Hi y'all! This week Neatorama welcomed a new author, Broderick Ives Engelhard. That's a mouthful, so you can just call him Brody. He's a recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, and has his own art blog called Ives Street. That's where I found out how excited Brody was to join our little crew. We are happy to have him!

For those of you with mobile gadgets that take pictures, we are proud to announce that Neatorama is now on Instagram! Follow Neatorama on Instagram for an easy way to share your pictures with us.

Our feature articles this week gave us a little of everything: history, literature, science, pop culture, fashion, travel, and even poetry!

Jill Harness showed us The 12 Best Geeky Costumes for Halloween 2012. It's the kind of post we do every year, and every year people come up with impressive new costume ideas.

Adrienne Crezo brought us Talking Pictures: Images and Messages Rescued from the Past, by Ransom Riggs as part of Neatorama's Book Excerpt series. We gave away a copy of the book to a random commenter, and the winner is Frenchmell. Congratulations, Frenchmell!

Eddie Deezen introduced us to Jimmy Nicol, the Beatles Drummer for Ten Days, and told us about The Strange Death of Alfalfa.

Salem Witch Trials: The Fungus Theory was from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

Mental-floss magazine gave us 10 Places to See Before They Die.

Ig® Nobel Limericks: Execution, Hang Length, and Beakers came from the Annals of Improbable Research.

The Neatorama Halloween blog has a lot of items you won't find on the main page. This week we had videos of a musical Halloween, a scary Halloween, and a funny Halloween (among others), plus a video tour of Knott's Scary Farm, and the latest holiday costumes, decorations, and food!

You need to check into NeatoBambino as well, for treats like a child's threatening letter to the Tooth Fairy and the World's Fastest Stroller.

In the What Is It? game this week, the mystery item is a woodworker's compass, a pencil or scribe placed into one of the holes would make a circle of the appropriate size when the compass was rotated around the spike. Berhard had the correct answer first, and wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! The funniest answer came from robopanda, who guessed it to be an extreme incense burner for especially smelly hippies! That's definitely worth a t-shirt. Thanks to everyone who played this week! Find out the purposes to all the mystery items of the week at the What Is It? blog.

The post with the most comments this week was Rate Your Poop With Movie Titles, followed by Ukraine’s Anime Girl and Real Barbie Meet Face-to-Barely-Human-Face. Those posts are still open for comments if you want to put in your two cents worth.

When you get caught up on everything here at Neatorama and all the sub-blogs, remember you'll find extra content at our Facebook page, too! And be sure to follow Neatorama on Twitter and Pinterest! Oh yeah, Flipboard, too! Have a great week!

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Now that Paranormal Activity 4 or 5 or whatever is in theaters, Screen Junkies gives the series the Honest Trailer treatment. Ha! -via Daily of the Day

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Watch this constantly-balancing robot walk a tightrope. That's one less way we'll be able to escape their wrath when they take over. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. -via The Daily What Geek

Big Tex, the 52-foot-tall mascot of the Texas State Fair, burned to the ground today. Big Tex had stood over the fair every year since 1952.

Fair spokeswoman Sue Gooding says she doesn't know the cause of the fire but did note electrical controls move Big Tex's mouth and head. Gooding says no one was injured in the fire and added that she expects Big Tex to be back for next year's state fair.

Link -via Metafilter

(Image source: Jenna Bush Hager)

This 6th-grader must have skipped breakfast the morning this was assigned. What he lacks in literary skills, he makes up in enthusiasm. Give this poor child some bacon! Link

You've probably heard that drinking cranberry juice is good for preventing urinary tract infections (UTIs). There is some evidence that it's true, but it ain't easy.

The strongest evidence available for prevention is among adult women with previous UTIs. In this group, results repeatedly show about a 50% reduction in disease recurrence with regular juice consumption. In elderly and pediatric patients, and some patients with bladder problems, the effect is less pronounced.

A caveat made in many of the prevention studies is that the cranberry juice’s effects seem to be dose-dependent, and that the amount a person would need to drink daily to have a real preventative effect is more than what most people are willing to drink. In some studies, as many as half of the participants withdrew before the studies’ completion, suggesting that prolonged, regular guzzling of cranberry juice is too much to bear, either because of stomach aches, the calorie load, or adverse interactions between the juice and certain medications.

Or maybe it's just because many people think cranberry juice is vile. Anyway, scientists aren't quite sure why the juice has an effect on UTIs, but there are several plausible theories, which you can read about at mental_floss. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Sally Crossthwaite)

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Or, conversely, how to tell if the person you are speaking with is Dutch. Dutch physicist and mathematician Christiaan Huygens contributed a lot to the science of physics, including the idea that light travels in waves. That was over 300 years ago. MIT physics professor Walter Lewin is Dutch, so he can pronounce Huygens correctly. -via the Presurfer

Kyle Camp of Hackleburg, Alabama is a 10-year-old with Down Syndrome. He went missing Tuesday evening, and a search was launched by the Marion County Sheriff's office and local volunteers. The state police also deployed a helicopter to find Kyle. On Wednesday morning, volunteer Jamie Swinney followed the family's dog down by a creek bank, where they heard the dog's litter of puppies in the thick brush. Kyle was there, too.

"The main thing was getting him to his dad. That's where I wanted to get him to was to his dad. When I found him I asked if he was alright and he said yeah, he said he just wanted to go home," Swinney said.

Officials said the boy was wet and had no shoes. They think the puppies kept him warm overnight.

As Kyle was being treated for minor scrapes and bruises at a hospital in Hamilton, his brother Chris Bailey stopped to thank the friends and perfect strangers who helped bring Kyle home.

Kyle was taken to a hospital for minor injuries and is expected to be okay. The puppies were returned home with their mother. Link -via Uproxx

Halloween is the time to watch horror films, but there are some old ones that you probably haven't yet seen, because they go back over a hundred years! Balladeer's Blog has a list of 31 silent horror films going back as far as Georges Melies' 1896 short film Le Manoir du Diable (The House of the Devil).

Unless an earlier example turns up this is the very first horror movie with a semblance of a story. This 3 minute film from THE Georges Melies features the Devil setting up housekeeping in a creepy mansion and conjuring up his infernal lackeys like witches, goblins and a living skeleton man to keep him company. Much as the early film world owes to Melies we all know if you’ve seen one of his flicks you’ve seen them all so this will be the last work by him that I cover for this list.

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PS. This movie is available at YouTube.

(Image credit: Jim Grant)

A six-foot-tall fork appeared in Carlsbad, California, at the intersection of Levante Street and Anillo Way on Tuesday. The unnamed artist is a 62-year-old retired teacher who said he was impressed by the joke in The Muppet Movie in which Kermit and Fozzie encounter a giant silverware fork when they are looking for a fork in the road. Thirty years later, he had the time to make the joke a reality. Carlsbad residents got a kick out of the sculpture, but a city crew removed it on Wednesday. You might say they got the fork out of there.

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Another resident erected a sign in its place that says "Why the fork not?" which the city also removed. Then locals began taping real, normal-sized forks to a nearby sign in protest. A spokesperson for the city said the sculpture is a code violation. Link -via Fark

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Samuel J. Seymour appeared on the TV show I've Got A Secret in 1956. Now, nearly 150 years after the event, YouTube has the record of a person (a child at the time), who was at Ford's Theater the night that President Lincoln was shot and killed. One the one hand, this artifact illustrates how short 150 years is in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, think of all the ways in which the world changed in Mr. Seymour's lifetime. Link -via Metafilter

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The Green Ruby Pumpkin is a delightful (but still scary) Halloween tale told in rhyme. The short film was produced by visual effects artists Miguel Ortega and Tran Ma. You can see a making-of video as well. -via the Presurfer

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Luc Bergeron, who goes by the name Zapatou, stitched together your favorite viral videos old and new to interweave with the song "What Can't You Do?" by David Meshow. It's like a little tour through the past few years of watching videos on the internet. -via The Daily What

Previously by Zapatou: Rollin' in the Deep

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The Discovery Channel is promoting the new season of Mythbusters with a super cut of their best crashes, explosions, and general destruction. After all, that's the reason we watch the show, isn't it? -via The Daily What Geek

Halloween costumes weren't always an excuse to dress super-sexy. Collector's Weekly looks back at very un-sexy costumes from Halloweens of the past. These are more creepy, weird, and/or just plain goofy. Of the twenty images in the gallery, this eyeball may be the weirdest. Or maybe it's the telephone heads. Or maybe the Depression-era Mickey Mouse. Anyway, you can decide which is the weirdest. Link