In recent years, the toy market has been inundated with action figures, both typical (superheroes) and not-so-typical (historical figures). Sadly, though, many of the action figures are still rather humdrum. To help you steer clear of boring desk decorations, we’ve dug through the plethora of action figures to bring you the best of the bizarre and offbeat.

Bossman & Deluxe Jesus

1. BossMan: This 3-faced super hero / super villain comes with a Wisdom Amplifier, Magical Management Stogie, Wireless Worker Leash, Truth Mystifier, and Early Retirment Plan. BossMan is also either the most appropriate action figure for work or the most inappropriate—You decide!

2. Deluxe Jesus: You may have seen Jesus action figures before, but I bet you haven’t seen the miracle-working action figure! The Deluxe Jesus kit includes a Jesus with “glow-in-the-dark miracle hands,” as well as 5 loaves of bread, 2 fish, and a jug for turning water into wine. (Sadly, the company does not guarantee miracles.)

Devo, Fuzz & Houdini

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In July 1969, the world watched as the crew of Apollo 11 successfully entered lunar orbit, landed, then blasted off and returned to Earth. At each step of the way there were dangers and NASA had backup plans in case something went terribly wrong — though there wasn’t much NASA could do from 384,403 kilometers away.

I recently came across a 1999 essay by William Safire, published in The New York Times — thanks again for opening those archives, Times — discussing the speech Safire wrote just in case the mission failed.

The most dangerous part of the trip was not landing the little module on the moon, but in launching it back up to the mother ship. If that failed, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin could not be rescued. Mission Control would have to “close down communications” and, as the world agonized, let the doomed astronauts starve to death or commit suicide.

Nixon aides H. R. Haldeman and Peter Flanigan told me to plan for that tragic contingency. On July 18, 1969, I recommended that “in event of moon disaster . . . the President should telephone each of the widows-to-be” and after NASA cut off contact “a clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to ‘the deepest of the deep,’ concluding with the Lord’s Prayer.” A draft Presidential speech was included.

Read more, including the text of the speech, in Safire’s piece Disaster Never Came. There’s also a Wikipedia page with links to external information, including a scan of the original memo.

(Via Kottke.org.)

Well, almost. With just 3 (three!) days to go until our new book’s release, mental_floss is happy to present another origin story you’re bound to dig. Enjoy!

The Red Carpet

If you want a black and white explanation for the public obsession with celebrity, it helps to start by understanding the red.

Great Feets

Hollywood actors are often considered American royalty, and as it turns out, they have the carpeting to match. The first mention of the red carpet we could find dates back to the story of Agamemnon, written by the Greek playwright Aeschylus in 485 BCE. In the play, Mycenaean King Agamemnon’s wife tricks him into walking across a red carpet fit only for the “feet of the gods.”Red-tinted colors, especially deep purplish reds, were especially admired in the early Greek and Roman societies because they were both expensive and scarce. In fact, throughout recorded history, royals and others of high rank have used the colors red and purple to symbolize how important and wealthy they were. The use of the red carpet appeared again in the 1600s, when Jahangir, a Mughal emperor, visited his brother-in-law on New Year’s Day. His brother-in-law carpeted the road from the palace to his house with gold brocades and rich velvets to prevent his royal feet from ever touching the ground.

Americans See Red

Over time, rolling out the red carpet for special or honored people trickled down from royalty. In1821, U.S. president James Monroe became the first to receive the treatment with a red carpet rolled out to the river to guide his path.

more after the jump…

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Even though it’s been awhile since author John Green last wrote for the _floss, he’s remains an unabashed knowledge junkie. Witness the latest post in his increasingly popular vlog experiment, “Brotherhood 2.0,” in which he explains the dramatic and bloody political situation in Nepal — as well as the condition known as pica, in which the sufferer is compelled to eat inedible things, like urinal cakes — while choking down five sheets of toilet paper. (It’s kind of a running gag on the vlog; don’t ask.) A kind of circus act cum mini lecture, it’ll make you laugh, cry and scratch your head — why?
You can also learn more about pica from these two floss posts:
• Do Not Eat — Unless That’s Your Thing, Man
• Ice: Nature’s Perfect Snack?

Thankfully, I’m no celebrity. But that doesn’t stop people from confusing me with Adam Sandler, Jason Biggs, Ben Stiller, Jerry Seinfeld or even, once, Seth Green. Now, would you confuse any one of those four guys for another? By asking me for Jerry Seinfeld’s autograph in Ikea (verily I say unto thee) are you actually saying I’m really just a familiar, funny, Jewish face? When confusing me with Adam Sandler on the beach in Malibu is it because you know he lives there – so, naturally you’d expect to run into him there while using the public toilet? (Once again, I jest not.)

Almost all of us have been compared to one celebrity or another at one point in our lives. Almost all of us have a celebalike or two – that’s my word for the celebrity you get compared to most often. It can be annoying, it can be fun, it can even be annoyingly fun. Now there’s a Web site that capitalizes on our obsession with celebalikes: MyHeritage.com.

The main purpose of the site is to build a family tree, but they’ve also got this cool face recognition tool with thousands of photos of celebs in their database. After uploading your mug into their database, the site spits out your top matches in real time.

I’m not so sure how accurate it is because my wife always says I look like the male version of Katherine Keener, yet the site insists my top female match is Courtney Cox. (Top male pick: David Schwimmer…oy.) I guess a lot of it depends on what photo you upload. Regardless, it’s pantloads of fun, and a sure-fire way to kill time when things are slow around the office.

So give it a whirl and then come back and tell us how accurate it is. We also want to know who your celebalike is. Let us know and give us a link to your flickr/photo page so we can see for ourselves. (start with www.flickr.com/etc, NOT http:…)

And remember: Even celebrities get confused for celebrities. Leonard Bernstein was on a plane once and a man asked for his autograph. Only it wasn’t Bernstein’s autograph the fellow wanted, it was Kenny Rogers’!

So how ‘bout you???

Every Monday, mental_floss ventures into the The New York Times archives to find first mentions worth mentioning. Got a suggestions for next week’s installment? Leave it in the comments.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

April 13, 1975

Bodybuilding: Is it Sport? Art?
“You don’t really see a muscle as a part of you, in a way. You see it as a thing. You look at it as a thing and you say, well, this thing has to be built a little longer, the bicep has to be longer, or the tricep has to be thicker here in the elbow area. And you look at it and it doesn’t even seem to belong ot you. Like a sculpture. Then, after looking at it, a sculptor goes in with this thing and works a little bit, and you do, maybe then some extra forced reps to get this lower part out. You form it. Just like sculpture.”

* * * * *
“It’s like you have a little BMW – you want to race the hell out of this car because you know it’s just going 110. But if you see guys driving a Ferrari or a Lamborghini, they slide around at 60 on the freeway because they know if they press on that accelerator they are going to go 170. These things are the same in every field.”

– Arnold Schwarzenegger

Taxicab

April 9, 1899

The Taxicabs
One taxicab company, in spite of all the popular clamor for cheaper fares, has raised its rates, so that a ride of two miles, if the meter works properly and the chauffeur is honest, will cost $1.30. We fear it will turn out to be like advertised hotel rates, $1.30 “and up.” The chauffeur’s fee is still to be considered.
* * * * *
It would be better for the companies to practice economies; to secure honest chauffeurs, to guard against taximeter errors; than to raise the rate of fares. We have all been dreaming of the establishment of a cheap cab system. We still have nothing cheaper than a livery stable horse coupe.

Keep reading for hippies, Nude Beer, ‘American as apple pie,’ the Colorado Rockies and more.
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QUIZ WEEK!!

That’s right. It’s QUIZ WEEK!! here at mental_floss, and we’re so excited that one exclamation point wouldn’t suffice. Every day this week(!!) we’ll be rolling out 3 new quizzes for your satisfaction (as well as posting a few of our favorite oldies). In fact, we’re getting things started by monkeying around with this terrific new quiz from Chris Weber. Click here to play, and be sure to post your score in the comments below.

Thanks to everyone who enjoyed our latest weekend batch of Skewed Clues. While no one got all fifteen answers correct, we did determine two winners: Jaymeson, who was the first to be missing only one correct answer, and Matt, who was the first to get the one answer Jaymeson (and most others) didn’t get.

If you haven’t tried the game, click the link above to give it a go. To see the answers…

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Money Pubs: Home of the World’s Most Expensive Wallpaper. What’s amazing is that there are several places where the walls are lined with money.

The world’s hottest chile pepper has been discovered. The Bhut Jolokia pepper measures at over one million Scoville heat units. Spicy!

Da Vinci’s The Last Supper has been rendered as a 16 million billion pixel digital image. It may take a while to load, but you can really zoom in on this one!

Roughly one-third of lottery winners find themselves in serious financial trouble or bankrupt within five years. Like your mother told you, easy come, easy go.

How To Convince Others To Do Your Bidding. If you try any of these methods, let me know how it works for you.

With just 5 days to go until mental_floss’s new book In the Beginning releases, we’re handing you another fantastic origin story. Today’s post goes out to all the shower stall singers and closet crooners out there. Enjoy!

Karaoke (b. 1970)

Given how many horrendous karaoke performances we’ve been subjected to, we weren’t at all surprised to learn that the guy who invented the karaoke machine can’t sing, can’t read music, and plays the keyboards about as well as your average third-grader.

Songs in the Off-key of Life

We were, however, surprised to learn that poor Daisuke Inoue has made almost no money from his invention, and that he didn’t even give it a try himself until 1999, on his 59th birthday. Inoue’s happy-go-lucky ineptitude has been pretty much the driving force of his entire life. In high school he picked up the drums, which he chose as an instrument because, hey, all you had to do was hit them. Eventually, he took his limited talent and
started playing with a Hawaiian band that frequented old dance halls from the days of the American World War II occupation. Inoue, shall we say, marched to the beat of a different drummer. Noticing this, the other band members quickly, and somewhat mercifully, realized that he’d be of better use on the business side, and he started acting as the band’s manager. But he still served as occasional drummer, particularly on amateur nights playing backup for rich Japanese businessmen.
Because Inoue couldn’t read musical notation, he had to rely on watching the singer’s lips in order to strike the right beat. One of his clients apparently found his drum technique flattering and asked Inoue to accompany him to a hot springs resort as his personal drummer. But Inoue couldn’t go. Time Asia tells what happened next: “[Inoue] obliged by
providing him with a tape of his accompaniment. The boss delivered an emotional rendition of Frank Nagai’s ‘Leaving Haneda Airport on a 7:50 Flight,’ Inoue collected his money in absentia and karaoke (a term long used in the industry for house musicians – it literally means ‘empty orchestra’) was born.”

Inoue quickly realized he was on to something. With some help from his buddies, he built 11 prototype machines, kitted them out with amplifiers and background music, and then leased them to bars in Kobe.
They were an immediate hit. But Inoue made one crucial mistake: He didn’t patent his invention. Big companies quickly realized they could make a mint on machines and tapes and made their own. Inoue only went so far as to patent two things: a type of plastic-covered songbook for wannabe Frank Sinatras, and a concoction he claimed could ward off rats and cockroaches in more downscale karaoke joints. But hey, give the poor guy credit: He certainly did things His Way.

Can’t wait to read more of In the Beginning? Order your copy at any of these fine stores today: Amazon, B&N, Borders, Books-A-Million. Oh, and if you e-mail us your proof of purchase at newsletters@mentalfloss.com, we’ll send you an autographed sticker to place in the book!