Photo: Fat Tony 1138/Flickr

Utinni! Hide your valuables lest this cake is just a decoy. You never know with Jawas - like perhaps how they could've persuaded Flickr user Fat Tony's wife to bake him this Jawa birthday cake as part of a nefarious plot by these wily scavengers.

Gingerbread houses are so passé. The new happening trend in culinary art is matzoh houses--miniature buildings made out of the flat bread traditionally eaten during Passover. Lily made this one for the first day of the eight-day holiday. You can see more at the link.

Link -via Foodiggity | Photo: Lily

(YouTube link)

Jillian Pavlica is a news anchor at Fox 54 in Huntsville, Alabama. Her boyfriend Vincent Ramos enlisted the help of her co-workers to make his proposal a "breaking news story" on her teleprompter. -via Hypervocal 

On Saint Simons Island, Georgia, you can meet the spirits that dwell in the trees. Artist Keith Jennings exposed their faces by chipping away the excess wood:

Jennings first embarked on hisTree Spirits project back in 1982 when he decided to creatively manipulate a tree in his backyard with a few hand tools. Starting out as a way to kill time on a budget, the artist wound up honing his craft. Jennings was later commissioned to apply his wood sculpting skills on a series of trees throughout St. Simons Island, located right off the coast of the state of Georgia.

Jennings took two to four days to sculpt each serene face throughout the forest, allowing them to intriguingly blend into their surroundings. (Of course, once they're spotted, it's hard not to notice their faces.) Each sculptural portrait emerges from its wooden post like a haunting sage, ready to impart some knowledge. The artist says that each face he carves into the wood is created entirely according to the tree. He insists, "I don’t have that much to do with it. The wood speaks to you, ya know?”

Link -via Juxtapoz | Photo: Slychedelic

Chemical Avengers by Wirdou

Chemical avengers, assemble ... covalently. Or ionically, depending on which ones you pick. Check out the newest Funny T-shirts and Science T-Shirts from the NeatoShop by your favorite artists.

New shirts by Wirdou:

Captain Americium	Hulkium	Iron	Thorium

Z is for Zombie by Amanda Flagg | More from the Zombie Shop

New shirts by donnie:

My Neighbor Gizmotoro	Deathstiny	Breaking Bricks	The Creeping Dead

Always Safe under the Umbrella by Jeremy Hawkins

New shirts from Maria Scrivan:

Casual Friday is a State of Mind	Climb a Cell Phone Tower	Better Cell Phone Reception	Jack and the Genetically Modified Beanstalk

View more Funny T-Shirts and Science T-Shirts over at the NeatoShop

Pixel Clock

What time is it? It's pixel time! Transport your home decor to a whole new level with the Pixel Clock from the NeatoShop. This fun timekeeper looks like it is made with pixels. Whether it's bedtime, mealtime, or game time every time can be fun time with the Pixel Clock. 

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Clocks & Timers. 

Link

The funeral industry wasn't always like it is today. Rituals and practices evolve over time, and made relatively sudden changes when society changes. Collector's Weekly spoke to undertaker Caitlin Doughty, the founder of  the Order of the Good Death, about how funeral practices have moved away from the personal to the industrial.   

Originally, the way we handled death in America was very simple, something I would ideally like to go back to. If somebody died, the family kept the body in the home. They washed them, wrapped them in a shroud, and then carried them to the graveyard and put them directly in the ground.

Collectors Weekly: All within a short time after a person’s death?

Doughty: Yeah, two days or so after the death. But this was in very small towns with communities that could rally to make this happen. There were huge numbers of fatalities during the early years of the American Colonies. Eventually capitalism took over, and death was pulled away from the family.

The first major change was embalming, a chemical treatment of the corpse to preserve it, which is a uniquely American practice. Embalming started during the Civil War, and soon after, anybody could be embalmed, and it was more about creating a standardized product, or what they now call a “memory picture.” Especially in the growing cities, it became clear that taking care of the body yourself was hard emotional work, and people realized they could pay somebody to do it. People who used to be cabinet makers now said, “I can make coffins,” and people who were just dressmakers were like, “I can make funeral mourning clothes,” and all these things now sold as part of the funeral industry.

The services quickly became centralized, with a funeral director or mortician or undertaker, somebody who could take the body away and handle everything. Now the family didn’t have to do any of the hard work around their loved one’s death. This transition happened in the late 19th century, and spilled over into the early 20th century as well.

Read more about the traditions of the past surrounding death, and how historic events shaped the way we deal with the loss of a loved one today. Link

In the battle of sci-fi weapons, where you can use any weapon you'd like from any sci-fi and fantasy franchise, which reigns supreme? A Jedi Lightsaber? Thor's Hammer? The Doctor's Sonic Screwdriver?

The crew of Sneaky Zebra put it to the test in their latest video. Watch it over at Geeks Are Sexy: Link - Thanks Yan!

Last week, we ran a Choose Your Own Star Wars Prize giveaway, exclusively for the subscribers of NeatoMail, our new email newsletter. It was a really easy contest - all you had to do was choose the item you'd like from the NeatoShop's selection of Star Wars items.

Well, it's time to pick the winners, using the random number algorithm from random.org. Congrats to the winners below (they've all been notified via private mail)

R2-D2 USB Hub, won by Ponder Variety	Battle Damage T-Shirt, won by Portiap.	LEGO Stormtrooper Alarm Clock, won by John Scallorn

Wanna play? The game is only open to subscribers of NeatoMail (here's a sample). The good news is that it's super easy to join (just follow the instruction to confirm your email address):

A dogsledder, or musher, takes a sideways look at Radagast’s bunny sled from The Hobbit. Bunnies pulling a sled? Could that ever happen in real life? Well, it depends. Recreational musher Teanne Byerts shares the pros and cons of hooking up rabbits to a sled, from the mechanical adaptations needed to the biological drawbacks. Along the way, we learn a lot about dogsledding.

Unlike driving horses, you do not use reins, only voice commands. You do not say mush to start your team, (you shout “hike!”, or scream “waaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiit, I’m not ready yeeeeeeeeeet!!!!”) Mush comes from a French word; “Marche!” to go, run. The French coureurs des bois and the voyageurs were the first Europeans in the Canadian Shield, so established many of the mushing traditions. The English speaking Canadians mangled it nicely into mush. We linguistically-impaired Americans adopted that. You say “gee” to turn right, “haw” to turn left, and “whoa” to stop. Then you converse like a mariner because your dogs are not stopping. Then you throw the sled over on its side. Or run into a tree and explain later that you were clobbered by an ent.

On-by, and ON-BY!!! (expletive deleted) are used when Radagast passes you on the trail and your dogs attempt to eat the rabbits.

Whether or not you've seen The Hobbit, or even if you're not a Tolkien fan, you'll get a kick out of this post at TheOneRing.net. Link -via Digg

Phasers ain't just a weapon in Star Trek! Researchers at the NTT Basic Research Laboratories in Japan have created a "sound laser" using a nanoscale drum:

Because laser is an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” these new contraptions – which exploit particles of sound called phonons – should properly be called phasers. Such devices could one day be used in ultrasound medical imaging, computer parts, high-precision measurements, and many other places.

A laser is created when a bunch of light particles, known as photons, are emitted at a specific and very narrow wavelength. The photons all travel in the same direction at the same time, allowing them to efficiently carry energy from one place to another. Since their invention more than 50 years ago, almost all lasers have used light waves. Early on, scientists speculated that sound waves be used instead, but this has proved tricky to actually achieve.

It wasn’t until 2010 that researchers built the very first sound lasers, coaxing a collection of phonons to travel together. But those first devices were hybrid models that used the light from a traditional laser to create a coherent sound emission.

Adam Mann of Wired has the story: Link

(Video Link)

In this incredible play at an Australian rules football game, Carlton player Andrew Walker jumped on the back of Adelaide player Sam Shaw to catch a high-flying ball. One US sports site explained the event for American readers who are not familiar with the sport:

"It's like an outfielder climbing a wall to rob a home run, but the wall is a person who is also trying to catch the baseball and the wall is trying to tackle you and dump you on your head," was how Walker's efforts were described.

Link -via The Borderline Sociopathic Blog for Boys

It's March Madness time! The tournament field for the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament is set. In offices all over, people are printing out their brackets and making their selections. But how much do you know about the schools these teams come from? Mental_floss offers a quiz that will test your knowledge. They name a school, and you decide what state that school is in. Easy, right? I didn't take the test myself, because I'm a Kentucky fan and don't even want to think about basketball right now. Let us know how you did. Link

Image: Yrving Torrealba/The Los Angeles Times

The geek Interweb is atwitter with the rumored iWatch, the mythical "smartwatch" that Apple is supposed to be working on. The iWatch, if such thing even exists, will be able to sync up to the iPhone - so you can view who's calling or texting you simply by glancing down on your wrist.

The iWatch rumor hit fevered pitch when the AppleInsider blog noted that Apple has filed a patent for a wearable accessory device with "a bi-stable spring with flexible display," which brings to mind the slap bracelets popular back in the late 80s.

There's plenty of interest amongst Apple and tech enthusiasts - after all, the concept of a smart wristwatch has been around since the golden era of Dick Tracy, a comic strip first drawn by Chester Gould back in the late 1930s.

And most recently, the huge interest that surrounds the Pebble Watch resulted in the company receiving more than $10 million from nearly 70,000 people on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. The Pebble watch is based on ePaper technology and if a scrappy startup could do it, imagine what a company the size of Apple could do. (Note: smart Android-based watches already exist, but so far they haven't made the big splash one'd expect. See the i'm Watch review over at the-Gadgeteer, for example)

No doubt that wristwatches are highly fashionable and very much coveted accessories (the list of watches that are more expensive than a Ferrari is suprisingly long) and that Apple has a knack of creating great products that critics dismiss out of hand at first (remember the iMaxiPad joke on MADtv?), but does the concept of an iWatch - basically, an always on, small iPhone on your wrist - make sense to you? (Personally, I don't get it).

Does the idea of being able to glance at your wrist to see who texted or called you is worth the alternative method of spending a few seconds to grab the actual iPhone out from your pocket or purse? (Because, you know, who actually carries their phone in their hands all the time?)

And what about the function of actually telling the time? Marshal Cohen of consumer research firm NPD Group (who's a big fan of the iWatch concept, by the way) noted that whenever he approached teenagers wearing a watch and ask them what time it is, as a way to do real-life research on the topic, they almost always pull a phone out of their pocket to check.

So what do you think about the iWatch or whole concept of a smartwatch, Neatoramanauts? Great idea or a stupid one?

POLL: Is the iWatch a Great Idea or a Dumb One?

• Great idea
• Stupid idea
• iWatch who?

We are told by those who know that homemade Cadbury Creme Eggs are even more delicious than the store bought kind. At least they have fewer unpronounceable chemical additives and you know how old they are. The best part about knowing how to make your own creme eggs is that when the stores are empty of Easter candy, you can just make another batch anytime you want! The complete recipe with pictures is at Food52. Link -via Lifehacker

(Image creditL Ashley Rodriguez)

Jesse Pinkman's sweet ride on the AMC show Breaking Bad is this svelte Toyota Tercel. After the final episode airs this year, Mike Faris Auto Wholesale will auction it. No, you can't pay in meth.

Link -via Jalopnik

Sunglasses Bag Clips

Is your favorite bag of snacks looking a little deflated these days? Spruce up his appearance with the stylish and functional Sunglasses Bag Clips from the NeatoShop. Your favorite snack really can be all that and a bag of chips. 

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Party Supplies and snazzy Sunglasses. 

Link

Has anybody seen the bridge? Sometime since yesterday, an entire bridge was taken from a village in Turkey.

The 22-ton bridge, which was 25 meters long, was in a village in Kocaeli's Gölçük district and was regularly used by villagers to cross a creek to reach their orchards. The villagers were astonished to discover the disappearance of the bridge on Monday morning as they were making their way to the orchards and immediately alerted the police.

Police arrived at the scene and determined that the bridge had been cut apart and loaded onto a truck by the thieves. They believe the bridge was stolen for scrap metal. Its worth was an estimated TL 20,000.

Meanwhile, villagers must the creek by wading. Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: İHA, Uğur Ulu)

Shannon Larratt, the founder of body modification website BMEzine and a long-time Neatoramanaut (his first comment was back in 2009), has died in an apparent suicide. Shannon has left a note explaining his medical condition and the situation that led up to his death.

Shannon Larratt (1973 - 2013), RIP.

Molly's photo project My Precious Roommate recreates your favorite baby pictures with her roommate and an impressive selection of props and costumes. You can view many, many more at the link.

Link -via Blame It on the Voices

Last week, we posted a picture from Harribel & Terribel of a group of teenage girls taken in Estonia in 1930. I expressed some curiosity as to what happened to them later, considering the history of that country. Kaisa was kind enough to send an update and tell us about her grandmother.

My grandmother's name was Aino and she was 15 when this picture was taken. They were just goofing around. She never smoked, by the way. She married my grandfather, a pharmacist, in 1939 and gave birth to my uncle in 1941. Toward the end of the war, when the Russians were advancing, a German officer billeted at their pharmacy wanted to get them out of harm's way. As far as I know, he was an aristocrat and had an estate near Frankfurt, so he told them to go to his family who would look after them. I don't know if he actually meant it or just made a nice gesture, and anyway, they refused and wanted to stay in Estonia. After the war, my father was born. My grandfather was sent to Siberia in the 1949 mass deportations on some trumped up charges (in reality, to fill a quota). He was sentenced to 25 imprisonment plus 5 years of exile (the standard sentence in those days). He was released with the amnesty given to political prisoners by Khrushchev but sadly his health had deteriorated and he died soon afterwards, so I never met him. I only know him by his art - playing cards and a set of Mahjong, which he made from start to finish, painting all the tiles by hand (!!!). We always used to play it whenever we visited her.

She was no delinquent, more like the opposite - porcelain skin, tiny, always perfectly groomed. My grandmother never remarried and passed away in 2009.

Here is the mahjong set her grandfather handcrafted.

Thanks, Kaisa!   

Was it actually a car? No, it was just a snow sculpture. But for police in Aachen, Germany, that was close enough. They wrote out the parking ticket:

"The wardens eventually realised they'd been had when they tried to scrape the snow off the number plate and found there was no plate, just snow," they added.

But the prank has received a frosty reception from local police.

A spokesman said: "We can take a joke as well as the next person and it was a very convincing prank.

"But whether it was made of metal or snow it was still obstructing a road that should have been clear."

Link -via Stuff | Photo: Orange News

(YouTube link)

Many of the facts as originally presented about the destruction of the Death Star just don't add up. What are they hiding? Was it an inside job? Conspiracy theorists are urged to confront the evidence. Which of the wacky scenarios make sense? You decide! This video by Graham Putnam is a parody of the 9/11 conspiracy video series Loose Change.  -via Boing Boing

These musical conjoined triplets form the triolin. It's a musical instrument made by Alex Sobolev, an artist and designer in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The musicians must work together carefully if they wish to play it successfully. You can find build photos at the link.

Link -via Make