You may have heard someone describing a chewing-out as "...then he read me the Riot Act." Or maybe your parents threatened to read the Riot Act to you. We kind of know what it means when they say that, but what's behind the idiom? At one time, it had to have made perfect sense to everyone, or else it wouldn't have fallen into common usage.

The idiom, which has been in use for centuries, is generally thought to mean the admonishment of a person or persons who have committed an error in judgment. But the origin of the term "riot act" concerns a very particular wrongdoing—an unlawful public assembly that peace officers of the 16th century fought with a pre-written warning to disperse or face serious repercussions. Like death.

So, it was a legally-worded warning. Strange that an act from England in 1715 would still be used as a common metaphor in the USA today, considering the First Amendment and all. Read how the Riot Act came about and what happened to it at Mental Floss.

The villains are often the best part of any fiction (not so much in non-fiction). We don't necessarily "like" them, but we love to watch them. In comic book movies, they are so over the top that we can't turn away. Robert Jones found the best clips of comic book villain in film and made us a delicious mashup.  

(YouTube link)

Maybe we love villains because they let us vicariously indulge in our more selfish instincts. We can see what is possible when ethics go out the window. It's safe because in comic book movies, we know that eventually justice will be restored. The song used in the video is "Saints of the Sinners" by The Faim. -via Laughing Squid

Even cool moms have their limits. The secret is in knowing where the real danger is. I forbade my kids from reading my online publications years ago by telling them I posted inappropriate things. So they never started, even though they are now adults. Sigh. My blogging has become more family-friendly over the years, yet they still avoid bookmarking any site where I post, no matter how many links I send them. This comic is from Dami Lee as As Per Usual.

The folks from Bad Lip Reading have been making songs out of their ridiculously loose lip readings lately, and here's another one. This song is based on (but not limited to) the early scenes in Star Wars Episode IV, also called A New Hope, and focuses mostly on Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin.  

(YouTube link)

It's not complete gibberish, but it's nonsensical enough to be funny in the parts that must line up with someone's lips. If you didn't know the story by heart, it would be totally incomprehensible.   

Ah, what a lovely fantasy, to ride a tulip-covered rabbit on an adventure to a verdant land featuring nothing but the best nature can offer. It's magical! The description of this video says,

Based on actual events. More or less.

(YouTube link)

This lovely video very badly wants to be a Studio Ghibli film, but it's a tourism ad for Travel Oregon.  Now we know why Alex moved there. I still have a sneaking suspicion that they left a few things out. The animation is from Sun Creature Studio in Denmark and Psyop in Los Angeles, with music by the Oregon Symphony.  -via Boing Boing

PS: Matt 252 found the real-life landscapes that are illustrated in the video. See them side-by-side here.

(Image credit: Flickr user Dale Mastin)

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

Research About Two Geographically Beloved Foodstuffs
compiled by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff

Vegemite and National Identity
“Vegemite as a Marker of National Identity,” Paul Rozin and Michael Siegal, Gastronomica, vol. 3, no. 4, Fall 2003, pp. 63–67. The authors, at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Sheffield, UK, report:

The preferences of the Australianborn subjects are shown in Table 1, based on a scale ranging from 1 = dislike extremely to 9 = like extremely. These individuals liked Vegemite quite a lot, and the taste for Vegemite was higher in females than in males.... Liking for Vegemite did not correlate substantially with a liking for any of the other sampled foods [chocolate, apples, milk, steak, carrots, etc.]; the highest correlation, not surprisingly, was with Marmite.

(Image credit: Flickr user Russ)

How many reams of paper does it take to make a record-breaking paper plane? Its engineer, John Collins, explains.

Let’s talk about the record you broke for the farthest distance traveled by a paper airplane indoors—226 feet, 10 inches.
The previous record was 207 feet, four inches. It stood for about nine years. The [last] guy who set it was only 15 years old. Joe Ayoob and I -Joe is my thrower; he’s a professional football player- set our record in February of 2012.

I didn’t realize this is a team effort.
It was really the first time a team had tried. I realized fairly quickly that I didn’t have the arm to throw anything 200 feet. The old method for breaking the distance record was to make [a paper airplane that was basically] a fancy-looking stick with fins: Fold the paper as compact as you can; the whole wingspan is about an inch. Put the wings at equal angles to each other, so if the plane rolled to one side, it didn’t matter. Throw it really hard at a 45-degree angle, and it would do this parabolic arc because of gravity and crash into the finish line. That’s how I started to do it.

How was your plane different?
I built a real flying machine- a glider.

Tommy Wiseau, the auteur responsible for The Room, is doing his best to stretch his 15 minutes of fame with a whirlwind publicity push for the Blue-Bay release of The Disaster Artist. He's done funny videos for Screen Junkies, Vanity Fair, and Nerdist. Nerdist had him audition for the role of The Joker, and that seems to fall into his wheel well better than the other ridiculous scenarios he's been put into.    

(YouTube link)

As others have pointed out, when he stops trying to act and is just himself, it  makes a better Joker. The true derangement is quite genuine.  -via reddit

A discussion at Ask Metafilter encouraged Mefites to contribute examples of songs that everyone recognizes when they hear them, but can't name. Some of them are opera songs covered in a classic Neatorama article from years ago. Others became popular by being used for advertising, movie soundtracks, and cartoons.

Many of these connections were established in the years of Spike Jones and Looney Tunes, when entertainers could make a joke out of setting up expectations with a clichéd bit of classical music, then subverting them with silly characters. Others were one-hit wonders that landed in commercials or became famous hip-hop samples. Now it’s hard to hear certain tunes without thinking of Bugs Bunny singing along, or some Ford truck rolling through hills, or the summer of ’93. So load up the playlist and get ready to remember every piece of pop culture ever.

There are 160 such songs in a Spotify playlist at Lifehacker. If you don't have a Spotify account, you'll only hear a snippet of each tune, but you can look them up at YouTube if you want to hear the entire song. -via Metafilter

Look at all that hair! Fashion in the 1970s was all about the hair. When high school and college students went all out for their formal dances or homecoming courts, some of the women reverted back to the earlier bouffant styles for the special occasion, but most let it all hang out. You'd see long formal dresses, but there were also mini skirts, hot pants, and bellbottoms. For the guys, it was mainly rental tuxes, so the hair was what made you stand out. Unless you were already a star, like this popular athlete at the University of California Santa Barbara in 1970.

See more images that showed how students in the 1970s dressed up for their most important formal occasions at Flashbak. -via Everlasting Blort 

America went on Daylight Saving Time over the weekend, and now on Monday, workers across the country are feeling tired and cranky. For people who have to wake up at a particular time to get to work or school, the effects of losing an hour in the spring (although it's still winter) can be tough, but that's not the only effect of DST. There have been plenty of studies that show DST affects traffic, prison sentences, spending, and more.

10. MORE CYBERLOAFING ON THE JOB

Another study looked at people’s Google search trends for the Mondays before the switch to DST, immediately after the switch, and a week after, with a specific focus on sites like Facebook, YouTube, and ESPN (i.e. entertainment sites that people probably aren’t Googling for their jobs). They found that on the Monday after the switch, people searched for 3.1 percent more entertainment websites than the Monday before DST, and 6.4 percent more than the subsequent Monday. While the researchers caution they can’t be sure this was all "cyberloafing," the fact that there was nothing else special about these Mondays meant it very likely was

Of course, here at Neatorama we welcome such loafing, whatever your reason. I actually got more sleep after the time change, because my clock told me to go to bed at midnight, even though I wasn't tired. Then I managed to sleep until six instead of my natural waking time of five. Read more study results on the effects of Daylight Saving Time at Mental Floss. 

A homeless man was stabbed and taken to Santa Casa de Novo Horizonte hospital in Sao Paulo, Brazil. His dog chased the ambulance to the hospital, and waited outside the entrance. The man soon died of his injuries, but the dog remained for more than four months, waiting for his man to come out the door. Local lawyer Cristine Sardella asked about the dog's story and posted it to Facebook. The Dodo contacted her.  

Hospital staff have been providing food and water for the dog since then, but Sardella hoped more could be done to help him. Having taken in two dogs already, she's unable to provide a home for him herself, so she decided instead to spread the word on social media. The response was overwhelming.

Shortly after, a local rescuer picked up the dog and carried him to a kennel while arrangements were made to find him a forever home. But before that happened, he escaped.

"He fled across the city," Sardella said. "He walked over 3 kilometers and returned to the hospital."

Read more of the dog's story at The Dodo. That article is from Thursday. Since then, Sardella has posted happy news. A Google translation of the linked article says,

Before adoption, the animal was taken to a veterinary clinic by Marco Antônio Rodrigues, who learned of the situation and decided to rescue him.

"He stood at the hospital door every day, but the important thing is that the hospital staff gave him support. Most of the time people drive the animal out. I hope he can now have a happy life with these new owners, "he says.

At the clinic, Champion went through treatment, showered and put the vaccines up. The man who paid the expenses was a woman who was also sensitized by his fidelity.

In an interview with G1 , the new owner, Leticia Fatima Nawas Botoluci, 30, who works at the hospital, said she chose the name because she considered him a winner.

The image at Mundo Pet shows Champion looking much better. -via reddit

(Image credit: Cristine Sardella)

It's been a year since the BBC interviewed Professor Robert Kelly of Pusan University on the impeachment of the South Korean president. His political reporting was totally overwhelmed by the grand entrance of his swaggering four-year-old daughter Marion followed by his baby son James in a walker. Then his freaked-out wife Jung-a Kim, who didn't have time to pull her pants up, made a perfectly-timed Cosmo Kramer slide into the room to to corral them both. The charming video went globally viral, and Kelly became the meme called BBC Dad. On the anniversary of the interview, Kelly gives us his thoughts on the fallout of his internet celebrity.

It is quite a curious sensation to be a quasi-celebrity, especially when you haven’t really done anything to earn it. People often ask me if it is fun or cool to be famous, and I suppose it might be more so if my fame was based on something meritorious.

As it is, we are famous simply because our children are cute and precocious, which is pretty much how everyone’s kids are. But whatever the reason, my wife now tells me I cannot go outside wearing grungy clothes because someone will recognise me. A loss for me but a gain for civilisation, I suppose.

The viral video has boosted Kelly's career somewhat, as more organizations reach out for his political perspective and more people follow his blog and Twitter account for news from Korea. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: @deathtodickens)

"All hockey hair innovation happens in the pomade plains here in Minnesota."  

It is the dream of every hight school hockey player in Minnesota to be included in the All Hockey Hair Team. It may even be more important than winning the state hockey championship. John King of Game On! Minnesota assembles the best heads of hair every year for the honor. This very Minnesota video follows up on a previous honoree and his awesome life before it gets into this year's rankings. The number one head of hair may be a surprise.   

(YouTube link)

Check out the team from 2017 and 2016. Also see the All Hockey Hair Teams from 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015. -via reddit

During World War II, consumer goods were restricted so that materials could be used for the military. This included food staples like sugar and butter, and most metals. It also applied to shoes. From February 1943 to October 1945, Americans could only buy three pairs of shoes per year.

Shoes were rationed because leather and rubber were in short supply. (Rubber especially, as Japan controlled Southeast Asia, where the bulk of the world’s rubber was produced.) Hoping to avoid serious shortages, the OPA set a cap on shoe purchases, and issued new rules about the kinds of shoes that manufacturers could make. Only four colors were permitted — “black, white, town brown, and army russet” — and two-toned shoes were prohibited. Further disappointing the nation’s snazzy dressers, the OPA banned boots taller than 10 inches, heels taller than two-and-five-eighths-inches, and “fancy tongues, non-functional trimmings, extra stitching, leather bows, etc.” The resort set felt the pinch, too: men’s sandals and golf spikes were deemed inessential, and discontinued.

There were some exceptions. If you lost your shoes in a flood or fire, or if they were stolen, you could, mercifully, apply for a special certificate to buy a new pair. Mail carriers, police officers, and others whose work was hard on their feet were also exempt. Allowances were made for orthopedic and maternity shoes and a few other cases. Otherwise, the three-pair limit stood firm, but the OPA figured it was better than the alternative: compelling manufacturers “to produce shoes that would be so unattractive that people would not buy them unless absolutely needed.”

It's hard to believe that any adult would ever need more than three new pairs of shoes per year, but maybe they didn't last very long in the 1940s. You can read more about the shoe rationing program and see lots of pictures from that era at Smithsonian.