Inspired by an article entitled Why Don't People Return Their Shopping Carts?, Rob Beschizza of Boing Boing created this shopping cart alignment chart. I'm glad each picture is captioned, because they may be hard to see here. I don't know that giving a shopping cart to the poor is a true neutral; you'd think that people would've widely varying opinions on the practice. Maybe the "neutral" comes in when those opinions cancel each other out. I'm at the point now where I just park a shopping cart in the store and carry my one or two bags to the car myself.
Blog Posts John Farrier Likes
YouTuber DEOKHEE KIM watched a cat at a busy city intersection in South Korea. The cat patiently waited until the crosswalk light turned green, and then proceeded to cross. What a clever cat!
It must be a born-and-bred urban cat to learn to read a crosswalk sign. However, I have a suspicion that the cat merely waited for all the cars to stop, which is not obvious from the framing of the video. It's still a clever cat, which is the only kind that roams city streets as an adult. What do you think? -via Tastefully Offensive
What happened here? It's a case of pavement not sticking to the road in Lufkin, Texas. It appears to be a case of road construction done to somewhat less than the highest industry standards coupled with torrential rain from Hurricane Harvey. The Lufkin police department was inundated with calls about the melting pavement, and are directing drivers with major damage to a Lonestar Hazmat team. -via reddit
With a new Star Wars film comes new characters, and most importantly, new toys for Christmas. Fans fell in love with BB-8 from The Force Awakens, and Disney hopes that The Last Jedi will make BB-9E a star as well. The new gray and black droid, described as "BB-8's evil twin," rolls around on a ball like BB-8, but has a flat head and a glowing red eye. The app-enabled toy is made by Sphero, along with BB-8 and R2D2.
"We saw some imagery and [learned] how it sounds and behaves in the movie," said Sphero CEO Paul Berberian.
The Boulder-based startup -- whose partnership with Disney began through a tech mentoring program -- created a robotic toy version of BB-8 in 2015, which sold more than million units.
Like the BB-8 toy, BB-9E is also a 4.4-inch app-controlled robot. It has the same ball-shaped body that moves without wheels. It comes with a magnetically-attached head. It features blue and red lights that illuminate when the head is attached to the body.
BB-9E retails for $149.99. It's the most-talked about new Star Wars toy debuting today for Force Friday, but there are a lot more products hitting the market today. If you want to do your Star Wars Christmas shopping early, check out the hot new Star Wars toys, and a list of all kinds of Star Wars merchandise unveiled for Force Friday.
More than 25,000 people attended the Tokyo Int'l Funeral & Cemetery Show 2018 last weekend. It's an industry convention and exposition for funeral professionals across Japan. The expo included a competition between the top funeral dressers. In the Shinto religion, dressing the deceased is a ritual that cleanses them before they enter the afterlife. It's usually done by family members, but some 2,000 or so undertakers have become experts. The top four competed in front of judges and convention attendees.
The winner was 23-year-old RinoTerai, who said,
“I practiced every day to prepare for this competition,” said a smiling RinoTerai after her win over three other finalists. “I took videos and made improvements by asking myself, does this look beautiful? Am I treating the deceased kindly?”
-via Mental Floss
SpongeBob SquarePants has a signature look influenced by 60s animation and the slapstick cartoon stylings of John Kricfalusi, both of which keep the show light and whimsical for the kiddies.
But if the show was made in Japan SpongeBob would have been a serious show about a serious young man, with a seriously kickass theme song that contains lyrics like "I sink into the tomorrow where I can't see colors anymore."
And his friends Patrick, Sandy and Squidward would have all been troubled and super serious too, with emotional depth that actually defines who they are as a character.
Eh, maybe this awesome anime intro for SpongeBob SquarePants created by the mighty Narmak is all the anime SpongeBob we can handle...was anybody else disturbed by Patrick's lack of clothing?
-Via Laughing Squid
"Go to Australia and see all the amazing sights" they said, "it'll be a life changing experience".
Little did I know there was all kinds of freaky stuff going on in Australia, stuff that will change your life forever but not necessarily in a good way. Stuff that involves marsupial swingers and Vegemite.
I wish I'd read this Mr. Lovenstein comic before I'd gone to Australia, and I wish I'd known my friends who love to travel were so freaky!
-Via Geeks Are Sexy
A couple, a few, several, some, what do those terms mean? The carpenter knows what he's doing, but he doesn't know precisely how many nails he'll need. Meanwhile, the assistant wants a number because he has no clue what those terms mean. I always considered "a couple" to be two, "several" to be three, and "a few" to be however many nails you can pick up easily with one hand. Your mileage may vary. However, when I'm writing a blog post, I use "quite a few" when I have no idea what the actual number is. This is the newest comic from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble.
I hope whoever was responsible for this carousel installed under a wall was fired, but they should have been forced to remove it first. In a collection of weird construction failures, you know some of them were the result of working around an addition, like cutting a hole in an existing door because moving a door is really hard. Some are due to laziness. Others are just incomprehensible.
At least this one is easily fixed, although it's probably in a hotel, in which case it's a scheme to save on toilet paper. You can see 21 weird construction results at Pleated-Jeans.
The recent episode of Rick & Morty entitled "Pickle Rick" changed some fans' wubbalubbin' lives, as Rick turned himself into a pickle then used his astounding intellect to survive a day as a limbless pickle.
Fans were so enamored of that episode they started creating fan art as a physical manifestation of their love, proving Pickle Rick is a smash hit and sure to be one of the most popular episodes of all time.
So in order to properly capitalize on this fan mania the folks at Sneaky Zebra created an 90s style TV commercial for the mighty ridiculous Pickle Rick action figure! (NSFW language)
-Via GeekTyrant
If you stare at this circle for ten seconds, your brain will begin to perceive it as a red dot. Go ahead, try it! Crinchy posted this at reddit, and SEILogistics gave a simple explanation.
It's caused by a prefrontal imbalance of the auxiliary nerve on the eye retina created by the spheroid object being stared it. It confuses the obsidian prenatal synapses in the brain.
If you'll notice on your peripheral vision you can see the prenatal synapse snapping on the right of your field of view before it turns red.
As your prefrontal cortex adjust you can see the neuropathic synapse being repaired in your eye and the circle centre returns to its normal colour.
Well, that makes perfect sense.
Artist Emma Ward was playing around with her chameleon Olive one day when she discovered Olive would hang on tight to anything placed in her hands, which made for perfect lizard photo ops.
So Emma grabbed every tiny weapon she could find and armed her scaly friend Olive, shooting pics of her silly little warrior to share online.
Emma's battle lizard chronicles inspired another pet owner to share pics of his sugar glider holding stuff too, which made them look tougher than any sugar glider has ever looked.
The darling little sugar glider is still cute, but also very, very tough with that massive warhammer in his hands, as if he's saying "come at me, sis!" to the chameleon that started it all, Olive the Omnipotent.
-Via Bored Panda
Drinking coffee is a great pick-me-up, and coffee can be used to stimulate the mind when your brain needs a kickstart, but did you know coffee can be used like watercolor paint?
Coffee paintings only come in brown but the watercolor-y look of the paintings is quite nice, and coffee artists like Michael Aaron Williams have turned java into a fun new medium you can find in every breakfast joint.
Michael mixes a tiny bit of ink in with the coffee, to give it more permanence on the page, then he paints his (often predatory) subjects on antique paper in a style that's a cross between sumi-e and Rembrandt:
The Knoxville, Tennessee-based painter and street artist creates his artworks by painting coffee and a bit on ink (for the darkest shades) on century-old ledger paper, which he found in an old, rural Appalachian store that was closed for decades.
Talking about his paintings, Williams states, “the paper has an immense amount of character that can only come from the wears of time, and the coffee just melts into the history of the paper.” The motifs and fauna that inhabit the works also reveal his deep connection to his Appalachian heritage
See more Evocative Coffee Paintings On Antique Paper by Michael Aaron Williams here
Did you see the eclipse today? It was 97% where I was. Watching the sun turn into a crescent, and then seeing that crescent flip around, was really weird. Some places actually went dark for a couple of minutes. Zach King (previously at Neatorama) explains what causes a solar eclipse.
Things should return to normal now that the job is done. -via reddit
People are surprised to learn snapping turtles can be really dangerous when encountered in the wild, thinking they have the same temperament as a tortoise or sea turtle, but mess with an alligator snapping turtle and you're bound to get bit.
Alligator snapping turtles are the most dangerous type, which should be obvious since they sport spiky warrior shells and wicked beaks made to tear through flesh, but you'll only have to tangle with them if you meet one in the water:
5. Believe it or not, these turtles rarely travel on land at all. The females will briefly venture out of the water to lay eggs, but males typically spend their entire lives beneath the water’s surface. Both genders can hold their breath for nearly an hour at a time!
7. These guys are masters at camouflaging themselves, which is good for them—but bad for just about everything else nearby. Their shells are often covered in algae, which makes them look like rocks in the muddy waters they inhabit. Their pupils are also surrounded by excess skin so they’re hard to spot.
Email This Post to a Friend