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

It's a Wonderful Life is on the American Film Institute's list of "100 Greatest Movies Ever made" (coming in at #11) and was voted the #1 spot on the list of "Most Inspiring Movies of All-Time."

To all of us now, the film seems as much a part of the Christmas season as Santa Claus, egg nog, gift giving, and kissing under the mistletoe. But much like The Wizard of Oz and Citizen Kane, the most beloved Christmas movie of all time was a disappointing box office flop when it was first released. In fact, It's a Wonderful Life may just have sailed away, out of our collective consciousnesses, but for television and the magic of reruns. It wasn't actually until the 1970s, almost 30 years after its theater debut, that It's a Wonderful Life became the cultural icon it now is.

The film's copyright protection ended and it fell into the public domain in 1974, so stations could air it for free. Repeated airings at Christmas time in the '70s caused millions and millions of movie fans to fall in love with this now-considered "timeless classic." Republic Pictures restored its copyright claim to the film in 1993, with exclusive video rights included. At present, it can only be shown on the NBC-TV network.

Directed by the wonderful Frank Capra, It's a Wonderful Life had its official debut on December 20, 1946, and going into limited release just five days before Christmas. It didn't go into general release until July of 1947. One has to wonder at the logic of the distributors of the film. Why put an obvious "Christmassy" film into general release after the holiday? Nowadays, that would be rather like releasing one of the Halloween films in November or the film Valentine's Day in March. What the heck were these guys thinking?  

It's a Wonderful Life also faced an even-bigger obstacle regarding its release. It was almost completely overshadowed by another film called The Best Years of Our Lives. An indisputably beautiful, touching film, The Best Years of Our Lives was a salute to returning World War II veterans. The film showed how each one dealt with life after war. The United States, of course, still had war on its mind, and this mindset probably caused the discerning movie-goer of 1946-47 to opt for The Best Years of Our Lives and neglect It's a Wonderful Life.

Critics, too, pretty much dismissed the film upon its release; reviews were decidedly mixed. It's a Wonderful Life did garner five Oscar nominations, but it was shut out at the awards ceremony. Jimmy Stewart was not the first choice to play the film's lead, perennial All-American George Bailey. (Stewart has called George Bailey his all-time favorite role.) The studio very much wanted Cary Grant, but fate, as is its want, intervened, and Stewart, a true screen legend, was given his quintessential role. Henry Fonda was also in the running for the lead role (he would have made a perfect George Bailey, too).

Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers

Ginger Rogers also was offered the female lead as Mary Bailey, George's devoted wife (director Capra's perennial favorite leading lady, Jean Arthur, was unavailable). But Ginger was set to do a Broadway play and gave the offer a thumbs down. She considered the story "too bland." Ginger never quite forgave herself for this monumental error in judgement, and Donna Reed got the part.

People who make toys, dollhouses, or other miniatures know that certain laws of physics apply that make miniaturization difficult. Certain laws of biology apply, too, but the fairy wasp seems to do an end-run around some of those rules. How else could an insect exist that is smaller than many single-celled creatures? Some are revealed by Alexey Polilov from Lomonosov Moscow State University, who has studied these tiny wasps for years.

Polilov found that M.mymaripenne has one of the smallest nervous systems of any insect, consisting of just 7,400 neurons. For comparison, the common housefly has 340,000 and the honeybee has 850,000. And yet, with a hundred times fewer neurons, the fairy wasp can fly, search for food, and find the right places to lay its eggs.

On top of that Polilov found that over 95 per cent of the wasps’s neurons don’t have a nucleus. The nucleus is the command centre of a cell, the structure that sits in the middle and hoards a precious cache of DNA. Without it, the neurons shouldn’t be able to replenish their vital supply of proteins. They shouldn’t work. Until now, intact neurons without a nucleus have never been described in the wild.

And yet, the fairy wasp has thousands of them. As it changes from a larva into an adult, it destroys the majority or its neural nuclei until just a few hundred are left. The rest burst apart, saving space inside the adult’s crowded head. But the wasp doesn’t seem to suffer for this loss. As an adult, it lives for around five days, which is actually longer than many other bigger wasps. As Zen Faulkes writes, “It’s possible that the adult life span is short enough that the nucleus can make all the proteins the neuron needs to function for five days during the pupal stage.”

There are other tricks tiny insects use to maintain life in miniature, which you can read at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Link

In 2009, Jesse Dimmick entered the home of Jared and Lindsay Rowley and held them at knifepoint for a couple of hours. The three watched the movie Patch Adams and had snacks. When Dimmick fell asleep, the couple escaped and police, who had been in pursuit of Dimmick over a murder and a car theft, arrested him. Dimmick was shot during the arrest.

Various lawsuits followed. Dimmick sued the city of Topeka over the shooting, and (possibly because of the prospect that he might get money from that suit) the Rowleys sued Dimmick last September for trespass, intrusion and negligent infliction of emotional distress. That seems to have given Dimmick the idea to sue the Rowleys, and he brought a counterclaim against them for breach of contract.

You see, Dimmick alleges that, after breaking into the Rowleys' home with a knife and gun, they all then sat down and hashed out a deal under which they would hide him from police (the police who were right outside) for an unspecified amount of money. "Later," he complained, "the Rowleys reneged on said oral contract, resulting in my being shot in the back by authorities." Ergo, breach of contract.

An attorney for the Rowleys says, of course, that any contract with Dimmick is not valid. Link -via Boing Boing

Andrew Harding had to take a picture during a 5AM train ride in Chicago, or no one would believe what he saw. It makes sense when you realize the photo was taken on October 30th. Link -via reddit

The Philips company introduces lights that run without electricity or solar power. Instead, they harness the bioluminescence of bacteria. You have to feed them fuel, namely methane and compost. The lights developed so far aren't bright enough to read by, but they may have other uses, like illuminating dark roads and exit signs. Link -via Buzzfeed

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

George Harrison passed away due to lung cancer ten years ago today, on November 29, 2001. George will, of course, always be remembered and beloved as the youngest member of The Beatles. But George was, besides that, a brilliant guitarist, a great singer, and a very gifted composer in his own right. Let's take a look at a few facts you may not know about "the quiet Beatle."

* George's favorite color was purple. He loved Formula One racing, egg sandwiches, and watching Monty Python's Flying Circus on TV. His favorite movie was Mel Brook's The Producers (1967).

* George's birthday was a bit nebulous. For most of his life and career, George thought his birthday was February 25, 1943. (Hundreds of Beatle's book state this date.) But near the end of his life, George changed his story and said his actual birthday was February 24, 1943. A family document revealed that he was actually born at 11:50 PM on the 24th.

* George and Paul McCartney were the first two Beatles to meet. The two rode on the same school bus in 1954. Paul was 12; George 11. Before this, George and John Lennon had gone to the same elementary school (Dovedale Primary School) for three years but never met there.

* George was the original "prolific" Beatle composer. Although everyone knows John and Paul composed a great majority of the classic Beatles songs, George actually co-composed the first two Beatles songs on record. In 1958, at their very first recording session, the Beatles (then called "The Quarrymen") played the Paul McCartney-George Harrison song "In Spite of All the Danger." In their next early recording session in 1960, the band played a John Lennon-George Harrison instrumental called "Cry for a Shadow." 

* He officially joined the Beatles ("The Quarrymen") on February 6, 1958. He was only 14 at the time. George briefly changed his name to "Carl Harrison" (in honor of his idol, Carl Perkins) for an early tour of Scotland in 1960.

* George's "first time" was with a German prostitute in Hamburg. He was 17. After the act was finished, the other three Beatles (John, Paul, and then-drummer Pete Best) applauded heartily. George didn't know they were in the room.

* He wrote his first "official" Beatle "Don't Bother Me" (it was featured on With the Beatles, their second album), when he was sick in bed.

* George became a devout vegetarian at the age of 22 in 1965. According to his ex-wife Pattie, he would allow neither meat nor fish to be brought into their home.

* He gave a slang word to the national vocabulary. In The Beatles' first movie A Hard Day's Night (1964), George used the word "grotty" to describe some items of clothing. "Grotty" (meaning "grotesque") caught on as an actual slang word used frequently in the sixties. It is still used, albeit sparingly, to this day. According to John, George "used to cringe every time he had to say it."

* He was the "best Beatle actor." Well, at least according to the director of the boys' first two films. Richard Lester, who directed both A Hard Day's Night and Help! (1965) named George as the best actor of the foursome. According to Lester, in A Hard Day's Night, George "nails every line."

* He was the first Beatle to have a number one song as a solo act. "My Sweet Lord" hit the #1 spot on the charts in December of 1970. 

* A versatile musician, George played 26 different instruments. Every Beatles fan knows George could play the guitar and the sitar. But he was also well accomplished on the conga drum, the African drum, the xylophone, violin, harmonica, marimba, and glockenspiel.

* George's greatest joy was gardening. He claimed to have "planted 10,000 trees" in his lifetime. In 1980, he published his autobiography I Me Mine. The book was dedicated "to all gardeners everywhere."

* He put up $4 million "to see a movie." When the Monty Python comedy troupe was having trouble getting their movie The Life of Brian (1979) financed, George actually mortgaged his home to help finance it. He said he gave them the money "because he wanted to see the film." According to Monty Python member Eric Idle, this remains "the most money anyone ever paid to see a movie."

* As we all know, George passed away from cancer in 2001. His mother, Louise, had previously died of the disease in 1970. George wrote the song "Deep Blue" in her honor. His dad, Harry Harrison, also died of cancer in 1978. The night of his father's passing, both George and his wife Olivia awoke in bed and viewed the same blue light. They both testified they saw a vision of Harry smiling at them.

(YouTube link)

The following is an article from the newest volume of the Bathroom Reader series, Uncle John's 24-Karat Bathroom Reader.

If you’ve ever visited the Hawaiian islands, you may already know that one of them, Niihau, west of Kauai, is off-limits to outsiders. Here’s the story of how that came to be, and what life on the island is like today.

In 1863 Eliza McHutchison Sinclair, the wealthy 63-year-old widow of a Scottish sea captain, set sail with her children and grandchildren from New Zealand for Vancouver Island off the southwest coast of Canada. There she hoped to buy a ranch large enough to support the dozen family members who were traveling with her, but after arriving in Canada, she decided the country was too rough for a ranch to be successful. Someone suggested she try her luck in the kingdom of Hawaii, 2,400 miles west of North America in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On September 17, 1863, she and her family sailed into Honolulu harbor, and quickly became friends with King Kamehameha IV.

The Sinclairs toured the islands looking for suitable ranch property. They turned down an opportunity to buy much of what is now downtown Honolulu and Waikiki beach, and they passed on a chance to buy much of the land in and around Pearl Harbor. “After some months of looking,” Eliza’s daughter Anne recalled years later, “we gave up and decided to leave for California. When King Kamehameha heard of this he told us that if we would stay in Hawaii he would sell us a whole island.”

(Image credit: Polihale at en.wikipedia)

SALE PENDING

The island was Niihau (pronounced NEE-ee-HAH-oo), a 72-square-mile island 18 miles off the southwest coast of Kauai. Population: about three hundred natives. Anne’s brothers, Francis and James Sinclair, had a look and liked what they saw. They offered King Kamehameha $6,000 in gold; the King countered with $10,000 (about $1.5 million in today’s money). Sold! Kameha­meha IV died before the sale could be completed, but his successor, King Kamehameha V, honored the deal. In 1864 the Sinclairs ponied up about 68 pounds of gold, and Niihau has been the family’s private property ever since.

CAVEAT EMPTOR

Eliza Sinclair

History (including Hawaiian history) is filled with examples of indigenous peoples being cheated out of their land by unscrupulous outsiders, but this may be a case where the natives pulled one over on the foreigners. When the Sinclair brothers first laid eyes on Niihau, the island was lush and green, seemingly the perfect place to set up a ranch. What Kamehameha apparently did not tell them was that the island was coming off of two years of unusually wet weather. Normally it was semi-arid, almost a desert. Niihau sits in the “rain shadow” of Kauai and receives just 25 inches of rain a year, compared to more than 450 inches on the wettest parts of Kauai. Droughts on Niihau are so severe that it was common for the Niihauans to abandon their island for years on end until the rains returned. If they didn’t leave, they starved.

Indeed, the only reason the island was available for sale—and the reason Kamehameha was so eager to unload it—was because it was so barren. After the Great Mahele (“division”) of 1848, when the monarchy made land available for purchase by native Hawaiians for the first time, the Niihauans had tried to buy the island themselves. They’d hoped to pay for it with crops and animals raised on the island, but the land wasn’t productive enough for them to do it, not even when the price of the land was just a few pennies an acre. They ended up having to lease the island from the King instead, at an even lower price. By the time the Sinclairs sailed into Honolulu harbor in September 1863, the Niihauans had fallen so far behind on even these meager payments that Kamehameha IV was ready to sell the island to someone else.

HEDGING HER BETS



The Sinclair/Robinson Family

After the sale went through, the Sinclairs built a large house on the west coast of Niihau and set up their ranch. But the dry weather returned, and it became evident that the operation might never be successful. Luckily, Eliza Sinclair still had plenty of gold left, and in the 1870s she bought 21,000 acres of land on Kauai that the family developed into a sugarcane plantation. It, too, remains in the family to this day. (In 1902 Eliza’s grandson bought the island of Lanai at a property auction, making the family sole owners of two of the eight inhabited Hawaiian Islands…but only for a time. They sold Lanai to the Hawaiian Pineapple Company—now part of Dole—in 1922.)

CHANGES, CHANGES, EVERYWHERE

When King Kamehameha V signed ownership of the island over to the Sinclairs, he told them, “Niihau is yours. But the day may come when Hawaiians are not as strong in Hawaii as they are now. When that day comes, please do what you can to help them.” The Sinclairs, it turned out, were more than just the owners of an island—they were also the rulers of the Hawaiians who lived on Niihau…at least those who chose to stay on the island after it changed hands. Having their land sold out from under them was a bitter blow to the Niihauans, and many moved off the island. By 1866 the native population of Niihau was half of what it had been in 1860.



Those Niihauans who moved away soon discovered that change was coming to all the islands, not just to Niihau. And few of the changes would be to their benefit. In 1887 a group of armed American and European landowners forced King Kalakaua to sign what has become known as the Bayonet Constitution, which stripped the king of much of his power and denied many native Hawaiians the right to vote. According to the new constitution, foreign-born landowners were allowed to vote, even if they weren’t Hawaiian citizens.

Kalakaua died in 1891, and his sister Liliuokalani became Queen. In 1893 she tried to replace the Bayonet Constitution with one that restored the power of the monarch, but her attempts had the opposite effect and she was overthrown in a coup organized by the foreign landowners. The Republic of Hawaii was declared in 1894, and in 1898 Hawaii was annexed by the United States.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH

(YouTube link)

Oskar the kitten may have been born blind, but things are looking up for him! Watch him in his new home, discovering what toys are for. We saw a slightly older Oskar in a video last month, playing with the wind from a hair dryer. That turned out to be a copy of the original video (now corrected) which did not explain that Oskar is blind. -via I Am Bored

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

How straight-laced were the Pilgrims? They tried to be, but you know how it goes. A shoe gets unbuckled, a bonnet becomes unlaced, and suddenly your hormones go into overdrive. The next thing you know, your horn of plenty hath spilled forth with wicked abundance.

Pretty much everything we "know" about the Pilgrims is untrue. Our modern-day image of the stern, clean-living, God-fearing residents of Plymouth Colony is largely mythical. It's an illusion that took shape in the nineteenth century, as some overzealous American attempted to construct an official, more respectable history of our growing nation. Historians cannot even determine exactly how many of the approximately 100 passengers on the Mayflower were Puritans and how many were just leaving to find better lives away from the gripping poverty that plagued England at the time. It is generally believed there were more of the latter than the former. 

First off, they never referred to themselves or thought of themselves as "the Pilgrims." The term "pilgrim" was reserved for Muslims making the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Pilgrims referred to themselves as "the Saints" or "the Separatists." They also referred to themselves as "Old Planters" or "Old Comers." Draw your own conclusions from that. The name "the Pilgrims," as we call them today, caught on around the time of the American Revolution. Yes, they were notorious beer drinkers. They weren't even headed for Massachusetts; they aimed for Georgia or a place further south, because of the milder weather. One of the reasons they ended up in Massachusetts in the first place was the lack of beer. According to one of the diaries of a Mayflower passenger, "We could not take time for further search ...our victuals being much spent, especially our beer." 

One of the first structures built when they landed was a common brewery for the colonists. Many of the Pilgrims were brewers, this being done primarily in the home at the time. While we don't have the details about their private lives, we do know that by 1636, the colonists had a published set of rules that listed capital offenses. Among them were sodomy, rape, buggery, and some cases of adultery. So they were certainly concerned with sex, if not necessarily always having it.

However, court records from the colony indicate that sex-related crimes were common transgressions. Fornication, which was defined as sex outside of marriage, was a frequently committed crime, one that often resulted in a fine. Sometimes the evidence of a conviction was solely of the birth of a child in the early months of a marriage.

The only recorded execution for a sex crime occurred in 1642, when 17-year-old Thomas Granger was convicted of buggery. The young man had engaged in unfortunate, intimate relations with some local sheep, and he paid the ultimate price for it. Less severe penalties (relatively speaking), often consisted of whippings. And like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, adulterers were sometimes required to wear the capital letters "AD" on their clothing. No, the Pilgrims weren't exactly saints. But they definitely took their sins seriously!

Air Force lieutenant Gail Halvorsen flew supplies into Berlin during the Berlin Airlift in 1948 and '49. On one run, he met a group of children near the landing strip.

“They could speak a little English,” he recalled later. “Their clothes were patched and they hadn’t had gum and candy for two or three years. They barely had enough to eat.”

Halvorsen gave them two sticks of gum and promised to drop more candy for them the next day from his C-54. He said he’d rock his wings so that they could distinguish him from the other planes. Then he returned to the base and spent the night tying bundles of candy to handkerchief parachutes.

Not only did Halvorsen deliver he candy, but when word of his caper leaked out, Americans sent lots more candy to be dropped over Berlin. And Halvorsen did just that. Fifty years later, he encountered one of those children on a trip to Berlin, which you'll have to go to Futility Closet to read about. Link -via Fark

You can read more about Halvorsen at Wikipedia. Link

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

You put your right foot in,

You put your right foot out,

You put your right foot in,

And you shake it all about

You do the hokey Pokey And you turn it all around

That's what it's all about!

You put your left foot in, You put your left foot out,

Etc. etc. etc.

For some reason, "The Hokey Pokey" always brings people up; it makes people happier. Why is the Hokey Pokey so popular and beloved? Well, you can come up with your own theory, but no other song seems to symbolize a good time for people and bring a smile to their faces to quite the same extent. In 1942, Irish songwriter and publisher Jimmy Kennedy, best known for "The Teddy Bear's Picnic," created a dance and an instruction song to go with it called "The Hokey Cokey." Written to entertain Canadian troops stationed in London, this song is similar to, but not the same as "The Hokey Pokey" we all know. 

Composer Al Tabor was also entertaining Canadian troops in wartime London, and in 1942, he wrote a participation dance called "The Hokey Pokey." He claimed the name came from the London ice cream vendors of his youth, called "Hokey Pokey Men." The accompanying dance was very similar to Kennedy's. In 1946, totally unaware of the British "Hokey Pokey" and "Hokey Cokey," two Scranton, Pennsylvania musicians, Robert Degan and Joe Brier, recorded "The Hokey Pokey Dance" to entertain summer vacationers at Poconos Mountain resorts. The song was a regional favorite at dances and resorts for the rest of the forties, but that still isn't the song we know today.

As if to confuse matters even more, British bandleader Gerry Hoey also claimed authorship in 1940 of a similar tune "The Hoey Oka." The general belief is that Charles Mack, Taft Baker, and Larry Laprise wrote the American version of the song, "The Hokey Pokey," in 1949 to entertain skiers at the Sun Valley Resort in Idaho. The song was a hit at resorts, so Laprise recorded it. It flopped, but Degan and Brier found out about it and sued Laprise for ripping off their "Hokey Pokey Dance."

Despite the fact that his version came out after theirs, Laprise won the rights to anything to do with "The Hokey Pokey."

(Image credit: Wikipedia user Salix alba)

In 2002, a reclusive Russian genius named Grigori Perelman put an end to more than 100 years of suffering in the mathematical community. He solved the most difficult math problem of the 20th century -the Poincaré Conjecture. Its siren call had lured generations of mathematicians to intellectual graves. It first, its simplicity would seduce them, and they'd become convinced the answer was near. But as years passed, they'd be left with nothing to show for their lives' toil but dead ends. By the time Grigori Perelman proved the Conjecture, the solution was worth $1 million.

THE MAN BEHIND THE MADNESS

Henri Poincaré

In 1885, all of Europe was talking about Henri Poincaré, a 30-year-old genius who'd mathematically proven why the solar system holds together. When a hole appeared in his calculations, he plugged it up by essentially inventing chaos theory: Kings were tripping over themselves to make him a knight· and Sweden gave him a small fortune in prize money. To this day; Poincare holds the record for the most physics Nobel Prize nominations, though he never actually won one.

But his most legendary achievement was something no one noticed until much, much later. At the turn of the century: Poincaré invented an entirely new field called algebraic topology; and today, it's one of the most complicated and vibrant branches of mathematics. Think of it as a twisted version of geometry, in which shapes stretch, bend, and fold inside out. Poincaré's goal was to classify objects by identifying their basic form, much the same way botanists classify new species of plants. In the process of creating topology, Poincaré tossed out a conjecture that seemed to be true. It was a side note to a larger problem, and he figured he'd work out the details later. Little did he know; his side note would become one of the greatest challenges in the mathematical world.

THE VICTIMS

Poincaré's conjecture seemed simple enough. It claimed that any object without a loop is essentially a sphere. Think of a knife made out of Play-Doh. Without punching a hole in it or closing a loop, can you squish it into a ball? Yes, of course. Now picture a pair of Play-Doh scissors. No matter how hard you try, you can't crush it into a ball without closing up the finger holes. It's impossible. Poincare believed that objects like the knife were related to spheres, while objects with holes and loops in them were not.

Poincaré thought the conjecture would be easy to prove, and he even published a solution. But then, he saw a flaw in his work and retracted it. After his death in 1912, the question lay dormant for decades, until an Oxford professor named J.H.C. Whitehead rediscovered it in the late 1930s. J,H.C. (known to his students as "Jesus, he's confusing") also published a solution. But he, too, found a mistake and retracted it. However, his work sparked interest in the problem. By the 1950s, the Poincaré Conjecture was one of the best-known challenges in the math community:

Christos Papakyriakopoulos

That's when two Princeton students, Edwin Moise and Christos Papakyriakopoulos (commonly known as Papa), decided to try their hands at it. Moise in particular looked like the guy to do it. Young and brash, he liked to announce his next big problem like a batter calling his shot. Twice that included one of the toughest problems in topology; and twice he returned with the solution. Then, he set his sights on Poincaré.

Papa was vastly different. A self-taught political refugee from Greece, he was famous for his odd, obsessive nature. Legend has it that when he came to Princeton, he checked into a motel and never checked out. He never even unpacked his bags. He simply fell into a routine that he followed every day; down to the minute, which always included a midday nap on top of his desk.

Throughout the 1950s, the two geniuses dueled with each other over Poincaré. Papa would announce a proof, and Moise would shoot it down. Then Moise would announce a proof, and Papa would shoot it down. This went on for years, while neither man worked on almost anything else.

The following is an article from the book History's Lists from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

From the archives of the Old West, we've culled a list of the most notorious places on the frontier. Here's our countdown of the baddest of the bad, meanest of the mean, Wild West towns. Some historians say that the Wild West wasn't as dangerous as we've been led to believe by Hollywood, but there's no doubt that some frontier towns were beyond the immediate reach of the law -places where mischief, mayhem, and murder were everyday occurrences.

8. FORT GRIFFIN, TEXAS One of the wildest places in the old West, Fort Griffin sprouted at the intersection of the West Fork of the Trinity River and the Clear Fork of the Brazos River in northern Texas. Built in the 1860s on a hill overlooking the Brazos, the fort itself was designed to protect the folks -mostly farmers and ranchers- who lived below in the settlement of Fort Griffin. The town was soon invaded by outlaws and cowboys driving their cattle north to Dodge City. By the 1870s, skirmishes with the Kiowa and Comanche in the north diverted the soldiers from Fort Griffin and, as a result, law enforcement broke down, which attracted even more rough types to the town.

Visiting Celebrities. The motley collection of buffalo hunters, gamblers, gunfighters, and "painted ladies" brought with them a penchant for violence. Among them were a gambler and prostitute named Big Nose Kate and her pal, the legendary gambler Doc Holliday. Also passing through were Wyatt Earp (who met Holliday for the first time at the fort), lawman Pat Garrett, and John Wesley Hardin -by some accounts the most sadistic killer to ever come out of Texas. Dustups and gun violence became so frequent that the commander of the fort finally placed the town under martial law in 1874.

7. RUBY, ARIZONA From the days of the Spanish explorations prospectors had searched for veins of gold, silver, copper, lead, and zinc near Montana Peak in southern Arizona close to the Mexican border. In 1891, high-grade gold was discovered. A local assayer judged it to be a bonanza, and the rush was on. The town of Ruby was born practically overnight.

Here Comes Trouble. Most of the miners lived in tents or rough adobe huts, and bought their meager supplies at George Cheney's Ruby Mercantile, the one and only general store. The men provided for themselves and their families by hunting and rustling cattle. But the primary source of trouble came from Mexican bandits who frequently terrorized the settlement. By the early 1900s, Ruby was so dangerous that Philip and Gypsy Clarke, who owned a general store, kept weapons in every room of their house as well as the general store. When Philip eventually sold the store to a pair of brothers, he warned them of the danger. They didn't heed Clarke's warning and were soon found shot to death. Today, Ruby is a well-preserved ghost town.

6. DELAMAR, NEVADA Delamar got its reputation as a notorious Wild West town not from gun violence but from dangerous conditions in the mines. The 1889 discovery of gold in nearby Monkey Wrench Gulch unleashed a stampede of miners intent on digging for the peculiar form of gold, encased as it was in crystallized quartz. A former ship's captain named Joseph Raphael De Lamar bought most of the profitable mines in 1893 and built a mill to crack the quartz and refine the gold. Within a few years, the town had 1,500 citizens, a hospital, post office, opera house, school, several churches, and plenty of saloons. But then the deaths began to mount.

I didn't know it, but there have been more than 50 movies that featured the character of Cleopatra! Unreality magazine looked up some of the best-looking actresses in their portrayals of the Egyptian queen, and presented them in a gallery for your enjoyment. Pictured here is Claudette Colbert in the 1934 film Cleopatra. Link

(YouTube link)

How many internet memes are in this song by the GAG Quartet? All of them! Well, according to the YouTube page, there are forty -in case you want to try to find them all. -via The Daily What