The mid-term elections are almost upon us, and much as we hate campaign ads around here, we thought we ought to express our own support for democracy — so for this week’s contest, we’re electing a People’s Tribune. That’s right, no goodies this week, but if you win you’ll have the opportunity to be corrupted by POWER! Our People’s Tribune will represent the readers; he’ll tell us what he’d like to see more of on the site; he’ll be the Marc Antony to our Roman Senate. So start campaigning in the comments section of this post, folks! We encourage outrageous slogans, unfulfillable promises, ambitious goals (lay out your free health-care plan for all mental_floss readers and you’re a lock). We don’t encourage:

1. Partisanship. This ain’t that kind of website.
2. Slander of other candidates. The Vernon Robinson approach will win you no friends.
3. Bribery. However, feel free to buy lots of stuff from our store.

For the primaries (this week), we’ll pick three candidates. The final vote begins on Monday!

+Lynn Swann, former Steeler and owner of four Super Bowl rings, is running for Governor of Pennsylvania against political powerhouse and Democratic incumbent Ed Rendell. Swann is a long shot.

+Former University of Tennessee standout quarterback Heath Shuler has a good chance to become a U.S. Congressman from North Carolina. Shuler did not have a memorable NFL career, spending time in Washington and New Orleans.

+The current New Orleans quarterback — Drew Brees — is not running for anything. But his mother is. She’s used photos of her son in her campaign for a spot on Texas’ 3rd Court of Appeals. This did not sit well with Drew, and he’s asked her to cease and desist. The two have been estranged for six years, stemming from a dispute over Drew not choosing his mom as his agent coming out of Purdue.

If you haven’t picked your horse in the 3rd Court of Appeals race, don’t let giving birth to a famous QB factor into your decision. “‘If you don’t know much about the election, vote for me because I know Drew,’” the son said of the mother’s campaign. “And that is a shame because the political process should be decided on your credentials.”

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Oh, the outrage they incite. So much as mention the name Bill Gates around a Mac-olyte, and you’re promised to get 10 minutes of intolerable screeching that will include the words “devil” and “nerdy little goober.” Same vitriol goes the other way around, too, except substitute the references to: “pompous prick” and “substance-less prick.”

Me, I don’t have a horse in the race. I prefer Macs and my iPod gives me the tinglies — but Bill Gates certainly does some nice stuff for the poor. Can’t fault a man for that. I’m more interested in the human drama between the two — their differences in personality and approach; how their rivalry sparks (and sometimes hinders) large-scale technological progress; what preferring one to the other says about you, etc etc. It’s juicy material that made for a kinda watchable Noah Wyle flick… no easy feat.

So, today, a side-by-side comparison of these two corporate titans in action. Tell me whose public style you prefer and why in the comments section, and please please please don’t turn this into a “Mac sux,” no, “Windows sux” geek-fest. In fact, don’t write “sux” at all. It’s not a word. Thank you.

This first video is from 1984, at a Macintosh unveiling. Two things to watch for: 1) Jobs’ smuggitude in extremis (not hard to pick up on), and 2) the crowd’s going absolutely ape-poop at the four minute mark.

And here Jobs is some years later discussing — again, with an air some might call haughty (”some” referring to those with eyes and barely registerable brain function) — a key problem with Windows:

Compare that performance to Gates’ in the early days:

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If you’re like us, you are so over bobbing for apples. Instead, why not try having some real fun this Halloween? We suggest scaring small children, egging your boss’ house, or bringing deceased creatures back to the land of the living.

YOU WILL NEED
1 extinct species (preferably herbivorous, just in case)
Its modern, surviving relatives
20-odd years of careful breeding

Ever since things went horribly wrong in Jurassic Park, mankind has carefully pondered the ethical and biological dilemmas of reviving extinct species and thought, “Hey, I could do better than that.” And, sure enough, over the past 10 years, Michael Crichton-esque cloning experiments have popped up like gophers all around the world. Currently, teams of researchers are attempting to replicate the Tasmanian Thylacine (a dog-like marsupial) and the Spanish Bucardo Mountain Goat (the last of which was smushed by a falling tree in 2000). There was even a failed attempt to resurrect the Wooly Mammoth.

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Think you’re ready for love, marriage and the baby carriage? Take our globe-trotting mini-quiz and find out.

TRADITION: “_ _ _ _ _ _ _ the _ _ _ _ _”
While my name has become synonymous with the happy institution of marriage, it was borrowed from a distinctly unhappy one: American slavery. Denied the right to marry legally, slaves improvised ceremonies with whatever they happened to have on hand. My tradition came to symbolize a couple’s leap of faith, and is still practiced in many African-American weddings today.

TRADITION: “_ _ _ _ _ _ _ I N G”
Nothing like a little hard labor to get a marriage off on the right foot. This Italian custom holds that neighbors must set up a log, sawhorse and double-handled saw for newlyweds, who halve the log together. The thicker the log and duller the saw the better; its arduousness symbolizes the equally mundane tasks a couple will have to endure together throughout their married life.

TRADITION: “P _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Y”
In Tibet, where for centuries a father and his sons could share the same wife (until the Chinese invaded in 1950 and put the kibosh on that kind of shenanigans), this custom was a matter of necessity. Thanks to prevalent female infanticide, there weren’t a lot of women to go around, and because there wasn’t a lot of arable land (read: food), P _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Y kept the birth rate — and the starvation rate — low.

TRADITION: “A _ _ _ _ _ _ _ WEDDING”
In Wales, a wedding procession would traditionally walk or ride to the church, with bride and her escort at the front gradually speeding up and away from the rest of the party as they approached. The whole party would then give chase, including the groom. In a twist on throwing the bouquet, whoever caught the bride would be sure to marry. Once the commotion of the chase had finished, the group would solemnly enter the church.

Answers after the jump …
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“As if he had been poured in tar, he lies on a pillow of turf and seems to weep the black river of himself. The grain of his wrists is like bog oak, the ball of his heel like a basalt egg.”

So says the great Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney of the Grauballe Man, one of more than a thousand well-preserved, ancient corpses found in peat bogs throughout Northern Europe over the past two hundred years or so. It’s the bogs’ unique conditions and chemical composition — the acidity of the water, cold temperature and the lack of oxygen –- that tends to preserve the skin and organs of those interred in them, sometimes for as long as 10,000 years. There are lots of things experts can divine from studying these strange biological – and sociological – time capsules, from the diet of the deceased (by studying the contents of the stomach) to the way that they died (many were violently killed: stabbed, bludgeoned or strangled; the remarkable Tollund Man was found with a noose still wrapped around his neck).

However, there’s one thing in particular experts find puzzling: many of the bog people appear to have groomed themselves with great care. It’s not uncommon for the boggies to have nicely-manicured fingers (pictured), artfully placed tattoos or even trendy hairdos. The 2300-year-old Clonycavan Man, discovered in an Irish peat bog in 2003, sports a well-coiffed mohawk held in place by a gel made from plant derivatives from southern France – ie, imported hair product.

From this, experts have deduced that either 1) Northern European Iron Agers were of a more, shall we say, metrosexual bent than other civilizations, or 2) the fact that all these well-groomed ladies and fellows were murdered ritualistically means that the bog people were either criminals who were allowed to get fancied up before their deaths, or more likely they were of high social standing, and bumped off for political reasons. Either way, it’s fascinatingly weird.

I just ate a handful of candy corn, a product I hadn’t ingested in roughly twelve years. “All of the candy corn that was ever made was made in 1911,” Lewis Black once joked. “Since nobody eats that stuff, every year there’s a ton of it left over.” But to me, it seems like as good a use of government-subsidized corn as any.

A few Halloween-inspired candy corn facts:

1) 20 million pounds of candy corn are sold each year.

2) Brach’s estimates two billion kernels are sold each Halloween.

3) There are 5.4 calories in one candy corn.

4) Want to make your own? Ingredients include sugar, corn syrup, honey, and carnauba wax.

5) The recipe has remained unchanged since the early 1900s.

[Adult Candy Corn costume courtesy image of Costume Craze.]

Happy Halloween and thanks to everyone who sent in their fantastic costume ideas for our parade! Our grand marshal is Molly, who tragically didn’t get any snaps of the Best Get-Up of All Time but submitted it anyway:

Once, my friend and I wore green shorts and tank tops, covered ourselves in tin foil, painted our faces green, fixed our hair all nasty and then put masking tape labels that said march 1999 on the foil – we were leftovers! We won a contest, too…

Molly, you just won another one; send us your contact info.

Below are three other written ideas we love, interspersed with some great photos, including two women’s very different takes on red capes and one awesome jack-o’-lantern.

You do have to be around people you know for this one, and do a whole bunch of pre-work (i.e., losing a whole bunch of weight). I had lost 90 pounds and for the Halloween party that year, decided to paint myself black from head to toe. Hair, face, teeth, hands (including fingernails, arms, legs, everything…. the whites of my eyes were the only non black body parts on me). I went to the party as “A SHADOW OF MY FORMER SELF.” Fun and easy….

Some medical student friends of mine once came to a Halloween party dressed fairly strange. One had camo pants and combat boots with a plain white t-shirt. The other had jeans, sneakers, a camo jacket and camo boonie hat. We couldn’t figure out what they were, and everyone let out a huge groan when they said “We’re an upper and lower GI.”

I have to say that my all-time favorite costume was when I went as “Inspector #8″ to a party thrown by some friends a few years ago. I don’t think there are any photos (sadly!) but the costume was complete down to the ill-fitting pants, bad shirt, glasses, pocket protector (full of gadgets), magnifying glass and rubber stamp. I inspected pretty much anything I wanted to and left my mark if it was approved. My second favorite costume was when I teamed up with a friend and we were a clothesline. We had to stand about 8′ apart the entire evening, which was bad for when one needed to use the facilities, but good because it kept us talking to new people.

We’ve been wrestling over the punchline for one of our 4 new t-shirts, and wanted to know what you thought. So, here’s the shirt design as is.
And here’s the question: Should we redraw the shirt to say “Lady Macbeth Hand Sanitizer: It gets out the spots!” or is the caption/picture funnier as is. The staff is split on it, so we’re looking to our readers for a gut check. Respond when you get a sec! Oh, and thanks in advance.

Oh, so many jokes we could make — but there’s a serious answer. As our regular readers know, my favorite animal is the tapir, so I was delighted to read that a Baird’s tapir named Scooter has a starring role in Apocalypto, the upcoming Gibson movie about ancient South American odd-toed ungulates tribes fighting a gruesome war. I was less delighted to learn that the tapir (well, actually, an animatronic doppelganger) will be chopped apart and eaten:

Apparently the tribe needs to hunt and kill a tapir and eat its testicles for fertility purposes. (No real animals were harmed during the filming–an animatronic tapir was built with help from staff at the Los Angeles Zoo who measured their Baird’s tapir for the production company.) …

The funniest thing that happened was on the occasion that Scooter had to run up a small hill escaping from the hunters. [Veterinarian Jesus] Barroso was in the lead running outside of camera’s sight. When he got to the top of the hill, he had to quickly move to one side of Scooter’s trajectory in order not to be filmed. The idea was that Scooter was supposed to continue in a straight path, but Scooter had his own ideas. When Barroso jumped to one side and hid in the bushes, Scooter stopped dead in his tracks and went after Barroso, sniffing and nudging him with his nose to get him back on his feet and go where Scooter thought he was supposed to go. That got a big laugh from all the crew.

Mel Gibson’s involvement aside, the movie looks pretty freakin’ awesome.