Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website. This article was selected for publication on January 8th, the anniversary of Elvis' birth in 1935. This post contains spoilers.

Elvis Presley was the hottest act in all of show business by the summer of 1956. The 21-year-old singing dynamo had electrified the entire world in his live show, concerts, and television appearances. His records and albums were selling like the proverbial hotcakes. In the early months of 1956, Elvis' long sideburns, swinging hips, and wild gyrations had made him one of the most famous men in America. But in spite of all his incredible success, Elvis had one major dream- he wanted to be a movie star.

As a teenager, Elvis had been an usher in a movie theater. He studied his silver screen idols: Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and above all, James Dean. Elvis watched Dean's iconic performance in 1955's Rebel Without a Cause dozens of times. It was reputedly his favorite film of all time and he knew the entire movie's dialogue verbatim.

Dean's tragic death at the age of 24 in September of 1955 profoundly affected young Elvis (Elvis was to call Dean "a genius"). There seems little doubt that Elvis' fervent hope at this early point in his career was to become the movies' next James Dean.

Early in 1956, after two screen tests, Elvis was put under contract to Paramount Studios. But Elvis' film debut was to be a "loan out" to 20th-century Fox. Although Elvis had signed a multi-picture deal with Paramount, his manager Colonel Tom Parker had shrewdly incorporated a clause allowing him to work with other studios.

Elvis' first day on the set was August 20, 1956. The film, originally titled The Reno Brothers, was a Western, set in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Elvis' co-stars were veteran actors Richard Egan, Robert Middleton, William Campbell, and Mildred Dunnock. His leading lady was the lovely Debra Paget, who Elvis developed a huge crush on.

Qingdao, China, may be more familiar to you as Tsingtao, as in Tsingtao beer. The city was a German colony for a couple of decades around the turn of the 20th century, and one of the first things they did was brew beer. The Germans used nearby Mount Fushan as a defense against the British colonial forces who wanted their piece of China. Darmon Richter got a chance to explore Mount Fushan and found plenty of tunnels, chambers, and bunkers from that era.

Torches switched to full-beam we stepped out of the storm, and into a still darkness.

The tunnel beyond was mostly formed from natural rock - the bulging contours of the passage illustrating where one crater at a time had been blasted into the solid rock, joining to form a corridor. Inside, nothing stirred... other than the slow, methodical dripping of condensation from the walls. Even the raging storm outside became inaudible, as we carefully made our way deeper inside the mountain.

Branching out from this main tunnel were a number of smaller caverns and chambers; some appeared to be no more than an accidental blast in the wrong direction, while others were reinforced with solid metal walls and bulkheads.

These chambers were often marked with Chinese characters scrawled clumsily across doorframes, and would have served as storerooms, ammo dumps, dormitories. At a humidity level not far off 100%, every surface was damp to touch - and the insides of these vaulted metal chambers sparkled like electric silver where the moisture ran down over mineral deposits.

Read more about the hollow mountain and the expedition at The Bohemian Blog. Link -Thanks, Tom!

Dress your bunny rabbit in the latest bunny fashions from Annie Elle Bunnies! Annie was a little shy about sharing her bunny-dressing hobby, but got such a kind reception that she's opened an Etsy shop and already has plenty of orders to keep her busy. One basic style fits most size bunnies, and will fit  dogs and cats, too! There are a variety of colors and trim available. Link -via reddit

Snow as an art medium can be made to express almost anything, until your fingers freeze off trying to finish the project. I love the gold tooth that probably started out as a Christmas tree ornament. Link

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The crow does what it must to get this woman to put the pan down. And it has no intention of giving up! -via Daily Picks and Flicks

In an article coinciding with the release of a book containing all the scripts of the TV show Monty Python's Flying Circus, the Atlantic dissects the humor of the comedy troupe Monty Python. The most classic example of the TV series' comedy is the Dead Parrot Sketch, which was a reworking of an earlier skit set at a car dealership.   

It is absurd from the start, but its absurdity represents a compact, dreamlike way of telling the truth. This time the role of the aggrieved customer is taken by Cleese—who plays him not as a straight man but as a Brylcreemed, raincoated weirdo. In the world of Monty Python, even a guy with a valid beef is a lunatic. As for Palin’s salesman, this time his denials of the undeniable have an existential audacity: he is ready to claim, and keep claiming, that the palpably dead parrot is just resting. Cleese, indignantly brandishing the bird’s corpse, is the victim of the ultimate—the archetypal—rip-off; but he remains an Englishman. Nutty as he is, he declines to vault over the desk and punch Palin’s lights out. Language is the only weapon available to him. So his tamped-down rage becomes a torrent of increasingly baroque synonyms for death, which Cleese and Chapman composed with the aid of a thesaurus.

When that outburst of manic poetry is over, the Pythons don’t bother forcing the parrot sketch toward a well-made conclusion. The quest for punch lines bored them. Instead the sketch collapses into a series of bizarre digressions, and finally Cleese’s character turns to the camera and declares that the situation has become “too silly.” And that’s that: we move on to the next item.

And that is the reason why the show didn't last long -the troupe refused to drag an idea out to fill time. With their best efforts compressed into three and a half TV seasons, they live on in recordings forever. Link -via Metafilter

Mark Anderson at Andertoons has a new tutorial on how to draw a polar bear. You can see the steps here, or all of them in order at his site. Put one on your next love note! Link

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DJ Deadmau5 took the opportunity to ride through an airport baggage x-ray machine in Mexico. I have no idea if this is as dangerous as medical x-ray exposure or many times worse. I wouldn't recommend it; even if the radiation was relatively safe, most airport security teams would arrest you for such shenanigans. Link -via JustDoHits

Talk about money laundering! Thefts of Tide liquid laundry detergent are becoming more and more common. Whether it's shoplifting, hijacking, or fencing, the profits are there, from the drug addict who needs a quick dollar to the grocer boosting his profit margin. Sergeant Aubrey Thompson of the Prince George’s County Police Department's Organized Retail Crime Unit first encountered Tide thefts in March of 2011 when a Safeway store reported losing thousands of dollars to detergent theft every month.

Later, Thompson reviewed weeks’ worth of the Safeway’s security footage. He found that more than two dozen thieves, working in crews, were regularly raiding the store’s household-products aisle, sometimes returning more than once the same day and avoiding detection by timing their heists to follow clerks’ shift changes. Owners and managers of other area stores, having seen Thompson on the news, reached out to him to report their own vanishing Tide bottles. Since then, the oddly brand-loyal crime wave has gone national, striking bodegas, supermarkets, and big-box discounters from Austin to West St. Paul, Minnesota. In New York, employees at the Penn Station Duane Reade nabbed a man trying to abscond with Tide bottles he’d stuffed into a suitcase. In Orange County, an attempted Tide theft led to a high-speed chase that included the thief crashing his SUV into an ambulance. Last year, for the first time, detergent made the National Retail Federation’s list of most-targeted items. Says Joseph LaRocca, founder of the trade group RetailPartners, who helped compile the report: “Tide was specifically called out.”

New York magazine traces the reasons for the rise in stolen Tide, which is a combination of the detergent's expense, the brand loyalty of its users, the ease of theft, a chain of buyers and sellers looking for a profit, and a manufacturer who appears to almost take pride in the black market status of its product. Link

(Image credit: Victor Prado/New York Magazine. Typography by Kevin Dresser.)

The first photographic portraits were taken in 1839, but it took decades for the custom to become common. This is a portrait of Conrad Heyer, taken around 1852. Heyer may be earliest-born person ever photographed, as he was born in 1749!

He was approximately 103 when photographed, having been born in 1749. He was reportedly the first white child born in Waldoboro, Maine, then a German immigrant community. He served in the Continental Army under George Washington during the Revolutionary War, crossing the Delaware with him and fighting in other major battles. He eventually bought a farm and retired to Waldoboro, where he happily regaled visitors with tales of his Revolutionary War exploits until his dying day.

The article at Doug's Darkworld goes on to describe how different the world was at the beginning of Heyer's life from the modern world in which he had his portrait made. Link -via reddit

Not every animal in Australia is out to kill you. Meet the quokka, a marsupial that resembles a rodent and hops like a bunny, native to Rottnest Island and a few other islands off the southwest coast. I wonder if all of them look this happy? Link

The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges into Music.

Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong is best remembered for his gravelly voice, for his intrepid trumpet, and for introducing the world to jazz. Get to know the man Wynton Marsalis calls "the embodiment of jazz music."

THE FOUNDING FATHER OF JAZZ

Louis Armstrong is called one of, if not the, most influential artist in the history of jazz music. He basically invented the now-ubiquitous feature of jazz, the improvised solo; was one of the first 'scat' singers; is one of the most recognized cornet and trumpet players -and singers; and his recordings of songs like "April in Paris," "Pennies From Heaven," and "Mack the Knife" remain hugely popular today. As jazz trumpeter Max Kaminsky wrote, Louis Armstrong was "the heir of all that had gone before -and the father of all that was to come."

BORN IN THE BATTLEFIELD

Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901, in a rough section of New Orleans known as the Battlefield, where the toe-tapping sounds of dance halls, brothels, honky-tonks, and even funerals surrounded and inspired him. When he was just six years old, Louis joined three other boys who were singing on street corners for tips, and a few years later, he bought himself an old cornet from a pawnshop. He also started hanging around with local musicians like Joe "King" Oliver and Bunk Johnson.

In 1913 Louis' life changed dramatically when, on New Year's Eve, he fired a gun into the air in celebration. He was arrested and sent to reform school. There he met Peter Davis, the man in charge of the school's music program. Davis gave him a bugle and his first formal music training. He also put Louis in the school's band and eventually made him the group's leader. When 13-year-old Louis emerged from the reform school, he was a polished musician.

A NEW KIND OF MUSIC

When Evan was only seven, he saved up his allowance for a year to donate to City Kitties, a rescue shelter in Philadelphia. He did the same thing every year since, each time saving a more money, until he was proud to donate $110 in 2012. Along the way, Evan got more joy from the donations, and the two cats his family got from the shelter, than from all the candy that money could have bought. Read his story, and the letters he wrote to the shelter, at Buzzfeed. Link

(Image credit: City Kitties)

Datta Phuge of Pimpri-Chinchwad, India, spent £14,000 ($22,754) on a custom-made gold shirt to impress women. The shirt is woven through with 24-karat gold thread and comes with matching cuffs, belt, and rings made of leftover gold. The six buttons are Swarovski crystals. Phuge made his fortune as a money-lender.

'I know I am not the best looking man in the world but surely no woman could fail to be dazzled by this shirt?' he explained

'The gold shirt has been one of my dreams,' Mr Phuge told Indian newspaper the Pune Mirror.

'It will be an embellishment to my reputation as the ‘Gold man of Pimpri"' Mr Phuge said.

That shirt is guaranteed to attract gold diggers. Link -via Breakfast Links

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A trombone player attached a GoPro camera to his instrument's slide. He calls it "silliness," I call it delightful! -via reddit