(YouTube link)

Simon works, and his cat wants to help. Anyone with both a cat and a computer can relate. Another animation from Simon Tofield. -via Laughing Squid

Charlotte Baker had a flat tire and pulled off to the side of the road between Byfield and Boddington in England. While the 28-year-old Baker, who is nine months pregnant, called her boyfriend for help, two men stopped and began to change the tire on her Porsche 911

But to Miss Baker’s disbelief, once he had finished he pushed past her, jumped into the front seat and drove off behind his friend in the white van.

She was left alone and distressed at the side of the road until an elderly man stopped and offered her a lift.

Miss Baker said: “The shock is starting to fade but now I am just reeling. It’s absolutely disgusting, these men have no morals.

Link -via Arbroath

(YouTube link)

This is a Google Doodle tribute to Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara) for what would have been his 65th birthday on Monday. If the doodle isn't showing up on the Google search page in your region yet, you can see it here. Clicking on the doodle will bring up this video. -via reddit

You may be familiar with Claus von Stauffenberg, who conspired to kill Hitler with a bomb and whose plot was the basis for the Tom Cruise film Valkyrie. But do you know about the many other attempts on Hitler's life? One involved Georg Elser, who worked alone for a year on a plan to destroy the Fuhrer, with a bomb planted in a beer hall.

While Elser was in the bierkeller he noted the stone pillar just behind the speaker’s dais; it supported a substantial balcony along one wall. His rough calculations suggested that a large bomb placed within the pillar would bring down the balcony and bury both the Führer and a number of his chief supporters. The question was how to conceal a device sufficiently powerful to do the job within a piece of solid stonework.

Here again Elser proved to have precisely the qualities needed for the job. Knowing that he had a year to prepare, he went to work methodically, obtaining a low-paying job in an arms factory and taking whatever opportunities presented themselves to smuggle 110 pounds of high explosives out of the plant. A temporary job in a quarry supplied him with dynamite and a quantity of high-capacity detonators. In the evenings, he returned to his apartment and worked on designs for a sophisticated time bomb.

When the bomb finally went off, it killed eight people and injured 64 others -but Hitler was not one of them . Read the whole story at Past Imperfect. Link

If you are a supervisor in your workplace and you die at work, there is a 10% chance that it was murder. If you're not in management, the chances of your case being a murder drops to 7%. Gizmodo crunched the statistics on the 4,547 American workplace deaths in 2010 and found some other interesting tidbits:

Overall, "Transportation and material moving occupations"—people who work operating vehicles—dominated the death list, with 1,115 killed on the job. Only seven percent of them were murdered.

The 45-54 year-old bracket made up the plurality of deaths, with a full quarter. 16% of them plummeted to their demises.

The deadliest state to work in? Texas, with 456 fatalities. The safest? New Hampshire, with only 5. West Virginia won the explosion death contest, with 34—likely from all that coal mining, which is extremely dangerous and explosion-prone.

Happy Labor Day! Link -via the Presurfer

Labor Day weekend, the traditional time to say goodbye to summer. The holiday is a day of tribute to the working people who built our country and who continue to make things run. Let's also remember so many who want to work, who need jobs when the jobs just aren't there right now. If you work and have Labor Day off, you may need some reading material to relax with between activities, and we have them here at Neatorama!

Stacy Conradt brought us the stories of Six Celebrities and their Alter Egos.

Jill Harness rounded up a bunch of Smurfingly Smurftastic Facts About The Smurfs.

Eddie Deezen contributed some timely trivia in 11 Facts You May Not Know About Jerry Lewis.

Now Hear This: Radio War Propagandists was our post this week from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

From the Annals of Improbable Research, we saw Mankiw’s Ten Principles of Economics, Translated.

The Political Hot Potato was the latest from mental_floss magazine.

Every once in a great while, our readers contribute something so neat in the comments that we have to post it to make sure everyone sees it. That happened this week when Stubb filled us in on Pattern Baldness in Russian Leadership.

The Star Wars Lightsaber Mini Hunt popped up suddenly, to give some Neatoramanaut a Darth Vader Force FX Lightsaber from Habro! That contest is still open, so check it out.

In the What Is It? game this week, the object pictured is an ice chipper. Craig Clayton was the first of many with the correct answer, so he wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop. The funniest answer came from Maxx McIlhargey, who said it was a toothpick for crocodiles, used by wildlife conservationists to get the drug runner bones from between the crocodile’s teeth from a distance. He did not select a shirt.

It's a long holiday weekend, so after you catch up on these posts, you may want to browse through The Best of Neatorama, where we have feature article going back six years! Happy Labor Day, everyone!

It happens every year -college textbook prices are so high that freshmen go into shock at the thought of paying $100 or more for a book. There are several reasons given for the high price of textbooks: some that the vendors will disclose and others they don't. First off, texts are expensive to produce, compared to everyday novels.

There’s certainly some validity to this explanation. Yes, those charts and diagrams are expensive to produce, and the relatively small print runs of textbooks keep publishers from enjoying the kind of economies of scale they get on a bestselling popular novel. Any economist who has a pulse (and probably some who don’t) could poke holes in this argument pretty quickly, though.

In the simplest economic terms, the high price of textbooks is symptomatic of misaligned incentives, not exorbitant production costs. Students hold the reasonable stance that they’d like to spend as little money as possible on their books. Students don’t really have the latitude to pick which texts they need, though.

Read the real story behind sky-high textbook prices at mental_floss. Link

Look at this tie -isn't it awesome? It's like the ties worn in the Kraftwerk video for the song "The Robots." Nine LEDs flash in descending order, guaranteeing you'll be noticed. You can make your own, too, and be the robot of the party, with instructions from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. Link

Chris Jeon is a 21-year-old college student from Los Angeles. On a whim, he decided to go on vacation by himself -to Libya.

“I just go and see what happens,” he said. “At spring break I told my friends a 'sick' vacation would be to come here and fight with the rebels.”

He spent $800 on a one-way ticket from L.A. to Cairo, then traveled by land across the border into Libya, where he has now been for nearly two weeks. His parents do not know he is here. He speaks no Arabic, and has been staying with fighters and families in the area.

“I haven’t spent a dollar in weeks,” he says, because the people of Libya have extended such hospitality.

Jeon plans to be back in L.A. before school starts later this month. Link -via The Daily What

(Image credit: Kristen Chick)

On a hill called Teufelsberg (Devil's Mountain) near Berlin, an abandoned facility complete with "radar domes" stands. It was once used as a listening station for the US to intercept Soviet communications, and then abandoned when West and East Berlin were reunited. It was built over top the remains of a Nazi war college. Exploring this station is difficult, as it is deteriorating. One of the dangers is an open 10-story elevator shaft! See a set of pictures at Environmental Graffiti. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Nate Bolt)

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

This Labor Day, September 5th, the annual Muscular Dystrophy Telethon will be aired. But unlike every previous telethon for M.D. since 1966 (that's the past 45 years!) one important ingredient will be missing this year. Jerry Lewis!!!

What, no Jerry Lewis on the M.D. Telethon? Kind of like a beach with no bikinis, a cowboy movie with no guns, or, to use a more precise analogy: Christmas without Santa Claus. For a majority of Americans, the M.D. Telethon was always "The Jerry Lewis Telethon."

After earning over $2 billion dollars for his pet cause (and Jerry's Kids), Mr. Lewis was recently very unceremoniously dumped by the M.D. Board of Directors. At the ripe old age of 85, Jerry Lewis, humanitarian and comedy legend, is still alive and well (okay, he admittedly needs to take a couple of dozen pills every day to keep rolling). Let's take a look at eleven facts you may not have known about the only and only Mr. Jerry Lewis, "The King of Comedy."

1. He's wrong about his show business debut (at least the date). Jerry has always claimed he made his show biz debut at the age of 5, singing "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" Jerry's story is that he sang the song before a crowd and accidentally kicked out a light and got his first laugh. Probably true enough, but he couldn't have been 5, as the song "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" wasn't written until 1932, which would have made little Jerry six. A minor point? True, but one wonders why Jerry has never corrected the "date confusion" in all these years.

3. He never wears the same socks twice. Jerry never forgot his early years, his poverty, and the holes in his socks. Thumbing his nose at the past, Jerry will never wear the same pair of socks more than once. He just wears a pair and throws it out. 

4. He sometimes carries his Oscar around. In 2009, Jerry was awarded a "Lifetime Achievement Academy Award" (deservedly so!) for his years of accomplishment. Unlike most other Oscar winners, Jerry sometimes carries his Academy Award around with him. At the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, Jerry pulled it out of a duffel bag at a press conference.  

5. He edits other people's films. A devoted movie fan, Jerry often screens films at his home. When a part of a film bothers or irritates him, Jerry simply takes the film and cuts out the offending scene on his own editing machine. 

6. He always called his partner Dean Martin "Paul." Jerry and his partner Dean Martin were the hottest act in show business for the ten-year partnership (1946-1956). For some reason, Jerry never called Dean "Dean," he always used Martin's middle name "Paul" instead.  

7. Family Jewels remake with John Travolta? Jerry recently met with John Travolta, where the two discussed Travolta starring in a remake of Jerry's 1965 film The Family Jewels, in which Jerry played seven different roles. John  wants to star in the film with his daughter, Ella Bleu.

8. He turned down Some Like It Hot. Jerry was offered the Jack Lemmon role by director Billy Wilder in the 1959 classic comedy Some Like It Hot, but turned it down. Every time Jerry would run into Billy Wilder, Wilder would say, "Schmuck!" Jack Lemmon would send Jerry Flowers every year.

Yeah, I know, every time a movie set on (or in) the ocean comes along, you hope to see sharks. They add quite a bit of suspense to any situation! Next Movie has posters for five ocean films that would have been improved if there had been sharks lurking about. You've seen one; now go see the other four! Link

If you haven't taken the mental_floss quiz on Soviet leaders yet (and want to), go do that before reading this post, because it contains spoilers. Neatoramanaut Stubb left a comment that blew my mind.

I'm pretty sure most russians don't consider Malenkov part of the line of sovereign leaders, and that Khrushchev followed Stalin. It all has to do with the hair, you see. Ever since Catherine the Great took over for Peter the Great, the pattern has been:

Catherine I - Full-haired
Peter II - Bald (shaved for wig)
Anna I - Full-haired
Ivan IV - Bald (infant Emperor)
Elizabeth - Full-haired
Peter III - Bald (shaved for wig)
Catherine II - Full-haired
Paul I - Bald(ing)
Alexander I - Full-haired
Nicholas I - Bald
Alexander II - Full-haired
Alexander III - Bald
Nicholas II - Full-haired
Lenin - bald
Stalin - Full-haired
Khrushchev - Bald
Brezhnev - Full-haired
Andropov - Bald(ing)
Chernenko - Full-haired
Gorbachev - Bald
Yeltsin - Full-haired
Putin - Bald(ing)
Medvedev - Full-haired

This also dictates that the next President should be bald, giving Putin an excellent opportunity to regain (formal) power. Especially since his main opponent, Mikhail Prokhorov has a head full of hair...

A quick check revealed this pattern is correct, explained at NPR in a 2008 post. However, Stubb's list goes back much further into Tsarist Russia. Link

(Image credit: KoS)

I enjoy the challenge of trying to figure out when a world map was made by looking at the countries on it. That challenge is easier with a handy chart from Replogle Globes that tells what year nations came into existence or changed names. Metafilter, on the other hand, took the question and made a joke thread, with each joke trying to one-up the one before.

My globe is so old...

HOW OLD IS IT?

My globe is so old it still says "here be dragons." On France.

The chart does not yet have South Sudan listed, but may someday soon. Link

Craig Fugate, the current head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), knows a few things about how to assess damage in a disaster area. There's hard data, and then there's a sense of how things are, developed by experience.

First, there is the well-known Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale. Then there is what he calls the "Waffle House Index."

Green means the restaurant is serving a full menu, a signal that damage in an area is limited and the lights are on. Yellow means a limited menu, indicating power from a generator, at best, and low food supplies. Red means the restaurant is closed, a sign of severe damage in the area or unsafe conditions.

"If you get there and the Waffle House is closed?" FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate has said. "That's really bad. That's where you go to work."

There are 1,600 Waffle House outlets across the USA, and the franchise policy is to try their best to feed customers even when conditions are difficult. Link -via J-Walk Blog