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2013/06/03

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Stay Cool This Summer With Boozy Frozen Treats

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 05:00 AM PDT

Having a hard time staying cool while still getting your buzz on? Then try one of these great frozen cocktails, including ice cream, snow cones and popsicles, on WineEnthusiast.

Link

In Case of Zombies...

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 04:00 AM PDT

Gearing up for the zombie apocolypse or periodic yard work? Well, this storage method for your yard tools can help with both while still making your back yard look all the more impressive and organized.

Link

Saving Ford from Ford

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 03:00 AM PDT

vThe following is an article from Uncle John's 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader.

You may know the story of how Henry Ford put America on wheels. Here's the story of how he nearly ran the Ford Motor Company into the ditch.

WHEEL MAN

If you're a history buff or just like reading about automobiles, you probably already know how Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, used the moving assembly line and other mass-production techniques to revolutionize the auto industry. He drove the price of his Model T so low that ordinary people, even the workers on his assembly lines, could afford to buy cars for the first time. In the process, Ford, more than any other individual, ushered in the modern automobile age. By 1923, 57 percent of all the cars manufactured in the United States, and half of all the cars on Earth, were Fords.

What's less well-known about Henry Ford is how close he came to  destroying the Ford Motor Company in the later years of his life. The only reason you can still buy a Ford today is that the other members of the Ford family were able to wrest control of the family company away from him before it collapsed entirely.

MR. T

Ironically, it was Henry Ford's obsession with the Model T, his greatest success, that initially set the Ford Motor Company on the road to ruin. Ford introduced the Model T in 1908 and for nearly 20 years fought every attempt to improve it or to replace it with something better. For many years, Model Ts had no gas gauge. If you wanted to know how much fuel was in your car, you had to dip a stick into the gas tank. They had no electric starter, either. You started a Model T by turning a hand crank in front of the car. And they had no gas pedals. You controlled the speed with a throttle that was located on the steering column.

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Even when Henry Ford did give in and make improvements, he did so several years after his competitors. Result: by the mid 1920s, the Model T was hopelessly outdated. For years Ford had terrorized every other auto company as he dropped the price of the Model T ever lower, from $825 in 1908 all the way down to $290 in 1924. But his refusal to update the car gave General Motors and other competitors the opening they needed. More than one auto maker battled its way back from the brink just by adding improvements to their cars that Henry Ford refused to add to his.

Ford finally announced in mid-1927 that it was ending production of the Model T in favor of the much-improved Model A, but the change came too late. That year Ford sold fewer cars than Chevrolet, GM's largest division. Strong sales of the Model A did put Ford back in first place in 1929 …but only for a year, and by 1933 it was in third place, behind both Chevrolet and Chrysler.

TROUBLE UNDER THE HOOD

By the early 1930s, the company itself was as decrepit as the Model T. It had taken Ford six months to retool its factories to manufacture the Model A, and the disruption cost the company $250 million -the equivalent of about $3 billion today. GM, by comparison, could retool its manufacturing plants in six weeks.

Ford's network of independent dealers was also a mess. Years of being forced to sell obsolete Model Ts on a cash-only basis (Henry Ford didn't believe in auto loans) had caused many Ford dealers to go under; other had abandoned Ford to become GM or Chrysler dealers. Many who did remain loyal to Ford were driven out of business by Henry Ford himself when they failed to meet the company's unrealistic sales targets.

The biggest problem of all was the Ford executive suite. The company was wholly owned by the Ford family, and executives who were not family members already knew they'd never hold the top job. Henry Ford made matters much worse by firing any executive who showed even a hint of independence or initiative. The most talented Ford executives soon became ex-Ford executives, working for GM, Chrysler, or other auto companies, and driven by the desire to get even with Ford.

THE HEIR

vAbout the only top executive who didn't leave was the one who couldn't: Edsel Ford, Henry's only child. Edsel had been the company's president since 1919, but he was president in name only. Though Henry held no title and liked to say his only responsibility was to "let Edsel find something for me to do," he was firmly in control.

TOUGH LOVE

If anything, Henry Ford's ideas for how to work with Edsel were even more peculiar than his ideas about how to run an auto company. Edsel was a dutiful son, but Henry saw this as a weakness. He blamed himself for being soft on Edsel when he was growing up, and he believed the best way to toughen up the boy was to deliberately sabotage him as he tried to run the company. Henry routinely belittled Edsel in front of other executives, once shouting, "Edsel, you shut up!" after Edsel dared suggest in a board meeting that Fords should have modern hydraulic brakes. When Edsel decided to build coke ovens to process coal for steel production at a Ford plant, Henry feigned agreement even as he whispered to an aide, "As soon as Edsel gets those ovens built, I'm going to tear them down." The ovens were built. Henry tore them down.

When Edsel commissioned a new office building to house the company's accountants and sales staff, Henry cancelled the building, fired the accountants (he hated accountants), abolished the accounting department, and had its offices stripped bare. Then he told Edsel to put the salespeople where the accountants had been. Without any accountants to help with bookkeeping, some departments were reduced to weighing stacks of invoices as a means of accounting their costs.

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Henry's meddling in his son's affairs didn't stop at the end of the business day. He even paid Edsel's domestic servants to spy on their employer. Once, when they told Henry, an outspoken teetotaler, that Edsel had liquor in his home, Henry went there while Edsel was away on business and smashed every bottle.

OUT OF GAS

"There was a twisted collusion in the sad game that father and son were to play throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and its cruelest twist was that time did not heal the process, it made it worse," Robert Lacey write in Ford: The Men and the Machine. "The more Edsel submitted, the more his father hurt him, and the more the boy was wounded, the more submissive he became."Edsel had joined the company straight out of svchool in 1913, when he was 20, and silently endured his father's cruelty for 30 years. In the 1930s, he began to develop ulcers, which Henry (of course) attributed to weakness. "Regain health by cooperating with Henry Ford" were Henry Ford's instructions to his son.

Edsel's stomach problems worsened, but he put off medical tests for more than a year. When he finally went to the doctor, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer that had spread to his liver and other organs. After surgery to remove half his stomach, Edsel (who was never told he had cancer) returned to work. Henry continued to belittle and undermine him until the very end. By the end of April 1943, Edsel could not go on. He took to his bed and died four weeks later at the age of 49.

HIS OWN WORLD

Henry Ford named himself as president of the Ford Motor Company after Edsel's death. Only months away from turning 80, he too was a sick man. He'd had strokes in 1938 and 1941 and was suffering from memory lapses, slowed speech and movement, and other signs of encroaching senility.

Many old men like to live in the past; Ford reconstructed his in bricks and mortar. When he was in his early sixties he'd had a 19th-century village and museum called Greenfield Village built in the countryside northwest of Dearborn, Michigan. Now as his faculties began to fail him, Ford spent more and more time wandering about his ersatz village instead of attending to business.

vGreenfield Village (Image credit: Flickr user Thomas M Parsons)

Ford became convinced that his teenaged niece, Dorothy Richardson, was his own mother reincarnated. Mary Ford had died in 1876 when Henry was only 13, and hadn't lived to see the automobile age. Henry made up for lost time by dressing Dorothy in period clothes similar to those he remembered his mother wearing, and teaching her how to drive a Ford -his way of showing his mother what he'd made of himself.

ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II

vThat the Ford Motor company was a dysfunctional, failing enterprise led by a dysfunctional, failing autocrat would have been bad enough in the best of times. But this was 1943, and the U.S. had been at war since the bombing of Pearl harbor in 1941. Civilian automobile production was suspended in 1942, and now the Ford plants were busy manufacturing jeeps, planes, and other materiel for the war effort. The switch from cars to war production had taken place while Edsel was still alive, and it had been chaotic. By 1943 production at Ford's B-24 bomber plant was six months behind schedule, and the federal government had no faith in Henry Ford's ability to turn things around. The government even considered seizing control of the Ford Motor Company and running it itself.

The idea was rejected in favor of discharging Edsel Ford's oldest son, 25-year-old Henry Ford II, from the Navy so that he could help his grandfather run the company. Henry II left the Navy as requested, but old Henry didn't have any more faith in his grandson than he'd had in Edsel. Locked out of Edsel's old offices, Henry II spent the war years wandering from one Ford department to the next and quizzing employees on how they did their jobs.

THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY

The expectation among Ford family members was that when Henry died, Henry II would become president. That expectation was shattered in 1944 when it was discovered that old Henry had added a codicil -an extra provision- to his will, saying that for 10 years after his death, the Ford Motor Company would have no president. It would instead be run by the board of directors, with one of the directors, a man named Harry Bennett, serving as secretary.

vThe codicil was Bennett's idea. "My Harry," as Henry liked to call him, was the old man's best friend and the only person in the company he trusted. Bennett was the head of the Ford Service Department, the 3000-man internal police force that Henry created to battle union agitators and maintain order in his factories. Bennett knew nothing about running an auto company; it was through scheming and brown-nosing that he had risen to become Henry Ford's right-hand man, wielding more influence than Edsel Ford. Indeed, Bennett was often the one who instigated, and then executed, Henry's orders to sabotage Edsel's work.

Now that Edsel was dead and old Henry was failing, Bennett's skill at manipulating the boss had made him the most powerful man in the company. He was also the most hated man, and no one hated him more than the rest of the Ford family. "Who is this man Bennett, who has so much control over my husband, and is ruining my son's health?" Henry's wife Clara had asked back in 1941.

Bennett burned the codicil to old Henry's will as soon as it was discovered, but the battle for the Ford Motor Company was on. Edsel's widow Eleanor now controlled Edsel's 41.9 percent share of the company's voting stock, and she threatened to sell her shares if Bennett succeeded in denying Henry II the presidency. "He killed my husband, and he's not going to kill my son," she vowed.

In April 1944, Henry II maneuvered to have himself named executive vice-president of the company, which made him superior to Harry Bennett …on paper. Bennett was still too powerful to confront directly, but Henry II used his new position to fire Bennett's cronies as he built his own alliances with people he trusted.

GRANDMA'S GIFT

vIn the end it may have been Henry Ford's wife, Clara Ford, who did the most the save the Ford Motor Company from ruin. As Henry slid deeper into senility, Clara ordered that when Harry Bennett called the house, he was to be told that her husband was not home. Cut off from the boss, Bennett was powerless to retaliate against Henry II as he fired one Bennett loyalist after another.

Clara's biggest contribution to the battle came when she spent the summer of 1945 gently persuading her husband to give up control of the company and let Henry II take the reins. Finally, on September 20, 1945, he gave in and told Henry II that the job was his. Wasting no time, Henry II scheduled a meeting of the board of directors the next morning. As soon as he was appointed president, Henry II marched into Bennett's office and fired him.

A NEW FORD

Before assuming the presidency of Ford, the largest organization Henry II had ever managed was was the Yale University rowing team. Yet in the years that followed, he proved himself a worthy successor to to his grandfather as he remade Ford into a modern, successful auto company. When Henry II retired in 1982 at age 65, the Ford Motor Company faced difficult new challenges as it struggled with quality-control problems and declining sales in the face of surging Japanese imports. That the company even survived long enough to face these threats, after many observers had declared it dead in the 1940s, may be Henry Ford II's greatest accomplishment of all.

___________________

The article above was reprinted with permission from Uncle John's 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

Help Wanted: Cat Video Technologist

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 02:00 AM PDT

cat video

What have you been studying in school? How will it help you get a paying career? Get serious, man. It's all about cat videos. Unless you've been studying Internet memes at a high level, you've been wasting your time. At least you have according to this fake ad for the PR firm Taylor Herring.

Yeah, sorry. They're not being serious. 

Link -via Ace of Spades HQ

Galaxy Night Light

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 01:00 AM PDT

Galaxy Night Light

Do you dream of traveling to galaxies far, far away? Let the Galaxy Night Light from the NeatoShop be your guide as you drift of on your next adventure. This beautiful night light, with swivel plug, features the stars of the galaxy. 

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Lamps & Lights. 

Link

Know Your Destiny

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 01:00 AM PDT

Jim Benton

The man in Jim Benton's cartoon has a power and a question. How would you answer?

Link

Soon You Could Have Your Password Printed on Your Skin

Posted: 03 Jun 2013 12:00 AM PDT

skin

How many different passwords am I supposed to remember? Every year, the number only goes up. But a tech company in Massachusetts may have solved that problem. It's developed flexible circuits that can be pressed into the skin and used to open accounts:

The tattoos have been developed by Massachusetts-based engineering firm MC10, and contain flexible electronic circuits that are attached to the wearer's skin using a rubber stamp.

Nokia has previously experimented with integrating tattoos into mobile phones, and Motorola's senior vice president of advance research, Regina Dugan, a former head of the US Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, demonstrated the silicon-based technology that uses bendable electronic circuits. Initially designed for medical purposes, Motorola hopes the ‘Biostamps’ could now be used for consumer authentication purposes.

Link -via DVICE

(Photo: 1C10)

This Photographer's Daughter Has Super Powers

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 11:00 PM PDT

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Emil Nystrom, a photographer in Sweden, loves his daughter. He's also no doubt proud of her prodigious development. He's photographed her doing amazing things. You can see more photos in the series at the link.

Link | Photographer's Website

<i>Adventure Time</i> Teapot

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 10:00 PM PDT

BMO

Oh, Beemo! There's nothing you can't do, except make yourself understood to Finn and Jake.

I drifted away from Aventure Time after the second season. But I caught an episode last week--"Simon & Marcy"--that leads me to believe that I've missed very good content. That episode was magnficent: a heroic and tagic tale perfectly executed.

Link -via Technabob

3D Stand Mixer Cookies

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 09:00 PM PDT

cookies

Jasmin Fine loves her stand mixer a lot. If you don't believe me, at the link, you can see romantic photos of the two of them together.

So it's only fitting that she made freestanding three-dimensional cookies that look like her metallic friend. She made the bowls with a brownie pop mold and used royal icing to bind the components together.

Link -via Craft

TARDIS Volkswagen Beetle

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 08:00 PM PDT


Photo via Technabob

We all know that the Volkswagen Beetle is surprisingly bigger on the inside, but this TARDIS VW Beetle is the only known Time Lord transportation device that can go to the impossible planet Fahrvergnügen.

And may we take this opportunity to remind you that we've got a neat Doctor Who sale going on over at the NeatoShop?

Hands Free Whopper

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 07:00 PM PDT

Wanna eat your Whopper but need both of your hands to tweet about it at the same time? Burger King in Puerto Rico has finally solved this vexing problem, fifty years after the Whopper came into being. Behold, Hands Free Whopper.

Hell yeah, humanity!

Twitter Map of Hate

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 06:00 PM PDT

Haters gonna hate and Geography professor Monica Stephens of Humboldt State University in California gonna place 'em on a map. Stephens and a team of undergrads spent a year sorting through geotagged tweets that contain homophobic and racial slurs to come up with this Twitter "map of hate".

Stephens wrote in this post over at Floating Sheep:

Using DOLLY to search for all geotagged tweets in North America between June 2012 and April 2013, we discovered 41,306 tweets containing the word ‘nigger’, 95,123 referenced ‘homo’, among other terms. In order to address one of the earlier criticisms of our map of racism directed at Obama, students at Humboldt State manually read and coded the sentiment of each tweet to determine if the given word was used in a positive, negative or neutral manner. This allowed us to avoid using any algorithmic sentiment analysis or natural language processing, as many algorithms would have simply classified a tweet as ‘negative’ when the word was used in a neutral or positive way. For example the phrase ‘dyke’, while often negative when referring to an individual person, was also used in positive ways (e.g. “dykes on bikes #SFPride”). The students were able to discern which were negative, neutral, or positive. Only those tweets used in an explicitly negative way are included in the map.

All together, the students determined over 150,000 geotagged tweets with a hateful slur to be negative. Hateful tweets were aggregated to the county level and then normalized by the total number of tweets in each county. This then shows a comparison of places with disproportionately high amounts of a particular hate word relative to all tweeting activity. 

Link - via Code Switch

Martian Rats

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 05:00 PM PDT

Let's hope the Mars Rover has got a rat trap or two, because the Red Planet is infested with ... Martian Rats:

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity snapped this panorama(above) of the “Rocknest” site with its MastCam camera on sol 52 (Sept. 28, 2012) of the mission. Now, with a keen eye and fertile imagination, a UFO enthusiast realized there was a camouflaged rodent hiding in the rocks. Needless to say, there’s no other evidence supporting this claim, it’s just something that looks like a rodent.

But as you may have guessed, after exercising an ounce of logical thought, what was once a cute furry four-legged creature suddenly becomes… wait for it… this is a good one… arock. And there you have it ladies and gentlemen: We’ve found a rock on Mars… that looks like a rat.

Ian O'Neill of LiveScience explains this Martian oddity: Link

Crossword Puzzle Magic by David Kwong

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 04:00 PM PDT

One across: Cruciverbalist that combines magic and crosswords. Ten letters. Give up? The answer is DAVIDKWONG.

David Kwong, as you can see in this mind-blowing video clip above, has a unique niche in the world of magic. He's probably the only guy that can combine making crossword puzzles and presdigitation. Even Will Shortz is impressed!

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via The Verge

Buddha Wallet

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 03:00 PM PDT

Buddha Wallet

Do you know someone who finds shopping stressful. Make it a more peaceful experience with the Buddha Wallet from the NeatoShop. This great Tyvek wallet features sound effects every time you open the wallet. There is an On/ Off option for those times when meditative chants coming from your wallet would be deemed inappropriate. 

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Wallets, Purses, & Coin Bags. 

Link

Lars Farmstead 4-Layer Bean Dip

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 03:00 PM PDT

Lars Farmstead(Photo: Scott Clark)

"Uncle Owen! Aunt Beru!" The poor Lars family. It had the bad luck to have Luke Skywalker in it. Brian Hirt of Lincoln, Nebraska made this tasty and moist 4-layer bean dip to resemble the destroyed Lars Farmstead from Episode IV of Star Wars.

Link -via Landa Calrissian

Man Duct Tapes Paralyzed Woman to His Back, Takes Her Surfing

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 02:00 PM PDT

surfingPhoto: Calum Robertson

Pascale Honore enjoyed watching her sons surf the waves near her home in Elliston, Australia. But she was paralyzed in a car accident 18 years ago, so she thought that she'd never be able to join them.

Tyron Swan, a professional diver and friend, however, thought that it could be done. At the link, you can read about how he trained for this complex feat and how Swan and Honore made their plan work.

Link -via Daily of the Day


(Video Link)

Octopus Lamp Made from Found Objects

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 01:00 PM PDT

lamp

Karl Dupere-Richer's cute lamp is made from "a suspended globe, garden hoses, a distributor of candy, Christmas balls, caps and lamp a plastic container." It's a nice blend of modern and steampunk styles.

Link (Translation) -via Recyclart

Fortune Cookie Cupcake

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 12:00 PM PDT

You will enjoy this cupcake...in bed. Crumbs Bake Shop unveiled its latest creation: the Fortune Cookie Cupcake. It's filled with vanilla buttercream and topped with a chocolate-dipped fortune cookie.

Link

Are You a Beautiful Woman? You Eat for Free at This Restaurant

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 11:00 AM PDT

beauty

Actually, it's a bit more complex than that. For one day, the Brazilian fast food restaurant chain Spoleto let any woman who sees herself as beautiful eat for free:

The restaurant Spoleto told every female customer she didn't have to pay for her meal as long as she could affirmatively answer the question, "Are you beautiful?"

The customers were handed mirrors by cashiers who hoped every woman would admit to her beauty — serving as a self-esteem booster for the day. The gimmick was the restaurant's way of celebrating International Women's Day on March 8, but the ad that accompanied it was only recently posted to YouTube.

You can watch a video of customer reactions at the link.

Link -via Marginal Revolution

Happy Sundog

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 10:00 AM PDT

(Video Link)

Enjoy the most relaxing day of the week with this adorable video of French bulldog puppies playing and frolicking. You're welcome.

Via I Can Has Cheezburger

Victorian Darth Vader Dress

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 09:00 AM PDT

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EPBOT reader May B. made this gorgeous Darth Vader costume inspired by Victorian mourning wear. But Lady Vader need not mourn the destruction of the Death Star. Another one is already under construction.

Link

The Deep-Fried Lasagna Bun Burger

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 08:00 AM PDT

Sometimes, it's important to step back and realize that you typical cheeseburger just isn't messy or fatty enough. Fortunately, Philly restaurant PYT is here to help with a burger that features a bun made from two chunks of deep-fried lasagna.

I'll be honest, I think most calorie-bomb foods look disgusting because the main point is only to add extra fat, but as someone who loves lasagna almost as much as Garfield, I would scarf this thing up in a heartbeat. 

Link Via The Consumerist

Outstanding Mortal Kombat Flipbook

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 07:00 AM PDT


(Video Link)

Etoilec1's flipbook is so good that you'd swear you're actually watching someone play Mortal Kombat. The sound is perfectly matched to enhance this impression. Content warning: violence and gore--just like the game.

-via Obvious Winner

Why is This Portal-Themed Room Devoid of Cake?

Posted: 02 Jun 2013 06:00 AM PDT

To be fair, this Portal bedroom is still pretty freaking amazing as is, but how appropriate would it be if it also featured a jewelry box or other item disguised as a cake? And how could anyone refuse the temptation to include a cake-shapped item in this room?

You can see more images of the fantastic fan room at the link.

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