Every year, Cintas holds a competition for the poshest public potty in the country. Now the top ten finalists have been selected, and it's up to you to vote for America's Best Restroom! Shown is the restroom at Mie N Yu Restaurant in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC. It's just one of ten lovely loos that made the cut. Link -via Boing Boing
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The folks at College Humor made 16-bit video game demo out of the erstwhile TV show The Wire. Some NSFW text. -via Metafilter
The laws are on the books, even if they are overridden by a repeal later. You have to wonder about the events that led the officials of Lyme Regis, Dorset, England to ban slapping people with eels.
Residents of Lyme Regis, Dorset, are no longer lawfully permitted to slap each other with a 5-foot-long conger eel. It’s officially known as ‘conger-cuddling’ or ‘doing the conger’, and the game — which involves knocking opponents off of a platform by swinging the dead fish at them — was both wildly popular in the community and a source of funding for a local lifeboat charity for 32 years. Despite its long history and general appeal, ‘doing the conger’ was banned in 2006 after an animal rights group complained that the game was disrespectful to dead animals.
Imagine a few friends sitting around one day long ago and deciding this would be a fun thing to do. I bet there was alcohol involved. Anyway, this is just one of seven weird things that cities have banned that you can read about at mental_floss. Link
If your car is fairly new, it probably doesn't have an ashtray. But if it does and you don't smoke, you can use that handy space to dock and charge your iPhone or other gadget. You'll find tips for doing just that at Jalopnik. Link -via Boing Boing
Savanna the cheetah cub at the Cincinnati Zoo gets a new playmate her own age, named Max. The fact that Max is a dog takes nothing away from the adorable video. Just listen to those little squeaks! -via Buzzfeed
Removies are what you get when you remove one letter from a movie title and make it into something completely different. The resulting posters are found at the Tumblr blog Removies, but the artist so far remains anonymous. Link -via Nag on the Lake
The Guinness Book of World Records has confirmed that the message in a bottle found by a Scottish fisherman is the oldest ever found -98 years after it was tossed into the ocean. Captain C. Hunter Brown threw it into the ocean along with 1,890 other bottles on June 10, 1914. Brown was studying ocean currents for the Glasgow School of Navigation. So far, 315 of those bottles have been found and logged. Although the scientist Brown is gone, the research is an ongoing project of Marine Scotland Science in Aberdeen. Read about the 98-year-old experiment at the Atlantic. Link -via the Presurfer
Tan Chaoyun is the mother of identical quadruplet boys. The six-year-olds are starting school, and teachers at the local primary school in China are concerned over how to tell the four boys apart. So, Tan ordered them all different haircuts. The barber shaved their heads, leaving a small patch on each boy's head in the shape of the numbers one, two, three, and four! The numbers will help at home, too, because even the quads' father has a hard time telling which son is which. Link -via Arbroath
How do you make the perfect perfume? Start with one that already failed twice.
Octogenarians are rarely described as "seductive." But when a 2009 poll asked 3,000 British newspaper readers to name the world's most seductive scent, the winner was no spring chicken. Nearly nine decades after its creation, Chanel No. 5 took the title. The perfume was declared the perfect scent for both getting a hot date and for turning said date into a boyfriend. A full ten percent of women polled insisted that they met "Mr. Right" while wearing the fragrance.
Nearly as important is its legend within the industry. To the masses, Chanel No. 5 is synonymous with the essense of luxury and lust, trapped in a square-cut bottle. But to the competition, it's le monstre -the monster. After all these years on the market, it remains the gold standard of perfumes. As one exasperated rival confessed, "It's not a fragrance, it's a goddamn cultural monument." Just the name seems to carry an almost mythic power. But is Chanel No. 5's success purely the result of genius marketing? And just how did this magic potion of a scent end up at the perfume counter in the first place?
The story dates back to 1920, when the inimitable Coco Chanel, one of France's most influential fashion designers, teamed up with perfumer Ernest Beaux to develop a signature scent. Chanel wanted a perfume that was clean but sexy, that blended the sultry notes of jasmine and May rose with the smell of soap and fresh-scrubbed skin. Ernest Beaux thought he had just the thing, a little idea he'd been toying with since World War I. Stationed in the Arctic, Beaux had fallen in love with the scent of fresh snow melting into Russia's famous "black soil," chernozen. He had dreamed of capturing that "winter melting note," and this seemed the perfect opportunity.
To bottle the scent, the perfumer experimented with aldehydes -modern synthetic compounds that could break open the shackles of perfumery. Aldehydes were still rare in the 1920s, but their olfactory effects were striking. Suddenly, a scent no longer needed to replicate the aroma of a "real" cluster of flowers. Instead, a perfumer could create the aroma of an abstract bouquet that had never existed.
That suited Chanel just fine. She believed "women do not want to smell like a bed of roses." In his quest to please the designer, Beaux used these aldehydes to tweak a formula that had already failed, a "modernist" perfume he had launched in 1912. The scent, which went by the humdrum name Le Bouquet de Catherine, had quickly flopped on the Russian market. An undeterred Beaux trotted it out again in 1914 under the name Rallet No. 1. It didn't fare any better the second time around.
Yes, you can watch 600 movies in two-and-a-half minutes, or at least enough of each to make you remember it. You'll just have to be curious about the ones you haven't yet seen. -via The Daily What
A thief hijacked a truck carrying 13 tons of potatoes at a farm in Essleben, Germany. However, he neglected to make sure the back door was closed securely before he took off.
"He was pretty easy to follow because he left this huge trail of potatoes behind him," explained one farm hand.
The hapless crook eventually fled empty handed when the trailer overturned, bursting one of the tractor's rear tyres causing it to crash into an electricity pylon.
What if there were an artful video game in which you could score points and advance to different levels by kicking cats? Well, there is no such game here, but instead a video that imagines one, by Pamela Reed and Matthew Rader. No cats were harmed in the making of this video. -via Everlasting Blort
There are many ways the world could end, according to the movies. Watch them all happen in just eight minutes, in this supercut from Zach Prewitt. -via Flavorwire
A solar flare sent a filament 500,000 miles into space on August 31st. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught it, and here you see it with different filters looking very pretty. Link
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
The all-too-common phrase "the butler did it" is commonly attributed to Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958). Mary was a very popular writer who authored over 50 books, many of which became best-sellers. Known as "the American Agatha Christie," Mary (also a playwright) at one point had three plays running simultaneously on Broadway.
Mary was the first writer to use the "once naive but now older and wiser woman narrating the story" device in her novels. She also created a super-criminal called The Bat (1920), who was cited by Bob Kane as one of his inspirations for Batman. Mary's first book The Circular Stairs was published in 1908.
In 1930, Mary's book The Door was published and (spoiler alert) in the story the butler does, indeed, do it. Although Mary Roberts Rinehart is generally credited with the origin of the expression, the words "the butler did it" do not actually appear in the book. Mary was to use the "butler as criminal" device in other novels during her illustrious writing career.
Before Mary Roberts Rinehart it was extremely rare for a butler to be the bad guy in any work of fiction. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did use the device in an 1893 detective story called "The Musgrave Ritual" from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Though not the actual central bad guy, the butler in this tale is found dead beside the Musgrave family treasure. "The butler, guilty of betrayal and theft, paid with his life for his perfidy." -as The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writings puts it.
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