Think about how much you paid for your last airline flight. Then imagine how much an unlimited-use lifetime first-class airline pass would be worth -one in which you could take a companion of your choice on each flight. American introduced the AAirpass in 1981 for $250,000. The price later went up, and the companion pass was extra, but it was always worth more to those who flew a lot. Steven Rothstein and Jacques Vroom each bought passes early in the program and flew everywhere -all the time.

In the 2009 film "Up in the Air," the loyal American business traveler played by George Clooney was showered with attention after attaining 10 million frequent flier miles.

Rothstein and Vroom were not impressed.

"I can't even remember when I cracked 10 million," said Vroom, 67, a big, amiable Texan, who at last count had logged nearly four times as many. Rothstein, 61, has notched more than 30 million miles.

But all the miles they and 64 other unlimited AAirpass holders racked up went far beyond what American had expected. As its finances began deteriorating a few years ago, the carrier took a hard look at the AAirpass program.

Heavy users, including Vroom and Rothstein, were costing it millions of dollars in revenue, the airline concluded.

This is clearly a case of launching a promotion without crunching the numbers, or thinking "what could possibly go wrong?" American Airlines investigated both Vroom and Rothstein for fraudulent use of their passes. After raising the price of the unlimited passes to $3 million (with an extra $2 million for a companion pass), no more were sold. The airline filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last November. Link -via Metafilter

Actor and comedian George Lindsey, best known for playing the character Goober Pyle on television, died Sunday in Nashville. He had been ill since suffering a stroke in March.

He introduced the character of Goober — the quintessential grinning hayseed, equal parts annoying and endearing — on “The Andy Griffith Show,” the long-running situation comedy set in the fictional North Carolina town of Mayberry. When Jim Nabors’s character, the similarly likable but naïve Gomer Pyle, was given his own series in 1964, Mr. Lindsey joined the Griffith show as Goober Pyle, Gomer’s cousin.

The character Goober made guest appearances on Gomer Pyle, USMC, was also part of the TV series Mayberry RFD, and was a regular on the variety show Hee Haw for twenty years. Lindsey was 83. Link

The following is an article from Uncle John's Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader.

Today, Canada has free universal health care. The man who made it happen: former Saskatchewan premier Tommy Douglas. Here's his story.

LIFE AND DEATH

In 1910, when Tommy Douglas was six years old, he injured his leg and it never healed properly. Four years later he developed a life-threatening bone infection, and because his family couldn't afford a specialist to treat it, the doctors wanted to amputate the leg to stop the infection from spreading. Tommy's leg was saved only by chance -a teaching surgeon took an interest in the case and offered to operate on Tommy for free, provided that his students could watch the procedure and learn from it.

Tommy never forgot the experience. A medical crisis could affect anyone -what would happen to the people who weren't as lucky as he had been? His situation wasn't all that unusual in the early 20th century. In most industrialized nations, there were few options if you were poor and happened to get sick. Hospitals would occasionally admit "charity cases," but only rarely. For the most part, if you needed life-saving surgery and couldn't pay for it, you died.

HUMAN RIGHTS

After spending his teens at a variety of jobs (printer, whiskey distiller, actor, boxer), Douglas became a Baptist minister and in 1930 took a job as a preacher at Calvary Baptist Church in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. The rural, blue-collar town was devastated by both a drought and the Great Depression. Even if families had money for food, there was none left over for medicine. It reminded Douglas of his own near-tragedy from childhood. "I buried two young men in their 30s with young families who died because there was no doctor readily available and they hadn't the money to get proper care," he wrote. Douglas came to believe that medical care was a basic human right and should be available to everyone.

In 1934 Douglas realized that he could do more for the poor in politics than he could at a small-town church, and joined the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. Like Douglas, they advocated health care access. (The party also agitated for social reforms to end the Depression, including workers' compensation and unemployment insurance.) Douglas ran on the CCF ticket for the Saskatchewan legislature in 1934 ...and lost. But in 1935, he won a seat in the national legislature, the House of Commons.

WINS AND LOSSES

Douglas served in the House for nine years but never got the support he needed to institute health care on the national level. The CCF wasn't well regarded in mainstream Canadian politics; their idea of tax-supported, government-run medicine was too reminiscent of the complete state control of the Soviet Union. But Douglas was no communist, and had no interest in totalitarian government. He just wanted universal health care.

The word scurvy may make you think of pirates and sailors on long sea voyages, but "land scurvy" affected many European Crusaders who spent months trudging through the Middle East. In 1747, Scottish physician James Lind found that oranges and lemons could cure scurvy, but that didn't help all sailors.

The British establishment grasped onto the concept of citrus, and then did it really really wrong. First, they substituted cheap and easy to get limes - readily available from British holdings in the Caribbean - for the more effective lemons or oranges. Then they further boiled the limes in copper vessels, which had the non-helpful side effect of reducing the (thus far unknown) Vitamin C content even further.

People began to suspect that maaaaybe this whole citrus thing was not as effective as it had been claimed. Of course by then steam engines in ships brought the age of sail and voyages of longer than 6 weeks to an end. Semi-success-via-roundabout-ways!

Read more about how gradual advances gave us the real cure for scurvy at Atlas Obscura. Link

Scientists are concerned about spilled coffee, because long hours of research require coffee, and a spill can ruin your train of thought, if not your valuable notes. Mechanical engineer Rouslan Krechetnikov of the the University of California, Santa Barbara, and graduate student Hans Mayer did some experiments after noticing coffee being sloshed at a fluid dynamics conference (of all places).

Back at the lab, Krechetnikov and Mayer set up an experiment: They asked a person to walk at different speeds along a straight path with a filled coffee mug in hand. The volunteer did this in one of two ways-either focusing on the coffee mug, or looking straight ahead. A camera recorded the person's motion and the mug's trajectory, while a tiny sensor on the mug recorded the instant of spillage.

A fluid's back-and-forth movement has a certain natural frequency, and this is determined by the size of its container. In their paper published last week in Physical Review E, Krechetnikov and Mayer show that everyday mug sizes produce natural frequencies that just happen to match those of a person's leg movements during walking. This means that walking alone, without any other interference, is tuned to drive coffee to oscillate in a mug. But the researchers also found that even small irregularities in a person's walking are important: These amplify the wilder oscillations, or sloshing, which bumps up the chance of a spillage.

"This is a very cool study," says Lei Ren, a specialist in the biomechanics of walking at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. "It reveals the sophisticated interplay between human body dynamics and the fluid mechanics of spilling coffee."

Their advice? Don't walk too fast while carrying coffee, don't fill the cup to the brim, and watch what you're doing. There's more, which you can read at Science Now. Link -via reddit

(Image credit: H.C. Mayer and R. Krechetnikov)

Fair food and cake pops are nice, but sometimes you want food-on-a-stick that's neither fried nor sugary. Michael Procopio at Food for the Thoughtless gives us the complete recipe for pimento cheese balls on sticks, and also a introduction about pimento cheese in general. Believe it or not, I never realized it was a Southern thing. I thought every American grew up around pimento cheese! Link -via Laughing Squid

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It's not the first time you've seen cats play pat-a-cake, but these two do it so well! They must be litter mates.  -via The Daily What

Ruth and Jesse Warren of Topeka, Kansas, bought a 1934 Ford Fordor Deluxe Sedan. They hadn't owned it very long when on April 29th, 1934, Ruth noticed the car was missing. A month later the Warrens were informed the car was in Louisiana, with 160 bullet holes in it after Texas lawmen shot and killed Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. The Warrens had to go to federal court to take back possession of their car, as the sheriff wanted to keep it for his trouble. Even then, they had to pay a $70 storage fee! The Warren car became more famous every year after that, as people flocked to see a part of history. You can follow its story through lots of links to tons of pages full of photographs and newspaper clippings. Link -via Everlasting Blort

In 1953, Ernest Hemingway won his only Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Old Man and the Sea, which was published in its entirety in LIFE magazine in September of 1952. The magazine sent photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt to Cuba to take pictures of Hemingway for the issue.

“He was,” Eisenstaedt once said of Hemingway, “the most difficult person I ever photographed.” Coming from a man who was a professional photographer across seven decades — someone who photographed presidents, emperors, socially awkward scientists, testy athletes, egomaniac actors, insecure actresses and once, famously, a scowling and goblin-like Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels — coming from Eisenstaedt, that bald assertion about Hemingway is striking, and sadly revealing. And it’s especially sad in light of the effort that Eisenstaedt evidently put into trying to like Hemingway.

Sixty years later, LIFE has posted a gallery of the photographs Eisenstaedt took on that mission, many which have never been published before. Link

(Image credit: Alfred Eisenstaedt)

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Astronaut John Young, commander of Apollo 16, tells a story during the April 1972 mission. Contains NSFW language that you won't hear in any museum exhibit I know of. -via Metafilter

There's an entire website about the "Secret Restroom" located to the side of Carnation Plaza at Disneyland. It's not so much a secret anymore, but it is a fully-accessible one-holer tucked away as to not be noticeable. It's also cleaned every half-hour. From the FAQs:

Why is the Secret Restroom better than other Disneyland restrooms? For a variety of reasons. For example, it is the only restroom in the entire park that is entirely handicapped accessible, full of cutting-edge technology, and against park policy for discussion by any cast member.

When was the location of the Secret Restroom first publicly revealed? Although Disneyland goes out of its way to avoid publicizing the Hidden Restroom, a photograph of it (seen at right) was printed in a "Disneyland Secrets" article in the Orange County Register in 1986.

The site has full pages dedicated to every amenity and fixture of the restroom. Link -via Boing Boing

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The first thing I thought of when I saw this video was El Kabong, the alter ego of the cartoon character Quick Draw McGraw. El Kabong made about the same sounds when he beaned a bad guy with his guitar. -via Arbroath

Common advice on what to do when you win the lottery is to not tell anyone. That's especially hard to do in states where you are required to make a public appearance or have your name published. In China, lottery winners are required to appear on camera accepting the prize, so they have developed the custom of wearing masks or full head coverings while doing so. Some of these disguises are better than others, as you'll see in a photo collection at EgoTV. Link -via the Presurfer

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Brothers Johnnathan and Joshua Gerard call their style of dance Gerardam for obvious reasons. They took dubstep dancing and added elements of mime, contortion, and um, maybe some other stuff, too. Warning: dubstep music. -via The Daily What

Even if you had no other obvious clues (such as kids with spring fever), you certainly know summer is near when Hollywood releases its big-budget action movies. You may have seen The Avengers already. Dark Shadows opens next week, with Battleship a week later. Then there's Men in Black II, Prometheus, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter all to follow. Of course, we at Neatorama love to geek out on all of them because the anticipation is often more fun than the movie itself. Right now, we have a giveaway in progress in connection with the movie Battleship, so go enter while you still can. And we ask that you devote at least a little of your weekend to catching up on anything you might have missed here over the past week.

Jill Harness looked at how a group of super heroes went From Comics to Film With The Avengers.

Eddie Deezen had the lowdown on some classic TV in The Story of I Dream of Jeannie.

Alex gave us a glimpse into his office space and what he calls The Messy Desk of Neatorama. Plus he teased us about new items soon to be unveiled at the NeatoShop.

We read up on The Lost Continent of Atlantis, courtesy of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

The Annals of Improbable Research gave us Quantum Gravity Treatment of the Angel Density Problem.

And we learned about Going Viral: The First PC Virus from mental_floss magazine.

In the What Is It? game this week, the object is indeed a jailer’s key pistol. The very first comment had the correct answer, so Craig Clayton wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! Almost every funny answer said it was a key to something or other, and then Michael S. Gatlin ran way into left field and said, “it’s a fart machine!” That was honestly the funniest answer, but he did not include a t-shirt selection. Thanks to everyone who played along. You can find the answers to all the mystery items of the week at the What is It? blog.

At NeatoBambino, we saw a his-and-her pregnancy photo shoot, a toddler battle Darth Maul, and a lion trying to eat a baby. Check it out regularly so you won't miss a thing!

The non-giveaway post with the most comments this week was Family Locked in Restaurant for Refusing to Pay Tip. Not surprising at all, because tipping is something everyone has an opinion on. The second-most commented-on post was Mom Arrested for Taking 6-Year-Old Daughter Tanning. Her appearance drew more attention than her crime.

If you need more fine reading material from Neatorama, check out the Best of Neatorama for feature articles from each year back to 2006. But first, order your Mothers Day gifts from the NeatoShop, because there's only eight days left until the finest holiday of the month.