In case you missed our first twenty-four volumes or the greatest hits edition, let me explain. Every Monday, we head into the archives of The New York Times to find first mentions worth mentioning. If you have a suggestion for next week, leave us a comment.

‘Politics of Fear’

September 29, 1968

Johnson Decries Politics of Fear
President Johnson called today for an end to hate and fear as vote-gathering tactics in a plea for unity in this “season of bitter debate.”

Without mentioning by name any of the Presidential candidates, Mr. Johnson said, “When feelings are so deep and emotions are so high, it is tempting for some to play upon the fears and uncertainties of their countrymen.”

Death of a Salesman

July 17, 1947

Miller Rejects Hollywood’s Bid
Arthur Miller has rejected a Hollywood writing offer and is hard at work on two new dramas, hopping from one to the other because “both seem equally urgent.” At the moment the author of the prize-winning All My Sons is devoting himself to one of the scripts, still nameless, that tells a love story of working people in an industrial city. He thinks it may be ready for the coming season.

The other play, which Mr. Miller has left danging “in the middle,” does have a working title, The Death of a Salesman, but the playwright is unwilling to commit it to a thumb-nail synopsis for fear that he may be misleading. It would take about ten pages of exposition, he says, to ensure that he isn’t misunderstood.
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Mr. Miller resisted the film offer after serious consideration. It involved a one-picture deal, and the product would have been directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Keep reading for Regis Philbin, Valentine’s Day and Randy Moss.
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If you asked my friends, they’d tell you I’m not very spontaneous. I mean, when it comes to little stuff – “Hey, it’s 6:30… want to go see a 7:00 movie??” – sure. But spontaneous as in “Hey, I found cheap tickets to Paris! What are you doing next weekend?” That’s definitely not me.

If you asked my husband, however, he would tell you that I’m way too spontaneous. As in, “Honey, on my day off today I tore down the tile in the bathroom, ripped out the sink and pulled up the linoleum.”

I guess it depends on the situation. Anyway, the past week has been a period of great spontaneity for me. Two friends and I sort of abruptly decided to go visit a friend who lives in the Boston/Providence area. Plans evolved from months of, “We should go visit Kylie sometime” to “I booked us tickets this morning. We have to get up at 3 a.m. to make our flight. We leave in two weeks.”

Then, even more abruptly, my husband and I decided on a weekend trip to L.A. We found some great tickets out of Omaha and decided to take a long weekend. It’s the weekend right after Boston.
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Design Boom reported the results of the recent “Dining in 2015″ competition. The winners were a set of pen caps that double as tableware for eating at work, a leaf-shaped spoon, and ceramic salt-and-pepper shakers that you break open to use. Those and the other finalists are all very trendy, interesting, and listed for your browsing pleasure. But one shortlisted entry from Iran grabbed my attention like a chocolate in a desk drawer: the Exhaust Burger mobile barbecue.

It’s an attachment for your car’s exhaust pipe. You insert a hamburger, and the heat from your vehicle exhaust cooks it! I knew I had to tell you about it, but I immediately started looking for all the unhealthy side effects of exhaust fumes in your food. Upon closer inspection, it looks like the exhaust travels over the food, with a partition in between. Whether that’s enough to make you feel safe about eating it, I can’t say. How far do you have to drive before a burger is cooked? Do you have to make a pit stop to turn it over? What if you forgot it was there? The people driving behind you might be able to smell it easier than you would. But don’t forget to take your oven mitts -anyone who’s ever suffered a muffler burn from riding a motorcycle knows how hot they can get!

It’s certainly not the first time car heat has been used to cook. You’ll find several examples in the mental_floss post Cooking with Tools.

I wonder if it comes with recipes. If it catches on, we’ll soon see different sizes available for different purposes. Then you’ll have to watch out for a semi with a crockpot attached to the back!

J.J. Abrams, producer of TV’s Alias, Lost, and the movies Mission Impossible III and Cloverfield, gave a TED Talk tracing a thread connecting his creative endeavors: Tannen’s Magic Mystery Box. It’s a sealed box he bought from a magic shop decades ago, but has never opened. As Abrams says:

The premise behind the box was the following: $15 buys you $50 worth of magic — which is a savings.

Watch Abrams spend twenty minutes talking really fast about movies, mystery, technology, and character. (Warning: he does use one four-letter word.)

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Last week, we asked our ever-growing army of reader-photographers to send us pictures of their “pants,” which was our in-jokey way of referring to some funny, absurd or incongruous thing in their neighborhood. (Why “pants”? This post explains.) So this past weekend, flossers from all over the country scoured their ‘hoods, cameras in hand, and now the frequently-hilarious fruits of their labor are in! So without further ado … these are your pants. Many of the submissions fell into a few categories, which is how I’ll organize them here.

Pictures Relating to Psychics and Religion

Reader Ellen spotted this graffiti on the outside of a bar in Towson, Maryland. I’ll be up all night trying to figure out what it means.

Reader Kate thought there was something incongruous about this elaborate Nativity scene on a psychic’s front lawn. (I think Ellen’s picture makes it obvious, Kate: this psychic was a Catholic until she developed psychic abilities.)

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With Tom Brady gimping around the West Village last week, there’s been a lot of talk about his backups, Matt Gutierrez and Matt Cassel. This got us thinking about other Super second-stringers who were just a heartbeat (or anterior cruciate ligament) away from the big game. How well do you know the men behind the men behind center? Here are fifteen questions to test your backup QB IQ.

Take the quiz: Super Backups

10 Ways We Get the Odds Wrong. We tend to worry about the wrong things, but it just means we’re human.
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A Violent History of Time. Astronomers are detecting gamma-ray bursts from millions of years ago, as long as they don’t blink their eyes.
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16 Post-It Note art projects. It’s amazing what you can do with too much free time and a closet of office supplies.
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Top 30 Tips for Staying Productive and Sane While Working From Home. Too late for me, I’ve already gone insane.
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How to be Happy, According to Confucius. Boiled down to seven steps, it all makes perfect sense.
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Oscarology: a system of astrology based on what movie won the Best Picture Oscar for the year you were born. I’m not about to tell with mine is, but it seems pretty accurate.
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Dog breaks his own record by popping 100 balloons in 77 seconds. Simon is serious about this, but it’s pure entertainment for you.
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The Neanderthal Apocalypse. Global cooling can be as deadly as global warming.

Was the unofficial national anthem of the United States lifted from a couple different sources? Consider the following:

In 1906 a trio of Irish songwriters scored a minor vaudeville hit with the song “When Mose with his Nose Leads the Band.” An eighteen-year-old named Israel Baline probably heard the song because he worked as a singing waiter and needed to know all the hits, big and small. One never knew what a table might request.

As Jody Rosen says in the liner notes from a recent re-release of “When Mose with his Nose Leads the Band” (Reboot Stereophonic): “A decade later, Baline had a new name, Irving Berlin, an exalted place among popular songwriters, and a habit of interpolating bits of half-remembered songs into his own numbers,” which is exactly what he did when he wrote “God Bless America” in 1918. As you’ll hear in the following two examples, the opening strains of the chorus from each song are identical, note for note.

“God Bless America” [excerpt]

“When Mose with his Nose Leads the Band” [excerpt]

As for Berlin’s lyrics, take a close look at this little excerpt from another song (a very obscure song) called “God Bless America” written by Robert Montgomery Bird published over 80 years before Berlin’s (1834, to be exact):

God bless America!/God bless the land, the land beloved

[Compare that to Berlin's: God bless America!/Land that I love…]

Now, whether or not Berlin lifted part of the tune, or part of the lyric, it’s still an amazing song. And, as I’ve noted in this feature before, refusing to make money off his deep-seated patriotism, Berlin donated all the royalties from his version of “God Bless America” to the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and Campfire Girls.

So it’s hard to nitpick. But still, one can’t help but wonder if part of the decision to do so was possibly/maybe/perhaps (just perhaps) due to the fact that he possibly/maybe/perhaps felt an eensey weensey pang of guilt? Eh? Eh? A soupçon, maybe?

What do you all think?

1. The Freemasons

This is the granddaddy of all not-so-secret secret societies. Freemasonry, or “The Craft” as its members call it, most likely has its roots in 17th-century stoneworkers’ guilds. Mason lore, however, extends its origins back to biblical times, linking the society to the building of the Temple of Solomon. Freemasonry is split into numerous subgroups and orders, all of which consider God the Grand Geometrician, or Grand Architect of the Universe. At their hearts, these groups are all means of exploring ethical and philosophical issues, and their rituals and symbols are famous (or infamous). Take, for instance, the square-and-compass logo often seen on the backs of Cadillacs. Or the use of secret handshakes, passwords, and greeting postures/gestures called “due guards,” all collectively known as the Modes of Recognition. The list of famous Masons is massive, a virtual Who’s Who of modern history, explaining the many conspiracy theories regarding the Masons’ influence and intentions. Mozart, FDR, Harry S. Truman, George Washington, Mark Twain, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, John Wayne, W. C. Fields, and Douglas MacArthur were all Masons. But perhaps the Masons’ greatest strides have been made in fast food: KFC’s Colonel Sanders and Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas knew how to secret-shake with the best of ’em.

2. The Illuminati

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Being a genius is hard work. (I’m not saying that I’m a genius… it’s a gimmick… just pretend with me.) As researchers and writers, my wife Kara and I spend long hours on the PC, at the library, at the bookstore, on the phone, and doing whatever else is necessary to find the information we need. As a result, we don’t have time to cook three-course dinners, and we survive mostly by finding things to put between two slices of bread. You may know this as a “sandwich.”

Long ago, Kara admitted to me that she sometimes ate onion sandwiches as a kid. (We’re married, so she doesn’t do that anymore.) I enjoy a good banana or pineapple sandwich every once in a while (with mayo). As a child, my mom served BST sandwiches — bacon and tomato with a sprinkling of sugar. I even ate plain mustard sandwiches when times were tight.

So for this Weekend Genius Challenge, we’re asking you geniuses to help us expand our palate by telling us some of your favorite sandwich combinations. Don’t give us anything fancy, now… if it’s more than $10 a pound or requires more than three items, forget it! But please share with us the ingredients and preparations to make the sandwich, along with any stories you have about how you developed them. On Monday, we’ll select a few entries and head out to the local grocery store to buy ingredients. And on Thursday*, we’ll have a sandwichfest in our office and choose a winner (or two, since our tastes may differ) to receive a free mental_floss T-shirt.

That’s all there is to it: comment to this post with your favorite sandwich, along with the size (small through XXL), style (mens or womens) and design of T-shirt that you’d like to receive.

Good luck, and thanks in advance for giving us options beyond deviled ham or sardines.

UPDATE: We’ve had to move up the date for our “sandwichfest” to Thursday… we’re helping put the final touches on a new issue of mental_floss magazine, and had NO idea that 350+ of you would chime in! So give us a little extra time to sort through the responses, and tomorrow, we’ll choose our winner!