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

In 1968, Groucho Marx signed on for the final movie role in his legendary career. Groucho agreed to play a mobster called "God" in a terrible movie called Skidoo, directed by famed director Otto Preminger. The film starred Jackie Gleason and Carol Channing.

It also featured an all-star (and eclectic) cast including Mickey Rooney, Burgess Meredith, Cesar Romero, Frank Gorshin, Peter Lawford, George Raft, and Frankie Avalon. The fact of Gorshin, Romero, and Meredith all appearing  would indicate some kind of Batman love by either the film's writer or someone behind the scenes. The three actors had famously played the three most popular guest villains on the show i.e. the Riddler, the Joker and the Penguin. That, plus the fact that Otto Preminger himself had played Mr. Freeze on the series, too.

With such an intriguing cast, all systems were go for the filming on location in San Francisco (Interestingly, John Wayne had donated the use of his personal yacht to be used as Groucho's yacht in the film.)

You might fall in love with pictures of a certain breed of dog and get it in your head that you want one of those. But do you know what that really entails? Personality matters more than over the long run, and adopting a dog is a lifetime commitment. That said, most mutts are pretty sweet and normal, even though they each have their own personality. But if you are pining for a particular breed, you need to be informed about what you are in for. Comic artist Grace Gogarty, who goes by little tunny on her Tumblr blog, captures what these breeds are generally like in hilarious cartoon form.   

See a gallery of 24 different breeds, illustrated, at Bored Panda. See more of little tunny's work at Instagram.

Screen Junkies looks at Justice League and tackles the question: What went wrong? They had the opportunity to improve on Batman v Superman, and try to catch the magic of Wonder Woman, but that didn't happen.

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They came down to three answers: the color scheme, bad CGI, the depressing heroes, and the lame villain. Oh, that's four. But there's even more in this Honest Trailer for Justice League. -Thanks, Lacey!

Police in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, were on the lookout for a suspect in the robbery of a farmer's market. A witness provided a sketch of the perpetrator, which was shown on the local TV station. Let's watch that report.

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The response by newscaster Ethan Forhetz is priceless. Considering he was winging the news as it came in, he kept his cool pretty well. Now, lest you think this is a police sketch, it's not. It was drawn by a witness. Yet it was enough to lead police to identify 44-year-old Hung Phuoc Nguyen, who was still on the loose at the time of the report. It turns out that police were familiar with Nguyen already, and honestly recognized him from the sketch. -via reddit

We've been taught that our brains are made up of neurons, which transmit electrical signals among themselves. That's true, but the model of a neuron either firing or not firing has led us to think of them as binary switches, and the work of the brain takes many cells to decode the firings.

When talking about how neurons work, we usually end up with the sum-up-inputs-and-spit-out-spike idea. In this idea, the dendrites are just a device to collect inputs. Activating each input alone makes a small change to the neuron’s voltage. Sum up enough of these small changes, from all across the dendrites, and the neuron will spit out a spike from its body, down its axon, to go be an input to other neurons.

It’s a handy mental model for thinking about neurons. It forms the basis for all artificial neural networks. It’s wrong.

Those dendrites are not just bits of wire: they also have their own apparatus for making spikes. If enough inputs are activated in the same small bit of dendrite then the sum of those simultaneous inputs will be bigger than the sum of each input acting alone

The image above shows a neuron on the left, and a flow chart of how it can work on the right. The explanation is much longer than I can summarize here, but it explains why human brains are so much more powerful than any artificial intelligence we've come up with yet. Read the whole thing at Medium.  -via Metafilter

I'm not really sure if this is a hedgehog or a porcupine, but you get the idea. If you're in Britain, it's a hedgehog, and if you're in America, it's a porcupine. The cactus is the same everywhere. And now you see why Jim is glad that Bill's eyesight was going -all the better for avoidance! This comic is from Shreya Doodles. You can see more of her work in a gallery at Bored Panda, and follow her work at Instagram. 

"She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid."

This purse looks just like Han Solo's/Lando Calrissian's/Chewbacca's spaceship the Millennium Falcon! It's the kind of thing you could spend big bucks on and still only use it for special occasions. But this is not on sale. Mikaela Holmes made this, and you can make one for yourself using her instructions. Looking through the supply list, I realize that I have most of the materials and tools already, except my leather is not vegan, and I can use the library's printer. Well, there's the electronics. Did I mention that this purse lights up with LEDS?

And then I read the steps, and I now understand why a purse like this would be worth big bucks. Maybe I will be okay with just reading the instructions, because it sure is pretty. See it all at Instructables.  -via Geeks Are Sexy  

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Papa can't find his phone. It rings, but it's not in his pockets. It's not in his car. When he walks away, no one can hear the ringing, so it must be on him somewhere. Can all the assembled family members help him find it? The best part of this video is his sense of humor about the whole thing. The mystery will be solved by the end of this video. -via Laughing Squid

The 2016 animated film The Secret Life of Pets deals with the drama that happens among New York City animals when their humans are not present. It gets pretty suspenseful when the protagonists, dogs Max and Duke, leave home and fall in with a gang of dangerous strays, including cats, snakes, pigs, rabbits, and other creatures. The movie was a huge hit around the world, but there are things you probably don't know about The Secret Life of Pets, namely, the large number of cultural references scattered through the film.

10. Gru from Despicable Me is visible in the park scene.

It’s a ‘there and gone’ kind of thing but if you watch closely you’ll see him walking his dog. These movies love to throw in those little details that take some watching to notice.

9. The name of the rabbit, Snowball, is the same name used by George Orwell in Animal Farm.

Snowball was one of the two pigs that led the overthrow of the humans. He was eventually run off when the greedier pigs decided he wasn’t going along with their plans.

Learn more about The Secret Life of Pets at TVOM.

There's an alley in the middle of Chinatown in Manhattan that's different from almost all the other streets in New York, because it has a bend in it. It has a dark and mysterious past, but it's still lined with businesses, including the Nom Wah Tea Parlor, which has been in business since 1920. The eatery has witnessed some of the events that gave the alley, called Doyers Street, the nickname Bloody Angle.  

For this cramped corner of Chinatown, with its sharp angled bend, was the home of the Hip Sing Tong, who waged vicious gang warfare with the rival  On Leongs. According to the Times, “law-enforcement officials say more people have died violently at Bloody Angle….that at any intersection in America.”

The angle was the perfect ambush spot. Herbert Asbury in his slightly more salacious than historical 1928 book ‘Gangs of New York’, wrote how “armed with snickersee and hatchet sharpened to a razor’s edge, the Tong killer lay in wait for his victim, and having cut him down as he came round the bend, fled through the arcade, or plunged into the theatre and thence into Mott or Pell Street through one of the underground passageways.”

The Nom Wah Tea Parlor looks much the same as it did in the 1920s, and the Hip Sing Association is still headquartered at Doyers Street. Read about their history, and see plenty of pictures at Messy Nessy Chic.

There's a chair on the beach. Right there, by itself, with no one sitting in it. Not the kind of thing you come across every day. The smallest thing can make a man feel territorial, and raise his competitive hackles. At the same time, we have evolved the ability to calculate possible outcomes before engaging in conflict.

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What's universal about the video is how well it depicts the weird stuff that goes on in our minds all the time about things that don't matter, the internal monologue that we'd never share on purpose. Or maybe that's just me. This subtly ridiculous short film is from Bridge Stuart (previously at Neatorama). No, it's not a Tide ad, but it would have been a good one. -via Digg

FutonSpecialOps shared this picture of his cat. What do you see? At first glance, I thought they had a transparent TV. No, that's a human body! Oh yeah, his wife took the picture, and that's her reflection. She just thought the cat looked cute, so she grabbed her phone to snap a "Kilroy was here" picture. Since the TV isn't on, it's acting as a mirror. Notice the space between her arm and the chair looks like the cat's front leg. So part of the picture is a selfie, the other part is a cat. Together, it's an illusion. That's three of the most popular pictures posted on the internet, all in one. -via reddit

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 Cigarette Butts and Large Groups of Humans
compiled by Stephen Drew, Improbable Research staff

Cigarette Butts in the Federal Republic of Germany (1972)

“The Effect of the Economic Depression on the Length of Cigarette Butts in the Federal Republic of Germany/Die Auswirkung der wirtschaftlichen Rezession auf die Länge der Cigarettenstummel in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” W. Schulz and F. Seehofer, Beiträge zur Tabakforschung/Contributions to Tobacco Research, vol. 8, no. 7, 1976, pp. 455-458. The authors, at B·A·T Cigaretten-Fabriken GmbH, Forschung und Entwicklung, Hamburg, report:

The influence of the economic depression on the length of cigarette butts in the Federal Republic of Germany was investigated in the summer of 1974. After the interruption of the continual increase in the butt lengths of filter cigarettes and plain cigarettes by the tobacco tax rise on 1st September 1972, there was a further decrease in the butt lengths until August. This was 0.44 mm for filter cigarettes and 1.5 mm for plain cigarettes.

The Olympics in PyeongChang saw something really unusual today- a halfpipe performance with absolutely no tricks. Half-pipe skiing has been a Winter Olympic event only since 2014. Elizabeth Swaney is an American skier competing for Hungary. She is, by all accounts, an average skier, but she made the Olympic team by consistently showing up in a sport that doesn't have many competitors, especially in the women's division. The Denver Post tells her story.

Swaney, who said her grandparents came from Hungary, earned her Olympic berth more from attending World Cup events than actually competing. Women’s pipe skiing World Cups rarely see more than 30 competitors, so it’s not hard to meet the Olympic requirement for a top-30 finish. At last December’s World Cup in China, when most of the world’s top skiers were competing in the Grand Prix at Copper Mountain and Dew Tour at Breckenridge, Swaney finished 13 out of 15 competitors, her best career finish.

“The field is not that deep in the women’s pipe and she went to every World Cup, where there were only 24, 25, or 28 women,” said longtime FIS ski halfpipe and slopestyle judge Steele Spence. “She would compete in them consistently over the last couple years and sometimes girls would crash so she would not end up dead last. There are going to be changes to World Cup quotas and qualifying to be eligible for the Olympics. Those things are in the works so technically you need to qualify up through the system.”

How freeskier Elizabeth Swaney made it to the #WinterOlympics with this very simple halfpipe run: https://t.co/enfDyoQjGC pic.twitter.com/kHTAV7XND4

— NBC Olympics (@NBCOlympics) February 20, 2018

She certainly skis better than I do, but this is not what you expect at the Olympics. Swaney ended up in last place in the qualifying runs at PyeongChang today. -via Uproxx

The Olympic Games were canceled in 1940 and 1944 due to World War II, but athletic competitions went on just the same -in POW camps. The German POW camp called Oflag II-C camp staged what they called the Woldenberg Olympics in 1944, in which prisoners -Polish officers in this camp- competed in a variety of events, but were forbidden to try fencing, archery, javelin, or pole-vaulting, for obvious reasons.

Music, art, and sculptures were put on display. Detainees were also granted permission to make their own program and even commemorative postage stamps of the event courtesy of the camp’s homegrown “post office.” An Olympic flag was crafted out of spare bed sheets, which the German officers, in a show of contagious sportsman’s spirit, actually saluted.

Roughly 369 of the 7000 prisoners participated. Most of the men competed in multiple contests, which ranged from handball and basketball to chess. Boxing was included—but owing to the fragile state of prisoners, broken bones resulted in a premature end to the combat.

Another camp in the Polish town of Gross Born put on their own games as well. Read about the POW Olympics at Mental Floss.