Neatorama

---

• Montserrat: The Modern Pompeii
• Painted Spider Webs
• An Apt Description
• Champagne Cork Chandelier
• Home with Dada
• My Little Beatles
• Attack!!!!
• Creepy Hyper Realistic Baby Mask
• The Beatles Yellow Submarine Jigsaw Puzzle
• Cut A Pepper And Watch It Scream
• Mechanical Pencil Lead Refills Sculptures by Peter Trevelyan
• Nautilus Reading Nook
• Swedish New Year Fireworks
• The 160 Million Dollar Bride
• Atari 2600 Cake
• New Year, New Oddball Laws
• What Does a "New Year" Really Mean?
• Potentially Ominous Wedding Ring
• New Year Resolutions Illustrated by Cats
• Wine Moleskine Journal
• 366 Days, 366 Books: How Jeff Ryan Read One Book Per Day in 2012
• Census Dotmap
• Grumpy Octopus Coffee Cup Cozy
• The Meatiest Snowman Around
• The Finnjet Is the Ultimate in Automotive Design
• Lego Golf Course
• Star Trails Down Under
• The Penguin and the Piper
• Parrots Hate Electronic Music
• Clumsy Kittens Compilation

Montserrat: The Modern Pompeii Posted: 02 Jan 2013 04:00 AM PST The island of Montserrat is a British territory in the Caribbean. In 1995, a volcano that had been dormant for centuries erupted and has been active ever since! A 1997 eruption buried half the island, including the capital city of Plymouth, under 40 feet of mud, ash, and rocks. Visitors are still banned from the "exclusion zone," as the latest eruption was in 2010. Read more about Montserrat and see pictures of what's left at Kuriositas. Link -via the Presurfer (Image credit: Flickr user Nick Brooks)

Painted Spider Webs Posted: 02 Jan 2013 03:00 AM PST Anthony Michael Simon, an artist in South Korea, has a little help in his studio. His eight-legged assistants produce webs, which Simon then treats and colors: The artist sprays a protective coating on the fragile webs, holding the network of fine threads together and adding color. The multihued netted structures are each held up by plastic rods, allowing the spectator to view the intricacies of each piece's intersecting lines. The fluorescent colors also add an otherworldly pop. Link -via It's Okay to Be Smart

An Apt Description Posted: 02 Jan 2013 02:00 AM PST I guess that's one way of looking at the story. Are we sure this movie is okay for children to watch? -via Criggo

Champagne Cork Chandelier Posted: 02 Jan 2013 01:00 AM PST Alkesh Parmar's Celebration Chandelier provides both an antique and a modern ambiance. He recovered bottle corks from campagne bars, hollowed them out, then placed LEDs inside. Think of how much fun it could be to have one if it the lights were progammable! Link | Designer's Website

Home with Dada Posted: 02 Jan 2013 12:00 AM PST (YouTube link) A time-lapse video of a father spending an afternoon with his son while mom is out (starting after his nap). They had a wonderful time! -via Irene's Internet

My Little Beatles Posted: 01 Jan 2013 11:00 PM PST Not pictured in Mari Kasurinen's set of custom ponies: Yoko Pony. Here are the Fab Four in their uniforms for the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. From left to right: Ringo Starr, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. Link

Attack!!!! Posted: 01 Jan 2013 10:00 PM PST These two cubs at the San Diego Safari Park sure look like they have a good time together. What I wouldn't give to join in on the fun before they get so big that they'd accidentally tear my face off during play time. Link

Creepy Hyper Realistic Baby Mask Posted: 01 Jan 2013 09:00 PM PST We've got a lot of neat Halloween masks over at the NeatoShop, but alas, we don't carry this one: a hyper-realistic latex mask of a giant baby's head by Landon Meier of Hyperflesh. It'll cost ya $350 to look that creepy fantastic! Video clip after the jump: Link - via Amazing Data

The Beatles Yellow Submarine Jigsaw Puzzle Posted: 01 Jan 2013 08:00 PM PST   The Beatles Yellow Submarine Jigsaw Puzzle Attention The Beatles fans! Are you looking for a fun way to beat the winter blues? Try passing the time with The Beatles yellow Submarine Jigsaw Puzzle from the NeatoShop. This colorful and funtastic 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle is a great way to pass the time when you are stuck indoors.  Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more amazing The Beatles items.  Link

Cut A Pepper And Watch It Scream Posted: 01 Jan 2013 08:00 PM PST Some vegetables are content with being cut up and made into various soups or stews, but not this creepy pepper. He'd rather scream until his spicy brethren come to his rescue, preferably before he hits the pot of bubbling sauce! Link

Mechanical Pencil Lead Refills Sculptures by Peter Trevelyan Posted: 01 Jan 2013 07:00 PM PST Look at these intricate sculptures by New Zealand artist Peter Trevelyan and weep: the geometric structures are made with 0.5 mm lead refills for mechanical pencils! I can't even reload my mechanical pencils without snapping a few of these graphite sticks ... My Modern Met blog has more pics, then head on over to Mint Style Studio for an interview with the artist.

Nautilus Reading Nook Posted: 01 Jan 2013 06:00 PM PST Alicia Bastian's Nautilus reading area provides a bit of privacy for a healthy escape into literature. Its segments unfold into a wavy line or can be closed off in a compact space. You can view more photos at the link. Link -via Dornob

Swedish New Year Fireworks Posted: 01 Jan 2013 05:00 PM PST Sanna Dullaway had some bad shrimp and suffered from a case of food poisoning on New Year's Eve, but still managed to go out on his balcony in Nynäshamn, Sweden to shoot photographs of the fireworks. He used a DSLR camera and stitched the images together to make a beautiful panorama. Only a portion is shown here, but you can see the long view at imgur or the panorama at Dermander. Link -via reddit

The 160 Million Dollar Bride Posted: 01 Jan 2013 04:00 PM PST The age of giving heads of cattle as dowry may have come and gone, but the replacement may not be better: a Chinese tycoon has set a record by giving a dowry of more than 1 billion yuan ($160 million) to marry off his daughter! Wu Ruibiao included as part of his largesse four boxes of gold which were placed on his daughter's bed as well as a Porsche and a Mercedes-Benz which were handed over draped with red ribbons. According to the Straits News newspaper Ruibiao's daughter, who has not been named, decided to marry her childhood sweetheart, a local government official called Xu from Jinjiang, an entrepreneurial city on China's south coast. An eight-day public wedding banquet began on December 28. But the generosity of the father did not end there. A bank account has been opened with an initial deposit of 20 million yuan and five million shares in Mr Wu's company, Wanli, with an estimated value of 100 million yuan, were transferred. Added to the gifts are a list of properties, including several villas and a retail store in Quanzhou city. Mr Wu also gave 15 million yuan to two local charities, for good luck. And not one wedding gift from the NeatoShop. Could you believe that? Malcolm Moore of The Telegraph has more on this story: Link

Atari 2600 Cake Posted: 01 Jan 2013 03:00 PM PST Ah, Atari. You were my first gaming platform. How many hours did I waste playing Combat on you? Not enough, probably. The Pink Cake Box made this Atari 2600 cake for one man's fortieth birthday party.  Link -via Between the Pages

New Year, New Oddball Laws Posted: 01 Jan 2013 02:00 PM PST New year, new laws. When the ball dropped on midnight, January 1st, we not only rang in the new year, but also a slew of oddball laws from around the country. Good Morning America has a few examples: Turns out 2013 will be unlucky for cat lovers in Wellington, Kan., where the city will be restricting the number of cats in a household to no more than four. [...] Another unusual law taking effect at midnight is Public Act 97-743 in Illinois. This law imposes a fine of $1,000 on anyone who pops a wheelie on a motorcycle while speeding. [...] Come 12:01 a.m. in Concord, Mass., plastic bottles will be considered contraband. Concord will be the first town in the nation to outlaw plastic bottles. As of Jan. 1, it will no longer be illegal to flash your headlights in Florida to warn drivers about a speeding trap set by police. In California, more than 800 laws are about to take effect, including one that allows driverless vehicles on the road. But a human must be present in the passenger’s seat of all computer-driven cars. Read more over at ABC News: Link

What Does a "New Year" Really Mean? Posted: 01 Jan 2013 01:30 PM PST Today is New Year's Day, which simply means the earth has completed another journey around the sun. But how in the world do we know how long that takes? To answer the question, Phil Plat has "taken a simple concept like 'years' and turned it into a horrifying nightmare of nerdery and math." Let’s take a look at the Earth from a distance. From our imaginary point in space, we look down and see the Earth and the Sun. The Earth is moving, orbiting the Sun. Of course it is, you think to yourself. But how do you measure that? For something to be moving, it has to be moving relative to something else. What can we use as a yardstick against which to measure the Earth’s motion? Well, we might notice as we float in space that we are surrounded by billions of pretty stars. We can use them! So we mark the position of the Earth and Sun using the stars as benchmarks, and then watch and wait. Some time later, the Earth has moved in a big circle and is back to where it started in reference to those stars. That’s called a “sidereal year” (sidus is the Latin word for star). How long did that take? Let’s say we used a stopwatch to measure the elapsed time. We’ll see that it took the Earth 31,558,149 seconds (some people like to approximate that as pi x 10 million = 31,415,926 seconds, which is an easy way to be pretty dang close). But how many days is that? Well, that’s a second complication. A “day” is how long it takes the Earth to rotate once, but we’re back to that measurement problem again. But hey, we used the stars once, let’s do it again! You stand on the Earth and define a day as the time it takes for a star to go from directly overhead to directly overhead again: a sidereal day. That takes 23 hours 56 minutes 4 seconds = 86,164 seconds. But wait a second (a sidereal second?)—shouldn’t that be exactly equal to 24 hours? What happened to those 3 minutes and 56 seconds? I was afraid you’d ask that—but this turns out to be important. And that's only the beginning of the explanation of where we get the concepts and the measurements for a "day" and a "year." Read the rest at Bad Astronomy. Link (Image credit: ESA ©2009 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA)

Potentially Ominous Wedding Ring Posted: 01 Jan 2013 01:00 PM PST Etsy seller Anama doesn't actually market this ring as a wedding ring. But if someone proposed to you with this ring, could you consider it to be a good or a bad sign? Link

New Year Resolutions Illustrated by Cats Posted: 01 Jan 2013 12:30 PM PST (YouTube link) Jeff Wysaski of Pleated-Jeans has a countdown of the ten most popular New Year resolutions as illustrated by cats. Good luck keeping yours! Resolutions, I mean. I very much hope you keep your cats. Link

Wine Moleskine Journal Posted: 01 Jan 2013 12:00 PM PST Wine Moleskine Journal Does one of your New Year's resolutions include becoming a real wine connoisseur? You need the Wine Moleskine Journal from the NeatoShop. The journal includes 6 themed sections, wine glossary, measures and conversions, and much more. Now you can keep detailed notes about all your new wine drinking experiences.   Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Office & Desk items.  Link

366 Days, 366 Books: How Jeff Ryan Read One Book Per Day in 2012 Posted: 01 Jan 2013 12:00 PM PST Jeff Ryan, like a lot of professional writers, spends a lot of time reading. He made a demanding resolution for last year: to read an average of one book per day. Since 2012 was a leap year, that meant 366 books. Ryan was appareantly successful--and not by reading only very short books. Here's how: No, my prime directive was: no min-maxing. In Dungeons and Dragons, “min-maxing” is focusing on one character attribute to the exclusion of everything else. (Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory is an excellent example of someone who min-maxes intelligence, stealing points from charisma and dexterity.) If you’ve ever been in a team sport, school play, or med school, you know how that commitment supersedes all others. Parties are missed, sleep is skipped, emails go unreturned. “I can’t—I have practice/rehearsal/a corpse to dissect.” [...] But for every period behind the eight ball, I had weeks when I was days or even weeks ahead of schedule. A slack day at work, an hour doing yard work with the iPod, a solo plane ride or overnight stay—these were my moments, and I seized them. Believe it or not, I grew so far ahead of my pace that I successfully read all 1,016 pages of George R.R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons. It took me three full weeks, but I slew that Dragon. I did have to give up some things. I listened to audiobooks exclusively—no music for me. I gave up video games, which wasn’t as big a deal for me as I expected it would be. Mainly, though, I decided that Starship Troopers 2, Lost Boys 3, and Saws V-VII weren’t worth the midnight oil I was expending on them. Yes, you, too, can read a book a day, just by giving up direct-to-DVD horror films! Here's his reading list. Read more about Ryan's methods at the link. Link | Photo: katerha My favorite read of 2012 was the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. What was your favorite book to read last year?

Census Dotmap Posted: 01 Jan 2013 11:30 AM PST Brandon Martin-Anderson created a map of the United States made only of dots. There are 308,450,225 dots, one for every person counted in the 2010 US Census! The map is zoomable at the site, in case you want to zoom in and see your dot. Good luck, as there are no state or city boundaries, roads, or natural landmarks. Link -via Holy Kaw!

Grumpy Octopus Coffee Cup Cozy Posted: 01 Jan 2013 11:00 AM PST For a holiday party gift, Twinkie Chan crocheted this frustrated octopus cozy. Why is he grumpy? He probably hasn't drunk enough coffee from his cup yet. Link -via That's Nerdalicious!

The Meatiest Snowman Around Posted: 01 Jan 2013 10:30 AM PST Even if you live somewhere that never snows (like those of us in San Diego) you can still make your own snowman this year with a little bit of Parmesan cheese and a lot of ground beef. Now that's a tasty winter wonderland. Link Via Buzzfeed

The Finnjet Is the Ultimate in Automotive Design Posted: 01 Jan 2013 10:00 AM PST The Finnjet, built by Antti Rahko, a Finnish immigrant to the United States, is everything that you could want in a car. It's made from two Mercedes station wagons and many, many other parts that Rahko has added continuously over twelve years: Today, the machine’s meticulously detailed exterior is tastefully trimmed with 86 lights, 36 mirrors and a couple of jet engine housings, through which the exhaust is routed. [...] The interior has seating for 10, a stove, microwave, freezer, television and two air-conditioning units. In a nod to his Finnish roots, Mr. Rahko also outfitted the passenger cabin with a functional sauna. Three batteries and three alternators provide the juice necessary to keep everything humming. No trailer queen, the Finnjet is quite drivable and relatively economical, achieving about 25 m.p.g. on the highway, Mr. Rahko said. A fuel-stingy Mercedes turbodiesel power plant drives a dual-wheel rear axle mounted in the center of the chassis. A total of eight wheels helps ensure that tires and suspension components are not overtaxed When asked how he could negotiate corners in such a lengthy machine, Mr. Rahko said that the Finnjet handled well, thanks to steerable rear wheels, which turn the opposite way of the front wheels. The rear axle is from a Chevy pickup truck and is installed backwards. Link -via Oddity Central | Photo: Auto Zurnal

Lego Golf Course Posted: 01 Jan 2013 09:30 AM PST Imgur user elviscoffeecup built a tabletop one-hole golf course complete with golfers out of LEGO bricks! It was a Christmas surprise for his son. See more photographs of different angles and closeups of the details. Link -via GolfBlogger

Star Trails Down Under Posted: 01 Jan 2013 09:00 AM PST This photograph of star trails over Lake Tyrrell in Victoria, Australia was taken by amateur astronomer and astrophotography enthusiast Alex Cherney. His daughter's school project involving astronomy was the origin of Cherney's interest in the subject. Originally from the Ukraine, Cherney currently lives in Australia and regularly travels the country taking pictures of the night sky.    See more of Alex Cherney's photography at his website. Link -via The World at Night (TWAN)   (Image credit: Alex Cherney/TWAN)

The Penguin and the Piper Posted: 01 Jan 2013 08:30 AM PST In 1904, William Speirs Bruce led the second voyage of the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition to the frozen continent. The ship, the Scotia, was trapped in ice for four days along the route. While the expedition was stuck, they continued to take geographical and meteorological observations and measurements. But the ship's bagpiper, Gilbert Kerr, took the time to pose for a photograph on the ice as he serenaded an Emperor penguin. According to the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, the penguin was tied to a cooking pot to hold him in place. The photograph was sent as a postcard from Antarctica. Piper Kerr was no doubt as full of Scottish pride as Bruce himself, but deserves extra points for wearing a kilt on an Antarctic icepack. Link The post was inspired by a funny animated video about the event at Nothing to Do with Arbroath. Link

Parrots Hate Electronic Music Posted: 01 Jan 2013 08:00 AM PST A new study involved exposing parrots to different types of music to see what they enjoyed. They all bobbed their head in sync with folk and rock music and one seemed particularly fond of pop music, but they all had one thing in common as well -they all absolutely hated electronic music. Researchers noted that they looked particularly "distressed" when they played groups such as Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers. While many humans can relate to this feeling, it's a little surprising considering how fond some parrots seem to be of sucking on the beads on their hoodies, like this guy. Doesn't he look like he's ready to rave? Link Via io9

Clumsy Kittens Compilation Posted: 01 Jan 2013 07:30 AM PST (YouTube link) Even if curiosity doesn't kill the cat, it can get them into some awkward positions. -via Tastefully Offensive

You are subscribed to email updates from Neatorama To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610