stalks, reducing some yields recently by as much as a quarter, according to entomologists at the University of Georgia. “Disappearing kudzu is a cultural problem,” says John Shelton Reed, a sociologist and essayist on Southern life. “But disappearing soybeans is an economic problem.” Researchers are looking for ways to protect soybean crops from Megacopta cribraria while still searching for a species that will kill kudzu and leave crops alone. Link -via TYWKIWDBI (Image credit: University of Georgia at Griffin)

The Power of a Press Release Posted: 04 Nov 2011 07:39 AM PDT (YouTube link) Conan O’Brien officiated a same-sex wedding on his TV show last night. Whether that is big news or not, the way the story has been covered shows how much television news depends on someone else to write their scripts news copy. There’s another video at Laughing Squid that synchs the newscasts so they repeat the phrase in unison. Link

Your Own Worst Enemy: Getting Over Impostor Syndrome Posted: 04 Nov 2011 07:21 AM PDT Have you ever felt like you are in over your head, that you don’t have nearly the competence to be doing the job you’re doing, and that sooner or later, others will find out you’re faking it? Maybe it will help to know that those other folks sometimes feel the same way. It’s called Impostor Syndrome. "They used to call it an inferiority complex. You're convinced you're not good enough or smart enough to do this. Impostor syndrome. The only thing holding you back is you." I wish I could say this call changed everything, but it didn't. My second Master's degree was worse than ever. Studying in a profoundly theory-heavy program, I felt hopelessly lost in every class, every day. I was convinced at any moment uniformed thugs would burst into my seminar to unmask me and drag me out. Obviously I did not belong here, as I understood maybe one tenth of what I was reading, and was frequently confused even by the comments of my own classmates. It seemed so easy for them. Surely I had made yet another mistake. It never occurred to me that I was there to learn, or that other students might be feeling the same way. Read more about Impostor Syndrome and how to deal with it at xoJane. Link -via Metafilter (Image credit: Flickr user madamepsychosis)

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