The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Canoramic Bathroom Reader.

You’ve heard of Puff the Magic Dragon; Smaug, the dragon in The Hobbit; and Norbert, the dragon in the Harry Potter books. Here’s a look at some dragons you may not have heard of.

BACKGROUND

Stories of enormous, terrifying reptilian beasts have been part of folklore around the world for longer than the written record can tell us. And while the beasts in these stories vary greatly, they have several traits in common: they are virtually always depicted as having snakelike or lizardlike bodies, they’re almost always covered or partially covered in scales, and they often (but not always) have wings. Here are some of the most historically significant dragonlike beasts ever recorded.

APEP

One of history’s earliest recorded mythical creatures with dragonlike characteristics, this ancient Egyptian god, also called the “Evil Lizard,” was the god of darkness and evil. Depictions of Apep vary. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which dates to 2100 B.C., he is described as a giant serpent, more than 50 cubits (about 75 feet) long, with a head made of flint. In some paintings he looks like a long skinny snake; in others he is part snake, part crocodile. Yet other images show him with a large, stout body; a long tail; and the arms, hands, and face of a human. He was also said to have magical powers, including the ability to hypnotize other gods with his gaze— very similar to a characteristic later attributed to other dragons.

HUMBABA

(Image credit: British Museum)

Another of the earliest dragonlike monsters, this beast is in one of the oldest known pieces of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, found etched into clay tablets in the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh. The tablets, which date to the eighteenth century B.C., tell the stories of Gilgamesh, the legendary warrior king of Uruk, a city in Sumer. In one tale, Gilgamesh sets out to kill the guardian of the Cedar Forest, a terrifying beast known as Humbaba. Humbaba is described as having the head and paws of a lion, the horns of a bull, the claws of a vulture, a body covered in scales, and a long tail which ended in the head of a snake. He has magical powers, including the ability to change the shape of his face and that most dragonlike characteristic: the ability to breathe fire.

KAMPE, THE SHE-DRAGON

The latest in the asdfmovie series is number nine. It’s totally insane, with vignettes that lead you in one direction and then skew sideways in the blink of an eye.

(YouTube link)

A gift from TomSka (previously at Neatorama). -via Geeks Are Sexy

This is a beautiful and touching animation of a woman’s life, by Junichi Yamamoto, a freelance video director and artist.

(YouTube link)

The machine translation of the video description from Japanese made little sense, but I believe this is an ad for a job placement service. -via Digg
 

We love movie villains. Take away the villain, and what’s left is just attractive movie stars with nothing to do. Actors love to play the villain and go nuts with the role. You wouldn’t want to run into any of these characters in real life, but from our seats in the audience, they’re safely scary and often strangely attractive.

(YouTube link)

This supercut features the villains of over 150 movies (if I counted them right). I was surprised to recognize almost all of them. The list of films used is here. Oh yeah, contains NSFW language. -via Daily of the Day
 

Gosha is a pet, but she’s also a typical raccoon. They wash things. That’s what they do. Gosha has her own tub, and plenty of toys she can wash in addition to her food, but she’s found other things to wash. What is she washing now?

(YouTube link)

There’s a good possibility the language in this video may be NSFW if your boss speaks Russian. -via Tastefully Offensive   

The bible shown here is three feet tall and weighs 165 pounds. It’s made of the skins of 160 animals. The handwriting throughout the Codex Gigas is consistent, leading experts to believe it was hand written by a single 13th century Benedictine monk, including the illustrations. That feat would have taken 30 years, even if he worked every day. But this book is called the “Devil’s Bible” for a reason. Read about the Codex Gigas and the legend that grew up around the mysterious text at Urban Ghosts. 

(Image credit: Kungl. biblioteket)

The year 2005 was when the number of blogs on the internet exploded, with around 50 million people deciding that they could do that. Ten years later, most of those blogs have been taken down or abandoned, while millions more took their place. The ones that survived required real dedication to make it this far. On August 9th of that year, Alex Santoso launched his blog Neatorama, with a pledge to himself to post at least five items a day. Ten years later, a half-dozen writers post a couple dozen items a day plus exclusive features. We have a shop to support the blog, where artists from all over the internet display their creative t-shirt designs. We have an active presence on social media, plus partners, friends, and contributors. This all came about not only because of Alex’s hard work, also but because he always believed in sharing, promoting, and encouraging bloggers, artists, writers, and content creators. That generosity made Neatorama stand out from the crowd.  

For the occasion of Neatorama’s tenth anniversary, I decided to go back and find the biggest posts ever. These are the ones people loved, shared, and remembered, and many of them are still popular years later. They are extreme standouts; a post had to have at least a quarter-million views just to be considered for this list. That said, I can’t vouch for its complete accuracy. The metrics we use to tally views weren’t instituted until 2012, so posts that went viral before that are seriously undercounted. I gave extra weight to some of those older posts, but other articles that deserve to be on this list may have been so undercounted that we overlooked them. You know, it really says something about an article from, say, 2007, when half a million people read it after it was five years old!  

I sifted through more than 80,000 posts to compile this list, so I hope you take some time to check out the links you are interested in, especially if you haven’t been hanging around Neatorama for the entire past ten years. If you have, or even if you’ve joined us recently, you’re invited to share your favorite posts, memories, questions, kudos, complaints, and suggestions with us. 

20. Top 15 Amazingly Fat Cats

The fat cats list was Alex's first big viral feature, in May of 2006. It should probably rank higher, since we don't know how many views it garnered before 2012. Posting about cats was a genius move at the time. The term LOLcat wasn't even coined until the next month, but we were LOL-ing already. The post was later added as an external reading link at Wikipedia.

19. 13 Photographs That Changed the World 

Unless you were a youngster, you were already familiar with the photographs. They are the ones we want to see again. And the stories of how each affected the world were fascinating. 

18. 10 Kick Ass Facts About Bruce Lee

Bruce Lee was the little guy who could plaster the wall with Chuck Norris's body parts, and look good doing it. He was even more interesting off screen, as we learned in Alex's trivia post from 2007.

17. 33 Pictures Taken at Just the Right Moment

This post from only a year ago is still steadily racking up views. It came in second in the end-of-the-year list in 2014.

Andrew Cremeans grew up in Tampa, Florida, in the neighborhood that was used as the setting of the 1990 film Edward Scissorhands. In the movie, the area seemed eerily fresh and suburban, with houses painted pastel colors and, eventually, custom topiary shrubbery in every yard. Twenty-five years later, Cremeans returned to the neighborhood to see how it had changed. And took pictures. He talked to Mashable about his project.

I couldn't believe how small of a section the neighborhood was used, it seemed so huge in the movie. It feels especially small when you are standing and looking down the street to the cul de sac the castle was on. It really just felt like any old Tampa neighborhood. I caught myself wondering many times if all these people know that their house was in the movie. If it were my house, I'd have a huge framed poster of my screenshot of the movie in my living room.

The trees that have grown up over a quarter-century make a huge difference. What I really want to know is how they managed to demolish that huge mountain in the background. See all of Cremeans’ photos paired with screenshots from the movie at imgur. -via mental_floss

In the spirit of Backstroke of the West, we have 84 screencaps of a Harry Potter movie with English subtitles translated from the Chinese-dubbed dialogue. Is it a machine translation, or just a weak effort? Does the person who subtitles DVDs even know English? Maybe they don’t know Chinese, either, because they all seem quite random. Then again, I'm just a melon. -via Pleated-Jeans

We knew astronaut Chris Hadfield was a musician when we saw him sing “Space Oddity” on the ISS. Now he’s written a song called “Feet Up,” about his personal experience with the lack of gravity in space.

(YouTube link)

It’s the first single from the album Space Sessions: Songs From a Tin Can, available for pre-order from iTunes. The entire album will be released October 9th. -via Digg

A pair of New York street dancers prepare to tumble and breakdance for the crowd at Washington Square Park. But when they turn the music on, instead of hip-hop, the strains of Tchaikovsky’s "Sleeping Beauty Waltz" came out! What to do? There was nothing to do but dance!

(YouTube link)

It soon became clear that these guys knew what they were doing. They are professional ballet dancers, as were the two women they pulled out of the crowd to dance with. This is the latest stunt from Improv Everywhere, which they performed several times for the changing crowds that afternoon. Read the details of the caper at their website. A good time was had by all. -via Buzzfeed

The franchise we know as Power Rangers debuted on American television in 1993 with the show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, but the concept was already old hat to Japanese TV audiences. The characters in the picture above are Zyurangers from the 1992-93 show Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger, one of the many Super Sentai Series shows that had been airing since 1975 in Japan. It was this show that became the American Power Rangers, thanks to a genius money-saving trick. Haim Saban of Saban Entertainment approached the Japanese producers about buying Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger, but only the action sequences!

This allowed Saban to essentially eject the vast majority of Zyuranger’s plot, and develop a vastly different story to slot the action sequences into. Originally, Zyuranger was not about modern-day people becoming superheroes, as many Super Sentai shows were. Rather, it was about a group of Humans who came from an ancient civilization that existed during the time of the dinosaurs 170 million years ago. The 5 heroes—Boi, Mei, Dan, Goushi, and Geki—were placed in suspended animation following the sealing away of their evil rival, the witch Bandora, only to reawaken in ‘90s Japan, following Bandora’s escape. Each hero represented one of 5 prehistoric “Guardian Beasts”, and they invoked their powers to summon giant robot dinosaurs and battle Bandora’s alien forces from a planet named Nemesis.

All that was dropped, and a team of California teenagers was inserted in the non-action sequences with a modern story. Who woudl know the difference, with the actors underneath masks? That led to some oddities, like the yellow Power Ranger being male in Japan and female in America. Read the entire story, including the connection between the Super Sentai Series and Spider-Man, at io9. -via the Presurfer

A spider web in the north Dallas suburb of Lakeside Park passes from tree to tree and stretches about as long as a football field and up to 40 feet high. Can a spider really spin a web that size? No, but hundreds of spiders can, if they cooperate with each other.

Most spiders work alone, but these massive webs encompass hundreds of spiders -- seemingly working together. Scientists suggest the webs are strung in cooperation in order to take advantage of rare influxes of insects, a hatch of midges or other water-borne insects from the nearby lake.

The spider species has not yet been identified, but is believed to be similar to the Tetragnathus guatamalensis species that built a similar community web in Lake Tawakoni State Park, Texas, in 2007. They are not harmful to people, and experts say it’s best to just let them be. Alrighty then. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Texas A&M/Mike Merchant)

Sam and Nia are obviously from the internet generation, where everything is recorded and everything is shared. He doesn't have to hide the camera, because she's used to it. The following video contains some intimate details of their bathroom habits, but if you can overlook that, you’ll enjoy the story.

(YouTube link)

Nia had her suspicions, but Sam found out that Nia is pregnant before she did. her reaction is priceless, as is that of their two kids. -via Viral Viral Videos

Did you pay a couple grand for a state-of-the-art refrigerator with in-door ice and water dispensers and fancy electronic controls? Maybe you ought to invest in a security camera, too, to determine whether you are drinking water from a nozzle drenched in dog drool.

(YouTube link)

Max discovered how to activate the water dispenser on the refrigerator so he can get a drink anytime he wants. Smart dog, expensive drinking fountain. -via Daily Picks and Flicks