October 2007 Archives

Not too far from the Vat19.com headquarters is a town that is believed by many to be the most haunted town in the United States. Given the timeliness of the subject, we've decided to share some pictures taken during one of nearby Antoinette's Haunted History Tours.

The Masonic Lodge - The tour began with dinner in an old Masonic Lodge that is said to be haunted by the ghosts of happy Masons from days gone by. Of course, the scariest thing there was probably the blood-red shag carpet that covered the floor of the room you see below:

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10. Unicorn - These guys have horse bodies, goat beards, lion tails, and of course, the horn. They’re known for being solitary and gentle but fierce when absolutely necessary.

9. Tomte - The tomte is a tiny, bearded old man who resides with farms in Scandinavia. They are easily offended, and must be appeased with gifts, lest they cause mischief or misfortune around the farm. Some people believed the tomte to be connected with the devil.

After a great deal of deliberation, we at Vat19 have decided that Custom Creature Taxidermy is another product that’s just not right for our store. We try to give our customers what they want, and right now, we’re pretty sure that doesn’t include horrifying patchwork dead animals.

On the other hand, the artist’s designs are so incredibly bizarre and unique that we can’t help but write about them. Below, you’ll see a couple of her more ambitious creations. At the website, you can view more affordable alternatives like the $40 “Mystery Foot on a Heavy Chain”.

Capricorn

Devil Cat

I'm a fan of taking small objects (such as paper clips or Legos) and making big pieces of art out of it. M&M candies come in plenty of colors for an artist to work with.

It just makes sense to make an image of Eminem out of M&Ms. The guy that made this also makes art from pieces of toast, earning him the nickname The Toastman.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so here's a couple "pink" works of art made from M&Ms. The first one is a M&M bra from a fashion show benefit and the second one was made by a breast cancer survivor who, despite the fact that she dislikes Mars Inc., made this impressive M&M mosaic.

I don't know that I'd call this art, but painting your entire body green shows some M&M appreciation.

In case you developed a habit of eating only brown M&Ms after watching sort M&Ms by color.

Slang 101 is back in session for a second semester.

Kangaroo - A female who has a large lower half of the body but a regular-sized top half. Example: Her butt takes up two seats on the bus, but she wears size small shirts! What a kangaroo!

Hamwich - Ham and sandwich combined to make one word. Example: My mom packed me a hamwich and Snack Pack for lunch!

Webmerized - Being mesmerized and totally submersed in the Internet. Example: John is so webmerized that he passed up World Series tickets to stay home and play World of Warcraft.

Crop Dusting - A stealth tactic of farting while walking past a person or group, leaving behind a stench and the blame on someone else; a walk-by-farting. Example: Joseph ate at Chipotle and then went crop dusting around the mall.

Pregzilla - An unpleasant and angry pregnant female. Similar to bridezilla, the term for a heinously mean and bossy bride-to-be. Example: Janet is constantly whining about getting fat and she has hoarded all of the cookies in the house. She's such a pregzilla.

When you ask a PC-user about the Windows key on their keyboard, you typically get one of 3 responses:

· Huh?
· What is that thing, anyway?
· Oh yeah, that thing that brings up the Start menu.

What they don’t know is that the Windows key is more than just another pretty key (or parrot chew toy, as seen to the left). We’ve outlined the most useful, relatively unknown functions below.



· Windows + E – Opens Internet Explorer. Although why you’d want to do that, we’re not sure.
· Windows + R – Brings up the Run prompt. If you don’t know what that means, you probably won’t care about this feature.
· Windows + F – This brings up the Search Windows window.
· Windows + D – This takes you straight to the desktop without the need to minimize everything you’re currently working on.
· Windows + M – This minimizes all windows currently open. Yes, the effect is the same – you’re back at the desktop.
· Windows + F1 – This brings up the Help feature.
· Windows + Pause/Break button – If you want to know what you’re working with, this is the easiest way to find out.
· Windows + L – This will log you off of Windows so that you can sign into a different user name.

I'm sure we've all been to Wal-Mart. Chances are you saw and heard some pretty interesting things while you were there, even if it was just for a few minutes. Here are some things I doubt that you'll ever hear while at Wal-Mart.

"There were so many empty spaces in the parking lot!"
"My girlfriend told me to come here to buy her engagement ring."
"Everyone looks so normal."
"We only buy American-made products."
"I love the peanut butter here."
"We're going out of business."
"Why don't they open early on the day after Thanksgiving?"
"I could never afford that."
"Wow, this place is the Rolls-Royce of retail."
"I wish this CD wasn't full of explicit lyrics."
"Nope, they don't accept food stamps here."
"That woman working the cash register is the hottest young lady I've ever seen."
"The manager said that Wal-Mart has no intentions of taking over the world."
"It's so clean in here."

As horror movies become more and more inventive with the ways they kill off their actors, it’s interesting to see how real life matches up in terms of gruesome deaths. Here are some interesting worldwide annual statistics based on data compiled in January 2004.

• Contact with a powered lawnmower – 51 deaths


• Varicose veins in the lower extremities - 1001 deaths


• Bitten by rat - 5 deaths


• Assault by pushing or placing someone before a moving object - 110 deaths. Clearly, this is the result of too many silent films with people tied to train tracks.


• Contact with hot tap water - 337 deaths


• Drowning in the bathtub - 4010 deaths, mostly in Japan. Why?


• Ignition or melting of nightwear - 85 deaths

You can read the entire list of causes at NationMaster. You’ll either be relieved (that you’re probably not going to die of being bitten by a rat) or terrified at all the new possibilities you had never considered.

Nearly everyone has, at some point, considered the possibility that their body is the way it is because of powers beyond their control. Too thin, too fat, too underdeveloped, too short, too tall...if we can't seem to change it, we tend to assume that there's something else at work.

In the case of muscle development, that something is myostatin. In normal people, it inhibits excessive muscle growth. If you have too little...you get people and animals like you see below. These images come from this fascinating post over on Who-Sucks.com.

Did you know that if you were to spell out numbers, you would have to go all the way to one thousand until you would find the letter "A"? Here's the proof:

zero
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
eleven
twelve
thirteen
fourteen
fifteen
sixteen
seventeen
eighteen
nineteen
twenty
thirty
forty
fifty
sixty
seventy
eighty
ninety
hundred
thousand

Sure, I could've typed out every single number from zero to one thousand for you, but that would be incredibly long and boring. But as you can see, none of the numbers that would be included on that list would have an "A" until you reach one thousand.

6. “At the end of the day…” – Okay, so this one’s not so much dumb as it is irritating. It’s just another conversational stall tactic like “well” and “as I see it” – an upgrade from childhood staples like “umm” and “like”.

We’ll take a nice, thoughtful pause over “At the end of the day” any day.

5. “Anyways” – Most dictionaries call it “nonstandard”. We call it a great way to make the people around you discount your intelligence by at least 10 points.

4. “Irregardless” - You don’t run around saying “I haven’t got no…” and this is the same kind of thing. “Regardless” will suffice.

3. “For all intensive purposes…” – What does that even mean? It’s actually supposed to be “for all intents and purposes…”

2. “For serious.” – We don’t know where this expression originated, but we don’t like it. For serious.

1. “I’m not gonna lie to you…” – The fact that a person feels the need to preface a sentence with this statement makes us wonder – were they lying to us before?

Do you only use a tennis ball when playing tennis or fetch with your dog? There’s so much more you could be doing with that tennis ball! Check out these “curiously awesome” alternative uses for a tennis ball.

• Cut a slit in it and hide your valuables inside. Just remember not to play with it!
• Throw a few in the dryer to fluff up a down coat or comforter.
• Fill it with pennies to use as a small hand weight. Make sure you tape it closed very securely.
• Put them on the bottom of chair legs so you don’t scratch the floor or make noise when moving the chair.

• Float it in your swimming pool to absorb body oils. Gross, but apparently it works.
• Cut one in half and use it as a grip to open jars and bottles.
• Place it on the end of a bike’s kickstand to prevent it from sinking into the ground.
• Use one to cover a padlock so that the lock doesn’t rust or get covered with ice.

Apparently the sky is the limit for the number of piercings some people are willing to put on their face.

This woman has over 5,000 piercing on her body.

Moses?

How much weight can his ears hold!?

This is a female.

Wait a second...is that drool?

He got over 1,000 piercings in one session.

I'm all for people picking up their dog's poop. Who likes to see piles of poop on the ground? Not me.

Someone had a thought: "I'll pick up that poop and store it on my dog's back!" This person then took a giant step into Lameville and named the poop backpack the Poopsadaisy. I will say that it isn't as awkward (for the human) as walking around with a pooper scooper. Thank you Poopsadaisy for trying to eliminate fecal land mines in parks around the country!

Fat can be funny. For example, Fat Bastard or Chris Farley trying to be a Chippendale. But, usually fat is not funny. The number of calories and grams of fat in the foods we found is anything but funny...it's disgusting.

The recommended amount of calories you should consume each day depends on your age, whether you are male or female, and how much physical activity you get. Usually examples will be based upon consuming 2,000 calories per day. To get a personalized plan that includes the amount of calories and foods you should eat, visit The U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The average American eats out four times per week. One menu item can account for more than half of the recommended daily amount of calories. We've compiled a list of 10 fast food and take out menu items that contain over 1,000 calories. They're food nightmares, making it easy for unaware customers to engage in fairly serious binge eating without even realizing it.

Most of us probably don't get enough exercise. So, to get your rear in gear, we've decided to also tell you how many minutes it would take a person weighing 150 pounds to burn off the calories consumed by eating the food on this list by bicycling at a speed of 10 mph. Is eating that burger worth pedaling around for 3 and a half hours? We think not.

Chili's Fajita Steak Quesadillas
1970 calories, 106 grams of fat, 290 minutes

P.F. Chang's Orange Peel Beef
1580 calories, 85 grams of fat, 232 minutes

Hardees Monster Thickburger
1420 calories, 107 grams of fat, 209 minutes

Burger King Triple Whopper with Cheese
1230 calories, 82 grams of fat, 181 minutes

It seems like plenty of companies are named after the individual(s) who founded or inspired them. Wal-Mart, Hilton Hotels, Disney, Ford, MGM (that’s Metro, Goldwyn, & Mayer), and Dell are just a few.

Of course, there are also those names for which no one seems to know the origin. For the truly curious, Wikipedia has compiled a long list of company name origins. We’ve collected the highlights:

Kodak - Kodak is the completely original creation of George Eastman, the founder and inventor behind the company. He believed that the letter K seemed strong, and liked that no one would mispronounce the name.

Amazon - As one might expect, Amazon.com was named for the Amazon River, the most voluminous river in the world. Someone had some foresight…

Lycos - This one comes from the word Lycosidae, the spider family that contains wolf spiders.

Coca-Cola - The world-famous beverage is named for the coca leaves and kola nuts that are used for flavoring. It’s actually a lot more appetizing than Pepsi, which was named for the digestive enzyme pepsin.

QVC - Quality, Value, and Convenience.

Starbucks - Starbucks was named for the character Starbuck in Moby Dick. See, even the name is pretentious and overrated.

Mozilla - This popular web browser was originally designed to replace a program called Mosaic. Mozilla is a combination of “Mosaic-killer” and Godzilla.

Taco Bell - Taco Bell was named for its founder Glen Bell. Because you know it’s good Mexican food when it comes from a guy named Glen.

Do you believe everything that your history teacher told you, what you read in a history book, or what you heard on the news? Don’t! Here are a few things that just might shock you about American History.

• George Washington never cut down a cherry tree. His biographer invented this story.
• Abner Doubleday did not invent the game of baseball. It seems that “America’s favorite pastime” originated in England. Read the story here.
• The Abraham Lincoln Birthplace Unit in Kentucky does not have the actual cabin in which Lincoln was born. The actual birth cabin was never found on the land that he was born on and is thought to have fallen apart or been torn down.
• Charles Lindbergh was not the first person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean and was not the first person to do the flight nonstop. He was, however, the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic solo. Click here to read more.
• The attack on Pearl Harbor was not a complete and total surprise. More info here.

Vending machines are great for a lot of things. They’re faster than waiting in line for stamps, easier than walking into a store to buy a soda, and convenient for buying new toothpaste when you’ve forgotten yours while traveling. All the same, we’ve seen some vending machine products that have given us reason to wonder about the people stocking them…

Live Bait – You know, for when you’re really craving a good nightcrawler. These machines are pretty common in small river and lakeside towns.

Live Lobsters – I’ve always viewed the ocean as the ultimate lobster vending machine, but the Japanese have other ideas. Japan may actually be the crazy vending machine capital of the world, as they sell not only lobsters, but fried food, toilet paper, breath testing, rhinoceros beetles, and airsoft pistols through their numerous vending machines.

Fruit – I’ve seen this on a couple of college campuses, and in most cases, the bananas were black, oranges were fuzzy, and the grapes were piling up at the bottom of the machine. The bananas might be feasible if they had a Banana Bunker on each one for protection, but you’d have to pay a little more than .75 for your bananas, then.

“Adult” Products and Publications – If you stray too far from the big hotel chains, you’ll probably run into a few of these vending machines. While I’m not one to question the rights of adults to do what they want in the privacy of their own homes, I’m not sure that leaving some of these products out in the open for children is such a good idea. Staying at a budget motel doesn’t necessarily mean that you want to come face to face with “Barely Legal” every time you walk to your room.

Perfume – If you’ve ever been to a truckstop, you’ve probably seen one of those fabulous “designer imposters” perfume vending machines. The only thing worthwhile about these machines is watching big-haired truckstop women try to contort themselves to make sure that the spray reaches all the important pulse points.

It’s generally agreed upon that romance novels are a little trashy. For most of us, they conjure up images of bon-bon eating spinsters, Fabio, and mobile homes filled to the brim with cats and cigarette smoke. Or maybe that’s just me.

All the same, even those of us who don’t enjoy curling up with the latest Silhouette bodice-ripper can appreciate their cheesy, often comical titles. Below, we offer a few of the best.

10. The Viscount in Her Bedroom - This is the story of Simon, the strikingly handsome but blind viscount who falls in love with Louisa because she smells good and lets him do things that blind men don’t always get to do. An instant classic. And in case you were wondering, a viscount is a member of British nobility who ranks above a baron but below an earl.

9. Undead & Unwed - This one is a little too convoluted for a quick summary. A former model/unemployed secretary dies and somehow becomes a vampire who isn’t subject to the usual vampire limitations. Somewhere along the way, she’s abducted by a tacky 500-year-old vampire and teams up with a hot but perverted “good” vampire/love interest.

Given the number of wines on the market, and the fact that you often purchase based solely on the label, it’s important for a bottle to stand out on the shelf. The wines below have definitely succeeded in that regard…

Hidden Lake Winery - Only an hour or so from the Vat19 headquarters, Hidden Lake Winery is a pleasantly light-hearted when it comes to its wines. We've never sampled them, so we can't vouch for the overall experience, but check out some of their more creative labels below:

Paper clips are tiny and cheap, but they are among my list of favorite office supplies (right after Post-it notes and Sharpie markers). If you thought that paper clips were confined to desks and used just to hold papers together, think again.

Here are some examples of paper clip art that are pretty impressive. There are more examples at this site.

Considering the fact that most Americans have never even heard of Evansville, Indiana, you wouldn’t think that they would produce too many people who qualify as curiously awesome…but you’d be wrong. We’ve collected 5.

5. Don Mattingly, Professional Baseball Player and Cultivator of a Most Extraordinary Mustache – Also known as "Donnie Baseball", Mr. Mattingly played for the New York Yankees throughout most of the 1980s and early 1990s. Today, he and his family enjoy the simple life on a horse farm back home in Evansville.

4. Matt Williams, TV Producer – The wildly successful producer of movies like What Women Want and television shows like Roseanne and Home Improvement. He actually used images of Evansville in Roseanne.

3. Neil Doughty, Musician – If you've found yourself singing along to songs like "Keep on Lovin' You" and "Can't Fight This Feeling", you owe a debt of gratitude to Neil Doughty. As one of the founding members of REO Speedwagon, he is most definitely deserving of the "curiously awesome" designation.

2. Michael Rosenbaum, Actor – Michael Rosenbaum has played a chest-flashing dance competition meanie, a cross dresser (twice), and "some guy that gets killed" in more than one teen horror flick, but he's best known for his uniquely complex portrayal of Smallville villain Lex Luthor. His dashing good looks give him the deciding edge over #3 Mr. Doughty.

1. Ruth Siems, Inventor – Although she passed on in 2005, Mrs. Siems was responsible for developing Stovetop Stuffing. She figured out the size of bread crumb that would be necessary to get the desired consistency, and we all know how that turned out.

So, while athletes and actors and producers are awesome, Ruth Siems puts food in our stomachs, and that makes her the most curiously awesome person from Evansville, Indiana.

One of the side effects of modern life is that a lot of manual jobs have disappeared. Instead of growing up to be a “woodcutter” or “armorsmith”, most of us will grow up to wear suits and call ourselves things like “forensic accountants”, “loan processors”, and “sales managers”.

To honor the memory of those fallen jobs, we’d like to taunt you with a list of careers you’ll probably never get to pursue (unless you want to relocate to a place like Colonial Williamsburg.)

Treadmill Worker - Before we had things like bulldozers and cranes, we had treadmill workers. They were the poor, brave souls who walked on precariously placed treadmills to lift stones to workers at new castles, churches, and other structures.

Ewerer - A ewerer was a person who delivered and heated water for nobility. It’s not the most glamorous job, but it put food on the table.

Fuller - A fuller is a person who treats cloth, typically wool. By the definition, there are still a few fullers left in the world. I doubt any of them do it the way they did it in Roman times, though. Roman fullers would walk around for hours in vats of cloth and urine, hoping to extract all the dirt and oil from the fabric.

Armorsmith - Outside of Hollywood costumes and historic re-enactment buffs, there’s just not much of a demand for full plate and chainmail armor.

Telegraph Operators - Less than a century ago, it was considered entirely reasonable to advise someone towards a career in telegraph operation. Today, the idea is laughable.

Hostler - Hostlers cared for the massive legions of horses that helped people and things get from one place to another. While horses aren’t exactly extinct, it’s not exactly a growing field.

Bootblack - A bootblack is a person who cleans and polishes footwear for a living. When’s the last time you had your shoes polished?

Furrier - It could be a shift in public interest, or it could be Pamela Anderson’s efforts on behalf of PETA, but for some reason, this is another career in severe decline. If you were hoping for a career in animal furs, we suggest you work on a backup plan, just in case.

When I took art classes in school, my supply lists included things such as acrylic paint, coal pencils, and a sketch book. Never did those supply lists include puke, an enema, or menstrual fluid.

I understand that art means different things to different people. What is artistic and beautiful to one person is downright ugly and disgusting to another person. Here are some people who use mediums that are generally considered disgusting to create their artwork.

Some guy named Lance makes himself throw up onto canvases and then blows his vomit around with a straw. He uses food coloring instead of paint. Apparently, Lance can store a reserve of vomit in his esophagus. Now that's an awesomely disgusting talent.

Keith Boadwee makes "butthole paintings". He fills up an enema with egg tempura paint and fills himself up. Then he aims himself over the canvas and, ummm, releases.

Vanessa Tiegs uses her menstrual blood instead of paint. How did she collect the blood? With a moon cup throughout 36 periods.