You can get your VW Camper Van Tent from firebox.com for £299.99 and comes in Yellow, Red or Blue. Sadly you can’t get it to look like the Mystery Machine.

Now we just need somebody to develop a Back to the Future Delorean tent and we will be all set.

A new study published in the Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology are recommending a new method of treating uncontrollable nosebleeds and it involves packing the nasal cavity with the yummy, cured salted pork.

Here is the description from the report:

"Cured salted pork crafted as a nasal tampon and packed within the nasal vaults successfully stopped nasal hemorrhage promptly, effectively, and without sequelae... To our knowledge, this represents the first description of nasal packing with strips of cured pork for treatment of life-threatening hemorrhage in a patient with Glanzmann thrombasthenia."

Apparently this pork packing technique isn’t new and has been around since before the 1940’s when Washington University School of Medicine, in St Louis regularly used it as described below:

“It has not been uncommon in the St Louis Children's Hospital service to have a child request that salt pork be inserted in his nose with the first sign of a nosebleed ... Wedges of salt pork have saved a great deal of time and energy when used in controlling nasal haemorrhage, as seen in cases of leukemia, haemophilia ... hypertension ... measles or typhoid fever and during the third stage of labour".

Via guardian.co.uk

Flickr Photo Credit: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by Daragh Ward

I just heard the news that Vancouver Island Paddlefest has decided to take a year off from their long running event.

Here is part of the statement from their website:

The Vancouver Island Paddlefest Society will not be hosting a Paddlefest Event in 2012. The Society will use this hiatus to develop a strategic plan to potentially continue with a new mandate.

The Society recognizes the paddlesport industry has evolved greatly over the past 14 years and it is time to look at re-structuring the volunteer/business model to develop a new mandate which will accommodate the needs of the public as well as the contributing partners.

This isn’t the first long running paddling symposiums to shut down on the West Coast over the past couple of years. Back in 2010 the West Coast Sea Kayak Symposium also closed up after 26 years.

Hopefully Paddlefest will return in 2013.

Thanks to @kayakyak for the heads up.

Any inventor with an awesome idea will tell you how difficult it is to take it from prototype to store shelves. In many cases an awesome idea never gets off the ground because they just can’t find the cash.

Finding that cash has always been difficult but getting easier. In the past year or so, Kickstarter has become the largest funding website for creative projects or inventions.

Here is how it works. You are looking for funding for your project, invention, art piece or documentary. On Kickstarter you create a page to sell your idea and people pledge. If the idea meets the fundraising goal then credit cards gets charged and everybody is happy. You get the funding and project backers get a piece of the action depending on their pledge level.

Browsing through the site, here are a couple of cool outdoor related projects currently looking for funding or were recently successful:

Here is a very interesting video demonstrating how massive ocean liners are pulled off the rocks when the flounder in a storm. This one is of the MT Phoenix when it was pulled from a South African beach back in July, 2011.

The success of getting it off the rocks was a combination of very good planning, extremely powerful tug boats and making sure you working with the tides and swells.

Flickr Photo Credit: Wreck at Heron Island / brittgow / CC BY 2.0