Domenico Crolla, a chef in Glasgow, UK, is a true artist in the kitchen. After his Bruce Lee pizza received a favorable response from the late actor's daughter, Crolla made more celebrity portraits. The Daily Mail reports:

Crolla uses mainly just cheese and tomato sauce to make the realistic images and posts images of his work on his Facebook and Twitter accounts. Crolla has gained a cult following - with many of the impressed famous faces he recreates getting in touch to thank him.

'Rihanna, Beyonce, Cristiano Ronaldo have all answered back thanking me for my pizzas. Sophia Loren also got back to me...

Official Website and News Story -via That's Nerdalicious!

Redditor Iphee spotted this awesome sand art sculptures celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who. While I don't know where the images were taken, I can tell you that you can find more fantastic pictures of the creation at the link.

Link

R2-Dalek by Randy Coffey

AMALGAMATE two sci-fi genres and what do you get? One confused robot, that's what. R2-Dalek may the universe's most lethal astromech droid, but Randy Coffey survived the mash up to tell us about it.

Visit Randy's website then go to his NeatoShop page to get his neat shirts: Link. Your purchase helps support indie artists like Randy, as well as this blog.

Ironing Man	Master Trooper Storm Chief	The Ungrammatical Yoda	Doctor Spock

View more designs by Randy Coffey | More Funny T-shirts

Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop, earn generous royalties, and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!

Fire Truck Lunch Bag

Are you looking for the perfect lunch box for your favorite pint sized hero. Speed off the NeatoShop for the Fire Truck Lunch Bag. This great soft insulated lunch bag is shaped like a fire truck.

The Fire Truck lunch Bag features flippable compartments with printed fireman tools underneath.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Mealtime fun. 

Link

Natalie Eve Garrett, an artist in the D.C. area and contributor to The Hairpin, has lately been retelling classic fairy tales using yogurt. Above you can see her scenes from Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood and The Little Mermaid. You can view more images in her 2-part series at the links below.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Artist's Website

It's done in the name of research, but it's also done in the name of tradition. Scientists tend to taste what they are studying. After all, Charles Darwin dined on all she species he described in his works. In the case of marine biologists, that means some exotic seafood. Peter Girguis and his colleagues ate tubeworms specimens.  

"We just took off a little piece and ate it raw," said Girguis, a professor at Harvard University. "It had the texture of hot dogs with match heads ground in," he said. Living next to hydrothermal vents that spew toxic water rich in heavy metals and sulfuric acid gives the worms an odd flavor. "If it weren't for the sulfur, who knows, they might even be tasty," Girguis told LiveScience.

Why would Girguis even try a tubeworm? A long-standing marine biology mantra holds that scholars should taste their species of study ... or at least waste not, want not. "It's been a tradition to eat animals that we study," Girguis said. "I figured that if we're going to drag the poor creatures up, I might as well leave no tissue to spare."

This practice is not limited to living animals. Frozen mammoths and bison, toxic plants, million-years-old water, rocks, and insects are all known to have been sampled by scientists. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science

So far, DeviantArt user kehchoonwee has only made one drawing depicting what would happen if Tim Burton had created a calymation version of Star Wars, but with any luck, he'll make more -especially a Luke and Leia image.

Link Via Geek Tyrant

(Video Link)

It was an eventful royal visit to the set of Doctor Who. Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall accidentally activated the TARDIS. A Dalek threatened Prince Charles. Then, at 1:10 in the video above, a crew member handed him a microphone that makes his voice sound like that of a Dalek. It was at this point that Prince Charles switched sides and joined the Dalek cause.

Link -via Nerd Approved

A lightning strike can happen at any time, even during a fireworks show -but it takes luck of a quick hand to capture it on camera. Redditor AJ192 took what he calls "One of the best pictures I will ever take" during the fireworks display at Rio Rancho High School in New Mexico. Link -via Laughing Squid

(Video Link)

According to owner Charles Redden, Lila never learned how to walk up stairs properly and, for some reason, she insists on going up backwards.

Via Laughing Squid

At a certain point in the problem solving process, it's time to reassess your strategy. That time is after your solution has failed three straight times and made the problem three times as bad. A Dave Barry blog reader named nursecindy writes:

We have had a lot of rain here in N.C.  Unfortunately no one told my daughter's neighbor that the ground gets soggy when it rains.  He left his truck in a field near her house overnight.  The next day it was stuck up to its axles so he called a friend, who also got stuck.  Thinking the third time would be the charm, they called another friend, who also got stuck.  They called yet another friend, and he got stuck too.  Finally they called a friend with a tractor.  When this picture was taken by my daughter, they had freed one of the trucks.

Link

This amazing video was taken by a research team headed by Nicolai Konow of Brown University, in order to study how bats became the only mammal that can fly.

The team specifically looked at a species called Seba’s short-tailed bat, and used technology called XROMM (X-ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology) that integrates three-dimensional renderings of bone structure into X-ray video, allowing for detailed analysis of muscle mechanics and anatomy during an animal’s movement. Their analysis—which they presented today at a meeting of the Society for Experimental Biology—showed that the bats first stretch out the tendons that anchor their biceps and triceps muscles to their bones, then compress the tendons to release energy and power their flight upward.

Read more about the research at Smithsonian's Surprising Science blog. Link

Twitter is the largest collection of cynical, unhappy people I’ve ever seen. I’m finally home.

— Exploding Unicorn (@XplodingUnicorn) March 8, 2013

~Illustrated by: Colin Graham~

(Video Link)

Vine user Hunter Harrison made this amazing six second Vine tribute to the end of any given Super Mario Bros. level in delicious snack food goodness. Just wait till Pac-Man gets to this level and starts munching down on the entire thing.

Via That's Nerdalicious

Your Attention Please

Is your stationery failing to grab people's attention? Drum roll please! You need the Your Attention Please Jumbo Sticky pad from the NeatoShop. This jumbo-sized sticky notepad contains 60 sheets for your attention grabbing pleasure. 

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Stationery. 

Link

Do my students understand what I'm saying? Am I leaving some behind? Teachers worry about this issue a lot. Now facial analysis software may be able to help them to quickly identify struggling students:

A recent study from North Carolina State University shows how this might work. Researchers there used video cameras to monitor the faces of college students participating in computer tutoring sessions. Using software that had been trained to match facial expressions with different levels of engagement or frustration, the researchers were able to recognize when students were experiencing difficulty and when they were finding the work too easy. [...]

The NC State researchers’ experiment involved students who were using software called JavaTutor to learn to write Java code. The researchers analyzed 60 hours of video footage with the Computer Expression Recognition Toolbox, a program that recognizes facial expressions. They compared the software’s conclusions with the students’ own reported state of mind and found that they matched closely. The work will be presented Saturday at the Sixth International Conference on Educational Data Mining.

Link -via Glenn Reynolds

(Photo: Enokson)

(YouTube link)

Coco, the doting mother cat, takes a breakfast of cranberries. I guess she knows she's not allowed on the counter, but as longs as she stays up there, she may be within the rules. Or something like that. -via Tastefully Offensive

Sorry zombies, but this is why you can't have nice things. You get a manicure and then within one day of shuffling around attacking the few remaining humans, they're all bloody and frayed again.

These delightful nails were created as part of a Halloween contest by Berry Polished. While some of the other creations may have took more technical talent, the creativity and goriness of these helped secure The Polished Mommy first place.

Link

Thirty-four years after the filming of Caddyshack, the AV Club went to see the country club where it was shot. Although the story was set in the midwest, the location was the Rolling Hills Golf Course near Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Its now named Grande Oaks Golf Club, and the current staff embraces its fame.

Perhaps fittingly, not much looks the same at Grande Oaks as it did when Caddyshack shot there more than three decades ago. The hotel that hosted some of the most raucous partying in Hollywood history is now a dorm for Nova Southeastern University, which owns Grande Oaks. The clubhouse was leveled when the club was renovated in 2000, and the golf course has been redesigned. The titular caddyshack is long gone, save for some of its foundation.

But Grande Oaks proudly touts its place in cinematic history: Its homepage proclaims it the “Home of Caddyshack,” it named its snack bar after the film, and it naturally has a variety of Caddyshack merchandise in its pro shop. “You hear a quote about every 20 minutes here,” says Joseph Semmler, the club’s membership director. He does it without even realizing he’s doing it. When we were chatting, a plane flew overhead—Grande Oaks lies in the flight path of Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, which caused headaches for the production—so we had to pause and wait for it to pass. “No big deal,” Semmler said.

Kyle Ryan talked to Cindy Morgan, who played Lacey Underall in the movie, about the filming. She said the press reports of the partying that went on during the movie were no exaggeration -in fact they were understated. WARNING: article contains auto-start video. Link -via mental_floss

Have you ever been trapped in an unwelcome, one-sided conversation? Ever needed to be rescued? Then you need Lunarbaboon's Son Signal.

This happened a lot at one library that I worked at because we had a very large number of mentally ill patrons. We worked out a system for freeing librarians from endless conversations like these.

Link

As someone who has always had an odd fixation with Jessica Rabbit, let me be the first to say, "she can freeze me in carbonite any time." Maybe Disney should take a note from DeviantArt user Hackman and make the next Star Wars movie an animation featuring the cast of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It certainly couldn't be worse than Episodes I-III.

Link

I was a little surprised to find that with the Fourth of July falling on a Thursday, many Americans got a long holiday weekend. And since the public fireworks display in my town was canceled due to rain, they were moved to Saturday night. So hey! There's nothing like turning a one-day holiday into a four-day celebration! With the kids out of school and a holiday schedule online, I've lost track of time completely in the past few days. But who am I kidding -the real reason is because I've been watching The Walking Dead marathon, and this time around, my kids are interested. Three years ago, they were too young for it. Come October, Sunday nights will be "family TV night." There are plenty of TV marathons on this weekend, but when you get a chance, you need to take a little time to catch up on what's been happening at Neatorama.  

Jill Harness went to a Transformers convention and showed us what she found in All About The BotCon. 

Alex showed us an amazing Life-Size Dexter Cake.

Eddie Deezen pondered the question Was the Declaration of Independence Written on Hemp?

We got an exclusive look at the latest sculpture from Joel Haas called St. Sweeper.

Uncle John's Bathroom Reader gave us Born on the 2nd of July.

How to Write a Crank Letter was the contribution from the Annals of Improbable Research.

10 Shocking Secrets of Flight Attendants came from mental_floss magazine.

Hy Conrad brought us another Whodunit: Foul Ball Burglary.

We had one featured pet on The Lifestyles of the Cute and Cuddly. His name is Blue, and I couldn't resist making a cat macro out of his picture. Thanks, Nathan, for sending his picture! We want to feature your pet, too, so send those pictures in to tips@neatorama.com. I would love to have a new featured pet every day!

In the What Is It? game this week, believe it or not, the odd thingamabob is a device for singeing the last remaining feathers off a plucked chicken. DrWhat was the first person who knew that answer, and wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! The funniest answer came from Ian Goldstein, who said, "It's an old victorian codpiece. Notice how it can open for either your night out with the town's ha'penny trollop, or to check yourself for the Clap afterwards." That story wins a shirt, too! See the answers to all this week's mystery items at the What Is It? blog.
 
The most commented-on post this week (besides the giveaway) was The American Way of Birth, Costliest in the World, trailed by What's Your State Burger? and Veterinarian Sits in a Parked Car for 30 Minutes to Show How Hot It Gets.

The most popular post was 10 Shocking Secrets of Flight Attendants. In second place was Life-Size Dexter Cake, and Born on the 2nd of July was third.

The most emailed post was Baking Cookies Inside a Car. Coming in second was Beards: What You Need to Know, and Dwarf Miniature Horse Walks with a Wheelchair for the First Time was third.

The post with the most ♥s was Veterinarian Sits in a Parked Car for 30 Minutes to Show How Hot It Gets, followed by This Hedgehog Travels More Than I Do and A Short Epic.

Clicking those little ♥s is an easy way for you to show us which posts you like best, and for us to see what kind of neat stuff to bring you more of! Now, if we could just get the kind of response that we get on our Facebook page. This picture of a bathtub was posted and got over 300 likes! You should checkout the Neatoramanauts Facebook page every day to see extra stuff you don't see here.
 
Twaggies is a part of the Neatorama family now. There are plenty of Twaggies besides those on the main page, so check them out often. And if you find one that particularly strikes your fancy, you can have it made into a t-shirt!

And if you liked any of this, just wait until next week, when we'll have a whole new batch of neat things on Neatorama!

Behold the march of progress! Once, s'mores were but a dream in the soul of primitive man. Now, thanks to Jasmin Fine, you can find them inside and around whole strawberries.

Jasmin stuffed the hollowed out strawberries with graham cracker crumbs and rolled the outside in more graham cracker crumbs. Then she dipped the strawberries in chocolate, spooned marshmallow on them and toasted them over an open flame.

Link -via Bon Appétit