Thanks to all who entered our 9th Caption Contest. I have to say, some of these made me guffaw out loud! Honestly. The best captions to date! Now it’s up to you all to pick the winner, after the jump you’ll find our 10 favorites.

Drop your vote in the comments below and may the best caption win!

And the finalists are…

click cartoon to enlarge

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Every now and again, a sportswriter or announcer or TV host earns a little time in the penalty box. The following questions are about members of the media who were warned, suspended, fired or forced to resign. Do you remember what they did to deserve this fate?

Take the Quiz: Sports Media Suspensions

[Thanks to researcher Kathleen Pierce and general sports media junkie Josh Evans for helping put this together.]

Look, I’m cynical and abrasive, but even I get gooey when it comes to stuff like this. What happens when animals lose their mothers? Well, erm. They usually die. But sometimes they don’t. (Trying to be optimistic here. Happy Mother’s Day!) Sometimes they get adopted—sometimes by completely different species. And it’s awkward, but usually quite cute, and also reassuring to know that despite biological differences, different species can coexist peacefully, and that maternal instincts cross species lines. Here are some of the most famous interspecies adoptions set in three installments for Mother’s Day weekend. Check back tomorrow and Monday for parts two and three.

Koko and the Kitten

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First, we need to make a distinction between the two main classes of painkillers, which are used for different situations and function via different mechanisms.

The first class is the narcotic opioid drugs. These are the heavy-duty drugs, like morphine and codeine, used to treat severe pain. They relieve pain in two ways: first by interfering with and blocking the transmission of pain signals to the brain, and then by working in the brain to alter the sensation of pain. These drugs neither find nor kill pain, but reduce and alter the user’s perception of the pain. They’re kind of like having an optimistic friend that says, “Hey man, everything will be cool. Nothing’s wrong. Here, look at this shiny, distracting thing!”
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It’s been a struggle to come up with mental exercises that are difficult enough for the many, many brilliant folks who read mental_floss and visit mentalfloss.com. It’s difficult to develop puzzles that are (1) safe from Web searches, but (2) not impossible to solve. After seeing many difficult contests won in a matter of minutes, I’m taking this weekend off to reassess the Weekend Genius Challenge.

We get the most entries in creative-type challenges… having you write haikus using the two words from the ReCaptcha service, asking you to tell us where the “lost” hour went during Daylight Saving Time, and so forth. So we’re considering going that route for future WGCs. What do you think? Ideas, suggestions, and comments are more than welcome. In fact, if you’ll kindly take the time to chime in, we’ll pick a random comment and send the responsible party the mental_floss T-shirt of his or her choice. Thanks in advance.

In the meantime, we’ll continue to do Brain Games on a daily basis, with puzzles of varying description each weekday. And we’ll have results for the last two WGCs in a day or two. Have a great weekend, everyone!

Every town has a Broadway or a Main Street. And while some are more exciting than others, they all kind of look the same. Here’s a look at six famous American streets, and what makes them so special.

Canal Street, New Orleans, LA

Don’t let the name fool you; there isn’t actually a canal on Canal Street. However, there were plans to build one when the town was founded, and a huge median was created to accommodate it. After the Louisiana Purchase, animosity between the native Creole population and the Americans was common, and the median in Canal Street served as the neutral ground.

Even though the canal never happened, the street has remained unusually wide over the years and now boasts three lanes of traffic in each direction, plus streetcar and bus lanes running down its center. One of the world’s first successful movie theaters, Vitascope Hall, opened on Canal Street in 1896, and two classic movie houses survive today as live performance venues.

Now lined with skyscrapers and storefronts, Canal Street serves as the upriver boarder to the French Quarter and also the heart of the business district. Following Hurricane Katrina, many of the damaged store fronts on Canal Street were covered with bright graphic panels illustrating the essence of New Orleans, including its food, music and culture.

Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, NY

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• A great green initiative: amazing urban art utilizing plants, grass and moss.

• From Dawn, have some fun with Google by typing the following phrases and clicking on “I’m Feeling Lucky” (seriously fun stuff—I’m going to make the black background search engine my new homepage): elgoog, google goth, google black, google fudd, google pig latin, google 1337, google linux, google klingon, and of course, google chuck norris.

• Danish artist Peter Callesen creates beautiful pieces of art using only a single piece of paper. Some of our Flossy Readers are pretty talented with paper art themselves.

• Here’s this week’s video from Michael Caruso at The Daily Tube (”The Best New Videos on the Web”).

• What do Paris Hilton, Kate Winslet, the native New Zealand bird the Pukeko, and yours truly have in common? We all have big feet. An energy commercial from New Zealand features these big-footed creatures (the Pukeko that is, not Paris and Kate) with adorable results.
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We’re joined this week by a special guest blogger. Patricia T. O’Conner, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review, is the author of the national best-seller Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English, as well as other books about language. She is a regular monthly guest on public radio station WNYC in New York. Learn more at her website, grammarphobia.com. Today she’s answering questions from our readers.

Q: “All right … so there’s no good reason to not end a sentence in a preposition … but that doesn’t mean that I have to like hearing, ‘Where you at.’”—Posted by Fruppi on 5/5

A: The problem with “Where you at?” isn’t that it ends in a preposition. The problem is that it shouldn’t have a preposition at all. (What it ought to have is a verb!)

Constructions like “Where is my car at?” and “Where are my keys at?” are considered substandard usage because “where” makes the addition of “at” redundant. “Where” essentially means “at (or in) what place,” so adding another “at” is overkill. It’s roughly equivalent to saying, “In which pocket are they in?”

Q: “Can we look forward to a discussion of the singular they this week?”—Posted by s michael c on 5/5
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When First Twin Jenna Bush is married this weekend in Crawford, Texas, she’ll be the first presidential child since 1992 to tie the knot while Dad’s in office. That year, Jenna’s aunt, Dorothy Walker Bush—younger sister of George W. and youngest child of George H.W.—married Robert B. Koch, in a quiet ceremony at Camp David.

Jenna’s betrothed, Henry Hager, is described as “a former aide to the president.” According to Doug Wead, author of All the Presidents’ Children, in her choice of spouses, “Jenna Bush is following a long line of presidential children before her. Like the rest of us, they marry whoever is around.”

It’s 37 years and counting since a son or daughter of the president was married at the White House (during the Age of Nixon). Historians reckon there have been about 30 major weddings at the White House. And of the 23 presidential offspring married while their father was in office (Jenna included), nine tied the knot at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

If I could pick five White House weddings to attend and report back to mental_floss—for their historical interest if not for the open bar—it would be these:

Maria Hester Monroe—March 9, 1820

This first wedding of a presidential child seems to have put a damper on President James Monroe’s Era of Good Feeling. Seventeen-year-old Maria was engaged to 21-year-old Samuel L. Gouverneur, her first cousin and a White House staffer.
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