(Image credit: Consumers Union)

Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.

From literary advocacy to union battles to communism claims, the origin story of the organization that publishes Consumer Reports kind of has it all.

Last year, a consumer advocate showed up in the most unlikely place: On YouTube, the home of the no-questions-asked unboxing channel. Cody Crouch, aka iTwe4kz, reviewed a set of earbuds from a company called Kanoa. In a Nike hat and a Puma sleeveless shirt, Crouch (who was clearly frustrated) trashed the earbuds at length and questioned the behavior of the company that was banking on him to give a good review. The company, blaming Crouch’s bad review for spooking investors, shut down, with thousands of paying consumers left in the lurch. However, it’s now widely believed that the company was running a scam, only made a few pairs of headphones, and used Crouch’s review as an out. Now, there’s talk of class-action lawsuits. This might sound like a crazy story, but it’s nothing compared to the tale that gave us the modern consumer advocacy movement. Strap in and we’ll get to testing.

The standards nerds who formed the basis of the consumer rights’ movement

The thing about watching a video from a guy like iTwe4kz is that you’re watching, really, for his opinion, which is likely to be loud, brash, opinionated, and not entirely impartial. That’s not a knock on him. That’s just the way YouTube works—we watch videos for the opinions shared.

But the problem, of course, is that biases swing in all directions, and in a world where you’re getting marketing at every single second. A lot of people read this in their inboxes. And a lot of the messages surrounding it are often promotional or marketing in nature.

And the problem, over the years, has gotten worse. How do you rein it all in?

Barnaby Dixon (previously at Neatorama) can make a puppet out of anything. He does just that in this video, fashioning a dancer out of a fluorescent silicon furry ball, and has another puppet narrate the process.

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The dancing puffball look neat, but the narrator, called Dabchick, is the real star of the show. -via Digg

If you have a Marvel superhero movie you've looked forward to but haven't seen yet, this video might spoil some really great scenes for you. But if you are caught up on them, and have a firm control of your suspension of disbelief, it's cool to see what went on before the special effects were added.

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A huge part of what you see in theaters was created by people working on computers. This look behind the scenes from Looper gives us a new respect for the actors who had to deliver lines with a straight face when everything going on around them wasn't really going on around them. -via Tastefully Offensive

In 1912, Norma Pfeiffer, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, discovered a new species of plant growing in the wetlands near Chicago's Lake Calumet. It spent most of its life living off underground fungi. Nothing like it existed anywhere else in the United States, but there were similar species in the tropics. Pfeiffer named it Thismia americana, and wrote her doctoral dissertation on it.   

Pfeiffer was excited to uncover much more about her mystifying botanical outlier. In her thesis, she expressed hope that she could grow the plant in laboratory settings.

"Up to date, the few attempts at germinating the tiny seeds have been fruitless. It is to be hoped that a larger harvest may give a better opportunity for positive results," she wrote.

But two years later, T. americana vanished, a disappearance that coincided with the building of a barn in the vicinity. It has not been spotted since.

Pfeiffer's plant has never been spotted in the wild again, but it left many mysteries behind. With only tropical relatives, how did it ever come to be in Chicago? How long had it been there? What made that particular wetland a good environment for it? And why did it go extinct in 1914? You also have to wonder about how many other species evolve and then go extinct before we ever find a trace of them. Read about the mysterious T. americana at Real Clear Science.

(Image credit: Norma E. Pfeiffer/Botanical Gazette via JSTOR)

In 1844, John W. Jones escaped a plantation in Virginia and walked to New York, dodging slave catchers, with four other men. He settled in Elmira, traded work for an education, and became a sexton caring for his church's cemetery. Jones worked with the Underground Railroad, helping around 800 enslaved people escape to Canada. During the waning days of the Civil War, Elmira sprouted a prison camp for captured Confederate soldiers.

Elmira was never supposed to have a prison camp; it was a training depot for Union soldiers. But when the Confederacy began refusing to exchange African-American soldiers—who it considered captive slaves, not prisoners of war—the Union stopped participating in prisoner exchanges. “Both sides started scrambling for places to expand, and that’s how Elmira got caught up in the web,” says Terri Olszowy, a Board Member for the Friends of the Elmira Civil War Prison Camp.

The rollout was ill-planned, Olszowy explains. When it opened in July 1864, the camp had no hospital or medical staff. The first prisoners were already in rough shape and deteriorated quickly. Latrines were placed uphill from a small body of water called Foster’s Pond, which quickly became a cesspool. A shelter shortage meant that hundreds of soldiers were still living in tents by Christmas. During spring, the Chemung River flooded the grounds. Rats crawled everywhere. When authorities released a dog to catch them, the prisoners ate the dog.

Thousands of Confederate prisoners died at the camp, and the duty to bury them was handed to the town's sexton: John W. Jones. Read about Jones' journey from slavery to life as a wealthy landowner with voting rights at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Chemung County Historical Society, Elmira, NY)

There have only been around 600 people who have traveled to space. Of the currently-active astronauts, most are scientists and the rest are highly educated. Do these folks, who have touched the vastness of outer space, believe in life on other planets? Their answers are open-minded, because while they know a lot compared to most of us, they are very aware of how little we actually know about space.

"We've basically proven that every star has planets," said Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who has spent 4,000 hours in space. "Then you start doing the math."

The math isn't easy. How many stars are in the universe? Well, that depends on the size of the universe. We're able to observe the cosmic microwave background (CMB), radiation formed around 400,000 years after the Big Bang. It tells us the observable universe goes back around 14 billion years. But there could be something beyond the CMB, or even other universes contained in a massive "multiverse."

Within the constraints of the observable universe, there could be 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or septillion) stars, according to astronomer David Kornreich. (He conceded to Space.com that the number could be a gross underestimate.)

If every one of those stars has at least one planet, then, well, it seems inconceivable that life wouldn't exist elsewhere.

Astronauts also know that "life" doesn't equate to the aliens we see in movies. Read more from Hadfield and astronauts Mae Jemison and Jeff Hoffman on the subject of extraterrestrial life at Mashable. 

Will always wanted to be an air dancer, one of these "tube men" that dances by blown air power to catch your attention. And he got his wish! Not only is he a tube man, but a professional tube man!

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The kicker is that this is a real ad, a local commercial for a car dealer. It matters little that you see any of the actual products for sale. If you live in the local area, you'll remember the ad, and the name of the dealer. -via Tastefully Offensive

(Image credit: Kitty Kay Sera)

The Pink Ladies were a gang in the musical Grease, and a Pink Lady is a drink, but Kitten Kay Sera is THE Pink Lady. The Pink Lady of Hollywood has lived a pink life for 40 years. Everything in her home is pink, her hair is pink, she dresses in pink, and her dog Miss Kisses is pink, too, a result of beet juice dye. Sera was recently given the title of "World's Pinkest Person" by Ripley's Believe It Or Not.  

‘I consider myself proudly to be a pink flamingo in a world of pigeons,’ she says, adding: ”I am the world’s pinkest person and my life is devoted to that color. Some people think I am weird but frankly, I am fierce and fabulous.’

Read about Kitty Kay Sera and see more pictures at Do You Remember. She's also got plenty of pink pictures at Instagram. -via Fark

How does Darth Vader eat? The question had been circulating among Star Wars fans, who overthink everything, for years. The answer is here, although is isn't in English, and you can't feed graphics into a text translator. I know enough French to get the gist of this, but people who know say it's even funnier in French.

1. Milk exists in the Star Wars universe. Luke drinks bantha milk.

2. Moisture exists, so therefore mold can exist to create cheese.

3. Darth Vader can't eat most things, because he needs his mask to breathe.

4. That's why his mask has a cheese grater in the front.

If you read French and can offer any further insights, please leave a comment. -via Gizmodo 

The following article is from the book Uncle John’s Uncanny Bathroom Reader.

Before they became big stars, many musicians had to pay their dues and find their styles by playing with a wide variety of musicians. Here are some band pairings that might surprise you.

1. Jimi Hendrix and the Isley Brothers

In 1964, the Isley Brothers recruited a 21-year-old guitarist named Jimmy James to join their backing band. James, who later became famous using his real name -Jimi Hendrix- played on the group’s novelty single “Testify,” in which each of the Isleys take turns imitating soul legends like Ray Charles, James Brown, and Stevie Wonder.

2. Rick James, Neil Young, and Goldy McJohn

Anglerfish don't just mate- they bond for life, literally. The tiny male bites into a female, and never lets go. He eventually becomes fused with her body. She provides nutrients to keep him alive, and he provides sperm for her eggs. The scary-looking anglerfish lives so deep in the ocean that they very rarely survive being brought to the surface. What we know about them is mainly from studying dead specimens. But in 2016, a mating pair was captured on video for the first time.  

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The video was captured at a depth of 800 meters by deep-sea explorers Kirsten and Joachim Jakobsen in a submersible. The husband and wife team was nearing the end of a grueling 5-hour dive along a steep deep-sea wall on the south side of São Jorge Island, when “something with a funny form” caught their eye, Kirsten Jakobsen says. Aborting their plan to surface, the filmmakers followed the strange creature around for 25 minutes, capturing its movements through the submersible’s 1.4-meter-wide window. It was exciting, but also challenging to maneuver the craft to get the best images because the female was only about 16 centimeters long, she says.

After surfacing, the duo sent the video to Pietsch, who identified the species as Caulophryne jordani, known as the fanfin angler. He was entranced by the species’s “gracefulness,” especially the way those whiskerlike structures—called filaments and fin rays—enveloped the animal. “Any prey item touching one of those would cause the angler to turn and gobble up that particular animal,” he says. “They can’t afford to let a meal go by because there’s so little to eat down there.” The video was captured in August 2016, but this is the first time it’s been released to the public.

Read more about anglerfish and how this video was taken at Science. -via Damn Interesting

The fun of seeing Godzilla and other movies featuring giant monsters is imagining what we'd do in those situations. But it is not to be. As we've seen before, giant monsters don't scale that way according to the laws of physics and biology. Putting a movie monster into the real world would only have the creature run into the limits of his own body. The solution? Suspension of disbelief. Even biologists who know better can indulge in fantasy when they want to enjoy a monster movie. And a physicist can thrill over a well-done lightsaber battle. At least I hope so. This is the latest comic from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Nancy Astor was the first woman member of the British Parliament, in 1919. She served until 1945. Winston Churchill served as Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945. You've probably heard of this famous exchange between the two political rivals.

Lady Astor: ‘If I were your wife I would put poison in your coffee.’

Churchill: ‘Nancy, if I were your husband I would drink it.’

That was a shorthand way to illustrate their relationship, but it never happened, at least between those two. The first time it was attributed to Astor and Churchill was in 1952, several years after they were both out of office. So where did the joke come from?

All this has been established by an excellent page which has tracked this exchange back to 1899 and the US press. I’m intrigued above all, by the way that the joke evolved afterwards in Britain. I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years following urban legends, but this is the first time I’ve tracked a simple apocryphal exchange. The first thing to say is that the story crosses the Atlantic in the by early 1900; and the first references notes its American origin.

The joke has been all over the place, and has evolved slightly in its telling. Read the long history of a simple joke that never went away at Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog. -via Strange Company

The wolf whistle has gone from crude to complimentary to crude again, depending on one's point of view. It can be sexy when Bogart whistles to Bacall, funny in a cartoon, and menacing on the street. The practice of wolf whistling is dying out even among catcallers these days. But where did it come from in the first place? There's a clue in the name itself.

“My theory I got from talking to an old shepherd,” says John Lucas, author of A Brief History of Whistling. “He was this very knowledgeable guy, trained sheepdogs, and he ran through a whole bunch of calls with me and did one that sounded exactly like a wolf whistle. I said, ‘Christ, that’s a bit politically incorrect!’ and he said, ‘No, it’s kosher, it’s from Albania’.”

The shepherd explained that in mountainous parts of Southern Europe, shepherds have for centuries used the whistle to warn each other, and their dogs, when wolves appeared. They’d put two or three fingers in their mouths, then blow those notes. “It’s an incredible carrying whistle, unbelievably noisy,” Lucas says, “You’d hear it for miles.” Both the technique and the tune seem to have been called wolf whistling.

What really popularized the wolf whistle as a signal to women were the cartoons of Tex Avery. Read about Avery's cartoons and the entire history of the wolf whistle at BBC Culture.

When you go to Showtime at the Apollo, you expect to hear some awesome music, and maybe see a dance routine or two. The audience wasn't prepared for Troy James.

(YouTube link)

The audience reaction is the really enjoyable part. Troy James is a noted Canadian contortionist who has appeared in several movies, usually as a monster or supernatural being, designed to freak people out. He's good at that! -via reddit