Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

The Beatles arrived in Manila to give two concerts in early July of 1966. This was to be one of their gigs on their 1966 final-ever tour; they had just finished a few very pleasant gigs in Germany. There were “bad vibes” almost from the word “go” as the boys arrived at the Manila airport. 

Ringo: “I hated the Philippines. It was like that hot/gun/Spanish inquisition attitude.” George stated, “As soon as we got there, it was bad news. There were tough gorilla-little men in short sleeves who acted very melancholy.”

The boys were greeted at the airport by severe-looking armed guards and were sternly instructed to get on a boat. A bit scared already, they complied. This was actually the first time in their time together that they were separated from their manager or any of their aides while on tour. They were taken to a limo and solemnly escorted to their hotel.

No one except them knew it, but they had another reason to be scared. The Manila guards had confiscated the boy’s traveling bags- which contained marijuana, illegal there as in many places. (Fortunately for the Fab Four, their bags were not searched and their secret stash was never discovered.)

At the time in Manila, the country was ruled by the dictatorship regime of Ferdinand Marcos and as soon as the Beatles got settled in, they were told they were to attend a reception for the country’s matriarch, Imelda Marcos. Tired and jet-legged, they politely informed the guards they would not be attending. A bit of arguing back and forth went on, but the boys stuck to their guns and settled in for the day.

They were soon joined in their room by their roadies, a few aides and their manager, Brian Epstein. They played two concerts that night, each before crowds of 40,000, and all went well. Their dressing room had been “a mess” and they had been served a horrible meal of corn flakes with lumpy, sour milk and some other horrible-looking food, but thought nothing of it. Little did they realize what was in store for them.

Scotland-based artist Demetria Skye Logan (DeviantART member DeeeSkye) can draw anything, but lately she’s taken to the character Baymax from the movie Big Hero 6. She’s drawn him in many incarnations, particularly as other Disney characters. That includes Mickey, Rapunzel, Elsa, Aladdin, the Mad Hatter, and Wreck-It Ralph, among others. See more of them at her blog and her DeviantART gallery.  -via Pleated-Jeans

Siberian photographer Alexey Trofimov captured extraordinary scenes of sunshine and ice on Lake Baikal. The turquoise blue ice shimmers like gemstones. Massive Lake Baikal is the oldest and deepest lake on earth, and the ice that appears this way every March draws tourists from all around to see it.

These unique frozen formations are in fact called ice hummocks. The knolls are created in part by pressure that develops gradually and unevenly in the layer of ice that covers Lake Baikal in winter. The physical make-up and temperature of the ice sheet then also become imbalanced, and hence the hummocks form and rise above the frozen surface.

This is Siberia, so the ice will be there until May. See many more pictures of the Baikal ice hummocks at Scribol.

(Image credit: Alexey Trofimov)

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Gluten intolerance is a real medical condition that’s fairly rare and a real hassle for those who suffer from it. However, it’s become the latest fad self-diagnosis, and so many people have jumped on that bandwagon that even real sufferers have become suspect -like autism or ADHD. If you want to contribute to this problem, JP Sears tells you exactly how to do it. -via Viral Viral Videos

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Henri, the existential cat, is earning a living for himself. Yes, this is an ad, for bacon-flavored cat food. Henri does a decent job of it, but you have to wonder if anyone outside the internet will get the humor of the character. -via Tastefully Offensive

As a train from Moscow to Nice, France, was passing through Poland, border guards checked luggage for smuggled goods. A suitcase belonging to a French passenger in his sixties was found to have a 30-year-old Russian woman inside!

“’Hi, and this is my wife,’” the Frenchman said when officers opened the luggage.

“The woman in the suitcase was feeling well and did not require medical attention,” said Sienicki.

The border guards made no arrest, but sent the couple back to Russia. If they were indeed legally married, she could have applied for a visa and traveled to France legally. But then she would have had to buy a train ticket. -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Polish Border Control)

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A ferret played a crucial role in building our National Accelerator Laboratory. There’s a crab that comes with its own pompons. There are 11,000 species of bats. When hyenas laugh, it doesn’t mean anything funny. The difference between kangaroos and wallabies will surprise you. This week’s mental_floss List Show gives us a quick rundown of things you don’t really need to know about animals, but you’ll want to, because they are quite interesting.  

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In this video, the Piano Guys go for Baroque with a mashup that spans a couple of centuries: The Jackson Five and Johann Sebastian Bach. The result just proves that good music is good music, no matter when or where it came from. That’s one rockin’ harpsichord! -via Viral Viral Videos

See also: More from The Piano Guys.

A cave in Belize has earned the name Midnight Terror Cave. In 2006, it was discovered to contain many thousands of human bones, and tests on teeth found indicate that they were children. Further tests indicate that those children were not local to the area. Could it be a case of human trafficking in order to supply sacrifices to the gods for rain? Collectors Weekly put together the story of the cave by talking to Dr. James Brady and Dr. Jaime Awe, who excavated the cave; Samantha Lorenz, who is writing her thesis on the project; Dr. Naomi Marks, who investigated the teeth, and Dr. James Doyle, curator of Mesoamerican artifacts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

“Various ethno-historic information from the Spanish suggest that if children were orphaned or something like that, the kids were snatched up immediately and used as sacrificial victims,” Brady says. “So we know that sacrifice victims also came from within a society. But if you’re sacrificing people on a large scale and you’re only drawing from within your own society, that could cause some real social unrest, which is why capturing warriors or importing victims from another kingdom probably came to be preferred. But we have no hard data on this yet for the entire Maya area.”

That may change as more teeth like the ones from the Midnight Terror Cave are tested for their strontium isotopic signatures. If those teeth are any indication of data to come, scientists and the general public may not like what they learn.

“Anything dealing with the sacrifice of children is going to be difficult to look at,” says Lorenz. “But it definitely piques my interest in the Maya culture, and makes me want to understand what would have been happening at that time to support a worldview in which children could be basically taken from their homes and sacrificed for what I would imagine was a belief in a greater good.”

Read how the Midnight Terror Cave was discovered, and the research that went into its story, at Collectors Weekly.

(Image credit: Cal State L.A.)

These Star Wars squirrels are not Photoshopped: they’re a product of Teeters’ Taxidermy Studio in Halifax, Pennsylvania. And this particular piece is up for sale at eBay. When they’re not doing jobs for clients, taxidermists Corin Teeters and Ryan Hoffman make all kinds of works from dead squirrels.   

As a smaller shop, Teeters said they’re free to think outside the box.

“We get to do a little more artsy stuff and have fun with it,” he said.

The squirrel projects tend to take 10 to 12 weeks to complete, Teeters said, and the shop has done about 30 so far.

“Pretty much, if you can think it up, we can do it,” he said.

See squirrel ballerinas, hockey players, bikers, and more from Teeters at Buzzfeed.

It doesn’t matter how many cats you see every day, or how many cat pictures you look at on the internet. Every once in a while, one will come along that’s so fascinating to behold that you find yourself confused. Why is this cat so attractive? Who knows? Just enjoy it and move on. that’s all you can do. This is the latest comic by Kangel at Anything About Nothing.

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If the AMC series The Walking Dead were a retro arcade game instead of a TV series, it would look like this. You’d spend your time shooting zombies, or driving them over with a vehicle, shooting people, or running, instead of getting to know folks who are going to stab you in the back or do something incredibly stupid anyway. In this version, there are no poor parenting decisions, no adultery, and no laundry. In other words, no Lori. In case you’re avoiding spoilers, this sequence only covers seasons one and two. -via Uproxx

In January, the folks at Fort Griffin State Historic Site in Texas noticed that a bobcat and her two cubs had moved into one of the historic houses. It's their den now, and who's going to argue with a mother bobcat? Of course, they set up a camera to catch the family's activities. Click on the images here to get the videos started. By February, the cubs are bigger, and are out exploring their world, including all those other critters that come by! Watch this compilation video below.

You can see other videos as they become available at the Fort Griffin Historical Site Facebook page. -via Metafilter

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

Further data mining on a masterful researcher of the human condition
by Don Danila
East Lyme, Connecticut

A recent monograph in AIR, republished here, documented in detail the fascinating research career of John W. Trinkaus. In describing Trinkaus’s research, which has focused on the often quirky behavior and motivations of humans, the authors supplied detailed citations of his publications. A casual perusal of this summary enabled me to make several inferences about the life and career of the author himself.

Trinkaus -- The Lone Wolf
An examination of any scientific journal shows a tendency -- especially in recent years -- towards multiple authorship research papers. After all, much of science tends to be collaborative. In this respect, Trinkaus has swum against the tide and has almost always gone it alone (see Figure 1).

Fully 94% of Trinkaus’s publications have no co-author. What is the reason for this apparent lack of collegial support? It may be that his study sites -- street intersections, supermarket checkouts, entrances to offices or subways and so forth -- do not lend themselves to multiple observers of human activities. After all, an individual casually lingering at one of these locations may not call attention to himself, whereas two or more people with clipboards, counters, and stopwatches may more easily invite notice from the subjects who are being observed, thereby altering behavior and invalidating the research.

Trinkaus – Short Circuiting the Publication Process
Unlike many scientists who endeavor to publish in a wide variety of journals to attract a wide readership, early on in his career Trinkaus found his publishers, and then stuck with them (see Figure 2).

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If you are only familiar with Muhammad Ali in his later years, suffering the effects of Parkinson’s, here’s a reminder of what a silver-tongued self-promoter he was in his prime. In this press conference at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in 1974, a few months prior to his world championship fight with George Foreman, Ali explains how good he is, in terms that can only be described as poetry.

I have wrestled with an alligator
I done tussled with a whale
I done handcuffed lightning
Throwed thunder in jail

-via reddit