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

 The most famous show business performers in history are no different than the unknowns, the obscures and the lesser knowns. Every performer has one thing in common- they all made their debut somewhere or other, whether auspicious or less so. Like they say, everyone has to start some place. Let's take a look at the show biz debuts and earliest performances of twenty stars.

1. Groucho Marx   

Groucho (pictured at right) had an early gig singing in a protestant church choir. This worked out well until they found out he was Jewish and fired him.

2. Harpo Marx

Groucho's older brother Harpo (on the left) made his debut at Coney Island at the age of 19. He was hijacked from his safe job as a piano player in a nickelodeon movie theater and tossed on stage to accompany his brothers, Groucho and Gummo (and another  singer named Lou Levy), as one of the Four Nightingales. Harpo was so scared he wet his pants. Harpo called it "the most wretched debut in the history off show business."

3. Sylvester Stallone

Sly got his first acting gig playing Smokey the Bear in a school play.

4. Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley's first-ever performance as a singer was in a singing contest at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair & Dairy Show. He was ten years old at the time. Dressed as a cowboy and wearing glasses, Elvis stood on a chair to reach the microphone. He sang Red Foley's "Old Shep" and won fifth prize in the contest. His prize was $5.00 plus a free ticket to all the rides at the fair.

5. Orson Welles

Orson's earliest public performance happened before he was ten years old. He appeared dressed as Peter Rabbit in the store window of Marshall Fields department store in Chicago. He was paid $25 a day.

When a cat has a poor opinion of something, they will let you know, clearly, in their own way. In this complication video from the Pet Collective, you'll see cats hating on modern technology, toys, food, family members, and everyday objects.

(YouTube link)

To be fair, some of these clips aren't so much dislike for objects, but more of a cat wanting to see how much destruction and chaos they can cause. Yet we still love them.

Sooner or later, just about every family takes a road trip to Six Flags, Disney World, or some other large theme park to show the kids a good time. That means standing in line for a hour to ride a one-minute ride, paying out the wazoo for lunch, and dealing with tired, cranky kids (or even worse, bored teenagers) and sunburn. There's a price to pay for everything.

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In the latest Honest Ad from Cracked, Roger Horton dresses up like Walt Disney and welcomes us to Hortonland, where all your dreams will come true- even if they are nightmares.  

The latest hipster food obsession is the "avolatte," a latte (which is a fancy term for coffee with milk) served in an avocado shell. Developed at the Truman Cafe in Melbourne, the idea has spread through the internet and around the world, pretty much instantly.

It appears to be an eco-friendly way to add a bit of avocado flavor to the drink, but not everyone likes the idea. Personally, I do not like avocado, and I do like having a handle on my coffee cup. -via Laughing Squid

(Image credit: ozeatingwa)

Jürgen Horn and Mike Powell continue their adventures in Vietnam, where they've been exploring villages on their own, without guides, away from the tourist spots. They'd heard that Tan Chau was where Vietnamese black silk was produced, so they set out with a map and their motorcycles -after  three ferry trips across the river.   

Properly motorized, we headed off in search of silk, stopping in a few towns where, to judge by the dumbfounded stares we received, foreigners are not an everyday occurrence. And nobody could help us. In fact, the famous black silk of Tan Chau didn’t seem to be all that famous in Tan Chau. Scouring the map, we decided to head to Long Chau, which looked like the region’s largest town. It was also the furthest away; if we struck out here, we agreed to give up.

Pressed right up along the river, Long Chau was cute, but we weren’t here to see the sights, dammit. We directed ourselves to the town’s central market, to look for silk vendors. If anyone knew where to find a silk manufacturing center, surely they. The owners of the first silk store were friendly but weirdly insistent we go to “Tân Châu Xứ Lụa”, which Google identified as a restaurant. “No, you must misunderstand us. But thanks anyway!”

But they eventually found a silk factory, and got some really neat pictures and video, which you can see at For 91 Days.  

This news anchor at the Russian channel MIR 24 is telling us about the planned renovation of some areas of Moscow, when she's interrupted by a Labrador retriever that had snuck behind the desk. It was startling.

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She tries to keep her cool and continue with the news, but all the attention is on the dog. Finally, she ends this clip by explaining that this is why she is a cat person. It's not nice to be upstaged. -via Tastefully Offensive

Cosplayer Cindy Salvus Artistry took a few lines from Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and made it a real thing. The character Yondu is mashed up with Mary Poppins! Here's the dialogue from the movie:

Star-Lord: You look like Mary Poppins.
Yondu: Is he cool?
Star-Lord: Hell yeah, he’s cool.
Yondu: I’m Mary Poppins, y’all!

And he certainly is. You can see more pictures of the character at Facebook and Instagram.

-via Geeks Are Sexy

The word "brainwashing" came about because of the Cold War. In the 1950s, Americans were shocked when thousands of soldiers captured by North Korea eventually confessed to war crimes they hadn't committed, and some even refused to return to the US when the war was  over. That was unthinkable.

Suddenly the threat of brainwashing was very real, and it was everywhere. The U.S. military denied the charges made in the soldiers’ “confessions,” but couldn’t explain how they’d been coerced to make them. What could explain the behavior of the soldiers besides brainwashing? The idea of mind control flourished in pop culture, with movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Manchurian Candidate showing people whose minds were wiped and controlled by outside forces. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover referred to thought-control repeatedly in his book Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. By 1980 even the American Psychiatric Association had given it credence, including brainwashing under “dissociative disorders” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-III. Had Chinese and Soviet Communists really uncovered a machine or method to rewrite men’s minds and supplant their free will?

The short answer is no—but that didn’t stop the U.S. from pouring resources into combatting it.

“The basic problem that brainwashing is designed to address is the question ‘why would anybody become a Communist?’” says Timothy Melley, professor of English at Miami University and author of The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. “[Brainwashing] is a story that we tell to explain something we can’t otherwise explain.”

Brainwashing seemed like mystical mind-control magic to the American public, although psychological change can be readily explained by simpler concepts, from persuasion to indoctrination to torture. The US government went into overdrive to research brainwashing in the 1950s, which you can read about at Smithsonian.

This coming Friday, May 26, will be the 50th anniversary of the release of the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Atlantic takes a close look at one of its most memorable songs, "A Day in the Life." It's no sing-along, but more of an anthem that reflects the many changes the Beatles had gone through since finding fame in the early '60s. For example, John Lennon makes himself into an observer of life from inside a bubble instead of a participant.  

That’s how he was writing, beachcombing inspiration from headlines and news briefs in the January 17 Daily Mail, which he had open at his piano (for this song); from a circus poster hanging in his home (“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”); from a cereal advertisement (“Good Morning Good Morning”); from his child’s drawing (“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”). In the song, the young man whose death gets noticed in the newspaper references an acquaintance of the Beatles, a Guinness beer company heir named Tara Browne, who crashed his Lotus sports car at high speed. Lennon reimagines Browne into the half-recognizable, presumably upper-class man who has it made and then throws it all away. What does it say that one crowd is transfixed by a privileged stranger’s grisly demise, but another crowd rejects a film about the achievement of a generation, the world war won? Only the singer of the song is willing to go back there, and only because he’s read the book.

There are many layers to the song, deconstructed in an article at the Atlantic. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Maclen Music)

Prom season in #Vancouver pic.twitter.com/pgLUqdkgjd

— Adam Scotti (@AdamScotti) May 20, 2017

It's prom season, and a group of students from the Catholic boy's school Vancouver College were taking photographs by the Stanley Park seawall in Vancouver with their dates before the dance Friday. A jogger went by, providing quite a contrast with the group in formal dress. But this jogger was Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau! When the teenagers yelled at him to stop for a minute, he posed for a picture with the group.

UPDATED: Justin Trudeau jogs by unsuspecting teens, stops for 'memorable' graduation photo https://t.co/xqXKYO7UWF pic.twitter.com/p0n2yvzeL7

— CTV Vancouver (@CTVVancouver) May 21, 2017

It's not every day you get a prom picture with the leader of your country. -via Uproxx

Dane Christianson (ChraneD) posted this gif to reddit's shitty robots forum with the title How to properly ask out the Queen of Shitty Robots. Of course, he's referring to Simone Giertz, whose ridiculous robots we've posted a few times. Gertz was rendered speechless for a nanosecond, then said,

Which everyone considers a win among engineers.

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

(Image credit: Bybbisch94, Christian Gebhardt)

If you've ever heard of the Nazca lines, you have this woman to thank for preserving them for posterity. And if you've ever doubted that one person can make a difference, think again…

HELP WANTED

In 1932, a 20-year-old German woman named Maria Reiche answered a newspaper ad and landed a job in Peru, tutoring the sons of the German consul. After that, she bounced from job to job and eventually found work translating documents for an archaeologist named Julio Tello.

One day she happened to overhear a conversation between Tello and another archaeologist, Toribio Mejia. Mejia described some mysterious lines he'd seen in a patch of desert about 250 miles south of the capital of Lima, near the small town of Nazca. He tried to interest Tello in the lines, but Tello dismissed them as unimportant. Reiche wasn't so sure. She decided to go to Nazca and have a look for herself.

MYSTERIOUS LINES

(Image credit: PIERRE ANDRE LECLERCQ)

Gazing across the desert floor, Reiche was amazed at what she saw: More than 1,000 lines crisscrossing 200 square miles of desert, some as narrow as footpaths, others more than 15 feet wide. Many ran almost perfectly straight for miles across the desert, deviating as little as four yards in a mile.

In the 21st century, we are so used to computers being able to create an image of anything that we forget what a hassle that used to be. For 2D logos, that meant drawing, paste-ups, and photography. For film, it was more complicated because you wanted a 3D effect, or at least some hint or possibility of movement. Co.Design put together several videos and discussions of how TV logos were made of actual physical objects created to brand the channel, then filmed to give them an identity that everyone would recognize. See how the logos of RTF, BBC, and HBO were created.

Toy Story 4 is planned for 2019. That's 24 years after the first movie. You have to wonder how long they can keep it up. This comic from Berkeley Mews gives us an idea of how the story might be ultimately wrapped up. Too bad it's an animated horror film. -via Geeks Are Sexy

When Hugh Jackman was first cast as the X-Men character Wolverine, he went to work researching the animal. But he did that research on wolves.  

“I didn’t even know there was a wolverine. I literally, embarrassingly did about two weeks of research on wolves. I was rehearsing for three weeks and I was shooting, so I was kind of on my own. I remember going past an IMAX in Toronto, and there was an IMAX documentary about wolves, and so I thought, ‘I’ll go and see that,'” Jackman said Wednesday.

When they stared shooting 2000’s “X-Men,” director Bryan Singer noticed something wasn’t right with Jackman’s performance.

“He said, ‘Are you sort of walking funny, what’s going on?’ And I said, ‘I’ve been doing this thing with wolves,’ and he goes, ‘You know you’re not a wolf, right?'” Jackman recalled.

Singer found out that Jackman didn't know wolverines existed as their own species. A trip to a zoo was in order. To be fair, there are no wolverines in Australia. That was 17 years ago; we can assume that Jackman knows all about wolverines now. Read the entire story at Page Six. -via The A.V. Club