Today’s stumper is a bit different than the usual. Most of you are probably familiar the Six Degrees of Ken Jennings feature in our magazine, where Jennings has to connect two disparate things like silly string and string theory - riffing on the Six Degrees of Separation theory. And, of course, there’s Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, with variations where any two actors are named and then connected through the movies they and their co-stars have worked on.

So we’re going to play that variation of the game now, only with a twist. In order to get the actors names you need to connect, you have to first answer the questions correctly. As always, no researching online, or otherwise - noggins only.

Question #1: An incident in the pilot episode of the new Aaron Sorkin show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, is lifted from a well-known movie. What is the name of that movie?

Question #2: What is the name of the actor in the Studio 60 pilot episode who plays the character who mimics the character in the answer to #1?

Question #3: What is the name of the actor who is mimicked in the answer to #1?

Using only movies (no TV shows), give us the lineage between the two people in the above questions. (Obviously there are several correct answers… so bonus points for the one who can do it in the fewest number!)

Bonus Question: What does the answer to #1 have in common with the game we’re playing?

First we were all about executive-branch doodles; now it’s about the hair. The delightfully witty and Euro-inflected Manolo’s Shoe Blog is featuring an appraisal of the top ten presidential manes. The top three:

1. Andrew Jackson — truly and indisputable magnificent hair. Hair so romantic and heroic that even the Beethoven would be jealous. And as one commentor has noted, it is very similar to the hair of the Alexander the Great.

2. Thomas Jefferson — Strong red hair, of the sort that betrays the active and somewhat unconventional mind. Thick, wild and beautiful hair with which to scorn the false periwigs of Europe.

3. Ronald Reagan — Yes, at the end, perhaps there was too much of the Formula of the Grecians, but still it was the most magnificent Irishy hair. Even into his dotage he still had the hair.

For the remaining seven (and to find out who was the first president to use a blowdryer), click here.

Here’s another fantastic item from an unlikely source — the DukeMedAlumniNews bulletin. A scary percentage of flossers are Duke grads, but this should interest Tar Heels and others as well…

Did you know that Durham is home to the world’s most famous trademark?

John Green of the Blackwell Tobacco Company [editor’s note: not to be confused with this John Green, the beloved mental_floss writer] named his product “Bull” Durham Tobacco after Coleman’s Mustard, which used a bull in its logo and which Green mistakenly thought was produced in Durham, England. By the time James B. Duke of the American Tobacco Company purchased the Blackwell Tobacco Company in 1898, Bull Durham was the most famous trademark in the world. It sparked such popular phrases as “bullpen” (from a Bull Durham ad painted behind the Yankees’ dugout) and “shooting the bull” (most likely from spitting chewing tobacco). The famous bull’s image was painted all over the world, including on the Great Pyramid of Egypt! Duke also was the first to put cigarette cards, predecesssors of modern baseball cards, into each pack of tobacco.

And let’s not even get into what a fabulous movie “Bull Durham” is.

Whelp, it’s Thursday folks. And you know what that means! One more day until the weekend? Nahhh. Try time for another Thingamajig Thursday. Today I’m naming what my father calls “wires.”

It’s true. No matter what kind of audio plug we’re talking about, to him, and many others, they’re just a bunch of “wires.”

So let’s start with the two on the top, there, which are called RCA plugs, or cables (sometimes jacks). Like the animals on Noah’s ark, they generally come in pairs, white is left in the stereo field, and red is right. They were invented in the 1940s by the Radio Corporation of America (thus the name, RCA), and were meant to connect phonographs to radios. Nowadays we use them to connect any audio device, such as a CD player, to an amplifier.

On the other end of that cable, you’ll often find the next plug in the photo, a 3.5mm plug, more commonly called either a 1/8” jack or a mini-stereo plug. It’s the one that fits in your iPod, and just about any other portable audio device these days. If you go to Radio Shack and say, “I need a wire for my iPod,” they’ll probably know what you mean. But why not call it by its proper name?

Lastly we have the 1/4” plug, which is also called a stereo jack. If it looks similar to the ones you often see in B&W photos of stylish-looking women sitting at old-fashioned switchboards, that’s because it is, and dates from the 1870s!

Of course, there are dozens more. But you should at least know the names of those three. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go forward this post to my dad…

According to the BBC, a 52-year old German man named Bernd Dressler has started a “separation agency” to help make breaking up easier. For 20 Euros he’ll break up with your partner over the phone, and for 50, he’ll do it in person. Simply give him 3 reasons why you want to break up, and he’ll deliver the message in either a sympathetic or direct way. States Dressler, “We have had dating agencies for 30 years… I think it’s the same market – just in reverse.” Story via BBC.

I stumbled across “The Twisted Films of PES” yesterday, and I was completely mesmerized. PES, or Adam Pesapane as no one calls him, is a stop-motion animator and director who seems to be taking the world by storm. His lovely pieces, which now appear as commercials, are the very definition of viral—things you instantly want to tell your friends about (hence this post!). I first read about his work in this great Print Magazine article, and it’s definitely worth reading. In any case, the way PES uses everyday objects like ribbons and plastic clown heads to symbolize explosions, or a paperclip to represent a fluttering moth is pretty unreal. Anyway, start with this 15 second short, and then explore. If you appreciate creativity, I guarantee you’ll dig it.

P.S. His slightly lewd film depicting armchairs having roof sex is a) hilarious, and b) won all sorts of awards. Filmed in 3 months, after he’d quit his secretarial job at an ad firm, PES racked up $20,000 in credit card debt. As one of his bosses put it: “He was a lousy secretary and a brilliant filmmaker.” This assessment, she admits, is “a little harsh—but so much better than if it had been the other way around.”

Inspired by David’s (admittedly bizarre) claim that Missouri is “the” place to live, I decided to get to the bottom of this. Heading straight for Bert Sperling’s popular bestplaces.net, I quickly discovered that the “best city” title is a hotly-contended one: there are at least eight U.S. metropoli vying for the honor — and none of them are in Missouri. Satisfied that such subjective rankings will leave cities like jogger-friendly Portland, OR, Southern charmer Charlottesville, VA and spickety-span Fort Collins, CO (Money magazine’s 2006 top city) duking it out for decades to come, I gravitated toward the weirder rankings. For instance:

• Birmingham, AL: the home of mental_floss, and also the city in which you are 2nd most likely to develop a respiratory infection. #1 was Nashville; in fact, 8 of the top 10 cities are in the South. (This study doesn’t discuss contributing factors — anyone care to hazard a guess?)
• Boston, MA: hardest city to navigate. Factoring in one-way streets, bodies of water, congested freeways and days per year when snow exceeded 1.5 inches, Boston took the cake. Can you dig it?
• Detroit, MI: worst place to get a good night’s sleep. A recent study found a link between high unemployment and sleepless nights, putting the Motor City way ahead of New York — the “city that never sleeps” — at #6.
• Cincinnati, OH is the city in which you’re most likely to develop a migraine headache. Big triggers include rapidly-changing weather and a high rate of red wine consumption.
• Kansas City, MO: toughest place to get a date. A lack of date-friendly hangouts like coffee shops, bars and bowling alleys (always my preferred lady-wowing venue), combined with a lack of eligible singles 18-24 make Kansas City the city least likely to help you get your freak on.
• The people of Las Vegas, NV have the highest rate of resistance to antibiotics. And if you need more information to explain that one, it’s time you left Kansas City.

I’m not sure which demographic this appeals to, but iwantoneofthose.com has the perfect gift for people who a) love Star Wars knock-offs, b) love taking baths, and c) love thinking about their Star Wars knock-offs while in the bath. That’s right—it’s a Darth Vader rubber ducky cleverly titled Duck Fader to avoid any chance of lawsuits. And while I have no real reason to post this, other than the fact that pics of evil/glowing bath toys kind of make me smile, I would like to take this moment to remind our under 4, musically-inclined fan base that, well, you’ll have to put down the ducky if you want to play the saxophone. Anyway, they’re available for about $13 here. Link via OhGizmo.

I’ve been looking into hospital hygiene for a freelance article I’m working on, and this article from the Times magazine had a doozy of a historical anecdote on the topic. After reading it, I felt the need to wash my hands a couple million times, OCD-style:

While it is now well established that germs cause illness, this wasn’t always known to be true. In 1847, the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis was working in a Viennese maternity hospital with two separate clinics. In one clinic, babies were delivered by physicians; in the other, by midwives. The mortality rate in the doctors’ clinic was nearly triple the rate in the midwives’ clinic. Why the huge discrepancy? The doctors, it turned out, often came to deliveries straight from the autopsy ward, promptly infecting mother and child with whatever germs their most recent cadaver happened to carry. Once Semmelweis had these doctors wash their hands with an antiseptic solution, the mortality rate plummeted.

The rest of the article has some equally gross modern-day stuff about how bacteria can thrive on just about any available surface. If you’ve ever skipped the sink after using a public restroom (we’re talking to you, Britney), please go read it right now.

Oh, how I chortled when I read this submission to our Reduce Idiocy campaign! And then I went back to drinking my tea with my pinky finger in the air:

Once, when I was in medical school, we were discussing the muscles of the face and, in reference to the eye, someone referred to the orbicularis oris. How we laughed because, of course, she meant orbicularis oculi!

I’m sure this submission from a “doctor in training” is a pompous-on-purpose joke, mostly because I am married to said doctor in training. Still, not wanting to embarrass myself at any future medical-community tea parties, I looked up the difference between the orbicularis oris and the orbicularis oculi, and it did turn out to be rather substantial: The orbicularis oris (below left, from Gray’s Anatomy) is the muscle around the mouth that allows you to make funny faces, while the orbicularis oculi (below right in dark pink, ditto) is the muscle that lets you close your eyes.