Man survives diving into wood chipper (w/ news video)
Woman's dead body lies in flat for 35 years
Teen escapes attacker by biting his genitals
Python immobilised after eating zoo deer (w/ photo)
Bikini Car Wash Reopens (w/ photo and video)
Woman Hopes To Sell Her 'Virgin Mary' Rock On eBay (w/ photo)
40% of student's photos Photoshopped in yearbook (w/ photo)
National Geographic has some stunning photos of nudibranches (sea slugs).
Amazingly, nobody was killed when a plane landed on top of another waiting to takeoff.
DivineCaroline.com has an article comparing portion sizes in the US twenty years ago and today.
A simple game in which you must keep the ball bouncing. [via]
Over here she would need to sell an organ to pay for petrol. At the moment, petrol at the bottom of my street costs $8.30 a gallon!
The image below is a press release from those evil people known as the Westboro Baptist Church. They also thank God for the cyclone in Myanmar, tornadoes in Oklahoma and for downing a medical helicopter in Wisconsin. That last one is because Wisconsin didn't like the WBC protesting in its state.
MovieMistakes.com has 143 Simpsons continuity errors and I don't think I've noticed a single one.
9-year-old girl's twin is found inside her stomach
Married couple ignores washing and haircutting for 16 years (w/ photo)
'Perv paid teens to boot him in groin'
Man Finds Gecko Inside Supermarket Chicken Egg (w/ photo)
Horse Does A Perfect Somersault (w/ photos)
Jealous husband puts wife on eBay (w/ photo)
Moldova child porn entry banned from Eurovision song contest (w/ song)
World's smallest helicopter takes off (w/ photo)
Rocket man flies to 8,200ft (w/ photo)
It's not really magic. The camera filming the helicopter is doing so at the same frame rate as the main rotors, or something like that.
[via]
I posted the original image (above left) a few days ago and it seems the owners of the website have noticed the traffic from this and many other website wondering why the woman's arm was so bendy. They've 'fixed' her arm but are now having a bit of fun of their own by removing some items from the picture. Or maybe they weren't there to begin with?
Coolspotters is a celeb blog with a twist. The aim of the site is to make it easy to discover and buy the products being used by the celebs – in their real lives, and in movies and television.
Who needs a fishing rod when you've got Brutus the fishing dog.
I've just installed a new commenting feature on AWV from Disqus. The system has been around for a couple of months and is designed to either be a replacement to your existing commenting system (e.g. Wordpress and Typepad) or will allow comments to be added to systems where they didn't exist before (e.g. Tumblr).
Disqus turns your comments into a threaded conversation complete with profiles and a rating system (here's a good post showing it in action). Another great feautre is video comments. If you already have a Seesmic account you can use that to record a comment but if you haven't you can still go ahead and record one. Who's going to be brave enough and post the first video comment on AWV?
You don't need to signup to make a comment but any comments that you make will need to be approved. If you want to use the extra features you will need to have a Disqus account. The signup process is easy and once logged in you can comment on any blog that has it installed.
There are a few different reasons for wanting to replace the Typepad comments with a better system. The Typepad system is slow for users and having to make them type a CAPTCHA each time that they want to comment is a pain. Another reason is that by having more features it may encourage more people to interact through the comments. I'm not sure how Disqus will cope with spam messages but it does allow you to easily remove comments and block problem commenters/spammers from within the blog post.
Disqus can be used on Typepad (Pro accounts only), Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr and Movable Type. The Typead installation is a bit of a pain especially if like me you have already fiddled around with your templates and have a ton of files to publish. It appears to be really simple to install on the other systems.
You can learn more about Disqus here.
Lucian Freud's 1995 portrait of a nude woman asleep on a sofa, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, has sold at Christie's auction house in New York for $33.6m. At 5x7 feet, that works out at $960,000 per square foot!
The subject of the painting, "Big Sue" (Tilley), was quoted as saying, "I think he probably picked me because he got value for money. He got a lot of flesh."
You can view an image of the painting here.
Image via LogoBlink.com
The evolution of USA political election logos from 1960 to the present day.
Image via OneBag.com
It seems my careful folding of individual items when packing a suitcase is completely wrong. I should be 'bundle wrapping'. This detailed guide from OneBag.com shows you how to pack your suitcase or bag more efficiently whilst reducing creasing. They've also got a useful diagram. [via]
The list only goes up to 2003 but here are 1,001 movies you must see before you die. I haven't seen a great number of movies before the 1980s so I'd better start catching up.
Image via Dooby Brain
How nerdy (and cool) is this laptop bag? Read more.
Images via CollegeHumor
What website logos really mean. More at CollegeHumor.
Image via SMH
According to the Google Blog, they have started rolling out a new technology that automatically blurs the faces of people caught on camera by the Street View van. The advanced state-of-the-art automatic face detection will also be applied to images already taken.
Google have also started using higher quality images for Street View and the blog shows updated images of Manhattan, one of the first cities captured by Google. [via]
I think I posted this dangerous mountain path recently but this version is much higher quality but just as scary! [via]
A couple of funny celeb pics I came across today.
Observed from a Japanese airliner over the sea of Okhotsk last summer. They apparently stretch for 100km.
Image via Szanalmas
Image via
These bears must have been waiting for a family to finish building this playground. It was completed on a Saturday and by the next morning they were already playing on it. [via]
He entertains too! Only in Japan.
At 6ft 6in, Chilli the Cow maybe the UK's tallest
Woman fired for giving 16-cent treat to toddler
California man losing nine homes in mortgage mess
Cardboard nurses to give free advice in hospital wards
Peacocks attack family car
Man beats clampers by cutting his car in half
Man loses 35,000 dollars in 'marinaded money' scam
Man drives himself to police station, allegedly intoxicated
Man Ticketed For Wearing Speedo On Beach
Man charged with throwing candy at police
Either someone got a little over zealous with Photoshop or this girl has got one very long and bendy arm.
Will Nike Swoosh clouds become a common sight in the near future?
A special-effects entrepreneur from Alabama has created giant 'foam clouds' shaped like corporate logos that can float up to 6000m into the air.
Francisco Guerra, who's also a former magician, developed a machine that produces tiny bubbles filled with air and a little helium, forms the foam into shapes and pumps them into the sky.
Guerra's company is working on a version that will spit out 6-foot clouds.
The foam is environmentally safe because it's mostly water, air and a soapy agent that creates bubbles, Guerra says. Flogos pop just like bubbles and disappear when they hit a tree or building, sometimes leaving a powdery residue that blows away.
A single Flogo can travel as far as 30 miles and as high as 20,000 feet, Guerra says, and a machine can produce one every 15 seconds. Guerra says he could put a half-dozen machines together and fill the sky with almost any shape a company orders.
The official Flogo website has another video of the Flogos in action. Link (Photo)
This service is not new but I only came across it today. TripIt is a travel organiser that is aimed at making it as simple as possible to organise things related to your trip. Getting started couldn't be easier - all you need to do is email them your booking confirmation and it converts it into an itinerary.
I sent it my booking confirmation for my flight to San Francisco and in a few seconds had converted it and started my itinerary. Next I sent a confirmation for a hotel and it updated the itinerary and even created a Google Map with directions from SFO to the hotel.
TripIt will also throw in maps of the area you are staying and will either give you accurate weather information or averages if you are not travelling within the next few days. There's also a simple travel guide for the area you are staying in and a facility to export the itinerary to a calendaring application.
Other features include the ability to bookmark site using a bookmarklet, a mobile version of the site and ability to get travel information emailed to you.
As with any new service, there are also social networking features included. I haven't tested these out but the aim of them is to connect you with either people who are travelling to the same destination as you or people who are travelling to where you live.
Rather than offering a searchable database of travellers who say have allowed their trips to be viewable, the social networking feature relies on searching your address books for people that you know who have registered with TripIt and shared their itineraries. As I haven't got a huge list of contacts, the option to find people I don't know who are travelling at the same time may have been of some use to me.
I did run into a few problems when using the site. It handled booking confirmations from Expedia with ease but when I added some from BmiBaby and Travelodge the site didn't recognise them even though they are listed as being supported. I'm sure this will change over time as more travel providers are supported.
Cute video currently doing the rounds on the Internets.
Powerset is a frontend for Wikipedia that adds natural language search technology. Powerset's engine has worked its way through 2.5 million Wikipedia pages and extracted "meaning" from them and "created a navigation and semantic layer on top of the popular Web encyclopedia".
Powerset makes a good attempt at trying to make information in each article more accessible but the floating menu on the right-hand side of the page is pretty annoying. [via]
Footage of the Chinese earthquake as it happened.
[via]
A high school student in Houston, TX was surprised to be kicked out by police after turning up to a prom dressed like a hooker. Link
I want to know what was sold. [via]
Google's Matt Cutts talks about web spammers and how you can deal with/avoid them.
Image via Divine Caroline
Last week someone spotted a plastic bag on the Google Street View car in Fairbanks, Alaska (sabotage?). This week someone has spotted what looks like some hookers on a street corner in Berkley, CA. Link
The Woman Who Can't Forget Anything - woman has the ability to perfectly remember every single day of her life
Man Launches Roadkill-Tracking Website - Road Kill Record Book Club: It's like the Guinness book, but for roadkill.
Man Performs Self-Tracheotomy With Steak Knife - And not for the first time either.
Jenny, the world's oldest gorilla, celebrates her 55th birthday - With photos.
Woodpecker Mistakes Aluminium Ladder For A Tree - Video
Giant NES Functioning Controller Coffee Table
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