From your experience of watching Sesame Street and the Muppet movies, it’s difficult to picture how surreal and edgy The Muppet Show was. Unless you remember watching it!

Imagine it from a TV executive's point of view: a weekly variety show, in an old vaudeville theater, featuring puppets, and a mix of A, B and C-list celebrities that catered to both kids and adults. That's not a pitch... it's a just list of random words that don't go together. Unfortunately, it's that weirdness that's been lost to the ages, as these days the Muppets are remembered more as a kids' show instead of the more adult, primetime comedy it was.

The Muppet Show's 10 Weirdest Moments has video clips of sexual innuendo, violence, and surreal guest stars that bring back fond memories. Link -via Look At This

Jill Heinerth has spent the past 14 years exploring underwater caves all over the world. Wired has a gallery of beautiful photographs she’s taken in underwater caves, lava tubes, and glaciers. This picture was taken at Devil’s Eye Spring off the coast of northern Florida. Link -via Digg

A 16-inch snake was killed at a home in China and then found to have a foot growing out of its body! 66-year-old Dean Qiongxiu said she awoke to find the reptile clinging to a wall in her bedroom. She killed the snake with a shoe and when she saw the clawed foot, she put the body in alcohol to preserve it. It was taken to the Life Sciences Department at China's West Normal University in Nanchang for study.

Snake expert Long Shuai said: "It is truly shocking but we won't know the cause until we've conducted an autopsy."

Link -via the Presurfer

Remember, your boss can see what you put on your Facebook page! This t-shirt design by Hogboy was not selected for printing, but I got a laugh out of it! Link -via Gizmodo

Three decades after I bought Queen albums, my children sing the same songs. You know the music, but how much do you know about the band Queen? Today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss will show you! I scored 73%, although I would have scored better during my deejay days. Link

A purebred Himalayan cat wandered into a hospital in Cloncurry, Queensland, Australia about four months ago. With an owner nowhere to be found, a nurse adopted him. The nurse was recently transferred and could not take the cat, so she took him to Donna Weber, the local veterinarian. Weber scanned the cat and found an embedded microchip. The cat’s owner was in Tasmania, 3800 kilometers away!

Clyde's owner Katrina Phillips was moved to tears when she got the call last week that Clyde was alive and well in Queensland.

"We just can't believe he's alive, it's just unbelievable and it's so emotional," Ms Phillips said.

"I bought him as a birthday present for my daughter Ashleigh and one day, about three years ago, he just disappeared.

No one knows how the cat traveled so far, or what happened during those three years. Clyde will be reunited with Phillips as soon as an escort is arranged. Link -via Arbroath

Adrian Bennett has been obsessed with the Mad Max movies since 1982 when he was a teenager in England. In 2001 he built his own Interceptor, the car Mel Gibson drove in the film. Three years ago, he moved his family from Yorkshire to Australia. Now he has settled in the remote Outback town of Silverton, where the first two movies were made. Silverton has a population of 51 (counting the five Bennetts), but draws 140,000 tourists a year and is also used often as a set for the film industry. Bennett plans to open a Mad Max museum in his new hometown. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

See more pictures of Bennett’s Interceptor.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' National Census of Fatal Occupation Injuries, fewer people died on the job in 2008 than the previous two years. Still, some jobs are much more dangerous than others. Using statistics from 2008, here are the five deadliest careers.

1. Fishers
2. Loggers
3. Aircraft Pilots and Flight Engineers
4. Structural Iron and Steel Workers
5. Farmers and Ranchers

Yahoo Finance has the statistics on each job. There is also a linked slide show from Forbes looking at the top ten deadliest jobs. Link -via the Presurfer

(image credit: Flickr user Sam Beebe / Ecotrust)

Most moviegoers don’t notice the math in popular films, but it’s there if you know what to look for. For example, one mathematician compared the spread of zombies to that of infectious diseases.

The problem of zombies intrigued Philip Munz of Carleton University and his colleagues at the University of Ottawa, who recently wrote a scientific paper quantifying various properties of zombie epidemics. Standard modeling techniques for disease outbreaks weren’t quite sufficient, the authors found. “The key difference between the models presented here and other models of infectious disease,” they wrote, “is that the dead can come back to life.”

After a thorough, if tongue-in-cheek, analysis, the authors found that the optimal method for halting such epidemics involves killing zombies early and often - the rare scientific paper that satisfies both the splatter-film aficionado and the Centers for Disease Control.

Other math questions come up in The Dark Knight, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and other films you are familiar with. Link -via Buzzfeed

(image credit: Flickr user joelf)

In this clip from National Geographic’s Wild Chronicles, two filmmakers study Johnny Rooks, predatory birds sometimes called Flying Devils, in the Falkland Islands. Meanwhile, the birds are having fun with the filmmakers!

“It’s all very amusing, of course. Unless it’s your campsite.”

It is not my campsite, and you will most likely find it as amusing as I did. Link -via Digg

See more adventures from National Geographic's Wild Chronicles.

Your mother always urged you to sit up straight, and you should have listened to her. A study by researchers from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain and Ohio State University finds that sitting up straight makes you feel more confident about yourself. 71 students were given a reason to either sit up straight or slouch in their chairs. Then they wrote down either three positive or three negative things about themselves. Then they were tested to see how much they believed the things they wrote.

The results showed that people who had been sitting up straight were much more likely to believe the positive things they'd been writing about themselves, whereas those who were slouching weren't so sure. Meanwhile a doubtful posture had very little effect on the half who were thinking negatively about themselves.

You know, Mom is always right. http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/09/sit-up-straight-be-confident.php

Corridors in science fiction movies may seem like a strange subject for an article, but that’s just because you’ve never thought about them. Martin Anderson notices them, rates them, and brings them to you for consideration. You’ll be surprised at how many there are, and the many features they have in common. Link -via b3ta

The Framingham Heart Study began in 1948 and followed over 5,000 participants for decades. The volunteers made up 40% of the population of Framingham, Massachusetts.

In 2003, Nicholas Christakis, a social scientist and internist at Harvard, and James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego, began searching through the Framingham data. But they didn't care about LDL cholesterol or enlarged left ventricles. Rather, they were drawn to a clerical quirk: The original Framingham researchers noted each participant's close friends, colleagues, and family members.

"They asked for follow-up purposes," Christakis says. "If someone moved away, the researchers would call their friends and try to track them down."

Christakis and Fowler used the social data to study changes in the population over time. They constructed networks of the volunteers social connections to see how these connections affected any changes. The findings? Some behaviors are contagious. Social connections with up to three degrees of separation influence whether we quit smoking or become fat. And even happiness is contagious, both online and offline. The social connections of the Framingham volunteers are graphically illustrated at Wired. Link

These flags made out of food were created to promote the Sydney International Food Festival. Each national flag is illustrated with food associated with that country: Greece has black olives, India features curry, South Korea has kimbap, etc. Guess which country is represented by the flag pictured. Link -via b3ta

This past week, drivers in Samoa had to switch from driving on the right side of the road to driving on the wrong, er, left side. Since the switch was relatively sudden, all the buses now open onto the middle of the street! The Samoans say the switch was to end their dependence on American-made vehicles. Mental_floss takes a look at how other nations decided which side of the road to drive on. Some reasons seems silly in retrospect. Link