Stranded at the airport? Don’t forget Rule 240. You could be flying out on time with another airline.
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Research just in time for your Superbowl party! A science class tests the bacterial contamination of double-dipping. The results: yucky.
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Caution: Slippery when wet! A collection of swimming pool accidents all wrapped up in one funny video.
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2007 Federal Tax Law Changes. It happens every year, just to keep us all on our toes.
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A tarsier takes a good look at you. With the clever audio, this could easily beat the dramatic prairie dog.
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10 Things You Can Do to Cheer Yourself Up. I’ll take the ice cream in bed, thank you very much.
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Mexican hen lays green eggs. Now all we need is ham!
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Quittin’ Time! People Who Punched Out of Work In Their Prime. Guaranteed to inspire envy.

I’ve encountered my fair share of punctuality stories–tales of extreme punishments & horrid ultimatums. I’ve even lived through a few of my own–like the time I was ten minutes late to high school volleyball practice & the coach just smiled and told me to take a seat in the bleachers while the rest of the team ran “suicide sprints” as punishment. There was nothing quite like that; I could just feel all my meager social collateral evaporating.

But the most egregious story of all came from someone I recently met, who told me that a habitually tardy actor on the set of a film once begged him to break his fingers because he needed a good–and verifiable–excuse for being late, or else the director would fire him. My friend tried to talk him out of it, but the actor wouldn’t relent, and my friend found himself breaking this guy’s fingers: two, to be safe. The actor kept his job…But who knows to what lengths he’ll go next time! Elsewhere, Ray Emery, goalie for the Ottawa Senators, is being “fined substantially” after arriving four (4!) minutes late to practice: “Emery could be docked up to one-187th of his $2.75 million salary, roughly $14,700.” Have you ever been punished for tardiness in an extremely profound, draconian, or just plain avant-garde way?

• Next week, we’re launching a lunchtime companion to Sandy & Kara’s wildly popular daily quiz. The new mid-day quiz will be posted here on the blog every weekday at 11:30am EST. Your regular quizmasters will be Sandy Wood, Kara Kovalchik, David Israel, Jason Plautz and Brett Savage, with special appearances by Stacy Conradt, Ethan Trex, Chris Weber, Matthew Smith, Terry Fernandes, and promising newcomers Sara Newton, Brian McCarthy, D.J. Hipsher. And more!

• Be a friend and help Allison Keene with The Weekend Links. Send your latest offbeat internet finds to flossylinks@gmail.com. The 13th and 31st people to write her win free mental_floss t-shirts. (Also, if you’re a Flickr user and want your work considered for our ‘reader photo of the week,’ tag your pics ‘flossphotos.’)

• Speaking of winning stuff, what about an interactive pop-up tour of Graceland? (Details – plus a new hint – here.)

• And this Friday and Saturday, we’ll be offering an abundance of lists – 19, to be exact. The countdown begins with a quirky list of 10 items, then 9, and all the way down to 1. To stretch into the weekend, we’ll snake around and head back up to 10. Get excited.

In the last week, I have managed to burn one knuckle on each finger, two fingertips, the palm of one hand and the back of the other. My hands, more or less, look like I washed them in napalm. I could, of course, blame all this on the fact that I’ve had to use the deep fryer at work more often than usual the last few days, but even if I didn’t go anywhere near a tub of boiling oil, I’m sure I would have managed to find a way to hurt myself.

You see, I’m a klutz. And that’s why today we’re going to talk about one of my brothers in arms, a fellow klutz. Quite possibly the most infamous klutz in American history.

Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. had spent most of the summer of 1945 working as an assistant in the preparation of a plutonium core for the Trinity nuclear bomb test in Alamogordo, NM. The tests were successful, and in August he was moved to the Los Alamos Omega site, where he assisted with a series of experiments concerning the critical masses of a 13.6 pound sphere of plutonium in various tungsten carbide tamper arrangements. In these experiments, the tungsten bricks were slowly added around the core as neutron reflectors, serving to reduce the mass required for the plutonium to go critical. Eventually, enough bricks would have been added to allow the assembly to go into a controlled critical nuclear reaction, basically becoming a miniature nuclear reactor.

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Grant Pace grew up in Kansas City, attended SMU, and later wrote the very first Bud Bowl ads. He is now the Executive Creative Director at Conover Tuttle Pace in Boston.

mental_floss: How did the idea for the Bud Bowl come about?

Grant Pace: It was truly a team effort. Our client August Busch had told our agency, DMB&B in St. Louis, that he wanted to “own the Super Bowl” the upcoming year. To that date, no one had ever run multiple commercials around one idea in the big game, but this seemed to be one approach to make the kind of impact he desired. We had previously done some simple spots promoting long necks to go, featuring some stop-motion animation. Someone suggested extending that idea, bringing more bottles to life against the backdrop of a game or contest. Several pots of coffee later, the Bud Bowl was born.

m_f: Did you write all six of the first Bud Bowl’s spots? How many more did you write after that?

GP: I had the tremendous good fortune of being a young copywriter at the time who was given the opportunity to be the writer on this project by a benevolent boss, Dave Henke. I worked with Dave and two other art directors, Bill Oakley and Martin Buchanan, in creating the “game.” It was the only year I would work on this, as I cashed in on my notoriety and amazing ability to craft beer related football puns and moved to New York shortly thereafter. (more…)

For those of you who’ve been waiting breathlessly for my third installment of “Shorts” (the first two are here and here), sorry it’s been so long! (It takes us awhile to find enough non-sucky shorts to fill a whole post!) This time we’ll be featuring films of a different breed: a foreign film, some music-based work and some concentrated weirdness by David Lynch, all of which is awesome.

And hey, before we get started (speaking of awesome!), I wanted to draw your attention to the still above: it’s a sneak-preview of the eponymous, geeky hero from my latest in-the-works floss short! Why am I so excited? Because it’s entirely new territory for me — not only is it fully animated, but we’re making it using cutting-edge performance capture technology! (You know, like Beowulf. But with a slightly lower budget.) Anyway, we’ll keep you up to date as it nears completion; we’re working hard on it even as I type. (Well, maybe not as I type. But in all likelihood, after I type.)

Now, without further ado, some awesome shorts that aren’t still works-in-progress.

I’ll Wait for the Next One (J’Attendrai Le Suivant)
In this Oscar-nominated short, a lonely woman finds love on the subway … or does she? (It’s arty ’cause it’s French!)

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During spring break at MIT in 1966, Peter R. Samson saw this quote on the back of a New York City subway map:

“A Flushing youth, who wanted his money’s worth, rode all lines of the subway on a single token. With doubling back as needed, the trip totaled over 400 miles – more than the train journey from New York to Pittsburgh. It took him 25 hours and 36 minutes.”

This set in motion Samson’s extensive efforts to duplicate the feat. Enlisting other students and some serious MIT hardware (including a PDP-6, the use of which was authorized by Marvin Minsky himself), Samson dedicated himself to the task of mapping the subway system and determining ideal routes through it. Using artificial intelligence (after manual calculation failed to produce a satisfactorily fast outcome), the team of MIT hackers engaged in a realtime subway race assisted by computers back at home base, relaying information via payphone.

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A truly international fruit, the modern strawberries we feast upon today come from an accidental hybrid of North and South American species by way of Europe in the 18th century, although many varieties of the plant were enjoyed as far back as ancient Greece and Rome. Here are some facts and figures relating to this most beloved berry:

1. William Butler (1535-1618) once said, “Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.” Apparently many people agree, because Americans eat 3.4 pounds of fresh strawberries a year, plus another 1.8 pounds frozen. California produces 75% of the nation’s strawberry supply, yielding 21 tons of strawberries per acre among the 23,000 acres of strawberries planted in California each year. Strawberry fields, indeed, forever.
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Who wouldn’t want a Graceland-themed pop-up book?

Even better, who wouldn’t want the chance to tell your friends you won a Graceland-themed pop-up book in a slightly ridiculous mental_floss contest? ($40.00 value.)

The good people at Quirk Books have kindly sent us a copy of Chuck Murphy’s Graceland: An Interactive Pop-Up Tour to give one lucky mental_floss reader. Here’s a summary:

More than 600,000 people visit Graceland every year, making it one of the most popular tourist destinations in the United States. With Graceland: An Interactive Pop-Up Tour, you’ll go behind the velvet ropes for an all-access tour of the Elvis Presley Estate. Eight full-color pop-up spreads feature the mansion’s most memorable destinations:

• The Kitchen: Home of the famous peanut butter and banana sandwich.
• The TV Room: With three TVs running simultaneously, there’s never a dull moment.
• The Trophy Room: A monument to the King’s legacy.
• The Meditation Garden: Where Elvis and his family are buried.

Along the way, interactive pop-up features allow you to flip through Elvis’s record collection, browse the family photo album, open his refrigerator, and discover other hidden surprises. Graceland: An Interactive Pop-Up Tour is the perfect gift for Elvis fans of all ages!

Now to the all-important how-you-can-win part…
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National Geographic has an interactive look at The Brain. You can study it, stimulate it, and scare yourself over its possible malfunctions.
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Jabberwocky Daddy. There are many dad-related words and phrases in popular use, including news ones you don’t know (yet).
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The Invasion of the Christmas Island Red Crabs. 150 million of them, every year, right on schedule.
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Should you buy a hybrid car? You have to analyze your motives, and crunch the numbers, too.
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Tips for becoming an everyday environmentalist. It’s easier than you may think to get into these habits, once you know how important they can be.
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Top Ten Concept Phones. They all look cool, but their success depends on how easy they are to use.
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Grand Entrances (or) How I Got to the Prom. The bar is set pretty high for unusual prom transportation.
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Killer asteroids are no joke. But worrying about them isn’t going to help at all.