The Seminole Indian tribe is a little different from your standard American Indian group.  For starters, they’ve never actually surrendered to the United States government at the end of the Seminole Wars.  They’re also the tribe to make the switch from being simple tribal gaming organization to actually owning their own casino company when they bought the Hard Rock Cafe and its various casino interests.  Now, they’re trying to get one of the traditional Seminole sports, alligator wrestling, back into the mainstream.

To that end, they’ve launched the Freestyle Alligator Wrestling Competitions (FAWC), and have one competition per month at the Okalee Indian Village at the Seminole Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood, Florida.  The top prize for the most daring participant is $10,000.  As you can see from the image gallery with the article, these guys are insane.  Anyone messing with gators is probably nuts.  Still, they probably have some cool stories about their gator experiences.

Tags: alligator wrestling, gator wrestling, Seminole Indians, Freestyle Alligator Wrestling Competitions (FAWC), Okalee Indian Village, Seminole Hard Rock Casino, Hollywood, Florida, unusual images, unusual animals, unusual sports

Actually, it’s not just perfume.  City workers at three different buildings in Detroit are banned from using or wearing the following:  “colognes, aftershave lotions, perfumes, deodorants, body/face lotions … (and) the use of scented candles, perfume samples from magazines, spray or solid air fresheners.”  This is part of a settlement agreement between the city and a female employee who sued because a colleague’s perfume made it difficult to do her job.  The disgruntled anti-smell employee also got $100,000 for her trouble, and Detroit has banned all scented products in city offices.

Now, I can understand both sides of the argument.  There’s something to be said for smelling your best, but at the same time there’s something to be said for not reeking of cheap perfume like some sort of French prostitute.  There has to be a happy medium between not stinking of BO and not stinking of perfume, even if some people are unable to find it.

Tags: Detroit, Michigan, employees forbidden from wearing scents, perfume ban, cologne ban, unusual laws, workplace relations, banned at work, dumb lawsuits, too much perfume

Apparently, not all three-leafed green clover-looking plants are shamrocks.  Only the lesser trefoil is a true shamrock.  The other plants, Trifolium repens (white clover) and Medicago lupulina (black medic), are actually fake shamrocks, if you believe Dr. Declan Doogue, a botanist at the Royal Irish Academy.  Most people don’t know the difference just by looking at them which is which.

Apparently the white clover is the plant most likely to be misidentified as a shamrock due to the fact it grows everywhere.  That must be the plant infesting my backyard right now.  Fake shamrock or real clover, so long as I can get my Shamrock Shake I’ll be all right.

Tags: shamrocks, unusual plants, shamrock shortage, St. Patrick’s Day, fake shamrocks, Trifolium dubium, lesser trefoil, real shamrocks unavailable, Dr. Declan Doogue, Royal Irish Academy

Maybe it’s all those years spent under Communist rule that made Russians so creative.  Maybe it’s because they’re used to making cars last for as long as possible.  No matter what drives Russians to make weird car mods, there’s no one quite as creative when it comes to customizing automobiles.  English Russia has a great gallery of weird and funny Russian car mods.  Among my favorites are the lights and antenna model above, the car with cardboard fins and spoilers, and, of course, the home-made Rolls-Royce.

If there’s one thing Russians must love (or maybe this is just something car modders in general love), it’s the spoiler.  Every other car in the gallery seems to have a spoiler stuck on the front.  The ones that don’t have a wind shear on the front to encourage aerodynamics (or to look cool).  It wouldn’t surprise me if half the entries over at There, I Fixed It were Russian in origin!

Tags: unusual cars, unusual car modifications, modified cars, car mods, Russian car mods, weird Russian cars, unusual automobiles, image gallery, funny Russian cars

Apparently Bigelow need astronauts, ground crew, and maintenance staff for their commercial space station project.  All kidding aside, given NASA’s big slate of recent cutbacks and the fact that America is about to be without a manned space vehicle, this is probably a great time to jump ship to the private sector.  Plus, how often are  you going to be able to get a job as an astronaut, anyway?

Tags: Bigelow Aerospace, Bigelow, company hiring astronauts, astronauts only job listing, experienced astronauts only, space travel, aerospace, manned space flight, commercial space flight

China is a veritable wonderland of weird people and even weirder animals.  Snake with a foot?  You know it’s from China.  Alien fish monster?  Found in a cave in China.  Village of midgets, dwarfs, and other wee folks?  China all the way.  And now, joining China’s menagerie of monsters and freaks is a six-legged calf, which was born in Leizhou, in the southern province of Guandong.  Now Fish Boy can have a pet of his very own!

People can blame this on any number of things:  air pollution, water pollution, conjoined twins, simple freak of nature… but here’s what’s up.  This is actually a test cow.  That’s right, this is all part of KFC’s plan to breed a six-legged mutatochicken.  Once they perfect the genetic mutation on cows (to keep people like me from uncovering the plot), they’re going to cross that technology over to poultry DNA and then bam, that’s a one-chicken extra-value meal.  You’re not fooling me, Colonel Sanders!

Tags: mutants, unusual animals, six-legged calf, calf born with two extra legs and an extra tail, Leizhou, Guangdong Province, China, unusual medical news, weird animals, mutations, conjoined twins

However, if there’s one thing you can say about Donna, it’s that at least she has a job.  In order to make ends meet and pay her $815-per-month food bill, she has a website in which people pay to watch her eat fast food.   She’s gonna need a lot of fast food to hit her goal.

To reach 1,000 pounds by 2012, she’ll need to eat 12,000 calories per day, well over the daily requirement.  The average person is supposed to eat between 2,000 and 2,500 calories per day in order to maintain a healthy weight.  Here’s world-class athlete Michael Phelps’ 12,000-calories-a-day training menu, for an example of what that kind of serious eating entails.

Tags: Donna Simpson, the world’s fattest mother, Guinness World Records, woman aims to be world’s fattest woman, woman wants to weight 1000 pounds, unusual records, unhealthy people, fat woman

I have a good friend of mine who, during the Vancouver Olympics, became the world’s biggest fan of men’s figure skating.  Weird, right?  I mean, I think most people are aware of figure skating during the Winter Olympics, but like she skipped past curling and other Internet favorites and just latched onto men’s figure skating, specifically Johnny Weir.  Of course, gold medalist Evan Lysacek of the USA is not one to take a dissing lightly, which is why Brooklyn rapper Don McCloskey cut a single for him called “Figga Please.”  Mildly not safe for work, but pretty dirty-word-free for a rap song.

I hate this song.  It’s just too catchy for my brain to deal with.  Thanks, Internet.  I’ll have this stuck in my head all day.  Still, if there’s any sport that’s secretly entertaining and could use a much-needed dose of macho, it’s probably figure skating.  I mean, in pairs figure-skating?  One of the crucial elements is actually throwing your partner across the ring as hard as you can while she spins in the air and then lands one one foot!  That’s pretty awesome. If you can get past the sparkles, there’s some secretly crazy stuff going on.

Image: Chicago Sun-Times

Tags: men’s figure skating, figure skating, Evan Lysacek, unusual music videos, men’s figure skating music video, Figga Please, Don McCloskey

If you’ve ever had a rough day, stumbled home after a bad commute, and immediately been snuggled up to by a pet, you’re not alone.  The benefits of pet ownership on emotional well being are well known, but not as well known are just how valuable those relationships are to the pet owners.  Dogs are an important part of most pet owners’ lives, with up to a third of pet owners saying they miss their dog more than they miss their spouse/significant other, probably because 90% of pet owners feel their pet is more pleased to see them at the end of the day than the other humans in their life!

Of course, the source of this survey is from pet food maker Pup-Peroni, but that doesn’t make the results any less valid.  People forge serious emotional bonds with their pets, much like they do us.  They don’t force their beliefs on us, they don’t nag us to talk about our day, and they don’t complain about chores that need to be done.  They’re just there for us, with unconditional love.  That’s why pets are better than most people.

Image: Discovery

Tags: Pup-Peroni, 33% miss their pets more then their mates after a long trip, relationships with pets better than with married couples, unusual pet news, pet and owner relationships

If you’re not pleased with the speed of your broadband Internet access, you’re not alone.  Most Americans are unhappy with something about broadband, which costs a great deal to purchase for the end user and costs a great deal for the provider to wire up for.  That’s why only about 65% of American households have high speed Internet access.  However, the FCC is aiming to change that by announcing what they call the National Broadband Plan.

The goal is a simple one:  create the world’s largest broadband market.  They want 90 percent of America’s homes connected to a high speed Internet network by 2020.  If that’s not ambitious enough, they also want to boost the speed of the Internet access from 3.9 megabits per second to 100 megabits per second for 100 percent of broadband customers.  Of course, the plan doesn’t do anything about the cost of broadband, which is why most people don’t get it at home, but hopefully that will come with time and Google’s Fiber For Communities plan.

Image: Business Week

Tags: broadband internet, FCC, government plans to invest in ultra-high-speed internet, internet access, National Broadband Plan, improving US broadband access, creating the world’s largest broadband market

Guinness is on the lookout for a new world’s shortest man today after the current record holder, He Pingping of China, passed away.  Shockingly, He Pingping was only 21 years of age at the time of his death while doing publicity for Guinness in Rome.  He was admitted to the hospital two weeks ago with chest pains and passed away on Saturday, but his death was only announced last night/early this morning.

If I had to guess, I’d say the new world’s shortest man will be Khagendra Magar, who at 22 inches tall is even shorter than He Pingping was.  It has to be awful being so tiny, but at least He got to have a little fun and soak up a little spotlight before he passed on.  People with primordial dwarfism are generally medically fragile (or so Verne Troyer’s Surreal Life appearance showed me), but I had no idea just how bad it was for them.

Image: Telegraph

Tags: obituaries, world’s shortest man dead, he pingping dead, he pingping, guinness world records, Rome, Italy, he pingping dead at 21, Khagendra Magar

In contrast, there are 668,000 dotcom addresses registered every month.  Verisign, the top-level domain registrar, logs 53 billion requests for various web addresses every day (that’s more per day than all of the requests from 1995 total!)  I own five of them myself, and I didn’t even think about running or writing for websites until college!  There are 1.7 billion people online, and that number is only going to grow as technology spreads across the globe like a technological squid fighting with a shark.

Tags: anniversaries, dot com, the first domain registered, dotcom’s silver anniversary, Symbolics computers, the internet, first domain registered, milestones, symbolics.com, domain names

The goal, as always, is to figure out a way to predict who just might turn out to be a psychopath via brain scan images.  This research used the PET and fMRI scans.  While the brain scan isn’t evidence of a proclivity to become a killer, it might help pick them out of a line-up at court.

Tags: brain scans, unusual health news, medical news, weird science, psychopath brain functioning, psychopaths, Vanderbilt University, Joshua Buckholtz, brain chemistry, PET scan, fMRI scan, brain scans

For 56 years, through good times and bad, Jim Becker has attended Green Bay Packers games.  Lots of NFL teams have dedicated fans, but so few have given as much to attend those games.  Considering Becker and his wife raised 11 children, money was generally tight.  So, to keep the tickets coming, he gave blood.  Over 145 pints of blood, in fact.  This earned him a spot in the Packers Hall of Fame and may have just saved his life.

Becker’s father passed away at age 43 of a rare blood disorder in which the blood retains too much iron.  The only known cure is giving blood.  Given that he’s 79 years old, Becker’s bloodshed for the team saved his life!  Or, at least, prolonged his life to roughly twice the age his father lived to.

Tags: selling blood for football tickets saves man’s life, selling blood for football tickets, fan elected to Packers hall of fame, Green Bay Packers, Green Bay, Wisconsin, Jim Becker, medical miracles, unusual health news, unusual diseases

It’s hard to say there’s a good way to die, but if there is, Peter Graves was lucky enough to get it.  He went out for a morning brunch with his family, then passed away upon returning home.  The official cause is a heart attack.   One of his daughters provided CPR, but it was in vain.  Graves passes a few days shy of his 84th birthday.

Tags: Peter Graves, Peter Graves dead, obituaries, celebrities, Hollywood, Biography, Mission: Impossible, Airplane!, Clarence Oveur, actors

I don’t care how much you love giant aquariums, camel burgers, and the world’s tallest closed building.  Once you’ve lived in the west (Najafi was born and raised in Great Britain), I don’t see how you could go back and live, full time, in a place with laws that restrictive.  I can understanding wanting some public decency, and like most people I’ve wanted to pepper spray teenagers at the mall for their PDAs, but to do that to adults is just crazy, especially in a he-said, she-said situation like this one without a legitimate witness.

Image: Geekologie

Tags: Dubai, United Arab Emirates, British pair arrested for kissing, arrested for kissing, British man jailed for a month for kissing, jail time for kissing, unusual crimes, Ayman Najafi

The two rushed the dog to the vet and found out there was only one way for the diamond to come out, and it’s not the good way.  Then again, there is no good way to get a diamond from within a dog.  So, every morning when Sollie and George went for a walk, Sollie’s… recycled breakfast… was scooped up and searched through by Geroge.  Eventually, the diamond was recovered, cleaned, and returned to the dealer (who undoubtedly boiled it for awhile to make sure it was extra clean).

Tags: unusual animals, golden retriever eats 3-carat diamond, dog eats giant diamond, Robert Rosin, George Kaufmann, Sollie, Robert Bernard Jewellers, Rockville, Maryland, dogs, dog eats 000 diamond

Each jar contains enough fresh air (not chocolate air) to relieve stress for 10 minutes and they come in a variety of flavors; a few of them I can make out are garden, forest, and lake.  I’m sure other traditional favorites like seaside air are there, as well.  You can get a free jar of air by emailing press.office@nationaltrust.org.uk, though you probably have to be in Britain to get your air.

If you could somehow make this a real product, possibly using chocolate air technology?  That would be stellar.  I’d love to be able to make my room or office smell like the fresh, salty air of the beach, without the artificial stink of chemicals from aerosol sprays.

Tags: National Trust, Great Britain, jars of air, canned air, fresh air to reduce stress, canned air, unusual nature, free jars of air

Police have been on the tail of the threesome for awhile.  Lukeisha A. Harris and two accomplices had a pretty good fraud ring going on.  Allegedly, they would obtain fake drivers licenses, then hit up banks and cash advance places for payday loans.  After a bank caught them using a stolen credit card and reported them to the police, cops trailed them to two other banks, then caught the trio in the act of fraud.  However, the biggest bust wasn’t breaking up the fraud ring, it was within the bra of Lukeisha Harris:  when she was searched at Spokane County Jail, police uncovered the biggest bust of all, including some $26,000 in cash and card receipts stuffed in the woman’s bra.

That’s no mean feat, but Ms. Harris is quite a large woman.  She’s 6 feet tall, and over 400 pounds.  That’s a lot of bulk, which means she has a lot of folds and creases in which she can stash her cash, bra or not.

Image: amycgx

Tags: woman hides k in bra, woman hides 26 thousand dollars in bra, Seattle, Washington, fraud ring, stolen credit card ring, unusual arrests, unusual criminals, Lukeisha A. Harris

If you’re looking to see a predatory cat out in the wild, then you’ve got one place to go.  The lowland rainforest of Jeypore-Dehing, in the Assam province of India, has the most wild cats ever spotted in one location.  There are an incredible seven different cat species to be found in the area’s 354 square mile range, and more might be on the way, according to study head and wildlife biologist Kashmira Kakati.  It’s like the Caboodle Ranch, but for giant cats rather than simple housecats.

Using a set of 30 digital camera traps, Kakati captured the seven cats and a number of other rare jungle animals during the study’s two-year run.  The most interesting finds, though, were the big cats.  The rare clouded leopard made an appearance, as well as an incredibly rare Chinese wildcat.  She believes that other cat species are migrating to Jeypore-Dehing to escape hunters and poachers in surrounding areas.

Tags: seven cat species found in one forest, seven cat species in an area, biodiversity, cat sanctuary, Jeypore-Dehing, Assam, India, rain forest, jungles, Kashmira Kakati

Overnight, there was an outbreak of March Madness.  With the last games of various conference tournaments wrapping up, Selection Sunday lead to the official beginning of NCAA Tournament fever, as teams did their best to make the cut and get into the 65-team NCAA Tournament and vie for the national championship in college basketball.  Once the NCAA Tournament got picked, that cleared the path for the two other post-season tournaments, the NIT (National Invitational Tournament) and the CBI (College Basketball Invitational) to finalize their fields as well. The coveted number one seeds went to the Kansas Jayhawks, Kentucky Wildcats (my home state team), Syracuse Orange, and the Duke Blue Devils (boo).

Brackets, brackets everywhere!  Here’s the basic breakdown of these tournaments.  The NCAA is the best of the best, the NIT is the best of what’s left, and the CBI is the best of teams that could break even and win half their games.  While the CBI is only a few years old, the NIT actually predates the NCAA Tournament and, at one point, was the most prestigious post-season tournament for college basketball.

Image: New York Daily News

Tags: College Basketball Invitational, NCAA Tournament, March Madness, National Invitational Tournament, NIT, CBI, post-season basketball, basketball tournament, brackets released, college basketball, NCAA basketball

Tomorrow is the second Sunday in March, and you know what that means.  It’s time for everyone to be grumpy and miserable by missing an hour of much-needed sleep in the wee hours between Saturday night and Sunday morning (unless you live near the equator or in Arizona, where there is no daylight savings plan).  At 2 AM early Sunday morning, you move your clock ahead by an hour.  Or, you can do what I do and just do it when you get up the next day (or before bed on Saturday, whichever is easiest for you).  Did you know Daylight Savings has only been around in the US since World War I?  That’s one of many interesting DST facts I found out.

Yeesh, it seems like just a few months ago we were rolling clocks back an hour.  Now we’re taking that hour back.  Everyone wave goodbye to our weirdest winter in years!

Tags: Daylight Savings Time, time change, spring ahead, set clocks forward an hour, DST

Would you like to taste a little of what is called Scotland’s liquid history?  Well, queue on up at your local liquor store and get your hands on Gordon and MacPhail’s Generations, the world’s oldest whisky.  Retailing for a mere £10,000, there will be 54 full-sized bottles will be available, while 162 of the £2,500 smaller bottles will be available for purchase.  Each bottle is hand-blown crystal, with a silver stopper in the top. The whisky itself was aged in a former sherry barrel made with Spanish oak.

The Mortlach 70-Year-Old Speyside is the oldest whisky ever bottled for sale, and is, supposedly, very tasty (and very expensive, naturally).  It was bottled by David and Michael Urquhart, the grandsons of John Urquhart, the guy who ordered the whisky casked on October 15, 1938.  The grandsons said, “Our family has been in the whisky business for a long time, with each generation building and handing on a lifetime’s expertise to the next.  We believe Mortlach 70 Years Old is a malt without comparison.”

Tags: world’s oldest whisky, whisky, alcohol, 70-year-old whisky, Gordon and MacPhail’s Generations, Mortlach, Speyside, £10000 bottle of whisky

Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, killing and serving an endangered species risks fines up to $200,000 for organizations or companies, $100,000 for individuals, and a year in jail.  Apparently, the meat was bought out of the back of a white Mercedez and served pretty much straight from there.  The meat was a $600 omakase, or chef’s special, which turned out to be endangered sei whale.  Because there’s nothing healthier than seafood bought out of someone’s trunk!

Mmm, tasty!

Tags: Santa Monica, California, The Hump, restaurant caught selling whale meat, endangered species killed for food, Typhoon Restaurant Inc., Kiyoshiro Yamamoto, sei whales, Marine Mammal Protection Act

The report doesn’t say what the warrant was for, but the boyfriend was so grateful for how well he was treated during his arrest that he gave the cops the bottle of wine.  Just what we need, more drunk cops.  No word on who ended up with the flowers; hopefully it was his girlfriend, since he probably could use a little help making bail.

Tags: boyfriend mistaken for burglar, prowling boyfriend arrested, romantic surprise gone wrong, romance gone wrong, Korbach, Germany

Like something out of a Jimi Hendrix song, the citizens of Stavropol, Russia, are surrounded by a purple haze.  It’s not LSD or smoke-machine related; this purple haze is actually purple snow, which blanketed the region earlier this week.  The snow isn’t actually all purple, it actually ranges in color from red to brown.  The region is no stranger to weird snow, both in terms of color of snow and in terms of the sheer amount of snow that can fall at once.

Experts believe the snow gets its unusual coloration from dust picked up in the clouds over Africa.  They say it’s safe, but they don’t recommend you eating it or doing anything crazy like that.  Then again, when is it a good idea to eat snow of any color?  These days, even clean white snow is probably chock full of pollution.

Image: Panoramio

Tags: unusual weather conditions, unusual snowfall, purple snow, Stavropol, Russia, weird weather, colored snow falls from the sky, nature

Charles L. Stewart’s religious practices are a bit strange.  He claims that, as part of his religion, he had to illegally import a dangerously invasive species of Giant African Snail so as to protect his followers from illnesses.  Stewart, from Hialeah, Florida, maintains that drinking the mucus from living snails is a common practice to cure sickness in his religion Ifa Orisha, which is a traditional African religion often confused with Santeria.  Drinking snail extract often made his sick followers violently ill, giving them strange lumps in their stomachs and severe weight loss.

Florida is home to a lot of invasive species like pythons and iguanas, but there’s nothing as dangerous as this snail.  In the areas of Africa where it lives, it’s renowned for its devastation.  It eats everything, and I do mean everything, from food crops to grass and even plaster and stucco.  The snails have both male and female sex organs and can lay up to 1200 eggs a year.  You can see how a few of these critters, which Stewart kept in his backyard in a box and fed lettuce, need to be kept under tight controls. Tighter than a 3×2 wooden crate, that is.

Tags: invasive species, cults, unusual religions, Hialeah, Florida, Charles L. Stewart, Giant African Snails, cult leader gets followers to drink snail juice, snail juice, disgusting drinks, Ifa Orisha, snail mucus, dangerous insects

You’d think that the world’s rarest flower would be something more exotic than a rose.  Maybe a man-eating jungle plant, or some kind of rare plant straight out of the global seed vault.   However, you’d be wrong.  The world’s rarest flower is a rose that was once sold in bulk to the public, but now exists in only two places in the world.  In 1806, John Middlemist brought a flower back from China.  He called it Middlemist’s Red.  Since that time, the plant has been wiped out in China, so there are only two places where you can find the plant:  a garden in New Zealand and the Chiswick House Gardens in Great Britain.  As luck would have it, the Chiswick House plant is in bloom.

That’s a gorgeous flower, isn’t it?  It’s called a Camellia, which is a flower generally native to Southeast Asia.  It’s amazing that a plant can go from a common backyard decoration to the world’s rarest in a couple of generations.  Experts say the hardy plant may still be around in backyards throughout England, so it’s time to start searching for that needle in a haystack, amateur botanists!

Tags: rare flowers, world’s rarest flower, Middlemist’s Red, John Middlemist, Chiswick House Gardens, image gallery, unusual plants, camellia

Sometimes it’s really, really hard not to make a Polish joke.  For example, when a Polish guy robs a bank with a spoon.  Or, in this case, when a Polish great-grandmother gets banned from riding her bicycle after biking around while drunk.  However, while the concept is funny, the penalty is not.   Keystyna Patycka, a 75-year-old woman from Kopacz, Poland, faces three years in jail for her drunk bicycling.  She’s also banned from the bicycle.

For the record, police say they’ve warned Ms. Patycka multiple times about riding her bike after having had too much to drink, but she’s ignored them time and time again.  Meanwhile, Ms. Patychka insists she was riding under the influence of only one beer.  Police say she was weaving all over the road on her way to the shops when they made the arrest.

Of course, the woman is 75.  Maybe both parties were right:  Ms. Patychka was too drunk to ride off one beer!  It shouldn’t take much to throw off the balance of someone who is already infirm.

Image: compujeramey

Tags: drunks, unusual crimes, drunk great-grandmother on bicycle arrested, woman banned from riding the bicycle, Keystyna Patycka, Kopacz, Poland, woman faces 3 years in jail for drunk bicycling

All college student Toby Elles wanted to do was eat a little snack before going to bed.  He’d been out, drinking of course, and he needed nature’s perfect hangover food to keep him warm and help him sleep off his partying.  So he got out the frying pan, threw on some bacon, and promptly fell asleep.  He awoke an hour later to the smell of smoke and a reproachful gaze from Jesus Christ, whose face appeared in the frying pan.  I guess you could call that Greasus, huh?

When they say Jesus is everywhere and in all things, they’re not kidding.  He’s showed up on naan bread, in an old woman’s bruise, and is now taking over household appliances other than the iron.  Young Mr. Elles has decided not to scrape the Savior off his frying pan, intending to take it back to Salford, Lancashire with him and put it in a display case or some other reverential location.  No word on what he did with all that delicious burned bacon.

Tags: unusual images, Jesus found in frying pan, iconography, religious images, face of Jesus in a frying pan, Toby Elles, Salford, Lancashire, Great Britain, frying pans, Jesus made in burnt grease, burned-on grease

Comedian and writer Conan O’Brien, the former host of Late Night and The Tonight Show, has succumbed to his bored state as a newly unemployed person contractually banned from being on television.  So, to cash in on his good will and to get out of the house (and his wife’s hair), Coco has decided to take his show on the road, literally!  Conan, the band, and all the rest of his crew are undertaking a fairly ambitious 30-city barnstorming tour.  It’ll have comedy, music, special guests, hugging, and even the occasional awkward silence!  Here’s a few details about Team Coco’s Road Show.  The cities and show dates are on the Team Coco website.

Unfortunately, he’s not going to be anywhere within a reasonable drive of me.  Well, Atlanta or Chicago, but that’s about it.  However, he is going to play in New York’s Radio City Music Hall and Los Angeles’ Gibson Amphitheater.  It’s not too often you get to go back to the place where you worked for so long and show them you haven’t been broken by their poor treatment of you.

Tags: Conan O’Brien, Conan O’Brien tour, Team Coco, tours, comedy tour, Conan O’Brien tour schedule, The Legally Prohibited From Being Funny On Television Tour

On the remote island of Svalbard, Norway, is the most genetically-diverse spot on planet Earth.  The island itself isn’t the most pleasant place; in fact, it’s a miserable, frozen rock above the Arctic Circle where the only wandering life is polar bears.  However, dug into the side of Platåberget Mountain is the Doomsday Vault.  Better known as the Global Seed Vault, the refrigerated vault is home to the world’s largest supply of seeds.

A combined venture of the Nordic Genetic Resource Center and the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the seed vault is home to literally every sort of seed cultivated by man.  There are over half a million seeds in the vault, from pink tomatoes brought to Iowa by a Bavarian farmer to dwarf wheat, disease-resistant soybeans, and beyond.  Scientists believe that the seed vault, with its various types of food plant, might be the key to humanity’s survival one day.  Heat, cold, drought, or poison, there’s a type of seed there that might one day be the key to crops that survive whatever conditions you throw at them.

Tags: Global Seed Vault, seed depository, doomsday vault, Svalbard, Norway, Nordic Genetic Resource Center, Global Crop Diversity Trust, seed storage, biodiversity vault, saved plants, Platåberget mountain

Eclipse is going to hit theaters in the US June 30, 2010.  Get your tickets now, because if it’s anything like the last Twilight movie, you’re going to be hard pressed to find an available seat on opening weekend.  Just make sure you bring your vampire-hunting kit in case any sexual deviant fake vampires try to attack you.

Here’s the trailer.  Try not to get too excited.  Remember, it’s only a movie, and you’re not a teenager anymore.  Unless you are a teenager, in which case I forgive you because you don’t know what you’re doing.

Tags: movie trailers, videos, Twilight, Twilight: Eclipse, Eclipse trailer, Twilight trailer, movies

Bryan Berg has been practicing his craft, building houses of cards, since he was a kid.  When he was 17, he broke the record for the world’s largest tower of cards, then later broke that same record again in 2007 with a 25-foot tower.  Given his love of stacking cards and his background as an architect, it’s only a natural that Berg would turn his unique talents and background towards another world record:  the largest house of cards ever built.

Using some 4,051 decks of cards, he built a 218,792-card replica of the Las Vegas strip at The Venetian Hotel in Macau’s Cotai Strip.  The structure is 35 feet long and weighs some 550 pounds.  If you placed the cards end to end, you’d have a line of cards 10 miles long!  Enjoy it while it lasts; to prove he built his model fairly and without using glue or tape, Berg is knocking down the whole thing in 10 days.

Image: Oddity Central

Tags: world record house of cards, Bryan Berg, card stacking, world’s largest house of cards, The Venetian Hotel, Macau, Las Vegas made from playing cards, 218792-card structure, 35-foot Las Vegas strip made from 4000 decks of cards, Cotai Strip

It was only a matter of time before their two worlds collided.  Barbie made her debut in March 1959, and the world of Mad Men takes place circa 1960.  It wasn’t long before someone came up with the brilliant idea to tie the two together, and thus the Mad Men Barbie dolls were born.  Barbie’s been a lot of things from devout Muslim to computer programmer, and now she’s going to be the latest in a long line of mistresses for Roger Sterling and Don Draper.  Assuming she’s not caught by Betty Draper or Joan Holloway, that is!

Actually, while the Barbies, part of the Barbie Fashion Model Collection, look like Mad Men characters, they won’t be behaving like them.  No booze, no cigarettes, nothing related to those signature 60’s vices, and what looks like a breast reduction for Christina Hendricks.  The dolls will retail for $74.95 each, so they’re for serious collectors only.

Tags: dolls, Barbie dolls, Mattel, Mad Men Barbie Dolls, toys, tie-ins, collector’s edition toys, Barbie Fashion Model Collection, Don Draper, Betty Draper, Joan Holloway, Roger Sterling

I’m not sure what to blame for this one.  The recession?  The fact that nobody uses cash anymore?  The fact that she robbed what sounds to me like a little bodega?  Take your pick.  Either way, a woman in Thermal, California went to a lot of effort for very little reward.  She used a semiautomatic pistol to hold up 11 customers at La Chicanita Market, but escaped with only $6 in cash.  When they said, “Crime doesn’t pay,” I don’t think they meant it literally, but it turns out to be true!

Police say the woman robbed 10 people in the store, then held up a guy on his way into the store before running out in the parking lot and fleeing in an old car.  Depending on the age of the car, she might have spent more money on gas to get to the store than she made from robbing the store.  Surely when you factor in the cost of bullets, the gun itself, gas, and a disguise, she’s running pretty far into the red.  I’d call this crime spree a failure, wouldn’t you?

Tags: dumb criminals, Thermal, California, woman holds up 11 people and gets only , robbery, law and order, crime and punishment, La Chicanita Market

Carlos Slim Helu has managed to turn the struggling Mexican phone industry into America Movil, the fourth-largest cell phone company in the world.  He’s then used that money to buy department store chain Saks, the New York Times Company, and pretty much everything else he could possibly want, showing an amazing ability to buy struggling properties and turn them into money machines. Balance that with a frugal personal life (he drives an older Mercedez and has lived in the same house for 40 years, with no $87,000 rugs in sight) and you can see why he’s become so wealthy.

Whatever the guy does usually ends up being the right thing.  Even when he’s wrong, somehow he doesn’t lose his shirt.  It’s amazing.  I wish I had half his business sense, or even a tenth of his money.

Tags: Carlos Slim, Carlos Slim Helo, the world’s richest man, Mexico’s richest man, richest man in the world, billionaires, America Movil, New York Times Company, Sak’s, Forbes, 20 richest men in the world

After one too many close calls with a screeching, honking car, Peter Smith had officially had enough.  Tired of eating dust and getting cursed at by angry drivers, the dedicated bicycle rider from Austin, Texas, started circulating a petition.  Over 2 years and 50,000 signatures later, and he finally achieved his dream:  Google Maps has now added bicycle-friendly directions to its directions node.  You can discover the Google Maps bike trails for yourself at http://maps.google.com/biking or click on the handy bikes button under Google Maps.

Not only has Google helped out commuter bicyclists like Peter, they’ve also helped out the recreational rider.  Google Maps has also added a layer to normal Google Maps to help riders explore bike-friendly streets and trails without the need for, you know, a place to go.   The Google Maps direction-finding algorithm takes into account hills, congestion, etc., to put together the best direction map for bikes it can, and it appears to be pretty accurate.  So long as you avoid the roving gangs of frogmen, that is.

Tags: Google, Google Maps, Google Maps bike trails, Google adds 150 bike trails to Google Maps, bike routes, bicycling, maps.google.com/biking, Peter Smith, Austin, Texas

Twitter came to life as a place where you could engage in live, real-time conversation with your friends and loved ones, but it seems as though the actual users of Twitter aren’t engaging in the world at large very much.  If you hold any truth to a recent study of Twitter done by security firm Barracuda Networks, only 21% of Twitter users are active.  In this case, an active user has posted 10 tweets, has 10 followers, and follows at least 10 people.   Rather than using Twitter as a social tool, users are hopping onto it to follow their favorite celebrities or use Twitter as a de-facto news feed.

This takes the bloom off Twitter’s rose a bit, given they wanted to position themselves as a vibrant, living social media service and legitimate competition to the Facebooks and MySpaces of the world.   If they’re not engaging with their social circle, then that’s bad news for Twitter.  When you’re just using the service to pump out RSS feeds or spy on the famous, then that makes it a lot harder to turn your eyeballs into money.

Tags: Twitter, Twitter user statistics, 27% of Twitter users active, Barracuda Networks, Twitter becoming a news feed, Twitter news feed, Twitter uses, social media, social networking

Normally at this time of year, Wilbraham Park in West Cape May, New Jersey is a pretty depressing place.  It’s still at the tail-end of winter there, so everything’s dark and dreary and generally not the most pleasant to look at.  Of course, when spring comes, everything will be green again, but until then someone known as the Midnight Knitter has taken it upon him or herself to knit scarves, leggings, cozies, and yarn coverings for trees and lamp posts in the area.

While the town is mostly pro-Midnight Knitter, there are some concerns, like when the city will take down the knitted yarn.  Residents hope they’ll find a happy medium and remove the brightly-colored works only when they start to fade, tag, or become tattered, and not before then.  The police are asking around, but something tells me that the Midnight Knitter will never be caught of his or her own free will, if only because residents seem enthralled by the efforts.  It seems like a rare thing for knitting needles to be used for their intended purpose in such a fun way, rather than in a hurtful stabby way.

Tags: West Cape May, New Jersey, Midnight Knitter, person knitting yarn coverings for trees, tree clothing, unusual events, performance art, art installation, Wilbraham Park, scarves and leggings for trees