Tag: neatorama

Why old books smell delicious

I love libraries and second hand bookshops. Especially old ones with creaky shelves. I love the smell of old books, and am delighted to have a new vocabulary to describe their smell thanks to this nice little video.

Via everywhere else, starting with Neatorama.

Chuck Norris toy wants you for Christmas…

You don’t want this toy for Christmas… it wants you. He also provides signature Chuck Norris facts when his belly presses your hand.

If only it came with an Invasion USA DVD.

Someone should make a zombie pull-a-part bread roll

This Zombie Doll from Neatorama spawned that brilliant idea in the title. Zombie bread rolls would sell in the tens. If not the hundreds. As would zombie “my family” stickers. I’d like to make “My Dysfunctional Family” stickers.

The Dismember-Me Plush Zombie is a real thing though. Unlike those two ideas.

Ending the quest for the Holy Grail

Most guides to better writing include, somewhere in the top ten tips, something about avoiding hackneyed cliches. Hackneyed cliches like describing the search for something special as a “quest for the Holy Grail.”

Here’s how bad it is.

“In 2008, Guardian columnist Tim Radford wrote: “British journalists have invoked the holy grail more than 1,000 times in the last 12 months. I have, almost certainly, evoked the same divinely-touched chalice, rightly celebrated in Arthurian legend, in some inappropriate context. We are all guilty… Grail imagery occurs with astonishing frequency in the scholarly press. Somewhere in the medical literature, I suspect, lurks a paper about the holy grail of hip replacement.”

This is a good story on the Holy Grail pandemic. Unless you’re actually searching for the cup Jesus allegedly drank out of on the cross, King Arthur style, then you should find a better phrase.

“Ten years later [in 1978], Stephen J. Lippard, then at Columbia University but currently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put the first holy grail into a research article in an ACS journal when he wrote a paper on how platinum antitumor complexes interact with polynucleotides and kill cancer cells. “As with the Holy Grail of medieval legend, the joy thus far has been in the searching,” Lippard wrote.

Since then, holy grails in chemical research have been steadily on the rise. Including Lippard’s, three holy grails appeared in ACS journals in the 1970s, and five could be found in the 1980s. During the 1990s, 39 research articles in ACS journals made mention of a holy grail, and since 2000, 169 research articles invoked the sacred goblet. A SciFinder search shows this trend of chemists gravitating toward grails holds true for non-ACS journals as well.”

Put a doll-up in every recipe

These Russian Doll measuring cups designed by Fred and Friends are cool.

Piercing stare

Glasses would be such a pain, I’d lose them all the time, having to take them off and put them on and take them off all over again would be a recipe for losing those very expensive little visual aids.

So here’s a novel solution – pierced eyeglasses.

Found here

Shirt of the Day: Clever? Stupid

Ambigrams are cool. Palingrams (which is I think the correct description of a palindromic ambigram) are cooler. The company we use for our internet hosting and Content Management at work has a palingram for a logo. I saw it at a conference I went to but haven’t found it online or I’d include it here.

Anyway, Ambigrams are cool. Shirts derived from popular novelty shirt concepts with mirror image antonymic ambigrams are cooler. Like this one. From neatorama. It’s clever. Or stupid. Depending on your perspective. It’s also cheap at $US10.