Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.

[Ed. note: With less than a week to go before a presidential election, maybe we could use a reminder that United States presidents are people, too, and often far from perfect -or even presidential.]

Zachary Taylor would spit tobacco juice on the White House rugs if a spitoon wasn't in spitting distance.

Teddy Roosevelt owned and could walk on stilts.

Herbert Hoover did not like to set his eyes on the White House servants- ever. Whenever he or the First Lady appeared anywhere where a servant was present, he or she would run into a closet and remain there until the coast was clear. Groundskeepers had to hide behind bushes. These people lived with the fear of being fired if Hoover caught a glimpse of one of them.

A student protester once gave Richard Nixon the finger. Nixon gave one back to him.

Andrew Jackson had a bullet painfully lodged next to his heart from 1806 until his death in 1845. He had been shot in the chest during a duel with Charles Dickinson, who had insulted Jackson's wife. Jackson sometimes coughed up blood and, to alleviate the pain from the bullet, he would on occasion slit open his own veins with a pocketknife and "bleed" himself.

John Adams didn't like his white servants "playing cards with Negroes."

After his presidency, Harry and Bess Truman moved in with her mother. His mother-in-law, who believed -and stated frequently- that Harry had never amounted to anything, also lived in the White House when he was president.

We've shown you floor plans from TV shows before, but most of those were classic series. Now we have some floor plans of the character's homes in wildly popular shows from the last decade or so, from Homes.com. Shown here is the home from Gilmore Girls, but for the life of me I can't find a toilet on the first floor, despite the fact that there is a bedroom there. Does Rory walk through her mother's bedroom upstairs every time she needs to go? The Albuquerque home of the Whites from Breaking Bad is in the collection, but where does Walt Jr. use the bathroom? There's no first floor bathroom for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, either, although there is a public toilet on the second floor. Check out the floor plans of eight television shows at Unreality.  

A marksman shoots a Magnum .44 into a block of ballistic gel. In a slow-motion replay, you can see the aftereffects, in which the block has a case of gas, then suffers an attack of fiery indigestion, and then farts, through its newly-created "digestive canal." There's a perfectly normal explanation for this.  

Slow motion video capture is a natural companion to just about anything that you’d need ballistic gel for, and good thing — because the video captured what appears to be a diesel effect! The block is hit with a bullet, and as the bullet rapidly expands and dumps its energy into the gel, a cavity expands rapidly. During this process, some of the (oil-based) material in the cavity has been vaporized. After the expanded bullet exits (to the right of the gif above but easier to see in the video below), the cavity in the block begins to collapse. The resulting pressure increase appears to ignite the vaporized material, which explodes with a flash followed by some exhaust.

Read more about the effect and see the original video at Hackaday. -via reddit

If you have ever removed hair from your body using wax, you know darn well that you do not want to do it slowly. I don't even know if it would work if done slowly. But thanks to the Slow Mo Guys and their high-speed cameras, we can see what it might be like to rip the hair our of your skin slowly. If watching that sounds too gross to you, then skip this video.

(YouTube link)

Dan gets the dubious honor of being the first guinea pig for this stunt. He's obviously never done this before, but he'll be quite experienced afterward, because they must do it over and over to get the shot right. Heh. But Gav gets his turn, too, in which we get to see his facial reaction. -via Digg

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

Research about the smells of human bodies
compiled by OttoDidact, Improbable Research staff

Garlic Ingestion and the Odor of Amniotic Fluid
“Garlic Ingestion by Pregnant Women Alters the Odor of Amniotic Fluid,” Julie A. Mennella, Anthony Johnson, and Gary K. Beauchamp, Chemical Senses, vol. 20, no. 2, April 1995, pp. 207-209. The authors, at Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, report:

Amniotic fluid samples were obtained from 10 pregnant women undergoing routine amniocentesis procedure.... Randomly selected pairs of samples, one from a woman who ingested garlic and the other from a woman who ingested placebo capsules, were then evaluated by a sensory panel of adults. The odor of the amniotic fluid obtained from four of the five women who had ingested the garlic capsules was judged to be stronger or more like garlic than the paired samples collected from the women consuming placebo capsules.

Peculiar Odours in Newborns: Spicy Food
“Peculiar Odours in Newborns and Maternal Prenatal Ingestion of Spicy Food,” G.J. Hauser, D. Chitayat, L. Berns, D. Braver, and B. Muhlbauer, European Journal of Pediatrics, vol. 144, no. 4, November 1985, p. 403. The authors, at Tel Aviv Medical Center, Israel, report:

This horse doesn't have a horn like a unicorn, but he sure has a chip on his shoulder! The ice cream must be sour grape flavor. And if no children ever crowd around him, he can blame it on the unicorn, instead of his own cranky disposition. How convenient. This is the latest from John McNamee at Pie Comic.

Ko Hoshino is undergoing Jedi training with master Jaan-Xu. She wants to train with a light saber, because don't we all? He thinks she isn't ready. But you know how young, impetuous trainees are.

(YouTube link)

You recall when Luke Skywalker first met Obi-Wan Kenobi and played around with a lightsaber? You can't help but think, "You'll put your eye out!" And that's the feeling you get watching this beautiful short film from Stephen Vitale. -via Tastefully Offensive 

The Denver Broncos cheerleaders put on their Halloween costumes for Sunday's game. You see a lot of superheroes, princesses (with short skirts), pop culture characters, and a classic spooky skeleton, all rendered in the "sexy" style. But what's this?

Romi Bean performed wearing an inflatable T. rex costume!

(YouTube link)

Bean managed to execute every move perfectly, despite the famous short T. rex arms and the oversized inflatable costume. She was the hit of the halftime show! -via reddit

The guys from Glove and Boots have some great ideas for new apps, but they just don't want to put in the time or effort to develop them. Or, in their words, they don't have the time.

(YouTube link)

Or, maybe the ideas aren't all that great. If you see any potential in these goofy ideas, hey, run with it! Assemble your venture capital, rent a facility in Silicon Valley, and start coding! Meanwhile, check out Vampire Caveman for no particular reason at all.  -via Laughing Squid

The United States began as an experiment in democracy, and the progress we've made in the process has come gradually but not consistently. The idea of a truly secret ballot in American elections is a relatively recent innovation. Voting locations in the nation's first century were put together with few rules, and it was often corruption and chaos.

Polling places might be set up in private homes or “sodhouse saloons”—usually there was some separation between the election officials and the crowd of voters, but there was no privacy for voters. Partisans would corral people to the polls to cast their party tickets and keep other parties’ voters away from the polls—using fists, knives, guns...or any other effective means. Voting could mean risking your life: in the mid-1800s, 89 people died trying to get to the polls.

By the 1880s, ballot reformers were looking for a new way to run elections, one that would wrench some control away from parties and limit vote buying and other fraudulent practices. They found it in Australia.

Australia had been letting people vote in secret. What an innovative idea! The secret ballot system was adopted state-by-state, and everyone had a different idea of how to do it. I've personally voted in more than one election where you filled out slips of paper on a counter with a cardboard divider between each voter. The voting booth has taken many forms, which you can read about at Atlas Obscura.

Making a cake that looks like a person is hard, but making a cake that is recognizable as a specific person is amazing. Austin, Texas, baker and food artist Natalie Sideserf did a realistic cake in the likeness of Willie Nelson that we showed you a few years back. But that's only part of her cake talents! Sideserf has also done cartoon characters, movie scenes, and inanimate objects in delicious cake. Have you seen her steak cake? If you can imagine it, she can render it in flour, sugar, and eggs. See some of Sideserf's best cake sculptures at Unreality.

(Image credit: Sideserf Cake Studio)

The following article is from the new book Uncle John’s Uncanny Bathroom Reader.

A few years back we told you the story of the WWII submarine that was lost due to a malfunctioning toilet. It turns out that a similar incident threatened the space shuttle Discovery in 1989, earning it a place in Uncle John’s Stall of Fame.

TOP SECRET

On November 22, 1989, the space shuttle Discovery blasted off from the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a five-day secret mission in Earth orbit. It is believed to have deployed a spy satellite for the Department of Defense, but since the mission was (and still is) classified, only the United States government knows for sure.

But some details of the mission have emerged, and they involve something a little more down-to-earth: the space shuttle’s toilet, or Waste Collection System (WCS), as it was more properly known. The $30 million device looked like an ordinary toilet, but because it was designed to operate in zero gravity, the experience of using it was quite different from using a toilet on Earth.

(Facebook link)

Matt MacMillan had a Halloween costume that you never saw coming. He's a cute girl wearing a pumpkin bag. Or is he? He was looking forward to greeting trick-or-treaters wearing this. I hope he had video running to catch their reactions. If that's not scary enough, look what's on their roof! -via Buzzfeed

The following article is from the new book Uncle John’s Uncanny Bathroom Reader.

Here’s a piece of recent American history that most people have never heard of. It involves many of the elements we associate with modern life—cars, travel, eating, entrepreneurship…and discrimination. Here’s the story of the Green Book.

ROAD TRIP!

For as long as automobiles have been around, they have symbolized freedom and independence. They offered the promise of taking people anywhere they wanted to go, as long as there was a road that went there. For many Americans automobiles did indeed deliver on that promise. But for African Americans living in many parts of the United States in the early and mid-20th century, the automobile was little more than a symbol—that of a freedom that, for them, remained out of reach.

In those years, a trip by automobile for African Americans was an experience all its own, quite unlike car trips taken by white Americans. A black family preparing for a long trip had to pack enough food to get them all the way to where they were going, in case the restaurants along the route refused to serve them—a form of discrimination that was perfectly legal at the time. They had to pack pillows and blankets so that they could sleep in their car if the hotels they stopped at refused to provide them with lodging. They had to put extra cans of gas in the trunk—enough to get them through towns where none of the service stations would sell them gas. And they had to leave enough room in the trunk for a bucket that they could use as a toilet in places where restrooms were reserved for whites only.

KEEP ON MOVING

The following article is from Uncle John’s Factastic Bathroom Reader.

Primates are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom. How close? According to some unconventional scientific research, we may have more in common with them than we thought.

(BBC via YouTube)

RAISING CANE

About 250 miles east of Puerto Rico is an island in the Caribbean called Saint Kitts. Today it’s a popular tourist destination, but for more than 300 years it was best known as a producer of both sugarcane and rum, the liquor made from sugarcane. The first cane plantations were established in the 1640s by England and France, which both had settlements on the island. In those days, France also had colonies in Africa, and when French colonists from West Africa came to Saint Kitts, they often brought monkeys called vervets with them as pets. Many of these monkeys escaped into the wild, where they thrived in the tropical paradise, free from predators and disease. The vervet population exploded in the years that followed. There were plenty of mangoes for them to eat, and when mangoes weren’t in season, the vervets happily devoured the sugarcane, as an English visitor named Lady Andrews observed in 1774:

They are the torment of the planters, they destroy whole cane pieces in a few hours and come in troops from the mountains, whose trees afford them shelter… When pursued, they fly to the mountain and laugh at their pursuers, as they are as little ashamed of a defeat as a French general.

MONKEY SEE

And just as vervets —like humans— acquired a taste for cane sugar, they also developed a taste for the rum produced from it. The monkeys probably got their first taste of alcohol by eating naturally fermenting cane stalks in the fields, then graduated to stealing rum whenever the opportunity presented itself. Islanders soon learned that an easy way to catch a vervet was to set out some rum in a bowl, then wait for one to come along and drink itself into insensibility.

As the years passed and Saint Kitts’s economy evolved from sugar and rum production to tourism, the vervets may have had an easier transition than the islanders did— at least as far as imbibing was concerned. Instead of heading out to the cane fields or into town in search of rum, the monkeys simply staked out the vacation resorts and stole drinks from tourists whenever their backs were turned. Some visitors found this annoying, of course, but for others, watching vervets steal drinks was —and still is— part of the experience of visiting Saint Kitts.