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

This Labor Day, September 5th, the annual Muscular Dystrophy Telethon will be aired. But unlike every previous telethon for M.D. since 1966 (that's the past 45 years!) one important ingredient will be missing this year. Jerry Lewis!!!

What, no Jerry Lewis on the M.D. Telethon? Kind of like a beach with no bikinis, a cowboy movie with no guns, or, to use a more precise analogy: Christmas without Santa Claus. For a majority of Americans, the M.D. Telethon was always "The Jerry Lewis Telethon."

After earning over $2 billion dollars for his pet cause (and Jerry's Kids), Mr. Lewis was recently very unceremoniously dumped by the M.D. Board of Directors. At the ripe old age of 85, Jerry Lewis, humanitarian and comedy legend, is still alive and well (okay, he admittedly needs to take a couple of dozen pills every day to keep rolling). Let's take a look at eleven facts you may not have known about the only and only Mr. Jerry Lewis, "The King of Comedy."

1. He's wrong about his show business debut (at least the date). Jerry has always claimed he made his show biz debut at the age of 5, singing "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" Jerry's story is that he sang the song before a crowd and accidentally kicked out a light and got his first laugh. Probably true enough, but he couldn't have been 5, as the song "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" wasn't written until 1932, which would have made little Jerry six. A minor point? True, but one wonders why Jerry has never corrected the "date confusion" in all these years.

3. He never wears the same socks twice. Jerry never forgot his early years, his poverty, and the holes in his socks. Thumbing his nose at the past, Jerry will never wear the same pair of socks more than once. He just wears a pair and throws it out. 

4. He sometimes carries his Oscar around. In 2009, Jerry was awarded a "Lifetime Achievement Academy Award" (deservedly so!) for his years of accomplishment. Unlike most other Oscar winners, Jerry sometimes carries his Academy Award around with him. At the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, Jerry pulled it out of a duffel bag at a press conference.  

5. He edits other people's films. A devoted movie fan, Jerry often screens films at his home. When a part of a film bothers or irritates him, Jerry simply takes the film and cuts out the offending scene on his own editing machine. 

6. He always called his partner Dean Martin "Paul." Jerry and his partner Dean Martin were the hottest act in show business for the ten-year partnership (1946-1956). For some reason, Jerry never called Dean "Dean," he always used Martin's middle name "Paul" instead.  

7. Family Jewels remake with John Travolta? Jerry recently met with John Travolta, where the two discussed Travolta starring in a remake of Jerry's 1965 film The Family Jewels, in which Jerry played seven different roles. John  wants to star in the film with his daughter, Ella Bleu.

8. He turned down Some Like It Hot. Jerry was offered the Jack Lemmon role by director Billy Wilder in the 1959 classic comedy Some Like It Hot, but turned it down. Every time Jerry would run into Billy Wilder, Wilder would say, "Schmuck!" Jack Lemmon would send Jerry Flowers every year.

Yeah, I know, every time a movie set on (or in) the ocean comes along, you hope to see sharks. They add quite a bit of suspense to any situation! Next Movie has posters for five ocean films that would have been improved if there had been sharks lurking about. You've seen one; now go see the other four! Link

If you haven't taken the mental_floss quiz on Soviet leaders yet (and want to), go do that before reading this post, because it contains spoilers. Neatoramanaut Stubb left a comment that blew my mind.

I'm pretty sure most russians don't consider Malenkov part of the line of sovereign leaders, and that Khrushchev followed Stalin. It all has to do with the hair, you see. Ever since Catherine the Great took over for Peter the Great, the pattern has been:

Catherine I - Full-haired
Peter II - Bald (shaved for wig)
Anna I - Full-haired
Ivan IV - Bald (infant Emperor)
Elizabeth - Full-haired
Peter III - Bald (shaved for wig)
Catherine II - Full-haired
Paul I - Bald(ing)
Alexander I - Full-haired
Nicholas I - Bald
Alexander II - Full-haired
Alexander III - Bald
Nicholas II - Full-haired
Lenin - bald
Stalin - Full-haired
Khrushchev - Bald
Brezhnev - Full-haired
Andropov - Bald(ing)
Chernenko - Full-haired
Gorbachev - Bald
Yeltsin - Full-haired
Putin - Bald(ing)
Medvedev - Full-haired

This also dictates that the next President should be bald, giving Putin an excellent opportunity to regain (formal) power. Especially since his main opponent, Mikhail Prokhorov has a head full of hair...

A quick check revealed this pattern is correct, explained at NPR in a 2008 post. However, Stubb's list goes back much further into Tsarist Russia. Link

(Image credit: KoS)

I enjoy the challenge of trying to figure out when a world map was made by looking at the countries on it. That challenge is easier with a handy chart from Replogle Globes that tells what year nations came into existence or changed names. Metafilter, on the other hand, took the question and made a joke thread, with each joke trying to one-up the one before.

My globe is so old...

HOW OLD IS IT?

My globe is so old it still says "here be dragons." On France.

The chart does not yet have South Sudan listed, but may someday soon. Link

Craig Fugate, the current head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), knows a few things about how to assess damage in a disaster area. There's hard data, and then there's a sense of how things are, developed by experience.

First, there is the well-known Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale. Then there is what he calls the "Waffle House Index."

Green means the restaurant is serving a full menu, a signal that damage in an area is limited and the lights are on. Yellow means a limited menu, indicating power from a generator, at best, and low food supplies. Red means the restaurant is closed, a sign of severe damage in the area or unsafe conditions.

"If you get there and the Waffle House is closed?" FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate has said. "That's really bad. That's where you go to work."

There are 1,600 Waffle House outlets across the USA, and the franchise policy is to try their best to feed customers even when conditions are difficult. Link -via J-Walk Blog

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What ever happened to Steve on the TV show Blue Clues, who supposedly went off to college and handed off his dog Blue to his younger brother Joe? Steve Burns, who played the original host of the show, did not commit suicide or die of a heroin overdose as rumor had it. He just left to pursue a musical career, and because he did not want to go bald on a children's show. In this video, Burns talks about how Blues Clues affected his life. This might make you feel really old, but it's so interesting you'll want to find a way to listen to all seventeen minutes. No profanity, but he mentions boobs. -via reddit

The birth rate in Brazil has dropped to historically low levels. The average number of births per woman is now just 1.9, and the drop has been quite steep for the past 50 years. What happened? In this predominantly Catholic nation, families of ten or more children were once common, but now Brazilian women say "A fábrica está fechada," meaning the factory is closed.

"What took 120 years in England took 40 years here," [Brazilian demographer José Alberto] Carvalho told me one day. "Something happened." At that moment he was talking about what happened in São Vicente de Minas, the town of his childhood, where nobody under 45 has a soccer-team-size roster of siblings anymore. But he might as well have been describing the entire female population of Brazil. For although there are many reasons Brazil's fertility rate has dropped so far and so fast, central to them all are tough, resilient women who set out a few decades back, without encouragement from the government and over the pronouncements of their bishops, to start shutting down the factories any way they could.

National Geographic lays out six reasons for the relatively sudden empowerment of Brazilian women, some that are also affecting other nations. One of those reasons is television. Link

(Image credit: John Stanmeyer)

You might not know as much as you think you do when it comes to the USSR. In today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, you are challenged to name all the leaders of our old Cold War rival. There were 8 leaders of the former Soviet Union, and the 3 leaders of the new Russian Federation -so far. Can you name them all in ten minutes? I got ten of them, but could not remember the current president! Oh, and spelling counts, which is what ate up my time, but you only need the surname. Link

Vital. Maligned. Mysterious. How well do you really know the potato?

During the 16th century, Europeans fell in love with a number of exotic plants from the New World. But the potato wasn't one of them. It would take two centuries and a spectacular PR campaign for people to even consider eating the ugly vegetable. But once the potato took root, it determined the fortunes of nations as no other crop has ever done before.

STARCH RIVALS

Spanish explorers brought potatoes back from South America in the 1500s. They'd been introduced to the veggie by the Incas, who grew hundreds of varieties of spuds. But the tuber had few takers in Europe. Since God hadn't mentioned potatoes in the Bible, the clergy preached that the starch was the Devil's handiwork. Also, because the gnarly potato can look like a leper's hand, rumors quickly spread that potatoes caused leprosy. Needless to say, the talk did little to boost the vegetable's popularity.

While most Europeans wouldn't touch the potato, they didn't mind growing them to feed their livestock. Then something strange happened. During a series of failed harvests in the early 1700s, farmers watched in horror as many of their favorite crops died; meanwhile, the potato flourished. Rulers across Western Europe took note and began actively encouraging their people to cultivate potatoes, going so far as to hand out free seeds, along with pamphlets abut how to grow them. The Austrian government took a more straightforward approach: They threatened peasants with 40 lashes if they refused to convert to the potato.



Some countries began to embrace the crop, but France remained a holdout. Finally, in the midst of a terrible famine in 1770, the government got so desperate that it offered a prize to anyone who could find a food capable of curbing the problem. Agriculturalist and pharmacist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier won the essay contest for his rousing defense of the potato. Parmentier believed that the humble starch could prevent the masses from starving to death, and both the scientific community and the monarchy endorsed his ideas. But it would take more than a prize-winning essay to sway France's working class and its aristocracy, neither of which trusted the suspicious-looking, leprous root.

SPUD MAGNET

Parmentier was determined to save his countrymen, even if it meant tricking them into giving the potato a try. In 1785, he organized a series of promotional stunts to win public opinion. At a royal banquet, he served potato dishes to King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette and presented them with potato flowers; the king pinned a flower to his lapel and the queen wore a garland in her hair. The occasion instantly sparked a passion for potatoes among the nobility, who were slaves to royal fashion.

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Carly received a cat balloon, complete with feet, for her birthday. Her cat Bert didn't like it. Bert make his feelings pretty clear. -via Buzzfeed

New York Times photojournalist Joao Silva was embedded with the U.S. military in Afghanistan when a land mine blew his legs off last year. Earlier this month, he made his first trip back to New York and gave a speech at the Bronx Documentary Center, in which he explained what happened.

I heard the mechanic click. I knew: this is not good. And I found myself lying face-down on the ground, engulfed in a cloud of dust, with the very clear knowledge that this has just happened and this is not good. I could see my legs were gone, and everybody around me was dazed. I was like, “Guys, I need help here.” And they turned around and saw me on the ground. They immediately sprang into action. I got dragged out of the kill zone, for safety reasons, to a patch of ground a few yards away.

Immediately, there were medics working on me. I picked up a camera, shot a few frames. The frames weren’t very good, quite frankly, but I was trying to record. I knew it wasn’t good, but I felt alive. Adrenaline kicked in. I was compos mentis; I was on top of things. So, I made some pictures. I dropped the camera, then I moved to Plan B, which was to pick up the satellite phone. I called my wife, Vivian, and told her, “My legs are gone, but I think I’m going to live.” Incidentally, I’m a father of two. I passed the telephone on to the correspondent so she could continue the conversation and keep Vivian calm.

Silva also talks about his recovery, the importance of photojournalism in dangerous places, and what he's learned about the lingering effects of war. A gallery of his photographs accompany the article. Link -via The Daily What

(Image credit: Joao Silva for the New York Times)

(College Humor link)

It's uncanny how much your parents change as you grow up. Can I get an "amen"? -via Breakfast Links

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Seismic measurements recorded on August 23rd during the earthquake centered in Virginia show how the shock wave traveled across the USA. If you didn't feel it, it was because the movements measured are very small.

What you’re seeing here are vertical displacement measurements from an array of detectors that are part of the USArray/EarthScope facility (you can read more about the array and the animation on the IRIS website). These are very sensitive instruments; note the scale on the lower graph showing the motion is only about 40 microns top-to-bottom! That’s less than the thickness of a human hair.

Read more at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link -via Metafilter

Redditor reyvehn told the story of the day he worked a beer stand at an air show, and someone from the military contingent sent a TALON Naval EOD bot up to the stand with a $5 bill in its claw. So he replaced the money with a Bud Lite and snapped a picture. And of course, someone had to say it:

...and then the bartender says, "We don't get many robots in here," and the robot says, "at five bucks a beer, I'm not surprised!"

Link

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This video is a fast-moving historical fashion show with dancing! The Viral Factory produced it for the grand opening of Westfield Stratford City on September 13th, which I believe is a shopping center, although it's kind of hard to tell from the website. Music by Tristin Norwell. Link -Thanks, Vincenzo!