Greetings to Remember

Believe it or not, there was a time when you went down to the dime store (yes, there were such things) or drug store and bought greeting cards to send to friends and family for special occasions. You could buy birthday greetings, get well cards, congratulations on your new baby, sympathy cards, and not much else. Now that the internet has made our world into a global marketplace, there are special greetings for occasions you’d have never thought of, in styles that no national distributor would’ve taken a chance on selling just ten years ago. See eight sources of these alternative greeting cards and ecards in this article I wrote for mental_floss.

Links for Fun

The dancing inmates of Cebu prison in the Philippines pay tribute to Michael Jackson. Don't miss the Thriller dance without the Thriller music.

Buzz Aldrin has only two passions: space exploration and hip-hop. He celebrates the 40th anniversary of the moon landing by recording with Snoop Dogg and Talib Kweli. (via Gorilla Mask)

A Chinese version of Popeye makes an appearance in a 1976 martial arts movie. No, he's not a cartoon, he just plays one in the movies.

Awesome remote-control airplane freestyle routine. I didn't know there are airplanes that can move like this, much less people with the skills to make them dance.

A shelter in Australia takes care of the world's cutest baby fruit bats during tick paralysis season.

This optical illusion stumped me until I got to see the closeup. Even clearer is a version with the distracting colors blocked out in the comments of this post.

You think you're a heavy sleeper? What about the guy who has an air compressor to wake him up every morning?

Time-lapse Tattoos. Four videos that don't begin to explain what it's like to get a tattoo, but you'll enjoy watching them anyway.

Recommended Reading

Michael Jackson grabbed headlines one way or another for 40 years. Whatever you think of the weirdness in his later life, you should be aware of why he became famous in the first place.

New Yorkers are mourning the death of Pretty Boy, the Mayor of East Seventh Street. He'll most likely be a hair stylist in his next life.

There is no known footage of the famous ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky dancing, but YouTube has Nijinsky dance videos. Here's how they were created from still photographs. (via Boing Boing)

A collection of photos of one family in eastern Kentucky. And the few that were chosen for a magazine slide show.

7 Man-Made Substances that Laugh in the Face of Physics. We may soon see soldiers wear liquid body armor and drive transparent metal vehicles.

Stereotypes looks at ethnic typography and how we use it. (via Metafilter)

Ground Zero 1945. Atomic bomb survivors illustrate their memories in this gallery of artwork. (via Cynical-C)

Doctors are Baffled and Intrigued by the Girl Who Doesn't Age. At 16, she's the size of a toddler, but no one knows why.

The Drinking Duck

This is just one of Sixty Symbols of physics and astronomy. When completed, all sixty will be connected to a video that explains the concept.

Red Ball

From Sesame Street. (Thanks, Frau!)

Friday Fun Links

Bad Tattoos. 162 of them so far.

Joel Veitch and his wife just wanted to record a simple song with/for their kids. The second half of the video shows how difficult that process is! (via b3ta)

The 15 Funniest Vampire Movies. Look some of these up before the Halloween rush. (via Gorilla Mask)

It's Take Your Goat to Work Day at this office. Watch it and you'll want your own kid pygmy goat.

It may look like a hat, or jewelry, or a hamburger, but it's Jell-O. See photographs from the Jell-O Mold Competition in Brooklyn. (via Buzzfeed)

A Donnie and Marie Star Wars. Complete with dancing Storm Troopers and Jedi Redd Foxx.

This guy knows how to use a water slide with style! Can we make it an Olympic event?

The Terrible Thing of Alpha Nine! Space explorers go to Alpha Nine to check out the monster, which turns out to be what you've secretly thought space aliens were really all about.

R.I.P. Michael Jackson

(via Boing Boing)

8 Mysterious Tales of Traveling Dogs

Dogs disappear, dogs get lost, dogs are taken, and when we’re lucky, dogs go home again. Here are eight stories of “How did that dog get here?” in this article I wrote for mental_floss.

Give it a Digg if you like it!

Good Reads and Information

An interview with Alex Santoso, webmaster at Neatorama.

The latest on Female Ejaculation.

An atomic veteran tells of his experience as a nuclear guinea pig in 1957, and the price he has paid.

Male pond skaters forced to 'sing' for sex.

8 Starship Enterprise Facts Every Trekker Should Know.

Why Men Prefer Direct Pick-Up Lines.

We hear about how the recession has affected rich people and middle-class people, but the poor are affected, too. They are just Too Poor to Make the News.

The 7 Greatest Robots of the Pre-Modern World. (via Gorilla Mask)

Turkish Ice Cream Vendor

You get a free floor show with your cone! (via the Presurfer)

Body Anomaly Tattoos

More people than you realize have some condition that makes their physical bodies different from the majority. Many try to hide those differences out of self-consciousness, even though the anomaly might be something you’d never notice anyway. Then there are some who celebrate their differences with a clever tattoo that provokes smiles and puts people at ease. See a collection of the best in this article I wrote for mental floss.

Fun and Funny Links

Kittens for my Tiger.

The Tattoo Body Map explains what your tat location really means.

Georgio, the Human Carpet.

Star Trek Cakes.

Wonder how Mommy will react to a little "man talk"?

Shut Up, Bands. Bad interviews, bad press releases, bad publicity, bad correspondence, and egos that need to be reined in. (via b3ta)

Excuse Me, Waiter…? There’s a Large Bird of Prey in My Soup. (via Neatorama)

Funny Exam Answers also includes notes on disciplinary action. You may laugh, until you recognize your kid here!

The Good Little Monkeys

(via Everlasting Blort)

The Cat Circus

Fun and Funny Links

The blog My Milk Toof features the pictorial adventures of ickle and Lardee, two baby teeth. The simple stories and photographs are just plain adorable. (via Metafilter)

Which baseball team has the best... dancers?

The Stories Behind 10 TV Theme Songs.

The History Bluff is holding a caption contest with a prize: an Obama Chia head!

Designs shaved into back and chest hair. Men only, thank you. (via Neatorama's Upcoming Queue)

Some Japanese sweet treats come in kits you mix up yourself. Itadakimasu! Kim Laughton tried a few and shares the processes with us. (via b3ta)

Top Ten Psycho Girlfriends.

10 Tips for Turning Your Kids Into Trekkies.

Man of Constant Sorrow

By The Soggy Bottom Boys, from the movie O Brother Where Art Thou?

Toadzilla

One big toad! (via Unique Daily)

Lily Tomlin

From the Tony Awards show in either 1977 or 1979, Lily Tomlin does some material from her one-woman show Appearing Nitely. (via Shakesville)

Informative Links

A time-lapse video of the coral polyp Montipora. File this under art instead of science. (via Dark Roasted Blend)

176 Great Geek Approaches to Design, Art, Technology. Retro art, Lego, steampunk, gadgets, knitting, weapons... it's all right here.

We like tall men, and taller men are perceived as having higher status. But short men will appear taller if there are other cues indicating high status.

A career in teen modeling comes with certain risks that our children should never have to confront. (via Metafilter)

Prehistoric Oddities. Paleontologists keep finding things they can't make heads or tails of.

The Learjet Repo Man. How one man collected a plane guarded by white supremacists in another state during a snowstorm. (via Cynical-C)

The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. A simple timeline for those just beginning to study this period in history.

Human behavior is often not rational, so why not take that into account when shaping social and economic policy?

Toonces Without a Cause

Vintage Saturday Night Live. (via Dark Roasted Blend)

Fun and Funny Links

The Leap Frog test. It took me quite a while, but I finally beat it!

Four naked guys dancing on TV.

If the Beatles Rock Band game is anywhere near as good as the animated trailer, I want to play! Oh yeah, the music is pretty good, too.

Repost: Animal Crossing Tragedy. Get your hankies ready. Then call your mother.

Adoption Rap. From a friend of mine who has both been there and done that.

Ten Failed McDonald's Products.

Star Wars Costumes Don’t Get Worse Than This.

5 Diabolical Animals That Out-Witted Humans. (via Gorilla Mask)

80s Hits Ragtime Style

By Scott Bradlee.

Good Reads

Life magazine has discovered photographs of Marilyn Monroe that have never been published. They're published online now. (via Metafilter)

Explosions heard ’round the world. Mother Nature can really throw a tantrum when she's in the mood.

Atlas Obscura is a “A Compendium of the This Age’s Wonders, Curiosities and Esoterica.” Users are invited to suggest odd places and add to information about existing entries.

15 Essential Moments To (Re)Visit if You Had a Time Machine. Just be sure you are ready to escape when things get hot.

A genuine "oops" moment: U.S. Releases Secret List of Nuclear Sites Accidentally. “These screw-ups happen,” says former CIA director.

Flint resident Michael Moore has a few suggestions for how to handle General Motors, now that the bankrupt company is in federal hands. (via Boing Boing)

"It’s one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we’re alive when we’re reminded we’re going to die". A cartoonist who was stabbed in the throat talks about the euphoria of survival. (via Metafilter)

Researchers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum decided to create an encyclopedia of concentration camps. They found 20,000, four times more than anyone had estimated.

Linit

One of The Muppets early advertising jobs, from 1966. (via Unique Daily)

The Big Doghouse

An excerpt from The Big Doghouse, a Dogville Comedy short, from about 1930. (via J-Walk Blog)

100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers

Movie quotes that count themselves down! Alonzo Mosley of the La-La Land Library took on quite a challenge for his first video project, a parody of “top 100 movie countdowns.” This is a treat for both movie buffs and number geeks.

Mocha and his First Broccoli

The little hamster that took the internet by storm. He was only three days old when this was recorded.

Friday Fun Links

Tetris turns 25 Saturday. In celebration, here's a Tetris Orgy.

Improv Everywhere threw a surprise wedding reception for a random couple getting married at City Hall. Frank and Raff felt like they won the lottery!

Ashes to Ashes is Batman done the French way: terrifying, kinky, and disturbing. (via Gorilla Mask)

Like a scene from a familiar Hitchcock movie, dozens of bald eagles take over a family's back yard. Luckily for the children, they are only there for the salmon.

How 15 of Your Favorite Bands Got Their Names. I'll admit I have wondered about Blue Öyster Cult.

The Top Ten Top Ten Food Lists. From the ten most disgusting candies to ten food sex scenes in movies, there's something here you'll want to read.

Mom’s the word: When sitcom stars start expecting. TV shows through the years have handled this delicate situation in strange and creative ways.

Next week I'm taking a little time off because I'm getting married this weekend. Posting will be light, but will return to normal by mid-June.

8 Bookstore Cats

In a sequel to the earlier post 8 Library Cats, I looked up their private industry counterparts, cats who live in bookstores. Here are the stories of eight kitties who greet customers at bookstores around the country in an article I wrote for mental_floss.

Good Reads

The 7 Most Bizarrely Unlucky People Who Ever Lived. With six billion people on the planet, a few have to have this kind of luck, but aren't you glad it isn't you?

Ten Vehicles That Bankrupted GM. In my opinion, these are only the most recent of a long line of cars that were doomed to failure.

Blind since birth, Daniel Kish uses echolocation to navigate his environment. Not only that, but he can teach the technique to other blind people.

The earliest known sound recording dates back to 1857, three years earlier than previously thought. Hear the historical recordings in this audio interview from NPR. (via Metafilter)

The Bay Area R2 Builders make real working R2D2 units, which cost a ton of money and take years to make, but they get a lot of satisfaction from them.

Never show disrespect to a player you don't know in World of Warcraft. You could be playing with a legendary game designer and never know it.

Breathing Xenon

It acts like both Sulphur Hexafluoride to make your voice deep, and like Nitrous Oxide to get you high, but costs a lot more. Therefore, you probably won't get the chance to try this. Which is good, because it's not quite safe.

Little Wolf

1992 animation by An Vrombaut. (via Everlasting Blort)

8 Library Cats

Libraries are wonderful places for people who love books, and wonderful places for cats to meet book lovers. There are an estimated 808 documented library cats, including 301 cats who currently reside in libraries around the world. Here are the stories of a few of those cats in an article I wrote for mental_floss.

Fun Links

In case you hadn't heard about it somewhere else, I am getting married this weekend. Here's the story of how I fell in love at age 50.

How well do you know your internet sensations? Here's a series of backgrounds with the subjects Photoshopped out. Can you identify what happened there? There are 23 in all; I knew 22 right off, and the other is fairly recent.

The 13 Best Obama Cameos in Comics. What other president could slip into the role of superhero as easily? Only Washington and Teddy Roosevelt come close. (via the Presurfer)

The ducks in the bathroom are not mine. They're small ducks, anyway, and will probably fly south for the winter.

Snack time turns into a sound board in this stop motion video. It's catchy, and might make you hungry as well.

Cool guys don't look at explosions, they just walk away. It happens a lot more than you thought -in movies. (via Gorilla Mask)

The Bay Area R2 Buliders make real working R2D2 units, which cost a ton of money and take years to make, but they get a lot of satisfaction from them.

Dueling Banjos

Steve Martin and The Muppets, from 1977. (via Boing Boing)

Informative Links

Does faking amnesia permanently distort your memory? Or could it be a case of too many lies to keep track of?

The 9 Most Outrageous Outlaw Heroes. I love these types of stories that would've made history classes so much more interesting IF they had been included. (via Gorilla Mask)

The 10 Most Powerful Political Daughters. That's five who have already made a mark and five who have the potential to do so.

McAllen, Texas has the lowest average household income in the nation, but the second-highest health care costs per person. The New Yorker takes a look at why costs are so high and why the residents aren't any healthier than in other towns.

On the Street and On Facebook: The Homeless Stay Wired. There are always places to go on the internet, even when there's no place to go in real life.

Escape from North Korea. National Geographic follows some who did just that.

Fifty Years of Space Monkeys. The first primates to survive space travel launched in 1959, followed by chimpanzees and finally astronauts.

Pygmy Jerboa

This little guy looks like a cartoon character! He's a pygmy jerboa, of which there are several species native to Asia. (via Arbroath)