The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again.

You’ve heard that clothes make the man? Meet the suit that made the woman.

Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was born in Samur, France, in 1883. Her life got off to a rocky start. Her mother died shortly after Gabrielle’s birth, and her father took off, abandoning the five Chanel children. Gabrielle was raised in a local Catholic orphanage until she came of age, at which point the nuns found her a job at a local boutique, the House of Grampayre.

TALENT WILL OUT

The little shop assistant honed her skills as a seamstress, and soon she had a faithful following of customers who came directly to her for alterations. She also worked at a tailor shop once a week. And in addition to her two day jobs, did some moonlighting as a café and concert singer for a few years. She used to sing one of those sad French songs about a poor girl who lost her little dog, Coco -that’s where her nickname came from.

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MES AMIS

She did very well in the male companionship department: two of her lovers -a military officer and an English industrialist- bankrolled her first millinery shop in Paris in 1909. It didn’t take her long to establish herself as a leading fashion designer.

Let this be a warning to you: if you receive an unsolicited vacuum cleaner, don't turn it on! By the way, the same goes for a mysterious stranger who tells you that pushing a button will bring untold riches.

CHILIK is a comic artist from Belarus whose work you've seen before at Neatorama. Here he tells the story of everything in one wordless metaphysical comic. See more his work at Instagram. -via Geeks Are Sexy

We often discover some really strange facts about our family's past when we reach adulthood, as all the truths that our parents kept from us when we were young are revealed.

These revelations about our relatives often fill in the blanks in our past and make us feel closer to our family, as we realize that we've gone through quite a few strange experiences together.

But Pauline Dakin's childhood experiences during the 1970s and 80s are some of the strangest I've ever heard, and it all started when her family left Vancouver to vacation in Winnipeg- where their mother Ruth told them they were never going back.

"There was no opportunity to say goodbye, it was just this abrupt, severing of relationships," Pauline says.

When she asked her mother why she had done this, there was never a good explanation.

"She would only say, 'I'm sorry, I can't tell you, when you're older I will tell you.'"

The same thing happened again four years later - this time the family moved to New Brunswick, on Canada's eastern coast.

"I knew something bad was happening," she says. "I didn't know what it was, but there was always a sense of something dire that was unspoken."

Along the way Pauline lost touch with her father and anyone she'd ever known as the family sans father kept moving until, at age 23, her family put down roots for a while in New Brunswick. Now it seemed her mom was finally ready to tell her the truth:

"She said, 'OK, I'm ready to explain all of these strange things that have happened throughout your life.'"

Pauline was to meet her mother outside a motel halfway between the two cities they were living in. When she arrived, Ruth slipped a note and an empty envelope into Pauline's hands.

The note read: "Don't say anything. Take your jewellery off. Put it in the envelope. I'll explain, just don't talk."

"It was just the most bizarre thing," Pauline remembers. "I thought, 'Who are you? What are you doing?' But I did what she told me."

Her mother took her to a motel room where Pauline was surprised to find Stan Sears waiting for them.

Stan and Ruth told Pauline that for the past 16 years they had been on the run from the mafia and that Pauline's family had been targeted because her father, Warren, had been involved in organised crime. She couldn't wear her jewellery because it needed to be tested for bugs.

Read 'The Story Of A Weird World I Was Warned Never To Tell' here

Did you watch Sesame Street in its first season, back in 1969? You might have seen a grouchy orange monster named Oscar. Yeah, he was orange, but somehow turned green for the second season and he's been green ever since. As Kermit would say, it's not easy being green. Other Sesame Street characters came on the scene over time and changed considerably. Some evolved from other characters, and some have mysterious origins that are lost to history.

(YouTube link)

In the latest episode of the Mental Floss series Scatterbrained, we learn all kinds of things we didn't know about the Muppets and the TV show Sesame Street. Whether you grew up with the show or maybe your children did, it's pretty cool to learn about the evolution of the show, its crew, and its characters.

By the way, the song mentioned that Carroll Spinney sang at Jim Henson's funeral is here.

In 1956, an albatross was tagged in Hawaii. She was estimated to be five years old at the time, and she came to be known as Wisdom. She is the world's oldest banded bird, and is still doing her part to replenish the world's supply of albatrosses.

Every year, Wisdom returns along with millions of other albatrosses to their nesting grounds at Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument on Midway Atoll. She's easy to spot - she always returns to the same nest site, and she has successfully hatched a chick every year since 2006.

This year, US Fish and Wildlife Services spotted Wisdom and her mate, Akeakamai, in November, and confirmed in December that the birds were nesting an egg, taking turns caring for it while the other searches for food.

The blessed event has now been confirmed. Bird watchers have announced that Wisdom has successfully hatched an egg at age 67!  The new albatross chick emerged on February 6. Wisdom is estimated to have produced around 36 chicks in her lifetime -so far. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: NOAA)

Precious Ring by daletheskater 

Some people lose their minds over material possessions, but the poor hobbit who became the creature known as Gollum takes the cake in terms of materialism- because he fell madly in love with the One Ring, until death do they part! Gollum didn't have much of a life left once he'd declared his love for his precious ring, but it still seems a bit crazy to throw yourself into a pit full of lava in the middle of the earth just to try and save it from melting. I guess love really does make people do crazy things...

You'll be able to lord over your fellow fantasy fans when you wear this Precious Ring t-shirt by Daletheskater- because it's one of the hottest LOTR-inspired designs ever created!

Visit daletheskater's Facebook fan page, official website, Tumblr and Twitter, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more fantastically geeky designs:

View more designs by daletheskater | More Funny T-shirts | New T-Shirts

Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!

How many horror movies have you seen? All of them? Then you probably have some idea about what makes a movie frightening. The things that scare you can be quite revealing.

In fact, we think we can figure out your most embarrassing secret with nothing more than a list of the horror movies you like. Are you a little too into your family members? Do you cringe at the thought of leaving home? Is your bed still fitted with a waterproof mattress cover? We think this quiz can reveal what you have hiding from the rest of the world.

So pick the flick you prefer and we'll guess what naughty little thoughts you have hidden from even your closest friends and loved ones your whole life. In the end, we may guess wrong, but either way, it should be fun to find out.

There are 60 movies in 30 matchups. Yes, I did the test, but I haven't seen hardly any of the movies, so it wouldn't work on me like it would on a horror movie fan. Try the quiz here. You might find some movies you haven't seen in so long that you'll want to look them up on home video!

What is reality, anyway? It is different for different people? Is it different for the various components of the self? While Brain is busy overthinking it, Heart is busy experiencing it. Heart's reality is nothing like Brain's, nor is it like your reality. Can we create our own reality? Well, we can think about it, or we can try it. But how would you know if you succeed? Whoa, there I am, overthinking it again. This is the latest comic from the Awkward Yeti.

They say to truly understand someone you've got to walk a mile in their shoes, but when it comes to understanding Emo kids you've gotta trade the shoes in for guyliner, some black hair dye and a lip ring to truly understand their angst.

So a group of parents who wanted to better understand their Emo teens actually agreed to let their Emo kids give them a makeover so they can see what it's like to dress like the owner of a permanently broken heart.

BuzzFeedVideo presents three of the bravest and most accepting parents ever expressing their love for their children by giving away all their dignity!

(YouTube Link)

A group of artists and architects attending the 1933 International Congress of Modern Architecture (CAIM) dreamed of designing the perfect modern city to serve the people living there. They imagined that a planned utopia would function much better than the chaotic way existing cities developed over time.

The subject of this particular congress was city-planning. The members of CIAM thought that cities were too congested, noisy, polluted and chaotic. And they believed some of these problems could be solved by separating out the functions of a city into distinct zones for housing, working, recreation, and traffic.

Zoning wasn’t a new idea, but the architects from CIAM wanted to take it farther. The living spaces would be in high-rise apartments so that the ground-level was open for recreation and collective spaces—live in the sky, play on the ground. Cars would even drive on elevated roads so that pedestrians could have the space below all to themselves. There would also be separate districts for industry and shopping. Where old European cities were winding, cluttered and polluted, this new one would be linear, open, and clean, with everything in its proper place.  

What could possibly go wrong? Due to the Great Depression, the plans were not made public until 1943. Among the entities that tried out the ideas after the war were Amsterdam's city planners, who began construction of a new city called Bijlmer in the 1960s. It wasn't long before unforeseen circumstances led to cascading disasters over several decades. Read about the experimental city of Bijlmer (including a horrible twist in the story) or listen to it in podcast form, at 99% Invisible: Part one and part two.

Gâteau Gato means "cat cake," but this is much more. Artist Alexandre Dubosc (previously at Neatorama) created a beautiful chocolate zoetrope that displays animated cats! Yeah, how could anyone combine chocolate cake, cats, and animation and not have a winner?

(YouTube link)

You'll recognize Maneki Neko playing the piano, Felix, Nyan Cat, and Yin-Yang Cat on this cake. There are other cats, plus mice, fish, and a big cat head on top with teeth! Notice the different language spellings of the word "meow" as well. -via Laughing Squid

You know that ZZ Top song "Legs"? Well Ariel the mermaid has legs now and she knows how to use them, only she forgot to specify what kind of legs she wanted so Ursula the sea witch stuck her with some sexy crab legs.

She seems to be fine with it, and Eric sees her sexy crab legs as a form of life insurance, guaranteeing he'll have a crab leg buffet waiting for him when Ariel dies.

But, as this Electric Bunny Comics strip shows, the townies aren't as open-minded as Eric so they ran poor Ariel out of town. Maybe if Eric had told them there was a possibility of all-you-can-eat crab legs they would have let her stick around...

-Via Geeks Are Sexy

The 1954 film On the Waterfront was about crime and corruption in a gangster-controlled longshoremen's union in New Jersey. The plot centered around rising star Marlon Brando as a young boxer and dock worker who is pulled into doing dirty work for the mob. The movie was a critical and box office smash, winning eight Academy Awards, including Brando's first Best Actor Oscar. Learn some more about the classic film On the Waterfront.

3. A lot of real longshoremen from Hoboken were used as extras.

It makes sense to get extras that know what they’re doing in order to make the film look a little more authentic. There were plenty of extras that wanted to be in the movie just for the experience.

2. Marlon Brando improvised a lot of his lines.

He would improvise a lot and as a result the director would take offense and tell him to knock it off.

Read more movie trivia about On the Waterfront at TVOM.

Nobody is born shy, but as we grow older we find more and more reasons to be bashful and insecure, and for some that shyness can be downright crippling.

But it's hard to imagine a monster dealing with a crippling case of shyness because they're usually portrayed as such savage creatures, and yet even monsters who were made to be fearsome brutes can experience bouts of bashfulness.

(YouTube Link)

Shyness was created by Les Drew and released by The National Film Board of Canada back in 1996. It's drawn in a sketchy style that reminds me of John Kovalic's artwork and the groovy shorts they used to show on Sesame Street.

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

Callie Khouri, a 30-year-old music-video line producer, was driving home to her apartment in Santa Monica on a spring day in Los Angeles in 1988. She didn't realize it at the time, but during this seemingly routine drive back to her home, Callie was about to experience an epiphany. The words came to her and hit her like a bolt from the blue: Two women go on a crime spree.

"That one sentence!" Callie recalled, "I felt the character arcs- I saw the whole movie."

Unlike so many others in Hollywood, Callie had never even tried to write a screenplay before, but thoughts and ideas kept flooding into her mind. "I saw, in a flash, where those two women started and where they ended up. Through a series of accidents, they would go from being invisible to being too big for their world to contain," she added.

Furiously inspired, Callie began writing, in longhand, and kept going, adding more whenever she had spare time, for the next six months. Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, more and more of the story came together for her. She would write whenever possible, at odd, free hours, then type out what she had written on her office computer.

The story gradually fleshed out- two women from Arkansas, one older than the other, one a waitress, one a housewife, both in mediocre relationships, one married, one not. The two women want to escape and go off to a borrowed fishing cabin, have some fun, a few laughs, and maybe find a little adventure and excitement to spice up their fairly tedious, drab lives. On the drive to the cabin they decide to stop off at a roadside cafe and have a drink or two.

But things go off the rails at the cafe, one of the women has a few drinks and a guy she had been innocently dancing with tries to rape her. In what would quickly become a nightmare scenario, her friend sees the attempt and fatally shoots the man. The planned fun but innocent weekend escalates into full scale getaway from increasing numbers of various and sundry lovers, strangers, police and G-men.