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

"People always wanted us to stay the same, but we can't stay in a rut. no one else expects to peak at 23, so why should we? Rubber Soul, for me, is like the beginning of my adult life." - Paul McCartney.

"You don't know us if you don't know Rubber Soul -John Lennon

Rubber Soul was the sixth studio album recorded by the Beatles. The title came from Paul, who said he'd overheard another musician refer to Mick Jagger's singing style as "plastic soul." You can hear Paul use the expression "plastic soul," for the first time, at the end of the first take of the Beatles record "I'm Down" (released a few months earlier). John confirms the title credit: "That was Paul's title... meaning English soul. Just a pun."

It was the second album (after A Hard Day's Night) to feature all original Beatles songs. It was the first album to feature composing credits from all four Beatles. The U.S. Rubber Soul album featured 10 new songs, with two carry-overs from their previous album Help! The British LP featured 14 all-new songs. The recording sessions for Rubber Soul began on October 12, 1965.

Odette Doest is a veterinarian and a wildlife rehabilitator on the island of Curaçao. The few rescued birds she cannot return to the wild find a permanent home with her. That includes Bob the flamingo. Bob was injured when he crashed into a window. Doest nursed him back to health, and found out he was raised by humans and is not equipped for life in the wild. So Bob became an ambassador for his species, visiting schools with Doest to teach children about island wildlife and the importance of conservation.

While Doest would have preferred to free Bob, she says he’s helping to instill a conservation ethic in the next generation. Kids want to know all about the four-foot-tall pink bird: how his life differs from that of his free-flying cousins, why his feathers are pink (as a result of compounds in the shrimp and algae he eats), and his favorite snack (caviar, which he tries to eat straight out of Doest’s hand). After each school visit, Doest asks one student to carry Bob back to her car. “You see them glowing with pride,” she says of the newest members of Bob’s growing fan base.

Doest's cousin Jasper Doest is a wildlife photographer. He visited Dr. Doest and accompanied her to a school and a television station with Bob. You can see those photographs, along with Bob's story, at Audubon magazine. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Jaspar Doest)

Here's something you probably haven't seen before: a domino run for pyromaniacs! Kaplamino, who brought us Magnets and Marbles last year, built a chain-reaction featuring matches, sparklers, candles, fireworks, and open flames. Rube Goldberg would have been proud.

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This had to be terribly precise, as it even harnesses warm air currents.

The ideas you can see in this video are more reliable than you think and work almost everytime if you build it correctly (the hardest part was to find how to build it correctly, in the screenlink you have the first version of the trick and in the final machine the 100% working version). And when there was a fail it was never caused by the part with the rubber band ( the match always lights up). Feel free to use it in your videos ! I'm sure there is so many tricks to invent with this concept.

If you try this kind of thing, be sure to have a garden hose or a fire extinguisher handy. -via Digg

A. Stiffler and K. Copeland have adopted a new cat. Nix was an adult feral cat with cerebellar hypoplasia that was taken in by a shelter. He has adjusted to domestic life quite well. See more of Nix, both in comic form and in photographs, at Chaos Life. 

See also: Previous posts about cats with cerebellar hypoplasia.

During World War I, the military needed enough food to fight, and civilians back home sacrificed so that they had it. But there weren't any treats. In fact, ice cream was considered "not essential," so the sugar that would have gone into its manufacture was diverted elsewhere, despite the pleas of the ice cream industry. That would change drastically over the next two decades, as Americans turned to ice cream during Prohibition as a substitute for alcohol, and then during the Great Depression as a rare affordable treat. Ice cream came to be associated with the American way of life. So when the U.S. joined in World War II, ice cream went with them.

In 1942, as Japanese torpedoes slowly sank the U.S.S. Lexington, then the second-largest aircraft carrier in the Navy’s arsenal, the crew abandoned ship—but not before breaking into the freezer and eating all the ice cream. Survivors describe scooping ice cream into their helmets and licking them clean before lowering themselves into the Pacific. By 1943, American heavy-bomber crews figured out they could make ice cream over enemy territory by strapping buckets of mix to the rear gunner’s compartment before missions. By the time they landed, the custard would have frozen at altitude and been churned smooth by engine vibrations and turbulence—if not machine-gun fire and midair explosions. Soldiers on the ground reported mixing snow and melted chocolate bars in helmets to improvise a chocolate sorbet.

Read more about the American obsession with ice cream, and how the frozen treat went to war, at the Atlantic. -via Metafilter

The cat sneezed for 15 minutes straight, according to redditor withagecomesnerdines. Then he finally found a clue as to her troubles. A tiny patch of green in her nose. It was a blade of grass! So he pulled it out.

My goodness. That had to be a relief for the poor cat. The joke, of course, is that you're not supposed to snort grass, you're supposed to smoke it. Others have speculated that the cat was probably eating the grass, but instead of going down to her stomach, the blade went up into her nasal cavity. She's all better now. If your cat won't stop sneezing, you might want to look in its nose.   

Summer camp is a great place to set a movie: you're away from your parents, you meet all kinds of new kids (and weird camp counselers), and anything can happen. What happened to us when we went to camp as children was usually fun but not outrageous, yet the possibility of something really outrageous was always there. So of course, those awesome ideas go into movies about summer camp. Relive the most outrageous moments from summer camp movies in a list at TVOM. With video evidence. 

Ancient people (and not-so-ancient people) thought the end of the world was coming when the sun went dark. Today, we know the celestial cycles that produce a solar eclipse and the earth's shadow that produces a lunar eclipse. But when the world did not end, those ancient people looked for meaning in the events. Many myths grew out of their experiences, which are quite different in various parts of the world.

When something dreadful happens in Norse mythology, you can safely assume Loki had something to do with it. The trickster god managed to father the ultimate world-consuming serpent, the queen of the underworld and a god-slaying giant wolf. That wolf, Fenrir, spawned the eventual doom of both sun and moon in the lupine duo Sköll and Hati. Yes, everything Loki touches turns to Ragnarök.

Sköll doesn’t get to gobble up the sun ‘til the end times arrive—and when he finally sinks his teeth in, the light of the world extinguishes in his grim belly. Meanwhile, Hati eats the moon. Stephen Hawking described the wolves as eclipse monsters in The Grand Design and many other publications follow suit, but not everyone’s convinced. Some commentators, such as skeptic Eve Siebert, argue that the often-cited Old Norse poem Grímnismál merely points to a dark eventuality and not recurrent events. Still, it’s possible the Norse saw these tales of doom reflected in eclipses, or even considered them near misses in an eternal race between light and all-consuming dark.

Read about other eclipse myths from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and Persia in an article at Atlas Obscura.

If you leave a pile of rocks in place for over a hundred years, it becomes an island with its own ownership papers, history, designation, and controversy. That's what happened to U Thant Island in New York City's East River.

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Even the smallest places can be interesting when you look into what happened to them over time. When we finally saw contemporary footage of the island in this video, all I could see was the survival of plenty of double-crested cormorants. -via Digg

The utterly prolific Stephen King has produced so many ways to scare us that's its difficult to keep up with them all. Some of his stories feature something supernatural, which gives us eerie freakouts, but then we can calm down by telling ourselves it's not real. Then there are the human villains, which are even scarier because they could very well be real. We know the human condition allows for hidden depravity that might someday affect us in horrifying ways. Den of Geek takes a deep look at the people who terrorize Stephen King novels and the movies made of them. You might argue about their rank, but you'll relive a moment of dread for every one of them.

Vitaly says he loves science, but he really, really loves cotton candy! In this video, he wordlessly shows us how to make it at home without a cotton candy machine. You'll need a cardboard box (let's hope it's clean), a jar lid, a soda can, and some tools. And sugar.

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If this looks like too much effort, he will also show you how to repurpose a blender to make cotton candy, or the power drill you already used. And how to build your own cotton candy machine. Just be prepared to clean sugar off every surface of the kitchen before you get the hang of it. -Thanks, Tracey!

Brian McKinney and Sam Vonderheide were hiking up California's Mount Whitney. On the way, they spotted what they thought was a cougar. The mountain lion was between them and their campsite, so they continued on the trail. As they rounded the corner, they wondered where the cat was.

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The cougar knew where the men were every second. Predators are like that. McKinney and Vonderheide ended up backing away, and stayed at a different campsite. Good move. This cat is not only pointy on five ends, but he's 135 pounds of ripped muscle. Read the full story of the encounter at National Geographic.

The Plaza Hotel in New York has a staff of 11 experienced butlers to treat their guests like royalty. Brandon Presser managed to join them for two days (after an express training session) to see what the job was like. What do hotel butlers do? Whatever it takes, from unpacking luggage to delivering ice, to making sure laundry is delivered on time.  

Another common request for the butler team is to draw baths with a signature blend of salt, oil, and roses—especially during the colder months of the year. But the butler’s duties aren’t necessarily complete once the tub is full. Bal, the Plaza’s resident bath-time specialist, said that 95 percent of the time, he’s asked to remain within arm’s reach as bathers suds-up. Most of them, he said, want more hot water or scented oil, and are happy to keep him on hand while they relax in the nude. He is often left to pull the plug from the drain, elbow-deep in leftover water.

It gets weirder.

Read more stories of butler experiences at the Plaza Hotel at Bloomberg. -via Digg

(Image credit: Zohar Lazar)

Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.

(Image credit: Taz)

The tale of the McBarge, the former McDonald’s location created for Expo ’86 in Vancouver. Shockingly, it wasn’t the only fast food joint designed to float.

That’s because I’m about to bring up a bad memory for the fast-food giant.

In the late ’80s, the World’s Fair was still a fairly Big Deal in North America, and Vancouver played host to one of the most notable World Expo galas, Expo ’86. (If you’re a millennial and don’t remember this, I’ll point out that Death Cab for Cutie wrote a song about it. I hope you’re not too young to remember who they are.)

Like the Olympics, World’s Fairs have a tendency to roll over a city and change its character for a short period of time, but eventually leave lingering signs of decay after the fact.

Occasionally, such large-scale events might force slow, grudging change to an urban area. But that’s not what happened in the case of the Friendship 500, a floating McDonald’s location better known as the McBarge.

Screen Junkies is doing it again, with a movie that did it again. Alien: Covenant came out this past May and was pretty much immediately forgotten. It did extend the Alien franchise to five movies over almost forty years.

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The first movie was a horror film. The second was an action movie. Then there were three more that rehashed all that without coming up with anything new or interesting. It's enough to make you feel sorry for the xenomorph. -Thanks, Lacey!