The toupees are coming! The toupees are coming! We’re wigging out, ’cause they’re finally in stock.

Four celebrity-inspired BabyToupee models will be available beginning next week at www.BabyToupee.com and at select specialty baby retailers with a suggested retail price of $29.99.

BabyToupee’s original line of wigs will include:

• The Donald - “You’re hired!! Meet the new CEO of the playgroup.
• “The Bob - “Mellow dreads for the Rasta inspired infant. No baby, No cry.”
• The Lil Kim - “For your little miss thing… sassy pink locks for the diva in diapers.”
• The Samuel L - “You know what they call a baby wig in Paris? Le Baby Toupee.”

We swear, this will be the last thing we say about Baby Toupees. At least for a week or so.

There was an interesting article in The New York Times last week about a new book called Two in a Bed: The Social System of Couple Bed Sharing, written by University of Minnesota sociology professor, Dr. Paul C. Rosenblatt.

“It’s not a self-help book,” [Rosenblatt] said, but an examination of some of the common and often humorous issues couples face when sharing a bed, including spooning, sheet-stealing and snoring.

For the book, Rosenblatt interviewed 42 couples about their nocturnal habits.

“Some mentioned sex, but not a lot,” Dr. Rosenblatt said. Most reported that the bed is where they talked. “The bed is where they found privacy and were able to leave behind the distractions and separate interests that keep them apart during the day. There’s also something about late night that allowed them to open up and connect.”

The subjects he interviewed invariably had their own side of the bed, and responsibilities like putting out the cat or opening the windows before turning in. They usually had rituals like watching the television news before lights out or snuggling before falling to sleep. And they often had signals for when they wanted affection, wanted to talk or wanted to be left alone.

I’ve heard of smoke signals, traffic signals, even mixed signals, but affection signals? Could someone please coin a word for this, now.

There are actually two Gs on the end of the 45-letter name for this lake in beautiful Webster, Massachusetts, but don’t blame us for it not fitting in the subject line — we never expected to have to deal with words that long. Specifically, Chargoggagoggmanchaugga- goggchaubunagungamaugg is the longest place name in the United States. (People who can’t spell prefer to call it “Webster Lake.”) The name is often said to mean “you fish your side of the water, I fish my side of the water, nobody fishes the middle” — but that’s just an urban (rural?) legend started by a local newspaper reporter in the ’20s. It actually means “Englishmen at Manchaug at the Fishing Place at the Boundary,” or something to that effect. You can hear it pronounced — in song, no less! — here. Scroll down to “Videos” and click on “The Lake Song.”

By the way, the longest place name in the world spelled in English is Krungthepmahanakornamornratanakosinmahintarayutthayamahadilok- phopnopparatrajathaniburiromudomrajaniwesmahasatharnamornphim- arnavatarnsathitsakkattiyavisanukamprasit in Thailand. You probably know it as “Bangkok.”

It’s time for another whimsical Tuesday Turnip Google search wherein I type a random phrase and we see what kind of interesting factoids “turn-up.”

Today I typed in “more women prefer” unearthing the following:

More Women Prefer Dogs Over Husbands: An online poll released by DogCatRadio.com, shows more women would rather have a pet than a husband.

More Women Prefer Looks Over Money: The more money a woman earns, the more likely she is to prefer good looks to money in her man, a new survey reveals.

More women prefer clean-shaven men (70% of women prefer a clean shave, 20% prefer a goatee, 7% prefer a full beard, 3% do not care about facial hair).

More women prefer shopping for their children than for their spouse (71% compared to 67% for women aged 16-55).

Cable TV’s Oxygen Network recently released a report suggesting that technology advertisers are missing out on a large market share by not marketing to women. The survey found that more and more women prefer technological gadgets to jewelry, clothes and shoes, nearly closing the gap between women and men and their technology needs and uses.

Given the option, more and more women prefer Caesarean section to natural birth.

More women prefer blue eyes (36 percent) to brown or dark eyes (30 percent).

When it comes to having their private parts examined, more women prefer a physician of their own sex. But for treating a broken leg, women don’t seem to give physician sex a second thought, according to a Norwegian study of women aged 36 to 55.

According to a Lifetime Women’s Pulse Poll, three times more women prefer to work for a man, with Bill Gates topping the list of ideal male bosses at 38%. But despite this preference for men, the #1 ideal boss is Oprah Winfrey with 58% of the vote.

The Louisiana Superdome reopens tonight, a year after the stadium, the city and its people were ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. Michael Vick and the Atlanta Falcons (2-0) will take on Reggie Bush and the New Orleans Saints (2-0). But before Monday Night Football kicks off, let’s go marching down memory lane and pick up some Superdome trivia souvenirs.

+While the stadium opened in 1975, the idea of The Superdome dates back to 1967. Louisiana Governor John J. McKeithen attended a baseball game at the Astrodome in Houston. During the game, he was quoted as saying, “I want one of these, only bigger.”

+Seating capacity is listed as 72,300. Somehow, a 1980 Rolling Stones concert packed in 81,500.

+When George H.W. Bush ordered us to read his lips, then outlined his stance on new taxes, he was standing in The Superdome, site of the 1988 Republican National Convention. (The speech, which also contained the famous phrase “thousand points of light,” was written by Peggy Noonan.)

+The Superdome has hosted more Super Bowls than any other sports facility (six). It also hosts the Sugar Bowl each year, and has been home to four Final Fours.

+The Saints came into the league in 1967. In all those years, they’ve only won one playoff game (in 2000).

+In their first ever game, the Saints’ John Gilliam returned the opening kickoff 94 yards for a touchdown. This did not happen in the Superdome, but must have been pretty exciting. Talk about instilling a false sense of hope – New Orleans would not make the playoffs for another two decades.

Some of you might recall this post I did some time ago on English language mishaps found in operating manuals, instructions, and the like. Well here’s a fresh one I spotted today while doing some online banking.

Either Al Gore didn’t invent the Internet when he said he did, or something is terribly rotten over at Emigrant Bank. You be the judge.

Last week, we announced our new campaign to reduce idiocy across America — and to kick it off, we asked for examples of stupidity in everyday life. We’ll be featuring them all this week and next on the blog, with the best two winning copies of Condensed Knowledge. We’re still looking for ‘em, so send us yours! The first week’s winner is Katie Britt, who submitted this great (and tragically common) example:

Our school’s visual ensemble made many posters for our homecoming dance, which will last from 8 P.M. to midnight. Most girls wrote 8 p.m.-12 p.m. That’s a rockin’ 16-hour dance.

Happy homecoming, Katie! Send us your address at tips-at-mentalfloss.com and we’ll get your book on its way. For the rest of you, we’d like to invite you all to a very special mental_floss dance marathon to benefit our cause, taking place from 8 p.m. to 12 p.m. tonight (and tomorrow).

Oh, and if you’re wondering what that headline is all about, click here. The pic is from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 1928.

In honor of Banned Books Week, our well-read research editor Sandy put together the following 12-question cultural-literacy test. The correct answers are after the jump — how bookish are you?

1. True or False: Two 1960s children’s books written by Dr. Seuss were later removed from print (and stricken from his bibliography) for questionable moral content.

2. Who is the hero of the popular book series by Dav Pilkey, which has been challenged for its “anti-family content”?

a. Wicked Wedgie Woman
b. Deputy Doo-Doo
c. Bionic Booger Boy
d. Captain Underpants

3. Ernst Zündel’s widely-banned book Did Six Million Really Die? questions whether or not what tragedy really occurred?

a. the AIDS epidemic
b. the Holocaust
c. the 2004 tsunami
d. the Great Leap Famine

4. Because the band members’ real blood was mixed with the ink, some shops refused to carry a 1977 Marvel comic book featuring what musicians?

a. KISS
b. Black Sabbath
c. Judas Priest
d. Styx

5. While nearly every library allowed the regular version, what book was rejected by many in its 1982 Reader’s Digest “condensed” version?

a. Gone with the Wind
b. The Bible
c. Mein Kampf
d. Of Mice and Men

6. True or False: Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford appeared on the American Library Association’s List of the “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books” from 1990-2000.

7. Why was an illustrated edition of Little Red Riding Hood banned in two California school districts in 1989?

a. wolf cross-dressing as grandma
b. little girl traveling alone in forest
c. little girl carrying wine to grandma
d. woodcutter attacks wolf with axe

8. What author claimed (perhaps with tongue-in-cheek) that his two most famous books were written “for adults exclusively” and that he was “distressed” when children were given access to them?

a. Mark Twain
b. Stephen King
c. Roald Dahl
d. Jack London

9. What oft-banned author made recent headlines when she had trouble boarding a plane with the only manuscript of her upcoming book?

a. J.K. Rowling
b. Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
c. Judy Blume
d. Lois Lowry

10. Characters from what animated TV show are featured in the book Stormy Weather, banned in some schools due to the use of the word “stupid”?

a. The Simpsons
b. Rugrats
c. Duckman
d. Futurama

11. Officials in many elementary schools challenged Helen Piers’ How to Take Care of Your Dog because it contained what word?

a. dam
b. stud
c. spay
d. bitch

12. What children’s classic was banned for several years (until a revised edition was published) due to a chatty parrot’s remarks that were determined to be racist?

a. Treasure Island
b. Kim
c. Doctor Dolittle
d. Kon-Tiki

And here are the answers…

(more…)

Sometimes, random is beautiful. Just ask John Cage, the experimental American composer famous for using coin tosses to decide notes while writing music; or beat poets William Burroughs and Byron Gysin, who chopped up other texts and rearranged them to make new poems; or glam-rock maestro David Bowie, who used the same technique to “write” the lyrics to his song “Moonage Daydream.”

Given humans’ propensity to find beauty in chance and intuit meaning from randomness (which in cinema is called the Kuleshov Effect), it shouldn’t be too surprising that the next frontier of language art is only a few mouse-clicks away: your email in-box. In an attempt to retain her sanity while deleting 400+ daily email come-ons from porn sites, weight loss drug-makers and Nairobi businessmen eager to send her money, blogger Kristin Thomas takes revenge on the spammers by stealing their words and spinning them into poetry.

Anyone seen any inadvertently poetic (or hilarious) spam subject lines or message bodies recently? If so, send ‘em in and later this week we’ll post the best o’ the best — or the worst o’ the worst! Meanwhile, here are some gems from Thomas’ canon:

Number 1
Quality ink up to 80% off.
Answers Now on the Distortion of Evidence;
Clean your colon.
Improve sense of well being.

Uncover what other’s don’t want you to know -
Check it out, man -
Success, guaranteed!

What is an MBA really worth?
Ask yourself - could your penis be bigger?
For Target guests,
Its safe, now.

I Used To Have A Pogo Stick Too!

To a man,
contained by lust
a pretty girl is always waiting,
never ending
always satisfied
pretty as a porn star
slutty as a co-ed
smarter than most small cap investors
Dreaming of a better day.

I’ve seen guys attract women by doing Michael Jackson moonwalks in clubs, but I had no idea the dance-move worked on chicks across the Animal Kingdom. The bird in this video (the winged one) is a Central American species known as the Red-Capped Manakin, and man, can it move! Personally, I think the bird needs to lose the human, and take his solo show on the road, but that’s just one man’s opinion. Video via the ever-amusing ettf.