People often wear colored ribbons on their lapel or stick a magnet on their cars to raise awareness of a certain cause. There are a lot of ribbon colors to keep up with! In this Lunchtime Quiz from mental_floss, we'll see how well you know your charity ribbons by the color. I managed to score 80% even though I was only certain about a couple of them. See if you can beat that! Link

Some animal species get more press than others, but there's always more to learn about the animal kingdom. For example, you've heard of the giant squid? Its cousin, the colossal squid, is even more astounding.

Colossal squids are found in the oceans around Antarctica, and were only recently photographed alive. Measuring up to 14 meters long and weighing up to 200 kgs, it is easily the largest invertebrate in the world. It also has the largest eyes of any living animal; these eyes allow it to see in the dark, an useful ability for an animal that spends most of its life in the deepest parts of the sea. Colossal squids are powerful, formidable predators armed with eight arms and two long tentacles; unlike the giant squid, which is armed with suction cups only, the colossal squid has both suction cups AND “tiger-like claws” on its tentacles, which allows it to catch bigger prey and to defend itself against its two main enemies, the sperm whale and the giant sleeper shark, both of which can sustain serious injury while trying to attack one of these squids.

Read about more of these little-publicized species at Listverse. Link -via Look at This

(TBT link)

Windows errors are annoying, but if you have enough of them you can dance! From Today's Big Thing. -via b3ta

(YouTube link)

Personally, I prefer this version from a few years back that uses sounds from both Windows 98 and XP.

The list is labeled "Passive Aggressive Library Signs", but they seem pretty straightforward and useful to me. They clearly communicate the frustration of the sign maker, and some are downright hilarious! I would love to know the story behind the sign pictured here. Link

(image credit: Flickr user rockcreek)

The Big Picture blog has some stunning images of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. The volcano erupted on April 3rd and spewed enough ash into the air to disrupt air travel to and from Europe. See photographs of the eruption in progress and its effects on the atmosphere as well as satellite images. Link -via reddit

(image credit: Ulrich Latzenhofer/CC BY-SA)

The folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories will put an LED into anything, but this is quite lovely. The dried shells of sea urchins are already beautiful, and can be made into tiny lights that resemble paper lanterns for night lights or decorations. Link

Three fox cubs got their heads stuck in a drain grate in Plainfield, Connecticut last Friday. Neighborhood residents could hear their mother calling for them from out of sight. After firefighters were unable to cut the grate, Animal Control Officer Karen Stone tried lubricating the pup's heads with Vaseline, then corn oil, but had no luck. What finally did the trick was a dose of Dawn dishwashing detergent. The pups were freed from the grate and driven back to the area of their den, soapy but unharmed. Link -via Arbroath

A small but terrifying new species of leech roams the Amazon basin. Tyrannobdella rex seeks out animal orifices to enter and attach itself inside, in order to suck the victim's blood. The case of a 9-year-old girl in Peru with a leech in her nasal cavity brought the creature to the attention of doctors and researchers. Three years later, earlier cases have been confirmed and a report has been published in the journal PLoS ONE.

"We named it Tyrannobdella rex because of its enormous teeth," said researcher Mark Siddall, curator in the division of invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Although its teeth only reach up to 130 microns high — a little more than the width of a human hair — "that's at least five times as high as that of other leeches," Siddall said. "And every one of the people who were found with these in the clinical cases had a frontal headache. Their teeth are big, and these things hurt."

Link -via Unique Daily

(image credit: Anna J. Phillips et al., PLoS ONE)

This website is an ongoing tournament to rank the most awesome things ever. Play along and choose from two things at a time to raise or lower their rankings. You can also check the current top rankings, which are pictured here. Those may be different tomorrow, depending on participation. You can also suggest awesome things to add to the competition! Link (warning: sound) -Thanks, Victor!

Cake Wrecks has a roundup of tragic cakes specifically for school events: back to school, the last day of school, graduation, teacher training, or in the case of the cake pictured, a special lesson in history (I think). Did I spell all those words right? I wouldn't want these cakes to rub off on me! Link

Hanako-san is a girl ghost who haunts school toilets. The urban legend goes back decades. No one knows for sure how the story got started, but artists and pop culture outlets are happy to feed the fear.

It is not uncommon for schools to have a toilet permanently occupied by the mysterious girl, who is known in Japanese as Toire no Hanako-san (lit. “Hanako of the toilet”). She is often found in the third stall in the restroom on the third floor — usually the girls’ room — but this can vary from school to school. Details about her physical appearance also vary, but she is usually described as having bobbed hair and wearing a red skirt.

Hanako-san’s behavior also varies according to location, but in most cases, she remains holed up in the bathroom until an adventurous student dares to provoke her. Hanako-san can be conjured up by knocking on the door to her stall (usually three times), calling her name, and asking a particular question. The most common question is simply “Are you there, Hanako-san?” If Hanako-san is indeed present, she says in a faint voice, “Yes, I’m here.” Some stories claim that anyone courageous enough to open the door at this point is greeted by a little girl in a red skirt and then pulled into the toilet.

See more possibly disturbing pictures of Hanako-san at Pink Tentacle. This story is part of a series on Japanese urban legends. Link

When the dorkiest guy in a collection of pictures is Mick Jagger, you know you're in for a treat. Pictured is Clark Gable. Link -via Everlasting Blort

Allie notices bad grammar and lazy typing. One common mistake we see a lot is to make the words "a lot" into one word, but Allie takes this particular mistake in stride. So that we may all enjoy the joke, she illustrated the Alot.

The Alot is an imaginary creature that I made up to help me deal with my compulsive need to correct other people's grammar.  It kind of looks like a cross between a bear, a yak and a pug, and it has provided hours of entertainment for me in a situation where I'd normally be left feeling angry and disillusioned with the world.

See the Alot in many different situations at Hyperbole and a Half. Link -via Buzzfeed

Robby Rose of Garland, Texas, was caught padding his catch in a fishing tournament when a one-pound lead weight was found in the small fish he caught. Since the prize in the tournament was a bass boat, he was charged with attempted felony theft.

"We took this case very seriously," said Rockwall County Criminal District Attorney Kenda Culpepper. "As far as we were concerned, the case was about a $55,000 bass boat, not a ten-pound fish."

Rose pleaded guilty yesterday to the charge, and received five years probation and 15 days in jail. Even worse -- he has to give up his fishing license while on probation.

"Cheating is cheating," said lead prosecutor Alex Imgrund, "and neither the fishing community, nor this office, will tolerate it."

The fish pictured is not the fish from the story. Link -via Digg

(image credit: Tim-N-Crystal-Connectic ut Outdoors)

A couple of months ago, we told you about Ken Bannister selling the entire inventory of the International Banana Club Museum. The collection found buyers, Fred Garbutt and his mother, Virginia. They paid an undisclosed amount for the museum, which they will house next door to Garbutt's liquor store North Shore, California. In an interview at Gawker, Garbutt tells how he came to buy the bananas.

The last week of March, I happened to be down at my mom's house working on my daughter's car. She called me up and said, 'Hey go on my computer and check out this guy. He's selling this banana museum on eBay'" I went on there and was like, Yeah, we ought to buy that and put it down at our liquor store. We've tried to think for the longest time of ways to bring in customers off the highway. So I thought we ought to put that down at the store—that'll bring people in. Paint the store yellow.

Garbutt explained how he plans to expand the museum and promote it with a BMW (Banana Museum Wagon). The Banana Museum will reopen in 2011. Link -via Arbroath