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Rodong Sinmun, courtesy photo

The Doggie Diner heads, icons of San Francisco's underground culture, are in desperate need of restoration. For twenty years, John Law -- pictured above with the Boing Boing crew and Adam Savage -- has cared for these lovely puppies that are now pushing 50. He and his co-conspirators have tirelessly driven them around the region to the overwhelming delight of young and old. For free. John is now seeking donations to restore them to their former glory. Please support the Doggie Diner Makeover at Kickstarter if you can! Here's what John has to say:

photo: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid

A NYC group called the Satanic Temple hopes to install a 7-foot statue of Baphomet, seen in an artist's model above, at the Oklahoma State Capitol building. I think it's a very tasteful monument! From Oklahoma's NewsOn6:

The Satanic Temple says Oklahoma's decision to put a Ten Commandments monument at the Capitol opened the door for its statute.

Temple spokesman Lucien Greaves says it's moving forward with plans to have its monument approved, despite the Oklahoma Capitol Preservation Commission's decision to place a moratorium on new requests.

The commission says it's waiting until a lawsuit over the Ten Commandments has been settled.

Satanists Unveil Design For Oklahoma Capitol Monument

If you want to learn about someplace, you can always pick up a textbook. But if you want to get to know a place, you're going to have to dig a little deeper. And what you find there might be a little strange. The Strange States series will take you on a virtual tour of America to uncover the unusual people, places, things, and events that make this country such a unique place to call home.

This week we’re swinging through the Crossroads of America, the Hoosier State—Indiana.

World’s Biggest Ball of Paint

Michael Carmichael of Alexandria, Indiana has a regulation-sized baseball that’s about 10-feet around and weighs in the neighborhood of 1300 pounds. It’s so big he had to build a shed next to his house to hold it. Yep, just a standard baseball ... covered in over 20,000 coats of latex paint.

Carmichael first had the idea of painting a baseball when he was a kid back in the 1960s. He was playing catch with a friend when a throw went astray, knocked over an open paint can, and the ball got covered. Carmichael thought it looked pretty cool, so for two years he kept dipping the ball in paint until he had 1000 coats; by then the ball looked something like a melting football. He wound up donating that baseball to a local children’s museum, but the idea still fascinated him.

So on January 1, 1977, Carmichael had his three-year-old son apply the first of many, many coats of paint onto a baseball. Since then, at least one new layer of paint has been added every day, either by someone in the family or curious visitors who drop by the house and give the rollers a twirl. These contributions helped the ball become the World’s Largest Ball of Paint according to Guinness in 2004.

If you’d like to add a layer, feel free to stop by the family’s house. But you must abide by one rule: It can’t be painted the same color twice in a row.

Have the scoop on an unusual person, place or event in your state? Tell me about it on Twitter (@spacemonkeyx) and maybe I’ll include it in a future edition of Strange States!

Read all the entries in our Strange States series here.

The Library of Congress's website hosts a high-resolution scan of a rare edition of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" illustrated by Gustave Doré. The title-page is at page 11, the list of illustrations is on page 14.

The illustrations are amazing, like no other illustrated Poe I've seen. I've collected my favorites below, and there are a lot of them -- honestly, it was impossible to choose.

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The Raven / by Edgar Allan Poe ; illustrated by Gustave Doré ; with comment by Edmund C. Stedman. (via Reddit)

Paul Hellyer was Canada's Minister of Defense in the mid-1960s. He is now a critic of the United States' willingness to trigger an interstellar war with aliens—aliens who might give us more advanced technology if only we were less belligerent.

"They've been visiting our planet for thousands of years," Hellyer told RT's Sophie Shevardnadze in a televised interview.

"There's been a lot more activity in the last few decades, since we invented the atomic bomb. and they're very concerned about that, and about the fact that we might use it again," added Hellyer, who said that a cold-war era commission determined that at least four alien species had come to Earth. "The whole cosmos is a unity, and it affects not just us but other people in the cosmos, they've very much afraid that we might be stupid enough to start using atomic weapons again. This would be bad for us and bad for them too."

Scientists are at fault for dismissing the evidence of "authenticated" alien contacts, added the longest-serving member of Queen Elizabeth Canada Privy Council. "This information is top secret in the way that government isn't talking about it, but if you talk to the whistleblowers ... there's a lot of information and it doesn't take a lot of effort to find it"

About 8 out of 10 UFO reports are false or mistaken. But it's the remainder that are so interesting, and amount to overwhelming evidence. Hellyer has even had his own encounter with a UFO--if not the aliens themselves.

"I have seen a UFO, about 120 miles north of Toronto, over Lake Muskoka," Hellyer said. The UFO "just looked like a star ... we watched it until our necks almost broke. It was definitely a UFO, because it could change position in the sky by 3 or 4 degrees in 3 or 4 seconds. ... There was no other explanation for it except that it was the real thing."

The Star of Bethlehem, he added, was one of God's flying saucers.

Moreover, the number of known alien species has leapt from "between two and 12" to as many as 80, said Hellyer, the senior cabinet minister from Pierre Trudeau's 1968 cabinet. "They have different agendas. Maybe all of us on earth should have have the same agenda. ... Nearly all of them are benign, but one or two are not, and that's what I'm investigating now."

(YouTube link)

I dropped the kids off at the multiplex one day and, since I was close to the door, scanned the posters across the front. They all looked alike. None of them told me anything about the movie they advertised. Dark colors, big heads, few words, nothing informative at all. It's almost as if movie producers expect the viewer to get all their information about a film from trailers or the internet …which we do, because the poster won't tell us anything. GoodBadFlicks takes a look at the various formulas and tropes used to produce these rather forgettable posters. -via Geeks Are Sexy

You know, adherence to a formula for designing posters can backfire on you.

As an experiment, Cracked writer Alli Reed composed a fictitious but truly awful online dating profile. Her goal was to to create a persona that was truly despicable and that no one would ever consider dating:

In making this profile, I made sure my creation touched on every major facet of being truly horrible: mean, spoiled, lazy, racist, manipulative, and willfully ignorant, and I threw in a little gold digging just for funzies. I maintain that there is not a human on this planet who would read this profile and think, "Yes, I'd like to spend any amount of the fleeting time I'm given on my journey around the sun getting to know this person." 

As you can see, she put a lot of thought into how truly offensive she could be. Her persona, aaroncarterfan, is despicable. She openly brags of engaging in paternity fraud and harassing homeless people.

But within a day, she received 150 responses from interested men. In their online conversations, she did her best to convey the impression that aaroncarterfan would be the worst possible girlfriend. She was unsuccessful. You can read them here.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, it's surfing season.

What I find particularly nifty about the Great Lakes surfing community is the way they're driven to amateur meteorology. Waves in the Great Lakes are highly dependent on near-shore weather systems. You aren't going to get big waves in Duluth unless you've also got high winds in or near Duluth. That means the surfable waves only exist for a few hours — long enough for the weather front to move through the area. (It also means the surfers are often doing their thing in the very storm that's creating their waves.) So groups like the Lake Superior Surf Club get into forecasting, as well as surfing.

This video was taken on January 1 at Stoney Point, a beach about 15 miles north of Duluth. Last year, Minnesota Public Radio did a photo essay on the Lake Superior surfing community, and you should check out those photos, as well.

Video Link

Meet Richard Meinertzhagen, a fascinating and disturbing character from the golden age of Edwardian science. I first learned about him last weekend, reading the Extinction Countdown blog. Meinertzhagen was single-handedly responsible for convincing a couple generations of scientists that the Indian forest owlet was extinct when it actually was not. How?

Turns out, Meinertzhagen had a habit of stealing taxonomic specimens from museums, altering them, and then resubmitting them to different museums as his own discovery, complete with fabricated information about where and when he found the animal. His forest owlet, for example, was an 1884 specimen swiped from the British Museum of Natural History sometime after 1925. He later repackaged the bird as his own specimen, collected in 1914. The problem: Meinertzhagen claimed to have found the forest owlet in an Indian state where the owlets don't live. Later researchers, upon not finding any owlets in that state, concluded the birds must be extinct. This assumption wasn't disproven until 1997. But that's not even the weirdest stuff in Meinertzhagen's biography ...

Also a member of the British military, Meinertzhagen managed to get himself falsely credited with the creation of the "Haversack ruse" — when the British allowed a small bag with fake battle plans to fall into the hands of the Ottoman Empire. He also claimed to have rescued one of the Russian Grand Duchesses from death at the hands of the Bolsheviks and to have insulted and then almost-but-not-quite assassinated Hitler. That's some of the stuff he made up about himself. His true biography includes the murder of a personal assistant that he covered up as a death from plague. Seriously. This guy's story is nuts.

(Via Steve Silberman)

Almost exactly fifty years ago as I write this, President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, TX, and we’re still talking about aspects of the shooting decades later. Was there a single shooter, or multiple assassins? Was the killing the action of a loner, or the product of a conspiracy involving the CIA, the Mob, and foreign powers?

Errol Morris has looked into the JFK assassination before, in works like the short The Umbrella Man. For that short he talked to Josiah “Tink” Thompson, a professor-turned-private investigator. He’s also a proponent of a three-gunmen theory, as put forth in the book Six Seconds In Dallas, which takes a scientific and evidence-based approach to the theory that multiple shooters acted on that day in Texas.

Now Morris presents more material with Tink, in a short called November 22, 1963, which looks at the various photographic evidence captured that day by ordinary citizens. The Zapruder film is, of course, the spine that connects many other pieces of evidence, but here the two men lay out a path of photographic evidence, and discuss how it effects our understanding of what happened that afternoon. 

The short comes from the New York Times, and there Morris says,

Is there a lesson to be learned? Yes, to never give up trying to uncover the truth. Despite all the difficulties, what happened in Dallas happened in one way rather than another. It may have been hopelessly obscured, but it was not obliterated. Tink still believes in answers, and in this instance, an answer. He is completing a sequel to “Six Seconds” called “Last Second in Dallas.” Like its predecessor, this book is clearly reasoned and convincing. Of course, there will be people who will be unmoved by his or any other account. This is a dogfight with too many dogs in the fight. Most people have already staked out their commitment.

• This Week In Trailers: The Unknown Known, Mister John, Proxy, Metalhead
• Errol Morris to Direct Thriller ‘Holland, Michigan’
• Errol Morris Crafting Donald Rumsfeld Interview Documentary?
• A Conversation with Errol Morris on the Nature of Truth, Photography, and Documentary
• Kristen Wiig, Owen Wilson, and Christopher Walken Could Join Paul Rudd in Errol Morris’ ‘Freezing People is Easy’
• Watch ‘The Umbrella Man,’ a Short by Errol Morris on the JFK Assassination and the Danger of Jumping to Conclusions

(Video Link)

Have you been losing sleep at night wondering where all those big name celebrities got their start? Are you going crazy trying to figure out the first televised appearance of Leonardo DiCaprio, Aaron Paul or Tina Fey?

Well, prepare to sleep easy my friend, because the crazed videophiles at Screen Junkies have put together one heck of a supercut that shows totally famous people before they were totally famous.

Before They Were Famous #2 is guaranteed to change your life, because you’ll get to see how uncool the rich and famous are before they become rich and famous...and cool. Everybody's got to start somewhere, why not start out selling some fried chicken or some Corn Pops?

Via Uproxx

Whatever you do, don't feed your voracious appetite.

The working dynamics of Monty Python were fascinating. While Cleese, Chapman, Palin, Jones, and Idle split into teams to write together and workshop each other, Terry Gilliam was squirreled away in his attic flat working alone on animation, providing most of the voices and sound effects for the interstitial cartoons that defined the visual look of the troupe. His descriptions of the process are predictably quirky, but now we’ve found a video that will guide you through your own cutout animation! Click through, and unlock your inner mob hedgehog.

[British accents and squishing sounds optional.]

Read the full article

When I was 5, my father told me that if I ate my spinach, I'd grow strong like Popeye. It never happened, but I now tell my kids the same thing. It's a tradition!

Here's a clever tattoo inked by Alina Fokina, an artist in Ufa, Russia. Crack open a can and punch through your problems. The thought bubble is conveniently blank, letting the owner write his own messages from the sailor man.

-via Fashionably Geek

Niemandshand (paywall) [De Volkskrant via @hansaarsman]

Did you know that Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd once invented a refrigerator? And a life-saving refrigerator, at that.

Michigan Tech physics professor Robert Nemiroff and grad student Teresa Wilson scoured the Interent for evidence of time travelers. They found none. From their scientific paper on the study:

Time travel has captured the public imagination for much of the past century, but little has been done to actually search for time travelers. Here, three implementations of Internet searches for time travelers are described, all seeking a prescient mention of information not previously available. The first search covered prescient content placed on the Internet, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific terms in tweets on Twitter. The second search examined prescient inquiries submitted to a search engine, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific search terms submitted to a popular astronomy web site. The third search involved a request for a direct Internet communication, either by email or tweet, pre-dating to the time of the inquiry. Given practical verifiability concerns, only time travelers from the future were investigated. No time travelers were discovered. Although these negative results do not disprove time travel, given the great reach of the Internet, this search is perhaps the most comprehensive to date.

"Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers"

When Canadian flute virtuoso Boujemaa Razgui flew to JFK en route to Boston, his 13 handmade flutes, made from rare reeds, did not arrive with him. They had been mistaken for bamboo by a US customs inspector who opened Razgui's luggage in transit, removed the instruments, and destroyed them. Razgui's been told to write a letter to the Department of Agriculture in DC if he has any further queries. (via Naked Capitalism)

As an American, I admit that only an outsider can view my country with the greatest clarity. And as long as we want to look at the United States through foreign eyes, why not look through those of Werner Herzog? Even aside from his wildly creative body of work as a feature filmmaker — he made Aguirre, the Wrath of God; he made Fitzcarraldo; he made Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans — Herzog the documentarian has offered up a host of his own rich and surprising perceptions. He’s traveled the globe, from the Lesser Antilles (La Soufrière) to Antarctica (Encounters at the End of the World) to southern France’s prehistoric caves (Cave of Forgotten Dreams), looking intensely and commenting even more intensely on people, from champion ski jumpers (The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner) to Vietnam prisoners of war (Little Dieter Needs to Fly) to wildlife filmmakers eaten by bears (Grizzly Man). By comparison, most of us might consider places like the auction houses and televangelical broadcast studios of America comparatively unexotic territory.

Not Herzog, however: when he watches a livestock sale, he hears in the rapid-fire babble of the auctioneer “the last poetry possible, the poetry of capitalism,” and when he watches a television preacher, he sees an appeal to “the paranoia and craziness of our civilization.” Here we have two fruits of these strands of Herzog’s fascination with his now-adopted homeland of America: 1976′s How Much Wood Could a Woodchuck Chuck and 1981′s God’s Angry Man. Like many other documentaries of Herzog’s, and not a few of his fiction films, these documentaries deal with pursuits so specialized, obsessive, or both that watching them in practice becomes mesmerizing. The first witnesses a series of auctioneers as their obscure, quasi-musical patter keeps one highly particular gear of the economy spinning. The second, one even more concerned with money and with an original title of Creed and Currency, looks into the world of Los Angeles’ flamboyant, donation-demanding, FCC-hating, seemingly untiring religious broadcaster Dr. Gene Scott. Do cowboy-hatted rural businessmen and manic televangelists accurately represent America? Hardly. But interpreted by Herzog, they show you the country in a way nobody else could.

Find more great films in our collection of 600 Free Movies Online.

Related Content:

Werner Herzog’s Eye-Opening New Film Reveals the Dangers of Texting While Driving

Portrait Werner Herzog: The Director’s Autobiographical Short Film from 1986

Errol Morris and Werner Herzog in Conversation

Werner Herzog Has a Beef With Chickens

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

Werner Herzog Presents Two Visions of America in How Much Wood Could a Woodchuck Chuck (1981) and God’s Angry Man (1976) is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture by signing up for our Daily Email. That is the most reliable and convenient option. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

There are myriad New Year’s Eve customs worldwide. In Japan, toshikoshi soba noodles are eaten to bring in the coming year. In North America, finding someone to share a New Year’s Eve kiss with as the clock winds down has become a boon to the romantically-challenged. In Germany, however, a different tradition has taken form: every year on December 31^st, TV networks broadcast an 18-minute-long black and white two-hander comedy skit.

In 1963, Germany’s Norddeutscher Rundfunk television station recorded a sketch entitled Dinner For One, performed by the British comics Freddie Frinton and May Warden. The duo depicted an aging butler serving his aristocratic mistress, Miss Sophie, dinner on the occasion of her 90^th birthday. Although four additional spots have been set at the table, the nonagenarian’s friends have long since passed away, and the butler is forced to take their places in drinking copious amounts of alcohol while toasting Miss Sophie’s health. Hilarity, as it is wont to do in such cases, ensues.

Since its initial recording, the clip has become a New Year’s Eve staple in Germany. Although Dinner For One has never been broadcast in the U. S. or Canada, the clip has spread throughout Europe to Norway, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Austria, Switzerland, and beyond the continent’s shores, to South Africa and Australia. In Sweden, a bowdlerized 11-minute version of the clip has been produced, where, for decency’s sake, much of the butler’s boozing was excised alongside its attendant comedic effect. In Denmark, after the national television network failed to broadcast the sketch in 1985, an avalanche of viewer complaints has guaranteed its subsequent yearly appearance. Although the category is now defunct, the clip held the Guinness World Record for Most Frequently Repeated TV Program. As for why the video’s garnered so much attention? No one’s really sure. The Wall Street Journal’s Todd Buell posits that the sketch’s easy to understand English combined with a German longing for security and simplicity may have led to its iconic status. To me, however, it seems that the finely tuned physical comedy translates readily beyond any linguistic boundaries, and simply hit the right note at the right time.

Above, you can view the original 18-minute comedic opus and celebrate New Year’s day in the same way that much of Europe brought in 2014 (don’t mind the German introduction — the video is in English). In future years, you can always find Dinner for One in our collection of 600 Free Movies Online.

From all of us at Open Culture to you, have a happy new year!

Related Content:

The Science of Willpower: 15 Tips for Making Your New Year’s Resolutions Last from Dr. Kelly McGonigal

The Ramones Play New Year’s Eve Concert in London, 1977

A New Year’s Wish from Neil Gaiman

The Top 10 New Year’s Resolutions Read by Bob Dylan

 

Watch Dinner for One, the Short Film That Has Become a Baffling New Year’s Tradition in Europe is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture by signing up for our Daily Email. That is the most reliable and convenient option. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

The 1994 documentary above, Einstein’s Brain, is a curious artifact about an even stranger relic, the brain of the great physicist, extracted from his body hours after he died in 1955. The brain was dissected, then embarked on a convoluted misadventure, in several pieces, across the North American continent. Before Einstein’s Brain tells this story, it introduces us to our guide, Japanese scholar Kenji Sugimoto, who immediately emerges as an eccentric figure, wobbling in and out of view, mumbling awed phrases in Japanese. We encounter him in a darkened cathedral, staring up at a backlit stained-glass clerestory, praying, perhaps, though if he’s praying to anyone, it’s probably Albert Einstein. His first words in heavily accented English express a deep reverence for Einstein alone. “I love Albert Einstein,” he says, with religious conviction, gazing at a stained-glass window portrait of the scientist.

Sugimoto’s devotion perfectly illustrates what a Physics World article described as the cultural elevation of Einstein to the status of a “secular saint.” Sugimoto’s zeal, and the rather implausible events that follow this opening, have prompted many people to question the authenticity of his film and to accuse him of perpetrating a hoax. Some of those critics may mistake Sugimoto’s social awkwardness and wide-eyed enthusiasm for credulousness and unprofessionalism, but it is worth noting that he is experienced and credentialed as a professor in mathematics and science history at the Kinki University in Japan and, according to a title card, he “spent thirty years documenting Einstein’s life and person.”

For a full evaluation, see a poorly proofread but very well-sourced article at “bad science blog” Depleted Cranium that tells the complete story of Einstein’s brain, and supports Sugimoto’s tale by reference to several accounts. Of the documentary, we’re told that “based on all available data, the basic premise and the events shown in the documentary are indeed true.” In the film, Sugimoto travels across the U.S. in search of Dr. Thomas Harvey, the man who originally removed Einstein’s brain at Princeton. (See one of the original pathology photos, with added labels, of the brain above). Depleted Cranium continues to set the scene as follows:

Eventually, Sugimoto tracks down Thomas Harvey at his home in Kansas. When he requests to see the brain, Harvey brings out two glass jars containing the pieces. At this point, Sugimoto makes a shocking request: he asks Harvey if he could have a small piece of the brain to keep as a personal memento. Harvey says “I don’t see any reason why not” and proceeds to retrieve a carving knife and a cutting board from his kitchen. He cuts a small section from a sample he identifies as being part of Einstein’s brain stem and cerebellum and gives it to Sugimoto in a small container. In the final scene, Sugimoto celebrates by taking his piece of the brain to a local kereoke [sic] bar and singing a favorite Japanese song.

The notion that the bulk of Einstein’s brain would have ended up in a closet in Kansas seems strange enough. And as for Harvey: the pathologist shopped the brain around for decades—if not for profit, then for notoriety—even driving across the country with journalist Michael Paterniti in 1997 to deliver a large portion of the brain to Dr. Sandra Witelson of McMaster University in Ontario. Paterniti documented the road trip in his book Driving Mr. Albert, which appears to corroborate much of Sugimoto’s narrative, though the trip may itself have been a publicity stunt.

In addition to the brain, Einstein’s eyes were also removed, without authorization, by his ophthalmologist, who kept them in a safety deposit box (where they presumably remain). The entire story of Einstein’s remains is gruesomely outlandish, though one might consider it a modern celebrity example of the centuries-old practice of body snatching. If some or all of this intrigues you, you’ll appreciate Sugimoto’s documentary. Unfortunately, the video upload is rough. It was recorded from Swedish television, has Swedish subtitles, and is generally pretty low-res. However, as a title card at the opening tells us, “due to the extremely limited availability of this documentary, this will have to suffice until a copy of higher quality rises to the surface.” You can find it added to our list of 600 Free Movies Online.

via Network Awesome

Related Content:

Albert Einstein Imposes on His First Wife a Cruel List of Marital Demands

The Musical Mind of Albert Einstein: Great Physicist, Amateur Violinist and Devotee of Mozart

Einstein Documentary Offers A Revealing Portrait of the Great 20th Century Scientist

Einstein for the Masses: Yale University Presents a Primer on the Great Physicist’s Thinking

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

The Story of Einstein’s Brain: A Japanese Professor Tracks Down the Organ in a Bizarre Documentary is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture by signing up for our Daily Email. That is the most reliable and convenient option. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

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

Batman, the TV series, made its debut as one of TV's first mid-season replacements on January 12, 1966. Featuring Adam West in the lead role and Burt Ward playing Robin, his co-crime fighter, the show became the breakout hit of the 1966 TV season.

Batman was everywhere and the show quickly developed into the biggest marketing campaign in television history, up to that time. Not only was every kid in America talking about Batman, but Batman magazines, t-shirts, costumes, posters, banners, records, etc. were everywhere- it was the biggest marketing craze since the Beatles themselves.

The series success was short-lived, however. It quickly became a huge fad that just burned itself out, like a meteor shooting through the sky. After a hugely successful initial run, the classic two-part cliffhanger-type episodes were dispensed with, Madge Blake ("Aunt Harriet") became ill and had to leave the show, and a new (and unsuccessful) character, Batgirl, was added. Batman now holds it's rightful place in TV history as a genuine TV "classic" series.

Let's take a look at a few facts you may not know about Batman.

* Before going on the air, Batman received the lowest test score ratings from test audiences in the history of the ABC network.

* Batman was originally planned to be a very serious show. Before the show went on the air, ABC held two test screenings, one with laugh track dubbed in and one with much additional narration. According to Adam West, both fell flat and the "campy" approach was eventually decided upon instead.

* 5 different Batmobiles were use during the series' run. (the car was actually a customized 1955 Lincoln Futura.)

* Batman's success as a TV series actually saved the Batman comic book from cancellation. Bob Kane, Batman's creator, has said the show's success gave the slumping Batman comics a much-needed huge boost in sales. Batman diehard comic fans, however, never liked the series because of it's campiness. After the show was cancelled, the Batman comics deliberately took a much more serious turn to placate upset fans.

* Alfred the butler had already been killed off in the comic book 18 months before the TV show originally aired. He was "brought back to life" (played by Alan Napier) for the show. After the show's huge success, Alfred was resurrected in the comics too.

* Alan Napier was the show's only cast member who had never heard of Batman and had no idea of who the character was before the show began filming.

* Lyle Waggoner was the other actor considered to play Batman, along with Adam West, who got the role.

* Burt Ward earned just $350 for the first season of Batman.

* When Burgess Meredith took the role of The Penguin, he hadn't smoked in 20 years. His trademark cigarette (in holder) irritated his throat, which caused him to ad-lib his trademark "quack, quack, quack" croaking voice.

* In the guy version of Barbara Eden having to hide her navel on I Dream of Jeannie, there was a huge controversy about both Adam West's and Burt Ward's "bulge in the crotch" during the show's run. Several different methods of crotch "inhibition" were used on West and Ward during the series' run, to fend off complaints from conservative and religious organizations.

* Adam West has admitted to Julie Newmar as Catwoman causing "strange stirrings in my utility belt", and Burt Ward also admitted that Lesley Gore (as Catwoman's assistant "Pussycat") caused him a great deal of intense male feelings, because she kept rubbing up against him (see previous factoid).

* During the show's third and final season, a new character "Batgirl" was added. The character never quite fit in and helped toll the death knell of the show. Ironically, Batgirl was added to try to get more female viewers, but Yvonne Craig and her skintight costume actually helped increase male viewers' interest.

* There is an urban myth that the Aunt Harriet character (played by Madge Blake) was added to the show to fend off viewers from thinking Batman and Robin were gay. According to most reliable sources, this story is, indeed, just a myth.

* Mickey Rooney was originally offered the role of the Penguin, but turned it down.

* Frank Sinatra was a big fan of Batman and actually expressed interest in the Joker role.

* Because of his great success as Batman, Adam West was offered the role of James Bond in the 1969 movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service. West declined, saying the role should be played by a British actor. Ironically, George Lazenby, an Australian, got the role.

(Video Link)

It's been a while since we've seen any videos from Ze Frank's True Facts series and man are we happy to have a new one. This time, the subject is armadillos, including their defense mechanisms and sexual behavoir. As always, there's all kinds of silly jokes mixed in with cool facts you might not know already, and don't worry, this video won't give you leprosy. 

Warning: There is some mildly NSFW language and a short clip of the armadillo's genitals.

Via Laughing Squid

Happy National Science Fiction Day! January 2nd is the day selected for this wonderful holiday because it was Isaac Asimov's birthday. It's a day to celebrate, appreciate, and even read some of the many science fiction offerings at your local library, bookstore, website, or your own bookshelf. 

And speaking of Asimov, Open Culture posted some of his predictions for the year 2014, which he wrote about in 1964. Some of them are eerily prescient, until you realize that quite a bit of our technology is inspired by visionary science fiction. Here's a sample:

“Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica.”

“Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.”

“[T]he world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000.”

Not too far off -the world population is now 7 billion, and the U.S. has 317 million. When he wrote that in 1964, the world had just over three billion people, and the U.S. had fewer than 200 million.

We should celebrate science fiction by sharing it with each other. Have you read any great science fiction books or short stories lately that you want to recommend to others? What's your favorite science fiction story, book, movie, or TV show ever? Since I am old school, I'll have to sing the praises of Slaughterhouse Five, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Star Trek: the Original Series, The Martian Chronicles, and Brave New World. My favorite Isaac Asimov story is The Ugly Little Boy.

(Image credit: Rowena Morrill)

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Martin Scorsese is the undisputed master of the gangster flick, responsible for such greats as Casino, Goodfellas and The Departed just to name a few, but his career seems to have brought him full circle with his latest release The Wolf of Wall Street. To illustrate his return to his good old days of student filmmaking we present It’s Not Just You, Murray!, a film he made as a student attending NYU.

The story bears certain similarities to The Wolf of Wall Street- the main character breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the audience about how he made all of his money, and the two characters seem to be a similar breed of smarmy narcissist. Enjoy this slice of New York cinema history!

Via Geek Tyrant

On January 1, the Curiosity rover celebrated its 500th sol (Martian day) on Mars. A few days earlier, it snapped an incredible new photo of 18,000-foot Mt. Sharp. Here is the entire panorama, a mosaic created from several individual images taken by the Mastcam on Dec. 26, 2013 (Sol 494).

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On January 1st, around 1:30 in the morning, astronomers spotted an asteroid heading straight for Earth. The good news is that it was probably only between 6.5 and 14 feet long. In fact, the International Astronomical Union says that the asteroid — 2014 AA — has most likely already hit us and burned up in the atmosphere. But here's the cool part: This is just the second time in history that we've spotted an asteroid before it hit us.

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Stylistically speaking, the retro cartoon look has been done to death in short films, artwork and various animated series, but there’s one medium which hasn’t used this rubber limbed style of animation nearly enough- our old pals the video games.

Cuphead is an indie game from developer MDHR which is going to be hand drawn and inked in the style of 1930s cartoons. In it you will play Cuphead, who runs and guns his way through wacky levels and over 30 bosses that look like they stepped straight out of your favorite old timey cartoons.  

The game already looks like a breath of fresh air in a market flooded with quirky puzzlers and hyper realistic combat simulation games, and we are eagerly awaiting its release some time in 2014.

Via Cartoon Brew