Stanley Kubrick directed 13 feature films over five decades. Can you name them all? Can you come close? Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss asks you to do just that, in three minutes. I didn't come close, but I kicked myself when I saw the answers! Link

It's hard to believe that twenty years have passed since Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, passed away on May 16, 1990. A half-dozen authors at GeekDad got together to post remembrances and a tribute to the Muppetmaster. Matt Blum says:

I was seventeen when I heard Jim Henson had died. It seemed impossible: he was Kermit, and Kermit was always there. He was only a few years older than my parents, so what kind of world was it where someone that young and that brilliant could die? I was, truly, as sad as I would have been if a friend had died suddenly, and felt the loss as keenly. I was angry, too, when I heard that he had died of untreated pneumonia, angry that he hadn’t gone to the doctor. Angry that the Muppets would never be the same.

I’m not angry any more, but the sadness is still there. I feel it every time I see — or, more accurately, hear — any of the characters he used to play. I don’t envy Steve Whitmire his job: how hard must it have been to pick up Kermit the first time after Henson’s death, put his hand inside the sleeve, and try to sound as much like Henson as possible? I’m glad that the Muppets, and Henson’s former characters, are still around. But they will never quite be the same.

Oh yes, there are videos as well. Link

(Image credit: Alan Light)

(YouTube link)

This five-month-old dog hears a fart machine and immediately checks to see if she produced it. -via Arbroath

Several studies of American men and women find that if you ask people to identify their favorite color, women tend to select colors closer to red, and men on average tend to select colors around blue. The reason behind this difference is up in the air, but there are several theories. A recent academic paper proposes a new theory to add to the list, the ecological theory:

The authors here propose that humans prefer colors like blues and greens because those colors and ecologically healthy (blue skies, clean water, healthy vegetation), and do not prefer colors like brown because it's associated with stuff that is ecologically unhealthy (like crap and things that are rotting).

Then they went about testing the theory by correlating color preference with objects that were judged favorable or unfavorable by the test subjects. Although the ecological theory incorporates parts of several other color theories, the data seems to support this idea more than previous theories. Link

Aren't you glad we can just cover those legs with jeans these days? This strange ad from the August 1953 issue of Mechanix Illustrated is one of many old ads featured at the blog Centuries of Advice & Advertisements. Link -via TYWKIWDBI

(vimeo link)

A simple song and a not-so-simple video by Andy Martin. Read about the making of this animation at his blog. Link -via The Litter Box

An incident in Detroit raises several questions about street art. Renowned British graffiti artist Banksy visited a crumbling factory in the city and painted a wall.

Discovered last weekend, the stenciled work shows a forlorn boy holding a can of red paint next to the words “I remember when all this was trees.” But by Tuesday, artists from the 555 Nonprofit Gallery and Studios, a feisty grassroots group, had excavated the 7-by-8-foot, 1,500-pound cinder block wall with a masonry saw and forklift and moved the piece to their grounds near the foot of the Ambassador Bridge in southwest Detroit.

The move -- a guerilla act on top of Banksy’s initial guerilla act -- has sparked an intense debate about the nature of graffiti art, including complicated questions of meaning, legality, value and ownership. Some say the work should be protected and preserved at all costs. Others say that no one had a right to move it — and that the power and meaning of graffiti art is so intrinsic to its location that to relocate it is to kill it.

The gallery defends its action by pointing out that the artwork would have been destroyed soon along with the building. Others respond that Banksy may have intended for that to happen. And then there's the fact that the context gave the painting it meaning in the first place. One could say that while Banksy broke laws against trespassing and vandalism, the gallery is guilty of theft. The property owner hasn't said anything about it yet. No one yet knows who, if anyone, stands to profit from the incident. Link -via Metafilter

(Image source: Banksy)

The book Geekspeak: A Guide to Answering the Unanswerable, Making Sense of the Insensible, and Solving the Unsolvable by Dr. Graham Tattersall poses, and answers, those questions that no one else seems to address -until now. Can you tell how heavy a bus is by looking at it? What size wings does an angel need to fly? What are the best words to use in a personal ad? How much could sea levels rise?

Geekspeak is an essential tool that will help you exercise your brain and solve the unsolvable, make you sound intelligent so you can impress your friends, and enable you to better understand the fascinating world in which we live in ways never thought possible before.

This is one of those books that makes being a geek fun (which geeks already knew) and makes real-world math accessible to those who might avoid it otherwise. To give you a taste of Geekspeak, we have obtained permission to reprint a chapter for your perusal. Fly Wheels looks at measuring biological power in mechanical terms in order to compare the two.

(YouTube link)

Mukhtar is a bud bus driver in Copenhagen. You can tell he was worried when a trumpeter started playing on his bus. Would the other passengers complain? Then it gradually became clear that almost everyone on the bus was there to wish him a happy birthday! -Thanks, Hanan!

Blue jeans are as American as apple pie and bathroom reading. In fact, you might have a pair around your ankles right now.

(Image source: Levi Strauss & Co.)

Canvassing the Customers

In 1850-during the California Gold Rush-a 17-year-old German-Jewish immigrant named Levi Strauss moved from New York City to San Francisco to sell dry good to the miners.
*He tried to sell canvas to them for their tents, but found little interest i it. So he made pants out of the material instead.
*The miners loved them. Although the pants weren't particularly comfortable, they were the first ones durable enough to withstand the miners' rugged living conditions.
*People nicknamed the pants Levi's, after their creator.

A Riveting Experience

In the early 1860s, Levi Strauss began using denim in his pants. It was still tough, but it was softer and more comfortable than canvas.
*He also found that when the denim pants were dyed an indigo blue, they wouldn't show soil and stains as much. Miners appreciated this, and Levi's became even more popular.
*Meanwhile, miners found that carrying heavy tools in their pockets often ripped the pants at the seams.
* A Nevada tailor named Jacob Davis solved that problem for his customers by securing each pocket seam with a rivet. It worked so well, in fact, that David wrote to Levi Strauss offering to sell him the idea. Strauss took him up on it; copper rivets first appeared on Levi's in 1873. They became a hallmark of the company's product. (Image credit: Flicker user thinkjose)

Levi's Middle-Age Spread

Levi's were working people's pants for their first 75 years. Then, in 1935, an advertisement featuring two high-society women wearing skintight jeans ran in Vogue magazine. The reaction was so great that jeans became all the rage. Jitterbugging teenagers started wearing them with the cuffs rolled up, and they've been fashionable ever since.
*Meanwhile, the Levi Strauss Company branched out into manufacturing other items as well as blue jeans... and by 1970 it had become the largest clothing manufacturer in the world.

(Image credit: Flickr user Troy Holden)

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The article above is reprinted with permission from The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

In celebration of National Nurses Week, Cake Wrecks posted a collection of cakes by and for nurses, with a decided emphasis on rectal thermometers. Link

(vimeo link)

This video by Lucy Cooke will introduce you to the sloths of the Aviaros del Caribe sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica, which is the world's only sloth orphanage. Link -via Metafilter

The Spanish festival known as El Colacho has included "baby jumping" since the 1600’s. If you are in the area in June, you can get your baby jumped over as well! See what that's all about in a video posted at NeatoBambino. http://www.neatorama.com/neatobambino/2010/05/14/castrilla-de-murcias-baby-jumping-festival/

This past week here at Neatorama, Alex formally introduced two new members of the Neatorama family: the blogs NeatoBambino (curated by Tiffany Santoso, aka Mrs. Neatorama) and NeatoGeek (curated by John Farrier). You can bookmark the sites, or go to either by using the pull-down menu near the top of this page.

At the Spotlight Blog, we had an exclusive infographic on Cats vs. Dogs, which sparked a discussion on their relative merits at the post itself, at the main blog, and at Digg.

From Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, we got a list of Lost TV Pilots, one-time-only episodes that were supposed to lead to a series, but didn't for one reason or another.

From mental_floss, we were Marching to the Beat of a (Very) Different Drummer. Rock and roll drummers leave some very strange stories behind!

Videosift presented the Neatorama Treasure Hunt in which you answered questions to find a hidden page. Six people won prizes from the Neato Shop and TeeVirus. Congratulations to grand prize winner GaussZ and five other winners!

Thursday brought another chance to win prizes with the What Is It? competition.

The month-long contest at the Upcoming Queue continues. It's not too late to get involved by creating your own Neatorama posts. Even if you aren't competing, we invite you to help us out by looking through the submissions, checking out the links, and voting those posts up or down.

Oh yes, there are even bigger and better games and contests coming next week at Neatorama!

We welcome your tips and suggestions, kudos and criticism, and comments of (almost) all kinds.

How do cobras shoot venom so accurately into a moving target's eyes? Bruce Young of the University of Massachusetts wanted to find out -which involved taunting a cobra into defensive action!

By taunting cobras from behind his visor, Young discovered their secret. The snake waits for a particularly jerky movement to trigger its attack and synchronise the movements of its heads in the same way. It shakes its head rapidly from side to side to achieve a wide spray of venom. And it even predicts the position of its target 200 milliseconds later and shoots its venom at where its eyes are going to be.

The finer details of how the cobra does this is explained at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Link