As a child, I was a Bennett Cerf fan because of the funny books he wrote. As an adult, I became vaguely aware that he was the publisher who founded Random House. But Cerf will be known to history as a man who battled for your right to read. In 1920, the James Joyce novel Ulysses was judged obscene and banned in the U.S. In 1932, Cerf was determined to reverse that decision, and crafted a scenario that would lead to a court ruling on the book. But first, a crime had to be committed, so it was arranged for a smuggled copy to be intercepted at an American port of entry. Things did not go quite as planned.

The smuggler was following very specific instructions. He’d obtained the text, just like he’d been told. He stuffed the book into his suitcase. Then he boarded the luxurious Aquitania in Europe, with orders to disembark at this very port. But as he waited in line eying the customs officials, things weren’t going to plan. In fact, it looked like the officer was just going to wave him through. This was not what the smuggler was being paid to do; he was under strict orders to get caught!

“Get out; get on out,” the customs agent yelled. Instead of checking bags for contraband, the officers were frantically stamping the suitcases in front of them. They didn’t bother to look inside, or halt passengers for random checks. As the official tried to push the smuggler forward, the traveler did something inane: he demanded to be inspected.

"I insist that you open the bag and search it."

"It's too hot," argued the inspector. Indeed, the temperature in the room was well over 100 degrees. The officials were rushing people through so they too could call it a day. But the passenger insisted. “I think there’s something in there that’s contraband, and I insist that it be searched.”

Despite such setbacks, the court case was established, and the story of how Cerf worked behind the scenes to bring the book’s censorship to an end can be found at mental_floss.

The folks at Photoshop Disasters have compiled their favorite Photoshop failures of 2014. There are 23 images, all with links to the original posts, because there might be more to the picture than you see at first. In the image above, there is so much going on, it’s difficult to list everything wrong with it (although you're invited to try here in the comments). You have to wonder how these pictures were ever unleashed upon the public -probably tired editors asleep at the computer.

The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, has been in business over 100 years, but it became much more famous after novelist Stephen King stayed there and was inspired to write The Shining. The current owners embrace the hotel’s connection to the King story (even though the 1980 movie was not filmed there) and are planning to erect a 10,100 square foot hedge maze, consisting of 1,600 to 2,000 Alpine Currant hedge bushes, designed by …well, that could be you!

A design contest is open now for the maze, with instructions and a template provided by the hotel. The deadline to submit your entry is January 31st. Construction will begin immediately, and the finished maze will be unveiled during the 3rd annual Stanley Film Festival on April 30th. -via OTIS (Odd Things I’ve Seen)

Alaskans Marty Mobley, Rob Uphus, and Avery Vucinich were snowmobiling around Hatcher Pass last week, wary of the possibility of an avalanche. The men had noticed moose tracks and ski tracks in a particular area, but when they returned a hour later, the tracks were gone- because an avalanche had occurred in the interim. The three immediately began looking for stranded skiers, but found no one. What they found was a snout sticking out of the snow.

"It looked like a guy's arm at first because we were expecting to see a skier," Mobley said. "But it was moaning and groaning and moving and we realized it was a moose, even though only his ears and some of its snout was sticking out of the snow."

Mobley said the men grabbed their shovels and began to dig the moose out of the snow. Mobley said it didn’t move as they worked and even seemed to get calmer as they cleared snow away. Mobley said two men dug while the other served as an avalanche lookout.

"It didn’t even fight us," Mobley said. "It was like, 'Help me. Help me.' It was totally docile and let us touch it. It just (lay) there," Mobley said.

Read the rest of the story, which has a happy ending, at Alaska Dispatch News. -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Avery Vucinich)

The following is a list from the book Uncle John's Bathroom Reader History's Lists.

The name's the same, but the personalities couldn’t be more different.

FRANCIS BACON

1. The first Francis Bacon was a true Renaissance man, and not just because he was born in 1561. An exceptional philosopher, politician, scientist, lawyer, and author, his biggest fans (and he has plenty even though he’s been dead for nearly 400 years) think so highly of him that some of them believe he -not Shakespeare- wrote the plays we think of as the Bard’s.

2. The 20th-century Francis bacon was a modern artist who former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called “that man who paints those dreadful pictures.” His fans would disagree with Thatcher’s eye for art. Even though they’re known for their “tortured imagery,” Francis #2’s paintings are considered brilliant by art cognoscenti.

(These two might actually be related: #2 was named for #1 by his father, who claimed to be descended from #1’s half-brother.)

CASSIUS CLAY

1. The first Cassius Marcellus Clay was born in 1810 in Kentucky. His father was a wealthy landowner and slaveholder. Rather than following in his father’s footsteps, Cassius #1 became prominent abolitionist as a Kentucky state representative, an early member of the Republican Party, and unofficial advisor to President Lincoln.

2. The three-time world heavyweight champion, better know by his adopted Muslim name Muhammad Ali (and who styled himself “The Greatest”), was christened Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. in 1942. He and his father, the elder Cassius Marcellus Clay, were both named for the 19th-century abolitionist cited above. Clay, Jr. changed his name when he joined the Nation of Islam in 1964.

HARRISON FORD

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I like olives, too, but this is ridiculous! Just a whiff of a can of olives makes this cat react rather strangely. She comes back for more, but really doesn’t know what to do. Then it has the same odd effect again! There’s no telling what would happen if you actually gave her one to eat, or play with, or maybe she’d just sniff it. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

The following is a list from the book Uncle John's Bathroom Reader History's Lists.

The first movie camera was patented in the late 1800s, and motion pictures have been dazzling us ever since. Here are 14 firsts in filmmaking.

1. First Movie Shown to a Paying Audience: Young Griffo vs. Battling Charles Barnett (1895)
Fact: It lasted four minutes and was of a real boxing match filmed on the roof of Madison Square Garden.

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2. First Striptease Caught on Film: Le Coucher de la Mariée (Bedtime for the Bride) (1896)
Fact: This French movie by Eugéne Pirou was also one of the first pornographic films ever made. [Ed. note: the two minutes that survive of the original seven-minute film are SFW.]

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3. First Censored Movie: Fatima’s Coochie Coochie Dance (1896)
Fact: Fatima was a well-known belly dancer of the time whose gyrating hips were covered up with a white grid in this short film.

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4. First Science-Fiction Film: Le Voyage Dans le Lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902)
Fact: This 14-minute film was loosely based on two novels: From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne, and The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells.

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5. First Feature-Length Film: The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906)
Fact: Made in Australia, this movie tells the story of the outlaw folk hero Ned Kelly, who was captured and hanged by Australian authorities in 1880. It was originally 70 minutes long, but only about 17 minutes still exist today. [Ed. note: skip to the 13 minute mark in the video to see Kelly being arrested in his homemade suit of armor.]

The Mars Curiosity rover has been exploring the surface of the red planet for two and half years now, and it shows. The rover’s wheels are displaying severe damage, developing holes and tears due to the rough Martian rocks. NASA officials didn’t seem to be concerned at first, but now they are. Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society wanted to find out exactly what’s happening to the wheels and how it will affect Curiosity’s mission, so she talked to Project Manager Jim Erickson to get the lowdown. Why weren’t the wheels designed for such rough terrain?

There were several factors that drove them to design the wheels to be as lightweight as possible. The large size of the wheels means that very slight design changes add a substantial amount of mass. Increasing wheel thickness by one millimeter would add 10 kilograms to the rover's total mass. But total system mass wasn't the only constraint. Erickson explained that a major constraint arose from a tricky moment in the landing sequence, at the moment that the wheels deployed, while the rover was suspended from the bridle underneath the descent stage. The wheels' sudden drop imparted substantial forces on the mobility system, and keeping wheel mass as light as possible reduced those forces to manageable ones. There were other factors that made it important to keep wheel mass low.

So the wheels needed to be as light as possible while still being able to do their job, but as to their job: "We misunderstood what Mars was," Erickson said. "Strongly cemented ventifacts are not something that we saw on Mars before."

Lakdawalla has a thorough (but easy to understand) writeup on Curiosity’s wheels, including an explanation of what “strongly cemented ventifacts” are, how the wheels and the rover’s suspension system work, and what lessons this incident has for the next rover mission, scheduled for 2020. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: NASA/JPL/Emily Lakdawalla)

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The guys who play Gaston at Walt Disney World walk a fine line by portraying a Disney villain while bringing happiness to park visitors. This fellow is very good at it. We saw how he got told off by a young girl in a previous video. Here he is challenged to a push-up contest where we find out that those muscles are real, even if they are a bit padded. Gaston may be a buffoon, but he’s no slouch physically. After all, he eats five dozen eggs, so he’s roughly the size of barge. -via reddit

A store called Fancy is offering this sweatsuit modeled after the Apollo 11 spacesuits, complete with seams, wrinkles, patches, ports, straps, and even the name “Armstrong” printed on it. The Apollo 11 sweatsuit would be perfect for a little make-believe in the comfort of your home, if it didn’t cost $139 plus what I hear is an outrageous shipping cost. Oh, I'm sure the real suits probably cost more than that, even in 1969, but you and I don't have NASA's clothing budget. -via Geekologie

Today, Bernice Madigan died peacefully at her home in Massachusetts. She was 115 years and 163 days old, which made her the fourth-oldest person in the world before her death. Madigan’s death leaves only five people in the world documented to have been born before the 20th century. They are, from left to right:

Misao Okawa, born March 5, 1898, Japanese
Gertrude Weaver, born July 4, 1898, American
Jeralean Talley, born May 23, 1899, American
Susannah Mushatt-Jones, born July 6 1899, American
Emma Morano-Martinuzzi, born November 29, 1899, Italian

When these five women were born, there were no airplanes. They may have talked to their friends about the sinking of the Titanic. They lived through two World Wars, the women’s suffrage movement, Prohibition, the Civil Rights Era, and the beginning and end of the Soviet Union. -via reddit

The Smoking Gun has compiled their annual list of Mugshots of the Year. The overall “winner” was Robert Burt, whose cleverness was reported earlier here. However, the other 24 on the list are a sight to see. You can look through the gallery, and get some further explanation for some of the more baffling pictures here. Can you guess what the woman in the picture above was arrested for? Yes, you can. -via Gorilla Mask

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Why do so many country names end in -stan? You already know the simple answer: “stan” means “country,” or “land.” But that’s just the simple answer. This video goes on to explain how the root word gave us so many other words in various languages, and spread to places you wouldn’t have expected -including the U.S.!  -via Digg

When the first antibiotic, penicillin, was new, it was a very precious commodity. Pharmacologists had to grow an enormous amount of mold to produce even one dose. And considering World War II was raging, the need was enormous, too. But scientists had an ace up their sleeves: they knew that penicillin could be recycled, by collecting a patient’s urine!

After one administration of injected penicillin, anywhere from 40 to 99 percent of the antibiotic is excreted in urine in its fully functional form about 4 hours after administration thanks to our efficient and hardworking kidneys (2). Due to this distinct feature of its pharmacokinetics, penicillin could be extracted from the crystalized urine of a treated patient and then used to treat another patient in the throes of serious bacterial infection just next door. In 1943, just shy of one year after its successful usage in saving the aforementioned woman’s life, the total amount of penicillin that had been produced was enough to treat only a hundred people, and this only if it was judiciously reclaimed and reused (3). Recycling penicillin wasn’t just smart; it was a necessity for such limited quantities of this wonder drug.

Of course, we’ve learned how to produce penicillin faster since then, and other antibiotics as well. Read about penicillin recycling at Body Horrors. -via Smithsonian

Steve Guntrip of Bournemouth, UK, became enamored of a stuffed toy he saw in a claw machine. It was a dinosaur called Mr. Dinosaur from the children’s show Peppa Pig. Over the next few months, he tried to win one from claw machines, or even buy one, but found they were becoming scarce. That only made him want one more.  

After lots of research, I came to the conclusion that the dinosaur was no more. It was marked as discontinued on the only website, the official one, which sold it. In a last ditch attempt, I emailed them:

They replied! They actually had some leftover but not enough to put them online. I strongly hinted if they could post me one but they said they were unable. This felt like the end of the road; I do not have very much money at all and while I did adore the dinosaur, bills and rent really must come above cuddly-toy-joy. The cost of the dinosaur was prohibitive but the petrol I’d need to put in the car to get there just made it impossible, especially in the time frame of “we’ll have sold the last of them in a few days”.

So he went to Ask Reddit, and had an adventure raising money to travel to Peppa Pig World and buy one of the few that were left. With the funds in hand, the best part of the story began. Guntrip and his girlfriend Bry documented the trip down to the last detail, in pictures, text, and video, in order to share with his benefactors. The got the last three dinosaurs, one for himself, and two for benefactors who wanted one. You can read the entirely charming saga at his blog. -via b3ta