Lots of great responses to our call for presidential trivia/book giveaway contest. We’re enjoying the comments so much, we’ve extended the deadline to end-of-day Monday. In case you missed the first post, here’s a recap:

The fine people at Globe Pequot have sent us three copies of Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House to give our brilliant readers. Here’s how you can win:

1. Test your ex-presidential knowledge by taking the mental_floss quiz.

2. Tell us how you did – plus give us one piece of presidential trivia.

On Tuesday, we’ll reward the three most fascinating facts with a copy of this Mr. Updegrove’s fascinating book.

Keep the fun facts coming.

The NFL may have better players, a sensible playoff system and flashier TV graphics, but the pros can’t compete with college football’s traditions. You’ve heard of Notre Dame’s painted helmets and dotting the “i” at OSU, but we found fourteen more traditions to test you.

First-place votes and a BCS championship berth are in order to anybody that gets 100 percent. Take the quiz, then let us know how you did.

We’ve been talking a lot about college football recently, first with David’s Fight Songs quiz, then in our weekly newsletter. But no discussion of collegiate athletics is complete without mentioning the marching band. Today, Steven Clontz kicks off a series of band-related stories with a look at pseudotrombones (either click here, or if you’re on the main page, just scroll down).

As a companion piece to Jason Plautz’s College Football Traditions quiz, Steven Clontz is here to make sure the marching band gets its due. Here’s a picture of him with his trombone, to prove he’s qualified.

Over the next few months, he’ll be contributing a series of band-related stories, including the definitive list of celebrity marching band alums (Know of any? Make his research easy and leave names in the comments — rock stars, musicians, CEOs, politicians, etc.) His first story explores the seedy underbelly of the pseudotrombone world. Enjoy.
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Some friends of mine are going to be collapsing their garage soon; that’ll be the first stage in a major renovation on the house they’ve lived in for ten years. They have a contractor on board, but much of it will be DIY. They also know that to complete the project, they’ll probably have to temporarily move out (like when my family lived in the RV park when we renovated!). Just hearing about it, renovating one’s own home seems like a giant commitment–maybe not the Oregon Trail, but perhaps more like donning a paper gown and letting the anesthesiologist give you whatever it takes to get you through surgery.

The Home & Garden section of the NY Times had an interesting profile this week of a Chelsea couple who did a gut renovation for $12,000. (more…)

We’ve been reading Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House, a terrific book by Mark Updegrove on the post-White House lives of presidents.

The fine people at Globe Pequot have sent us three copies of Second Acts to give our brilliant readers. Here’s how you can win:

1. Test your ex-presidential knowledge by taking the mental_floss quiz.
2. Come back and tell us how you did – plus give us one piece of presidential trivia.

On Monday Tuesday, we’ll reward the three most fascinating facts with a copy of this Mr. Updegrove’s fascinating book.

Are you a live sports fan? Are you a graphic design geek? Well, for the three of you who fit both descriptions, grab a drink and get ready for a new event guaranteed* to rock you. Starting today at 3pm Eastern (that’s noon Pacific or 7pm in London), you can witness the online debut of Layer Tennis. What’s Layer Tennis, you ask? The official description states:

We’ll be playing matches using lots of different applications, from Adobe® Photoshop® to Adobe® Flash®, but the basic idea is the same no matter what tools are in use. Two artists (or two small teams of artists) will swap a file back and forth in real-time, adding to and embellishing the work. Each artist gets fifteen minutes to complete a “volley” and then we post that to the site. A third participant, a writer, provides play-by-play commentary on the action, as it happens. The matches last for ten volleys and when it’s complete, everyone visiting the site votes for a winner.

So basically it’s live serial collaborative image-editing, sponsored by Coudal Partners. Awesome!

Today’s Layer Tennis match pits Shaun Inman (described as a designer/programmer) against Kevin Cornell (a designer/illustrator), with color commentary by John Gruber (of Daring Fireball). There are lots of ways to follow the action — start with the main page, geek out on the forums, or even follow along via Twitter. (Only the truly obsessed will need the RSS feed.)

In just a few short hours, the action begins. Get ready to nerd out!

* = The phrase “guaranteed to rock you” is not to be construed as a warranty or promise of rocking, unless you really REALLY like graphic design.

“I took this photo while studying in New Zealand my junior year” is not a sentence I can say. First, I didn’t take this photo at all (these guys did). And second, I never studied abroad. So for today’s installment of our Friday series, let me live vicariously through everyone who has. The topic is study abroad. Where’d you go? What’d you study? What’s your best memory?

If you could do it again, would you go somewhere different?

Since today just happens to be Love Note Day, let’s celebrate by talking about Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s “The Love Letter” and “Love Letters.” Some interesting tidbits:

1. The inscription on the title letter in “The Love Letter” (left) has two interpretations among scholars. It could be “cavalier,” as in a gentleman or knight, or it could be the name “Cuvillere.” If the latter is the intended interpretation, then the girl in the painting is Marie Émilie Boucher, the daughter of Fragonard’s teacher (François Boucher) and the wife of Charles Étienne Gabriel Cuvillier, an architect and friend of her father.

2. Some believe “The Love Letter” was part of Fragonard’s “pitch” for a commission from Madame du Barry, mistress to Louis XV.

3. Fragonard received the commission and created a series of panels, Les Progrès de l’Amour dans le coeur d’une jeune fille (Love’s progress in a girl’s heart), to be installed in Pavillon de Louveciennes. Within two years, though, Madame du Barry returned the panels to Fragonard, who then installed them in his cousin’s home. Today, copies of the panels are on display in the home in Grasse, while the originals reside in the Frick Collection in NY.

‘Feel Art Again’ is a regular feature in the capable hands of InternAndréa Fernandes, a junior at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. If you missed the first installment, catch up here.

I’ve long been interested in ecstatic religious traditions — Buddhists who self-induce trance states; ancient shamanic cultures whose elders ingest hallucinogenic roots or dance for days so that they might travel some interior spirit world; Christian holiness churches where people drink poison, speak in tongues and handle snakes. The latter I find especially fascinating, as it’s most closely related to my own religious upbringing (though I grew up a comparatively milquetoast Methodist).

Back in college, I took a great seminar on the subject, and the professor showed us this grainy, old, long out-of-print cinema verite documentary film called Holy Ghost People, shot in a Pentecostal church in Scrabble Creek, West Virginia in the early 1960s. It’s an absolutely engrossing (and rare) peek into the hardcore holiness tradition, and features plenty of footage of people who seem to be in the grip of horrible epileptic fits (but later claim to have had a grand old time in church) as well as plenty of snake handling — a preacher even gets snakebit near the end.

I was thrilled to fing Holy Ghost People on Archive.org a few weeks ago, and took the liberty of editing it down to a slim eight minutes of my favorite excerpts and uploading it to YouTube so I could share it here. So take a look.
Also, we’d love to hear from anyone who’s ever been to a service like this — this film is more than 40 years old; does the footage seem dated?

Also, check out this blog from Floss alumnus Mary on glossolalia (aka “speaking in tongues”) — fascinating stuff.

With the 153rd comment, Karen correctly guessed meerkat. Congratulations on your free t-shirt!

And our special guest artist was Cyrus Winslow Taft, Jr., the legendary mental_floss art director. He’s in New York on the lecture circuit and paid us a visit.

We’ll do this again next week. And we’ll have another win-free-stuff opportunity later today. Stay tuned…