Neatorama

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• Animal Covers
• The (Totally) Phantom Menace
• Back Problems in Veterans
• St. Patrick’s Day Parade
• Rabbit Ears Salad Servers
• Forget Sand! These Hourglasses are Filled With Nanoballs
• Emo Cat
• Thom Browne’s Fall 2012 Haute Couture Fashion
• Museum Anatomy: Body Painting by Chadwick Gray and Laura Spector
• Blah, Blah, Blah Book
• Tea Pots of Infamy
• How to Best Survive a Free-Falling Elevator
• Galactic Storm
• License Plates Invitation
• Jerk Penguin
• Where’s the W Cuh?!?!?
• Domo Bunny Rabbit
• How Real People Will Use Windows 8
• Green Sheep for St. Patrick’s Day
• Power Outlet that Charges for Charging
• How Vernon, Florida Became Known as “Nub City”
• Paul Villinski’s Beer Can Butterflies
• First Ski Jump
• Cookbook Ghostwriters
• The Adventures of Kim Jong Un
• This Week at Neatorama

Animal Covers Posted: 18 Mar 2012 05:02 AM PDT Isabelle Dansereau makes arty but protective felt sleeves for iPads, Macbooks, and Kindles. Besides the cat and fox, check out the wolf, elephant, owl, and more! See the rest of the critters at her Etsy store, Boutique ID. Link -via Laughing Squid

The (Totally) Phantom Menace Posted: 17 Mar 2012 07:43 PM PDT (YouTube link) How to use a light saber in a completely ineffective manner in order to draw out a fight scene which should have ended in seconds. -via reddit

Back Problems in Veterans Posted: 17 Mar 2012 07:15 PM PDT Veterans are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain Injuries. That’s bad enough, but the number of veterans suffering from back injuries is much bigger. VA social worker Carroll McInroe says the strain put on the backs of young soldiers is making them into old men -and women- way before their time. McInroe started to ask each and every vet who came through his office if they were suffering back pain. Just about all of them had pain, he says. “I would say 70 percent of them. And not just a little. I’m talking chronic stuff here — misaligned vertebrae, bulging discs, herniated discs, the whole list of back problems.” At national conventions, he would share his informal findings with his counterparts at other VA facilities. They told him much the same situation prevailed in their offices. He called around to military hospitals and asked the nurses what their most common complaint might be. Back pain, he was always told. He saw nothing like that among his cohorts in Vietnam. Since grunts have humped heavy packs since Napoleon’s day with no resulting epidemic of back woes, McInroe believes that modern body armor is to blame. “It’s too heavy. You can’t just put 120 pounds on a 19, 20-year-old musculoskeletal system, 14 hours a day, 365 days a year and not create some real serious problems.” And in his view, this is a real serious problem indeed. If McInroe’s estimate — that 70 percent of returning veterans have moderate to severe back problems — holds true across the nation, the costs to America’s taxpayers will be enormous, and the bill will do nothing but grow and grow over the next 50 years. The Houston Press has an extensive article on veterans, their pain, and the problems they have getting treatment. Link -via Digg (Image credit: Brian Stauffer)

St. Patrick’s Day Parade Posted: 17 Mar 2012 07:11 PM PDT (YouTube link) Okay, so only one entry showed up, but he’s well worth watching by himself! -via The Daily What

Rabbit Ears Salad Servers Posted: 17 Mar 2012 04:56 PM PDT Rabbit Ears Salad Servers – $11.95 (bowl not included) Easter is April 8th. Are you looking for the perfect salad servers for your Easter brunch? You need the Rabbit Ears Salad Servers from the NeatoShop. This adorable fork and spoon set is perfect for serving up your favorite herbaceous snack. The Rabbit Ears Salad Server also makes a great hostess gift. Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Easter fun and fantastic Serveware! Link

Forget Sand! These Hourglasses are Filled With Nanoballs Posted: 17 Mar 2012 04:55 PM PDT Time is money, but if you covet these hourglasses by Australian designer Marc Newson, time will set you back exactly €9,500. But that's the price you'd expect to pay for borosilicate glass and stainless steel copper plated nanoballs. Nanoballs, man. Nanoballs! Link Previously on Neatorama: More designs by Marc Newson

Emo Cat Posted: 17 Mar 2012 04:51 PM PDT Perhaps it just heard the tragic story of the earless bunny, but sad Emo Cat still managed to be very cute at the same time. Via Cute Overload

Thom Browne’s Fall 2012 Haute Couture Fashion Posted: 17 Mar 2012 04:51 PM PDT Zeon posted about Thom Browne's latest Fall 2012 haute couture designs, but he missed these two. I think I saw John Farrier sporting these looks just a couple of days ago ...

Museum Anatomy: Body Painting by Chadwick Gray and Laura Spector Posted: 17 Mar 2012 04:50 PM PDT Chadwick Gray and Laura Spector took body painting and elevated it into a whole other level. In the series "Museum Anatomy," the duo collaborates to recreate museum pieces onto Chadwick's body. The one on the left above is inspired by Wishbone by Nikolaos Gyzis, and the right one is Judith Beheading Holofernes by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Link - via Lost in E Minor

Blah, Blah, Blah Book Posted: 17 Mar 2012 04:49 PM PDT Photo: Foko A book filled with text that says "Blah, Blah, Blah"? Lithuanian designer Gogelmogel must've gotten a hold of my college textbooks! Link - via Design Milk

Tea Pots of Infamy Posted: 17 Mar 2012 04:44 PM PDT Mike Leavitt of Intuition Kitchen Productions collaborated with Charles Krafft to create the most murderously awesome tea pots you'll see today. Behold, the Ahmadinejad, Manson, and Kim Jong Il tea pots made from Delft pottery: Link - via Cakehead Loves Evil

How to Best Survive a Free-Falling Elevator Posted: 17 Mar 2012 03:07 PM PDT Say that you find yourself in a free-falling elevator. What position will increase your chance of survival? That is the question being answered by The New York Times' Q&A column by C. Claiborne Ray: The best option would be to lie on your back on the floor as flat as possible, said Eliot H. Frank, a research engineer at the Center for Biomedical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “This will distribute the force of impact over the greatest area of your body so that no particular part of your body is subjected to the weight of any other part of your body,” he said. Link (Illustration: Victoria Roberts) - via Book of Joe

Galactic Storm Posted: 17 Mar 2012 02:06 PM PDT This is fantastic - and since it's impossible to capture the grandeur of the image on Neatorama's teeny 500 pixel-wide image format, we won't even try. Instead, you should head on over to Earth Science Picture of the Day to enjoy "Galactic Storm" by photographer Bret Webster, who wrote: The photo above showing the Milky Way stretching across the desert sky and a distant monsoon thunderstorm on the horizon was captured just outside of Dead Horse Point State Park in Utah. I had been out taking some nighttime images of the sky in Canyonlands National Park, but as I was driving towards Dead Horse Point, I realized that the Milky Way was aligning perfectly with a thunderstorm cell well to the south of my location. So, I popped out of the car and snapped this shot. Fortunately, the sky overhead was still clear and very dark. The anvil top of the cumulonimbus cloud was just below the central portion (densest area) of the Milky Way. Altair is the bright star at upper left center – in the constellation of Aquila. Just above and to the left of the cloud tops the constellation of Sagittarius can be seen. Corona Australis is the semielliptical grouping of stars below Sagittarius and to the left of the storm. Link - via Bad Astronomy

License Plates Invitation Posted: 17 Mar 2012 01:05 PM PDT What are those Pennsylvanians doing, holding up strange license plates like that? Inviting typographic artist Jessica Hische to visit, actually! Today the Society of Design in PA (my home state) invited me to speak. In doing so, they created the most touching awesome thing I’ve ever seen and I spent the last hour and a half crying at my desk just amazed that 35 people would go out of their way to make me feel so loved and appreciated. On twenty-seven actual registered license plates, which individuals in the club now use on their cars, they invited me to visit. Here's the full invitation: Link - via BB-Blog

Jerk Penguin Posted: 17 Mar 2012 12:25 PM PDT Think penguins are all sunshine and rainbows? You haven't met ... the Jerk Penguin from Tokyo Sea Life Park. Perhaps this sort of bullying is why that penguin escaped from the zoo. Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Stuff I Stole From the Internet

Where’s the W Cuh?!?!? Posted: 17 Mar 2012 11:23 AM PDT Where indeed. Can you solve the mystery of the disappearing W, Neatoramanauts? Via Accordion Guy

Domo Bunny Rabbit Posted: 17 Mar 2012 10:23 AM PDT Domo Bunny Rabbit – $19.95 A tisket, a tasket you need a Domo Bunny Rabbit in your Easter Basket. That’s right folks, for a limited time, you can get your very own Domo Bunny Rabbit from the NeatoShop. This adorable plush Domo in a rabbit costume will have you hopping with joy. Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Domo madness and Easter fun! Link

How Real People Will Use Windows 8 Posted: 17 Mar 2012 10:22 AM PDT Technies are abuzz about Microsoft's Windows 8, its newest operating system that features a completely new "tile" design. Mat Honan of Gizmodo called it a "radical departure from anything Microsoft has done before." He loved it. Michael Miller of PC Magazine's Forward Thinking blog, was less enamored, but thought that the new user interface looked quite good on a tablet. J. Peter Bruzzese of InfoWorld downright hated it, calling the software "Windows Frankenstein." Millions of people have downloaded the Windows 8 Consumer Preview from Microsoft's website. But how would real people use Windows 8? Chris Pirillo of Locker Gnome put it to the test by asking his dad to figure it out without any help. Priceless quote from the clip: Dad: "Now who puts this out?" Chris: "Microsoft." Dad: "They're trying to drive me to Mac? Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

Green Sheep for St. Patrick’s Day Posted: 17 Mar 2012 09:47 AM PDT Happy St. Patrick's Day, Neatoramanauts! To help you celebrate, here are some Scottish sheep from Bathgate, Scotland, dyed in the appropriate color o' the day: Link

Power Outlet that Charges for Charging Posted: 17 Mar 2012 09:28 AM PDT We posted a comic about people charging their mobile devices at an airport, and it made me wonder how long it would be before the airport started charging money for this service. Technology is working toward that glorious day. Sony is building a new kind of power outlet that raises a not entirely pleasant prospect—in the future, plugging a phone into a public wall socket might require authentication and take a chunk out of your bank account. But the technology will have many important uses, Sony says, from managing payments for recharging electrical vehicles to avoiding blackouts by intelligently regulating the use of power. Announced by Sony last month, and demonstrated today in a video posted by Tokyo news site DigInfo TV, Sony’s authentication outlet manages electricity use on a per-user and per-device basis with NFC (near field communication) and RFID (radio-frequency identification) tools. The technology may be years away from commercial release, but a prototype demonstration shows a handheld dryer being plugged into an outlet that has the ability to authenticate devices. The dryer doesn’t need to be modified because it attaches to the outlet through a plug containing an NFC chip. I don’t know about years away, when there’s money to be made, the introduction of new technology seems to travel in light speeds. It may appear sooner than you think! Link -via Geekosystem

How Vernon, Florida Became Known as “Nub City” Posted: 17 Mar 2012 09:09 AM PDT Though once a prosperous town, Vernon, Florida’s economy and population dwindled in the Twentieth Century. During the 1950s and 60s, people got so desperate that they took out insurance policies, then cut off or shot off arms and legs. It became such a popular activity that this town of fewer than one thousand people became the dismemberment capital of the United States: Quite literally, people in Vernon were shooting themselves, blowing off a limb, and collecting on the insurance. How the trend started, no one knows — perhaps it was an accident at a sawmill or with a plow, or perhaps it was a calculated effort to scam an insurance company out of tens of thousands of dollars (or more). Truly, it doesn't matter. For when word got out that so-and-so just received a check for untold riches — and all it cost him was a hand or foot, perhaps even to the elbow or knee — well, the idea spread. By the time the early 1960s rolled around, according to the Tampa Bay Times, Vernon, Florida was responsible for roughly two-thirds of all loss-of-limb-related insurance claims in the United States. Read about the end of the scam and the fate of Vernon at Dan Lewis’s Now I Know. Link | Image: IFC Films

Paul Villinski’s Beer Can Butterflies Posted: 17 Mar 2012 08:49 AM PDT Paul Villinski takes discarded beer cans from the streets of New York City and turns them into beautiful butterflies and birds. I find this one particularly striking because it suggests that the guitar, like a cocoon, is sheltering emerging life. Link -via Nag on the Lake Previously by this artist: FEMA Trailer Modded into an Emergency Artist’s Studio

First Ski Jump Posted: 17 Mar 2012 08:42 AM PDT (YouTube link) Zia is in the 4th grade, so she’s probably nine or ten years old. Here, she wears a camera while taking her first run on the ski jump. She’s certainly got more guts than I do! This is my vision of ski jumping. -via reddit

Cookbook Ghostwriters Posted: 17 Mar 2012 08:31 AM PDT In this age of the celebrity chef, recipes and cookbooks are cranked out constantly, at a pace no single chef can keep up with. So they have a retinue of cooks, writers, and other support staff who work behind the scenes. Julia Moskin writes about what it’s like to stay in the shadows, and talks with other ghost writers. In his first assignment, another writer I know had to produce a book on Japanese cuisine based on two interviews with a chef who spoke no English. "That," he said, "was the moment that I realized cookbooks were not authoritative." "Write up something about all the kinds of chiles," one Mexican-American chef demanded of me, providing no further details. "There should be a really solid guide to poultry," a barbecue maven prescribed for his own forthcoming book. (After much stalling, he sent the writer a link to the Wikipedia page for "chicken.") At the most extreme level, a few highly paid ghostwriter-cooks actually produce entire books, from soup to nuts, using a kind of mind-meld that makes it possible not only to write in the voice of another human but actually to cook in his or her style — or close enough. One recent best-selling tome on regional cooking was produced entirely in a New York apartment kitchen, with almost no input from the author. Link -via Metafilter (Image credit: Owen Smith)

The Adventures of Kim Jong Un Posted: 17 Mar 2012 07:00 AM PDT (College Humor link) There is no propaganda so persuasive as Saturday morning cartoons. Especially cheaply animated cartoons featuring superheroes and anime. -via mental_floss

This Week at Neatorama Posted: 17 Mar 2012 05:58 AM PDT Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Sorry, kids, you won’t get any points for wearing green to school because it’s a Saturday. But that just makes the adult parties a little easier to do! Americans like to celebrate everyone’s holidays: Chinese New Year, Cinco de Mayo, St. Patrick’s Day, etc. and there’s always talk about cultural appropriation and how we tend to do the food and costumes without understanding their real meaning and the culture the holidays came from. Hey, it’s in our nature to try and celebrate the kaleidoscope or the melting pot that the nation is made of. But still, while you are preparing for a green beer bash, you might take some time to read up on St. Patrick and Ireland and how the Irish celebrate their national holiday today. And you can catch up on all the neat stuff you may have missed during the work week here at Neatorama. Wednesday’s date was 3/14, which is significant, so Jill gave us 14 Pi Pies For National Pi Day. Eddie Deezen wrote about The Day John Lennon Met Paul McCartney. We learned a bit about building skyscrapers from The Fearless Wonders, from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader. The Annals of Improbable Research brought us The Second-Hand Effects of Bitching. And mental_floss magazine gave us the story of Grant Wood's American Gothic. Over at NeatoBambino this week, we had posts on difficult pregnancy, summer fun for kids, a toddler car theft, and a creative video birth announcement. Check them all out! In this week’s What Is It? game, the pictured object is a Pro Pitch Gauge, made by The Classic Company, for measuring the angles in the holes of bowling balls. Steve Pauk had the right answer with the very first comment! However, he did not select a t-shirt. StilesJM wins the prize for the funniest answer: Phrenology gauge used by sororities, applied to the cranial midline of a prospective member to determine how much of a pitch she really is. That wins a t-shirt! See the answers to all this week's mystery items at the What Is It? blog. The most commented-on post of the week was The Surface Area of Nothing. Coming in second was The Death of Manners, and Will Eating Red Meat Kill You? is in third place. However, the recent post Millennials: The Most Selfish Generation Ever? will probably end up having a lot more comments before it slips into the archives. Want more? Be sure to check our Facebook page every day for extra content, contests, discussions, videos, and links you won’t find here. Also, our Twitter feed will keep you updated on what’s going around the web in real time.

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