Who wants to listen to complaints? Sometimes you have no choice, but when you spent time listening to people complaining, you tend to develop a negative attitude. Author Trevor Blake cites some research in his book Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life.

Even worse, being exposed to too much complaining can actually make you dumb. Research shows that exposure to 30 minutes or more of negativity--including viewing such material on TV--actually peels away neurons in the brain's hippocampus. "That's the part of your brain you need for problem solving," he says. "Basically, it turns your brain to mush."

But if you're running a company, don't you need to hear about anything that may have gone wrong? "There's a big difference between bringing your attention to something that's awry and a complaint," Blake says. "Typically, people who are complaining don't want a solution; they just want you to join in the indignity of the whole thing. You can almost hear brains clink when six people get together and start saying, 'Isn't it terrible?' This will damage your brain even if you're just passively listening. And if you try to change their behavior, you'll become the target of the complaint."

Blake also has some advice on protecting yourself from complaints. As the mother of multiple teenagers, I vouch for selective hearing loss. Link -via mental_floss

(Image credit: Flickr user Michael Lore)

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New Brunswick potato farmer Heliodore Cyr had 27 children, and this accomplishment got him onto the TV show "I've Got a Secret." This is his third appearance, in 1959. His wife was too busy to do the show herself. However, a little more digging reveals that not all those children survived infancy. This video is also notable in that many of the comments at YouTube are from his descendants.  -via Metafilter

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A kitten gets himself into a spot -and then he gets himself out as well. -via The Daily What

The following is an article from Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader.

Are you scared of the dark? Do you sleep with the light on? Do you hear noises in other parts of the house when you know you're alone? You're about to read a ghostly tale with an incredible twist: It really happened!

DOCTOR WHO

William Wilmer, an ophthalmologist who practiced in Washington, D.C. in the early 1900s, was one of the most distinguished eye doctors of his era. Among his patients were eight different presidents, from William McKinley to Franklin Roosevelt. He also treated Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator; Joseph Pulitzer, the New York newspaper tycoon and creator of the Pulitzer Prize; and countless other prominent Americans. But perhaps his most unusual claim to fame is the fact that in 1921 he managed to talk a prestigious medical journal, The American Journal of Ophthalmology, into printing a ghost story.

The story had been recounted to Dr. Wilmer by one of his patients, whom he identified only as "Mrs. H" to protect her privacy. The strange occurrences she and her family experienced began in 1912, shortly after she, her husband, and their children moved into a large, run-down old house that hadn't been lived in for about a decade. The house didn't have electricity -it was lit with gaslights and heated by an old furnace in the basement.

THIS OLD HOUSE

(Unrelated image credit:Flickr user 'Nino" Eugene La Pia)

The gloomy old house began to exert a strange influence on its new occupants, as Mrs. H recounted in Dr. Wilmer's article. "Mr. H and I had not been in the house more than a couple of days when we felt very depressed," she wrote. The floors were covered with thick carpets that absorbed all sound of the family's servants going about their tasks, and Mrs. H found the silence a little overpowering. But even more disturbing than the silent footsteps of the people who were in the house were the noisy footsteps of people who weren't there …or at least could not be seen with the naked eye. "One morning, I heard footsteps in the room over my head, Mrs. H recounted. "I hurried up the stairs. To my surprise, the room was empty. I passed into the next room, and then into all the rooms on that floor, and then to the floor above, to find that I was the only person in that part of the house."

YOU ARE BEING WATCHED

The house's strange power seemed to grow over time. Soon, the entire family began to suffer from headaches and exhaustion, yet whenever family members took to their beds to regain their strength, the headaches and fatigue only grew worse.

The following is an article from Uncle John's Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader.

More than three centuries after the end of the Salem witch trials, they continue to defy explanation. In the mid 1970s, a college undergraduate developed a new theory. Does it hold water? Read on and decide for yourself.

SEASON OF THE WITCH

In the bleak winter of 1692, the people of Salem, Massachusetts, hunkered down in their cabins and waited for spring. It was a grim time: There was no fresh food or vegetables, just dried meat and roots to eat. Their mainstay was the coarse bread they baked from the rye grain harvested in the fall.

Shortly before the New Year, the madness began. Elizabeth Parris, the 9-year-old daughter of the local preacher, and her cousin, 11-year-old Abigail Williams, suffered from violent fits and convulsions. They lapsed into incoherent rants, had hallucinations, complained of crawly sensations on their skin, and often retreated into dull-eyed trances. Their desperate families turned to the local doctor, who could find nothing physically wrong with them. At his wit's end, he decided there was only one reasonable explanation: witchcraft.

BLAME GAME

Word spread like wildfire through the village: an evil being was hexing the children. Soon, more "victims" appeared, most of them girls under the age of twenty. The terrified villagers started pointing the finger of blame, first at an old slave named Tituba, who belonged to Reverend Parris, then to old women like Sarah Good and Sarah Osborn. The arrests began on February 29; the trials soon followed. That June, 60-year-old Bridget Bishop was the first to be declared guilty of witchcraft and the first to hang. By September, 140 "witches" had been arrested and 19 had been executed. Many of the accused barely escaped the gallows by running into the woods and hiding. Then, sometime over the summer, the demonic fits stopped -and the frenzy of accusation and counter-accusation stopped with them. As passions cooled, the villagers tried to put their community back together again.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

What happened to make these otherwise dour Puritans turn on each other with such destructive frenzy? Over the centuries several theories have been put forth, from the Freudian -that the witch hunt was the result of hysterical tension resulting from centuries of sexual repression- to the exploitive- that it was fabricated as an excuse for a land grab (the farms and homes of all the victims and many of the accused were confiscated and redistributed to other members of the community). But researchers had never been able to find real evidence to support these theories. Then in the 1970s, a college student in California made a deduction that seemed to explain everything.

A comic from the weird mind and talented hand of Plutos the Bubbleman. Link

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Tori is partially paralyzed, and gets around with the aids of wheels under her backside. This makes it easier for her to do her household chores, like raking the autumn leaves. As you can see in another video, Tori gets time to play as wells work. -via the Presurfer

Oh no, this cake is NOT created to look like a skinned human head. It's modeled to look like a wax model used in anatomy classes. It just LOOKS like a skinned human head! Conjurer’s Kitchen contributed this cake to the Eat Your Heart Out event. The model is from the La Specola (Florence) museum collection. The cake is no doubt tasty, but who's going to make the first cut? Link -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Sarah-jane Millard)

As we are settling into the new Neatorama, Alex keeps bringing out new features and experimental ideas so fast, it's hard for me to keep up! This week, he posted two exclusive book excerpts: 8 Most Outrageous Things Politicians Have Done and 5 Really Strange Ways to Cure a Hangover. These are the first of Neatorama's Book Excerpt feature. If you have a book and would like to see it featured on Neatorama, send Alex an email at info@neatorama.com and set it up.

Alex also wrote two new entries for the new sub-blog On the Origin of Success: 1. Jim Carrey Once Wrote Himself a $10 Million Check, and 2. FedEx: Founder Gambled His Last $5,000 at a Blackjack Table to Stave Off Bankruptcy.

Jill Harness wrote 7 Extreme Versions of Normal Activities.

And then yesterday she posted Over 40 Fantastic Animal Halloween Costumes. I still can't decide which is my favorite!

Eddie Deezen told us about Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer. He also gave us some Members of the Mustache Hall of Fame.
 
Scientific Dining: Reviews of Research Institute Cafeterias (part two) was contributed by the Annals of Improbable Research.

Uncle John's Bathroom Reader gave us Queen Isabella. You know about Columbus, but what do you know about his sponsor?

The Spice is Right: Origins of Your Favorite Seasonings came from mental_floss magazine.

Over at the Halloween blog, new posts are going up almost as fast and heavy as they do at the main page! Halloween costumes, decorations, and recipes are quite useful, but there's also spooky entertainment with videos, ghost stories, art, games, and music, all centered around Halloween.

In the What Is It? game this week, the pictured item is an ink well, the antlers could have been used to hold several pens. The first person with the right answer was Craig Clayton, who wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! Even he had to make a few guesses before he got it right. The prize for the funniest answer goes to FuzzySpork, who said, "Behold, the Holy Door-Ringer of Antioch! Ask not for whom the bell tolls, the door is for thee." That deserves a t-shirt, too! Congratulations to our winners, and thanks to everyone who played along. See more pictures of this inkwell and the answers to all this week's mystery items at the What Is It? blog.

Congratulations to ladybugs, David Parker, and Kantoboy, who all won t-shirts from the NeatoShop in our latest Caption Contest! See their winning entries here.

We want your feedback! If you have any additions or opinions on a particular post, please leave a comment. If you just want to simply register your approval, that's easy -click the little ♥ at the top of the post, so we can determine what kind of posts to bring you more of. If you have general comments about the blog, leave a comment here, or you can email one of us. Here are some handy addresses:

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Today, the Neatobot is modeling the Zombie Hawkman mask, available in the NeatoShop.

No, "holiday creep" doesn't refer to the character in the picture, but to the fact that Christmas decorations show up in stores before Columbus Day. Why do stores do it? Because customers respond -by buying early and buying more.

Despite the loud sighs and eye rolling that usually occurs when shoppers see Christmas decorations in stores parked next to an aisle of Halloween candy, shoppers are taking advantage of the layaway programs, the toy reservation schemes and early discounting as a way to soften the holiday’s blow to the household budget.

Nearly four in 10 parents with children under the age of 18 begin their holiday shopping before November, according to a recent study of more than 1,600 subscribers to couponing website RetailMeNot.com.

“The reality is that holiday shopping is officially in full swing,” said Jill Balis, senior vice president of marketing at WhaleShark Media, the operator of RetailMeNot.com.

The group has even gone so far as to trademark a term for the phenomenon, “OctoNovemCember,” and it plans to center a new marketing campaign — complete with a mascot, the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus — around the idea.

Black Friday sales have spilled over into Thanksgiving Day sales -and the people who take advantage of them save money. Link -via Fark

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Back in the '80s, we used to watch surgical procedures up close on the Lifetime cable channel. That's what they showed for hours on end, until someone got the idea that women's programming was a better idea. The "M" in MTV once stood for "music." HLN was once Headline News. In the future, new networks should know better than to use their name as a brand, because it's easier to change programming than the name. Geek Mom takes a look at six networks, how they've changed, and why their names no longer make sense. In at least once case, it's because the network came with strings attached, like when Disney bought the Fox Family Channel for its ABC network. They had big plans for the new channel.

They’d rename it XYZ (as in the opposite of ABC) and sell it to a younger, edgier audience. Too bad nobody read the contract that said the word “family” had to stay in the name forever.

Why? For that, we rewind to its beginning as Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network Satellite Service in 1979. That religious beginning followed the network through multiple sales, each of which has been required to continue broadcasting Robertson’s The 700 Club, hence the reason that show is now bookended by the disclaimer, “The following/preceding CBN telecast does not reflect the views of ABC Family”as well as the network’s slogan of the last few years, “A New Kind of Family.”

Read more network stories at Wired's Geek Mom. Link -via Kottke

NBA player Al Jefferson is 6'9" and 289 pounds. A regular bed just won't cut it, and NBA stars can afford to have beds custom-made. So Jefferson got a bed that's twelve feet long and ten feet wide! This picture is from his friend Mo Williams, who is shown demonstrating how big the bed is. And it cost over $23,000! Okay, now consider this -during the basketball season, Jefferson must sleep in hotel rooms most of the time, anyway. Link -via Dooce

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The final episode in the Max X series gets meta to the point of creepiness, as Max figures out that he's a brand -via b3ta

Previously: More from Max X.

Often sleep is exactly what we need to recover from overwork or writer's block or the inability to get anything done. And maybe if you're really lucky, the answer to what you're looking for will come while you sleep! Don't count on it -those moments are rare, but they do happen. In some cases, inspiration comes in a dream when you weren't even looking for one.

Does an emotionless cyborg killing machine that looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger seem like a nightmare to you? It was a nightmare for James Cameron. He was fighting a 102-degree fever when a vision of a robot dragging itself along the floor with a knife came to him in his sleep. Apparently Cameron brainstorms best in a dream state: it’s how he thought of Avatar as well.

His is one of eleven such stories at mental_floss. Link

In 1979, designer Bill Moggridge built the first laptop computer. In 1982, it was introduced to the public as the GRiD Compass. It was heavy, and expensive, but the real reason businessmen didn't want it was something most computer users wouldn't guess today. It was the keyboard. 

At that time, 1982, business people, who were in their 40s and 50s, did not have any computer or keyboard in their offices. And it was associated with being part of the secretarial pool or the word processing (remember that industry?) department. And so you'd put this thing in their office and they'd say, "Get that out of here." It was like getting a demotion. They really were uncomfortable with it.

And besides that, they didn't know how to type -that was women's work. It was a sign of the times -my father did not want me to take typing class in high school (in the 1970s), because he was afraid it might lead to secretarial work, and he wanted me to be a scientist. Read the entire story at the Atlantic. Link