Today's featured pets are Lucy and Muffin, sent in by Neatoramanaut Jane Lang. They are mountain climbers in their own imaginations. -Thanks, Jane!
The rest of you, send your pet's picture to tips@neatorama.com to be the featured pet at Lifestyles of the Cute and Cuddly.
The following is an article from Uncle John's Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader.
This article by Lisa Bannon, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal on October 24, 1995, tells the story of how a significant rumor was born. It's one of the best investigative pieces we've ever seen on the spread of an urban legend.
Anna Runge, a mother of eight, was so enamored of Walt Disney Co. that she owned stacks of its animated home videos, a Beauty and the Beast blanket and a Disney diaper bag. ''Disney was almost a member of the family,'' she said.
Until, that is, an acquaintance tipped her off to a startling rumor: The Magic Kingdom was sending obscene subliminal messages through some of its animated family films, including Aladdin, in which the handsome, young title character supposedly murmurs, sotto voce, ''All good teen-agers take off your clothes.''
''I felt as if I had entrusted my kids to pedophiles,'' says the Carthage, New York, homemaker, who promptly threw the videos into the garbage. ''It's like a toddler introduction to porn.''
A PERSISTANT RUMOR
By now, just about everyone has heard the rumors that so shocked Runge. Indeed, Disney catapulted into the headlines a few weeks ago on reports that there are subliminal sexual messages in three popular Disney videos: The Lion King and The Little Mermaid, as well as Aladdin. The charges were reported around the world; TV news shows broadcast the offending snippets in slow motion, among them a scene from The Lion King in which dust supposedly spells out the word ''sex.''
Disney denies inserting any subliminal messages. And the three allegedly obscene sequences are hardly crystal clear; even using the pause button on a videocassette recorder, viewers may debate whether they exist. Yet those sequences have quickly become the stuff of suburban myth, like the ''Paul is dead'' rumor from the heyday of the Beatles or the persistent allegations that Procter & Gamble Co.'s moon-and-stars logo symbolizes devil worship.
As the rumors spread, though, so did a common refrain: Where does this stuff come from?
You'll probably see a lot of mushy videos about wonderful mothers this weekend for Mothers Day. How about a supercut of horrible moms that will make yours look saintly in comparison? Flavorwire put together such a video, culled from movies about crazy, evil, and just plain awful mothers. NSFW language. Link -via Holy Kaw!
Ypres, Belgium, stages the Festival of Cats on the second Sunday of May every three years. The festival harkens back to a time in which cats were tortured and destroyed because they were believed to be witches or incarnations of the devil. However, the modern festival is instead a celebration of cats, and no live cats are involved.
The centerpiece of the festival is the Cat Parade. The first parade was held in 1938 with music, a jester, and a bunch of altar boys carrying a bunch of plastic cats. They marched from the city hall to the belfry. Amid a concert of trumpet music and the carillon of bells, the jester climbed to the top of the belfry tower to throw the toy cats into the crowd below. This was based on how live cats were once thrown from the bell tower during the Middle Ages. These days it is soft plush cats that are tossed to the crowd below, perhaps mocking the awful brutality that is now thankfully left to the past. A mock witch burning also remains as a part of the festivities.
Kattenstoet would have been this weekend, but the festival was held last year and the next one will be in 2015. See plenty of pictures and a video of the parade at PetsLady. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Flickr user Cedric Dubois)
Mark Crayford of Swindon, Wiltshire, England, went for an elaborate proposal plan to ask Tracey Badenski to marry him. He bought a ring, ordered a suit of armor from Germany, and practiced riding a horse over the course of six months. Then the big day came, and it didn't go quite as planned. Oh no, she didn't turn him down, that would be the worst. But he should have practiced dismounting in the armor a bit more. Link -via Arbroath
If you've been paying attention, you probably know that Mother's Day is tomorrow. If not, HEY! MOTHERS DAY IS TOMORROW! It would be a bit embarrassing if you forgot, and your mom would know, because mothers always just know. So do something nice for your mother, if you are lucky enough to still have one. You should also find some time to catch up on what's been happening at Neatorama this week.
Eddie Deezen wrote a Mothers Day article on Gladys Presley, the Mother Elvis Presley Worshiped.
We had two new books featured in articles this week. The first was Vertical Horizon, from Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze. His stunning photographs are in on the Spotlight blog, where you can see them in the larger format they deserve.
We also had a guest post from Jessica Hagy: How to be Interesting on Facebook, which is an excerpt from her book How to Be Interesting: (In 10 Simple Steps).
The Pee-Mobile was a contribution from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
The Annals of Improbable Research gave us Pringles in Your Ear.
And 50 Shades of Prey: Poison Dart Frogs came from mental_floss magazine.
We only had one BRI Brainteaser this week, Book on the Floor. We'll have more if I can find some really good ones.
Have you been over to our sub-blog Lifestyles of the Cute and Cuddly lately? Our featured pets from Neatoramanauts this week include Trekker and the siblings Buster and Stella (shown). Your dog, cat, goat, bunny, or other pet can be the featured pet, too: just send us a picture at tips@neatorama.com and then watch for your sweetie on Lifestyles of the Cute and Cuddly!
In the What Is It Game, the mystery object is a rock, but despite many guesses, the What Is It? blog was never able to ascertain anything else about it, which means there is no correct answer this week. So… we decided to pick two of the funniest answers! StilesJM declared it to be C-3PO's kidney stone, which is certainly good for a t-shirt! And Anthony Zaragoza told a great story that's a winner:
A deadline was fast approaching for Clark Kent. But during his speed-typing, the IBM Selectric typewriter ball had a meltdown from the friction. The story that would have exposed the insidious 4-H organization was never published.
See the answers to the rest of the mystery items of the week at the What Is It? blog.
The post with the most comments this week was (by far) Abercrombie & Fitch: No Fat Women, Please! It was followed by Your State's Highest-Paid Employee and Robinsons Ad.
The comments of the week have to go to the folks who visit at the Neatoramanauts Facebook page. You were asked to identify the place in this picture. Great comments ensued! Bill Hunt said, "The seldom visited island of Photoshoppio." Other folks said it was Photoshop Island, Photopia, Palm of Palms, Ray Harryhausen's house, and "a handy place to live."
The most popular post of the week was Vertical Horizon. Coming in second was Mystery of the Atacama Humanoid Solved, and Words That Survived Since the Ice Age was third.
The most emailed post was Science-Based 7 Minute Exercise, which set some kind of record, I think. Then there was a three-way tie between Bluth's Original Frozen Banana Stand, The Colorful Life of Antonia Larroux and Beth for second place.
The post with the most ♥s was Hyperbole and A Half Returns (no surprise there), followed by Riker Sits Down and Adorable Baby Duck Trying to Stay Awake.
May I remind you that the NeatoShop is the perfect place to find gifts for graduates? Get him or her something that will commemorate this auspicious occasion in a way they'll always remember! And if you want to stock up on gifts for future occasions, the NeatoShop has a Clearance Sale going on right now!
Here's a list you might want to bookmark for the hot months ahead: 33 Super-Cool Popsicles To Make This Summer. Shown is the Grapefruit And Strawberry Greyhound Poptail, made from grapefruit juice, strawberries, and vodka. There are other cocktail popsicle recipes, plus fruity concoctions, dessert popsicles, and even vegan ices, with links to the recipes. Sure beats freezing Kool-Ade in an ice tray! Link -via mental_floss
The Albion Beatnik shop in Oxford, England, has this sign in a window. Respect! The text is a reworking of This is a Printing Office by Beatrice Warde. Link -via Buzzfeed
Well, this is silly, but you might want to give it a try for laughs. Petswitch allows you to easily put your features on your pet's face. Or if you don't have a pet, there's a gallery of pet pictures you can select from. It helps to make sure the two pictures combined are facing the same direction, and pay attention to the tilt. Shown here are my eyes and mouth on my cat Marshmallow. Link -via b3ta
As much as Disco talks, it's a good thing he knows a lot of different phrases. He jumps from one pop culture reference to another, sometimes garbling them a little, just enough to make you laugh! -via Tastefully Offensive
The Childrens Television Workshop worked on a new show for a long time to ensure its quality before putting it on the air in 1969. Everything was finally in place, except the show still didn't have a name. A promo sketch shows Muppets mulling over possible titles, but the actual story was more frantic.
The name Sesame Street was not dreamed up by Muppets in a boardroom but the promo sketch does reference the dilemma the Workshop had in finding a name for the show. As producer Jon Stone remembers, “the name was set at the 11th hour and fifty ninth minute.” Early promotional materials simply referred to the show as a “preschool educational television show.” In early spring of 1969, the press conference announcing the show neared and producers had still not made a decision. “We were just frantic for a title,” said Joan Ganz Cooney. “Our press and publicity people were going nuts. How were they going to promote a show that had no name?”
But they managed to come up with the perfect name. Read what happened at the Sesame Workshop blog. Link -via Laughing Squid
The natural gas supplier Energy West distributes scratch-and-sniff cards to its customers so they can learn to recognize the smell of a gas leak. That backfired in Great Falls, Montana. When a batch of expired cards was discarded, they were picked up by a garbage truck that compressed them with the other trash, which released the smell to the entire town as the truck traveled its route on Wednesday.
All the cards combined to make a very strong smell, so as the garbage truck drove around downtown, it left behind the smell people think of as natural gas.
“It’s really, really potent,” said Jamie Jackson, a battalion chief for Great Falls Fire/Rescue.
The smell wafted into downtown buildings, so emergency crews responded to several reports of gas leaks Wednesday morning, and numerous buildings were evacuated.
Workers still were checking for possible gas leaks at noon “to make sure two things didn’t happen at once.” Workers followed the garbage trucks out to the dump and went through those loads of garbage after they were dumped.
“There’s no problem with contamination,” Bohr said, and the smell samples “can be buried with normal garbage.” He said 25,000 of the samples were sent out at one time.
The gas company has apologized for the situation. Link
Google Earth put images from LandSat satellites together to create time-lapse images of our changing Earth. You can see how some places have changed dramatically over the past 30 years, such as the Amazon, where agricultural plots and towns are carved out of the rainforest (shown here); Las vegas as it grows; retreating glaciers; the Aral Sea drying up; and Saudi Arabia, where irrigation is making farms bloom. Link -via Boing Boing
Ze Frank narrates the entries of a cat's diary. This is a bit like Henri, the Existential Cat, with an added dollop of Ze's craziness. Watch for the sand cat at 2:27. -via Viral Viral Videos
State governments have a lot of people on the payroll. There are legislators, judges, social workers, inspectors, police, and the educational system, from elementary school to state universities. Deadspin looked at the records and determined the highest-paid employee on each state's public payroll.
Based on data drawn from media reports and state salary databases, the ranks of the highest-paid active public employees include 27 football coaches, 13 basketball coaches, one hockey coach, and 10 dorks who aren't even in charge of a team.
Those "10 dorks" are also university employees: chancellors, presidents, or deans (and then there's Nevada). At the link, you'll find more information about where the money for the coaches comes from, and where it might otherwise go. Link -via Digg
