Plus: NASA Movie Posters, a Flying Hovercraft and MORE.

Another Pointless Contraption
Following feedback on last week’s Rube Goldberg contraption, below is another Rube Goldberg machine.

Not quite as complex as the one featured in OK Go’s music video, this creative contraption, from the Discovery Channel’s MythBusters, is nonetheless fun (and pointless):

Odd Excuses for Tardiness
With more employees fearing for their jobs and subsequently watching their performance — including punctuality — you might think the pool of bizarre excuses for being late was drying up as well.

You’d be wrong.

A new CareerBuilder survey reveals the most outrageous excuses employees offered for arriving late to work:

• My deodorant was frozen to the window sill.
• My car door fell off.
• It was too windy.
• I dreamt I was already at work.
• I had an early morning gig as a clown.

As in years past, animals and insects do not escape blame for workers showing up to work late. Included among this year’s responses: “My dog swallowed my cell phone” and “A roach crawled in my ear.”

Homemade Flying Hovercraft
Rudy Heeman, an inventor in New Zealand, has created a flying hovercraft.

“The hovercraft functions as a stand-alone vehicle, but with the detachable wings in place it becomes a small aircraft capable of a top cruising speed of about 60 miles per hour,” according to Popular Science. “While it doesn’t fly very high, the 1.8-liter engine pushes the craft to a ceiling between around 10 feet [...] and has a range of 140 miles.”

“Heeman, who has been building hovercrafts as a hobby in his backyard for more than 13 years, said this is his first flying model,” the (U.K.) Telegraph says. “It has taken Mr. Heeman, a mechanic, 800 hours to build his invention and he has clocked up more than 75 hours’ flying time in it.”

According to Autoblog, Heeman wants to make and sell his hovercrafts for only $13,000.

NASA: The Movie (Posters)
NASA has produced Space Shuttle mission posters made to look like popular movie posters. Gizmodo describes them as “pure gold.”

IMT agrees. Here are a few of them:

NASA Scientists Plan to Approach Girl by 2018
The Onion fosters the stereotype that scientists are awkward, nerdy men — albeit humorously:

Cheers.