The Fairmont Hot Springs Resort in Butte, Montana, was missing a pygmy goat from its petting zoo. The staff didn't realize that the kid had been kidnapped, instead of just wandering off, until they saw a newspaper report of a goat in a bar.

Steve Luebeck, general manager at Fairmont, said staff knew the animal was missing, but they hadn’t realized it had been stolen until they saw Wednesday’s article in The Montana Standard that reported a goat had been brought into an Uptown bar at 1:30 a.m. Sunday.

A patron called police, and an animal control officer took the goat to the shelter.

The goat was returned to the petting zoo on Wednesday.

“She made it home, and she’s safe and sound,” Casagranda said.

Luebeck said nothing like it had ever happened at the petting zoo, which goats and miniature horses call home. He said he hoped anyone who knows about the incident will come forward with information. He said if livestock were stolen from a rancher, it wouldn’t be considered a joke.

Luebeck said they would press charges against the kidnappers -if they knew who they were. Link -via Fark

(Image credit: Walter Hinck/Montana Standard)

It took me years and years of cooking and canning with inadequate measuring utensils and obsolete recipes to memorize how many teaspoons are in an ounce (which is 1/8 of a cup). All that would have been easier with this handy conversion chart from S.B. Lattin Design. Print yours out and hang it on the inside of the cabinet door where you keep your baking supplies. Link -via mental floss

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Boris the cameraman has a thick head of curly hair. When the crew was shooting footage at the Nambiti Private Game Reserve in South Africa, a serval became fascinated with it. The grooming session that followed was recorded for posterity. That the kind of experience you never forget!

Check out this visualization by David Paliwoda that gives us a sense of the astronomical distance to our planetary neighbor Mars. Note: Since yesterday, the graphic was changed from the original, which said "If the Earth was 100 pixels wide." I can imagine the storm of comments that caused the change. Link  -via Metafilter

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AsapSCIENCE has finally struck the one subject that even web users who avoid science will watch. We all want to know more about cats! Now I know why our female cats always bury their poop while the one male cat just leaves his on top. He thinks he's the alpha. -via Buzzfeed

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The latest Hank Green video from mental_floss is a quiz about cereal. If you've been reading the articles at Neatorama over the past few years, you should know the answer to every question. Because we've already told them to you!

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

It was February of 1974, and Mel Brooks' new Western satire comedy was about to hit movie screens across America. Probably no one could have possibly imagined the stir, the controversy, the raised eyebrows -and the laughter- it would create, and does to the very day. Filmed on a skimpy budget of just $2.6 million, Mel Brooks was taking on one of American film's most revered staples- the classic American Western.

Satires of cowboys and the Old West was standard for the great comedians, much like being in the army or dressing in drag. Western satires had already been done by the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and Martin and Lewis. But Mel Brooks, an indisputable comedic genius, was determined to really pull out all the stops with this one.

The film's original working title was Tex X, in honor of Civil Rights leader Malcolm X. It was changed to Black Bart, after the film's African-American character. Neither title sounded quite right. According to Mel, the title Blazing Saddles came to him as he was taking a shower one day. He immediately told his wife, Anne Bancroft, the title and she liked it. Blazing Saddles it was.

The U.S. Census Bureau made a March Madness-style tournament bracket for the populations of the 64 largest American cities (actually, their "metro areas," which is a little different). It's a tournament that New York always wins, but what counts in this tournament is your score at picking the winners of each matchup. I scored 49 out of 63 in my first attempt, but each time you play again, the matchups are different. And you'll learn along the way -I mean really, who expected Louisville to be bigger than Cleveland? When you've played the cities enough, you can switch the bracket to U.S. states and play again! Only a portion of the bracket is shown here. Link -via Metafilter

I've never seen Game of Thrones, but I know enough about it just from being on the internet to find the characters' Facebook feed funny. This is only one entry from the post at Funny or Die. Not only do they snipe at each other, but they register their opinions on things passed around Facebook -the Games of Thrones Drinking Game, to be exact. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy

In Boston in 1774, tensions were building up that would lead to the Revolutionary War. The colonies were chafing under British rule, and the British were exerting their authority by clamping down on rebellious communities. This was the atmosphere in which John Malcom, a bad-tempered loyalist customs official, was found yelling at a young boy in the street. One thing led to another, and Malcolm hit a townsman in the head. Later that night, a mob gathered to give Malcolm what for.

After a stop at a nearby wharf to pick up a barrel of tar (at some point, down-filled pillows, perhaps taken from Malcom’s own house, were also collected), the crowd, which now numbered more than a thousand people, hauled Malcom through the snowy streets to the center of town, where after three “Huzzas,” they loaded him into a cart parked in front of the Customs House. Almost four years before, this had been the site of the Boston Massacre, and as a consequence the building was now referred to as Butchers’ Hall. Bonfires were common in this portion of King Street, a 60-foot-wide plaza-like space in front of the Town Hall paved with seashells and gravel where the stocks and whipping post were also located. One of these fires may have been used to heat the stiff and sludgy pine tar (a distillation of the bituminous substance that bubbled from a smoldering pine tree) into a pourable black paste.

It was one of the bitterest evenings of the year. Boston Harbor had frozen over two nights before. Malcom was undoubtedly trembling with cold and fear, but this did not prevent the crowd from tearing off his clothes (dislocating his arm in the process) and daubing his skin with steaming tar that would have effectively parboiled his flesh. Once the feathers had been added, Malcom was clothed in what was known at the time as a “modern jacket”: a painful and mortifying announcement to the world that he had sinned against the collective mores of the community. Tarring and feathering went back centuries to the time of the crusades; it was also applied to the effigies used during Pope Night; several Boston loyalists before him had been tarred and feathered, but none could claim the level of suffering that Malcom was about to endure.

The story of John Malcolm's torture at Smithsonian also describes the political background of the incident, and the mob mentality that eventually was harnessed as a tool for the Revolution. Link

(Image credit: The Granger Collection, NYC)

Here it is, our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog! Tell us what this object is, if you know. If you don't, make a wild guess!

Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. We'll have two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.

Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?

Check out the other mystery items this week at the What Is It? Blog. Have fun and good luck!

Update: The mystery item is a mechanical pry tool that was used to free people who were trapped in cars before the jaws of life were invented. After studying the comments and collaborating with the powers that be, we have decided to award two prizes for the correct answer. Craig Clayton said it is a automotive tool to force open body panels. That's sort of right. Then Jonnette Samantha Huntley Mix said "The Jaws of Life for [ pick your favorite Kardashian ]'s pantyhose." That's sort of right, and funny, too! So both Craig and Jonnette win t-shirts from the NeatoShop! The prize for the funniest answer goes to The Professor, who said, "It's the remote control for a North Korean TV set." Alrighty then, that's good for a t-shirt as well! Thanks to everyone who played, and see the answers to the other mystery items of the week at the What Is It? blog.

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I think the original goal here was to create the illusion of a dog-headed person eating at the table with utensils and probably an overdubbed monolog. It turned out to be a lesson in how much dogs like peanut butter. And the videographer's laughter is better than any monolog they may have come up with! -via Metafilter

Given an odd sentence out of context, can you determine whether it comes from the instructions for a video game or a fringe religion? You can probably score pretty well in this Lunchtime Quiz from mental_floss if you play video games or have read up on cults. I figured I would fail, as I have read very little of either, but I tried and scored only 38%. However, the lines you are given are hilariously nonsensical. Going through the answers to see their sources was the best part of the quiz. Link

Photographer Fabien Nissels always has a model, now that he's constructed the "block man" for his series called Blocks. And he's fairly easy to pose, since he's made of disjointed blocks.

So, to make it short, I took my friend Johan (http://www.chezkatz.com) in the studio and we shot 4 views from each part of his body. We then printed everything and fixed the images on polystyrene blocks we had constructed. Once the blocks were all finished, we took my car and went shooting them in various environments. There is no photoshop cheating, our modular man really went to all these places and always asked for souvenir pictures, except maybe the one when he was on the toilets :)

See the rest of the series at his website. Link -via Laughing Squid

Etsy seller Holly Renee makes dresses printed with images from Mars! The dress is made with stretch Lycra and cotton, belt sold separately. The images are from the Mars Curiosity rover. The store Shenova also has tank tops, leggings, and skirts with Mars images. Link  -via Boing Boing