The time of year is upon us, when grown children take their first steps into the real world. How many Neatoramanauts are graduating from college or high school this year? If you are, please let us know! And if someone in your family is graduating, you are welcome to express your pride in the comments in this post. Congratulations, graduates, from Neatorama!

We had some neat features this past week you don't want to miss out on. Jill posted The 8 Best Mothers In The Animal Kingdom for a Mothers Day special last weekend.

Jill also brought us some interesting cinematic supplements in 8 Fan (Or Hater) Made Alternate Endings.

Joe Stalin vs. John Wayne is a very strange story that might not be all it seems, from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

The Annals of Improbable Research gave us To Sit or Not to Sit. It's about peeing. Between the article and the comments, I learned more about male urination than I ever thought I'd know.

Really Successful People Who Never Actually Existed is a roundup of strange cases from mental_floss magazine.

In the What Is It? game this week, Timbering was the first with the correct answer: this is a grab maul or a rigging hammer; it's used to set and remove a grab hook from a log. Jeffos won the award for the funniest answer: “It’s a training device for that game where they make you put your forehead on a bat, spin around, and then try to run a straight line. The spike keeps it in place.” Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop!

You can still enter the giveaway from literary blog Bit Lit in which the prize is the book All Your Base Are Belong To Us -ten copies are up for grabs, so your chances are good! But don't put it off, winners will be announced Monday!

There are more ways to get your Neatorama fix: If you aren't checking our Facebook page every day, you're missing out on extra content, contests, discussions, and links you won't find here. Also, our Twitter feed will keep you updated on what's going around the web in real time.

How to Steal Like an Artist (and 9 other things nobody told me) is a condensation of a talk given at Broome Community College in Binghamton, New York, by artist and author Austin Kleon. It was hard for me to select just one good idea from this post to quote.

My mom used to say to me, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

It used to drive me nuts. But now I know what she means.

Your job is to collect ideas. The best way to collect ideas is to read. Read, read, read, read, read. Read the newspaper. Read the weather. Read the signs on the road. Read the faces of strangers. The more you read, the more you can choose to be influenced by.

Link -via b3ta

Update: You can also hear an interview with Kleon about this essay. Link

(YouTube link)

Wait for it.... -via reddit

We know that a piece of toast, if dropped, will fall butter-side down. We also know that a cat, if dropped, will land on its feet. What happens when you strap a piece of buttered toast to a cat's back and drop them both is called the Buttered Cat Paradox, and there's an extensive amount of research on the internet devoted to just this conundrum. Find out more about it at mental_floss, including possible uses for the energy produced from such a venture, and ways it could go wrong. Link

The Art of Manliness offers an extensive tutorial in the art of negotiation, also known as haggling.

Depending on where you are in the world, negotiation is either a part of everyday life or an uncomfortable practice that’s consciously avoided whenever possible.

But here’s a truth that many of us, especially those of us living in the Western World, don’t always consider: whether or not you realize it, every interaction you have with another person is a negotiation. From picking a romantic date with your wife to finding an agreeable price for some tchotchke gift with the local thingamajig salesman, we’re navigating a world of back and forth deal-making.

If you accept and embrace that, you can become much better at it, getting what you want from your life and feeling more fulfilled. If you reject it, your other choice is to take what’s given you and hope that it matches what you want. I learned from Dad long ago that the first option comes with better odds.

The article contains lots of advice and tips. As long as you are nice about it, you have nothing to lose by asking for a better deal. Link -via Gorilla Mask

Peter Jackson snapped this picture of Sir Ian McKellan as Gandalf on the set of The Hobbit, which is being filmed in 3D.

Even wizards have to wear the glasses.

The Hobbit is scheduled for 2012. http://geeks.thedailywh.at/2011/05/12/the-hobbit-set-photo-of-the-day/

(Image credit: Flickr user Ian McKellan)

Two Brazilians who are known for their resemblances to other people met for an unusual photo opportunity -and a drink. Francisco Helder Braga Fernandes, who somewhat resembles Osama bin Laden, owns a bar in São Paulo. Ananias Rodrigues da Silva is a businessman and a pastor, and also became a Barack Obama look-alike a few years ago. When Silva visited Fernandes' bar, they took the opportunity to pose for a series of pictures. They said, "our meeting is to seal world peace." Link -via Dangerous Minds

Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation about the need for more skilled blue-collar workers.

In high schools, the vocational arts have all but vanished. We've elevated the importance of "higher education" to such a lofty perch that all other forms of knowledge are now labeled "alternative." Millions of parents and kids see apprenticeships and on-the-job-training opportunities as "vocational consolation prizes," best suited for those not cut out for a four-year degree. And still, we talk about millions of "shovel ready" jobs for a society that doesn't encourage people to pick up a shovel.

In a hundred different ways, we have slowly marginalized an entire category of critical professions, reshaping our expectations of a "good job" into something that no longer looks like work. A few years from now, an hour with a good plumber – if you can find one – is going to cost more than an hour with a good psychiatrist. At which point we'll all be in need of both.

His purpose was to encourage support for industrial education through programs Rowe participates in, such as  Go Build Alabama, I Make America, Discover Your Skills, and mikeroweWORKS. Read his entire testimony at the Discovery Channel site. Link -via reddit

Ben Greenman started making charts as an exercise to help him write a novel about a guy who makes charts. But it became a hobby. You'll find quite a few more to make you laugh at I Love Charts. Link -via Metafilter

I love this! DeviantART member MasterPlanner made a rainbow scarf, complete with a detachable Pop Tart Cat! You can buy one for $75 plus shipping- if there are any left. Link -via The Daily What

The fungal cells in this picture are so small and hard to detect that they had to be colored with fluorescent dye before they could be recorded. They are attached to algae cells.

The first views suggest that unlike any other fungi known, these might live as essentially naked cells without the rigid cell wall that supposedly defines a fungus, says Tom Richards of the Natural History Museum in London and the University of Exeter in England. He calls these long-overlooked fungi cryptomycota, or “hidden fungi.” Of the life stages seen so far, a swimming form and one attached to algal cells, there’s no sign of the usual outer coat rich in a tough material called chitin, Richards and his colleagues report online May 11 in Nature.

“People are going to be excited,” predicts mycologist Tim James of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who also studies an ancient group of fungi.

But now scientists will have to either redefine what a fungus is, or classify a new group of species that are "almost-fungus." Read more about it at Wired Science. Link

(Image credit: Meredith Jones)

This 1948 advertisement for a "radioactive soil conditioner" promises a 20% increase in your tomato, beet, lettuce, and carrot crops. What could possibly go wrong? Link -via Boing Boing

An air conditioner technician in Augusta, Georgia, spotted something odd on the roof of the Gordon Highway Waffle House. A man was making his home atop the restaurant! Police and firefighters responded to the report.

Another witness, Marvin Stone, says he “just pulled up to work, saw the fireman on the roof, saw a couple cops on the roof, started asking questions and came to find out there was a guy stuck on the roof.”

James Mayle, when asked if he’d seen anything like, said “No, you never expect anything like this, a person on top of the roof at a Waffle house? No, never that.”

We’re told the unidentified man was dehydrated and taken to a nearby hospital.

Link -via J-Walk Blog

A museum in Rotterdam, Netherlands, has an art installation that consists of peanut butter covering 14 square meters of the floor. The smooth peanut butter "carpet" has no fence around it because museum directors believe it would detract from the art. You can guess it would be easy for a visitor to walk into it -and that's exactly what happened.

Bemused tourists watched as the man sank into the 1100 litres of peanut butter - enough to fill more than 2000 regular-sized jars. He has been asked to pay for the damage after leaving a trail of footprints.

"It is normal that people pay if they damage the art," spokeswoman Sharon Cohen told the Rotterdam-based newspaper.

The pricey installation - created by the artist Wim T. Schippers in 1962 and known as the Peanut Butter Platform - has suffered similar mishaps in the past.

He was the third person to step into the exhibit over the years. http://www.news.com.au/weird-true-freaky/man-wades-across-peanut-butter-art-exhibit/story-e6frflri-1226053768611 -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Patrick Wenmakers)

The Library of Congress has an extensive online collection of historic sound recordings going back over 100 years! Select from classical, ragtime, opera, gospel, and ethnic music, as well as spoken word recordings.

The National Jukebox debuts featuring more than 10,000 78rpm disc sides issued by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1900 and 1925.

Imagine your computer as a new Gramophone purchased for family and friends to enjoy in your home parlor. Audition popular recorded selections of the beginning of the 20th century years—band music, novelty tunes, humorous monologues, hits from the season's new musical theater productions, the latest dance rhythms, and opera arias.

And, unlike a jukebox, you don't have to insert quarters. Link -Thanks, Rich!