news, cake, and celluloid

the cake picture is from cakewrecks, the blog. it says "congratulations on your vasectomy pete!" it's too good.

and now, more food photos because i'm hungry: eyeball insalata caprese! via neatorama. i'm not even that into halloween, but i'd make this.



one more thing, also from neatorama: ping pong balls as useful aids to organ transplant surgery! in this case, a little girl's adult-sized liver transplant was putting too much pressure on nearby arteries. so, the surgeon called for a ping pong ball to hold the liver away...and then just decided to leave it inside. why not...what are ping pong balls made of, anyway?



wikipedia's entry on table tennis tells me this:

"The ball is made of a high-bouncing gas-filled celluloid, colored white or orange, with a matte finish. The choice of ball color is made according to the table color and its surroundings. For example, a white ball is easier to see on a green or blue table than it is on a grey table. Stars on the ball indicate the quality of the ball. 3 stars indicates that it is of the highest quality."

so of course i looked up "celluloid" and this is what i found:

"Celluloid is the name of a class of compounds created from nitrocellulose and camphor, plus dyes and other agents. Generally regarded to be the first thermoplastic, it was first created as Parkesine in 1856 and as Xylonite in 1869 before being registered as Celluloid in 1870. Celluloid is easily molded and shaped, and it was first widely used as an ivory replacement. Celluloid is highly flammable and also easily decomposes, and is no longer widely used. Its most common uses today are the table tennis ball and guitar picks."

guitar picks!!!

breaking news! thinking makes you fat

they've found a link between mental activity (i.e. problem-solving at computer) and increased appetite due to glucose instability in the body. apparently muscular exertion requires proteins, fats, and glucose...but mental activity only requires glucose. So much so that the brain freaks out and needs you to eat stuff with the aim of providing a fast glucose fix.

well, results are "tentative" for now. Read about it here, on ABC News. meanwhile, i'll be horking down my lunch and buying an ice cream before i sit at this computer for a few more hours.

pinhole camera built into prepared skull, yowza

what is crazy and really cool? this thing. according to geekologie, neatorama, and engadget, and probably others, this camera is built using the century-and-a-half-old skull of a 13 year old girl. the camera takes hazy, dreamy pictures which can only be described as Incredibly Creepy Since They Are Produced Through A "Third Eye" Bored Into A Skull AND AS SUCH ARE Just Like Prophecy On Film OMFG! freak. out. the artist responsible is wayne martin belger; he's a man that loves to make a good pinhole camera, what. click here for his creepy and incredibly fascinating website, with more pics and more pinhole cameras. (check out "yama", which is another skull-cam with cast-bronze pinholes in the eye sockets; it's set-up to take 3-D pics.)

omg what is even happening

from cuteoverload: RepairCat will repair your printer! with captions. hilarious.

miscellania superb

so neatorama rocked me again. sorry about the long list of links, but there is so much! i should probably update more frequently instead of having long lists. i'll work on that. but for right now, link madness!

1. How long could you survive chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor? It's a 10 question quiz! According to the quiz, I could survive for 51 whole seconds. Hah!

2. Stealth Cell Phone Towers: why is that tree so ugly? This is a great article - with photos - about how our need for constant cell phone reception and our rejection of ugly cell phone towers has resulted in "urban camouflage" cell phone towers. they've got 'em on church steeples, grain silos, palm trees, pine trees, fake trees, even fake boulders. in-SANE, but in the back of your mind, you already knew. some of the pictures are impressively stealth.

3. some crazy artist-guy got sick of his blond wood kitchen flooring. so he got a fat Sharpie marker, put down some white plastic board, and doodled. pretty trippy.

4. speaking of crazy artists, this belgian artist named Wim Delvoye likes to build digesting machines that create unique turds. yes! the turds are then vacuum-packed and displayed. one of the machines - called cloacas - has three settings: human, rabbit, and cat! it's art, people. art imitates LIFE. ("cloaca" is latin for "sewer", btw. it's also the combined excretory opening for reptiles and birds, and platypi, and echidnas.) here is a sketch from the website, although there are also many photographs of everything. you'll find much art of interest on delvoye's site, but beware: it is almost all scatalogical, sexual/pornographic, or involving dead animals.

i know, because i just looked. this is a weaker version of how i felt after watching Pink Flamingo. listen, it's Not Safe For Work, but it's damn interesting. and i'm so curious in general. right now i'm imagining the Power Puff Girls scouring out my brains with soap, baking soda, and diamond gravel.

Tina Fey does Sarah Palin on SNL!

they both rock. i love them.

hey, remember The Sims?

i loved playing The Sims - Deluxe Version; mostly i enjoyed building extravagant mansions using the cheat code for unlimited funds, and then persuading my two Sim women to fall in love with each other and adopt a Sim-puppy... but then i had that stressful encounter with the grim reaper in the game. and how many alien abductions are really possible in one play, honestly! okay, tangent.

the creator of that crazy PC and PS2 game is Will Wright, and he's now created a more universal Sim game, called Spore. Have you seen those mysterious billboards all over your city, citing spore.com? yeah, those. according to Time magazine's interview with Wright, they had expected to get a million downloads in a year or so - well they download has been available since September 7th and they've already surpassed a million downloads.

whoa.

so i finally visited the site, where you can download a creature design application, among other things... awesome?! replay evolution and civilization, all on one planet. start from a microscopic creature in the ocean, and fine-tune until you can take over the world and send out space missions to other galaxies. AWESOME. watch the intro here at www.spore.com!

gina gershon's sarah palin impersonation

See more Gina Gershon videos at Funny or Die

from funnyordie.com, and also TheSuperficial. when you're done with that, check out this spoofy website for the next new craze: genpets! they scare me.

also, if you're getting hysterical over that sarah palin Banned Books list, fear not! she only asked if the librarian would be willing to pull "objectionable" books, she didn't actually offer up a list.

because that makes it so much better, right? look at the snopes article on Sarah Palin's Banned Book List here. omg, i really don't like her.

Don't be such a Tardigrade

A wealth of fascinating information today on Neatorama! To begin, what is a tardigrade, and why is it also called a "water bear"? Why does that sound so darn cute?

Well, apparently some space scientists loaded up some micro-organisms called tardigrades onto petri dishes and sent them into space. Click here to read about how the tardigrades fared under unfiltered solar radiation, etc. (Hint: I think tardigrades officially kick rotifer ass!) The original article is right here on wired.com, and why did i stop my Wired subscription. (Maybe I felt like I just needed to try other magazines for a while?) According to wired, tardi-bears can survive dessication, complete vacuums, direct solar radiation, and - most impressively - they can repair their own damaged DNA. What!? They also have many little claw-paws.

On a smaller and less ex-planetary scale, you can enter your surname into this WorldNames application and see your surname's world distribution. I have many distant relatives in Holland. And Australia. And Alaska.) It's just nice to see the world through you-colored glasses, isn't it?

And now for my biggest time-waster of the day: 35 of the most unique couch designs, including the previously mentioned coffin couches! I really enjoy the one called the "Sitscape" (towards the middle of the page), but I wish its reclining surface wasn't made of paper fins. I also enjoyed the cave-like couch and the couch that reminds me of giant sugar cubes. This is from a blog called freshome, btw.

Finally, if you're really lazy and can't be bothered to read the hour-by-hour weather report, just click on over to UmbrellaToday? it will tell you - by zipcode - whether or not you'll need a fricking umbrella today.

A note: I have been eating so much eggplant lately, I decided to look up eggplant toxicity. Well, it's not really that toxic, but wikipedia's Eggplant/Health Properties entry did surprise me with this little factoid:

"Eggplant is richer in nicotine than any other edible plant, with a concentration of 100 ng/g (or 0.01mg/100g). However, the amount of nicotine from eggplant or any other food is negligible compared to passive smoking.[7] On average, 20lbs of eggplant contains about the same amount of nicotine as a cigarette."

the lingerie bowl is your new half-time show?

well, i'm just giving up. i'm having some kind of hormonal week, or ovulating, or something. i apologize for my fascination with under-dressed women this week, people. hopefully this blog will not entirely change theme, because i really enjoy posting about echidnas and dung beetle truffles and gadgety gadgets like the chumby(i want!). but for right now, i am posting a picture taken at the Lingerie Bowl; generally attractive women in skimpy football outfits playing some version of tackle football.

not my finest moment, i'll admit.

giant spiders, satan, and donut burgers

so many good pictures from neatorama today. i am tempted to leave out all explanation and just let the pictures speak for themselves. but i'll put links under the pictures, just in case you're curious.


explanation: giant robotic spider "resting" on side of condemned building!


explanation: totally self-explanatory. on neatorama, but originally snapped by LiveJournaler scarlett_1975. i'm proud to be an american?


explanation: I think this is what Google's cafeteria is serving in honor of hiring a new cafe manager? yes, it is a "Krispy Kreme bacon cheeseburger".

the anti-blonde

there are so many reasons to love christina ricci. omg, she played wednesday addams with such aplomb! she made me cry during Prozac Nation. my god, she did great work in Bastard Out Of Carolina, Pumpkin, The Ice Storm, The Opposite of Sex (!!), 200 Cigarettes, and Sleepy Hollow. just to name a few. i haven't even seen Monster yet - i'm scared - but i'm sure it kicks ass and will make me cry. you must heart christina ricci - she's kinda like meryl, or holly hunter, or susan surandon. or mary louise parker. she just rawks.

so now we have another reason to love her - her bikini bod, via The Superficial. whammo! not usually my style to post bikini pics, but i was moved by how super ms. ricci is looking on the beach.

moved, i tell you.

evil genius

there's a website out there that specializes in creating spoof magazine and tabloid covers. the site is called Panopticist: Cultural Surveillance. and it's funny. check out the latest cover for the fictional Foreign Affairs Weekly featuring McCain and Palin. i like! and i really like this one link to "sementeen" magazine, which may not be okay for work. depending on the nature of your work. found via the wonderful boingboing.net!

stiletto race

well, there's an 800 meter race run by women in stilettos. the link has video, and a short blurb! i believe it's australian, and the prize is 2500 monetary pounds.

hmph, i'll be really excited if I find out how to make the numismatic-pounds sign in the next five minutes. (link to stiletto sprint found via neatorama.)
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oh my god, will it work!? £ 2500.00, woo-yeah!