Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire

Are Your Pants Lying to You? An Investigation

Click the image to read the article.

Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

The Ghosts of World War II’s Past

Taking old World War II photos, Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov carefully photoshops them over more recent shots to make the past come alive. Not only do we get to experience places like Berlin, Prague, and Vienna in ways we could have never imagined, more importantly, we are able to appreciate our shared history in a whole new and unbelievably meaningful way.

Click the image to see more.

Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

Authentic Piggy Bank

Designed for anyone who has far too much money and loose change, this is the piggy bank of all piggy banks. Its a real piglet that has been taxidermied and inserted with what all piglets probably dream of as babies, a coin storage unit and a cork plug.
Make your plush overpriced apartment complete with this little guy.

The piglet bank will take up to 12 months to produce from the time of order. We expect half the money up front and half when the piglet had been completed. Just so you know that we don’t actually kill the Piglets, they die of natural causes and these are the ones that we use.

Click the image to order yours!

Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

Little Kids Reenact the American Revolution

In celebration of Independence Day I thought I would share this unique recreation of the American Revolution.

Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

Accident Sketch

You’ve been involved in an accident. You have many questions to answer and forms to fill in — from the police, insurance companies, and perhaps even lawyers and courts. And almost every one of those forms requires you to draw a diagram of what happened. AccidentSketch.com provides you with the tools to draw the sequence of events — and you only have to drag and drop road and vehicle icons onto a screen, fill in some details, then print out the accident report with your sketch. All for free.

Click the image to learn more.

Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

Taco Bell Petitions Federal Reserve “We Want Our $2 Bills!”

Taco Bell® launched a national petition to the Federal Reserve calling on them to circulate more $2 bills to celebrate its all-new $2 Meal Deal. Consumers who crave value and enjoy the quirky nature of the $2 bill are asked to sign the petition on the “$2 Dollar Deal” tab at www.facebook.com/tacobell for Taco Bell’s “$2 Meal Deal Appeal” campaign.

The Federal Reserve prints all denominations according to demand. However, the $2 bill has not been in demand and production of the note is the lowest of U.S. paper money at less than one percent of all bills printed. The last year the $2 bill was printed was 2006. While older generations of Americans treat the $2 bill with reverence, giving them as gifts or keeping them for good luck, younger generations have yet to discover it.

Click the image to read the full article.

Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

Friendly’s Grilled Cheese BurgerMelt

Friendly’s newest sandwich creation, released early this month, is a burger and grilled cheese in one — you know, in case you can’t choose. We found five more of the worst fast food sandwiches.

At 1,500 calories, the Burger Melt features the best of all worlds — a burger in between two grilled cheese sandwiches. With 1,500 calories and 97 grams of fat, it’s hard to imagine a worse sandwich than an item that is literally three sandwiches combined.

Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

Interactive Map: Where Americans Are Moving

More than 10 million Americans moved from one county to another during 2008. The map below visualizes those moves. Click on any county to see comings and goings: black lines indicate net inward movement, red lines net outward movement.

Click the map to see the migration to your county...and be ready to waste quite a bit of time on this cool map.

Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

The flipper bridge

In Hong Kong, cars drive on the left while in the rest of China, they drive on the right. If you're building a bridge between the two, you've got to come up with a clever way to switch lanes without disruption or accident. Behold, the flipper:

The only way that could be more cool is if one of the lanes went into a tunnel under the water or corkscrewed over the other lane in a rollercoaster/Mario Kart fashion. Lots more on the NL Architects site.

Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

Time Spent In Shower

Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

Picture Show: The 37 or so Ingredients in a Twinkie

A popular rule of thumb among proponents of healthy food is that the fewer ingredients there are in something, better it is for you. With a remarkable 37 or so ingredients, many of which are polysyllabic chemical compounds, Twinkies would seem to embody the antithesis of that rule.

The photographer Dwight Eschliman was never a health nut himself, but he was raised by one; his mom kept her kids away from meat, dairy, or any kind of processed food. When Eschilman went away to college, he loosened up a bit, allowing himself to indulge in all sorts of previously forbidden treats, but by the time he had kids of his own, he found a renewed appreciation for simple, healthy food—and a renewed skepticism of chemical-filled, preservative-laden snacks. He'd also developed a love of disassembling ojects and photographing their component parts.

"Thus, this project," he writes in his photography book 37 or so Ingredients. "It's the product of a kid that was raised to be suspicious of foods that weren't assembled in mom's kitchen, and bordering on obsessive compulsive."

Click the image to read the article.

Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

Designers Spin Spidey-Worthy Webs From Packing Tape

Packing tape has gotten MacGyver out of many a jam, but he never managed to make an entire home out of the stuff. So he could probably learn something from Viennese/Croatian design collective For Use/Numen. The team uses nothing but packing tape to create huge, self-supporting cocoons that visitors could climb inside and explore.

Click the image to read the full article.Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

Model Rocket + Dentistry = How to pull out a tooth with a rocket...

Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

What If Your Plane Was Attacked By Giant Ravens

Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

Paying it foward with umbrellas

If you happen to get caught in the rain around town this weekend without an umbrella, don’t be surprised if a perfect stranger hands you a bright yellow one to keep — just because it’s a nice thing to do.

It’s part of a pay-it-forward project that started two years and 1,000 umbrellas ago and already is generating interest from around the world.

At the time Julie Kresen was driving around Squirrel Hill in a downpour when she spotted a very wet girl waiting for a bus.

Her eyes darted back and forth from the poor drenched soul at the bus stop to an umbrella on the floor of her car, and she quickly decided that giving up her umbrella was the right thing to do.

“She was so thankful, and I felt great about it for hours,” said Ms. Kresen of Emsworth. “I just started thinking, ‘Man, I want to give everybody an umbrella.’ “

And with that rainy day, an idea started to bloom.

Click the image to read more.Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

Fly Your Face in Space

NASA wants to put a picture of you on one of the two remaining space shuttle missions and launch it into orbit. To launch your face into space and become a part of history, just follow these steps:

First...Select the Participate button at the bottom of this page and upload your image/name, which will be flown aboard the space shuttle. Don't have a picture to upload? No problem, just skip the image upload and we will fly your name only on your selected mission!

Next...Print and save the confirmation page with your flight information.

Later...Return to this site after the landing to print your Flight Certificate - a commemorative certificate signed by the Mission Commander. You can also check on mission status, view mission photographs, link to various NASA educational resources and follow the commander and crew on Twitter or Facebook.

Click the image to send your face to space.

Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

The Reoccurring Prop Newspaper

If you watch enough television shows and movies, then you might even start to notice that a bunch of the same props are used over and over again. I first noticed this with a magazine prop in various television shows including Married With Children, which featured a gum advertisement on the back cover. Someone on Reddit recently put together a compilation of photos from various television shows, commercials and movies, showing how one newspaper prop gets around and is reused, and reused again.

I don’t know the story behind this prop newspaper, but I assume it was created as a royalty free prop for television shows. Somewhere along the line, the prop became a reoccurring gag between propmasters. Something like how sound designers reuse the Wilhem Scream in every movie.

Click the image to see more instances of this paper being used.

Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

BP Irony

Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

US Birth Tourism becoming flourishing business

Millions of foreign tourists visit the United States every year, and a growing number return home with a brand new U.S. citizen in tow.

Thousands of legal immigrants, who do not permanently reside in the United States but give birth here, have given their children the gift of citizenship, which the U.S. grants to anyone born on its soil.

The number of U.S. births to non-resident mothers rose 53 percent between 2000 and 2006, according to the most recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics. Total births rose 5 percent in the same period.

Among the foreigners who have given birth here, including international travelers passing through and foreign students studying at U.S. universities, are "birth tourists," women who travel to the United States with the explicit purpose of obtaining citizenship for their child.

Catering to the women is a nascent industry of travel agencies and hotel chains seeking to profit from the business.

Click the image to read the full article.

Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

Congratulations BON!

If you have monitored this blog for very long you probably realize that it includes very little original content. I keep my eye out on the internet for things that I find interesting and then I post links to them here. Many (okay, maybe most) of this links come to me courtesy of the blog Bag of Nothing (a.k.a. BON).

Well, my material is going to be hit or miss this week because BON became a daddy for the first time. If you have ever appreciated one of my blog posts that included the tag line "Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing" then you should click the picture above and leave a comment congratulating the new parents.