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And you thought nothing could be sillier than Sharktopus! SyFy does it again with a man-eating fish-reptile called Piranhaconda, coming to a river, er, TV near you. -via The Daily What

This story reminds me of the joke about a customer who was upset that a waitress cut him off the buffet after two plates. "That's ALL you can eat for ten dollars!" she said. But this is a real story out of Thiensville, Wisconsin, where a man says all-you-can-eat doesn't mean just until the restaurant runs out of food.

At 6'6" and 350 lbs, Bill Wisth admits he's a big guy who can pack it away more than most.  And he wants one restaurant to make all-you-can-eat, all he can eat too.

"It's false advertising," said Wisth to TODAY'S TMJ4.

Wisth has a beef with the all-you-can-eat fish fry at Chuck's Place.  He was there Friday when the restaurant cut him off after he ate a dozen pieces.

"Well, we asked for more fish and they refused to give us any more fish," recalled Wisth.

The restaurant says it was running out of fish and patience; arguing Bill has been a problem customer before.  They sent him on his way with another eight pieces, but that still wasn't enough.

He was so fired up, he called the police.  "I think that people have to stand up for consumers," said Wisth.

And he wasn't done.  He came back two days later with a picket sign.

Wisth says he plans to protest at the restaurant every Sunday. A restaurant employee says Whisth still owes for food he's already eaten. Link -via HuffPo

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Elaine Balden and Bobby Burgess demonstrated the hot dances of the 1960s when they performed "Land of 1,000 Dances" on The Lawrence Welk Show in 1981. Compare and contrast with the hit 1966 version by Wilson Pickett, if you're not familiar with the song. -via Buzzfeed

In a two-part article at Sociological Images, David Pickett traces the history of LEGO and the toy's male-female dichotomy. The toys were pretty much gender-neutral before the introduction of mini-figs in 1978. Even then, the figures were generic and ambiguous -until 1989.

I discussed the introduction of LEGOs the invention of gendered minifigs, and early efforts to market separately to girls and boys in Part I of this series, covering 1932 to 1988.  The segregation of LEGO into feminine and masculine sets would escalate beginning in 1989.  That year the LEGO group introduced gender to the minifig in a big way with the new Pirates theme. The masculine figs sported copious facial hair and the lone feminine pirate had lipstick and a curved shirt that implied a busty chest.

This pioneering pirate was the first in a long line of token females in otherwise male-dominated action-centric themes. The imbalanced ratio of masculine to feminine minifigs persists today, though it has lessened over time. I have seen several different numbers for this ratio, so I decided to do my own count. I gave TLG the benefit of the doubt and counted as gender neutral any minifigs lacking definitely masculine (facial hair) or feminine (lipstick, eyelashes, cleveage) traits, even when LEGO marketing materials clearly delineate them as male or female.

The imbalance is huge, even when you discount people's tendency to look at "gender-neutral" figures as male by default. Link to part one. Link to part two. -via Boing Boing

A house in Tokyo, Japan, by Sou Fujimoto Architects stands out because it's completely transparent, made from a plastic frame, some transparent panels, and lots of open space. The idea was inspired by our distant ancestors who lived in trees and could never expect privacy. The split-level house has minimal furniture and, as far as I can tell, no bathroom. It looks pretty in daylight, but imagine all the people staring at the occupants at night! However, this concept may never have permanent residents. Completely open walls above the ground floor wouldn't adhere to building codes for residential structures. See more pictures at Bored Panda. Link -via The Daily What

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You can't fool all the people all of the time. But in in T. Mills Kelly's class Lying About the Past, you can learn how to fool a lot of people once. Kelly is a history professor at George Mason University, and in this class, students learn how easily historical documents can be falsified, manipulated, and used to deceive the public.

The first time Kelly taught the course, in 2008, his students confected the life of Edward Owens, mixing together actual lives and events with brazen fabrications. They created YouTube videos, interviewed experts, scanned and transcribed primary documents, and built a Wikipedia page to honor Owens' memory. The romantic tale of a pirate plying his trade in the Chesapeake struck a chord, and quickly landed on USA Today's pop culture blog. When Kelly announced the hoax at the end of the semester, some were amused, applauding his pedagogical innovations. Many others were livid.

Critics decried the creation of a fake Wikipedia page as digital vandalism. "Things like that really, really, really annoy me," fumed founder Jimmy Wales, comparing it to dumping trash in the streets to test the willingness of a community to keep it clean. But the indignation may, in part, have been compounded by the weaknesses the project exposed. Wikipedia operates on a presumption of good will. Determined contributors, from public relations firms to activists to pranksters, often exploit that, inserting information they would like displayed. The sprawling scale of Wikipedia, with nearly four million English-language entries, ensures that even if overall quality remains high, many such efforts will prove successful.

Last January, as he prepared to offer the class again, Kelly put the Internet on notice. He posted his syllabus and announced that his new, larger class was likely to create two separate hoaxes. He told members of the public to "consider yourself warned--twice."

This time, the class decided not to create false Wikipedia entries. Instead, it used a slightly more insidious stratagem, creating or expanding Wikipedia articles on a strictly factual basis, and then using their own websites to stitch together these truthful claims into elaborate hoaxes.

The 2012 hoaxes didn't turn out so well, as one didn't gain much notice and the other one was posted on reddit, meaning that it gained more scrutiny than the perpetrators foresaw. The students learned a lot about the dynamics of the internet anyway. Read the entire story at The Atlantic. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: "Lisa Quinn")

Once again, it's time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog! Do you know what the, um, object in this picture is?

Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many times as you like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will each win a T-shirt from the NeatoShop.

Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?

Check out the What Is It? Blog for more clues. Good luck!

Update: the object in question is a fence twisting tool, it's for applying the vertical or stay wires to the lateral wires of a fence, patented even. The first person who figured out what it was for was theoneoneandonly. The funniest answer came from trishlovesdolphins, who recognized her Mother's Day gift:

This is the gift my husband gave me on Mother’s Day morning. It was so romantic, as I was receiving my card from my son, I heard him mumble “aw, crap.” Obviously, he forgot to wrap it. He ran out to the garage, he must have hidden it well because I heard all kinds of boxes being tossed around. I’m afraid to ask him what it is since he obviously put so much time and effort into choosing it, so if someone knows, please let me know. Right now, I’m just using it as a paper weight.

Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop for their efforts! See the answers to all the mystery items of the week at the What Is It? blog. Thanks, to everyone who played, and watch for another What Is It game coming soon.

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The Beatles have been walking across that street for forty years now, and they still haven't reached the other side! -via Arbroath

You might think you could easily distinguish the pithy wisdom of a baseball player from that of a feminist literary figure. Or can you? You'll be given a quote, and you decide whether it came from Jose Canseco or Gertrude Stein. That's the challenge of today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. What's really confusing is how nonsensical the quotes are! In the end, I only scored 56%, which is what you'd expect from not knowing any of the answers. I hope you do better! Link

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The Music Box is a project in New Orleans that consists of nine shacks made of reclaimed building materials. But they're constructed to create sounds, which the group of artists, musicians, and engineers who made them call "musical architecture."

The new instruments inside are Rube Goldberg contraptions that bring to mind the ingenuity of Southern jug bands. There’s a twisting staircase that pumps out tones from organ parts retrieved from a church flooded during Hurricane Katrina; a giant stand-up bass with a weed-whacker line for a string and a bathtub for a resonator; a tall, weather-vane–like structure hooked up to an analog synthesizer. “It reacts to rain, sunlight and wind velocity and uses those variables to modulate an ever-present, droning E major chord,” explains its inventor, Quintron, a New Orleans musician who conducts Music Box performances. The concerts attract hundreds who wait in line for a chance to sit in a small set of bleachers.

Read more about The Music Box at Smithsonian. Link -Thanks, Perrin!

Isn't this a cool post? Redditor RalphiesBoogers showed his coolest post ever. Then joekewle responded with a confused post. This post is so cool, it's chillin'! Link

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In Russia, even the dogs stop and and gather to sing when they hear the national anthem! However, as a commenter said elsewhere, their accents are so thick I can't make out the lyrics. -via I Am Bored

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If it weren't for the English subtitles, you'd think this was an everyday pop song, possibly about family. It's more like a love song to the Chinese Communist Party, the ultimate in this young man's aspirations. The propaganda music video is both amusing and unnerving. -via Metafilter

Every Time Zone might be a real handy site to bookmark! See how your local time compares to that of other cities around the world right now. Or any time, for that matter. Click on a bar to pull up more information about that time, zone, or city. Link -via the Presurfer

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

Mickey Mouse? Banned? You must be kidding!

No, I'm not. Mickey Mouse, that ultra-safe, conservative, harmless, beloved, world-famous cartoon character was banned -in the United States, no less. Or, to be exact, one of his cartoons was. The Mickey Mouse cartoon The Shindig was officially banned in America. But why?

Well, for one, in a scene in The Shindig, Clarabelle Cow is shown in the stable reading a book entitled Three Weeks.

Soon her date, Horace Horsecollar, knocks on her door to pick her up. Clarabelle quickly dresses, therefore she was technically naked while reading the book.

It was reported by TIME magazine in 1931 that the state of Ohio banned The Shindig because it showed a cow's udders. While TIME noted that many moviegoers didn't min viewing Clarabelle Cow's udders, many others were very offended. That was reason  number one.

Reason number two is a bit more esoteric (although equally ridiculous).

The book Clarabelle was reading, Three Weeks, was a notorious book written by Elinor Glyn, a British novelist and screenwriter who pioneered women's mass market erotic fiction. It was Elinor Glyn who coined the word "it" to mean "sex appeal." This was considered very racy and suggestive by 1920s Middle-American standards.

Her book Three Weeks was declared obscene and banned in Canada in 1907. It was condemned by religious leaders in the United States. How it came to be included in the Walt Disney Mickey Mouse cartoon is a mystery to this day.