Friday Fun Links

5 Trends You Think Are Ruining Movies (Are Older Than Film). Oh, they’re still being ruined, but the methods are nothing new.

Royal Wedding unites the world in mathematical lunacy. Or, more likely, the media likes to hype a story and exaggerate the numbers.

Joe the paraplegic bunny rabbit got around by dragging his hindquarters behind him, until Liam designed him some wheels. Now Joe is an all-terrain bunny!

Florida takes the title of America’s Weirdest State. The evidence is overwhelming and strangely entertaining.

John McCain follows Obama's lead, releases original long-form Birth Certificate. (via reddit)

A kaleidoscope of pizza costumes. (via Gorilla Mask)

Sarah Hubbard was taken with the Pop Tart Nyan Cat just like the rest of us. She got out her violin and her cat ears and recreated the meme in real life.

The Intergroom’s Creative Challenge competition for dogs is not really a beauty contest, but more like using a dog as an artist’s canvas. Those poor, pitiful, patient dogs. (via Nag on the Lake)

A spider and an ant battle to the death, which is the way nature works. But this time, there’s a surprise ending you will not see coming.

Doggy Diva

In a sweet little pink dress. (via I Am Bored)

Informative and Interesting Links

11 Grammatically Incorrect Movie Titles. I’m sure there are way more than eleven, but these will cause you to wonder why you hadn’t already noticed (probably because you didn’t see the movies).

6 Little-known Secrets of the Mickey Mouse Club. Includes what the original Mouseketeers did after they left the show.

Horse Calculus.

Do you have one of the 15 Most Stressful Jobs in the World?

The Mystery of the Singing Mice. Researchers believe they have discovered that mice can carry a tune, but anyone who’s seen An American Tail knew that already.

A flash mob dances to illustrate how electrons act in a superconductor. A thermometer and subtitles help you follow along without spoiling the mood.

When fire ants are faced with lots of water, they will band together to form an ant raft. And try as you might, you can’t sink it.

14 Serial Killers Who Were Never Caught. Maybe they are dead, or maybe they are still out there. (via Neatorama)

26 Important Comic Books. Each is important for its own reasons, but together they helped create the culture we have.

Other species have incredible ways of seeing the world. Check out eyes that are made of stone, bifocal eyes, eyes with mirrors, and trinocular vision eyes.

You may have seen wooden bikes before, but this one is made of nothing but wood. The Splinter Bike has no metal screws, no rubber wheels, and (unfortunately) no padded seat. (via Metafilter)

A Spoonful of Wheaties Facts. Good for you, and a textbook lesson in marketing as well.

Crack in the World

The Trailer for the 1965 film Crack in the World. (via Everlasting Blort)

Fun and Funny Links (Wednesday)

To create a TV ad announcing a new rail line, Japan Rail invited locals to come and participate. If I could see scenes like these, I’d take a train every day.

25 Everyday Things You Never Knew Had Names. Oh, mental_floss readers know at least some of these already, but you are still liable to increase your vocabulary from this list. Bonus points for using them in conversation today.

Scott Weaver spent 35 years building a model of San Francisco out of toothpicks. Take a tour as little balls move through this amazing work of art!

Duck news: AFLAC has found its new voice. And a baby duckling terrorizes a dog.

New drugs for women.

30 of the most elaborately nerdy wedding cakes ever. The cake is a lie, but it’s also worth a power-up!

A stage performer shows off amazing balancing skills. I found myself holding my breath for him.

Little Chefs illustrates why we don't let kids cook without supervision. Close supervision.

Puss 'n Boots

From 1963, Puss 'n' Boots was originally a Mexican production called El Gato Con Botas. (via Metafilter)

Taxidermy Gone Wild

Art takes many forms and uses a variety of media. A skilled artist can make a thing of beauty out of any available material, including dead animals. However, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and many beginners think they are a skilled artists. That’s why we have a range of “art” that includes not only masterful results, but also bizarre artifacts from our nightmares and other objects we just can’t figure out at all. In this article I posted at mental_floss, you’ll find all three.

Good Reads and Info

The Great Moon Hoax. No, not Apollo, the more interesting story from 1835.

Larry Marten wanted to build a coffin for his father as one last gift. Making the finely-crafted coffin, complete with parts saved from his father’s life, was easy compared to negotiating the bureaucracy involved in burying the dead. (via Boing Boing)

Ten Royal Weddings to Remember. May Prince William and Kate Middleton be blessed with a marriage far less interesting than these.

10 Things You Didn't Know About IKEA.

10 Things Wrong With the MPAA Rating System. (via Interesting Pile)

In the 1920s, architect Hermann Soergel had a wild idea to build a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar, drain water into the Sahara Desert, and form lots of new land in the Mediterranean basin to colonize. (via io9)

Eight Tiny Numbers that Secretly Rule the Universe. (via Gorilla Mask)

The 5 Biggest Backfires in the History of Disaster Relief. Our attempts to intervene are like pouring salt on Mother Nature’s wounds.

Disney is updating the hitchhiking ghosts in the Haunted Mansion using state-of-the-art technology. They’ll be doing more than just hitchhiking with you!

Why is a curveball so hard to hit? It may be the optical illusion or it may be the curve …or both.

5 Massive Screw-Ups in Paleontology. What else can you expect from a science that involves a fair amount of guessing?

The tree named Ochroma pyramidale is better known as the balsa tree, from which we get lightweight wood. But its flowers are more valuable to many species in Panama, because they bloom at night during the dry season and fill and refill with sweet nectar.

Thinking Globally

The term "globally" here does not mean worldwide so much as it means seeing the problem as a whole as opposed to parts. Dr. Eli Goldratt explains what happens to the supply chain of consumer goods during a recession, in terms even I can understand. With animation by Aharon Charnov. (Thanks, Joe Brown!)

Links for Fun

A parakeet wakes a sleepy cat. That’s all that happens, but it’s incredibly cute.

How scary can a planet-destroying ray be if you can’t see it? Darth Vader gets his Storm Troopers to help illustrate the concept.

In her latest story, Allie Brosh goes into the mind of her simple dog, which appeared to be wiped clean by a small adventure. What she sees may be terrifying to contemplate, but more likely will provoke a laugh.

Cats Pepper and Snowball try their best to figure out a treadmill. Try slapping some sense into that contraption!

Inspired by the xkcd comic “Heaven,” GUD magazine made a playable version of Tetris that occasionally sends a piece “from heaven” that’s exactly what you need to fit in with the rest of your blocks. (via Blame It On The Voices)

Release the Dweebs! Guaranteed to make you smile.

How These Two White Guys Wound Up In This Kendrick Perkins Family Photo. A friendship between a young NBA player and two bloggers breaks the old rules about interaction between stars and fans. (via Metafilter)

Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies. This is what happens when we let computers and ‘bots do our work without proper supervision.

That’s an awfully big egg, so let’s open it up and see what’s inside. Maybe you can guess before the big reveal.

Life Savers Ad

From 1966. I think I remember this one! (via Everlasting Blort)

Easter Fun

Now that we are into a holiday weekend, let’s take a look at some of the goofier videos that celebrate the secular side of Easter in this list I posted at mental_floss. These are “fun”, but most are not recommended for children.

Narwhal Migration

(via the Presurfer)

Good Friday Links

After we published 6 Easter Traditions You May Not Know, you told us what traditions you do know. Enough that we could put together 6 Easter Customs from Our Readers.

How to Buy, Slaughter and Spit-Roast a Sheep. A report from a friend in Afghanistan, with pictures.

Acne is a peculiarly human problem that might have been caused by the loss of our ancient ancestor’s body hair. But knowing where acne comes from doesn’t help those who are mortified by having it. (via Buzzfeed)

Watch the birth of a sunspot cluster in a video from NASA’s SDO satellite. Each spot is bigger than the earth and more powerful than a million nuclear bombs.

Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played With Fire. It’s not easy being a 14-year-old internet sensation, especially when the backlash and threats start raining down. NSFW text.

12 Golf Course Perils. These horrible things have really happened -and will make you want to stay in the clubhouse and drink instead of playing.

13 Delicious Recipes Using Cadbury Creme Eggs (with links to each). The Eggs Benedict is a lot sweeter than it looks.

A new world record has been set for the most complex Rube Goldberg machine ever. This contraption uses 244 steps to water a flower. (via Boing Boing)

10 Young Female Composers You Should Know. “Contemporary classical music” seems like a contradiction in terms, but it really just means some good tunes!

Some people work better in a coffee shop than in an office or at home. It’s either the distractions or the lack of distractions that fuel the creative fires. (via Metafilter)

5 Bad Ideas Humanity Is Sticking With Out of Habit. Or the fact that changing things, even for the better, is more difficult than doing nothing.

How good do you think you are at judging shapes, angles, and distances just by eyeballing? Test yourself and pat yourself on the back if you beat my score of 5.67. (via J-Walk Blog)

Weird Camera Effects

We can never know the world around us as it really is; we can only know it as our brains perceive it. The process of interpreting the signals that come to our eyes is quite complicated, but it works well for us most of the time. Optical illusions occur when our minds interpret visual signals incorrectly. When we began to record images outside our brains, we added a mechanical layer of interpretation that can also go slightly wrong. Then we started using several different methods of recording visual images, and the possibility of incorrect interpretation multiplied, leaving us with some weird camera effects, as you'll see in this article I posted at mental_floss.

Image by Flickr user Jason Mullins.

Fun and Funny Links

Today is National High Five Day! Do you know how the High Five came about?

Weird Al Yankovic released his parody song “Perform This Way” free online. It was supposed to be on his next album, but Lady Gaga declined to approve it.

What Lies Behind the Grand Canyon?

Artist John Martz brings us Trexels, a poster featuring 235 characters from the Star Trek universe in pixel form, all in one artwork. How many can you name? (via Boing Boing)

7 Memes That Went Viral Before The Internet Existed.

5 Middle School Magazines. I have three middle school students, so I found this to be spot-on. (via Buzzfeed)

English as She is Spoke is a classic phrase book written by a translator who did not know English. The 19th century version of a bad mechanical translation was also the 19th century version of a viral sensation. (via Metafilter)

How to Cater a Roman Orgy.

Rob Cockerham knew that the Post Office would be a madhouse on the evening of tax deadline day, so he set up shop scalping postage stamps. It was a fine experiment, but next year he’s going to sell champagne instead. (via Boing Boing)

How difficult would it be to get a cat to climb into a bowl? This Japanese TV show wanted the answer, and used many cats and bowls to get the definitive answer.

Symmetry means more than being equal or even complementary. Sometimes imperfect matches are the most thought-provoking.

10 Foreign McDonald’s That Aren’t Exactly McDonald’s. These are just far enough off to be unofficial and completely funny.

Interesting Links

As the Mountaintops Fall, a Coal Town Vanishes. The residents are leaving, and soon the native flora and fauna and the very contours of the earth will be gone a well. (via Breakfast Links)

Paul Jones was so ashamed of his teeth that he didn’t smile for years. Now he’s going through dental reconstruction, and is blogging about it. (via Metafilter, where you’ll find more dental horror stories)

Pie charts deserve more respect than they get. To prove it, here are charts on the effectiveness of different types of charts. (via Boing Boing)

America's immigration policies since 9/11 are contributing to a national "brain drain." We educate people from all over, and then won't let them work here.

9 People Who Knew They Could Do It. People who are labeled as disabled can opt out, but some take their dreams to the limit.

Is Chernobyl a Wild Kingdom or a Radioactive Den of Decay? Twenty-five years later, the Red Forest still has high radiation readings, but animals live there like they always have -or do they?

The 6 Greatest Athletic Feats Ever (Aren’t What You Think). Today you want to read the stories you haven’t heard a hundred times already.

The Mountain is a beautiful time-lape video of the Milky Way. Shot atop Spain’s highest mountain, El Teide, over several days in April, 2011.

6 Ways to Decorate Easter Eggs. Not including the easy way: buying them in pre-colored plastic.

How record companies got into the music business: in order to sell furniture. Musician Phil Alvin condenses a history lesson into a few minutes in a 1993 video.

5 Presidential Secrets Left off the White House Tour. Bush the elder became a Japanese word -did you know that?

Flowers fool flat-footed flies by faking fungus-infected foliage. This orchid is just as clever as the headline writer.

10 Variations On Our March of Progress

The March of Progress is the name of a 1965 illustration by Rudolph Zallinger for the Time-Life book series Life Nature Library, specifically for the volume entitled Early Man. The image is so familiar that it is a classic jumping-off point for parodies, jokes, and illustrations for everything from advertising to politics. Here are some of the more clever reworkings found on the internet, in a list I posted at mental_floss.

Links for Fun

Sweet Home Alabama, performed by Lynyrd Skynyrd in 1987, their first concert after about ten years off.

A stupid line in a bad romance novel yielded an epic discussion and possibly the greatest literary passage ever. NSFW text. May cause you to LOL.

12 Hilarious Signs That You Are a Computerholic.

What if the upcoming Royal Wedding had the pop music and choreography of other weddings of the YouTube Age? Find out in the new ad from T-Mobile, featuring excellent royal look-alikes.

The idea in Dadgame is that poor Dad goes berserk after a long hard day at the office, and want to break things. The more chaos you cause, the more points you rack up- and you even get to play guitar! (via The Daily What)

Have you ever seen a penguin get tickled? Cookie the sock-wearing Little Penguin loves a tickle, and lets you know exactly how he feels.

Robot Monster: The Ultimate Golden Turkey.

The Comic Genius of Jonathon Winters.

Do we ever get tired of looking a the nocturnal primates we call tarsiers?

To promote the new Internet Explorer 9, Soap Creative developed the world’s biggest Pac-Man game which involves thousands of user-submitted screens, and could take years to play. (via Simply Left Behind)

Wayne Dorrington gave us Star Wars Episode IV in icons a couple of months ago. Now he has completed the plot of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back in the same manner, which he calls “Iconoscope.” (via Laughing Squid)

Bulldogs make great dance partners. This little fella gets his groove on with his best buddy.

Good Reads and Information

Six Odd but Awesome Spring Celebrations Around the World. Sign me up for the water fight when I’m supposed to be spring cleaning. (via Dark Roasted Blend)

When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink? There was a time when it wasn’t really necessary for strangers to know the sex of a young child.

How Ayn Rand ruined my childhood.

The Mickey, the Smoot and Other Unusual Units of Measurement. The post was really popular for about a warhol.

Why The Deadliest Catch is more documentary than reality TV.

The Real Housewives of Wall Street. Rolling Stone lays out who the bailout funds went to and how they profit off them. (via Fark)

Kazimierz Piechowski escaped from Auschwitz. Arrested for being a Boy Scout, the now 91-year-old tells how he joined the resistance and got out of the concentration camp. (via Metafilter)

Experience What It Is Like To Be Old With The Aged Simulation Set. All I need is a t-shirt that says “I am experiencing the effects of aging.”

6 Civil War Myths, Busted. Face it, it had a lot to do with slavery. (via Breakfast Links)

Boycotting and Banning: The Real Olympic Sports. Can sports ever truly rise above politics?

"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. How one short story outraged a nation in 1948.

Patriotic Millionaires For Fiscal Strength. This is not what you would expect. (via Breakfast Links)