Before young Wolfgang Mozart became the toast of Europe, the family promoted his older sister, Maria Anna Mozart.

“Virtuosic.” “A prodigy.” “Genius.” These words were written in the 1760s about Mozart—Maria Anna Mozart. When she toured Europe as a pianist, young Maria Anna wowed audiences in Munich, Vienna, Paris, London, the Hague, Germany and Switzerland. “My little girl plays the most difficult works which we have … with incredible precision and so excellently,” her father, Leopold, wrote in a letter in 1764. “What it all amounts to is this, that my little girl, although she is only 12 years old, is one of the most skillful players in Europe.”

Her younger brother learned to play as well and eventually joined her on tour. However, Maria, who the family called Nannerl, was taken off the concert circuit when she became old enough to marry. We'll never know what could have become of her music if she'd had the same opportunities as Wolfgang. However, Smithsonian looks at Nannerl's influence on her brother and how much she may have been responsible for his fame. Link

Encyclopedia Dramatica was always a place to get in-depth information on internet culture, memes, and history, but the site was rarely linked here at Neatorama because it was NSFW and far from family-friendly. Now Encyclopedia Dramatica is no more, and a new site has risen in its place. The new Oh Internet is dedicated to the same type of information, but is not open to unlimited editing by users as ED was. Geekosystem has more on the big switch. Link to story. http://ohinternet.com/Main_Page to website.

Alexia Sloane is only ten years old, but she got the opportunity to work as an interpreter at the European Parliament in Brussels. Alexia received an exception to the age 14 minimum rule because she is fluent in English, French, Spanish, and Mandarin, and is now learning German -and she does a great job interpreting. Did I mention that Alexia is blind?

Alexia has been tri-lingual since birth as her mother, a teacher, is half French and half Spanish, while her father, Richard, is English.

She started talking and communicating in all three languages before she lost her sight but adapted quickly to her blindness. By the age of four, she was reading and writing in Braille.

When she was six, Alexia added Mandarin to her portfolio. She will soon be sitting a GCSE in the language having achieved an A* in French and Spanish last year. The girl is now learning German at school in Cambridge.

Alexia has wanted to be an interpreter since she was six and chose to go to the European Parliament as her prize when she won a young achiever of the year award.

Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Geoff Robinson)

The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Absolutely Absorbing Bathroom Reader. Contains spoilers, but you can skip to the end and watch the entire movie first if you like.

There are bad movies...and then there are BAD movies. Years ago the Medved brothers reintroduced stinkers like Plan 9 From Outer Space to the public in their groundbreaking books, The 50 Worst Films of All Time and The Golden Turkey Awards. The "Mystery Science Theater 3000" gave us a chance to watch the best of the worst on TV. Today there are millions of bad movie buffs... and Uncle John is one of them. Here's one of his favorite stinkers.

ROBOT MONSTER (1953)
Starring George Nader, Claudia Barrett, Selena Royle, John Mylong, George Barrows.

Background: Director Phil Tucker made this opus for less than $20,000. He couldn't afford to rent a real robot costume, but (fortunately for bad movie lovers) he knew a guy named George Barrows, who owned his own gorilla suit. "When [moviemakers] needed a gorilla in a picture," Tucker explained to the Medveds in The Golden Turkey Awards, "they called George. [He] got like forty bucks a day... [but] I thought, 'George will work for me for nothing. I'll get a diving helmet, put it on him, and it'll work!'"

It did work. Years later, Tucker's robot even won an award. Okay, it was a Golden Turkey Award for "The Most Ridiculous Monster in Screen History." But it was well-deserved. "Unlike many other cinematic robots," Ken Beggs writes in Jabootu's Bad Movie Universe, "[this one] has the appearance of a morbidly obese man in a shaggy gorilla costume, adorned with a deep sea diving helmet over his nylon-stocking bedecked noggin" -and the helmet was topped with a rabbit-ears TV antenna. You have to see it to believe it.

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Note: Strange anomaly for such a seat-of-the-pants production: Robot Monster was filmed in 3D, and the music recorded in stereo. Even more surprising: the score was written by Elmer Bernstein, later one of Hollywood's most accomplished composers (he wrote the music, for example, for The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape).

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It's difficult to determine exactly what is going on here, because the small amount of information that came with this video is in Polish. Zenek is the "mascot" of the Lublin University of Technology's superconductor laboratory. Isn't he cute? -via Arbroath

Just like Pop Tart Cat, these are sweet and colorful and fun, but they are also real marshmallows treats you can make at home. The instructions are at the decorated cookie. Link -via Laughing Squid

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Last week we met Cady Coleman, who is both a musician and an astronaut. Here she is performing the first ever space-earth musical duet with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. Coleman is aboard the International Space Station, while Anderson is somewhere on earth. -Thanks, özi!

So there you are at the office and your mind wanders. For some reason, you don't have the internet to keep you occupied, but you have plenty of paper clips. People can get very creative with paper clips, as you'll see in this post from Kuriositas. There are gadgets, toys, artworks, science experiments, and this amazing set of weapons Brett made. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Dan4th Nicholas)

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Cute little Cookie is a penguin of the species known as Little Penguin {wiki}. He is the mascot of the Zoo Bird House at the Cincinnati Zoo. On a related note, I looked up "bumblefoot" and found out where they got the name for the penguin in the movie Happy Feet. -via Ever So Strange

I love spring, but man, it keeps you busy: spring cleaning, garden planting, Easter preparations -whew! But you need to take some downtime this weekend and catch up on what's been going on here at Neatorama.

My Parents Hate Me at NeatoBambino is the story of a drum set the grandparents bought. Tiffany had to be creative to thwart their diabolical plan! And if you've been keeping up with her series called Weeks and Counting, you now know what her real title is.

Phil Haney brought us the lowdown on The Almost Famous Relatives of Famous People.

Jill Harness dug up 10 Origin Stories of Common Household Products for your edification.

Uncle John's Bathroom Reader followed the deterioration process in When Good Food Goes Bad.

The Annals of Improbable Research gave us What Lies Behind the Grand Canyon?

We learned the story behind "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson, courtesy of mental_floss magazine.

In the What Is It? game this week, it took more than 50 guesses for someone to come up with the correct answer! Berhard finally said this object is a corn dryer. You stick it into an ear of corn to hang and dry it so you could use the kernels for seed corn. trishlovesdolphins gave us the funniest answer: it’s the air freshener from Mad Max’s car! Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop.

We've got a lot of in-depth articles compiled over the years on subjects that are way more interesting than you might have thought. You'll find those at The Best of Neatorama, arranged by year, with pictures to make it easy for you to find something good to read. And there's more on the way next week!

If you have any suggestions, comments, or questions about Neatorama, feel free to leave them here in these weekend roundup posts anytime. We'd love to hear from you!

We showed you 13 Hilarious Peeps Candy Easter Dioramas and led you to Sci-Fi Peeps Dioramas, but since it's the season for Peeps, there are always more! Check out a roundup of Peeps dioramas that aspire to what we call high culture: scenes of artists, art galleries, famous artworks, and literary references, and a symphony as well, in this collection of pictures from the Chicago Tribune's competitions at mental_floss. Shown here is a marshmallow version of Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles. Link

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An entire litter of easily-distracted kittens nevertheless give their best in an effort to rid their home of nasty shadows. -via Cynical-C

Ever wondered what bears consider worth their hard-earned money? You probably could have guessed this one, but Pleated Jeans has also charted how bats, cats, kangaroos, snails, rabbits, bluejays, anteaters, and more animals are spending their tax refunds. Link to part one. Link to part two.

Billed as "the ultimate stiletto," this pair of shoes is made of gold or platinum (your choice) and encrusted with 2,200 handset diamonds, over 30 karats total. It also features "the exquisite Stamen Fluted Heal" (sic). It also comes with extra soles, so it will never wear out. The price? £100,000. That's $163,500 US. Got that in a size 6E? Link -via J-Walk Blog

U.S. income tax returns must be in the mail by Monday, but most people who did not have to pay more into the system have already filed. Many folks who expect refunds got the money faster by getting refund anticipation loans, or RALs. Mother Jones explains how refund anticipation loans work, by looking how John Hewitt, founder of Jackson-Hewitt, got into the loan business. The RAL was invented by Ross Longfield in 1987.

Ultimately, Longfield persuaded H&R Block to sign up. But no one was as smitten as John Hewitt—who understood that people earning $15,000 or $20,000 or $25,000 a year live in a perpetual state of financial turmoil. Hewitt began opening outposts in the inner cities, Rust Belt towns, depressed rural areas—anywhere the misery index was high. "That was the low-hanging fruit," he says. "Going into lower-income areas and delivering refunds quicker was where the opportunity was."

Customers wanting a RAL paid Jackson Hewitt a $24 application fee, a $25 processing fee, and a $2 electronic-filing fee, plus 4 percent of the loan amount. On a $2,000 refund, that meant $131 in charges—equivalent to an annual interest rate of about 170 percent—not to mention the few hundred bucks you might spend for tax preparation. "Essentially, they're charging people triple-digit interest rates to borrow their own money," says Chi Chi Wu, a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center.

A few hundred bucks for tax preparation? Really?

"These businesses are in this neighborhood for one reason: They see they can make a killing here," says Ramon Dalmasi, an accountant with a front-row seat on the growth of the instant tax business. Dalmasi opened a bookkeeping business in the Bronx in 1997 and watched as chain after tax-prep chain popped up on commercial strips in his community. A few years ago, he relocated to Yonkers, an aging suburb just north of New York City, and found the same chains there as well. "They don't see people struggling to put food on the table," he says. "They just see people who can make them millions." Even without a RAL, a working parent who qualifies for the EITC often pays $300 or more at a tax mill. Dalmasi, a CPA who teaches accounting at nearby Lehman College, charges that same client $75 or $100. "Why should I charge anything more than that," he asks, "when it's taking me 20 minutes?"

I have four different types of income from many small sources and a family of six, but my CPA only charges $100. The article points out how the poor are being taken advantage of, but as some have said elsewhere, this type of loan is still preferable to organized crime loans. Link -via Metafilter, where there's a lively discussion on this article.

(Image credit: Joshua Lutz)

See also: Why Do People Fall For Payday Loans?