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2012/01/25

Neatorama

Neatorama

Making The Jumbaco A Reality

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 01:36 AM PST

If you’ve seen the Jack In The Box commercials promoting the imaginary Jumbaco, then you probably already figured that someone would end up trying the item out, even if it isn’t actually on the menu. Sure enough, Serious Eats has gone ahead and tried it so the rest of us wouldn’t have to.

Surprisingly, the review is pretty positive other than the fact that it is so messy:

Cheeseburgers and tacos share a lot of the same core ingredients, so the flavors blended together well (with the exception of the pickle)…The shell added some texture, and the two extra slices of cheese and taco “meat” brought a touch of simulated Mexican flavor to the burger, which is pretty mono-texture and bland on its own. On the downside, you need about one napkin per bite, and under no circumstances should anyone ever look at the slimy meat paste inside the tacos.

Now that you’ve seen someone else eat it, would you try the Jumbaco out?

Link

And Here’s A Fat Bunny Eating A Banana

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 01:29 AM PST

(Video Link)

If that last post creeped you out a bit, here’s a great palate cleanser for you. Of course, like many adorable animal videos, you might want to watch it on mute.

The Creepiest House Cleaning Reminder Ever

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 01:26 AM PST

Of course, the problem here is that skin and again can be made to rhyme, so what will happen if you don’t put the dishes in the dishwasher…certainly you won’t get the hose again. Then again, do you really want to risk finding out what Buffalo Bill will do to you if you defy him?

Link

You Too Can Smell Like The Hulk

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 01:22 AM PST

JADS International has decided to release a line of perfumes based on The Avengers, including a “Yuzu, bergamot and tarragon create clean, clear top notes along with unexpected accords of water lily and nutmeg,” scent that apparently reflects the scent of The Hulk. While the colognes probably don’t smell anything like the real heroes would smell like, you have to admit that it’s probably a lot better than the sweat, blood and testosterone scent the characters would probably have in real life.

Link via io9

Geeky Transformations of Victorian Portraits

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 01:15 AM PST

Alex Gross takes classic Victorian pictures and then repaints them into portraits of pop culture personalities like Aquaman, Bride of Frankenstein and Godzilla. His work will be exhibited at the Jonathan Levine Gallery in LA next month, so if you’re in town, stop by and support a great geek artist.

Link Via io9

Characters Drawn By Edwin Vazquez Look Like Total Drips

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 12:40 AM PST

With a soggy and totally psychedelic style to his character renditions, it’s no wonder that Edwin Vazquez and his eye catching artworks have become a popular part of publications such as MAD magazine and Bongo Comics. Trip out on the drips, and some sweet tattoo inspired pieces, at the links below.

Link  –via ComicsAlliance

Gameplay Trailer For Upcoming Doctor Who Video Game

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 12:25 AM PST

(YouTube Link)

This is the first trailer for the upcoming Doctor Who video game The Eternity Clock that shows gameplay, and it seems the game will be combining old school platformer elements with third person action and super cinematic cutscenes.

Starring the Eleventh Doctor, River Song, Amy Pond and just about every major enemy from the last few seasons of the show, this game is definitely going for an epic level look, but I feel like the fun in gameplay variety might get sucked out by frustrating platforming puzzles and too many cutscenes. After watching the video, what do you guys think about this game?

–via Topless Robot

Custom Elder Scrolls Daedric Sword Looks Pretty Sharp

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 11:56 PM PST

The craftsman known as Evil FX has a very ambitious, and geeky, goal when he hits his workshop-to create a full suit costume of Daedric style armor from the Elder Scrolls video game series. Here’s how he made it:

..he is starting out with a pretty cool Daedric sword as a “test build.” The one-handed sword was constructed out of heavily dremeled EVA sheet foam which is apparently perfect “for carrying around all day at conventions and passing all con/customs weapon policies.”

Pretty slick for sheet foam, eh?! If you’re interested there’s a video showing the process at the link, otherwise thanks for stopping by!

Link  –via Obvious Winner

 

Child Slavery For Art

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 08:42 PM PST

What's better than child slavery? Child slavery for art!

Just kidding. While designer Lucas Maassen employs child labor to create his furniture/artwork, it's completely legal. The best part? Selling the furniture pieces for up to $3,500. Who knew that employing your kids could be so profitable?

Dutch child labor laws let the boys work up to 3 hours a week. So, each Tuesday, instead of watching TV or playing with their toys like all those lazy kids, they schlep into Maassen & Sons and get to work painting dad’s furniture (assorted wooden chairs and cabinets and mirrors) in cheery colors for 1 Euro a pop.

It might sound like a gimmick--a devilishly cute way to sell a few chairs in a crap economy--except that for the Maassen family, the project has served a deeper purpose: It has helped the boys develop an enviable work ethic. “They take the work very seriously,” Maassen tells Co.Design. They even signed employee contracts, which stipulate things like when the work day starts (3 p.m.), how long of a break they’re allowed (15 minutes), and how many vacation days they’re entitled to (12, depending on how long they’ve been employed).

“They love doing it,” Maassen says. “They think it’s great to work in the family business.”

$3,500?! Where are my paint buckets and my kids? Link

7 Movie Favorites Recast With Cats

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 07:27 PM PST

You love movies; you love cats. Put them together, and you have seven delightful movie posters! See the rest at Next Movie. Link -via Buzzfeed

Moby Dick Typed on Toilet Paper

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 06:40 PM PST

Forget paperbacks or even Kindles - the future of reading, as this eBay listing shows, is in toilet paper! From the_heppcat's auction listing:

MOBY DICK TYPED ON TOILET PAPER

My friend and I once joked that toilet paper should have instructions printed on them for certain people.

One day, the conversation grew from there and turned into a wager that i couldn't (or wouldn't) be able to type out a novel on toilet paper.

Yes, we did have some time on our hands but, as you can see from the photos, I won the bet.

There are four full rolls, one roll (epilogue) is about 1/5 of a roll and one half-roll
All of the rolls of TP came out of a brand new -- clean -- package of 2-ply Cottonelle.
They've been handled very gingerly and infrequently.

As you'll see in the following photos, one or two rolls have a tear at the beginning.
This is where i was trying to pull the paper through the typewriter.

I've kept this mod oddity in a box in a cool, dry place for the last 10 years
and have only broken it out to prove to doubters that I actually did it.

Considering what it's been through, it's in amazing condition.

Link - via @brainpicker 

See also: Moby Dick Postertext from the NeatoShop

The Girl with Seven Horses

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 05:08 PM PST

In a photo essay that uses laundry to form images of horses, photographer Ulrika Kestere tells this delightful story:

Once upon a time there was a girl who had 7 invisible horses. People thought she was crazy and that she in fact had 7 imaginative horses, but this was not the case. When autumn came the girl spent a whole day washing all her clothes. She hung them on a string in her garden to let the gentle autumn sun dry them. Out of nowhere, a terrible storm came and its fiercefull winds grabbed a hold of all her clothes and all seven horses (authors note: since they are invisible they obviously didn’t weigh much). The girl was devestated and spent all autumn looking for each horse spread around the country, wrapped in her clothes.

View the other other horses at the link.

Link -via Colossal

Black Market Liver Transplants

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 04:53 PM PST

Does it look like Cajun Mike’s in New Orleans is offering a bargain? Counteroffer: the NeatoShop will give you the same service at 10% off whatever price Cajun Mike’s quotes you.

-via That’s Nerdalicious! | Bar Website

6,072-Page Book Is a Scale Model of the Solar System

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 04:48 PM PST

When I was in high school, one of my science teachers took the class out to the football field and helped us create a model of the solar system scaled down to one hundred yards. That’s a lot like what artist Mishka Henner did, except that he used a twelve-volume book of five hundred six pages each. The width of each page represents one million kilometers. Earth is on p. 155 of the first volume, and Jupiter on p. 283 of the second. Each celestial body is to scale, as well, with the Sun filling two pages and Mercury just a speck.

Link -via io9

Baby Bugs Out

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 04:39 PM PST

Baby Charlotte had the *exact* same expression as I did when her dad made the infernal motorboat sound by flapping his lips. Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Fatherhood Is

Nursing Home for People with Senile Dementia Disguised as Ordinary Village

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 04:22 PM PST

It’s hard to watch the mind of a beloved family member slip, and also painful to know that you’re losing mental acuity with age. Now there’s a nursing home in Wiedlisbach, Switzerland designed to make that transition easier. Caretakers lead residents to believe that they’re living independent lives in the past:

The newly approved €20m (£17m) housing project is to be built next to the Swiss village of Wiedlisbach near Bern and will provide sheltered accommodation and care for 150 elderly dementia patients in 23 purpose-built 1950s-style houses. The homes will be deliberately designed to recreate the atmosphere of times past.

The scheme’s promoters said there will be no closed doors and residents will be free to move about. To reinforce an atmosphere of normality, the carers will dress as gardeners, hairdressers and shop assistants. The only catch is that Wiedlisbach’s inhabitants will not be allowed to leave the village.

Link -via Marginal Revolution | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user Jess & Peter

Woman Paints Portrait of Famous Basketball Player with a Basketball

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 04:11 PM PST


(Video Link)

Hong Yi painted a strikingly detailed portrait of Yao Ming, a basketball player who recently retired from the Houston Rockets. She decided that a basketball would be a more appropriate instrument than a brush. Watch this time-lapse video of her at work.

Link -via Gizmodo

Controller-Mounted Hot Pocket Dispenser

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 03:52 PM PST

The problem is popularly known as the Hot Pocket Conundrum, and it has vexed gamers for generations. Here it is: you need food, but that requires stopping the game. As this is obviously an unacceptable option, many gamers have starved to death on their couches.

Thankfully, Ben Heckendorn has now solved that problem by designing a Hot Pocket delivery device and mounting it on the back of a controller. Never again need anyone die from in-game malnutrition — provided that some kindly soul will periodically reload the dispenser. Thank you, Mr. Heckendorn. You are a true hero.

Video Link -via DVICE

Previously by Heckendorn: See-Through Shirt

Sea Butterfly

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 02:37 PM PST

It's hard to believe but that otherworldly creature above, photographed by Alexander Semenov, lives in our ocean rather than on the pages of a sci-fi novel. The sea angel above was found in the White Sea, northwest of Russia.

See more at Alexander's gallery: Link - via Popsci

Raising a Gender-Neutral Child

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 12:37 PM PST

When Beck Laxton and Kieran Cooper had an offspring, they decided that their Baby Sasha should not be influenced by society's prejudices and preconceptions when it comes to gender:

They referred to their child as "The Infant" and only allowed him to play with "gender-neutral toys" in their television-free home.

For the first five years of his life Sasha alternated between girls' and boys' outfits, leaving friends, playmates and relatives guessing.

But the couple have finally revealed his sex after it became harder to conceal when Sasha started primary school.

Yesterday Miss Laxton, a web editor, said that she thought gender stereotyping was "fundamentally stupid".

"I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping," she said.

"Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?

The gender of Sasha was finally revealed (he's a boy) when he started school: Link - via Arbroath

Suburban Fishing

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 10:32 AM PST

Remember this trick the next time you drop something out of a window and don’t want to walk all the way downstairs to retrieve it. It helps if your vacuum cleaner is lightweight. Link -via John Walkenbach

10 Misconceptions Rundown

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 10:21 AM PST


(YouTube link)

C.G.P. Grey gives us ten more reasons we take anything we see on the internet with a grain of salt. You can always look for more information.  -via reddit

You Don’t Say

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 09:29 AM PST

You can find puns and one-liners all day on Twitter if you follow the right people. Twaggies takes those one-liners and illustrates them in comic images. This one is from @yuckybot. See more of them at Go Comics. Link

Archaeopteryx and its Feathers

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 08:51 AM PST

Ryan Carney and his colleagues at Brown University released a scientific paper on the feathers of the Archaeopteryx today. Carney celebrated by having an Archaeopteryx feather tattooed on his arm, thereby gaining himself an entry in Carl Zimmer’s science tattoo collection. But what about the Archaeopteryx?

The first fossil of Archaeopteryx was a single feather–the one that Carney has turned into a tattoo. It was discovered in 1861 in a limestone quarry near the town of Solnhofen and brought to Hermann von Meyer, one of Germany's leading paleontologists at the time. As scientists would later determine, this exceptional feather was 145 million years old. Despite its antiquity, the feather looked much like the feathers on the wings of living birds.

The fossil was so extraordinary that Von Meyer wondered if some forger had etched it. After all, Solnhofen limestone was prized for making finely detailed lithographic prints. But then von Meyer compared the slab and the counterslab and found them to be identical.

Now 150 years later, we know a lot more about the Archaeopteryx and how it fits in the evolution of dinosaurs to birds. Read how many of these discoveries came about at The Loom. Link

Family Reunion Dinner

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 07:59 AM PST


(YouTube link)

Warning: This Chinese New Year video might cause you to run for your hankie. From Bernas, a rice distribution company. -via The Daily What

Tour the Underground Missile Silo Home

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 07:20 AM PST

You’ve probably seen the ad for this underground missile base in New York state that’s been on the market for some time. Now you have a chance to take a virtual tour! Scout from Scouting New York went to the site and the owners were gracious enough to let him look around and take plenty of pictures. There’s a nice house on top, and part of the underground has been renovated for use as a modern living area. Then there are parts that recall the facility’s original use during the Cold War. Link -via the Presurfer

Wastelander Panda

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 07:04 AM PST


(vimeo link)

Mashups of two different but familiar stories are a common basis for internet videos, often because they are just plain strange. Can you imagine any stranger combination than Mad Max and Kung Fu Panda? Wastelander Panda is the story of a fighting panda set in a post-apocalyptic world. Epic Films produced this as part of a TV series in development. -Thanks, Marcus!

The Psychoanalyst Says Your Gut Says…

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 05:13 AM PST

by Marc Abrahams, Improbable Research staff

Some psychoanalysts can find meaning in the most ordinary-seeming bits of your life. Some discern it even in your intestinal rumblings. There's a technical name for those digestive sounds: borborygmi. Several published studies tell how to interpret people's gut feelings—how to translate those borborygmi into common everyday words.

In 1984, Prof. Dr. Christian Müller of Hôpital de Cery in Prilly, Switzerland, published a report called "New Observations on Body Organ Language," in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomics.

"New Observations on Body Organ Language," Christian Muller, Psychotherapy and Psychosomics, vol. 42, nos. 1–4, 1984, pp. 124–6.

Müller paraphrases a 1918 essay by someone named Willener that "concludes that the phenomenon generally known as borborygmi must be regarded as crypto- grammatically encoded body signals that could be interpreted with the help of [special] apparatus." Müller laments that Willener's "attempts to follow up on his theory were thwarted by the defects of recording techniques at that time."

Happily, Müller himself had access to later, better equipment. "We have been trying at our clinic since 1980," he writes, "to combine electromesenterography with Spindel's alamograph, and in addition to use digital transformation for a quantitative analysis of the curves via computer."

Müller reveals his greatest interpretive triumph:

The presence of a negative transference situation was not difficult to deduce from the following sequence: 'Ro… Pi… le… me… 1o…'. The following translation is certainly an appropriate rendering: 'Rotten pig. leave me alone.'

This lovely piece of deadpan, intentional nonsense, I am told, was swallowed whole by some readers, and perhaps also some journal editors.

A few years later, Guy Da Silva, a Montreal psychoanalyst, published several apparently quite serious papers about the psychoanalytical significance of borborygmi.

The most accessible (in my view, anyway) is his "Borborygmi as Markers of Psychic Work During the Analytic Session: A Contribution to Freud's Experience of Satisfaction and to Bion's Idea About the Digestive Model for the Thinking Apparatus." This professionally dense monograph appeared in a 1990 issue of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. Freud is Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalysis pioneer who lived in Vienna, Austria. Bion is Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, director of the London Clinic of Psycho-Analysis in the 1950s, and later president of the British Psycho-Analytical Society.

"Borborygmi as Markers of Psychic Work During the Analytic Session: A Contribution to Freud's Experience of Satisfaction and to Bion's Idea About the Digestive Model for the Thinking Apparatus," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 71, 1990, p. 641–59.

"The Emergence of Thinking: Bion as the Link Between Freud and the Neurosciences," Guy Da Silva, in M. Grignon (Ed.) Psychoanalysis and the Zest for Living: Reflections and Psychoanalytic Writings in Memory of W.C.M. Scott, ESF Publishers, Binghamton, NY, 1998.

"Le Modèle Alimentaire dans la Théorie de la Pensée de Bion: Suivi d'une Application de ce Modèle dans l'Analyse d'un Patient," Guy Da Silva, Symposium of the Société Psychanalytique de Montréal, Spring 1992.

Guy Da Silva digested a little Freud together with a little Bion. He writes: "Borborygmi may signal the process and acquisition of new thoughts (symbolization) and the free associations derived from borborygmi often provide the key to the understanding of the session by linking the verbal flow of ideas to the underlying sensory and affective experience, thereby providing a 'moment of truth'. Within the primitive maternal transference, borborygmi are often accompaniments to the fantasy or the hallucination of being fed by the analyst."

The name Guy Da Silva will be familiar to some readers as the star of hundreds of psychologically gut-wrenching films, among them Beyond Reality 3, The Lube Guy, Attack of the Killer Dildos, and Porn-O-Matic 2000. But Guy Da Silva the actor and Guy Da Silva the psychoanalyst are not the same person, no matter how similarly stimulating their work may be.

(Title image credit: Flickr user threefatcats. Captioning via Speechable.)

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the September-October 2009 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
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