If you’re in the Cleveland area this weekend and looking for programming, the Ohio _flossers have a tent you could visit. Toby, Melanie, and office dog Leo will be at the Taste of Hudson on Sunday from 12-8 and Monday from 11-6.

We’re booth/tent #41, near Main Street in downtown Hudson. Tell them Jason sent you and they’ll be obligated to give you something free.

Here’s a description from TasteOfHudson.com:

The Taste of Hudson is returning for its 6th year to historic Downtown Hudson, Ohio, for a two-day celebration of food and fun. Sunday and Monday, September 5 & 6, 2010, will be another Labor Day weekend to remember as you leisurely stroll amongst acres of delectable food, music, entertainment, fine arts, family and children’s fun, luxury cars and the great specialty and boutique shops and stores that make downtown Hudson such a unique experience.

The 2009 Taste of Hudson attracted over 30,000 food and fun loving patrons, making The Taste one of the biggest, and most successful events ever held in the entire region. Join us this Labor Day Weekend and experience The Taste. Experience the best of the Western Reserve!

Here’s a photo from a completely different festival, featuring people who won’t be in Hudson tomorrow. But you get the idea.

In case you weren’t obsessively refreshing mentalfloss.com all week, here’s what you missed:

1. What’s in a Nickname? The Origins of All 32 NFL Team Names, by Scott Allen
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2. The Surprisingly Interesting History of Margarine, by Ethan Trex
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3. The Quick 10: 10 of the Biggest Movie Failures Ever, by Stacy Conradt
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4. 10 Strange and Wonderful Soaps, by Miss Cellania
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5. A Crash Course in Wikipedia Vandalism, by Matt Soniak
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6. The Hardest Word to Guess in Hangman, by Jill Harness
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7. The Quick 10: Princess Diana, by Stacy Conradt
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8. 12 Celebrity Professors, by Ethan Trex
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9. An Analysis of Couch Fort Architecture, by Chris Higgins
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10. Sam I Am: How a Butcher Became America’s Most Famous Face, by Mark Longo

We’re giving away 25 copies of our new game Split Decision. But we’re going to make you work for it. If you’d like to nominate yourself, here are the details. We’ll be notifying the winners later this month.

I love this link from Danielle, who brought to my attention the performance of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” on the carillon on August 27th. Tin-Shi Tam, Iowa State University carillonneur and associate professor of music and theater, acquiesced in playing the song after a campaign was launched. Did you guys ever have any surprising tunes come out of your bell tower? At Emory I knew some people who had once programed in Black Sabbath. Another time we woke up early to the sounds of “It’s a Small World,” which was kind of nice!
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The anti-social side of social media is explored among these 7 Bloodiest Social Media Battles, which range from exposing tens of thousands of government secrets, to supporting a huge site’s competitor, to, in a rare moment of decency … preserving democracy via Tweets.
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Be honest, Flossers – would any of you try these Out-of-the-Ordinary Milkshake flavors? Or better yet, have you tried them??
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If you’re interested in accents and linguistics, or if you’d just like to polish up your imitations, hear accents from all over the world with the speech-accent archive. Does the person nearest to your area sound anything like you?
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An English teacher in high school used to say to us that, when it comes to glorifying one’s childhood, “people often have amnesia about the past.” You memory, it turns out, has several ways of playing tricks on you! (Thanks Kelsey for the link!).
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From the Department of Awkward: The Ten Strangest Celebrity Records of All Time. You might think Conan O’Brien’s new Frankenstein-themed single is strange, but you probably haven’t heard Crispin Glover’s semi-rapped “Clowny Clown Clown” …
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I hope everyone has a great 3-day weekend (if you are so lucky!). Start getting ready for Fall and cuddling up indoors with these 16 best dystopian books ever. Any other recommendations to this list?
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I’m off tomorrow but will be back next week with fresh batches of new links! Remember in the meantime to send all your submissions to FlossyLinks@gmail.com

Cha Sa-soon, a 69-year-old woman who lives by herself in South Korea, obtained her driver’s license last year—on the 950th try.

Related Facts: She’s become a national celebrity in South Korea. Last month, the Hyundai-Kia Automotive Group gave her a new car, and she’s appeared in their commercials. It was the written test that she failed 949 times. She passed the two skill and road tests after failing each four times, for a total of 960 tests.

[Source: "At First She Didn’t Succeed, but She Tried and Tried Again (960 Times)," New York Times. Image credit: STRINGER/KOREA/Reuters/Corbis. See previous Numbers of the Day here.]

Friends and Flossers,

Sean Kerr is the four-year-old nephew of fellow mental_floss blogger Erica and myself. He was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia this past Valentine’s Day. He is kicking this cancer’s ass like it’s his job, but the hospital stays, the procedures, the chemotherapy, and everything that comes with it have taken a financial toll on Erica’s sister and brother-in-law. To help ease the burden, a bunch of Sean’s family and friends are throwing a beef-and-beer on September 18th at the United German-Hungarian Club in Oakford, PA, with all proceeds from the event going directly to Sean’s parents.

If you’re in the Philadelphia area, we’d love for you to join us. For just $35 (in advance, $40 at the door) we’ve got all-you-can-eat grub and all-you-can-drink beer, wine and non-alcoholic beverages. We’re also raffling off a ton of cool stuff, including Flyers tickets, signed Eagles gear, cases of local beer, two enormous baskets of cheer, restaurant and museum gift certificates, and even some mental_floss shirts and books.

If you’re not close to Philly but still want to do a little something help Sean, we’re taking monetary donations at Get Well Sean and really appreciate any little bit you can give.

Erica and I hope to meet some of you on the 18th!

—>Buy Tickets Now

Drill Teams come in all shapes, sizes, and flavors. Some have a gimmick and some must rely on talent, practice, and discipline. We have some of each on the Late Movies.

Lawn Mowers

A performance by the Reel Lawnmower Drill Team, who won the Best in Parade title at the 2008 Greenbelt Labor Day Festival.
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Top Secret Drum Corps

Based in Basel, Switzerland, these guy are amazing.
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College football season is here, and bands around the country are firing up their most rousing fight songs to inspire their players to gridiron victories. How well can you tell the songs meant to motivate pigskin glory apart from those that are intended to spur soldiers, sailors, and airmen to success? Let’s find out.

Take the Quiz: Fight Song or Military Anthem?

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. To some of you, this will mean nothing, but I bet if you’re an old-school Nintendo gamer, your ears just perked up. It was a cheat code used in several Konami games, but most notably, it gave you 30 extra lives in Contra. This super-secret (…or not) code has a special place in the hearts of geeks who have since grown up and used it to code fun stuff in their websites. Here are 10 of those websites – I’ll tell you where to go, but I won’t tell you what it does until after the jump. That way you can try it for yourself if you want, but if you don’t have time or happen to be somewhere with restricted access you can still be in the know. Here goes:

1. This one is my favorite. Go to the GeekStuff website and enter the code. If you’re at work, don’t do it without headphones (unless you work someplace really cool).

2. Enter it in Google Reader. This only works if you are signed in, so if you don’t have a gmail account… sorry. You can read what it does after the jump.

3. Double geek points for ActivateMedia for what the code results in. After you enter the code, you have to hit the enter key for it to work.

4. Darkscribes.org capitalizes on a certain Internet meme from a couple of years ago…

5. A little daily affirmation for you over at Lekevicius.com.

6. Even Marvel Comics gets in on the act. Press enter to activate this one as well.

7. It’s Shark Week every day at Qiwi. Keep hitting enter once you key in the code.

8. Some old-school Nintendo nostalgia for you at virtualNES. Enter to activate.

9. Just when you thought the bacon craze had reached its limits, SoundClick takes it to another level.

10. Fittingly, GameSpot.com has one too.

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