This Halloween in Dance

You know what horror films are lacking in? Dancing! A nice dance number always makes a movie more memorable. Ellen Degeneres rectified that grievous omission for quite a few classic horror movies. because you can use a few goofy laughs after dealing with hordes of trick-or-treaters. (via Tastefully Offensive)

Big Cat Rescue Halloween

The lions, tigers, and panthers of Big Cat Rescue always get pumpkins to play with for Halloween, but this year, they also get their own haunted houses! To the cats, they are just balls and boxes, which is just what a cat wants to play with! (via Tastefully Offensive)

School Segregation

This is not a historical retrospective. Schools are very much segregated in 2016. A lot of that has to do with local funding, usually with property tax, which not only segregates districts, but also causes one school to have many times the funding of the next school. John Oliver addresses the subject on his HBO show Last Week Tonight.

Naked Goblin

(via I-mockery)

Cat and Cat Costume

The cat is either terrified or just baffled. (via reddit)

The Haunted Hospital

Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky  is supposedly one of the most haunted places in the world. Why? It's because of the hospital's history, as so many people suffered and died there for different reasons. It has been a TB hospital, a nursing home, a failed religious monument, and now a paranormal investigation site. Read the sad history of The Haunted Hospital in a classic mental floss article I wrote in 2007.

Miss Cellania's Links

What Do Zombies Really Eat?

For Halloween every year, Mark Williams and Heidi Loutzenhiser of Portland, Oregon, turn their home into an attraction called The Doll Asylum. See some rather gruesome images of the Doll Asylum here.

The Pseudoscientific History of Ghost Hunting Gadgets. (via Digg)

About Those Witches and Their Broomsticks…

35 Awesome Homemade Matching Pet and Owner Couples Costumes. 

A Definitive Ranking Of The Walking Dead Villains.

 It's Alive! 13 Forgotten Frankenstein Movies. There are plenty to watch besides the classics.

Beyond Halloween: 8 Holidays Spirits Love. Most are for remembering the departed, but some are for fun. 

Where to Stream the Best Horror Movies This Halloween. Because the night is long after trick-or-treat is over.

The Spellbinding Stories of 6 Historic Witches. Back when being odd could get you burned at the stake.

The Return of Dracula

This 1958 movie has been titled The Curse of Dracula and The Fantastic Disappearing Man. From Wikipedia:

It is set in a small town in California in the 1950s, where Count Dracula arrives in the form of an artist named Belak Gordal (Lederer) who has traveled from Europe to visit his cousin, Cora Mayberry (played by Greta Granstedt). The story revolves around his interaction with Cora's daughter, Rachel (Eberhardt).^[2]

The Return of Dracula was overshadowed by The Horror of Dracula, which came out about the same time and starred Christopher Lee.

Halloween Greetings

(via I-mockery)

Halloween Decorations

(via Fark)

Waiting

(via Eddie Deezen)

11 Recipes For Creatively Creepy Halloween Cocktails

A Halloween party for adults needs special drinks to highlight the occasion. Try some of these cocktails in a list I compiled for mental_floss to really impress your guests. Or maybe just frighten them! 

Vampire Kermit

(via Fark)

Who Was Dr. Frankenstein?

Was there a real Dr. Frankenstein? Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus is considered by many to be the first science fiction novel. It was written in 1816-1817, during a time when bringing the dead back to life was a serious endeavor in scientific circles. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley) wrote the book as an exploration of the ethics of such experimentation and brought the question to a wider audience. The model for the character of Dr. Frankenstein could have been any, or several, of a number of actual people. Meet some of those people in a classic mental_floss article I wrote in 2008.

A Stranger Things Christmas

Yes, I am well aware that it isn't even Halloween yet. I saw the first Christmas ad on TV ten days ago. But you wouldn't want to miss out on seeing this mashup of Stranger Things and A Charlie Brown Christmas. Will Byers takes the place of Charlie Brown and his angst as he tries to return to the real world. Eleven is now Lucy van Pelt, and Dustin is Linus. Wait until you see who takes Snoopy's place. You can thank Leigh Lahav for this spot-on parody. (via Uproxx)

Specialized Election Map

(Thanks, Margaret!)

Masks and Faces

(via Mostly Forbidden Zone)

Cleaning the Empty Nest

When I was a kid, I was impressed by how clean Grandma's house was. Our house was always a mess. You probably had the same experience. When I grew up and got kids, it became clear that my house was going to be a mess for some time. Not only do kids constantly make a mess, they take up the time you might have spent cleaning house (even though it feels like you're always cleaning). By the time you attend to emergency spills and pick up general clutter, you are too exhausted to mop. Besides, someone needs a band-aid or help with their homework. I made sure to apologize to my mother (whose house is now spotless).

Then the kids grew up and went to college. I knew I would miss them, but looking at the bright side, I could now have a clean house like Grandma! There's only one snag in that plan. I have to clean it up.

You might recall that we put an apartment in our attic a few years ago to house the preteen daughters. The older I get, the less likely I am to go upstairs, and it's been quite some time since I really inspected up there. It was shocking. I asked Princess when was the last time they mopped the bathroom floor. She just looked at me funny over FaceTime, because apparently they had never mopped the bathroom. That's been seven years. It's taken me a month to sort and classify the mess of things she left on her bedroom floor when moving out. The bright side is that she moved to an apartment, so half the furniture is gone. Gothgrrl is a professional health care worker, but somehow never noticed how much toothpaste she slung around. How does one get toothpaste stuck in the baseboards? 

My plan was to do something every day, even if it's just a partial project, instead of tackling it all at once. It took over a month before I felt I was making any progress at all, but after two months, I can see a real difference. The upstairs won't be ready for human occupation for another couple of weeks at least (I am also working on the downstairs), but should be really nice by the time they come home for Christmas. And then it will start all over again.  

Waste Your Life

From Married to the Sea.

Miss Cellania's Links

"The Monster Mash": The Most Popular Holiday Novelty Song. Eddie Deezen has the story.

31 Horror Days in animated gifs.

The gig economy has grown big, fast -and that’s a problem for workers.

A Eulogy for the Pavilion, the Worst Movie Theater Ever.

Female Doctors Speak Out About Racism and Sexism During Airplane Emergencies. More here. (via Metafilter)

13 Episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 to Watch on Halloween. Since you need some laughs to go with your thrills.

The Psychology of Scary Movies. Knowing why we get a kick out of them won't stop you from getting a kick out of them.

Realistic Disney Villains. Finnish artist Jirka Väätäinen puts the bad guys in the flesh.

There Are 5 Types of Haunted House Visitors. Which One Are You?

The Mystery Behind the Missing Corpse of One of the Richest Men Ever. His  body was never recovered -or was it?

Sheets

(via Pleated-Jeans)

Miss Cellania's Links

Anatomy Research Review. Research on bedbugs, nipples, rodents, and bra sizes.

When comic book superheroes confront real-world stuff, it can get pretty weird. (via reddit)

Vintage Halloween pictures.

Science confirms rich people don’t really notice you—or your problems.

How to Read The Secret Language of Starfleet Uniforms. 

What it’s really like to scare people to death for a living. HAuNTcon brings professional haunters together for a one-of-a-kind trade show.

How do pumpkins grow? Visit a farm that grows both the kind we carve and the kind we make into pies.

Willow the Squishy Cat has more Halloween spirit than you. She even has an "avacato" costume.

What’s A Woggin? A Bird, a Word, and a Linguistic Mystery.

Historic Vampires. Real monsters from history who contributed to the legends.

Give the Devil Your Head

(via Mostly Forbidden Zone)

Tweet of the Day

So my 15 year old dog passed away two days ago.. My mom found his bowl like this tonight. Doggie heaven does exist. Love you Bandit pic.twitter.com/1Py92pXYwu

— Catie Callaghan (@_c80_) October 21, 2016

I believe someone is cutting onions in the next room. (via Buzzfeed)

Miss Cellania's Links

The Spirits of Lily Dale. The town where Spiritualism survives.

22 Food Jokes That Are Just As Funny As They Are Ridiculous. Bone app the teeth!

How do two different movies about a fairly obscure news story from 1974 end up being made at the same time? The Writers of Christine and Kate Plays Christine on One of the Strangest Cinematic Coincidences in Recent Memory.

Snow Leopards and Humans Are Competing For Food, With Tragic Results. There may be as few as 4,000 left in the wild.

Singular or plural? It's complicated. “Quantifiers” are not adjectives and are only sometimes numbers.

The Police Killings No One Is Talking About. Native Americans are being killed by police at a higher rate than any other group in the country. (via Metafilter)

Where Rococo Meets Space Age: Treasure Hunting at Italy's Premier Antiques Fair.

The First Known Depiction of a Witch on a Broomstick. Link contains some art nudity.

The Strange Tale of an X-Rated Haunting. Cambridge-based parapsychologist AD Cornell conducted a set of experiments designed to study how seeing a ghost affects people, by dressing as a ghost with a sheet pulled over his head.

How Donald Trump spectacularly failed his supporters.

9 Spooky Halloween Events Worth Traveling For

Halloween is becoming a bigger holiday every year—Americans are expected to spend $8.4 billion on spooky loot this year alone. And though you’ll find haunted houses, parties, parades, and costume contests almost everywhere, some places go the extra mile to celebrate Halloween in extraordinary fashion. These huge celebrations are a great excuse for an autumn road trip or vacation. Read about some of those are are still to come in a list I posted at mental_floss. 

Please Re-Elect Gerald

This is what a political ad should be. Gerald Daugherty is a county commissioner in Travis County, Texas. He’s either a pretty good actor, or else this is exactly how he is in real life. And his wife Charlyn is an excellent actor. This ad is for his re-election campaign this year. What you want in a local office like this is someone who cares about the job and is willing to do the work. It helps if he (or she) knows what they are doing. This ad conveys all that in a 60-second drama that will also make you laugh. (via Digg)

Obama Reads Mean Tweets

President Obama was on Jimmy Kimmel Live! last night, reading mean Tweets about himself. HuffPo described the recurring bit as people reading “some of the nastiest things said about them on Twitter.” I guarantee that no network TV show would air the “nastiest” things said about Obama on Twitter, but these were funny. The prez had a couple of good burns for them.

Miss Cellania's Links

11 Spooky and Totally Tasty Halloween cocktails. Bottoms up!

The Strange Secret Behind the Tragic Deaths of Oscar Wilde's Half-Sisters.

The Oldest House for Sale in the U.S.

The 30 Weirdest Horror Movies of the 1970s. (via Metafilter)

America's First Woman Police Officer. Marie Connolly Owens was an officer in the Chicago Police Department for 32 years beginning in 1891, but her employment wasn’t seen as a breakthrough for the history books, and was forgotten for decades.

The Secret Behind Italy’s Rarest Pasta. (via the Presurfer)

The Greatest Teen Job in the World Might Be Reopening Italian Catacombs. They are also revitalizing Rione Sanità by welcoming tourists.

Scientists See Signs of Learning in a Ball of Dough. This is not an expose of earlier faulty experiments, but shows how training can change an inanimate object.

The kids were reading Fahrenheit 451 for Banned Books Week, but first they needed a permission slip from their parents. Father and Daily Show writer Daniel Radosh reveled in the irony. 

8 of the Undead from Around the World. And here are 9 more of them.

Knight Rider 2016

The TV show Knight Rider aired from 1982 to ’86, and was a product of its time. Michael Knight was a cool cop with an even cooler car, chasing the bad guys like a real hero. But that was thirty years ago. Kitt, the amazing car, has updated to a Lamborghini. Kitt would like Michael to update his looks a bit, too. Troy Duffy and Sean Patrick Flanery appear in this updated version by Sam Macaroni. Duffy also co-wrote it. (via Geeks Are Sexy)

16 Adorable Halloween Costumes for Non-Traditional Pets

We’ve seen plenty of dogs and cats dressed up for Halloween, but they aren’t the only animals getting into the holiday spirit. Check out some other critters who have dressed up for the occasion, even if they don’t go door-to-door begging for candy. There are hedgehogs, guinea pigs, turtles, horses, snakes, and even a spider in this list I posted at mental_floss.

11 Fun Halloween Projects You Can Do With Your Kids

Halloween is lots of fun for kids, from decorating a pumpkin to trick-or-treating. But there are plenty of other Halloween projects you can do in between. Here are some fun family activities for children of all ages, in a list I posted at mental_floss.

Spirit of Halloween

(via Mostly Forbidden Zone)

The Morning After

Oh well, they faked us out again. As you can see from the picture, none of the folks we cared about died, and The Walking Dead wound up with a happy ending. Even though the table is laden with salad, antipasto, and spaghetti, it must be a Thanksgiving meal. Or spaghetti Tuesday served on a Wednesday, in honor of Herschel. 

If you want to know what really happened on last night’s episode of The Walking Dead, or you saw it and need to discuss, you can get a rundown of what happened at Mashable, the A.V. Club, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone.

On Opoids

America has a problem with opiods. They are probably the best thing nature ever gave us to kill pain, but they are also addictive. Where do you draw the line? John Oliver tells us about where we are, and how we got there.

(I got spoofed by a unofficial channel earlier today and posted a year-old video from Last Week Tonight. This is from last night's episode.)

Our Favorite Vampires

This classic mental_floss list went up for Halloween in 2007. I made a list of famous vampires from pop culture, totally unaware of the three Twilight books that were starting to take over the bestseller lists. It was another year before the first movie came out. Still, in its initial posting, commenters raked me over the coals for not including the Twilight vampires. I don't know why I didn't include the vampires from The Lost Boys; it may have been that the list was supposed to have ten entries. That was a long time ago. But these vampires have stood the test of time, so enjoy a look at Our Favorite Vampires.

Miss Cellania's Links

A Formal Undertaking: The Mortician’s Job Title. 

She Never Spoke of It to Her Husband. Then She Heard the Trump Tape.  The best thing Trump has done was to bring subject of sexual assault out in the open.

How Girl Stunt Reporters Changed Journalism.   

How The Truth Set Snopes Free. A little background on the fact-checking site.

George Washington’s Halloween. And part two.

Meeting Donald Trump. Sir Richard Branson weighs in on the US election. (via Uproxx)

The Bleeding Heart of Dracula. How the Count went from a horrifying monster to a sexy beast.

How Frankenstein's Monster Works. A look at the ideas behind Mary Shelley’s unnerving creation.

The Ballet Girls Who Burned to Death. Tutus and gas stage lamps were a deadly combination.

Six Seriously Spooky Cemetery Stories. You decide how much is true.

Camping

(via Bad Newspaper)

Tweet of the Day

108 years later, Chicago holds its breath. pic.twitter.com/jnH02i34OV

— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) October 23, 2016

The Chicago Cubs beat the Dodgers last night 5-0, which means they are going to the World Series. That hasn’t happened since 1945. They haven’t won a World Series since 1908, so I am assuming that’s the 1908 team who showed up as ghosts for yesterday’s league championship game. The Cubs will be playing the Cleveland Indians, who last won the World Series in 1948. The 2016 World Series begins Tuesday.

(via reddit)

SNL Does the Third Presidential Debate

Tom Hanks moderates Alex Baldwin and Kate McKinnon as they recreate the final presidential debate of the 2016 campaign on last night’s Saturday Night Live. Once again, they wrote jokes for Clinton, but just let Trump do what he did, and both got laughs.

I Got You Bae

Cher, who is 70 but looks perfectly preserved, appeared on The Late Late Show with James Cordon and sang the classic Sonny & Cher ballad “I Got You Babe,” with updated lyrics for the internet generation. Cordon joined her for the duet. He sings pretty well for a talk show host! (via Tastefully Offensive)

Relax

(via Mostly Forbidden Zone)

Gruesome Halloween Party Food

Are you thinking of throwing a Halloween party? Maybe you can gross out your guests with some tasty treats, like the Bleeding Human Heart shown here. Gruesome Halloween Party Food is a mental_floss post I put together in 2007.

Presidential Poetry Slam

The final presidential debate gets the Bad Lip Reading treatment, and this time the event is reshaped into a poetry slam. The lips are dead on, but nothing else makes sense. Cricket meat in the gravy, indeed!

John Cleese Recaps The Walking Dead

John Cleese is apparently a big fan of The Walking Dead. He told Newsweek:

“I can’t get enough of The Walking Dead. The beautiful scenery, the emotional depths of the characters and, most of all, the gentle sprinkling of horrific barbarism,” the Fawlty Towers star deadpanned. “Hopefully fans will think the video is dead funny, and if not, I might just have to introduce them to Lucille personally.”

So who better to give us a quick rundown on the first six seasons? Warning: he says the season premiere will be on October 24th. That’s in Britain. It’s the 23rd here in the States. (via mental_floss)

Play-writing Fever

(via Mostly Forbidden Zone)

Tweet of the Day

"and then he said, 'no one has more respect for women than I do'" pic.twitter.com/Q5QtJ95S7j

— blake laliberte (@blakelaliberte) October 20, 2016

This one got 181K hearts. Wonder how many of those Twitter users are registered to vote in the U.S.

Tiny House

From Married to the Sea.

Bad Hombres, Nasty Women

You already know what was said in the third presidential debate, if you care at all. Still, it’s worth a revisit when the Gregory Brothers auto-tune the rhetoric, and Weird Al Yankovic comes into moderate! Also, they did a top-notch job getting those sound bites to rhyme adequately for a song. (via Tastefully Offensive)

Miss Cellania's Links

The Tombstones of 25 Famous People.

8 Haunted Houses You Can Buy Right Now.

Nobody on Yahoo Answers can spell pregnant. https://youtu.be/EShUeudtaFg

72 Cute Animals in Tiny Sweaters.

The Fashion Institute of Technology is cleaning out its closet and trimming its collection 50,000 pieces of clothing and accessories with an auction. (via Nag on the Lake)

8 Essential Gothic Horror Movies. If you haven’t seen them all, this weekend would be a good time to catch up.

The Flavorwire Guide to Pop Cultural Costumes for Halloween 2016. You might have to explain yourself to everyone who sees you.

Placebos Reduce Pain Even When Patients Know They're Taking Them. Or maybe we just feel better about how little they cost.

Devon made a silicone mask for her boyfriend Peter as part of a sculpting class at Make Up Designory NYC. The finished product is jaw-dropping!

The Haunted Prison. The specters of misery and death still cling to the buildings.

Next Generation Pokemon

(via reddit)

Old Salts

(via Mostly Forbidden Zone)

A Truly Amazing Teacher

This video about Jeffrey Wright of Louisville Male High is a few years old, but it made my tear up. I was so impressed with this video that I linked the accompanying New York Times article for you. This was my ninth out of ten free articles this month, and with an election looming, that was a big sacrifice for me. (via Metafilter)

Miss Cellania's Links

The Nikon Small World Photography Winners 2016. Celebrating the best in microphotography.


Chartered Waters: Music Chart Stories.

Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu created a data visualization of ten royal families of Europe called Royal Constellations. You can manipulate it to show how the royal families are related to each other.

Life in the Victorian Workhouse.


John Tesar Eats the Most Absurd Fried Foods in Texas.


Who Will Die in The Walking Dead Season Seven Opener?

How the World’s Biggest Costume Maker Cracked Halloween. (via Digg)

A new study shows that Millennials are not lazy. Their overall work ethic is almost identical to Generation X and Baby Boomers.

What causes cavities? And better yet, what can we do about them?

9 Spooky Halloween Party Treats. If that’s not enough, here’s Ten Terrific or Terrifying Treats for Halloween.

Halloween at Instructables

Once again, it's a classic mental_floss link for Halloween. This one was up for Halloween of 2008, but the projects linked are still available with all the instruction. Instructables is a great place for DIY projects, with instructions from proud builders who don't mind helping you out with your projects. Enjoy Halloween at Instructables.

Listen

(via Mostly Forbidden Zone)

Tweet of the Day

"Do I have anything in my teeth?"
"No one is looking at you Barack." pic.twitter.com/AjI2OchgzK

— Myles Brown (@mdotbrown) October 18, 2016

The Obamas held their final state dinner last night, hosting Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and his wife. Michelle Obama wore a sparkly Versace gown that is all over Twitter now. This picture had the best caption I could find. 

Election 2016: A Rap Recap

This is a clever recap of the 2016 presidential election so far, by Ryan Tellez and TJ Smith. (via Laughing Squid)

10 Amazingly Intricate Jack O’Lanterns

Most of us will carve a few angled shapes into a pumpkin and call it good. At least it shows the trick-or-treaters where they can find candy. Then there are artists who do amazing things with pumpkins, carving clever, detailed, and beautiful faces and scenes into pumpkins to makes them one-of-a-kind sculptures. Check out the works of a few of these master pumpkin sculptors in a list I posted at mental_floss. 

Miss Cellania's Links

The Smells of Politics, Danger, and Food.

The Toilet Duty Dukes and Duchesses of England. 

It’s Sweater Weather! Check out some of the horrors you can buy. (via Nag on the Lake)

The Rise and Fall of the Army Surplus Store. (Thanks, John Farrier!)

How 10 Iconic Movie Monsters Were Created. 

An interview with Melissa McBride of The Walking Dead. She talks about Carol and what’s to come in season seven

The Best and Worst Films of the 2016 New York Film Festival. Jot down what looks interesting, so you can find them at a theater near you. 

This Gorgeous Fan Video Puts Studio Ghibli Icons In The Real World. The fan mashup includes characters from My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Porco Rosso, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Kiki’s Delivery Service.

Mountaintop Removal Never Ended: Coal River Mountaineers Fight On. Coal companies are still ruining the environment without hiring miners.

Why you should think twice before using a debit card. A credit card is usually a better option.

An Honest Trailers for Ghostbusters (2016)

It’s rare that Screen Junkies puts out an Honest Trailer for a movie that’s this recent, but their fans really bugged them about it. The movie is not yet available on home video, so if you plan to watch it, you’ll want to skip this for possible spoilers. What am I talking about? It’s Ghostbusters. You already know the story. Ghostbusters seemed to be set up for failure, since the 1984 movie was a masterpiece and still doesn’t feel outdated. It sold a lot of tickets this summer, but didn’t make a profit since it was expensive to make. The reviews were okay. The planned sequels probably won’t materialize anytime soon. (Thanks, Andrew Valdes!)

Impulse

(via Mostly Forbidden Zone)

Math Teacher

(This post originally appeared in May 23, 2006*)
 

In high school, I was assigned to a new math teacher named Joe. I knew Joe already, we were friends and neighbors, but I didn’t realize he was old enough to be a teacher! He dragged me through several classes, including one he just made up for me because I needed more math, but was not eligible to take trig my senior year. I asked how he was going to grade me. He said if I won the math competition at the science fair that year, he’d give me an A. I could see then that my grade point average was in danger. So I spent the year attending a consumer math class, while flipping coins to prove statistical theory (I also did my share of donut runs). I won the competition, and received my A! Joe had more confidence in me than I had in myself.

Joe has always been a great teacher and a great friend. But he’s also a musician, a comedian, a fishing nut, an ecologist, a newspaper columnist, and an all-around likeable guy. He recently won League of Kentucky Sportsmen's award for Conservation Educator of the Year 2006! Now I hear he has retired! HOW can a teacher who started out when I was in school be retired already?!? Oh yeah, I’m old, that's how. So I guess Joe is going to be spending more time in the mountains, fishing, picking, traveling, and making people laugh as always. Thanks for a great run at making educated people out of so many clueless kids.

HISTORICAL MATH

There were three medieval kingdoms on the shores of a lake. There was an island in the middle of the lake, over which the kingdoms had been fighting for years. Finally, the three kings decided that they would send their knights out to do battle, and the winner would take the island.

The night before the battle, the knights and their squires pitched camp and readied themselves for the fight. The first kingdom had 12 knights, and each knight had five squires, all of whom were busily polishing armor, brushing horses, and cooking food. The second kingdom had twenty knights, and each knight had 10 squires. Everyone at that camp was also busy preparing for battle.

At the camp of the third kingdom, there was only one knight, with his squire. This squire took a large pot and hung it from a looped rope in a tall tree. He busied himself preparing the meal, while the knight polished his own armor.
When the hour of the battle came, the three kingdoms sent their squires out to fight (this was too trivial a matter for the knights to join in).

The battle raged, and when the dust had cleared, the only person left was the lone squire from the third kingdom, having defeated the squires from the other two kingdoms, thus proving that the squire of the high pot and noose is equal to the sum of the squires of the other two sides.

MATH IN THE NEWS

AP NEWS — At New York’s Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher, was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a slide rule, and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement. The FBI is charging him with carrying weapons of math instruction.

Al-gebra is a fearsome cult,” Gonzalez said. “They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in a search of absolute value. They use secret code names like ‘x’ and ‘y’ and refer to themselves as ‘unknowns’, but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, ‘there are 3 sides to every triangle’.”

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, “If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, he would have given us more fingers and toes."

More math jokes can be found here and here. 

Thought for today:

100 YEARS FROM NOW...

A hundred years from now,
it will not matter
what sort of house I lived in,
what my bank account was
or what kind of car I drove,
but the world may be different
because I was important
in the life of a child.

* This is a repost from May 23, 2006. I am sad to tell you that Joe passed away Sunday. He touched a lot of lives in many different ways, and the tributes are rolling in at Facebook. More about him here.

Honk

(via Pleated-Jeans)

Miss Cellania's Links

An Unfamiliar Face. Face blindness can be a real pain to sufferers.


How a white supremacist changed his stripes.

Husband Makes Wife Harry Potter-Inspired Pensieve Full Of Happy Memories.

The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards recognizes wildlife photography that, while displaying excellent camera skills, gives us a dose of derp and LOL. The 2016 finalists have been announced.

Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his crew are buried in the Ross Ice Shelf, which is moving. Here’s what will happen to their bodies in the next few hundred years.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to work in a fire observation tower? (via Metafilter)

Digging Through the Archives of Scarfolk, the Internet's Creepiest Fake Town. Where community spirit, surveillance, and propaganda rule.

Star Wars’ first teaser proves the studio had no idea what the movie was about. The film wasn’t even finished yet.

Little-Known October Surprises. The presidential campaign “gotcha” scandal has a long history.

38 Facts on Frankenstein (Including the Aerosmith song it inspired and the reason the Munsters never got sued).

Stay With The Group

(via Mostly Forbidden Zone)

The Art of the Jack O'Lantern

In the continuing series of "classic mental_floss articles," meaning old ones I wrote years ago, check out The Art of the Jack-O-Lantern: More than just a pretty face! I'll have another one along the same lines later this month, but this one was first.

That Time of Year

(via Someecards)

Third Parties

So many people do not like the major party candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. So who do you vote for? There are alternatives. In fact, we have lots and lots of “third” parties. Many of them can’t get on the ballot in very many states, but you can write one in. John Oliver tells us about some of them on the HBO show Last Week Tonight.

Oh yeah, here’s Joe Exotic’s website. 

Miss Cellania's Links

It’s Taking Over My Brain! A short course on Toxoplasmosis. 

What School Lunch Looked Like Each Decade for the Past Century. 

28 Headstones That Defied Expectations.

The Surprising Genius Of The "I Voted" Sticker. (via Digg)

22 Pictures That Prove Clowns Have Always Been Scary. Adults used to find great pleasure in traumatizing children.

The 10 Greatest Supernatural Stephen King Villains. Relive the terror all over again.

The Civil War's Worst Cup of Coffee. The Essence of Coffee was a bright idea that turned out awful.

Extremely Weird and Confusing Illustrations from a 1994 Scientology Handbook. See if you can make any sense out of them. 

Great Barrier Reef Obituary Goes Viral, To The Horror Of Scientists. It’s too soon to give up on saving it.

Tituba, the Early American Witch. The Caribbean slave was ground zero for the Salem witch panic.

Mad

(via Fark)

Magnus Carlsen Playing Chess Hustlers in Washington Square Park

Norwegian grandmaster and world champion Magnus Carlsen was in New York and went to watch the old guys playing chess in the park. One of them beat his manager pretty badly, so Carlsen sat down and proceeded to checkmate in ten moves. The old guys play so many people they don’t look too closely at them, so it was a surprise. But that’s only the beginning of what’s going on in this video. Live Tyler is there, not saying anything until the end. There’s a guy with unbelievable teeth. And a squirrel gives us a priceless photobomb. Just another day in Washington Square Park. (via reddit)

A Bedtime Story: Julia Was a Clever Girl

Julia knew she was smart. She was one of those clever children, the kind of child who figures out early on that parents aren’t all-powerful and all-knowing.

The first time she realized this was when she got scared. There had been a noise in her room, coming from under her bed, or from the closet.

Julia ran down the hall, crying, “Mommy! Daddy!”
“What’s wrong, honey?”
“I huh-heard a m-monster,” Julia glubbed.

She expected them to comfort her, or roll their eyes, or get annoyed. Instead, they jumped up immediately and raced to her bedroom, where they checked under the bed, inspected the closet, and tested the window lock. They poked, prodded, and scoured every inch.

Julia caught on quickly. She knew what they were doing. By taking her fears seriously, they were showing their little girl that she was safe and loved. They had probably read about it in some book.

But the lesson Julia learned was that she had power. Thereafter, waking her parents became a nightly event. Julia would scream and cry, they would rush to her bedroom, and Julia would hide her grin behind tears. But not once did they ever complain.

One night she could stand it no longer, and she burst out laughing when Daddy fell down while examining the light fixture, as if a monster could fit up there.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, rubbing his backside.
“You,” Julia smirked. “You always believe me.”
Daddy wasn’t angry. He just looked at Mommy.
“Once,” he said quietly, “just once, we didn’t believe your brother.”

And Julia, an only child, did not sleep well that night.

Found at reddit, credited to IPostAtMidnight.