Castle Vale Performing Arts College is a public high school in Birmingham, England. This year, students will be issued a "tinkle card" once a week to use as a bathroom pass. They have to surrender the card when used, and unused cards are collected on Friday and re-issued on Monday.

Pupils were also allegedly told their bags would be searched to ensure their mobile phones are switched off and that they have the required number of pens and pencils.

But the change which has outraged parents the most is issuing every pupil with a “tinkle card”. It states: “I am missing a super important learning opportunity because I need a tinkle.”

Another card given to pupils explains how they will have to “track” the teacher rather than talk to them, through a series of hand gestures which have specific meanings.

The new rules were announced after parents protested outside the school after children were sent home for breaching a new uniform dress code. Parents are again furious about the new rules. Link -via Arbroath

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Okay, who does better sound effects, men or women? It doesn’t actually matter, as you can enjoy quite a few of each trying their best in this short film by Marcella Coad and Paul Constantakis. (via The Daily What)

The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader.

From where you sit, you can probably see several pieces of glass: a window, the bathroom mirror, maybe even a glass shower door. Here's the BRI's history of glass.

ANCIENT GLASS

Glass has existed for millions of years. Whenever natural events involving super high temperatures -volcanic activity, lightning strikes, or the impact of meteorites- cause certain type of rocks to melt, fuse, and then cool rapidly, glass is formed. Fossil evidence shows that Stone Age humans used this natural glass to make tools, such as spearheads, and cutting instruments, as far back as 9,000 years ago. (Better dating techniques may eventually push that date back much further.) Obsidian, the shiny black glass formed when lava cools quickly (as when flowing into water), was widely used by ancient people for these purposes.

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After thousands of years of using naturally-formed glass, humans finally discovered how to make it -probably by accident. The Roman historian Pliny wrote in A.D. 77 that Phoenician sailors places "stones of soda ash" into a fire (presumably to rest their posts on) on a sandy beach. They later found a "hard smooth stone" in the ashes. That's one possible scenario, given that sand, soda ash (sodium carbonate) , and heat are all ingredients for making glass. Another possibility is that potters inadvertently let some sand drift into their kilns, where it stuck to the wet clay, accidentally creating a hard, smooth glaze on their pottery when the baking was done.

However glassmaking was first discovered, historians agree that it happened about 6,000 years ago. The story of glassmaking after that is one of continuous technological change: refining the recipe to create new types of glass, learning to shape it into new forms, and finding new and better uses for it.

GETTING INTO SHAPE

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Martin Woutisseth made an alternate illustrated version of the Breaking Bad opening credits. Since we'll have no new episodes for a while, this may ease a fan's pain just a little. -via The Daily What Geek

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Jeff Wysaski of Pleated Jeans demonstrates "wrap rage" in a video he calls Your Food Packaging is Bad and You Should Feel Bad. Wrap rage is when you can't open your lunch because the packaging is designed for someone besides mere humans. And why I keep scissors, a screwdriver, and pliers in the kitchen. Link

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The cats of Mars lead everyday, normal lives until a NASA rover comes to visit. That is, if Martian cats on a flying carpet is what you'd call "normal." Jacob Stålhammar wrote Cats on Mars in 2004 and finished the Swedish animated version in 2010. Now translated into Englsh! Link  -via mental_floss

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Scooby doo does dubstep? He does in the latest Pogo remix, featuring Scooby and the whole gang! -via Laughing Squid

There's no indication of where this bus stop is, but it's a great idea for the entire world! Link -via Breakfast Links

Update: Neatoramanaut Joshua Frazer identified this! It's an art installation in Montreal called 21 Balançoires in which the swings play music. Link -Thanks, Joshua!

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Meet Fluffy, Muffy, Buffy, White Shirt, and Flop-ear. White Shirt has a touch of Attention Deficit Disorder. Together they formed a dance troupe and would love to work for anyone willing to replace the polka tunes with Rammstein. -via Buzzfeed

Sixty years ago, William Newman designed an alternate Monopoly game for Alan Turing. Now a version of that game is for sale!  

In this special edition of Monopoly, the squares around the board and revised Chance and Community Chest cards tell the story of Alan Turing’s life along with key elements of the original hand-drawn board, which the great mathematician played on with a young William in the early 1950s – and lost. The board has been developed by the Bletchley Park Trust, William Newman and Winning Moves, which creates new editions of Monopoly.

The Special Edition Turing Monopoly will be released in November and can be pre-ordered now. Link -via Boing Boing

Mark Siddall is an expert on leeches. To find new species, he travels the world and wades into strange waters, offering his own flesh as bait.

My expedition to Peru was especially fruitful. We started out in the Andes Mountains, elevation 16,000 feet, to look for a lake that had been recorded in the 1880s as having the highest-altitude leech ever found. We found the site, but the problem was that local mining operations had obliterated the lake. Fortunately, just as we were about to leave for lower ground, I spotted another small lake nearby. We jumped in, turned over some rocks to unsettle any leeches that might be in the sediment, and felt some pinches on the skin. We found the highest leech ever, a new species I’m still trying to classify.

But it gets really weird when he begins to describe specialized leeches that target certain body parts. Link

(Image credit: Zina Saunders)

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Millions of hermit crabs were observed on the move, carrying their homes on their backs at Nanny Point in the Virgin Islands. The music makes their trip seem like an epic quest! Where are they going? What do they hope to find there? I had no idea, so I looked around and found an article that explained:

Take the hermit crabs in the Virgin Islands. The adults are terrestrial, but the larvae develop in the sea. The adults must migrate to the waters edge in order to reproduce and release their eggs into the water.

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Yay! It's the weekend! And, as always, it's been a busy week at Neatorama. We're busy pumping up our Halloween blog with costumes, decorations, food, videos, and stories to get you prepared for the best Halloween ever! Don't wait until October to start reading it every day, because by then you'll have a ton of reading to catch up on. The Halloween blog answers such questions as what damage does a 1,200 pumpkin do when dropped on a car? How will your dog look wearing a duck bill for trick-or-treat? And how can I make skeletons stand up on cupcakes? And besides, how cool will you be, passing on neat Halloween stuff to your friends?

Alex gave us the biggest article of the week in Four Geeky Laws That Rule Our World.

John Farrier wrote Sisko Wanted to Be Bald and Other Things You Might Not Know about Deep Space Nine.

Eddie Deezen kept us informed with 14 Things You May Not Have Known About Marilyn Monroe and Why Do We Say "The Butler Did It"?

The Story of Judo came to us from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

The Annals of Improbable Research gave us a reason to stuff bacon in our faces with Cured, Salted Pork Up Your Nose, Therapeutically.

And mental_floss magazine contributed The Perfect Scent: Chanel No. 5.

In the What Is It? game this week, the mystery item is a steak branding iron, used when grilling for marking steaks Well done, Medium, or Rare, the fourth side had a John Deere buck logo. Craig Clayton had the answer right off, and wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! A lot of folks had fun with the M and W, which stands for a lot of things, but the funniest was from trishlovesdolphins.

That's The Dark Lord, Voldemort's old seal. Back when he was called "Morty" he would dip the hammer in wax to seal his correspondence. However, too many people mistook the M for a W and started calling him "Worty." This lead the the immediate torture and death of many, and thus "Voldemort" was born.  

That's certainly worth a t-shirt! The answers to all the mystery items of the week are up now at the What Is It? blog. Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everyone for playing along!

The post with the most comments this week was World's Richest Woman's Advice to the Poor: Drink Less and Work More! followed by In a Mass Knife Fight to the Death Between Every American President, Who Would Win and Why? and coming in third was Is Organic Better For You?

We are working on bringing out the new version of our exclusive article archive, the Best of Neatorama, coming soon. Meanwhile, you can access of lot of features just by flipping through the leaderboard at the top of th page. Click on a picture to go to that article, and click on the side arrows to see more. You'll find extra Neatorama content on Twitter and Facebook as well! Have a great week!

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StoryCorps' new animated short is from the memories of Ramon "Chunky" Sanchez, who recalls the days when Mexican-American students would find their names Anglicized by schoolteachers. Until that one day... Video directed by the Rauch Brothers. Link

Oreo cookies with creme that tastes like candy corn -now, that will get you in the mood for Halloween! Kraft will have the limited edition cookies available starting Monday, September 10th at Target stores. I'll have to find someone with a Target in their town to send me some! Link -via Laughing Squid