The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.

by Marc Abrahams, Improbable Research staff

French teeth are something of a specialty for the president of Great Britain’s Royal Historical Society. Colin Jones, who is also a history professor at Queen Mary University of London, wrote two memorable monographs on the subject.

A Large Man Who Yanked Teeth
His study called “Pulling Teeth in Eighteenth- Century Paris” centers on a literally huge Parisian tooth-yanker called le Grand Thomas. Jones explains that:

“For nearly half a century, from the 1710s to the 1750s, Thomas was a standard fixture, a living legend, plying his dental wares on the Pont-Neuf in Paris... If the tooth he was attacking repulsed his assaults he would, it was said, make the individual kneel down, then, with the strength of a bull, lift him three times in the air with his hand clenched on the recalcitrant tooth.”

Jones suggests that a well-informed toothache sufferer, surveying the major health care options, might reasonably opt for Le Grand Thomas or one of his many self-taught peers.

Surgeons, the people most likely to do a good job, were enjoying a rise in prestige and fees. They would commonly decline the pedestrian, relatively low-paying task of tooth-pulling. Doctors and apothecaries “were both still primarily hands-off practitioners” whose services might be expensive and whose array of remedies still included things like “the ingestion of flayed, crushed and cooked mouse.”

We don’t do nearly as much celebrity news as other sites, but when a celebrity meme goes LEGO, we are on it! Singer Justin Bieber posted a photograph of himself on Instagram showing his bare butt, on a boat, admiring the view. The view of the water, that is. The picture caused a sensation among both fans and detractors. LEGO artist Iain Heath, known as Ochre Jelly, couldn’t resist the temptation to recreate the scene in LEGO. After all, he is no stranger to celebrity butts.

The original photograph has since been deleted from Bieber’s account, but copies exist, and you can see one for comparison purposes at Ochre Jelly’s Flickr page for this project. If you are so inclined.

Archaeologists have unearthed gold from Zealand in Denmark for years, but now they’ve come across something really enigmatic. A dig near Boeslunde reveaed about 2,000 little spirals made of flat gold thread. The stash dates back to 700-900 BC.

“The fact is that we don’t know what they were for, but I lean towards them being used as part of a priest king’s clothing or head piece,” Flemming Kaul, a curator with the National Museum of Denmark, told Jyllands-Posten newspaper.

The spirals were unearthed during two separate digs in the area. The digs also revealed a couple of golden fibulae, which allowed for a precise dating of the find. The remains of what archaeologists believe is a fur-lined wooden box were also found.

Royal clothing decorations? Or maybe some kind of currency? We’re all gonna have egg on our faces when they determine that these are cake decorations or a Viking version of packing peanuts. Can you think of some other possibilities? See more pictures of the find at Archaeology News Network.  -via Gizmodo

(Image credit: Morten Petersen/Zealand Museum)

Adam Savage of Mythbusters has made it a tradition to walk the floors of Comic Con without being recognized due to an awesome costume. He wore a spacesuit last year. This year, he takes it up a notch by wearing a spacesuit from the 1969 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, taking astronaut Chris Hadfield with him.

(YouTube link)

The Comic Con walk begins at about ten minutes in, but if you watch the whole thing, you’ll learn a lot about space suits from both Savage and the man whose life depended on one. But the Stanley Kubrick version is still something new to Hadfield. An apt comment:

Real astronaut dresses as fake astronaut so nobody will know he's an astronaut...

-Thanks, Daniel Portolan!

(Image credit: David Ngo) 

A cosplayer at Comic Con got a great reception with his costume. It’s a bit obscure, but just enough people noticed and remember the extra in Jurassic World who was careful to save his margaritas when the pterodactyls attacked. Priorities, people!

Well, it turns out the barely-seen park visitor was actually an important movie role after all, and it was played by Jimmy Buffet. If anyone can save a margarita, it’s him. Not the hero we need, but the hero we deserve. -via reddit

Latent Existence speaks from experience on how to push a wheelchair, and more importantly, how to treat someone who is in a wheelchair.

Today my sister used a wheelchair for the first time. (We share the same inherited mitochondrial condition.) Her husband has little experience of pushing a wheelchair so I tried to give him some tips, which resulted in what I have written below. Believe it or not there is actually some skill involved in pushing a wheelchair and keeping the person in it comfortable. These are just observations from my own experience of being in a wheelchair pushed by someone else, but everyone is different. If you’re pushing a wheelchair for someone new then you should ask them if they have any preferences.

The tips are invaluable, but they were also supplemented by the commenters at the post, and by commenters at Metafilter who have experience in that area.

Cats love to cause chaos by overturning your wastebasket and knocking things off shelves and tables. They get even worse when you aren’t looking!

(vimeo link)

Not to be confused with Garbage Cat (although there is a resemblence), Trash Cat is a senior animation project by Kelsey Goldych of the Savannah College of Art and Design.  -via Tastefully Offensive

One of my uncles used to curl up with a volume of the World Book encyclopedia and just read it cover to cover. It took years, but he eventually read them all-and enjoyed it! Yeah, that was a long time ago. The Fine Brothers confronted a group of teenagers with World Book encyclopedias. They had seen encyclopedias before, years ago, but the thought of actually using them was strange and different.

(YouTube link)

What surprised me is realizing how we’ve abandoned finding things by alphabetical order, so that kids no longer rely on it as a skill. They managed to retrieve the entries they were looking for, but it was not the simple task we older folks consider it. It’s so much easier to just “search”! However, the teenagers eventually found it sad that we don’t use physical encyclopedias anymore, just not sad enough to want to use one. -Thanks, Benny!  

(YouTube link)

The 1984 Winter Olympics were held in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. A lot has happened since then, and the city is now in  Bosnia-Herzegovina. Thirty years later, some of the tracks built for the Olympics are still there, but have not been maintained. Kamer Kolar, Tarik Hadzic, and Kemal Mulic rode their mountain bikes down the leftover bobsled run on Mount Trebević. The footage might make you a bit dizzy. The run will be in much better shape when it is renovated next year.  -via Daily Picks and Flicks

Movie star Clark Gable had an amazing string of paramours in his life, but one tryst was elaborately covered up from 1935 until the year 2000. Today it’s common knowledge that actress Loretta Young gave birth to Gable’s daughter, who didn’t even know who her own parents were until she was an adult. Not long before her death, Young realized that she had been the victim of what we now call date rape.

Young loved to watch Larry King Live, which is most likely what prompted her to first ask her friend, frequent houseguest, and would-be biographer, Edward Funk, and then her daughter-in-law, Linda Lewis, to explain the term “date rape.” As Lewis recalled from her Jensen Beach, Florida, home this April, sitting next to her husband, Chris — Young’s second born — and flanked by Young’s Oscar and Golden Globe, it took a tact to explain, in language that an 85-year-old could understand, what “date rape” meant. “I did the best I could to make her understand,” Lewis said. “You have to remember, this was a very proper lady.”

When Lewis was finished describing the act, Young’s response was a revelation: “That’s what happened between me and Clark.”

The two actors met when they filmed The Call of the Wild in 1935. Gable was married at the time and Young was heartbroken that Spencer Tracy would not divorce his wife for her. The only time Gable and Young were alone together was on the train ride home from the location shoot. Read the story that didn’t go public until after both Gable and Young were dead, at Buzzfeed.

The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Perpetually Pleasing Bathroom Reader.

You didn’t think his mother named him “Kid Rock,” did you?

SLASH (Guns N’ Roses). Growing up in Los Angeles, Saul Hudson’s best friend was the son of character actor Seymour Cassel (Faces, Rushmore). The actor nicknamed Saul “Slash” because, as Slash said in his memoir, “I was always in a hurry, hustling whatever it was I was hustling, and never had time to sit and chat.”

GOTYE. This singer had a huge hit in 2012: “Somebody That I Used to Know” spent eight weeks at #1 and was the best-selling song of the year. Gotye really is his name… sort of. He’s from the Flanders region of Belgium, where Flemish is spoken, and his real first name is Wouter. That’s the Flemish version of Gauthier, a common French name (French is spoken in the rest of Belgium). The phonetic spelling of Gauthier: goh-tee-YAY.

IRON & WINE. Singer-songwriter Sam Beam spotted a protein supplement called Beef, Iron & Wine at a small town gas station. He shortened it to his stage name because he thought it was more interesting than his given name.

IGGY POP. Before he formed (arguably) America’s first punk band, the Stooges, James Osterberg played drums for an Ann Arbor garage band called the Iguanas. From “Iguanas,” his friends called him Iggy. The Pop came from his intentional resemblance to a friend named Jimmy Pop (his real name) who had lost all of his hair and eyebrows. Iggy thought that looked cool, so he shaved off his eyebrows, too.

(YouTube link)

Open wide and say “Aah!” Dr. Cat is looking for cavities. What he finds shocked him. -via Tastefully Offensive

In the late 1960s, counterculture youth known as hippies swelled the population of San Francisco and surrounding areas. They were rebelling against the middle-class life and sensibilities of their parents and looking for a new way to live. In 1969, photographer Joe Samburg moved there to join his brother Frank in Berkeley.

When they pulled into Berkeley, the hippies were everywhere—standing on every corner, lining every avenue. Joe had never seen anything like it. “People don’t really understand this now, but at that time, in most of the country, you couldn’t have long hair and not be in danger of being beaten up,” Joe explains. “In Boston, cars used to come screeching to a halt and guys would jump out and want to kill me. I’d have to run.” Even in New York, whenever he left Greenwich Village, “I was continually harassed, spit on, and shoved around.” And Joe wasn’t even really a hippie. “I was hip,” he says. “That meant boots, black jeans, a black t-shirt, a leather jacket—the kind of thing you’d maybe see the Rolling Stones wearing.”

In California, the flower-child style was at its apex. “People had really developed their individual looks,” he says. “They were no longer trying to figure out what being a hippie meant. I found that really stimulating. It made a great subject for a photographer—even though, by any middle-class standards, these people were living totally miserable lives.”

They banded together for acceptance and unity, but when a population reaches a critical mass, it will share problems as well as benefits. And the biggest problem the hippies shared was drugs. Read an account of those days from photographer Joe Samberg (who is, incidentally, comedian Andy Samberg’s father) and see his photographs of the era, at the Atlantic. -via Daily of the Day

(Image credit: Joe Samberg)

Police were called twice from nearby locations on July 2nd because two neighbors both like pizza. You can imagine that neighborly relations are a bit strained because of the mix-up, but we receive the benefit of the juxtaposition of reports in the local police blotter. -via Arbroath

Robot Chicken’s third DC Comics special is coming to Adult Swim this fall. If the full show is anything like the preview here, it’s going to be insane.

(YouTube link)

It explores the multiverse theory, and crosses over with other universes, so that we see different versions of our favorite superheroes. Seeing a different version of yourself can be pretty unnerving. Especially if you’re an ape. -via Uproxx