In a strange case of nominative determinism, a Worthington, Ohio, doctor was arrested for drunk driving. Elizabeth Unk was arrested after striking a bicyclist with her vehicle.

Unk, 38, is charged with one count of vehicular assault and two counts of driving a vehicle under the influence of alcohol, drugs or a combination of them.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol determined that Unk's blood-alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit.

Unk's driver's license has been suspended.

The incident happened last September, and the grand jury returned an indictment against Dr. Unk this week. Link  -via Arbroath

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Is it ballet or morning calisthenics? This juvenile bearded dragon is said to be "waving," which some say is a dragon sign of deference to a superior, but I think this critter's style puts him into the category of "performer." -via Tastefully Offensive

Famed Swiss watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet made a beautiful and complex watch for Marie Antoinette. The works were mostly gold, and its value is hard to estimate not only because of its history, but because of its workmanship. But Marie Antoinette never wore the watch that eventually became known as the Queen.  

The watch ultimately took 44 years to complete. In the interim, the French Revolution and the resulting European upheaval led to the death of both the man who likely commissioned the watch and its intended owner. (Marie Antoinette, of course, fell under the guillotine. Seventeen years after her death, an incensed crowd, convinced that von Fersen had conspired to assassinate Sweden’s would-be king, beat him to death in a Stockholm square.) Breguet died in September 1823. His son, a talented horologer in his own right, finished the masterpiece in 1827. It traveled in the coat pockets of a French nobleman and later ended up in the collection of Sir David Lionel Salomons, a British polymath who brought the first car shows to England and patented an idea for buoyant soap. Salomons left his watch collection to his daughter Vera, a globe-trotting nurse who settled in Jerusalem after World War I and later used her father’s money to build the museum—and to house his collection of watches.

What made Breguet’s work so significant was his skill as both a watchmaker and a designer. His creations have pristine faces, delicate hands that end in apple-shaped tips, and movements that appear as complex as a computer circuit. The Queen was at once immensely complicated—it had all the features of a cathedral clock in the space of a pocket watch—and beguilingly elegant. Breguet even made a clear crystal face that allowed the owner to see the movement of the gears underneath.

Skip ahead to 1983, and the watch is stolen from the museum, along with other valuable watches. The investigation led nowhere for 23 years. But then, it gets really interesting again. Read the saga of the watch Wired. Link

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When his favorite song, "Make You Feel My Love" comes on, Rev wakes up and has to sing along with Adele! This dog may not pronounce all the words correctly, but he sure has an emotive voice. -via Viral Viral Videos

The following is an article from Uncle John's Unstoppable Bathroom Reader.

(Image credit: Flickr user Ed Schipul)

What would Porter the Wonder Dog have eaten 200 years ago, before there was Alpo or Dog Chow? Here's the history of the multi-billion-dollar dog food industry.

CHOW DOWN

* More than 2,000 years ago, Roman poet and philosopher Marcus Terentius Varro wrote the first farming manual. In it he advised giving farm dogs barley bread soaked in milk, and bones from dead sheep.

* During the Middle Ages, it was common for European royalty to have kennels for their hounds. Kennel cooks would make huge stews, mostly grains and vegetables with some meat or meat byproducts -the hearts, livers, and lungs of various livestock.

* Dogs in common households had meager diets. They were fed only what their owners could spare. A normal domesticated dog's diet consisted of crusts of bread, bare bones, potatoes, cabbage, or whatever else they could scrounge on their own.

* In the 18th century, farm dogs, which had to be fairly healthy to do their jobs, were regularly fed mixes of grains and lard. In cities, you could make a living by searching the streets for dead horses, cutting them up, and selling the meat to wealthy dog owners.

* There were exceptions: The very wealthy, throughout history, have fed their pet dogs fare that was much better than what most humans ate. In the 1800s Empress Tzu Hsi of China was known to feed her Pekingese shark fins, quail breasts, and antelope milk. European nobility fed their dogs roast duck, cakes, candies, and even liquor.

LUXURY FOOD

The in the mid-1800s, the Industrial Revolution created a growing middle class with more luxury and more leisure time, pets began to be regarded as "luxury items" by everyday folk. Result: pet food became more closely scrutinized.

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I put this new Windows 8 advertisement on my own site because, although it's funny, I didn't think it was quite "neat" enough for Neatorama. Then later, I found out something strange about it. No one seems to know what language the actors are speaking!

Native speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean declare that it is not any of those languages.  The first time I listened to them, the ads sounded as though they contained elements of some Wu topolect, a bit like mangled Shanghainese, but I could also definitely hear bits of Mandarin, albeit with unusual tonal contours and slurring.  What was most perplexing of all to me was that, although I was certain that the ads contained Chinese phrases and sentences, every Chinese person to whom I showed them emphatically maintained that they could not understand a single word!  In contrast, several non-native speakers of Mandarin said they could pick out a word of Chinese here and there.

Victor Mair of Language Log asked other people who speak different languages if they recognized the language, but still haven't found anyone who understands it. Link -via Metafilter

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A child's personal project turned into a documentary Yuck: A 4th Grader's Short Documentary About School Lunch. The film is 19 minutes long and has won several film festival awards. The trailers here are just short clips, but you can find a schedule of screenings at the film site.

In the fall of 2011, fourth grader Zachary Maxwell began asking his parents if he could start packing and bringing his own lunch to school.  Unfortunately, they kept insisting that he take advantage of the hot lunch being served at the school.  After all, the online menu sounded delicious and the NYC Department of Education (DOE) website assured parents that the meals were nutritious.  Zachary wanted to convince his parents that the online menu did not accurately represent what was really being served at his school.

In an effort to prove his point, Zachary started sneaking a small HD camera into the lunchroom to show his parents the truth.  Over the next six months, Zachary would continue to gather "inside" footage and research the claims being made by the DOE and the media about the City's public school lunch program.

To the surprise of no one besides his parents, the published menus differed quite a bit from the actual lunches served in schools. To be fair, all the lunches at his elementary school are free, and I've seen much worse. But Zachary Maxwell has a wonderful career ahead of him in filmmaking, journalism, or whatever he decides to do.   

(vimeo link)

The film has a website. Link -via Boing Boing

By the way, Zachary now gets to bring lunch from home. Read more about his experience at the New York Times. Link

Hey, looky up there at the menu bar. Do I see a new sub-blog? Yes! We want to give a big welcome to Twaggies, which is now under the Neatorama umbrella. As a matter of fact, we have the entire archive of Twaggies here with us! In case you're not familiar with Twaggies, they are cartoons illustrating funny Tweets from all kinds of people. And if you find a Twaggie that's particularly funny or meaningful to you, you can get any one of them printed on a t-shirt through the NeatoShop! Or you can look through the most popular Twaggies t-shirts already in the shop. Let's take a look back at other stuff that happened this week, so you can catch up.

John Farrier wrote 8 Ponies and Their Matching Civil War Generals. Bronies will understand, the rest of us can just enjoy it.

Eddie Deezen got to the bottom of a rumor with Did Groucho Really Say That?

Sex in Aladdin: Anatomy of a Rumor was another story about show-biz rumors, from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

The Annals of Improbable Research gave us Apples and Oranges: A Comparison.

4 Public Works of Art Gone Terribly Wrong came from mental_floss magazine.

Over at NeatoBambino, Tiffany wrote Visiting the Autry and Learning about the American West.

Alex gave us a book feature, The Resurrectionist, which is an excerpt from The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black by E.B. Hudspeth.

We had a couple of personal posts this week, too. Tiffany wrote Happy Mother's Day about school-made gifts for mothers. Then David Israel gave us How to Introduce Your Child to the Symphony Orchestra. If you like those, we may have more coming.

Over at our sub-blog Lifestyles of the Cute and Cuddly, the featured pets this week were Lucy and Muffin, from Neatoramanaut Jane Lang, and Blaze, submitted by Neatoramanaut Miki Davis. If you have a photogenic pet, we'd like to feature yours, too! Send your pictures to tips@neatorama.com anytime.

We had two Brainteasers from the Bathroom Readers Institute this week: Touch This and Mouthy Abbreviation. I may have to find another source for puzzles, as the supply is getting thin.

The post with most comments this week was Internet is Destroying the Middle Class. In second place, there was a tie between How to Beat the Lines at Walt Disney World
and GeoGuessr. 

The comment of the week was a simple pun from Sham on the Venezuelan toilet paper crisis, but that simple pun was delivered with style:

I guess it's a...
(•_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
...crappy situation.
YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH

The most popular post was A Fast Food Purse, followed by Merida Reverts to Original Form and Sex in Aladdin: Anatomy of a Rumor.

The most ♥ed post was by far the graduation speech This is Water. The next most ♥s went to Portland Police Pursuit, and in third place we had a tie between Merida Reverts to Original Form and Curious Kitten and the Bearded Dragons.

The most emailed post was This is Water with Curious Kitten and the Bearded Dragons coming in second.

All of us here at Neatorama want to say a hearty CONGRATULATIONS! to all the 2013 graduates, whether you are graduating from preschool, trade school, boot camp, high school, college, or you're finally getting that PhD. Well done, y'all!

Superman

French animation designer Andry Rajoelina imagined comic book superheroes in the act of walking their sidekicks to school. Aren't they adorable? Link -via The Mary Sue

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The annual Dance Off with the Star Wars Stars is back as Disney's Hollywood Studios launch their Star Wars Weekends. This year's dances include "Bad," "Fight for Your Right to Party," "Hey Ya," and since this is the first Dance-off since Disney bought Lucasfilm, a special appearance by Jedi Mickey. You can see all the numbers on video at Inside the Magic. Link

Tulsa, Oklahoma, is not the largest city around. It's not even the largest city in Oklahoma. But they are thinking about putting in a bid to host the 2024 Olympics.   

"I see this as a great opportunity, I really do,” said Tulsa’s mayor, who probably has a name like Dewey Bartlett. Oh. His name really is Dewey Bartlett. Anyway: "If we come off looking a little lighthearted on it, so much the better, but we are serious about putting our name out there."

Although Tulsa has almost 400,000 people, the Olympic Committee might consider it a small town. ESPN Playbook had a little fun with the idea, and made a template for small-town Olympic bids. All you have to do is fill in the name of your town. A sample:

Gym Sports Venue: High School Gym and the YMCA

Basketball, volleyball, wrestling, badminton, whatever handball is, gymnastics -- we can host them all. The main gym floors at our high school and our town’s YMCA have lines for basketball and volleyball. There is also a full-sized basketball court at the middle school, but the floor is pretty old and it is slippery even if it’s just been swept.

If these venues are not enough to accommodate all the gym sports, the badminton competition can be moved to any number of backyards in our town. Gymnastics have not been part of our gym curriculum since the late '80s -- again thanks to insurance issues. (People will sue you nowadays if their kid gets hurt falling off a pommel horse.) However, we probably have most of our gymnastics equipment still in some equipment closet somewhere.

The rest covers aquatic, equestrian, and other sports venues, athlete housing, transportation, and production for the opening and closing ceremonies. Link -via mental_floss

Look at this: A historic brick temple raised up two stories high on scaffolding. Just imagine the strength and care that went into this feat of engineering! The Provo (Utah) Tabernacle burned in 2010, and although the interior is gone, the brick facade survived. To restore the building, it has been raised up so that a two-floor foundation basement can be built underneath it. Read about the project and see more pictures at Gizmodo. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Brian Hansen)

A group of researchers from the CDC sampled water from 161 public and private pools and water parks in Atlanta and found that half of them were contaminated with e. coli, which comes from -you guessed it- poop.

The study, published in the latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, specifically looked at pools in Atlanta, but the researchers say such contamination is likely a widespread problem in U.S. pools, thanks to swimmers not washing themselves off before taking a dip. According to the scientists, each of us carries about 0.14 grams of fecal material into the pool — and that doesn’t include accidents or cases of diarrhea. Among municipal pools, the genetic testing for pathogens detected E. coli in 70% of the filters, while 66% of the water parks contained the bacteria and 49% of pools in private clubs showed evidence of the contamination.

“These findings indicate the need for swimmers to help prevent introduction of pathogens, e.g., taking a pre-swim shower and not swimming when ill with diarrhea, [for] aquatics staff to maintain disinfectant level and pH according to public health standards to inactivate pathogens, and state and local environmental health specialists to enforce such standards,” the authors write in their report.

Because of the way they did the tests, the researchers did not determine whether the bacteria was alive. If pools are properly chlorinated, they should be dead. Atlanta had no reported pool-borne illnesses last summer, when the samples were taken. But just to be sure, try not to swallow pool water. Link  -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user Vegas ER)

Emily Spivack, who runs the Smithsonian blog Threaded, browses eBay for vintage clothing. She found herself especially drawn to clothing items that had stories behind them. Intrigued, she began buying those items with the best stories. It became a hobby.

“I was intrigued by the idea that this marketplace—which was supposed to serve one function, to be transactional—could also have a storytelling emphasis,” Spivack explains. “Interestingly, the time I spent on eBay became much more about looking for stories than things that I actually wanted to purchase.”

Of course, those stories feed right into her blog about historical clothing. Now, Spivak has an exhibition of some of those clothing items (and their stories) called “Sentimental Value” at the  Philadelphia Art Alliance.

Spivack’s favorite stories typically blur the line between historical, personal, and hearsay, like the description of the green silk gown belonging to a seller’s aunt in the 1920s. “Supposedly, her aunt wore the dress to a club one evening,” says Spivack. “She was a blonde, and moved fast, and her boyfriend was involved in the mob. And when they went out that night, someone next to her was shot and killed, and blood splattered on her dress. So they were selling this dress with blood splattered on it. I bid on it, and it’s in the show. To me, that story is absolutely incredible.”

Read about how the clothing items of eBay reached out and grabbed the historian at Collectors Weekly. Link

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One Minute Galactica made this using the audio from the 1949 educational film You're Driving 90 Horses and creatively-edited video from the 1971 made-for-TV movie Duel, starring Dennis Weaver and directed by 24-year-old Steven Spielberg. -Thanks, Nick!

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Woe unto the man who comes between Korra and her ice cream cone! That man is Mike Reeves, who finally just gave up. Good move. Korra like potato chips, too. I see a weight problem in the future. -via Laughing Squid

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Australian magician and comedian Nicholas Johnson invites you to a games party in which he cheats his way through every game. It won't take you long to figure out how it's done, but even afterward there's some weird stuff that will make you scratch your head. Not that scratching your head helps you think better. The title of this video is Can you name all the games and beat the cheat? but I think that is to distract you from the shenanigans going on. The Tetris song is by the group Flap! -via the Presurfer

Luo Gang was five years old when he was kidnapped from his home in Sichuan province, China, and taken to Fujian province. He was adopted by a family 1500 miles away.

“Everyday before I went to bed, I forced myself to re-live the life spent in my old home,” he said. “So I wouldn’t forget.”

But the only memory Luo had of his hometown was of two bridges.

He drew a rough map of his hometown from memory, before posting it on “Bring Lost Babies Home”, a Chinese website devoted to locating missing children through the help of volunteers.

Soon afterwards, a volunteer wrote back with valuable information - a couple from a small town in Sichuan’s Guangan city had lost a son 23 years ago. The time matched Luo’s abduction perfectly.

Luo searched for pictures of the Sichuan town and found they looked familiar to him. To confirm his suspicions, he turned to the satellite version Google Maps. The minute he zoomed in on an area called “Yaojiaba” near the Sichuan town, Luo recognised the two bridges.

“That’s it! That’s my home,” shouted Luo, in tears.

Luo was reunited with his parents soon after. Link -via Fark

Previously: Lost Boy Used Google Earth to Find His Mother

We already know that cats will steal anything that's not tied down. But what about the rest of the animal kingdom? The tendency to steal food is a beneficial adaptation for a species, and taking what another critter has is not really rare. For example: Flowers produce nectar to attract bees for pollination purposes, but bumblebees take nectar from flowers without pollinating the plants in exchange.

Bees who’ve evolved with short tongues and thus can’t reach for the sweet nectar have learned to carve holes into the side of a flower in order to reach their reward. This phenomenon, first observed by Charles Darwin, gets a bee nectar without the bee pollinating the plant. More cannily, there’s evidence suggesting that bees aren’t born behaving this way—they learn how to thieve from other bees, a sad sign that bee society is being overrun by hoodlums.

Read about seven thieving species at mental_floss. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Joe Penniston)

An unnamed man in Cork, Ireland, stopped by a McDonalds outlet early Tuesday morning. For some reason, he sat in a high chair designed for infants and toddlers. When he couldn't get out, police were called. They managed to free the man from the high chair, and no charges were filed. However, witnesses, who say alcohol was involved, managed to snap a picture that went viral. A spokesman for McDonalds remarked that anyone using a high chair in their shops should always have adult supervision. Link -via Gawker

(Image credit: Maverickkat)

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Star Wars: Episiode VII is too important to mess up. J.J. Abrams went on Jimmy Kimmel Live and took suggestions from the audience. Which he would do well to ignore. -via Tastefully Offensive

If you could arrange a race between famous science fiction spaceships, who would win? Would it be the Milliennium Falcon, the Jupiter 2, Serenity, the Enterprise, or some other ship? Find out in an online race to destinations light years away at Slate. They also explain the results, according to the canon of each science fiction universe as we know it. Link -via mental_floss

(Photo credit: Wolfgang Sauber)

1. Diego Rivera’s “Man at the Crossroads”

The Moral: Never hire a communist to do a capitalist’s job.

During the Great Depression, Mexican artist Diego Rivera was on a roll. In 1931, he painted a massive mural for San Francisco’s Pacific Stock Exchange. And by 1933, he’d completed two more enormous murals of Ford’s assembly line for the Detroit Institute of Arts. But there was a disconnect in Rivera’s work. Although the artist was a vocal and committed communist, his art was decidedly capitalist. After a few friends pointed out the hypocrisy, Rivera decided to put his paintbrush where his mouth was.

Opportunity knocked in 1932, when the Rockefeller family hired Rivera to create one of his signature paintings in the lobby of the new RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. Their suggested theme for the work was “Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future”—an allusion to the crossroads between industry and technology. Rivera’s final product depicted a crossroads, but hardly in the way the Rockefellers had intended. Instead, the sprawling 63-foot masterpiece illustrated two alternate futures: a communist heaven and a capitalist hell.

Rivera might have gotten away with his political statement if it hadn’t been for one detail—he painted his personal hero, Vladimir Lenin, into the piece. When building managers realized Rivera was filling their lobby with Red propaganda, they ordered him to cease and desist.

John Cheese at Cracked is 39, and starting to recognize the signs of aging. I can relate to several of these. I don't mind slang terms yet, but I find that it now takes a lot to impress me.

Eventually, you reach a point where you have heard virtually every debate point for every topic ever conceived by man. Nothing anyone says is new. Nothing anyone says is convincing the other side to "convert" to their line of thinking. Consider how long debates have been around between atheists and Christians, legalization and anti-drug groups, pro-lifers and pro-choicers, Democrats and Republicans, and on and on. So many of the talking points and debate styles overlap from topic to topic that you can damn near lip sync to them as they're being said. All debates have turned into a Nickelback album.

Maybe it says something about how much older I am that I don't even know what Nickelback sounds like. But he's got some good points in this list, in plenty of NSFW language. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Aislinn Ritchie)

Fried S'mores is an easy recipe that goes something like this:

1. Make s'mores.
2. Dip in pancake batter.
3. Fry.
4. Stuff your face.

If you'd like the complete recipe, Carleyy has it for you at Instructables. Link  -via Daily of the Day

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The pygmy marmoset (Cebuella pygmaea) is the smallest monkey in the world. They are about five to six inches tall, not including the tail. This one is eating a piece of macaroni, which looks huge in its hands! -via Daily Picks and Flicks

The map above is based on information from the World Values Survey, which does ongoing research. The data from a single question was used to gauge racist attitudes around the world. Two Swedish economists used the data for a study to determine if there was any correlation between economic freedom and racism in different countries.

Among the dozens of questions that World Values asks, the Swedish economists found one that, they believe, could be a pretty good indicator of tolerance for other races. The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors. Some respondents, picking from a list, chose “people of a different race.” The more frequently that people in a given country say they don’t want neighbors from other races, the economists reasoned, the less racially tolerant you could call that society. (The study concluded that economic freedom had no correlation with racial tolerance, but it does appear to correlate with tolerance toward homosexuals.)

Max Fisher used the raw data from the study to create the map. It has been pointed out that the survey results may be affected by cultural differences in answering survey questions honestly. At the Washington Post, you can enlarge the map and read more about the project. Link -via Digg

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They say to never look at a solar eclipse, because you'll hurt your eyes as badly as looking into the sun …because you are looking into the sun. But you don't have to, because Colin Legg took this awesome time-lapse video of the sunrise annular solar eclipse over Pilbara in Western Australia last Friday. Cameras were recording from three different locations. Undoubtedly the strangest sunrise I've ever seen. -via Laughing Squid

Disney has quietly reversed its decision to give Merida from the movie Brave a new look as she joins the group known as the Disney Princesses. The official Princess website has replaced the newer artwork with images of Merida as seen in the Pixar film.

The new design made her thinner, bustier, older, and hotter, and put her in a slinkier, lower-cut version of the dress she loathed from the film. The new look may have been designed to bring Merida in line with the other princesses on Disney's princess site, all of whom are canonically older and, well, hot. But it was also a move that undid everything the character fought against in her own movie.

After Chapman herself wrote an angry open letter on May 11 addressing the sexualization of the character and the message it sent to teenage girls everywhere, the floodgates opened on an Internet backlash. A Change.org petition started by the media watch website A Mighty Girl received over 200,000 signatures in a couple of days.

Earlier today, just as quietly as it had unveiled Merida's new look, Disney substituted an image of Merida from the film on its princess website, and removed all of the images of the new doll from the website.

Disney might not always make the right decisions, but they can tell which way the wind is blowing. Link

Bridget Evans, founder of the Illini Service Dog Program, received her Masters degree from the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Saturday. She was accompanied at the graduation ceremony by her service dog Hero. Evans said,

Hero knows over forty commands to assist me! He loves to retrieve objects for my like envelopes, pens, my crutches, etc. He also turns off the lights, opens doors, and he pulls me in my wheelchair up ramps! I couldn't have gone to college without him!

Hero grabbed a lot of attention and photographs at the graduation. These were posted by two different redditors, in threads that tell more about Bridget and Hero. In both, it was mentioned that while Bridget got a Masters, Hero was awarded a "dog-torate."

Link and Link