Some people shake their heads at how far youth has fallen, with their selfies, lack of formality, and droopy pants. A couple of decades ago, it was video games and rap music. Before that, rock music and long hair. NPR looks at the phenomenon of moral panic by examining the song "Ya Got Trouble," from the 1957 musical The Music Man, which was set in 1912. In it, con man Harold Hill panicked the citizens of small town in order to sell them musical instruments.  

A lot of folks are familiar with the "trouble right here in River City" refrain of the song, but when you look at this double echo of cultural fretting — 50 years plus 50 years on — it serves as an impressive reminder that nothing, nothing, is new about the raising of alarms about the decline and fall of culture.

Hill has noticed that people are peeking into the billiard parlor, and he learns that it's because they've got a new pool table in there. And these folks haven't had a pool table in town before — "Just billiards." And he instantly knows that just this, just change, change itself, is enough to plant the seeds of panic, no matter how little sense it makes to suggest that pool is wicked but billiards is noble.

Did you know there was a difference between billiards and pool? I didn't. Although we laughed about the sinfulness of pool and some boys' habit of rebuckling their knickerbockers below the knee, the song was a sneaky jab at contemporary folks who were easily stirred up about rock ’n’ roll and surfing. The article at NPR is actually a lot of fun. -via Metafilter

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Queen Victoria had a tattoo? We may never know for sure, but tattoos were somewhat of a fad in Victorian society, after sailors came back from Polynesia with them. But tattoos go back as far as human civilization, for various reasons in various places. This TED-Ed animation skims over many of them briefly, and together they reminds us of how universal the art of tattoo really is. You can get the full lesson by Addison Anderson here. -via Digg

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Julie Taylor couldn’t figure out how her Maltese Sophie was getting out of her kennel, but every time she was confined, the dog was soon seen playing with Twitch, the German shepherd. Setting up a camera was all it took to find out what happened. Overlooking the question of why a one-year-old dog would be confined to a small cage, they sure look happy to be out and about together! -via Daily Picks and Flicks

Does contextual advertising ever impress you? Or does it make you nervous? Ads targeted to you (or someone else who uses your computer) will trip you up as surely as forgetting to delete your browser history. At least for a normal internet user- contextual ads on my computer make no sense at all, just like my browser history. That’s just an occupational hazard. This is the latest comic from Owl Turd. -via Daily of the Day

The Mary Sue has a list that you’ll only want to read if you’re ready for a melancholy trip through your childhood, and maybe a good cathartic cry. Six Fictional Animals That Broke Our Hearts the Most is a reminder of how we get caught up in fictional stories and invest our emotions and loyalties in characters that are totally made up. That’s the sign of a well-told tale, although it can be traumatic. I won’t tell you who’s on the list (aside from the picture you may or may not recognize), because I don’t want the waterworks to start too early.

That said, the list is totally aimed at the internet generation. Personally, I was unfamiliar with most of the entries. If it were aimed at my age group, it would have contained certain characters from the movies Bambi, Dumbo, and Old Yeller, and from the books Watership Down and Charlotte’s Web. None of these made the list of six, although some are mentioned in passing.     

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What starts off as a cute video about a guy and his dog becomes an anti-drunk driving PSA. So prepare yourself -you might need a hanky. And surprisingly, it’s a tearjerker from Budweiser that doesn’t involve a Clydesdale at all. See, if you had a good sober horse to take you home, we wouldn’t have to discuss drunk driving. -via Buzzfeed

Geoff Beattie stills lives in the Queensland, Australia, house where he grew up. Now 68, he’s had an eventful life: wooing his wife, Elaine, over her father’s objections, building a dairy farm, and raising children. A spine injury caused him to hand over the farm work to his wife while he cooked for the family for a while. Then Elaine developed leukemia, leaving him heartbroken, with four children when she died at age 38.

In the weeks and months after Elaine’s death, Geoff suffered insomnia and barely functioned by day. “I’d be lying there and I just couldn’t go to sleep,” he says. “So I hit the bottle a bit. I’d had it. I don’t know if I’d get depressed. I’d get … sad, drink half a bottle of brandy.” He points to his kitchen cupboard. “I’d have the whisky ­bottles lined up above me cupboard there.”

Then, late one strange and divine night as he lay awake, lost and sunk deep in the depths of longing and despair, Geoff Beattie was struck by a profound and persistent compulsion to make marmalade. He rose from his bed and walked to the kitchen. He reached for his wooden chopping board and a bag of oranges and, as his ­children slept, he began slowly and carefully ­slicing orange rinds well into the night. He cut those orange rinds with such out-of-body ­precision that they were thin enough to dissolve on the tongue. On the stovetop he reduced his cooking liquid with such tenderness and innate understanding that, come morning, Geoff had created a marmalade so pure and so clear, it looked like the dawn sun had chosen not to rise outside his kitchen window that day but inside the glass jar he held in his hand.  

Beattie continued making marmalade and jellies and cakes, which were so impressive he began entering them in contests. He’s now won the national Florence Morgan Memorial Prize for Rich Dark Fruit Cake four times! Read the melancholy yet fascinating story of Beattie’s life, and get the recipe for his award-winning fruitcake at the Weekend Australian Magazine. -via Metafilter

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Have you ever heard the saying, "No good deed goes unpunished"?

Simon Cowell of Wildlife Aid got a call about a cygnet (baby swan) stuck in a chain link fence along the Thames. It would have been a routine rescue, except that the swan family was standing by, and the father did not like the interference of this human at all. His overprotectiveness discouraged Cowell not one bit, but it did leave him a little bruised. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

Redditor delpaint often does arty things with his glorious beard. This one is called the Galaxy Beard, and it came with a long-term contract of sorts. The post was titled “No amount of hot showers will get rid of the glitter on me now.” The picture is awesome, but remember that glitter lasts forever. He may be finding glitter on his collars for years, if he ever gets enough of it out of the beard to look normal again.

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This annoying cat wants in, and he won’t take no for an answer! The dialogue is in French, so check the subtitles. In this version, it’s not even his house! The original video was already funny, but with dialogue added, it’s completely ridiculous. It was dubbed by Faireset, the same guy who gave us Dansons la Capucine and Cats and Mirrors. -via Tastefully Offensive

Iceland has an extremely low crime rate, which leaves the police with time to interact with the public. And take pictures. May I draw your attention to the Instagram account of Lögreglan, the Reykjavík Police Department?

Many of the photographs show they have quite a sense of humor.

See a selection of pictures at Buzzfeed, where the consensus of commenters is that police officers in Reykjavík are overwhelmingly hot.

If you were around in the 1970s, you might remember the McDonalds coffee spoon, which was nicknamed the McSpoon. It was small, well-designed, perfect for stirring coffee, with a scoop about size of a nostril, and could hold exactly 100 milligrams of cocaine. Of course, most people used the disposable spoon to stir sugar in their coffee, but it was the Model Drug Paraphernalia Act that brought the minority use of the spoon to the general public. Under the act, which was only enacted at the state level, innocuous items such as baggies and straws could be labeled a “drug paraphernalia.”

Just prior to the creation of the Model Drug Paraphernalia Act, then-Senators Joe Biden and Charles Mathias held a hearing in Baltimore, where the Paraphernalia Trade Association (who represents headshop vendors) could voice their concerns. The PTA swiftly went about arguing that, under such a broad definition, anything could be deemed “paraphernalia.”

According to minutes from the hearing, one PTA representative attempted to make a mockery of the proposed law. “Look at this,” he facetiously told the panel, thrusting a McDonald’s coffee stirring spoon above his head. “This is the best cocaine spoon in town and it’s free with every cup of coffee at McDonalds.”

His intention was to highlight how vague and overreaching the act was, but it set into motion a storm of controversy for McDonalds and the demise of the McSpoon. Oh, you can still get one, but they’re collector’s items now, and will cost you. Read the story of the little spoon that was a casualty of the War on Drugs at Pricenomics. -via Metafilter

Slipping on banana peels, seeing Jesus in toast, magnetic dogs, and baby poop sausage: what do these thing all have in common? They are the subjects of prize-winning scientific research!

Our friends at The Annals of Improbable Research pulled off the 24th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony last night at Harvard’s Sanders Theater. The winners are:

PHYSICS PRIZE [JAPAN]: Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, for measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that's on the floor.

REFERENCE: "Frictional Coefficient under Banana Skin," Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, Tribology Online 7, no. 3, 2012, pp. 147-151.

WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Kiyoshi Mabuchi

NEUROSCIENCE PRIZE [CHINA, CANADA]: Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, and Kang Lee, for trying to understand what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast.

REFERENCE: "Seeing Jesus in Toast: Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Face Pareidolia," Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, Kang Lee, Cortex, vol. 53, April 2014, Pages 60–77. The authors are at School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Xidian University, the Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, and the University of Toronto, Canada.

WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Kang Lee

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [AUSTRALIA, UK, USA]: Peter K. Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons, for amassing evidence that people who habitually stay up late are, on average, more self-admiring, more manipulative, and more psychopathic than people who habitually arise early in the morning.

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The language of sea travel may seem like a foreign language to you, as it does to me. In an examination of the use of “port” and “starboard” to mean the left and right sides of a ship, the nautical terms get even more confusing to us landlubbers. At one time, they were “starboard” and “larboard”! What could possibly go wrong? But like all language, those terms evolved over time. Get enlightened with this video from Today I Found Out.

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Elin Nordlander caught these two koalas airing their differences at Great Otway National Park in Melbourne, Australia. Although angry koalas usually sound like grunting pigs, these two communicate with party horn sounds. -via Tastefully Offensive