“Feel Art Again” is something we’ve done before in the magazine. To make sure you’re getting a steady diet of art education, we’re reviving it here on the blog. InternAndréa will be your guide – give her a polite round of applause. –Mangesh & Jason

In celebration of today’s Harvest Moon, we present you with Caspar David Friedrich’s “Two Men Contemplating the Moon.” A few fun facts:

1. Friedrich created several paintings with this same general theme and composition. The most well-known of the other versions is “Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon” (1824), which even features the same tree.

2. The first owner, Dr. Otto Friedrich Rosenberg, received the painting from the artist himself in exchange for medical attention. The good doctor can rest in peace knowing he received adequate payment for his skill; in 1999, Artemis Fine Arts (NY) purchased the painting at Christie’s (London) for £771,500 (~$1,277,000).

3. Friedrich is considered by many to be Germany’s greatest Romantic painter, although at the time of his death, he had been mostly forgotten. Only with the rise of Symbolism, in the late 19th century, did people begin to fully appreciate his work.

Everyone knows that Beethoven wrote some of his most famous music after he’d already gone deaf. But guess what? He wasn’t the only one. Here are 5 others you should know:

Like Bach, William Boyce (1711-1779) made his living as a church keyboardist, but was also a master composer—one of the best to come out of England during the 18th century. Boyce went deaf and had to quit his job as an organist, but went on editing works by well-known composers like William Byrd and Henry Purcell.

A colleague of Mozart’s, Ignaz Holzbauer (1711-1793) wrote about 70 symphonies and over half-a-dozen operas. During the last years of his life he was totally deaf.

Felix Draeseke (1835-1913) is most famous for his (remarkable facial hair) piano piece, Sonata quasi Fantasia, which was admired by Franz Liszt. Draeseke wrote operas and symphonies even though he suffered from a chronic hearing ailment that later left him almost completely deaf.

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) is best known for his gorgeous Requiem. Like Boyce, Holzbauer and Draeseke before him, Fauré went deaf later in life and had serious trouble hearing high and low frequencies.

Perhaps the best-known of the lesser-known composers to lose hearing late in life is the brilliant Czech composer Bedrich Smetana, who was already going deaf when he wrote his most famous piece, Má Vlast (My Country), a symphonic tone poem featuring a movement called Vltava, or “The Moldau.” As he lost his hearing, Smetana also suffered from chronic tinnitus, which eventually caused him to go insane. In 1884, he died in a mental hospital in Prague. Oh joy…

As the name implies, “The Moldau” paints a musical portrait of the famous river that twists through the Czech Republic. Click the play button to hear an excerpt and be sure to Czech out Smetana’s own description of “The Moldau” after the jump.
By the way, can anyone tell me which country’s national anthem sounds similar to the Smetana tune and why?

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Crocodiles have a powerful homing instinct. Move them, and they’ll travel hundred of miles to get home. This just-released study is the last paper by “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin.

The growing “happiness gap” between men and women. Thirty years ago, women reported being slightly happier than men. Now men are happier.

One of the very few copies of the Magna Carta is going to auction. The only copy in America has been on display in the National Archives, but is owned by Ross Perot!

Some Halo 3 discs were shipped in defective cases, causing them to become scratched in transit. If you received one of these, there is an exchange program.

A team of students designs fantasy planets for NASA to study. These same students never, in their wildest fantasies, thought they’d ever have such a fun job.

Since my foreign garage sale correspondents are still filing their reports, wouldn’t you know I’d find another way to talk about garages. Specifically, the garage band. I’d love to be able to say I formed one in the 90s and that it enjoyed a small, jealous, following of anarchists…

But no. I was never in a band, though I did learn early on that the way to a confused teenage boy’s heart, or at least ego, was by being a groupie. So I sat there in a group of other young hopefuls, drinking suicide slushies and distressing the hems of our jeans with Exacto knives while blithely incurring noise-induced hearing loss. And for some reason rehearsals were never in garages–ranches were falling out of fashion, and parents didn’t seem to mind noise parties in their moldy basements. Ultimately, I was a bad groupie–I never learned how to sell “merch” and I never carried Preparation H to soothe the bands collective calluses (seriously–the stuff works).

But when I talk to people today, it seems they were either one or the other: groupie or band member. But could you ever properly be both? Regardless, I love hearing the names of bands people used to be in, or bands they’ve roadied (or bands they wish would’ve asked), so share the love if this includes you.

When I was in elementary school, I attended a twice-weekly “computer class” which primarily consisted of repeated runs through some now-forgotten typing software on Apple ][e computers. While running this program, we had to put cardboard boxes over the keyboard (with cut-outs so our little wrists could get in), and let me tell you, cheating was rampant. When a student got to the end of a level in the typing program and reached the timed test, a teacher would stand there with one hand on the box to prevent the “lift and peek,” the most popular form of performance enhancement. (I was guilty of that one, though I never graduated to the heinous “oops, where’d my box go?” which could only be perpetrated with a confederate who maintained a distraction for the duration of the test.)

Despite years of continuous typing education, I didn’t pick up touch typing until late in the sixth grade. What happened then? Well, I got a job as a typist and simply had to figure it out. I had a job for an online service typing in hardcopy articles (with permission) into their library of ASCII text downloads (the payment was free access to the service). I had to key in something like five articles a week. The first week, typing five articles took me hours…but very quickly I was doing it in just minutes. During this period of rapidly learning touch-typing, I found myself daydreaming about the keyboard, visualizing the keypresses as I thought words. For example, if I thought the word “wombat,” I’d see it as a series of keypresses on the keyboard, w-o-m-b-a-t. It got to the point where I wouldn’t let myself think faster than I could mentally hit the keys — that’s when I really learned it.

I think everyone’s journey to typing is a little different. My typing is pretty standard home-position touch typing. I’m pretty fast, but I make a lot of mistakes. I have several very computer literate friends who have evolved a surprisingly fast variant of hunt-and-peck which relies heavily on index fingers and thumbs. And they seem to get along with it just fine. So here’s the question: how did you learn to type? And the bonus question: what typing method do you use? (Do you perform true touch-typing or some personal variant?)

As soon as we hang the whiteboard, Mangesh and I will be all moved in. I’m writing today from the new, semi-permanent mental_floss New York headquarters. OK, headquarters might overstate the space. But there are desks and cabinets, plus fridge access and a vigilant network of security cameras.

Our quest for stationery led me to email the creative gurus at Behance, a company whose mission is to increase creative productivity. (They also make nice notebooks and pads.) Scott invited me over for a quick tour and some free stuff. He also told me about the new Behance Network, where designers and illustrators and otherwise creative people can upload their portfolios, collaborate on projects, and look for jobs. A good place to browse, find work or find workers.

The lesson here, of course, is that we’re always in the market for free cool stuff. As we continue to dress up the set, let us know if you’ve got something we need on our walls.

Get excited! From fertilizer to fuel to flaming baggies on doorsteps, you probably know all the standard uses for dung. But apparently there’s a whole world of crap you don’t know. The following are 6 unexpected ways to make the most of animal dung.

1. Crocs and Birth Control

In 2000 BC, Egyptian physicians recommended using pessaries of crocodile dung as a spermicide. While this ancient birth control method is no doubt unavailable at your local pharmacy, you can probably ask your local crocodile to provide it under the table.

2. Elephants and Paper Products

Since elephants only digest 45% of their food, and the waste product is mostly fiber, the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang, Northern Thailand has developed a method for making elephant dung into paper. The paper is later cut and fashioned into handmade notebooks. Amazingly, an elephant can generate enough dung to make 115 pages of paper a day (or an 1/8th of a Stephen King novel).

As for the process, papermakers boil the fibers for sterilization before spinning and framing them into paper. Of course, elephants aren’t the only ones getting into the stationery business. In Thailand, Panda Poop Paper is also quite popular, and the Welsh company Sheep Poo Paper has also managed to make paper from, you guessed it, sheep dung.

Got stockpiles of llama, bat, moose or flying squirrel droppings? Read on…
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There are forward-thinking people, and then there’s Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly. Talk about overkill: Kelly modified a daily countdown application for the Mac to tell him how many days he’s got left — on Earth. He’s 55 now, and using this Life Expectancy Table, he set his countdown for 8500 days, when he’ll turn 78.68 years old and, there’s a fair chance, be dead.

According to the chart, I have 47.77 years left to go, depending of course on my lifestyle choices. (Let’s see: I could eat better, but I exercise and take Omega 3 oil pills to fend off the demons of heart disease. I don’t smoke, I drink in moderation (usually) and I don’t enjoy downhill mountain biking or base-jumping. So 47 more years sounds about right.) That gives me until the year 2054, which doesn’t sound all that far away given that it feels like just yesterday we were all partying like it was 1999 — because it was. Jeez, if I’m going to walk on Mars and be president before then, I’d really better get on it!

So how am I going to get everything done in such a short time? Kelly describes one approach:

“My friend Stewart Brand, who is now 69, has been arranging his life in blocks of 5 years. Five years is what he says any project worth doing will take. From moment of inception to the last good-riddance, a book, a campaign, a new job, a start-up will take 5 years to play through. So, he asks himself, how many 5 years do I have left? He can count them on one hand even if he is lucky. So this clarifies his choices. If he has less than 5 big things he can do, what will they be?”

Seems like a good way to approach the time you’ve got left whether you’re 69 or you’re 29. Does anyone else organize their lives in chunks? If so, what’s your 5-year plan — or your 75-year plan?

Via Boingboing.

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

Today I typed in “quotes attributed to Jon Stewart” unearthing the following list from many sources, but mostly from these two:

• [Talking to Amazon.com] “Do you guys have to sell everything? I’d like to buy the Earth’s core.”
• [The College of William and Mary Commencement Address 2004] “We declared war on terror—it’s not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I’m sure we’ll take on that bastard ennui.”
• “The seven marvels that best represent man’s achievements over the last 2,000 years will be determined by Internet vote… so look for Howard Stern’s Private Parts to come in number one.”
• [Interview in Wired Magazine] “The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.”
• “President Bush announced we’re going to Mars, which means he’s given up on Earth.”
• [On Oprah After the Show] “I’m 145 pounds of asthma.”
• “I’ve been to Canada, and I’ve always gotten the impression that I could take the country over in about two days.”
• “Capote, of course, addressed very similar themes to Good Night and Good Luck. Both films are about determined journalists defying obstacles in a relentless pursuit of the truth. Needless to say, both are period pieces.”
• “McVeigh’s lawyer got him the death penalty, which, quite frankly, I could have done.”
• “Ahh, Earth Day, the only day of the year where being able to hacky-sack will get you laid.”
• “In South Carolina , Senator John Edwards won handily, fulfilling his promise to win every state he was born in.”
• “Critics have noted Schwarzenegger’s only previous government experience was serving under President Bush senior as Chairman of the Council of Physical Fitness, a largely symbolic office, where Schwarzenegger’s only responsibility was doing hundreds of jumping jacks he was going to do anyway.”
• [From The Daily Show the night before the 2004 U.S. Presidential election] On a personal note, I’m a comedian who makes fun of what I believe to be the absurdities of our government. Tomorrow when you go to the polls, make my life difficult. Make the next four years really hard, so that every morning all we can do is come in and go, ‘Madonna is doing some Kaballah thing, you wanna do that?’ I’d like that. I’m tired.”

Have a favorite quote I left off? Slap ‘em down in the comments for all to appreciate…

How far can cameras go to make the personal into the public? Pretty far, considering how many news stories I’ve seen in the past year illustrated with x-rays, MRIs, and medical tomography. The idea of seeing inside the human body is strange enough, without seeing the weird things that can happen inside the body of someone on the other side of the world. Some of the images in this story may be disturbing to some people.

77-year-old Jin Guangying suffered from lifelong headaches when she was finally x-rayed at Shuyang Leniency Hospital in China. Doctors were stunned to find a bullet in her head! Jin remembered she had been shot during the Japanese invasion in 1943, but had only used herbal treatments for the wound at the time.

59-year-old Margaret Wegner had a brain scan in Berlin to find the source of her constant headaches. It was a pencil. She had tripped and embedded the pencil in her skull when she was four years old! The bigger part of the pencil was finally removed, but a smaller part was left, as delicate nerves had grown over the 2cm piece.

More curious cases, after the jump.
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