Johnny Eck was an actor, artist, musician, and sideshow performer who was billed as "The Amazing Half-Boy," among other titles. You may remember him from the 1932 movie Freaks, or as the Bird Monster in early Tarzan movies. Due to sacral agenisis, Eck appeared to only exist from the waist up. He actually had all necessary body organs, and even underdeveloped legs and feet, but hid them under his clothing. John Eckhardt, Jr. was born a twin. His brother Robert had a normal build, and although they were fraternal twins, the brothers looked very much alike.

Robert was often part of Johnny's act. This made possible an amazing stunt you won't soon forget.

In 1937, Eck and Robert were recruited by the illusionist and hypnotist, Rajah Raboid, for his "Miracles of 1937" show. In it they performed a magic feat that amazed audiences. Raboid performed the traditional sawing-a-man-in-half illusion, except with an unexpected twist. At first Robert would pretend to be a member of the audience and heckle the illusionist during his routine, resulting in Robert being called on stage to be sawed in half himself. During the illusion, Robert would then be switched with his twin brother Eck, who played the top half of his body, and a dwarf, who played the bottom half, concealed in specially-built pant legs. After being sawed in half, the legs would suddenly get up and start running away, prompting Eck to jump off the table and start chasing his legs around the stage, screaming, "Come back!" "I want my legs back!"

You must read the rest of the story for the exquisite audience reaction. No doubt a few were seriously traumatized. The article includes more about Eck's astonishing career. -via a comment at Metafilter

🎬 What does that house/building/park/street in your favorite movie look like in real life nowadays? Take a look at this compilation of movie locations then and now - this one above from Back to the Future still has a Burger King!

🤖 While it's not yet Skynet level scary, it's pretty darn close: AI managed to turn Buzzfeed headlines into horrifying pictures.

🤣 Russian President Vladimir Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron's meeting featuring the now infamous extra long table has been turned into funny memes thanks to Twitter.

🐐 Oldie but goodie: Biquette, the punk rock goat who loves grindcore.

🍟 If you want to attract a man, put on a fragrance that he finds irresistible: Idaho Potato Commission's new aptly-named Frites perfume that smells like French fries.

🏨 Nintendo's first HQ is now a hotel.

🧛 Sure it's a horror movie, but Bram Stoker's Dracula is actually a love story.

🏠 In 1929, a wealthy father gave a designer $100K to decorate his 17-year-old daughter's bedroom. The result is an Art Deco bedroom that's one for the history book.

More neat stories over at our new sites: Pictojam, Supa Fluffy, Pop Culturista, Homes & Hues, Infinite 1UP, Laughosaurus, and Spooky Daily.

Current special from the NeatoShop: Save up to 20% on all Sci-Fi T-shirts, Fantasy T-shirts and Horro T-Shirts.

My husband and I used to tell each other, "It's okay that we don't look too good, because we don't see too well, either." Then he got cataract surgery and left me. But I digress.

Another quote that comes to mind is from It's a Wonderful Life: "Youth is wasted on the wrong people." Old folks who have been together a long time understand what is important, and it's not a hot bod or a smooth face. The hormones get replaced by respect, familiarity, and a lifetime of adventures together. At the same time, they can look at each other and picture what how they appeared when they first fell in love, and just that can bring up a tiny rush of hormones -which is enough. This poem was written by Josh Whicker and illustrated by Lauren Dodson. -via Fark

If you've ever received a Valentine card that you thought didn't quite measure up to your expectations, try to be forgiving. At least it wasn't one of the misguided, bizarre, or downright insulting cards of the Victorian era. The morbid example above, in case you can't read the script, says,

My late dear Wife preserved in a glass case
She was such a darling Pet that I had her stuffed.
Will you be my second?

That's probably the worst marriage proposal I've heard of ...ever. Twitter user Lauryn Ipsum posted a thread that shows us some of the worst valentines of bygone eras. Some are well-meaning but accompanied by creepy imagery. Others are cringeworthy, including some "vinegar valentines" and the plainly misogynist cards aimed at suffragettes. Some are, frankly, just incomprehensible.



Yeah, it was a different time. Maybe we should be thankful for the kinder, gentler valentines at the corner convenience store, even if they are blandly generic. See all of these unhinged vintage valentines in the Twitter thread, or in a more image-friendly version at Threadreader.

-via Metafilter

If you are planning to dedicate a love song to your sweetheart for Valentines Day, it might pay to listen to the lyrics first. Any wedding DJ will tell you that "Every Breath You Take" from The Police will be requested for the reception, because people think it's a song about undying devotion. But if you really listen to it, it's clearly about stalking. Just as people embraced the mistaken idea that "Born in the USA" is a patriotic song, lovers take the wrong message from a song's title or chorus, isolated from the full set of lyrics. Or they just like the tune. For example, "Marry You" by Bruno Mars. While it has been effectively used to express true love, the lyrics are more of a pickup line.

According to this 2010 Bruno Mars hit, marriage is a sacred union involving two people and a whole lot of booze. “Is it the look in your eyes / Or is it this dancing juice?” Mars asks in the chorus. It’s definitely the latter, as this couple is admittedly wrecked on tequila and “looking for something dumb to do.” As for the next morning, “If we wake up and you wanna break up, that's cool,” Mars sings.

Read about ten other songs that are used as love songs until you listen to the lyrics at Mental Floss.

📷 Inspired after seeing unconventional advent calendars featuring pets and cute animals, Matt Bonito decided that he'd create his own funny pics by photoshopping his father Dom into famous movie scenes. The results are hilarious!

🐢 This vet couple's wedding featured the slowest - and cutest - walk down the aisle: their pet tortoise is the ring bearer and had to be bribed to walk down the aisle with bits of strawberries.

⚾ Homeowner found a neat surprise when renovating their newly bought house: a wall of 1,600 retro baseball cards.

🎬 What if The Book of Boba Fett was made in the 1980s?

👤 "Shadowologist" Vincent Bal's shadow art is so awesome we featured him twice on Pictojam.

🕹️ YouTuber eli_handle_b.wav placed Mr. Bean into the video game Half Life 2 and Austin Powers into Mass Effect. Yeah, baby - this is what the Internet is made for.

🎃 Love Halloween? Check out this Top 25 Most Popular Halloween Costumes of 2021 over at Spooky Daily, our new all-Halloween-all-the-time site.

Image: the_dadvent, Vincent Bal

More neat stuff over at our new sites: Pop Culturista, Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Infinite 1UP, Supa Fluffy and Spooky Daily.

Current special: Save up to 20% on all T-shirts in NeatoShop's limited-time sitewide sale. But you'd better hurry - this special ends very soon.

Just in time for Valentines Day, but sadly too late for a Oscar nomination this year, Tibo Charroppin and his cat Lizzy, whose stage name is OwlKitty (previously at Neatorama) have unveiled their newest cinematic creation. OwlKitty has landed the role of Rose in the 1997 movie Titanic! Poor Kate Winslet has been relegated to a bit part. It's a romantic masterpiece, as Rose and Jack frolic aboard the doomed ship and kindle a romance for the ages. You'll be swept away by the sheer joy in their hearts. Don't miss the part where OwlKitty gets her portrait drawn. She's naked, but it's still SFW because, well, she's a cat and is quite hairy. That in no way undermines her magnificent performance.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

Sweets for the sweet! That makes so much sense that it's hard to imagine a Valentines Day without candy, whether it's fancy chocolates in a heart-shaped box from your sweetheart or a desk full of handy conversation hearts you picked up at the checkout counter. But it was not always so.

The holiday started out as the feast day of St. Valentine, first observed in 496 AD. It wasn't associated with romance until centuries later, possibly when Geoffrey Chaucer wrote a poem in the 1300s mentioning St. Valentines Day as the day birds chose their mates. If that's the case, the holiday as we know it today came about simply because it's mating season.

Candy is a nice gift to show romantic feelings, along with flowers and jewelry, and certainly more affordable. Candy as a Valentines Day gift got off the ground during Queen Victoria's reign. Victoria was a hopeless romantic, had a sweet tooth, and was the world's biggest influencer in her time. That was also when a man named Cadbury invented the heart-shaped candy box. Then came Hershey's Kisses, Russell Stover assortments, and conversation hearts. Read the history of Valentines Day candy at Cracked.

(Image credit: Parnote)

1955 Disneyland Casa de Fritos Matchbook https://t.co/qfLqdDgDkL pic.twitter.com/AkwhcbABs9

— Cory Doctorow RIGHT-CLICKING WORDCEL MENTALITY (@doctorow) November 12, 2018

Does anyone remember the restaurant Casa de Fritos at Disneyland? It was sponsored by Fritos (later Frito-Lay) and served Mexican food at the park -dishes heavily dependent on Fritos- from shortly after the park opened until the name was changed in 1982. You could get a full combination plate there for a dollar, and then purchase a small bag of Fritos from an elaborate vending device featuring a statue of the Frito Kid. Casa de Fritos got their tortillas delivered from a manufacturer called Alex Foods.

“One day, a salesman from Alex Foods noticed that Casa de Fritos was dumping stale tortillas in the trash,” Bob Sorokanich wrote for Gizmodo. “He gave the kitchen a tip: instead of trashing the stale tortillas, cut them up and fry them.”

Now, mind you, this wasn't an original idea from the tortilla salesman. He was passing along a trick that came from tortilla manufacturer Rebecca Webb Carranza that had been in use since the 1940s to produce tortilla chips. But the resulting chips became very popular at Casa de Fritos, and Fritos partnered with Alex Foods to market them nationally in 1966. Read the story of how Doritos came about and took the country by storm at SFGate. -via Digg

Redditor Ravi emphasizes that he is not from Australia. He's from Texas. But Australia is basically British Texas, so that's close enough.

Anyway, as an honorary Australian, he makes boomerangs, including an axe-shaped boomerang, a Batarang (Batman's throwing weapon), and a whistling boomerang. Perusing his Reddit profile is very educational. I learned that there are left and right-handed boomerangs.

Javi's most recent creation is this one shaped like a kangaroo. So it's a kangarang or a kangarooarang. I suppose that it could be used to hunt kangaroos in Australia, which would be appropriate, as that was one of the original purposes of the boomerang.

National borders are artificial constructs that you can't see from above. However, they are important to people who live in those countries, and are carefully surveyed by cartographers. They are marked with signs, survey markers, and sometimes fences. Many are also supervised by border guards and immigration officials. But when national borders are also natural features of the earth, like rivers, oceans, or mountain ridges, they can sometimes move. This brings us to the glacier that covers the peaks of the Alps. The border between Switzerland and Italy runs over the highest ridge of the Alps, and the glacier underneath is moving. This is cause for concern, as you can imagine. It's a special concern for businesses, such as ski resorts, that can change nationality without moving at all. Vox tells us the history of the Swiss-Italian glacial border and what's to become of it as climate change melts the glacier.

One part of figure skating that you don't see that much of on TV is the part where a skater's fans will throw things onto the ice after a performance. At one time, it was customary to throw flowers on the ice, but that left a lot of debris that had to be cleaned up, and in 2001 the US banned flowers from rinks because of security concerns after 9/11. But fans found another way to show their adoration- by throwing stuffed animal toys on the ice. Skaters talked to NBC Sports about the gifts they've had thrown at them, which sometimes require an army of sweepers to collect. Michelle Kwan had a full skating outfit thrown once -and it fit her! Elvis Stojko and Patrick Chan have seen lingerie thrown on the ice. Stojko got a bra once with a name and phone number attached. Debi Thomas once got a Domino's pizza. And of course, there are the stuffed animals.

What happens to all those toys? For international competitions, shipping them all home is out of the question, so skaters pick and choose what to keep, while the rest are given away. Michelle Kwan once threw a stuffed animal on the rink for a skater she admired before she became famous. Now she still has a great number of stuffed toys still stored at her parents' home, but believes they may be too old to give away. Read about the toys and the stranger items thrown at figure skaters at NBC.  -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Luu)

We've been graced with a few songs by The Kiffness where he turns cat noises into music here and at Supa Fluffy. We've also seen TikTok chains where people add onto existing videos until it's a full orchestra. In this video, TikTokers started with a Kiffness video in which an angry cat has already been autotuned, but changed the song to something you'll recognize. These TikTok chains can go in many directions, but this particular collaboration is an earworm. The third vocalist (second rapper) has some NSFW lyrics. -via Fark

👃 Just think of it as the opposite of wearing your mask as a chinstrap: Behold the Kosk, a nose-only mask from South Korea. The name is a portmanteau of 'Ko' (Korean for 'nose') and 'mask.'

🎵 This makes us happy: YouTuber played Toto's Africa using the musical instruments found in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask on the Nintendo 3DS.

📷 This pic is out of this world! Photographer Michael Shainblum managed to snap the "impossible" photo of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Milky Way in a single frame.

🐱 Cat + Marble Run = Not what you'd expect outta cats!

🏠 General contractor Peter Cohen "catified" his house into the House of Nekko, a paradise for 24 rescue cats. Now that's a cat lover's dream (though cleaning the litterboxes of a house with that many cats is probably a nightmare).

🧙‍♀️ For those who love Halloween 365 day a year: Cookies that look like a witch's severed fingers. It's like nom-nom with a side of eww, so in short: perfect.

🐶 Here's how dogs identify various wild animals, a field guide by Megan McKay. Let's hope my dog never chases a spicy squirrel in our backyard. Related: Street Cats by Hillary White.

⛳ Watch Bill Murray casually hit a no-look golf putt at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am. Legend!

More neat posts over at our new sites: Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Infinite 1UP, Laughosaurus, Pop Culturista, Spooky Daily and Supa Fluffy.

Featured art: I'm Evil But I Have Feelings by indie artist Edu Ely.

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Images: Kosk, House of Nekko

We can easily purchase a chess set for around $20 or less. However, did you know that a handcrafted wooden chess set that is certified for the World Chess Championship can cost you as much as $500? All certified chess sets need to have knights that look the same, and there are only ten people or fewer that are trained to carve knights for these special sets. Business Insider visits a factory in Omrisar, India, to learn about the process of making these chess sets to provide a context as to why they’re so expensive.