Gimme Five Dollars' Worth of Cool

Abe representin'! Cool Stuff You Can Do With Paper Money

Technorati tags: money, origami, art

Cape optional

Ten of the Strangest Names Ever

Technorati tags: strange, names

"I'm not sure that I agree with you 100% on your police work there, Lou"

Small town Gang Task Force struggles to decipher sidewalk graffiti

From hometown heroes Recoil Magazine, Grand Rapids' answer to The Onion.

Technorati tags: satire, Recoil

Okay, you're not quite in frame. Take a step back... another... one more... Oops!

Chinese artist Li Wei creates art that proves to be impossible. How does he do it, you ask? Performance art and photography is what creates these dangerous illusions. He also uses props such as metal wires, mirrors, scaffolding and acrobatics to help him with the effect. (via InventorSpot)




Also from InventorSpot, and also involving a little bit of visual deception, artist Kittiwat Unarrom creates disturbingly gruesome works of art out of bread!

Kittiwat puts his master's degree in fine arts to use by creating bruised and battered heads, feet and other internal organs at a bread shop in Thailand.

Technorati tags: impossible, photography, art, creepy

You missed a spot...

Great photos of the Seattle Space Needle as workers clean it for the first time since it opened during the 1962 World's Fair. Interestingly, they are doing the high-pressure, high-temperature scrub with pure water and no soap, in order to minimize the environmental impact.

Technorati tags: Seattle, Space Needle

If babies ruled the world...

Does the premise of an entire site devoted to photos of dads and their babies with their heads swapped sound hilarious? Then ManBabies.com is the place you're looking for, you freak you.

Hope you weren't planning on sleeping nightmare-free anytime in the next, oh, say, year or so. (via BoingBoing)



If you just can't get enough of that trans-generational Photoshop stuff, there was something similar with grandparents and babies a few years back over at Something Awful. Enjoy(?)


Technorati tags: funny, Photoshop, who thinks up this crap?

Da pain! Da pain!

How do painkillers find and kill pain?




Is it true that some people remain alert--but paralyzed--under anesthesia, trapped and suffering through the pain but unable to scream out and alert others to the agony they are enduring?

You know... kind of like Hayden Christensen in 2007's "Awake". Or like the audiences who watched Hayden Christensen in "Awake".

Technorati tags: aspirin, medicine, science, anesthesia, pain

The Secret Lives of Stormtroopers

Stormtroopers have downtime just like you and me. Take a behind-the-scenes peek at what they do when they're not shooting lasers at Alliance rebels from 10 feet away and missing.

Hey, they seem pretty good at breakdancing! I wonder if their high school guidance counselors maybe steered them down the wrong career path? (via Digg)

Technorati tags: Flickr, Star Wars, stormtrooper

Brother, Can You Spare $1.23 (adjusted for inflation)?

When you've only got three seconds to convince someone to part with their spare change, you need to get a little creative. Not your grandfather's panhandling signage, page one, and two.



"Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?" came out in 1931. Adjusted for inflation, that dime is equivalent to $1.23 as of 2007. See what stuff was worth then and now with The Inflation Calculator. Dates range from 1800-2007.

Technorati tags: panhandling, funny, inflation

The Last Picture

No, this is not great-uncle Joseph napping after completing the Sunday crossword. Actually, Great-uncle Joseph (or whoever this really is) is deceased in this photo. The practice of postmortem photography (or memento mori) was a way for Victorian era families to remember their loved ones.

One practice sometimes used was to place the subject in a lifelike pose, such as you see above. This photo and many others are featured in a PBS.org documentary, "Gone But Not Forgotten". Further examples can be found at the website.

Postmortem portraits of children are quite common. For modern viewers they may be particularly difficult to examine, but because child mortality rates were much higher in the past than they are today, photographs of lost children were very meaningful to families. Sometimes they were the only proof of that child's existence. (via mental_floss)




This photo and others are from the fascinating and poignant memento mori gallery at Jack & Beverly's Collection of Collections.

Technorati tags: memento mori, postmortem photography, death

Giants for young and old

They Might Be Giants - Alphabet of Nations
Brush up on your geography (or perhaps your alphabetry, if you are part of the preschool set) in this outstanding little refresher course of alphabetical nations.




They Might Be Giants - The Mesopotamians
The artwork might be done in the style of Gorillaz, but once they burst into that sun-shiney chorus of "We're The Mesopotamians! Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal and Gilgamesh!", it's more like The Monkees.

Technorati tags: They Might Be Giants, tagname

Tin Ear

Can you name that note? Perfect Pitch has various levels, though it didn't matter for me because I failed miserably at even the easiest level.

Technorati tags: perfect pitch, musical, quiz

Groovy cats and tripping cows

Cute overload, kitty-style.




This is what happens when you lace Bessie's hay with the brown acid.

Okay, not really. It's a simple yet pretty cool little science trick involving nothing more than a bowl of milk, some food coloring and some liquid dish detergent. (both links via Neatorama)

Technorati tags: cute, kitties, science, experiment, milk, psychedelic, like woooowwwww maaaaaaannn

Math is hard! Graphs are pretty!

Not at all new, but worthy of a share, I think. Royksopp - Remind Me. While I really do like the song, above that, there's something really, really appealing to me about all the neat, clean little diagrams and graphs.

Technorati tags: Royksopp, Remind Me, infoporn

Pulp Fiction, Forsooth!

Heads up!

I am aware that there are a few guests who stop by Info Nation on a regular-ish basis who are, shall we say, still flush with the dewy glow of youth. And for the most part I try to keep this particular small corner of the Interwebz, well, maybe not G-rated, but perhaps hovering in the PG to PG-13 zone, if you dig.

So, if you're a young 'un, are offended by salty language, or by simulated violence performed by robots, rabbits and/or Muppets upon other robots, rabbits and/or Muppets, then this particular post likely ain't gonna be your cuppa cocoa. The rest of you degenerates, follow me...

Oh, yeah, one more thing. If you're not familiar with Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, these links will likely either
a) not make any sense, or
b) not seem very funny, or
both a) and b)


Robots Can't Act performing the "Describe Marcellus Wallace" scene




Pulp Fiction in 30 seconds, performed by bunnies




A freakalicious mashup called Pulp Muppets



A glimpse at some Pulp Fiction scenes if they had been penned by Shakespeare (via Boing Boing)

Technorati tags: Pulp Fiction, funny

Just Don't Look Down

This is Caminito del Rey.

El Caminito del Rey (English: The King's pathway) is a walkway, now fallen into disrepair, pinned along the steep walls of a narrow gorge in El Chorro, near Álora in Málaga, Spain.

The walkway has now gone many years without maintenance, and is in a highly deteriorated and dangerous state. It is one meter (3 ft) in width, and is over 700 feet (200 m) above the river. Nearly all of the path has no handrail. Some parts of the walkway have completely collapsed and have been replaced by a beam and a metallic wire on the wall. Many people have lost their lives on the walkway in recent years. After four people died in two accidents in 1999 and 2000, the local government closed the entrances. However, adventurous tourists still find their way into the walkway.

You know, I was relatively okay for the first part where the left side of the trail dropped off, but when the right side of the trail opened up, that's when I started getting the heebie-jeebies. Why is that, I wonder? (via J-Walk)



And here is a cute Flash game called Chasm that appears to be based upon the Caminito del Rey. You are charged with diverting the water through a Rube Goldbergian series of sluices, gates and waterwheels to bring water and electricity to your hometown of Chasmton.. I gave up after half an hour of fruitless effort, but maybe you'll do better.

Technorati tags: Caminito del Rey, dangerous, chasm, game

Reporter laughs his butt off. Film at 11.

While this is funny enough with the sound off, really, do yourself a favor and turn up the audio. Those news anchors are what really makes this clip hilarious.




Another case of a news anchor with the giggles. Unfortunately for him, it happened to occur while he was reporting the death of several people in a horrific highway accident. I somehow think it might have turned out to be his last night doing the news at this particular station.




No laughing reporter here, though I'm sure his cameraman got a good chuckle out of this.

Technorati tags: model, tripping, laughing, anchors

Awwww, look! Junior just flashed his first gang sign!

Parents fight over which gang their toddler should join (no, this is not a headline from The Onion). Mama's a Crip, but Daddy's a Westside Baller...

In other news, neighborhood sees sudden surge in trike-by shootings...

Technorati tags: dumb, gangs

CAUTION: Beatle Crossing

The mental_floss blog explores parodies of and tributes to the famous Beatles Abbey Road album cover, and even more finds over at Am I Right.

The Abbey Road Webcam lets you check out what's going on at the famous crosswalk anytime. I haven't yet witnessed it firsthand, but I hear tell it's a pretty common sight to see tourists wreaking havoc on traffic flow as they try to recreate the iconic shot.

Technorati tags: Abbey Road, Beatles, webcam

Making it fit (or die trying)

Still another edition of the Lords of Logistics.

Technorati tags: crazy, logistics, what-is-this-safety-stuff-of-which-you-speak?