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

In 1963, the Beatles, newly becoming famous and with their star obviously on the rise, signed a three-picture movie deal with United Artists. They made the first two films, as agreed upon, in quick, neat order.

The first film A Hard Day's Night, made in 1964, was loved by all, fans and critics alike. It made a huge profit and became an instant classic. Help!, the second Beatles movie, was made in 1965 and made a bundle too. But this time the reviews were much more mixed, with most critics finding many flaws and noting the lesser quality, humor, and originality of the second film.

Help!, although the higher-budgeted of the two films, was seen as a disappointment to many, the Beatles included. And most especially to the Beatles' unspoken leader, John Lennon. Lennon was to always cite Help! as being "crap" and other not-so-gracious epithets.

Several other movie projects were put forth, but a third, contract-fulfilling film, was never quite agreed-upon. And so it stood until 1967, when a solution was put forth.

The Girls Scouts of the USA is mad at the Boy Scouts of America. The Girl Scouts are accusing the Boy Scouts of conspiring to poach their potential members: girls. A letter from the president of the Girl Scouts was sent to the president of the Boy Scouts accusing the organization of considering programs that will be open to girls, in order to please millennial parents and boost the BSA membership count, which has been declining. You will be forgiven if you thought that these were two sides to the same organization; they are not.

A Girl Scouts spokesperson confirmed that Kathy Hopinkah Hannan, GSUSA's national president sent the letter to BSA's national president, Randall Stephenson, and the entire BSA board.

"Through various means we have learned that BSA is very seriously considering opening their programs to girls and we have made repeated efforts to engage with them and talk about the implications," the spokesperson told BuzzFeed News on Tuesday.

"It's a potentially dangerous and bad idea," the spokesperson said, citing research supporting "single gender programming" which says that girls learn best in an all-girls environment when it comes to scouting.

The spokesperson or the letter did not specify what BSA's proposed programs for girls were.

Read the story and the entire letter at Buzzfeed.

(Image credit: Flickr user Dennis Carr)

In 2015, artist Damon Belanger was commissioned to add art to downtown Redwood City, California. He painted shadows on the sidewalks for fences, bike racks, benches, and other structures that added a little extra something to give those things personality. There are 23 Belanger shadows in all.

The project won an International Design Award in 2017. See more of the shadow paintings at imgur and at Belanger's website. And the next time you are in Redwood City, keep an eye on the sidewalk. -via reddit

The BBC asked 253 film critics from around the world to list their top ten comedy films, and used their responses to compile a list of the top 100 funny films. They learned that the "around the world" part mattered a lot.

In fact, if the results had just been confined to critics from the US and Canada an entirely different film would have topped the list. It was largely because of the critics from Europe, East Asia and Latin America that Some Like It Hot was ultimately crowned number one.

Oops, we just gave away the number one movie! But where do your favorites rank? Find out at BBC Culture, where you can also access the individual lists from each critic. -via Digg

The 1997 Al Pacino/Johnny Depp movie Donnie Brasco was based on a true story of organized crime and the FBI infiltration that busted the Bonnano family gang. But as most such project go, it didn't exactly follow reality. The differences are fascinating.

10. The real operation was supposed last six months. It went on for six years.

Pistone went so deep into the cover of Donnie Brasco that he eventually had to be pulled out. Upon that time it was released to the families that he was actually an FBI agent.

9. The Bonnano family was kicked out of the Mafia Commission due to the security breach.

It’s rare that family gets kicked out of the Commission for anything but the most egregious of crimes. This however was simply too much and strangely enough it actually benefited the Bonnano family when the Commission was all but torn apart later on.

Read more about Donnie Brasco and how well it reflected -and then affected- the real-life characters at TVOM.

I didn't have any trouble at all reading what he said. Did you? The upshot is that you needn't worry about things you can't change. Concentrate on the things you can change, but do it realistically. This comic is from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble.

In 1886, 16-year-old Fannie Quigley left her home in Nebraska to seek adventure out west. She followed the gold rush to Alaska in 1897, and made her life there for the next 47 years. Her fame came not by prospecting for gold, which she did, but by the more successful business of supplying what prospectors needed.  

Over her decades in the backcountry, Quigley acquired a reputation as not only a renowned hostess and cook, but one of the finest hunters the region had ever seen. Her guests—who were many, despite the fact that her cabin was only accessible by foot or dogsled—were universally impressed by the woman who “tracks her own game, prefers to hunt alone, skins and dresses, packs and caches even such massive beasts as moose and bear, skins out the cape and horns of mountain sheep and can both butcher and cook any game meat to the queen’s taste.”

Quigley's cabin is now a historical part of Denali National Park. Read the story of Fannie Quigley at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Denali National Park and Preserve, Museum Collection)

Positive thinking has been regarded as a motivator for decades. While general optimism may be a good life strategy, research has shown that when positive fantasies are connected with specific goals, the outcomes are often not good.  

My colleagues and I performed such studies with participants in a number of demographic groups, in different countries, and with a range of personal wishes, including health goals, academic and professional goals, and relationship goals. Consistently, we found a correlation between positive fantasies and poor performance. The more that people ‘think positive’ and imagine themselves achieving their goals, the less they actually achieve.

Positive thinking impedes performance because it relaxes us and drains the energy we need to take action. After having participants in one study positively fantasise about the future for as little as a few minutes, we observed declines in systolic blood pressure, a standard measure of a person’s energy level. These declines were significant: whereas smoking a cigarette will typically raise a person’s blood pressure by five or 10 points, engaging in positive fantasies lowers it by about half as much.

Such relaxation occurs because positive fantasies fool our minds into thinking that we’ve already achieved our goals – what psychologists call ‘mental attainment’. We achieve our goals virtually and thus feel less need to take action in the real world. As a result, we don’t do what it takes to actually succeed in achieving our goals. In multiple experiments, we found that people who positively fantasise about the future don’t, in fact, work as hard as those with more negative, questioning or factual thoughts, and this leaves them to struggle with poorer performance.

Further research found that cases of depression correlated with positive fantasies and poor outcomes. So, while fantasizing about successfully attaining our goals may provide great feedback in the short term, it's the actual real-world results that matter. Read about the research by psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen at Aeon. -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user Jason Dean)

Among several koala babies who are starting to emerge from their mothers' pouches at the Australia Zoo in Queensland is one that stands out among the crowd. She's got white fur! She's not an albino, but just has rare white fur due to a recessive gene. While it's possible that her hair may turn darker as she matures, that white fur would be dangerous for animals in the wild, because it will stand out to predators searching for a meal.

The Australia Zoo and Tourism Australia are soliciting suggestions for the white joey's name on Facebook. Many of the comments are names that reference how unique or white she is. See more pictures of the yet-unnamed joey at Mashable.

(Image credit: Australia Zoo)

Shot of a lifetime. #solareclipse #2017 #Nikon #makeshift #solar #filter

A post shared by Kirsten Jorgensen (@cursetenj) on Aug 21, 2017 at 11:12am PDT

Kirsten Jorgensen almost didn't get this shot. She was getting ready to leave after taking pictures of the solar eclipse in Lewiston, Idaho, and then a plane approached. It was probably American Airlines flight 9661, as later research indicated. She tells about the moment it happened:

I was about to pack my stuff up and go back inside, but I had my camera set up and in the direction of the sun when I was taking pictures. All of the pictures were ending up looking like the moon pretty much so I gave up. Then I saw the plane fly over and ran over to take a photo. It caught me off guard!

The result is beautiful, and you might see it in many places over the next few days. Or years. -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!

compiled by Dirk Manley, Improbable Research staff

Chinese Jumpy About Eggs
“Egg Phobia in Retirement Homes: Health Risk Perceptions Among Elderly Chinese,” C.Y. Lew-Ting, Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, March 1997, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 27–51. The author, who is at National Taiwan University, reports that:

Cholesterol has become a commonly-discussed issue in the daily lives of the 203 residents interviewed, and many of them were found to be preoccupied with the risk involved in excess consumption (especially of egg yolks).

Jumpy Japanese Eggs

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!

Highlights from the handwashing literature
compiled by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff

Wash When Watched
“Effects of an Observer on Conformity to Handwashing Norm,” Darhl M. Pedersen, Sheila Keithly, and Karie Brady, Perceptual and Motor Skills, vol. 62, no. 1, February 1986, pp. 169–70.

Observed women after elimination in a public restroom to determine the effects of the presence or absence of an observer on the likelihood of handwashing. 18 of 20 subjects in the presence of another and 3 of 19 who were not observed washed. The difference in frequency of handwashing between the 2 groups was significant. Results suggest that handwashing after going to the bathroom appears to be a behavior that results primarily from social pressure.

A student just out of high school has plenty of decisions to make, like what to do with their lives, whether to go to college, which college to attend, and what to major in. Many of those decisions will be changed over time. But when you've borrowed money, you have a debt no matter what you eventually decide to do with your life.

(YouTube link)

The latest in Cracked's Honest Ad series looks at those friendly student loan providers who help you breeze through the decision of how to pay for college. You'll learn a few things that go on behind the scenes. What to do about the situation? The video doesn't say anything about that.

Did you see the eclipse today? It was 97% where I was. Watching the sun turn into a crescent, and then seeing that crescent flip around, was really weird. Some places actually went dark for a couple of minutes. Zach King (previously at Neatorama) explains what causes a solar eclipse.

(YouTube link)

Things should return to normal now that the job is done. -via reddit

Do you need a minute to de-stress? In the interactive web toy Ribbons, you are thrown into a sea of wavy ribbons lined up in rainbow colors. You can swim among them, or if you stay still for a minute, you can enjoy their waves moving over you. Cosmic. -via Boing Boing