The White House has been operating for about 200 years now, with an impressive staff. You know there are a lot of stories to tell, but mostly workers are restricted to sharing their expertise. Fanny Lemira Gillette and Hugo Ziemann wrote a book in 1887 to share their household tips. Here's a small excerpt:

1. Rooms get stuffy, probably more so when air-conditioning hasn’t been invented yet. To clear the air in a room that needs some refreshing, Gillette advises pouring a healthy sprinkling of ground coffee onto a shovelful of hot coals. If no coffee is available or if you’d prefer to leave the house smelling like something different than a malfunctioning Keurig, try a cupful of sugar instead.

2. To keep your milk from curdling, grate a tablespoon of horseradish right into the pitcher. “It will keep it sweet for days.”

Read more of these at mental_floss. Link

(YouTube link)

ModPrimate and Whitney adopted a American Pit Bull Terrier/Boxer mix. The new puppy is pretty happy to have a home and a family and lots of toys to play with. Ecstatic, actually. He's four months old in the video. By next year, he'll be the size of a house! -via I Have Seen The Whole Of The Internet

Right before elections is the usual time to toss people off the voting lists. The Texas Secretary of State sent out of list of dead voters generated by cross-referencing federal Social Security deaths with state voting records. The only problem with this was that those dead voters didn't like it one bit.  

At least one county registrar (Don Sumners of Harris County) refused to comply with instructions to delete thousands of names, based on his belief that the Social Security database is unreliable and/or that other mistakes were made.

He apparently believed this because, after getting notices informing them that they would not be allowed to vote, hundreds of the presumably dead contacted him to complain.

The state responded to Sumners' information calmly and rationally by changing its plans. What? No it didn't, it cut off Harris County's election funds in an effort to force it to purge the dead voters, whether the dead voters liked it or not. After some haggling, Sumners said he would purge voters whose families confirmed their deaths before the election, and the state agreed to restore funding (essentially backing down).

The four not-dead plaintiffs argue that there is no state-law authority for the purge and that because Texas has a history of voting-rights violations (not against the undead, but still), it was required by the federal Voting Rights Act to get pre-approval for the relevant rule change.

Who will speak for the undead? For at least four of them, lawyers. Link -via Breakfast Links

(YouTube link)

Our old friend Brian Kidd, known as the Unipiper, has a new video, and this time he channels Mario! Watch him play the Overworld theme from Super Mario World on bagpipes while riding his unicycle in Portland. -Thanks, Brian!

Previously: More from the Unipiper.

I keep my wallet in my front pocket, and still, tragedy strikes. #fallingmattresses

— Jesse Scott Owen (@JesseScottOwen) September 19, 2012

Jesse Scott Owen was new to New York City, but the 18-year-old got a big city experience Tuesday when a mattress fell off the roof of a building and landed on him. Owen was walking along Broad Street when the falling futon knocked him out cold.

“This was the most absurd thing that ever happened to me,” he told the Daily News.

Owen, who moved to the city three weeks ago from Florida to attend King’s College in lower Manhattan, said he was on his way to a class when he suddenly lost consciousness.

“I woke up and people were putting me on the mattress,” he said. “I asked where the mattress came from and they said, ‘You were knocked out by it.’ ”

Passers-by tended to him until emergency workers arrived. Owen was taken to a hospital with a sprained neck and a possible herniated disc. But he managed to Tweet about the experience. The mattress had fallen from the rooftop spa of the Setai Wall Street, about 30 stories up. Link -via Arbroath

An unnamed British military gunner gave birth to a boy Tuesday in a field hospital at Camp Bastion, in Helmand province, one of the more dangerous parts of Afghanistan.

Britain's Ministry of Defence does not allow troops to deploy on operations if they are pregnant, but the ministry didn't know the woman was expecting.

It refused to confirm reports in the British media that the soldier didn't know she was pregnant.

The mother and baby at Camp Bastion are both in stable condition in a field hospital, the ministry said.

A team from John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England, is prepared to go to the base to care for mother and child, and they will be brought back to England. The baby was born only four days after a raid on the base by insurgents disguised as U.S. military. Link -via Fark

(Unrelated Camp Bastion image credit: Flickr user isafmedia)

Are you in the Halloween mood yet? Take a look at Neatorama's Halloween blog to get into the spirit! Today we are featuring one of Neatorama's most popular articles ever, in which Alex takes us on a tour of the 10 Most Fascinating Tombs in the World. Explore the world of the dead and the various burial practices of the living over at our Halloween blog, and check back every day for more and more tips, stories, and entertainment for the holiday! Link

(Image credit: Flickr use B10m)

The Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded last night in a ceremony at Harvard's Sanders Theater. One of the awards was a wedding gift for the researchers! The Psychology Prize went to Dutch researchers Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan, along with their colleague Tulio Guadalupe, for their study "Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller." Eerland and Zwaan's wedding is tomorrow. Some of the other winners:

PEACE PRIZE: The SKN Company [RUSSIA], for converting old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.

ACOUSTICS PRIZE: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada [JAPAN] for creating the SpeechJammer — a machine that disrupts a person's speech, by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay.

NEUROSCIENCE PRIZE: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford [USA], for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon.

LITERATURE PRIZE: The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.

PHYSICS PRIZE: Joseph Keller [USA], and Raymond Goldstein [USA and UK], Patrick Warren, and Robin Ball [UK], for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.

FLUID DYNAMICS PRIZE: Rouslan Krechetnikov [USA, RUSSIA, CANADA] and Hans Mayer [USA] for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.

MEDICINE PRIZE: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti [FRANCE] for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode.

But that's just a few of the awards. You can read the entire list at Improbable Research. Pictured above are the winners of the Physics Prize. Link

You can also see a video of the entire ceremony. Link

(YouTube link)

The most important performance of an actor's career is the Emmy Awards acceptance speech. So of course you must take lessons to get it right. Parker Posey stars in this short from the Emmy Awards, which will be broadcast Sunday. -via Irene's Internet

It's been 19 years since Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar was killed in a shootout with police. His property was seized by the government, and while some has been repurposed, many of Escobar's holdings are abandoned and falling into disrepair. Now, thanks to urbex photographer Stefaan Beernaert, we get to take a trip to his formerly private island and look at the crumbling paradise. Link

(Image credit: Stefaan Beernaert)

(YouTube link)

Three New Zealand soldiers, Corporal Luke Tamatea, Lance Corporal Jacinda Baker, and Private Richard Harris were killed by an IED (improvised explosive device) in Afghanistan in August. When their bodies were returned to Burnham Military Camp in New Zealand, they were greeted by fellow Kiwi soldiers in dress uniform who performed a tradition Maori Haka for their fallen comrades. Link

(YouTube link)

Some of these you've heard before, but some may be new to you. You'll have to listen carefully, as these amazing facts go pretty fast! -via Geeks Are Sexy

(YouTube link)

It's a mashup/video parody that just had to be. My Little Pony meets PSY when the gang goes all Gangnam style! From a collection of "Gangnam Style" video parodies at The Week. Link

(YouTube link)

Colin Britt and Arianne Abela put together an arrangement, a choir, and an orchestra to bring you Carly Rae Jepson's "Call Me Maybe" the way it was always meant to be. -via The Daily What

Throughout history, whether because of abundant food or lack of exercise or both, monarchs have been plagued with largeness of girth (what hardship!). Here are just a few of the fattest kings and queens on record.

1. Itey (ca. 1490 BCE)

Sort of an ancient Egyptian punch line, this corpulant queen ruled over the land of Punt, located somewhere in East Africa. So how exactly do we know of the great monarch's girth? Well, the Egyptian pharoah Hatshepsut launched a trade delegation to Punt, and carvings on the walls of her temple complex at Deir el-Bahri record the expedition. Itey is depicted as grossly obese and is even pictured standing next to a diminutive husband and a tiny donkey. Under the donkey, in a delightful bit of Egyptian humor, is the inscription "This donkey had to carry the queen." A beast of burden indeed.

2. Eglon (ca. 1100 BCE)

According to the Bible, Eglon was the king of Moab (in modern Jordan) who united several tribes of highland and desert raiders to conquer the central Israelite tribes sometime in the 12th century BCE. An Israelite named Ehud gained the king's confidence, got him in a room alone, then killed him. Of course, the murder wasn' exactly a smooth operation. The Bible describes vividly that Eglon was so fat that Ehud couldn't retrieve his blade. Luckily, though, he managed to escape with little trouble. As he fled, Ehud told Eglon's servants that the king was using the restroom. The stench coming from the room must have been fairly run-of-the-mill, because by the time they went to check on their beloved king, Ehud had already rallied his followers and formed an army.

3. Charles the Fat (Ruled 881-888)