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The TV series Mad Men aired its final episode last night, and the 1971 Coca-Cola ad called "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" featured prominently. While fans of the show are debating the meaning of how it was used, the man who actually came up with the ad tells us the story behind his inspiration. Bill Backer was the creative director at McCann at the time.

See, my moment came out of truth and emergency. I had to come up with a commercial, we were getting sent to record in London and were stuck in Ireland.

I had to come up with something. I was stuck in an airport. I had a studio rented and paid for, lots of actors and producers. I looked around people were sitting there together having a coke. So I wrote that on the back of a napkin: “I’ve got to teach the world to sing. I’d like to buy the world a coke and furnish it with love.” That’s what the product was doing at the time. It just felt like I heard a voice from somewhere saying, “I’d like to be able to do this for the whole world.”

In the interview, Backer explains what his job was like in the ‘60s and how it differed from the Mad Men version. Be warned it contains a video of the final scene in the series, in case you are avoiding spoilers. -via Digg

Aw, Moishe got a bump on the head! Of course, Dad wants to make everything better, but fathers sometimes do that a little differently from mothers. As illustrated by the latest shenanigans from Lunarbaboon.

For his final project in an After Effects class, Christopher Haley made a speculative title sequence for a Black Widow movie. I hope he got an A in the class. I love the way it evokes a James Bond spy film and separates Black Widow from the normal Marvel style to makes it something unique. The song is “Sour Times" by Portishead.  

Cut off one head, two more shall take it's place. . . For this speculative title sequence of a Black Widow film I decided Black Widow's villain would be. . . Black Widow. Yelena Belova, to be specific. Belova believes herself to be the superior Black Widow, and in some ways she is right. Swift and ruthless, Belova is the most talented assassin to graduate from the Red Room--and now she is Hydra's most deadly weapon. At Belova's side is a super-soldier of her own, Alexi Shostakov--the Red Guardian, who also happens to be Natasha's former lover. When the new heads of Hydra make a play for the power of the infinity stones it is up to S.H.I.E.L.D.'s top agent to stop them.

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Marvel has movies scheduled through 2020, but sadly, a Black Widow film is not among them. Maybe in a few years, Haley will be in a position to direct one. -via Daily of the Day

Loz, of The Shonky Brothers, managed to record his own fart sound. And it wasn’t just any fart sound, but a magnificent multi-note series that he manipulated into a song. One that you can download as a ringtone, believe it or not.

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The video has few images, but does feature a non-stop barrage of fart jokes in text to accompany the story of the one fart that finally gave them a viral video. -via Viral Viral Videos

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When I was a kid I noticed that cats and dogs don’t pay any attention to what’s on TV. But that was the old cathode-ray tubes. Flat screens are a completely different animal, as far as animals go. Now mum cats will sit and watch whatever we watch. They prefer nature shows, but haven’t yet learned to use the remote. Cats and computers can be hilarious, especially as a cat regards that flitting cursor to be the same as any insect on a wall. -via Tastefully Offensive

We’re not surprised that being born a mutant is a shortcut to superhero status. But I read mostly DC comics when I was young, and am not as familiar with the Marvel pantheon as I could have been, so I was surprised at how many characters they used as both X-Men and Avengers. Some superheroes just get around! And even more surprising was how characters can go from evil to hero (and back again). Take Quicksilver, for example.

In Avengers #16, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby did, at the time, the unheard of. The legendary fathers of the Marvel Age replaced the current roster of Avengers with an entirely new team, mostly comprised of former villains. Joining Captain America on the team were Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, and mutant speedster, Quicksilver.

Before he joined the Avengers, Quicksilver was a member of the Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. He was a reluctant villain whose main motivation was protecting his sister from Magneto’s machinations. When he and his sister joined Cap on the Avengers, a cohesive history between the X-Men and the Avengers began.

And he’s not the only one. Read the backstories of 14 characters who were both X-Men and Avengers at on time or another, at Den of Geek.

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

(Image credit: Flickr user John Donges)

Warning! Do not even THINK about doing this at home.

HONEY, I’M HOME

You’ve probably seen pictures of bee beards— brave and foolhardy people with their lower faces covered in insects, as if they’re auditioning for some kind of entomologist-only version of ZZ Top. It’s an old pastime among thrill-seeking bee fanciers. Ukrainian beekeeper Petro Prokopovych, the inventor of several beekeeping innovations still in use today, modeled the first bee beard in the 1830s. Demonstrating what he’d learned about bee-swarm behavior, Prokopovych placed a captive queen in a cage under his chin and released thousands of bees near his face. Sure enough, the bees went into their typical swarming behavior, bunching tightly around their queen, creating a “beard” that hung off his chin. Naturally, his stunt inspired imitators, and bee bearders soon became as popular in carnivals and freak shows as fat ladies, dog-faced boys, and wild men of Borneo.

THE STING

(Image credit: Flickr user Alfred Shum)

Making a bee beard isn’t difficult, but it takes guts and a willingness to be stung a few times. Warning: This is NOT recommended for kids or anyone with an allergy or aversion to bee stings or any level of good sense… But, here’s how it’s done:

• Select a hive with easy-going bees willing to put up with your outrageous shenanigans without exacting too much revenge. (You must be experienced with bees to be able to identify this kind of hive.)

• Find the queen and lock her in a “queen cage”— a small wooden box with metal screening on one side that looks sort of like a homemade kazoo.

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The latest song from The Key of Awesome explores our addiction to our phones. After all, they have everything the internet offers, wherever you go, plus you can call someone on it. You can watch this video on your phone -but what where you step!  -via Viral Viral Videos

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Yo-yo master Luis Orlando Abrajan shows some tricks to a flock of ducklings. They hang on his every move, even when he starts to go really fast! He’s good, but his audience is adorable. Do this a little longer, and they’d be completely hypnotized! -via Daily Picks and Flicks

Will Herring’s cat wakes him up at 3AM every day because he wants to be fed. Anyone who has a cat can relate. Herring used that experience as inspiration for the game Garbage Cat. In this game, you are the cat. You can climb on your human and miaow, and even knead him or jump up and down on him. But that doesn’t wake him up.

The way to win the game is to jump on the furniture and knock everything off the shelves. Make it all crash loudly onto the floor. That should do the trick! Yeah, it did, but it wasn’t easy. -via Metafilter

It’s a bittersweet story. This lion spent 13 years in a circus, confined to a cage too small for an animal this size. He was confiscated and taken to Rancho dos Gnomos sanctuary in Brazil, where he has a much larger enclosure.

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It’s not the savannah, but it has room to run, grass to roll in, dirt to dig in, and trees to rub against. You can almost feel the joy when he realizes what a great place this is -compared to what he had. -via Boing Boing

Making a big budget feature film is never an easy job, but some shoots are worse than others. And none of those involved really know whether the finished product will be worth it until months later when it’s ready for an audience. Just imagine that every six months or so you find yourself working for a completely different company with a new boss and new co-workers. Your job may be the same as ever, but the environment is strange and different, and there’s bound to be personality clashes between some people. Take The Blues Brothers. John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd were at the peak of their popularity, and the movie turns on their comedic talents. That doesn’t mean making it was a cakewalk. Belushi was high all the time, but there were other problems.

The story behind Aykroyd's original Ghostbusters script has become the stuff of legend, but even that may not have anything on his first draft of Blues Brothers. The typical script generally clocks in somewhere between 90 and 120 pages. Aykroyd's script was 324 pages long. If someone tossed it at you, you would die. The studio people had no idea what to make of it, other than recognizing there was some outstanding comedy hidden in those rambling, generally pointless pages written by Aykroyd in between stealing cars from the Universal motor pool and getting high at the Leave It To Beaver house. And yes, those were things that actually happened.

There’s more to that story, plus those of five other wildly successful films at Cracked. Don’t miss the story behind The African Queen, even if you haven’t seen the movie.

Yes, this is the same guy in all the pictures. A couple of years ago, Ronnie Brower weighed 675 pounds. His doctor told him he wouldn’t live long like that -he might not even make it to age thirty. Brower took that seriously. He gave up drinking and pills, went on a diet, and worked out. Boy, did he work out! With the help of trainers, he has lost 425 pounds!

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Brower is a big Taylor Swift fan, and played her music during his workouts for inspiration. His friend Joe Bufano is taking him to a Taylor Swift concert next month, and made this video in hopes that she will meet him then. -via Viral Viral Videos

We’ve seen lots of videos of confrontations between cats and dogs. This is one of those videos on steroids. It turns out pretty much as you'd expect. Juan Cholo was riding his bike through River Legacy Park in Arlington, Texas, and encountered a bobcat and a coyote, who were busy encountering each other. Neither animal cared a bit that humans were watching. People must be just part of the background to them, not a bit helpful, dangerous, or tasty.

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Commenters on YouTube talk about seeing such critters as they jog through the park. The joke is that it’s an encouragement to run faster and further. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

What the average person knows about viruses is pretty bad. We know they can only reproduce by invading a cell of a different species and usurping its normal function. We know that some of the worst disease ever are caused by viruses: Ebola, polio, AIDS, hepatitis,  influenza, etc.  So how could we ever think of a virus as beneficial? Dr. Marilyn Roossnick of Pennsylvania State University tells us that, just as we carry around a biome of beneficial bacteria, we also carry our own population of funguses and viruses that don’t make us sick.   

Many of Roossnick’s examples focus on plants and insects as there is more information on the symbiosis in this realm than in the human environment. But she does point out several critical factors already known about viruses in the human body. We have a population of viruses in the gut, the skin, and even in the blood. This particular fact has been known for well over forty years. This viral collection even has its own name to counter the bacteria-centric focus of the microbiome; it’s called the virome.

The virome appears at a very young age and appears to be dynamic in the first months of life. But, eventually the population tends to settle. Each of us has a unique collection of viruses although there are some species common to us all.

There are three ways viruses can be beneficial: some attack invading bacteria instead of human cells, some compete with pathogenic viruses and keep them at bay, and some have even contributed to our DNA somewhere along our evolutionary line. Read about how this happens and how it benefits us at Popular Science.  -via the Presurfer