Face it, there are plenty of things in the Star Wars prequels that make no sense at all. Some can be attributed to the temptations of modern CGI, while others are clearly due to the difficulty of retrofitting a plot to link to the story in the original trilogy. The prequels were there to set up the character of Darth Vader, his motivations, and the characters that surround him. It all leads to Anakin Skywalker turning to the dark side in Revenge of the Sith because he was afraid his pregnant wife would die. It should not have been so.  

Prenatal visits never happen in Episode III, not even offscreen. Despite Anakin’s spiraling paranoia about Padme’s health, doctors or hospitals are bizarrely never mentioned. And the evidence says that Padme never got an ultrasound.

When she confronts Anakin towards the end of the movie—shortly before giving birth—she refers to “our child,” rather than “our children.” It doesn’t make sense for her to be hiding the ball here, she’s making one last emotional appeal to the father of her children, to try to bring him back to the light side. Rather, Padme simply doesn’t know that she’s about to give birth to twins.

Later, when she actually gives birth, everyone is taken aback by the revelation that she’s having babies in the plural.

All of this points to one thing: Padme’s never had an ultrasound. In fact, Padme’s never had a prenatal check-up.

Padme is a privileged character who should have had access to the best medical care in the galaxy, but medical technology in Star Wars leans more toward bionic body parts to replace those sheared off by a light saber. Yeah, it's a feminist issue, one that the entire plot of the Star Wars saga pivots on. Read more about the nonsensical twists that led to Darth Vader at Motherboard.

Not only does this ad remind you of local cable access commercials, it's full of jokes, memes, bad puns, and the occasional breaking of the fourth wall. Oh, and it's full of cute cats, too.

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Furkids Animal Rescue and Shelters in Georgia resorted to making a parody of bad local TV ads in order to draw attention to their many cats (and dogs) who needs homes. You can be assured that your local shelter is in the same fix. -via Uproxx  

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David Bevil of Paris, Tennessee, volunteered to help local police when a call came in about an escaped calf on highway 79. Henry County Sheriff Monte Belew drove down the highway with Bevil sitting on the hood, ready to rope in the calf. Belew had his phone camera running when the calf was spotted.

Belew said the calf became loose when a man was driving through town and his cattle trailer door broke. “There were actually two that got loose, but Dr. Lyons at Mineral Wells Animal Clinic and his crew were able to get the other one,” Belew said.

“So everybody is happy—we roped one calf, Dr. Lyons got the other one and the guy who was hauling them through town is happy, too,” Belew said.

It's always handy to know a cowboy when you've got a job to do. -Thanks, John Farrier!

Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon are new role-playing games in the Pokémon family released to coincide with the franchise's 20th anniversary. If you haven't tried them out, be warned that they take a bit of a left turn in relation to the rest of the games. If you have, be assured that you're not the only one surprised. Learn a bit of what makes these games so different.  

2. Mimikyu Can Kill with Terror

Mimikyu managed to win the hearts of Pokemon fans all around the world within a short time after its introduction. However, it is important to note that while it has good intentions, it is nonetheless a Ghost Pokemon, as shown by how its true form is so terrible that it has killed through sheer terror. This is rather appropriate, seeing as how the sighting of ghosts as a warning of imminent death is a common motif in folklore.

3. Gengar Wants a Friend

Speaking of Ghost Pokemon, Mimikyu is far from being the spookiest of them, as shown by Gengar’s latest mention in the Pokedex. Past entries revealed that it tends to be rather cruel towards its victims, but what is interesting is that the latest mention reveals that its cruel actions are not without purpose. In brief, Gengar is tormenting its victims in an attempt to create another Gengar as a companion, which it knows to be possible because it used to be human.

Read the rest of the list at Unreality.

When George Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney in 2013, it was his aim to retire, to scale back his imprint and live away from the public eye. Part of that plan is to give away most of his vast art and memorabilia collection. Lucas would like to put it all in a museum somewhere. He's offered to pay for the construction of such a museum, and even set up an endowment for running costs. You'd think that cities would be falling all over each other to land such a deal, but that's not what happened.    

But so far, Lucas hasn’t found a permanent home for his museum. The monumental project has brought him almost as much grief as Jar Jar Binks, the prequel creature from the planet Naboo with an oddly Jamaican accent that some found racially offensive. Lucas tried to build in San Francisco’s Presidio, which is a national park, and then on Chicago’s downtown waterfront, only to abandon both sites after being assailed by local forces. Some people derided his architecture. Others knocked the artwork. Lucas seemed to find most irritating those who said they didn’t mind his proposal but thought he needed to be more flexible about where he put his building. He had long suffered highfalutin critics as a nuisance when he was selling tickets to movies. Now they were thwarting his will when he was trying to give something away.

In Round 3, Lucas is pitting San Francisco and Los Angeles against each other as potential host sites. “Call it hedging your bets, call it beefing up your odds, call it the architectural equivalent of quite publicly asking two people to prom on the same day: Lucas’s dual-track proposal is an unconventional strategy by any measure,” wrote Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne.

Location is not the only problem. Proposed building designs have been rejected because of size or architectural style. Local response to the project hasn't always been welcoming. Some view the art offered as lowbrow. Read the particulars of the museum that Lucas can't give away at Bloomberg.  -via Digg

(Image credit: Simon Abranowicz)

Snow leopards are pretty rare. A snow leopard with a new cub or two is good news. The World Wildlife fund says this camera trap footage from Mongolia is the first time scientists have seen a snow leopard with four cubs at once in the wild.

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The footage is from September, when the cubs were about three months old. They would be half grown by now. Estimates of snow leopard population put their numbers at anywhere between 4,000 and 10,000. -via HuffPo

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

   "A kid like Eddie Haskell only comes along about once every hundred years"

-Wally Cleaver, 1958

"Nonsense. There's one on every block"

-Ken Osmond, 2014

Ken Osmond was born in Glendale, California on June 7, 1943. His father, Thurman, was a carpenter, and Ken described his mother, Pearl, as "a typical movie mother." Every day, after school, Pearl would drive her two sons, Ken and his older brother Dayton, to acting classes. Besides drama, the two boys were also took classes in dance, diction, dialects, martial arts, and equestrian riding.

At the age of nine, young Ken landed his first movie role, an uncredited bit in the Mayflower/Pilgrim film Plymouth Adventure starring Spencer Tracy in 1952. Other film roles shortly followed, including So Big (1953), Good Morning, Miss Dove (1955) and Everything But the Truth (1956).

TV roles came for Ken too, including guest shots on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Circus Boy (featuring a young pre-Monkees Micky Dolenz), Annie Oakley, and Lassie. In October of 1957, a new TV show made it's debut- the show was called Leave It To Beaver.

The first few episodes of Leave It To Beaver were pretty standard 1950s "family show" stuff, although as an interesting twist, Leave It To Beaver, unlike other family shows of the '50's, focused on life from the kids' point of view, as opposed to the parents.

After a few good, but bland and tame, episodes of Leave It To Beaver, in the episode "The New Neighbors," a new and very different teenage character made his debut on the show. This strange but fascinating teenager was to be probably the greatest "scene stealer" in the history of American television.

A friend of Beaver's older brother, Wally, in the show, Eddie Haskell was a snide, smarmy, loud-mouthed braggart in front of his fellow kids and teenagers, who put up a "sweet and courteous" front whenever an adult or parent was present.

Screen Junkies starts 2017 with an Honest Trailer for the 1989 film Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, a comedy about time travel you might remember.

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That movie will be 28 years old next month. It hasn't aged all that well, as the long rash of stoner buddy movies has played out now. But it is a treat to see George Carlin, even when he's dispensing someone else's wisdom. -via Tastefully Offensive

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.

Popular culture and life experiences have a crazy way of influencing the way that we talk and use words. Perfectly cromulent, if you ask us.

Language is constantly expanding in numerous ways—and in tends to make us uncomfortable to see a new bastardization of the language, even a good one. A recent study noted that the evolution of language has lots in common with the shifts in DNA throughout history, though with one major difference: As a society becomes more insular, the genetic makeup becomes more same-y, but the language becomes more interesting. Which seems like a pretty great explanation of why 4chan is a petri dish of memes. Seriously though, today we’re gonna talk about the nature of how new words are created. YOLO.

The Simpsons, language, and evolution

The year was 1996, and the pop-culture role of The Simpsons was perhaps at its all-time peak. The show was in the middle of its seventh season, months after it had gotten America talking about its Dallas-parodying episodes “Who Shot Mr. Burns.”

The show was still pulling in more than 10 million viewers every week, and it was in prime culture-influencing position. And, on February 18, 1996, it did just that—by inventing a couple of words.

It wasn’t the first time that—d’oh—the show had created new words, but the words the show launched in that episode, “cromulent” and “embiggen,” hold special prominence in Simpsons lore.

The phrases first came to light when Mrs. Krabappel was complaining about the town’s motto: “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.” She claimed she had never heard the word “embiggens” before coming to Springfield.

“I don’t know why; it’s a perfectly cromulent word,” Miss Hoover says in response.

What makes the words so effective is that they’re designed to look like real words, obscure words that showed up in the forgettable parts of the dictionary that surround the memorable words, but instead, Simpsons writers created them both to sort of screw with the audience. Since then, both words have only grown in stature, with the latter actually showing up in the dictionary.

Swedish people as whole have some of the best teeth in the world, but it wasn't always so. In the 1930s, even three-year-olds had cavities in most of their teeth. There weren't enough dentists to repair teeth, and no one knew how to prevent tooth decay, because they didn't know what caused it. They needed to do some controlled experiments. What they did was highly unethical, and would never be permitted today.

During the second World War, at a mental hospital outside of Lund, Sweden, researchers forced a group of patients to ingest 24 pieces of a sticky, light brown substance in a single day. These severely disabled patients were involuntary participants in a long-term study commissioned by the state medical board in cooperation with big industry, and this coerced feeding would continue for three years. The four to six doses that they consumed four times a day over that time were in some ways sweeter than their typical medicines—but also more troubling. No benefit to the patient was ever expected. Rather, the goal was to measure the damage inflicted by the substance over time and determine a dosage safe for public consumption.

That substance was caramel, and it inflicted so much damage to the patient's teeth that we learned it was sugar that caused tooth decay. Read about the experiments and the legacy they left behind, at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Harris & Ewing/Library of Congress)

Cats love catnip, and we love to watch cats react to catnip. It has no lasting effect on them, and they aren't operating heavy machinery anyway, so what's the harm? Simon Whistler from Today I Found Out takes a deeper look into what catnip does.

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The key ingredient is nepetalactone. That's a new one on me. It's a kind of cat pheromone, which only makes you appreciate how nature has given a gift to cats in plant form. -via Laughing Squid

The question is, how realistic do fake body parts have to be before you can't bring yourself to eat them? You've seen Halloween recipes made to look like disembodied fingers and other limbs, but they contain cake or candy or something. This recipe is the real deal, because the fingers are made of meat, with the exact shape of real fingers, complete with bones sticking out! Tye Lombardi cast molds of her fingers that ended up being so realistic that she recognized her own scars. She filled them with meat, stuck in pretzel "bones," and garnished them with barbecue sauce. The result is too realistic, but still delicious. Learn to make your own fingers edible at the Necro Nom-Nom-Nomicon.* 

*Motto: Putting the Gore into Gourmet

Back in 2005, one of the earliest posts on Neatorama called attention to Jeremy Winterson's hilarious account of a Chinese bootleg DVD of Revenge of the Sith called Backstroke of the West. The English subtitles, generated from the Chinese translation, gave us a nonsensical dialogue that birthed the "Do Not Want" meme. Now we find out that YouTubers have dubbed the mangled English right over the movie. Contains NSFW language.   

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You can see more video highlights from Backstroke of the West at the A.V. Club and watch the entire feature-length dub here. -via reddit

To make one movie, writers must create an entire world of characters to interact with the protagonist. The minor characters can be as rich and interesting as the main cast, but we don't get to know them very well. Some of these characters are intriguing enough to carry their own movie, but it rarely happens. Be honest, you'd go see a movie based on the sea turtles from Finding Nemo, wouldn't you?

One of the most beloved characters in Disney’s Finding Nemo is Crush. He is a sea turtle who speaks like a surfer. He helps Marlin and Dory get to Sydney Harbor so that they can find and rescue Nemo. He gives Marlin the nickname, The Jellyman and he calls Dory, Little Blue. He takes the pair on a fantastic ride along the East Australian Current. He also has a son named Squirt and a group of other turtles that he travels with. It would have been great to see Crush get his own spinoff so that we can see what his family is like and what it is like to travel along the East Australian Current. Crush is very funny and very lovable. Fans fell in love with him in Finding Nemo, and they would love him even more if he had his own movie.

Read about other side characters who should be in their own movies at Unreality.

Tom Scott take us to an amazing place: Lake Constance. Where is Lake Constance? It's in Europe. It's in Germany, Switzerland, and/or Austria.

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Whether there are actually international borders running through the lake depends on what country you are from. One nation claims there are lines. Another says the lake belongs to all three countries. And the third doesn't really care! -via reddit