Some of the most important events can slip past us because we don't know how important they are until much later. You know about Sputnik, Elvis, and Rosa Parks, but did you know that The Pill was developed in the '50s?
You probably think that – along with Twister and concept albums – the oral contraceptive pill was one of the great inventions of the swinging sixties. In fact, it was a product of the more famously staid and conservative fifties. Developed by a team of biologists led by Gregory Pincus, it was first tested in Puerto Rico April 1956. The Food and Drug Administration did not approve the marketing of the pill until 1960, just in time for it to be a symbol of sixties freedom.
Read about four other events that also turned out to be very newsworthy ...much later. Link
What's 65 feet tall and consists of 340 bicycles and one tricycle? A work called Cyclisk, newly installed in Santa Rosa, California, by artists Mark Grieve and Ilana Spector. Placed among several car dealers, the obelisk was funded by a grant from Nissan to the city of Santa Rosa, which has a regulation that one percent of major construction project funds be devoted to art. Link -via Unique Daily
A woman in China has done what many of us would like to do. Chen Xiaomei, a lawyer in Xian, Shaanxi province is suing a movie theater and a film distributor for wasting her time by playing twenty minutes of advertising before a film.
Chen Xiaomei claims she was unreasonably treated by the cinema's owners and the distributors of the film she went to see, because she was not warned there would be 20 minutes of adverts prior to the screening of the main feature. She is demanding a full refund (35 yuan), an extra 35 yuan in compensation for emotional damages and a written apology, reports the Xinhua agency.
In addition, Xiaomei is calling for the Polybona International cinema in the northern city of Xian to publish the length of advertisements on its website, in the lobby or on its customer hotline. In total, they should be less than five minutes, she says.
The film was Aftershock, a big hit in China. Chen's lawsuit has been accepted by the People's Court in Xian. Link -via Arbroath
The webcomic Subnormality by Winston Rowntree has a series of pictures illustrating the difference between reality and your perception of reality using monsters. This is only the first one, which is a concept I'm trying to teach my adolescent daughters. Link -via The Daily What
A man burglarized a house in Redhill, Surrey, England Saturday and stole a telephone and a package of bacon. That's all he took.
Det Con Knowles said: "This is a very peculiar burglary as the suspect placed a rasher of bacon over a door handle before leaving the property.
"The victims are at a loss to understand why someone would break in to their house and steal a packet of bacon and we are equally stumped as to who this potentially peckish suspect is."
The telephone was recovered. The bacon is nowhere to be found. Can you imagine why anyone would steal wonderful, delicious bacon? Police have released this CCTV image of the suspect. Link-Thanks, Steve Piercy!
DeviantART member kreugan wondered how Princesses from classic Disney movies would fare as comic book super heroes. They look awesome! See all eight princesses at her gallery. Link -via Buzzfeed
Think you know everything about the history of dieting? Fat chance.
Slim to None
To put it mildly, dieting wasn't really a concern for our ancestors. For them, the main problem was getting more carbs, fat, and sugar into their systems, not less. That's why, in all of human history, the first person to go on a recorded weight-loss diet was England's first king, William I. Better known as William the Conqueror, by all accounts, he's the fattest man to lead a major country until William Howard Taft became stuck in a bathtub nearly 1,000 years later. Near the end of his life, William became so corpulent that he was unable to get on a horse, a major drawback at a time when that was a key means of transportation and regal honor. To cut his waistline, William adopted a liquid diet; with "liquid" here meaning "liquor." For the better part of a year, the king attempted to subsist on nothing but alcohol. Amazingly, this worked better than you might expect and, eventually, he was even able to get back in the saddle. Unfortunately, this also led to his undoing. Not long after losing the weight, the king was riding his horse when it reared, driving the saddle horn into his gut and causing internal injuries that killed him shortly thereafter. To add insult to fatal injury, when it came time to load William into his casket, it turned out his diet hadn't worked all that well, Courtiers still had to squeeze him into the box. Thus, appropriately, the first diet was also the first failed diet.
Fletcherism
The first fad diet programs began popping up in the 19th century in America, usually centered around sanitarium health spas. But it wasn't until the dawn of the 20th century that the diet really became part of popular culture. Much of the credit for that achievement goes to Horace Fletcher, a businessman and self-taught nutritionist who became the 20th century's first diet guru. Fletcher's diet was really more of an overall plan for how people ought to eat, whether they were fat or not. To Fletcher, most of America's dietary health, from corpulence to bad dental hygiene, could be explained by one simple fact: people weren't chewing enough. Fletcher taught that, for ideal health, people should chew food until it becomes liquid in their mouths. Yum. From 1895 until 1919, Fletcherism was a part of the American psyche, with believers claiming that it would help you lose weight, keep your teeth clean and healthy, and save you money on food you'd have otherwise wasted in rushed, careless eating. For best weight-loss results, Fletcherites were also urged to eat only when they were really, really hungry and to never eat when their emotions were running high. If they followed these rules, and adequately chewed everything, they could eat whatever they wanted.
Weight Watchers
Arguable not so much a "fad" as a long-standing love affair, Weight Watchers was started in the small Queens, New York home of Jean Nidetch in the early 1960s. According to her own reports, Nidetch had always been a "big girl," and had never felt comfortable around thin people, preferring to build friendships with people who were struggling with their weight as much as she was. As a young wife in her 20s, Nidetch decided to finally get control of her body, but even after losing 20 pounds in 10 weeks using a diet sponsored by the New York City Board of Health, she found she couldn't seem to stick to the plan in the long term. That was when she realized she needed the support of her friends. Nidetch began holding weekly meetings at her house, passing copies of the Board of Health Diet to anyone who came, with the hope that the more people were dieting together the better they all would do. Bear in mind, this predates the self-help movement and its attendant support-group networks. Nidetch and her friends were making this all up from scratch, and it turned out to be an addictive recipe. Within three months of her first meeting, more than 40 people were cramming into Nidetch's house on a weekly basis. Over the next year, she started several different groups around the New York metro area, finally incorporating her fledgling business in May of 1963. Now down to a trim 142 pounds, Nidetch hosted her first official Weight Watchers meeting, drawing more than 400 attendees.
The Drinking Man's Diet
In 1964, stylish San Franciscan Robert Cameron launched the one diet we would personally be ecstatic to follow. Combining his triple loves (booze, gourmet food, and weight loss), Cameron launched what he christened "The Drinking Man's Diet," aiming it at slightly chubby men-about-town such as himself. Cameron began the business with a simple pamphlet, price at $1 (cheap!) and within two years he'd sold more than 2 million copies. And no wonder. At its core, The Drinking Man's Diet was a pre-Atkins take on the low-carbohydrate plan. In Cameron's time, however, low-carb tended to take the form of country-club lunch foods: fine steaks, meaty fish, French sauces, and high-quality cheese. Cameron called this "man-type" food and supplemented it with a healthy daily serving of booze. Noting that distilled spirits, such as rum, vodka, and gin, all contained mere trace amounts of carbs, Cameron incorporated them into his plan, thus finding a way to stand out from the crowd by crafting a diet perfectly fit for the pages of Playboy. In fact, the Drinking Man's Diet and Cameron himself are still going strong. The pamphlet now costs $4.95 on Amazon.com while Cameron remain svelte at 96 years old.
And Another Thing: The Other "Ayds"
Just a simple appetite-suppressant candy laced with phenylpropanolamine (try it in chocolate, caramel, or butterscotch!), Ayds were the toast of the weight-conscious 1970s. Then, the company hit a small marketing snag. Although company officials claimed that there had been no HIV-related impact on sales in 1983, within five years Ayds had lost 50 percent of its market share and the company was reluctantly forced to "soften" the name to "Diet Ayds," a name that customers were less prone to associate with the horrific virus-related deaths.
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The article above was reprinted with permission from mental_floss' book In the Beginning.
From Big Hair to the Big Bang, here's a Mouthwatering Guide to the Origins of Everything by our friends at mental_floss.
Did you know that paper clips started out as Nazi-fighting warriors? Or that cruise control was invented by a blind genius? Read it all in the book!
It's time for another Fill in the Bubble Frenzy with boy genius Mal and his talking dog Chad! Fill in the empty speech bubble and win any T-shirt available in the NeatoShop -take a look around, pick one out and tell us what shirt you’d like with your submission in the comments. If you don't specify a t-shirt with your entry, you forfeit the prize. Enter as many times as you like (text only, please), but leave only one entry per comment. For inspiration, check out Mal and Chad’s comic strip adventures by Stephen McCranie at malandchad.com. Good luck!
Update: Congratulations to our winner, Matt, who said "I think you misheard! I wanted PteriYAKI!"
Google Instant brings up results for your search terms as you type. That's weird enough in itself, but use it to type the lyrics to Tom Lehrer's "Elements Song" and it quickly turns to entertainment! -via Boing Boing
Anson Wong spent years running a global network of illegal wildlife trafficking. He smuggled contraband such as Sumatran rhino horns, panda and snow leopard fur, and live endangered species across borders for those who paid premium prices.
Wong previously served five years in U.S. prison, after being nabbed by an extraordinary international undercover investigation by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service called Operation Chameleon, considered one of the most successful in history. [You can read about this extraordinary sting operation in last January's National Geographic, in writer Bryan Christy's story, 'The Kingpin".] But Wong's wife continued to operate the smuggling network while her husband was in prison, and Wong returned to Penang in 2003 to resume his criminal activities. "Nothing can be done to me," Wong boasted then to an undercover agent. "I could sell a panda -- and, nothing. As long as I'm here, I'm safe."
He was caught this time by an alert airline security officer [Hear! Hear!] who noticed the broken lock on his luggage, and found it to be full of 95 boa constrictors.
The good news is that traffickers are no longer safe from prosecution in Malaysia. Wong was convicted by Malaysian court this week under a new law designed to crack down on the illegal wildlife trade. Link
This is an image taken by the Hubble telescope of a binary star system (named AFGL 3068) in which one star is a a carbon star, a dying red giant, which throws off material in which appears to us to be a spiral pattern. The explanation of this very strange star system is at Bad Astronomy. Link -via Monkeyfilter
The roof of the reptile house caught on fire at the Poestlingberg Zoo in Linz, Austria. One species that couldn't make a quick getaway from the billowing smoke were the four huge tortoises.
Quick-thinking firemen and zoo staff adapted oxygen masks designed for humans to save the lives of the 140lb African-spurred tortoises.
"We expect them to make a full recovery," vet Isabella Eberle told CEN. "The masks were designed for human use but we managed to make them fit."
This baby monkey clings to a young boar for security as it roams about the Fukuchiyama Zoo in Kyoto, Japan. TV reports on the two have caused five times the usual number of people to visit the zoo!
Baby monkeys are known to cling to their mother for many months after they are born, and Miwa the orphaned monkey seems to think of the boar as his mommy (even though the boar is a boy). Miwa has also taken a liking to the woman who works at the zoo’s ticket counter. When he’s not riding the boar, Miwa is usually sleeping in the woman’s lap.
Both the monkey and the wild boar are growing up fast. The rodeos will only continue until the monkey grows out of the stage at which he feels it needs to cling to a parent – or – until the the boar will no longer tolerate the presence of a monkey on his back.
See several other videos of Miwa and the boar at Japan Probe. Link
Our friends at Urlesque are staging a giveaway in which you can win prizes from the NeatoShop! Just select an item valued at $25 or less and post that item and how you're going to use it in the comment section of the Urlesque giveaway post, or at their Facebook page. Four winners will be selected randomly. Good luck! Link
Oh, did you think Morse code was obsolete and had no use in the modern world? Here are six ways the code is still used -although most of these gadgets were designed specifically for geeks who know Morse code to show off their knowledge. I would be impressed! Shown is a Morse code leather arm guard, a steampunk creation by Etsy seller ProfMaelstromme. http://blog.promomachine.co.uk/morse-code/ -Thanks, David!
