Anyone else remember 1925? Man, was that some crazy partying! The popular music of the time was very popular, and everyone went to that place everyone was going to.
A little-known thing of 1925, though, was the Isolator.
The Isolator helmet was created by Hugo Gernsback. It's made to block out distractions so you can really focus on something, and there's an oxygen tank so you can breathe.
It's made of a thick metal that blocks out all sounds, and allows you to see only a little line of vision. This may be helpful for focusing, but overall, makes it impractical. There's no way to sense danger or switch to doing something else. Also, can you imagine how heavy that would be on your shoulders?
Anyway, though this thing may be part of the world in 1925, not 2015, there's still a lot of pictures of it on the Internet. Here's a few of them:
Photos and information courtesy of these websites: here and here. I recommend looking at the first link, the whole website is pretty cool.
Just so you know, this will be my last Thingology Specialties post. They take a long time to make (even if they seem half-hearted) and, well, they aren't actually anything... special. (Sorry. Pun intended.)
You know, took me a while to even come up with a specialty to feature. I don't know why I decided to do this "specialties" thing. Well, here it is – weird jobs.
As usual, here is a list of weird examples:
Ice Cream Taste Tester (self-explanatory) – pays ~$56,000/year (Forbes)
Live Mannequin (like a mannequin but a person) – up to $100/hour (Forbes)
Duck Master (take care of and lead ducks around to parades and stuff) – salary unknown (livecareer.com)
Bed Warmer (roll around in a hotel bed so it's nice for the guests) – salary unknown (livecareer.com)
Anyway, my point is that there are plenty of jobs beyond the basic things people think of (teacher, doctor, arsonist, etc.) and a lot of entertaining ones, too.
You can get paid to become a mermaid, for example. Basically, you wear this skin-tight tail and swim around a huge tank in front of your audience, lip syncing and modeling dat tail. Buzzfeed made a video about it, too:
If you're into swimming, it may be the perfect career for you.
I'd also like to elaborate on the Duck Master career I briefly explained. As well as herding the ducks, you are in charge of their welfare. The only place I know of that has a Duck Master position is the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. Here's a quote from the Peabody on the job:
Responsible for handling and maintaining the health, diet, rotation and living quarters for the five mallard ducks and conducting the daily march of The Peabody Ducks before hotel audiences and off-property audiences. Required to take the ducks to schools and give presentations about wildlife, ducks, and the environment. Required to work closely with management to do media interviews and hotel tours...
Look at the whole job description page here. It says the posting has expired, however, so I don't know if the job is still available/even a thing. It also later says you need to be able to lift and carry 50 lbs, and push 150 lbs. up an incline. I have no idea why.
I suggest looking at that livecareer.com link I cited to in the original interesting jobs list. It links you to a page full of weird jobs and a sentence or two describing them.
Anyways, thanks for listening, thingologists, and I'll see you later!
Also, while making this post, I took a quiz and apparently...
I paid attention during 79% of high school!
68-84% Pretty good, you know that there are libraries and newspapers, and you remember what you've read. You were a child that wasn't left behind!
Right now I have brown-butter blondies baking in the oven. #omg
Anyways, we have another Thingology Specialties post coming at you now. (If I wasn't clear, I'm going to do a string of specialties posts and then stop.) Today's specialty is furniture.
Wow, huh! Sounds exciting!
No, but really – people make weeeeiiiirrrd furniture. Here are some examples made by StraightLineDesigns.com. (Pictures found on WoW Pics.)
Sorry about the last one. You have to admit it's funny, though.
Anyway, my point is that people have gotten really creative with furniture these days. A lot of it is humorous, but some of it is for certain aesthetics, too:
The last one could actually be normal. Still, it's not really everyday.
I've been doing some research in weird furniture and I've noticed a pattern: patio and outdoor furniture these days is all about spheres. From "Elegant Crater Furniture" to "Globe Patio Furniture". (both of which are available at www.opulentitems.com)
Anyway, furniture has really come along. To some, it's boring, but to some, it's weird and/or hilarious.
Thingology is a little-known science. I got my degree in it, but at a little school in the woods and mountains of rural Vermont (just kidding, of course). Very few universities even have it as a class, and even fewer have specialties.
In the field of medicine, everyone knows you can have a specialty. It's the same in thingology. So, because thingology itself isn't well-known, I thought I should teach y'all about thingology itself, specifically specialties.
Today, I'm featuring plant specialties.
We live in an amazingly biodiverse world. If you don't believe me, or think I'll just be ranting about something boring, just look at this.
All of these trees are completely natural and from the same place, an isolated island off of Yemen called Socotra. Because it's so isolated, a lot of plants there are entirely unique to the island.
Socotra also has an amazing history and culture you can read about at that link (a National Geographic website article).
Hey, let's take a moment to talk about buttercups. Cute little flowers. The name of one of the Powerpuff girls. Makes me think of buttery caramels and freshly mown grass.
I never saw any buttercup flowers when I was growing up, except in pictures, so I've never heard of the game Listverse talks about where children try to make temporary red marks on their skin from touching buttercups. Just by handling it, you can get temporary rashes. And eating it is far worse. Grazing animals that eat it experience severe gastrointestinal sickness, and if eaten by a human it can cause death. According to Wikipedia, symptoms include bloody diarrhea, salivation, colic, and blisters basically everywhere the buttercup touched you when you ate it – including the mouth and digestive tract. Basically, you don't want to tangle with buttercups, pretty as they are.
Anyways, I just wanted to give you a taste of this field of thingology. It's a vast and interesting field, so I suggest you further research it. Anyway, have a wonderful day. Thanks for listening, thingologists!
Hi, my name is Alyson. I am a blogger on Fun, Friends, Food and, as you can probably tell, I love food. Some of my favorite foods include pizza, pastries (especially chocolate croissants or just plain butter croissants) and sushi. Since pizza has already pretty much been done to death, I decided to write about a mixture of my other favorite foods. Meet, the California Croissant. The California Croissant can, so far, only be found at Mr. Holmes Bakehouse, a small bakeshop in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, California which serves a variety of croissant-themed items. Some of their products include various flavors of croissants, savory pastries and doughnuts (although a full menu can be found here). I have yet to try it, but when I do, I'll be sure to post about it!
I am a diehard Harry Potter fan, like a lot of other people. What can I say? J.K. Rowling is simply an amazing author. The first few books are cute and nostalgic, the later books are deep and riveting. I have dabbled in fanfiction, lusted over going to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, and hoped that Rowling's new book is secretly another Harry Potter book.
But I'm not cut out for making fanfic, I've never been to Orlando, and her two other books have nothing to do with wizards – though there is another wizarding-world movie coming out next year. Until we can watch that movie, we will have to stick with pretending we aren't Muggles somehow...
And that's where this comes into play.
ThinkGeek is a website designed for geeks. Whatever geeky thing you're obsessed with – Game of Thrones, Sherlock, Marvel, MLP, Portal, Minecraft, Harry Potter and more – they most likely have some sort of swag for it. This isn't officially part of their Harry Potter collection. It's filed under "Camera, Photo and Video" (no Oxford comma?) in Electronics and Gadgets. But it's pretty Harry Potter-y for a... TV remote control.
That's right – it's a stick, it has no buttons, how does it work? Well, you move it around, like the swish and flick Professor Flitwick taught you back in first year charms class. Change the channel with a flick, lower and raise the volume with a twist. It's an almost universal remote, so it doesn't matter what TV device you have for the most part.
There are only two things I am not sure about. First, what batteries does it use? And, they say it "learns from your existing remotes". How. The. Heck.
To be fair, I'm not a tech geek like a lot of people from ThinkGeek are. Still, I just don't have the foggiest as to how, as this picture shows, the remote wand learns from other remote controls.
It costs $79.99, so if you're willing to shell that out, get it here. You can also search for similar, cheaper, and probably less amazing things through Amazon.
Overall, seems confusing, but I guess I'm just not enough of a techie to understand. I guess my father really didn't rub off on me.
Thanks for reading, thingologists, and I'll see you tomorrow!
You may remember the Spen. Much like a spork, it takes cutlery to a whole new level. Well, consider this the Spen: Part II.
See, the Spork is a two-in-one utensil. As the name suggests, it's the hybrid of a spoon and a fork. The Spen, as I covered previously, is a cross between a spoon and a pen (and a fork and pen, knife and pen, whatever).
The Chork is the ruler of all of these two-in-one things. See, the Chork is a three-in-one utensil.
The top is a fork, for eating with a fork. Simple enough, right?
Then, it morphs into chopsticks. Squeeze at the base of the fork, right where it diverges, and the fork will snap apart and you can chopstick.
The third option is using the chopstick without separating the fork. This provides an easy training chopstick, or – as the Chork's website calls it – a cheater's chopstick.
Any way you use it, the Chork is the perfect blend of fork and chopstick and the in-between for the training and the cheating.
You can get it from the website with flat-rate shipping ($3.50) and it's $5.99 for a 12-pack, $7.99 for a 24-pack.
On Amazon, you can get a 6-pack for $6.99. Which makes sense. Half the Chorks you get with a 12-pack, but for a dollar more...
Anyway, reviews on Amazon are mostly praising, but some say the Chorks are less than durable and one reviewer says a couple of the Chorks even arrived broken.
Well, whatever they say, I signed up for the newsletter on their website.
Thanks for reading. Don't forget to buy some Chorks. Praise the almighty gods of P!ATD. Have a good day.
I've been binge-listening (though that isn't a thing... yet) to Panic! At The Disco. And fangirling inside. Welp.
Also, sorry this is technically Tuesday. Procrastination.
But you're not here for that. You're here for BOOK REVIEW #1!!!
Today's thing is The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black.
Fairfold is a small town, nestled right next to deep forests holding... faerie. All kinds of faerie that love to trick and use and kill humans. Every few years, a tourist goes missing and is found, dead, somewhere in a lake or forest or pit, or they are never found.
Why are there tourists in a small town? It's not just because of the Folk. It's because of one Faerie, that lays immobile in a glass case.
He is like a human, wearing an ancient suit, but with horns. He has laid in the casket for hundreds of years. Teenagers have partied, tourists have gawked, strangers have come alone just to talk to him. Plenty of people have tried to break the casket, but nobody has ever succeeded.
Ben and Hazel are a sibling pair, both with a history with the Folk. Ben has an infatuation with a certain one of them, and Hazel has a secret tie with them all that she keeps secret from Ben. And both have a shared history, one of fighting and killing the faeries they came across while marching through the forest. Hazel fell in love with it and can't give it up. Ben's musical curse, put onto him by a faery, worries him too much. But both are tangled much, much deeper in the web of the faerie than either realizes...
Let's get this straight: I don't read fantasy. Not my genre. But I fell in love with this book. Why? Because I feel like I've met every single character in real life, and like I've been to Fairfold and seen dead tourists and faerie. That's the kind of book I love. I really got a feel for everything and everyone in Fairfold. Annnnd I got really involved and fell in love with Ben and Hazel. Yes, the brother/sister relationship was kind of unrealistic (zero sibling rivalry issues, basically, or like half an issue).
It talks about fantasy, reality, love, relationships (homo as well as hetero), family, uniqueness, bloodloss.... basically amazing.
If you're threatened by the blood and murder parts, don't be. A paragraph or two is, well, descriptive, but don't worry. It's more the idea of bloodloss than real bloodloss they talk about.
tl;dr Fantasy for people who don't like fantasy and who love books where you get emotionally involved. 9.5/10.
Thanks for reading, thingologists. Here's to our first book review *holds up glass*
Happy Father's Day! If you are a father, have a great day. If you have a father, wish them that.
Today's weird thing is centered around olives, as I mentioned in the last post. If you were bothered to look around for olive-centric things on the Fred and Friends website, then you probably deduced that today's thing is Oliver.
As you can see, Olivers are not solid like normal elephants. Instead, they have a large crater in their head. This holds things such as olives, cherries, and pistachios. But Olivers are useful for more than just holding those things. Olivers have trunks, made to slip in pistachio shells or olive and cherry pits.
Where do the pits and shells go? Through the trunk, and into a shelter right below the food part. How do you clean out this shelter? I wondered that, too, but apparently there is a little rubber plug on the bottom that opens to let out pits and shells.
Oliver is everything – cute and tasty while functioning and useful. When empty, Oliver weighs one pound (about half a kilogram). Its dimensions are 2.74" x 7" x 4.15". It's made of ceramic and designed by Robin Levein. Fred and Friends sells it for $21 here. As far as I can tell, Amazon doesn't stock this one. Get it and make your new best buddy.
Thanks for reading! See you tomorrow, thingologists!
I'm sure everybody here has heard of the spork. A wonderful thing, isn't it? Well, some people decided to step that up a level. And thus created... this.
As you can see from the picture, that woman (eating salad... is that officially a thing?) is eating with a strange, strange set of utensils. Notice at the bottom that the spoon part of the spoon fell off and OMG IT'S A PEN.
It's available on Amazon for $12.99, and that's for the whole fork, spoon, and knife. But the name isn't clear. Amazon calls it a Fred and Friends (the company's name) DINE INK Pen Utensil Set. The website I found it on calls it a ForkNPen. I call it the Spen. It's up to you what you call them. But that's besides the point.
Reviews on Amazon are mostly good. The only 1-star review is by some person saying it's stupid, and clearly their logic is horribly flawed. I mean, say you were peacefully eating some salad and then you get a brilliant idea. You can write it down with only a flick of your hand to take the utensil cap off. It makes eating while working much easier.
Now, you can't use the Spen for everything. They are made of plastic, and can only do what a plastic utensil set can do (as well as write, of course) so you can't cut hard or thick things with the knife. Overall, though? They are simply a work of genius brought to you by Fred and Friends.
I strongly encourage you to check out the Fred and Friends website. You can get this utensil set for only $9.00 there, compared to $12.99 through Amazon. Plus, they have a whole lot of really cool things there. (In fact, my next weird thing is also a Fred and Friends creation. Think olives. But don't tell anybody else about that.)
Thanks for reading. Now, you can go off and buy your new utensil set.
By the way, if you were wondering where I've been the past week? I was in California's Sierras, away from an internet connection. Sorry I didn't get a chance to say that I'd be gone. But now we should be back to regular posting!
I bring to you today a miracle. And I am not trying to play this invention up. I would love to have this in my kitchen.
I distinctly remember wanting a glass toaster. That way, I could see how my toast is doing. Burnt toast? Never again. Also, hours of entertainment over the years of watching toast, well, toast.
Today, I learned of a miraculous thing. A glass toaster. Meet Noun.
This is the Noun. It toasts well. It is clear. I assume you sometimes need to clean it out a little to have the perfect window to your toast. But guess what? So many things make up for that.
It's not just toast you can have with this toaster. Yes, ladies and gentlemen and everyone else out there, it cooks basically anything. If you can put it inside the toaster, inside a heat-resistant bag, it can cook it.
It was made by Clemente Bugatti and he demonstrated its amazing-ness at the EuroCucina in Milan by cooking shrimp and a steak. It took his company two years to develop the technology for the toaster, technology that nobody had ever used on an appliance such as the toaster before.
And it only costs... $1000? Shoot. Well, everyone can go on home now.
UPDATE: Noun is not the only glass toaster out there, apparently. There is also a Magimix glass toaster, the Magimix Vision Toaster. This one is still pretty expensive, though, at $249.95.
Also, there is a Kalorik glass toaster which you can get on Amazon for $99.99. Much cheaper than the other glass toasters out there, but still expensive for a toaster. There are mixed reviews on Amazon. A lot of people praise this toaster as wonderful, but others say it cooks drastically uneven. These critical reviewers say that the side of the toaster with the window (only one side has glass on this toaster) reaches a good shade of gold-brown, but the other side – the side you cannot see – will be burnt to a crisp.
Ice cream. Most everybody loves it to death. But everything can be improved with a little spinning action, right?
Imagine this predicament:
There you are, licking a cone of ice cream when you realize you are only enjoying one side of the scoop. So what do you do? Twist your hand to reach the other side.
NO LONGER!
Yes, no longer do you have to spin around the cone like a wild animal. This cone does it for you.
Using the power of two AA batteries, the plastic cone will twirl a scoop of ice cream around. Yes, it is compatible with any flavor. Yes, it comes in different colors. Yes, there is a removable disc to put the ice cream in. Yes, it is dishwasher safe. Yes, it provides ice cream fun for all ages because everyone loves ice cream.
Also compatible with sorbet and gelato.
Unnecessary or heavenly? Please tell me with a comment.
Purchase this nifty cone here. Found via ViralNova.
Hi! I'm Lola, a cat, and I welcome you to Thingologies!
The idea of thingologies is simple. It's a blog about, well, things – particularly the weirdest, strangest, maddest things out there. Every post features an oddity I've found, with a source to see more.
I also like to talk about some of the most wonderful and delightful things out there: books. Every once in a while, you can expect a book review.
