Her father found a letter that redditor judokitten had written to the Tooth Fairy years ago, on the occasion of losing a tooth and not getting the expected reward. She tells the story in the comments:

Full story. So, I had lost a tooth, but I was suspicious about the actual validity of the toothfairy's magical abilities. So, I didn't tell anyone about the lost tooth. Lo and behold, she did not arrive.

The next morning, I loudly proclaimed the toothfairy bullshit in my 9 year old terms, and my mom told me to write her a letter expressing my displeasure.

I was returned a letter that basically said,

"I couldn't get to your pillow the night before last because I got stuck in all the mess. Maybe if you clean your room, I could get to you in a timely manner."

Well played, tooth fairy. Well played.

Although the post title mentions the letter is passive-aggressive, there is nothing passive about either the daughter or the mother’s Tooth Fairy's response. Incidentally, I was impressed that, even though her handle is judokitten and the letter is signed “Jennifer,” many commenters still assumed the letter-writer was male.

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There is no end to the strange things people will think up- and share on the internet. A ball pit in a wading pool is an enrichment activity for the mongooses at the Houston Zoo. It’s about as chaotic as you’d imagine. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

If you’ve ever said you read Playboy for the articles, this would be the article to read. Jordan Hoffman took on the monumental task of ranking 695 Star Trek episodes -from The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, and The Animated Series. The introduction implies that he may not have done it alone.  

I've been a rabid fan of the franchise since childhood and I've got the wedgie scars to prove it. While still maintaining a semi-functional adult life I pen the One Trek Mind column at StarTrek.com and host panels at Star Trek conventions. So when I present you with this complete ranking of every single Star Trek episode ever, it's not like we just shot photon torpedoes at the wall.

The first thing you’ll want to do is skip to the last page and check out the top ten. Then you’ll want to skim over and see where your favorite episodes rank. Then you may want to argue about it. The list can come in handy as a guide in deciding what to show a Star Trek newbie so they get the best out of their initial experience. And it’s not just a list -for each episode there is a brief explanation of its ranking. If you’re a serious fan, you can kiss your day goodbye, unless you work somewhere where Playboy is blocked. The list starts here. -via Digg

If you’ve been around a while, you’ve probably read an awful lot about farts here at Neatorama. Still, there’s always something new to learn. Flatulence is a natural process of a healthy functioning physical body, but that doesn’t make it a bouquet of roses. You’ll learn about that physical process in a list of fart facts at Vox, plus an occasional glimpse at how some of these scientific facts were discovered.

Hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and methane make up as much as 99 percent of the gas produced in our large intestines by volume. (They're supplemented by air you swallow — more on that below.) All of these gases are odorless, which is why much of the time, farts don't actually smell at all.

The potent stink, research has found, is largely due to the 1 percent or so of compounds with sulfur in them, such as hydrogen sulfide. (This sort of research itself is pretty amazing: one experiment involved two people judging the smelliness of farts of 16 participants who'd been fed pinto beans, collected with the aid of "gas-tight Mylar pantaloons.")

Now, that’s something to put on your CV! -via mental_floss

(Image credit: Towsonu2003)

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

 (Image credit: Xavier Romero-Frias)

Secret codes and urban legends- Uncle John’s idea of a perfect combination!

SECRET TEACHINGS

There’s been a story going around for years that the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” which seems like a nonsense song, actually contains coded teachings of Catholicism. It was written, the story says, during England’s anti-Catholic era, after King Henry VIII split with the Catholic Church and founded the Anglican Church in the 1500s. The open practice of Catholicism did become illegal in England, and remained illegal until the Emancipation Act of 1829. During that era one could be imprisoned or even executed for being Catholic. To avoid such punishment and preserve the faith,, the story continues, some clever Jesuit priests wrote the song, with each day’s “gifts” representing the  Catechism -the essential teachings of the Church.   

THE HIDDEN SYMBOLS

* The “true love” that is giving the gifts, the story says, is God.

* The “partridge in a pear tree” represents Jesus Christ.

* Two turtle doves: the Old and New Testaments.

* Three French hens: the Holy Trinity; or the three Virtues: Faith, Hope, and Charity.

* Four calling birds: the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).

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Stella the pit bull has never seen a pineapple before. And she doesn’t like it, no, not one bit. Jolene Creighton, who dared to purchase the demon fruit, assures us that Stella eventually made friends with the pineapple. If we looked at the offending fruit through Stella’s eyes, it probably looked something like this.  -via Uproxx

A couple of months ago, we told you about the painful last days of King Charles II. Over a hundred years later, when former president George Washington fell ill in December of 1799, medical science hadn’t much more to offer. Washington felt worse the next morning, so his estate’s overseer, George Rawlins, tried to help.

At 7:30 a.m., Rawlins removed 12 to 14 ounces of blood, after which Washington requested that he remove still more. Following the procedure, Col. Lear gave the patient a tonic of molasses, butter and vinegar, which nearly choked Washington to death, so inflamed were the beefy-red tissues of his infected throat.

Dr. James Craik, Washington's longtime physician, was summoned. He didn’t have much to offer, either.

Dr. Craik entered Washington’s bedchamber at 9 a.m. After taking the medical history, he applied a painful “blister of cantharides,” better known as “Spanish fly,” to Washington’s throat. The idea behind this tortuous treatment was based on a humoral notion of medicine dating back to antiquity called “counter-irritation.” The blisters raised by this toxic stuff would supposedly draw out the deadly humors causing the General’s throat inflammation.

That was just the beginning of the efforts Dr. Craik made to save Washington’s life. Washington died on December 14, at the age of 67, but not before enduring dubious remedies that only made his last day likely the most agonizing of his life. Read about the treatment the father of our country endured at PBS Newshour. -via Digg

Since the Gemini program, NASA has allowed astronauts to design patches for the missions they fly on. There are also patches for each mission of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which launches spy satellites. Those patches aren’t as well publicized, and they are definitely weirder than NASA’s mission patches.

Today NRO launches about four to six satellites per year, including the NROL-35 mission, with the patch seen above, slated to fly this Thursday. The public still doesn't know exactly what each satellite is doing, but for a couple decades now the agency has advertised the date and time of its launches—probably because, as Pearlman points out, “it’s hard to hide a rocket.” In response, a subculture of fervent hobbyists has become committed to watching the skies at night, piecing together the satellites’ orbits. At some point, those hobbyists discovered that—just like NASA—NRO also issues mission patches. The agency didn’t seem to care if the patches were leaked, and eventually it even started publishing depictions of the patches along with launch announcements. Even so, for years knowledge of the patches largely remained confined to enthusiasts, especially in the days prior to widespread social media.

That changed somewhat in 2000, when a fan figured out a spy satellite’s mission from clues on the patch. Since then, the symbols on the patches have become more outlandish and obscure -even frightening at times. We don’t know if there’s a method to the madness, or whether the NRO is just having fun with the designs, but you can read the story and see a gallery of the patches at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: National Reconnaissance Office)

You are probably pretty familiar with maps of the world, especially maps of the English-speaking world. But if history had been a little different, our maps might now be very different. What would Europe look like if the Nazis had won World War II? Hitler had a map for that. What would have happened to the U.S. if Germany had won World War I -with the help of Mexico? There’s a map for that, too. Where would Africa’s national boundaries be if the continent had never been colonized by Western powers? It might look like Nikolaj Cyon’s vision of national divisions along ethnic boundaries. Vox has twenty maps that give us a glimpse of alternate history, including the 1998 map shown above of how at least one Russian envisions the economic breakup of the United States.

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We’ve seen Denver the Guilty Dog before. But she keeps doing things she’s not supposed to do! Now that it’s Christmastime, Denver is in trouble again. She's been caught red-handed -or red-lipped, in this case, eating Christmas tree ornaments. I was worried for a minute, but I found out that the ornaments are made of foam, not glass or hard plastic. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

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Tony Starch is …Iron Can! In an upcoming movie, he goes head-to-head with the super villain Fabrice Crimp, who is out to put a wrinkle in Starch’s world. Can Iron Man flatten Crimp before he runs out of steam? This parody trailer by Anders Wotzke and Michael Nixon was two years in the making. Wotzke says it’s because he’s lazy. -via Viral Viral Videos 

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Birdbox Studio has given us many delightful cartoons, so you’d think their Christmas card would be animated …and it is, sort of. What they have is an old-fashioned flip book animation with music and a special effect at the end. It’s not clear whether this is a single “card” they made to film or whether it has actually been mass-produced. Then again, it could be rigged with a bit of video magic. Either way, it’s gloriously odd and retro. If this is their Christmas card, you have to wonder how much money these guys spend on actual gifts! -via Tastefully Offensive

Look at this amazing cake! It’s got multiple references to events that happened in the TV series The Walking Dead. This image has been passed around Pinterest and Twitter for months with no reference to the artist who created it, although they deserve a golden spatula. It’s just one of the many Walking Dead-themed cakes in a collection at Uproxx. Who knew there were so many ways to incorporate zombies into cakes?

The first attempts at sex education in the U.S. over 100 years ago were to reduce the incidence of venereal disease (now called STDs). The medium of movies proved to be a valuable tool for disseminating information, although laws against pornography caused problems for those who honestly tried to educate. Public health concerns, changing laws, moral panic, and politics created a tug-of-war over sex education in schools (which continues today), although the military cut right to the chase in the war against VD. Sex education films for schools continued to demonize premarital sex, masturbation, and homosexuality, and didn’t even address venereal disease until 1959.

In Coronet’s 1947 film “Are You Popular?,” Jenny, the promiscuous high schooler, is shamed and compared unfavorably to proper, virginal Carolyn. The voice-over says, “Jenny thinks she has the keys to popularity, parking in cars with boys at night. When Jerry brags about taking Jenny out, he learns that she dates all the boys, and he feels less important. No, those who park in cars are not really popular, not even with the boys they park with. Not when they meet at school or elsewhere.”

“That was certainly a message in these films, which I think still exists today, that a young woman who is interested in sexual relationships, who maybe initiates sex, is seen as the ‘bad girl’—and that’s the girl nobody wants to sustain a relationship with.” Goodman says. “That was a burdensome message to many young women.”

Sex education films changed drastically in the 1970s, when movies were produced that would never be approved for schools today. You can read a fairly comprehensive history of sex education films going back to the beginning of motion pictures at Collectors Weekly.

Chef Thomas Keller owns the renowned Bouchon Bakery in Napa, California. Oliver Bernardino is a 23-year-old pastry cook in Vancouver who idolizes Keller and would love to work for him. Instead of sending a letter or a resume, Bernardino spent 70 hours baking and constructing an exact replica of the Bouchon Bakery out of gingerbread!  

"I wanted to make something that I was truly inspired by, and would motivate me to bring out my best work," says Bernardino. So he meticulously studied the Bouchon Bakery cookbook, his own photos from the visit, and info on the Web to replicate the look, down to tiny details like a table stacked with Keller's signature TKOs, blue apron, and a roll of green painter's tape and a Sharpie, used in Keller's kitchens to mark containers. "It's a take on what I thought their version of a 'plate of cookies for Santa' would look like," he says. Other replica elements include a macaron tree, a stack of baguettes, and the bakery's signature yellow awnings. "I was also really happy with how the benches and garbage bins came out," he says.

Bernardino’s gingerbread bakery is now on display in an exhibit called Gingerbread Lane at the Vancouver Hyatt, to benefit the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Read more about it and see pictures from all angles at San Francisco Eater. -via Messy Nessy Chic