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

Ig Nobel Achievements distilled into limerick form
by Martin Eiger, Improbable Research Limerick Laureate

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think. For details of all the Ig Nobel Prize–winning achievements, see each year’s special Ig Nobel issue of the magazine, and also see the winners page. 

2006 Ig Nobel Biology Prize
Awarded to Bart Knols (of Wageningen Agricultural University, in Wageningen, the Netherlands; and of the National Institute for Medical Research, in Ifakara Centre, Tanzania, and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna Austria) and Ruurd de Jong (of Wageningen Agricultural University and of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Italy) for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.

[REFERENCE: “Limburger Cheese as an Attractant for the Malaria Mosquito Anopheles gambiae s.s.,” B.G.J. Knols and R. De Jong, Parasitology Today, vol. 12, no. 4, 1996, pp. 159-61; and other papers.]

Here’s a quiz that will pay off for those who have been following Neatorama for a few years. You’ll be shown a picture of a cat, and you determine what species it is. We’ve posted some of these exact photographs. I expected to ace this one, but got tripped up on an easy one, and found one cat I wasn’t familiar with. Oh well, maybe I should write up a post on that cat!

Try it yourself, at The Ark in Space. -via the Presurfer

You’ve seen women in movies undergoing beauty treatments at spas. You may have remarked that they look like a salad, slathered with some food-based mask and sporting cool cucumber slices on their eyes. Now that look really is food! Anna Hezel and Gabriella Paiella at Lucky Peach made this cheese ball in that likeness using various cheeses covered in mashed avocados. Her towel head wrap is mozzarella cheese, and her lips are a big red bell pepper. But they make it clear that they did not come up with the original idea.

Anna initially found Spa Lady when she was browsing around for Halloween-themed crafts. A few clicks down the rabbit hole, a tutorial on Hungry Happenings revealed her in all her glory. We read the comments, which we’re told never to do, and found throngs of home cooks bickering about her true origin. While many lauded Spa Lady as a breakthrough in cheese-ball artistry, one commenter claimed that the recipe was not revolutionary whatsoever, and had been around since she was “in school.”

Then you get to see the recipe, and the process of building this in pictures.  -via Boing Boing

Sam Dekker of Wisconsin dunks the ball so hard that the net swings around and it goes through the hoop a second time! The Badgers went on to eliminate the Oregon Ducks from the NCAA tournament 72-65 yesterday, but it wasn’t because of this weird goal. It didn’t count, because 1. the opposing coach called a timeout before the dunk, and 2. even if it were a legitimate 2-point basket, the opposing team gets the ball after a goal, so you can’t score two goals in a row without surrendering the ball between them. It’s still a neat little stunt to catch on video. It’s not the first time Dekker has astonished the crowd with a weird throw. This one happened last fall.

-via reddit

(YouTube link)

Being a citizen of the internet makes it very likely that you enjoy cats and occasionally enjoy a pizza. The problem is that cats enjoy pizza, too, and cats have no concept of resisting temptation, neither do they have respect for stupid human “rules.” My husband watched this and said, “Why don’t they push the cat away from the pizza?” Duh, these people are too busy recording a video for that! -via Tastefully Offensive

(YouTube link)

EnChroma, Inc. worked for ten years to develop lenses that enable colorblind people to distinguish more colors than they ever have before. Those glasses went on the market a couple of years ago, and are available to the public for $350-$400. Of course, affected people have varying levels of colorblindness and the enhancement from the glasses varies among them.

As part of their Color for All campaign, Valspar Paint invited a few colorblind people to try the glasses out and got their reactions to seeing vivid colors for the first time. It was quite emotional for them, and yes, they got to keep the glasses. Valspar also offered them to some commenters at YouTube who shared their stories. -via Viral Viral Videos

The final half-season, seven episodes, of Mad Men will begin in two weeks. To get you in the mood for the last go-round, here are some tidbits from the series creator Matt Weiner and the cast from reminiscences they shared during a Film Society event at Lincoln Center in New York City over the weekend. For example:

4. Everyone makes fun of the way Aaron Staton (Ken Cosgrove) smokes.

“I had a rule that no one could fake-smoke on the set if they’d never smoked,” Weiner said, fearing their naiveté would show on screen. “I made the horrible mistake with Aaron Staton, where I was like, you have never smoked before. You look terrible at it. And he was like, actually I did smoke for, like, 10 years. And I was like, like that? Like a douchebag? He’s the sweetest person in the world and he still brings it up. He goes, ‘Remember that time you told me I smoked like a douchebag?’” Staton still smokes “like a douchebag” for consistency purposes. “You can see them sort of giving him a hard time in the scene … you can actually see it,” Weiner said of the rest of the cast when filming a smoking scene with Staton.

5. Roger was almost killed off in Season 1.

“The only thing that’s ever been reversed is that I did think that Roger Sterling was going to die in the first season,” Weiner said. “John had another job, and I didn’t know if he wanted to stay with the show.”

There’s plenty more, strictly for Mad Men fans, because a lot of it won’t make any sense unless you’ve followed the series these past few years, in a list at Buzzfeed.

The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader.

In a civilization ruled by men for thousands of years, only one woman ever made it to the top in imperial China -Empress Wu.

HIGH CHINA

China hasn’t had a monarchy since the Communist Revolution of 1949. But for more than 4,000 years before that, it was ruled by 308 different emperors spanning 14 dynastic periods. Of those 308, only one was a woman.

It happened during the T’ang dynasty, which ruled China from AD 618-907, an era commonly considered the height of Chinese art, literature, philosophy, trade, and technology. The capital city, Chang’an (modern day Xi’an), was the largest and most culturally advanced city in the world, with a population of more than a million. This was also a rare era of freedom for women in China; women had long been treated as inferior, but now enjoyed such freedoms as the right to be educated, to divorce, to own land, and to take part -to a degree- in politics. But no one could have expected a woman to take as large a role as the girl known as Wu Zhao.

LUCKY GIRL?

Wu Zhao was born in 624 into a noble and wealthy family, and was educated from an early age in music, art, literature, and philosophy. That education would help her immensely. When she was 13 years old, her family’s connections allowed her the great privilege of becoming a Cairen, one of nine “fifth-tier” concubines of the Emperor Tai-tsung. Her education, her musical talent, her beauty, and her wit made her stand out from the other girls, and she soon became one of the emperor’s favorites. He gave her the title Meinang, or “Charming Lady,” and assigned her to work in the imperial study. There she would add to her knowledge the workings of government- knowledge that she would put to great use in the coming years.

In 649, when Wu Zhao was 25, Emperor Tai-tsung died -not a good thing for a concubine: in keeping with tradition, all the concubines were sent to a Buddhist convent, where they were to spend the rest of their lives. But Tai-tsung’s son, Kao-tsung, became emperor and soon began visiting Wu at the convent. Many historians believe that Wu Zhao had been having an affair with the prince for a number of years, possibly because she knew he could get her out of the convent when his father died. True or not, two years later the new emperor broke tradition and had Wu Zhao returned to the palace, where she became Wu Zhaoyi, Zhaoyi signifying the highest rank of the second-tier concubines. There were now only two women above her in what became her quest for the throne: Kao-tsung’s wife, Empress Wang, and his first consort, Xiaoshu.

HEIR REPLACEMENTS

Within a few years, Wu Zhaoyi had two sons by the emperor -two possible heirs to the emperor’s throne if she got rid of the two women in her way. And she soon did.

You may have been tempted to put your cat in a copy machine at one time or another, but this is taking that urge to a whole new level! The Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) in Germany has a Toshiba Aquilon CX CT-scanner that can accommodate patients up to around 300 kilograms. That’s necessary when you want to scan an unconscious zoo animal like a lion or a bear. IZW has scanned around 80 different species so far, from the tiny naked mole-rat to a two-meter-long fish. You can see the scans of many of those animals at EZW’s website. See how big a leopard’s fangs really are inside its face. The elephant skull appears to revolve around teeth, instead of the trunk. And somehow, the chameleon looks the same inside as it does outside. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: IZW)

Jeff Minetti of Philadelphia is getting married, but first, there’s the bachelor party. All of Jeff’s friends were invited, even Joey DiJulio in Seattle. But Joey DiJulio has never met Jeff or any of his friends -he just got put into the email loop by mistake. DiJulio just read the emails for a while, but got up the courage to respond when final RSVPs were requested. DiJulio sent his regrets.

    Hi All,

    So, I have no idea who any of you guys are, but I have been enjoying being a fly on the wall hearing about the plans for this bachelor party over the last few months.

    I’m assuming my E-Mail address was added to the list by mistake (perhaps a typo of someone else?).

    I live out in Seattle, WA and although for a moment I thought it might be funny to just show up and be that guy nobody knows but everyone wonders “who is that guy?”, buying a plane ticket for a cross-country flight just to crash a bachelor’s party might be a bit over the top (although it would be epic!).

    Nonetheless, I do hope you guys have a great time and I’d like to take a moment to wish the best of luck in life to the groom!

    Cheers!

    Joey DiJulio
    Seattle, WA

Then the rest of the guys -including the groom- insisted that DiJulio was welcome anyway. They noted that he resembled Jeff Minetti and wanted to meet him. One thing led to another, and the stranger from Seattle will be attending the bachelor party in Philadelphia this coming Friday. You can read the whole story so far at Q13Fox-TV and follow the story as it unfolds at DiJulio’s Facebook page.  -via The Chive

(Image source: GoFundMe)

PS: This experience might remind you of James West, who traveled from Australia to spend Thanksgiving with the Tran family in Florida due to an email mixup.

The students that toured the Seven-Up should have known there would be a pop quiz.

Einstein developed a theory about space, and it was about time, too.

Would you like this dead battery? It’s free of charge.

The soldier who survived attacks of mustard gas and pepper spray is now well-seasoned.

I was up all night looking for the sun. Then it dawned on me.

I wondered why the rock was getting larger. Then it hit me.

I changed the name of my MP3 player to Titanic, because it was always synching.

Despite all our hard work, we couldn’t get the tent up. Too many missed stakes.

How does Moses make his tea? Hebrews it.

Kim said she knew me from the vegetarian restaurant, but I’ve never met herbivore.

Did you hear about the indecisive plastic surgeon? He couldn’t pick his own nose.

Jon’s addicted to brake fluid, but he says he can stop any time.

Haunted French pancakes give me the crepes.

Velcro is such a rip off!

I used to be a banker, but then I lost interest.

Studying fungus is a cultured way to mold young minds.

The kitchen remodelers were very counterproductive.

The cross-eyed teacher was fired because she couldn’t control her pupils.

German sausage is the wurst.

Don’t you limp in here late with a lame excuse!

(Image source: Bad Newspaper)

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This article is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader.

Get ready to be thoroughly entertained while occupied on the throne. Uncle John has ruled the world of information and humor for 25 years, and the anniversary edition is the Fully Loaded Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

Some thoughts on the hardest job in the world.

“To me, life is tough enough without having someone kick you from the inside.”

-Rita Rudner

“People who say they sleep like a baby seldom have one.”

-Leo Burke

“When kids hit one year old, it’s like hanging with a miniature drunk. They bump into things. They laugh and cry. They urinate. They vomit.”

-Johnny Depp

“Raising a kid is part joy, and part guerrilla warfare.”

-Ed Asner

“When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice, safe playpen. Then, when they’re finished, I climb out.”

-Erma Bombeck

“The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.’

-Duke of Windsor

“Like all parents, my husband and I do the best we can, hold our breath, and hope we’ve set aside enough money to pay for our kids’ therapy.”

-Michell Pfeiffer

“The way we know our kids are growing up: the bite marks are higher.”

-Phyllis Diller

“You learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.”

-Franklin P. Jones

“If a growing object is both fresh and spoiled at the same time, chances are it’s a child.”

-Morris Goldfischer

“Before I got married, I had six theories about bringing up children. Now I’ve got six children and no theories.”

-Lord Rochester

“You don’t know how much you don’t know until your children grow up and tell you.”

-S. J. Perelman

“You know children are growing ups hen they start asking questions that have answers.”

-John J. Plomp

“Few things are more satisfying than see in your children have teenagers of their own.”

-Doug Larson

_________________________

This article is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader.

Get ready to be thoroughly entertained while occupied on the throne. Uncle John has ruled the world of information and humor for 25 years, and the anniversary edition is the Fully Loaded Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

(YouTube link)

I have never, ever worked anywhere where the boss decided it was a good idea to have an office pet. Some offices have aquariums, but that’s always just a decoration for clients or customers. However, over the past few years (while I’ve been working from home), many office managers are exploring ways to make the workday more pleasant for their staff. Whether this is to increase production or to make employees deal better with the fact that they haven’t had a raise in years is anyone’s guess. If you decide to try this, your best bets are aquarium fish or a cat. Don’t opt for an alligator snapping turtle. -via Tastefully Offensive

(YouTube link)

Marc Polet and his wife were out on their farm in Belgium when a wild boar approached at breakneck speed and attacked! But then their miniature ponies spring into action and chase the boar off. That’s a good pony. Those who speak French say the commentary is quite amusing, but outside of a couple of familiar epithets, I can’t understand a word. Therefore, this may contain NSFW language in French. -via Viral Viral Videos

(YouTube link)

You’d be a little peeved if someone interrupted you while making sweet love. It’s the same with the giant tortoises on Assumption Island. National Geographic expedition leader Paul Rose is in the Seychelles right now. When he goes to see what’s making that sound, it breaks the romance of the moment, so to speak. The angry tortoise leaps into action to chase the intruder away. I guess he told Rose what's what, and good riddance! When he’s finally driven the interloper out of his territory, he returns to his lovely lady. He should be there in, oh, about an hour. -via Daily Picks and Flicks