Remember the first time you saw an ad for Sea Monkeys? I really wanted some, but never made the order. I figured the X-ray Spex were a rip-off, even in my childhood. Kirk Demarais was fascinated with those ads in the back of comic books, so much that he made a film about them, went to work for a novelty company, and wrote a book called Mail Order Mysteries. He talks about some of those products in an interview at Collectors Weekly.

Collectors Weekly: Isn’t it funny how when your parents tell you something is a rip-off, it just makes you want it more?

Demarais: Oh yeah. Suddenly, it was the forbidden fruit. I trusted my parents in general, but something about that, I thought, “How did they know?” They didn’t order it. It’s also the first time I ever encountered dishonest salesmanship. I thought, “With all the other commercials I see on television, you get what they show you.” Part of me had a hard time fathoming that people would just out-and-out rip you off, especially kids. That’s the coming-of-age lesson behind it.

Read the full interview, and learn the truth behind those tantalizing products at Collectors Weekly. Link -Thanks, Lisa!

A vague bill now working its way through the Tennessee legislature could lead to unintended consequences. It may soon be illegal for teachers to mention kissing, hand-holding, and other "gateway sexual activities". From the bill summary:

Instruction of the family life education curriculum may not:

(1) Promote any gateway sexual activity or health message that encourages students to experiment with non-coital sexual activity;

But the bill does not define exactly what gateway activity is. Holding hands? Kissing? Possibly. Teachers will have to be careful because they don't yet know how the law will be interpreted.

Discouraging heavy petting and more intense shenanigans is one thing. But critics of the bill say it's so vague that activities as innocent as "holding hands and kissing could be considered gateways to sex," says Jerica Phillips at WMC-TV. The bill also says parents can file a complaint, triggering an official investigation, if they believe a teacher has mentioned or demonstrated a "gateway sexual activity." So watch out, teachers, says Jeanne Sager at The Stir. Hand-holding isn't just verboten for teenagers ... for you, it's "a fire-able offense."

The consequences of the bill would depend on definition of "gateway sexual activities" and who does the defining. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Entrer dans le rêve)

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Bill Sauder talks about examining relics from the Titanic, in this clip from a NatGeo special. The perfumes he is talking about belonged to Adolphe Saalfeld, who was bringing samples to the United States in hopes he could market them here. Saalfeld survived the disaster and died in 1926. You can see the perfume case in an exhibit of Titanic relics. -via reddit

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Imagine sitting on a beach and an adorable baby sea lion comes right up to you! This happened at Gardner Bay, in the Galapagos Islands. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

Draw your stickman and watch him go on adventures! But you'll have to draw things to help him out along the way. Link -via reddit

Jack Shepherd of Buzzfeed was able to score an interview with the internet's favorite cat, Maru. The answers to his questions had to be translated from cat to Japanese by Maru's roommate, Mugumogu, and then into English by Aya Hibino, but we still get some insights on what it's like to be Maru, supplemented by a few videos. Link

Apprehensive and inexperienced parents seek out advice from people who are only too happy to tell you the "right" way to bring up baby. Then science tells us that "right" way is baloney. For example, here's a study about giving kids candy:

The researchers studied over 11,000 kids ages 2 to 18 who were divided into two groups. One group was fed sweets and chocolate about 4 grams above their daily recommended sugar intake, while the other kids received no sweets at all (having to sustain themselves on a steady diet of pity and taunts from the first group). Despite the almost negligible amount of candy they've been given, the results of the study showed that, statistically, the candy-munching brigade were later 22 to 26 percent less likely to be overweight than the kids raised on free-range carrots and vegan water.

The good news didn't end there. Kids who rode the sugar dragon also had lower levels of a protein that has been linked to heart disease and other chronic illnesses, which goes against all the so-called common sense of healthy nutrition. However, the results only applied to typical sugar candy and not chocolate, for no other reason than life just being arbitrary and unfair.

Yep, parenting basically boils down to common sense and moderation, just as you thought. Read more at Cracked. Link

Taking a look at the Fictional Character Birthday Calendar, I see that I share a birthday with Scott Pilgrim, who was born in 1981. Maybe I should see that movie. The calendar at Flavorwire has birthdays of your favorite movie, TV, comic book, literature, and game characters on each day of the year -and you didn't even know fictional character had birthdays! They do, they're just fictional birthdays. Which one is your fictional birthday buddy? Link

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website. Were there any black people on the Titanic? There have been three excellent movies about the ill-fated luxury liner, the most famous, of course, being James Cameron's 1997 classic Titanic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. There are also two other very well-made movies about the doomed ship: another entitled Titanic (1953) and A Night to Remember (1958). In none of these three films is any black person depicted aboard the ship. Several insightful, well-researched documentaries have also been made about the Titanic. In none of these (at least to my knowledge) are any blacks shown, seen, or talked about. So, were there any blacks aboard the Titanic? The answer is yes. The Laroche family, consisting of four members, were the only blacks aboard the ill-fated ship. Joseph Loroche was born on May 26, 1886 in Cap-Haïtien (in the northern part of Haiti). As a young boy growing up in Haiti, he was a very good pupil. In 1901, at the age of 15, he decided he wanted to study engineering. Unfortunately, there was no school for such in Haiti, so he decided to emigrate to France. He went to France, traveling with a teacher, Monseigneur Keruzan, the Lord Bishop of Haiti. Joseph was an excellent and dedicated student and made good marks. France was a beautiful country with fine food and beautiful sites. Unfortunately, this couldn't hide the extreme racial prejudice rampant there. The dark-skinned Laroche had trouble procuring employment. He got a few jobs here and there, but his employers made excuses that he was too young and inexperienced. He was paid poorly and often treated shabbily.

The post doesn't say who made this display, but it's a great way to visualize the amount of sugar in what you drink. Personally, I prefer black coffee with my sugar on the side in the form of a doughnut; that's easy to visualize. Link -via Nag on the Lake

If anyone can teach us about love, it should be the great philosophers. But as it turns out, a lover of wisdom and a wise lover are two very different things.

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU Putting Babies in the Corner

One of the most important figures of the French Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that humankind's natural state had been corrupted by society. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," the philosopher once wrote. Rousseau believed that marriage was a necessary "chain" that mankind needed to submit to, and he argued that the nuclear family -built around the core of a husband and wife- was integral to society's success.

Of course, Rousseau's personal appetites were in stark contrast to the conventional morals that he publicly championed. He enjoyed flashing women, claiming to get an "absurd pleasure" out of the practice. And while he praised the nuclear family as that necessary straightjacket that all men must wear, it wasn't cut to his own liking. In his autobiography, Rousseau recounted his many relationships with upper-class women ...and their staffs. When Madame de Warens took Rousseau into her home in 1729, the philosopher initiated a menage a trois with the noblewoman and her property manager. The three only broke up when Rousseau took a job in another city.

But the philosopher didn't restrict his philandering to high society. In fact, Rousseau's longest relationship was with Therese Lavasseur, an illiterate seamstress whom he met in March 1745. They had a sizable family -or would have, if they'd kept any of their offspring. Rousseau personally abandoned every one of their five children to a French foundling hospital (sort of a YMCA for unwanted children). These tinier chains, he argued, would have interfered with his important work.

Neither Rousseau nor Lavasseur was faithful to the other, but after abandoning their fifth and final child in 1768, they decided to marry. The ceremony wasn't legal, though, as marriages between Catholics (Rousseau) and Protestants (Lavasseur) weren't recognized in France at the time. That appeared to be fine with Rousseau, who barely acknowledged Lavasseur anyway: Instead of referring to her as his wife, he preferred to call her his "housekeeper." He kept her "services" until his death in 1778.

ARISTOTLE The Man, the Myth, the Misogynist

The following is an article from Uncle John's Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader.

BRI member Ben Brand sent us this information about a couple of experiments conducted by a Stanford professor a few years ago. The results are a little scary -but frankly, they're not that surprising, are they?

EXPERIMENT #1

Researchers: Dr. David Rosenhan, a professor psychology and law at Stanford University. He was assisted by eight people, carefully chosen because they were "apparently sane in every measurable aspect, with no record of past mental problems": three psychologists, a psychiatrist, a pediatrician, an artist, a housewife, and a psychology graduate student.

Who They Studied: The people who run America's mental institutions.

* Using pseudonyms, the researchers presented themselves at 12 different mental institutions around the U.S. as patients "worried about their mental health." They were admitted and diagnosed as insane. According to Ron Perlman in the San Francisco Chronicle, "All told the same tale of trouble: they had been hearing voices which seemed to be saying 'empty' or 'hollow' or 'thud.' This was the only symptom they presented, and the pseudopatients were scrupulously truthful about all other aspects of their lives during interviews and therapy sessions."



* Perlman adds, "As soon as they were admitted to the hospitals, they stopped simulating any symptoms at all, and whenever they were asked they all said they felt fine and that their brief hallucinations were gone. They were cooperative a patients and behaved completely normally. The only symptom they might then have shown was a little nervousness about the possibility of being found out."

* They remained in the institutions for as long as 52 days, getting regular treatment.

* The eight "mental patients" scrupulously kept a written record of both their treatment and the things that happened around them in the mental wards. At first they did it furtively, hiding their notes so that the staff wouldn't find them. But gradually they realized that the staff didn't care, and never even bothered to ask what they were writing. "One nurse," writes Perlman, "noticing that a pseudopatient was taking regular notes, saw it as a symptom of a crazy compulsion. 'Patient engages in writing behavior,' she wrote portentously on his chart day after day."

Thousands of soldiers were wounded during the Battle of Shiloh on April 6, 1862 -150 years ago today. Medics on both sides were overwhelmed, and some of those wounded had to wait quite some time for treatment.

Some of the Shiloh soldiers sat in the mud for two rainy days and nights waiting for the medics to get around to them. As dusk fell the first night, some of them noticed something very strange: their wounds were glowing, casting a faint light into the darkness of the battlefield. Even stranger, when the troops were eventually moved to field hospitals, those whose wounds glowed had a better survival rate and had their wounds heal more quickly and cleanly than their unilluminated brothers-in-arms. The seemingly protective effect of the mysterious light earned it the nickname “Angel’s Glow.”

In 2001, almost one hundred and forty years after the battle, seventeen-year-old Bill Martin was visiting the Shiloh battlefield with his family. When he heard about the glowing wounds, he asked his mom – a microbiologist at the USDA Agricultural Research Service who had studied luminescent bacteria that lived in soil – about it.

“So you know, he comes home and, ‘Mom, you’re working with a glowing bacteria. Could that have caused the glowing wounds?’” Martin told Science Netlinks. “And so, being a scientist, of course I said, ‘Well, you can do an experiment to find out.’”

And that’s just what Bill did.

Martin and a friend worked on the question and their research eventually won a science fair competition. Read about their findings at mental_floss. Link

It's been years since we checked in on the Ryugyong Hotel, the monolithic concrete building in Pyongyang, North Korea, that was never completed. After work was abandoned in 1992, officials even denied its existence! But in 2008, the 105-floor structure got a second chance from the Orascom Group of Egypt. A new glass facade gives a less foreboding and more modern look. See more pictures and read about the history of the Ryugyong Hotel at Urban Ghosts. Link

(Image credits: Wikpedia users Timon (left) and Pocketchef (right))

Movie producers and designers tend to use outdated ideas because it's just easier to do things they way they've always been done -even if they make no sense in the modern world. For example, my daughters first saw nuns wearing habits in a restaurant when they were 8 and 9 years old and asked me about it. See, they had been going to a parochial school for years already! They knew plenty of nuns, but they hadn't seen enough movies.

Nuns, for their part, mostly stopped wearing habits in the '60s, totally missing out on the whole nunsploitation genre. In fact, the number of habit-wearing nuns in the U.S. went from 180,000 in 1964 to a third of that in 2009, and today, the vast majority of religious women dress like ... women. This means that there are probably more nun costumes in America right now than there are actual nun habits, begging the question: Who is dressing up as whom?

But that's just one of the seven outdated assumptions you see in movies. Read the rest at Cracked. Link