Why do Americans eat bacon or sausage and drink orange juice for breakfast? Why do we shave our armpits? Why did we ever buy a tie for Fathers Day? So many of the everyday rituals we take for granted aren't because of tradition, but because someone wanted to sell us something. While some of these schemes are pretty well known, at least to Neatorama readers, others may surprise you. You know how churches want to put up a plaque or a stone monument with the ten commandments at government buildings? You might have wondered why they chose that instead of, say, the Sermon on the Mount, or John 3:16. That started with Cecil B. DeMille.  

People are pretty protective over the monuments to the Ten Commandments that appear on government property across the country considering they didn’t exist until Cecil B. DeMille needed to promote a movie. The Fraternal Order of Eagles had wanted to put them up for some time, but they couldn’t raise the funds until they teamed up with the director, who paid for hundreds of monuments modeled after the tablets in his 1956 movie. He even sent Charlton Heston out to the unveiling ceremonies.

Find out about other "traditions" that started out as marketing stunts in a list at Cracked.

As we slip into Mother's Day on Sunday, let's listen to a soundtrack for the holiday (and if you need one, it's reminder). You might be surprised at how many pop songs mention Mom, Mommy, Mama, or Mother. Or maybe not, since we all had one at one time or another and a mention of your mother makes a song all the more relatable. No, they aren't all rainbows and roses. Science comedian Brian Malow put together clips from 70 songs from more than 50 artists for a medley that will put you in the mood to pay tribute to Mom, as you should. If your mother is not available, I'll be your mother.* There's a list of the songs at the YouTube page.   -via Boing Boing

*Offer good Sunday, May 8 only.     

The Kentucky Derby will take place tomorrow in Louisville, Kentucky. The horses in the lineup have some unusual names, like Epicenter, Cyberknife, Tiz the Bomb, Zozos, and Summer is Tomorrow. Why do racehorses have such odd names? Mainly because there are so many of them. You can't give a racehorse the same name as a previous horse, sometimes for years, sometimes forever. And names have to be approved by the governing body.

There are rules for naming horses. The Jockey Club has a set of rules for thoroughbreds, and the American Quarter Horse Registry has different rules, which are spelled out at Horse Racing Sense. They categorize names that come from the horse's lineage, pop culture references, traditional names, horses named after a person, and humorous names. The humorous names are the ones we recall best. Some have great stories behind them. Some try to push the envelope to see what they can get away with.

There are herds of racehorses with pun names, but I really like those that are designed to be funny when the track announcer uses them. Recall the race between My Wife Knows Everything and The Wife Doesn't Know. Or ARRRRRRRRRR! And of course, the unforgettable Hoof Hearted.

-via Mental Floss

(Image credit: Velo Steve)

The Social Security Administration has released the statistics for what Americans named their babies in the year 2021, which you can see above. There doesn't seem to be a lot of changes from 2020 in the top ten. Theodore has replaced Alexander on the top ten, and William and James have switched places. The girl's list has the same names in the top ten, with a little shuffling of rank. I'll bet Sophia would be number one if everyone spelled it the same.

On the same page as the top ten, you'll find calculators to see the top names of any year since 1879, expandable up to 500 deep, and you can look up your name to see when it peaked in popularity.

Check out the top five names for both boys and girls for each of the last 100 years. The most common names for the entire century were James and Mary. Mary was number one every year until 1947! Michael had a hot streak, too, as it was number one for 44 of those years.

If you're tracking trendy names, you'll want to see which ones have gained the most in popularity since the previous year, and the ones that have declined since 2020. You won't be surprised to see Karen has dropped 263 places in rank. -via Digg

The National Recording Registry has inducted 25 new songs into its registry this year, one of them being "It's a Small World." The song was never a radio hit, but it's been played more than 50 million times- all in the theme park ride at Disney theme parks. All you have to do is see the title and it starts playing in your head, no matter how much you hate it. When composers Robert and Richard Sherman wrote the song in 1964, they had no clue how long-lived it would be. Walt Disney asked the brothers to write a song to accompany their exhibit at the 1964 World's Fair in New York City. The exhibit was a boat ride through all corners of the world, and the idea of having all the characters sing their national anthems didn't work out because they had no unifying features and could not be meshed. So the Sherman brothers banged out a ditty that could be played all the way through. They didn't expect it to last past the World's Fair. Read how the song came to be the universally-known earworm that it is today at the Library of Congress. -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Deror_avi)

Last year, we told you about Halima Cisse of Timbuktu, Mali, giving birth to nine babies at once. It was the first incidence of nonuplets being born alive, and many had doubts as to whether the infants would survive. Some had doubts as to whether the story was even true. But now the nonuplets have seen their first birthday. Cisse, along with her husband Kader Arby and older daughter Souda, are living with the babies in Casablanca, Morocco, where they were born by cesarian section. There are five girls, Adama, Oumou, Hawa, Kadidia, and Fatouma, and four boys, Oumar, Elhadji, Bah, and Mohammed VI. Bah is named after Bah N’Daw, the president of Mali when they were born, and Mohammed VI is named in honor of the King of Morocco.

The babies all weighed between one pound, two ounces and two pounds, two ounces at birth. They were kept on ventilators until August. But now they are being cared for by their parents along with a team of nurses, feeding from bottles and watching Baby Shark cartoons. The cost of their care is being underwritten by the government of Mali. See more pictures of the nonuplets and read about their lives at the Daily Mail. -via Fark

(Image credit: les_nonuples_arby at Instagram)

We know that "average lifespan" in the past is a statistic that is often misunderstood. An average lifespan of 40 for a community doesn't mean they mostly died around that age; it almost always means that half the population died in infancy or early childhood, which skews the numbers. If you made it past childhood, you were very likely to live to an old age. But there are some cases in which that thinking doesn't work.

For example, the literary family of Brontës lived in the village of Haworth, West Yorkshire, England, in the mid-19th century. The six siblings lived extraordinarily short lives. Maria and Elizabeth died of tuberculosis at ages 11 and 10. Emily died in 1848 at age 30. Branwell also died in 1848 at age 31. Anne died in 1849 at age 29. Charlotte died in 1855 at age 38. All the adult deaths were attributed to vague but common causes of the day, such as consumption, marasmus, and childbirth, but none of the siblings were ever really healthy throughout their lives.  

Their father, Patrick Brontë, requested an investigation, which was carried out by Benjamin Hershel Babbage. It wasn't just the Brontë family, but the entire village of Haworth that saw an unusually high death rate! Find out about Babbage's conclusions at LitHub, but make sure you're not eating when you read it. -via Metafilter

When Warner Bros. made the first Road Runner cartoon in 1949, they had no plans for bringing back the characters again. Once movie audiences raved about how funny the short Fast and Furry-ous was, they made sequels to show in movie theaters. The cartoons featuring the Road Runner and the Coyote had their own rules and format, making them instantly familiar in a new short. Audiences knew what to expect- absurd schemes, the ultimate failure of such schemes, breaking the laws of physics, no dialogue, and plenty of laughs. Then TV beckoned, Warner Bros. laid off their artists to save money, and in the 1980s the cartoons were heavily edited to reduce the violence. "Reducing the violence" only made them shorter, because the ridiculously over-the-top violence was the main point. Still, After more than 70 years, the cartoons still make viewers laugh, both adults and children. -via Boing Boing

I'd never thought there was any kind of procedure involving Mr. Spock's home planet on the TV show Star Trek. Vulcan is a perfectly logical place for a perfectly logical Starfleet officer to be from. But when Gene Roddenberry conceived of the character, he would have one parent from Earth and the other from Mars. Spock as a Martian? That seems a bit antiquated these days, not to mention overly common at the time, as we've known of Marvin the Martian and other stories of little green men from Mars. However, Roddenberry was going to be more scientifically accurate and make Spock's skin red, because Mars is the red planet. That may seem logical on the surface, but then you remember that the Earth is a blue planet, and blue is the rarest color among Earthlings. Still, Star Trek was on television before we ever had full color photographs of the whole earth.

So why did Spock end up being Vulcan? It had to do with makeup and the fact that most people were watching on black-and-white TVs in 1966. Read the story of Spock's changing colors and home planets at Cracked.

High school student Benjamin Choi had some time on his hands during the summer of 2020, as the lab he had planned to work at shut down for the pandemic. So he set about solving a problem that had bothered him for years. Choi had seen a report about a mind-controlled prosthetic arm, but it required surgery to implant the brain sensors. So Choi harnessed his sister's 3D printer and went to work. He went through 75 designs before he was satisfied with his robotic arm. The resulting arm is tough enough to withstand four tons of pressure. It works by EEG, using sensors placed on the outside of the skull. And it only costs about $300 to manufacture! Other hi-tech prosthetic arms can cost up to a half-million dollars once you include the cost of brain surgery.

Choi's arm landed him as a finalist in his year’s Regeneron Science Talent Search. He didn't win, but the arm he built may open doors for many people to use their arms again. Read about Choi's project at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Society for Science)

A simple pun somehow turned into a worldwide celebration of all things Star Wars. It's futile to try to pinpoint who first made the joke. Every year when I was a kid, my father would make a big deal out of March fourth, as in "March forth!" so we can assume that someone somewhere altered the Star Wars reference for humor in May of 1978, and there is evidence that it was re-used for July 4th that same year.

Interestingly, the first major public usage of “May the Fourth be with you” wasn’t some geeky pronouncement, but rather a political joke made by British conservatives. It was a celebration of a slight return to the days of empire under Margaret Thatcher. On May 4, 1979, Thatcher had just been elected as the first female prime minister in the U.K., and the London evening newspaper ran a half-page ad that wished her well. The ad read: “Congratulations Maggie, May the 4th be with you!”

So by now the phrase is almost 45 years old. But it took several more steps for the day itself to be recognized as a geek holiday. Read the history of Star Wars Day at Mel magazine. And May the fourth be with you.  -via Digg

 
An amoeba known as Naegleria fowleri is a parasite that can be harmful to humans during one of its three life stages. Kurzgesagt explains exactly how it can eat your brain. It's pretty gruesome. Our immune system will fight this amoeba, but that battle does more damage to the brain than to the parasite. After this video scares you silly with the description of this deadly infection, they offer some encouraging facts to help you sleep tonight. As if that will help. Read more about the brain-eating amoeba Naegleria fowleri at Kurzgesagt. This video is only nine minutes long; the rest is an ad.  -via Kottke 

In its fight for independence from Portugal, Brazil recognized the invaluable fighting strength of a woman. Maria Quitéria was a real-life Fa Mulan (who may have been real, but not as well documented). Their stories varied in that Quiteria fought for love of country over the vehement objections of her father, who controlled her life down to her choice of spouse. She had grown up working on her marksmanship for hunting, encouraged by her mother, who died when Quiteria was still young. In order to fight with rebel leader Dom Pedro, Quiteria snuck away from her home in 1822 and enlisted in the Brazilian army accompanied by her brother-in-law, wearing one of his old uniforms.

Quiteria took on the identity of a young male soldier, and rose through the ranks for her shooting skills. Matters came to a head when her father found her and insisted that her superior officer send her home. Instead, the major refused the let her go, because her skills were so valuable! Unmasked, Quiteria became the first woman to officially serve in the Brazilian army. The army's confidence in her paid off, too. Read how Maria Quiteria became a hero of the Brazilian War of Independence at Truly Adventurous.   

How would ants react to chili sauce? We know it's spicy to mammals, but not to birds, which is why you can keep squirrels out of the bird feeder by adding pepper seeds. Insects are a whole nother question. From the video, we learn that they are attracted to a dab of Sriracha sauce, because it's red and it smells good. As you might guess, the first ants to try it are rather shocked. From there, you will never guess what the other ants do. YouTuber eLapse specializes in time-lapse videos, not ants, and was surprised himself when these bugs did their thing. Ants are smarter than you might think, and always have the welfare of the entire colony in mind. -via Digg

One thing we knew for certain is that McDonald's Happy Meals began in the 1970s. But who came up with the idea? A woman in Guatemala served them first, but she wasn't a big name in the company. Several McDonald's executives took credit for the idea. And the rival chain Burger Chef (remember them?) sued McDonald's because they'd packaged up kid's meals for years by then. While the origin story is pretty complicated, we also get a rundown in this video of the more memorable toys in Happy Meals, and the controversy over the meal's nutritional value.  

The customs around Happy Meals can be kind of intrusive, if you ask me. I recall ordering two Happy Meals for the kids when they were young, and the staffer asked if they were boys or girls. What difference does it make? She said because of the toys. I made her describe the toys before we decided whether the kids were boys or girls. Then the staffer seemed a bit upset that I selected coffee for the drinks. What? My kids already had drinks with them. I still order coffee with a Happy Meal, and just give the toy back at the window.