Traveling is great, but it's also expensive -at least, most of the time. If you don't have a big budget though, you can still visit nice places. In fact, this Travel and Leisure article has 10 different places that will cost you under $25 a day to visit. Of course, you have to pay to get to the destinations, but the site was even kind enough to include an average cost to fly to the locales from either Los Angeles or New York City.
Here’s your no brainer deal of the day (well, other than $20 off Amazon Prime): Buy a $25 Papa John’s gift card for full price, and Groupon will toss in a pair of free one topping pizzas to go with it. Who doesn’t love free pizza?
(Images via Vladimir Malder)
I've seen some dedicated SpongeBob Squarepants fans online but I've never seen one willing to climb to the top of a high tower spire atop a building just to declare their love via vandalism.
But it appears Russian SpongeBob fans, or more specifically Patrick Star fans, are braver than the rest and don't mind putting their lives in danger to give Patrick the exposure he deserves.
As you'd expect the Russian authorities aren't happy about the stunt, but the Voronezh chapter of the SpongeBob Appreciation Society must be thrilled to bits!
-Via Bored Panda
It's important to learn a foreign language if you plan on traveling outside the U.S., and there are many cities in North America where knowing French, Spanish or Chinese will help you feel at home.
It's equally important to learn another language or three if you want to catch all the non-English jokes hidden in your favorite movies.
Then you would know Christian Slater's character J.D. was lying when he said he had "Ich Luge" (I'm lying) bullets in Heathers, and you would have noticed Bruce Wayne is driving a Lamborghini Murciélago in The Dark Knight, which is Spanish for "bat". (NSFW due to language)
I will never think of the expression "ho there" the same way ever again!
-Via Cracked
FIA GT World Cup Audi R8 LMS racer Laurens Vanthoor clipped the inside curb at Macau’s Mandarin Bend at 155 mph, sending him out of control into the wall on the other side of the track, per Motorsport.com. Vanthoor’s Audi flipped over and started sliding on its roof, immediately triggering a red flag to stop the race.
Enure01Read this story and tell me who this reminds you of.
Enure01Speechless.
"A section of road in the centre of the Japanese city of Fukuoka has reopened just days after a sinkhole opened up outside a busy railway station and threatened to topple nearby buildings."
Submitted by: (via Hakata,JAPAN LOVE)
If the NFL gets any more physical it will have more in common with wrestling than any other ball based sport, which will definitely change the branding for each team.
Instead of the classic fully clothed New England patriot we'd have a bare chested John Cena, and that racist and outdated redskin's head would be replaced by Hulk Hogan's noggin, to help bring Hulkamania to the gridiron.
Teams like the Chargers who seem to be up for grabs in terms of home city would dig in to their roots with a little help from the Undertaker
And Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson would return to his roots in Miami to become the head of the Miami Rocks. Smells like he's cooking some pigskin!
Just in time for Black Friday (and ostensibly to commemorate the premiere of The Grand Tour), Amazon’s discounting 1-year Prime memberships to $79 today, for new members only.
David Blaine television specials are like evolved versions of Punk’d in that they seem to exist primarily to temporarily bring celebrities down to level of the viewer: astonished, freaked out, and unsure of what humanity is capable of. Last night ABC aired a new Blaine special called Beyond Magic, which featured a…
Enure01Crazy and I like it.
Quite a few people have come up with their own unique way of sharing travel photos on Instagram only to have their idea ripped off by others, who typically copy their style for a few pics and move on.
But travel blogger gypsea_lust has a copycat who is going to great lengths to recreate her Instagram famous vacation photos- and the purposeful sameness is super creepy.
The copycat (diana_alexa) tries to match gypsea_lust's original shots as closely as possible, going so far as to pose the same way and wear the same clothing, playing an imitation game that comes off like social media stalking.
diana_alexa has since deleted many of the photos and made her Instagram account private, but she has already proven that imitation is the sincerest form of (in)sanity.
-Via Bored Panda
Enure01Has anyone tried this?
On August 21, 2017, the United States is in for a totally American solar eclipse. The path of the total solar eclipse runs from the beach at Oregon to Charleston, South Carolina. Astronomers have determined that the best place along that path to see totality will be Hopkinsville, Kentucky, a small town between Paducah and Nashville. The sun will be blocked for two minutes and 40 seconds in the middle of the day there. And that won't be the only thing going on in Hopkinsville.
In a strange coincidence, August 21, the day of the 2017 eclipse, carries a lot of significance for Hopkinsville. That’s the day, in 1955, that a local farmhouse in nearby Kelly received an alleged visit from a band of extraterrestrials and a fierce gunfight ensued. Local police and military police from nearby Fort Campbell investigated, and the incident received considerable coverage from the national press.
The community now celebrates the event annually with the “Little Green Men Days” festival. Next year’s four-day spectacular will be capped off with a total solar eclipse, and probably considerable UFO conspiracy theories.
“I like to say the aliens were here to pick out their viewing site early,” Cook joked.
But forget booking a hotel room in Hopkinsville next August. They've been booked for years. Read about Hopkinsville and the eclipse to come at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Flickr user army.arch *Adam*)
I Survived The 2016 Election T-shirt
Wasn't that one nail biter of an election, folks? Did your party win? Are you moving to Canada? Anyhow, whether your candidate won or lost, there's no arguing that we're all lucky to have survived the night.
Celebrate that the end of the election season with this "I Survived the 2016 Election T-Shirt" from the NeatoShop*.
Better yet, win it by subscribing to NeatoMail: we'll have a giveaway where you can win this T-shirt and others in the next day or two. The only way you can enter and win is enter your email (don't worry about spam - we won't share your details with anyone).
*This T-shirt isn't endorsed by any political candidate, thank goodness!
The Māori Battalion fought in Greece, Italy, and North Africa during World War II. Here they are performing a Haka for George II, the King of Greece, who was living in Egypt in 1941 after his country fell to the Nazis.
In total, almost 3,600 men served overseas with the Māori Battalion between 1940 and 1945. Of these, 649 were killed in action or died on active service – more than 10% of the 6,068 New Zealanders who lost their lives serving with 2NZEF in the Middle East and Europe. In addition, 1,712 men were wounded and 237 were prisoners of war. In the words of Lieutenant-General Bernard Freyberg, who commanded the 2nd NZ Division: “no infantry battalion had a more distinguished record, or saw more fighting, or, alas, had such heavy casualties as the Maori Battalion”. This sacrifice did not go unnoticed. The unit was among the most highly decorated for individual bravery of all the New Zealand forces.
See more pictures of the Haka at Rare Historical Photos. -via reddit
As news agencies called more and more states for Donald Trump Tuesday evening, Canada’s informational website on immigration and citizenship began experiencing repeated outages, presumably due to a surge in traffic. Wonder why.
Enure01Dont share this with Bonner.
The following article is from Uncle John’s Factastic Bathroom Reader.
Primates are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom. How close? According to some unconventional scientific research, we may have more in common with them than we thought.
(BBC via YouTube)
RAISING CANE
About 250 miles east of Puerto Rico is an island in the Caribbean called Saint Kitts. Today it’s a popular tourist destination, but for more than 300 years it was best known as a producer of both sugarcane and rum, the liquor made from sugarcane. The first cane plantations were established in the 1640s by England and France, which both had settlements on the island. In those days, France also had colonies in Africa, and when French colonists from West Africa came to Saint Kitts, they often brought monkeys called vervets with them as pets. Many of these monkeys escaped into the wild, where they thrived in the tropical paradise, free from predators and disease. The vervet population exploded in the years that followed. There were plenty of mangoes for them to eat, and when mangoes weren’t in season, the vervets happily devoured the sugarcane, as an English visitor named Lady Andrews observed in 1774:
They are the torment of the planters, they destroy whole cane pieces in a few hours and come in troops from the mountains, whose trees afford them shelter… When pursued, they fly to the mountain and laugh at their pursuers, as they are as little ashamed of a defeat as a French general.
MONKEY SEE 
And just as vervets —like humans— acquired a taste for cane sugar, they also developed a taste for the rum produced from it. The monkeys probably got their first taste of alcohol by eating naturally fermenting cane stalks in the fields, then graduated to stealing rum whenever the opportunity presented itself. Islanders soon learned that an easy way to catch a vervet was to set out some rum in a bowl, then wait for one to come along and drink itself into insensibility.
As the years passed and Saint Kitts’s economy evolved from sugar and rum production to tourism, the vervets may have had an easier transition than the islanders did— at least as far as imbibing was concerned. Instead of heading out to the cane fields or into town in search of rum, the monkeys simply staked out the vacation resorts and stole drinks from tourists whenever their backs were turned. Some visitors found this annoying, of course, but for others, watching vervets steal drinks was —and still is— part of the experience of visiting Saint Kitts.
BIRDS OF A FEATHER
Vervets are one of few primate species (other than humans) that choose to drink alcohol. Though they’re covered in gray fur, have long tails, stand only two feet tall, and weigh less than 20 pounds, they share 90 percent of their DNA with humans. That has prompted scientists to study their drinking habits in the hopes of developing insights into the drinking behavior of humans.
Frank Ervin, a professor of psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, has been observing the behavior of a colony of vervets in Saint Kitts since the 1970s. Earlier in his career he ran a rehabilitation clinic for alcoholics in Boston, Massachusetts, and after witnessing the ravages of alcoholism firsthand, he began studying vervet to “understand more about alcoholism so the damage can be reduced.”
MONKEY BARS
Ervin has conducted numerous studies over the years. Many have a similar structure. Vervet are given access to three kinds liquids:
1. Plain water
2. Water mixed with fruit juice or some other sweetener
3. Alcoholic beverages ranging in potency from 7.5 percent alcohol, about as strong as malt liquor, to 25 percent, which is stronger than wine but not as strong as the rum the vervet drink “in the wild.”
The vervet select what they want to drink and in what quantities. In some studies, the alcohol is available all the time; in others, it is only available at certain times of the day. Some times the vervet choose between alcohol served straight, diluted with water, or mixed with fruit juice. Whatever the case, the vervets decide for themselves what to drink.
GROUP DYNAMICS
“The parallels between the vervet’ behavior and human drinking is striking,” Ervin says. He divides vervet into four categories:
1. Teetotalers
Fifteen percent of vervet studied drink little or no alcohol at all. That’s a larger proportion than is found in those human societies where alcohol consumption is not forbidden for religious or other reasons.
The teetotalers preferred sweetened, non-alcoholic “soft drinks” over water. This distinguishes them from the vervets who do drink alcohol: all categories of those drinkers prefer water over soft drinks when they aren’t drinking alcohol.
(Image credit: Derek Keats)
2. Social Drinkers
Sixty-five percent of vervets drink small to moderate quantities of alcohol, and only when other monkeys are around.
Social drinkers prefer alcohol mixed with fruit juice or other sweeteners and rarely drink before noon.
Social drinkers are more likely to be female than male, and older males rather than younger males.
3. Abusive Binge Drinkers
Five percent of vervets will drink until they pass out in an alcoholic coma, “sometimes repeatedly within a 24-hour period,” if the alcohol isn’t allowed to run out or isn’t taken away. “They will stand at the alcohol bottle,” Ervin writes, “and will drink continuously, blocking access for all other monkeys.”
Binge drinkers prefer their alcohol straight or mixed with water rather than mixed with fruit juice or other sweeteners. They drink more in the morning than they do in the afternoon.
If access to alcohol is restricted to certain times of the day, the binge drinkers can consume an entire day’s worth of alcohol in as little as an hour. They will not drink water as long as alcohol is available.
Left to their own devices, abusive binge drinkers can drink themselves to death in amateur of months or even weeks.
Most abusive binge drinkers are young males.
(Image credit: Derek Keats)
4. Heavy Steady Drinkers
Fifteen percent of vervets drink as much as abusive binge drinkers but do so gradually, sipping it over time instead of drinking it all at once.
Heavy steady drinkers prefer their alcohol either straight or diluted with water, not sweetened with juice.
They tend to be dominant, sociable animals with strong leadership skills.
Males who drink heavily as adolescents, either as binge drinkers or heavy steady drinkers, are likely to continue drinking heavily into adulthood. Their off spring will, on average, drink twice as much as the offspring of social drinkers.
OTHER FINDINGS
Behavior
In vervet studies where access to alcohol is restricted to certain times of the day, in the hour before that time, the orkneys show “significant attention to the external environment” and “anxious attention to stimuli.” After the alcohol is made available, this heightened attentiveness and anxiety diminish considerably.
As wit humans, how vervets respond while under the influence of alcohol varies from one individual to the next. Some become more social; others are playful but keep to themselves and interact little with others in the group. Still other monkeys become withdrawn and remove themselves from the group, often retreating to a corner or sitting next to the alcohol bottle so that they can continue drinking. If approached by other vervets, they will either ignore the overture or respond aggressively.
(Image credit: Flickr user Ben Tullis)
For the group as a whole, when the monkeys are drinking, the total number of social interactions increases… but the number of friendly or “affiliative” behaviors such as grooming and huddling decreases. “The increase was accounted for by fragmentary and inappropriate behaviors… There were many aggressive overtures, including threats or slapping… which were neither responded to nor followed up by the initiator,” Ervin writes.
Play sessions between males who have been drinking are more likely to end in fights than play session between sober males.
Miscellaneous
Adolescent vervet of both sexes, and adult females who have low social status in the group, Ervin writes, are not “over-represented among drinkers.”
Young vervet showed a greater preference for sweetened alcoholic drinks than did older vervets.
In one study, alcohol was available in unlimited quantities for three weeks and then suddenly taken away. The result: “abrupt withdrawal led to restlessness, cage pacing, voluminous consumption of [sweetened water], hyperirritability to sound or observer intrusion, tremulousness… and repeated approaches to the drinking bottle together with handling, rattling, and banging of the drinking bottle.
_______________________________
The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Factastic Bathroom Reader. The 28th volume of the series is chock-full of fascinating stories and facts, and comes in both the Kindle version and paper with a classy cloth cover.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
Last night, BBC rolled out the first part of its six-episode series, Planet Earth II; host David Attenborough and the showrunners wasted no time showing us that nature is sports and being born as anything but a human is scary as hell. Also, snakes are still the devil (even with the 10-year interim between series, this shot of sea snakes is still enough to convince me that land is just fine and the ocean is not meant for man.)
OMG OMG my @Uber driver in Ohio was the You've Got Mail voice Elwood Edwards!!! I made him say it in this video #GOTVforHRC pic.twitter.com/Jgcl7v040D
— Brandee Barker (@brandee) November 5, 2016
Submitted by: (via @brandee)
Enure01One of my favorite Sunny's
Facebook, a never-ending source of useful information, has been our goto for up-to-the-minute election coverage this past season. As such, it’s probably caused us more anxiety about this election than any one speech, Wikileaks email, or video featuring Billy Bush. Your Facebook wall feeds into your worst fears about the candidates, and Stephen Colbert knows it.
On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night, Colbert took a big swig of cough syrup, dusted off his box of Reynolds wrap, and made a new tinfoil hat to block the radio signals that the Illuminati uses to read our minds. Colbert is full of great intel about such things as the whereabouts of Chumbawumba, the shadowy industry of upstate New York weddings, and what oysters actually are. By the end of it, you’ll have your cork board up and long strands of yarn connecting seemingly disparate items together to prove your theory that, hey, what if the Chicken McNugget is more nugget than chicken?
Check out the video and prepare to have your mind blown.
Submitted by: (via The Late Show with Stephen Colbert)
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