At the request of reader John, today’s post features the “Pavement Picasso,” a.k.a. Julian Beever. While quite a lot has been written online about the UK artist (including a popular chain e-mail), very little actual information about Beever’s life is available. Here’s what we do know…

1. Julian Beever got his start on pavement creations while he was attending art school; he would make two-dimensional chalk drawings and receive pennies from passers-by. He began experimenting with anamorphic trompe-l’oeil chalk creations after seeing tiles being removed from a street, an effect he tried to recreate on paper.

2. When viewed in a photograph, Beever’s creations appear amazingly realistic. Those who walk past them don’t get quite the same view, though. The 3D effect works only from one certain angle, the place where Beever positions his tripod-mounted camera. From any other angle, the work is distorted and odd-looking.

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• For anyone stuck working this weekend, here’s a quick clip called Insane Office Sports to help you through the day.

• When discussing sustainability, the recycling of cars is always a debated issue. Here’s a great idea, even if it was just used as a marketing gimmick: familiar musical instruments made out of car parts (and they really work!)

• This video really made me laugh, and should strike a chord with anyone familiar with those crosswalks that countdown the seconds until you’re given the green. This group staged a New Years Eve-type celebration for the countdown, with hilarious results.

• 15 Absurd Police Reports. Enjoy.

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As a German soccer fan, I’ve been doing quite a bit of screaming the past few weeks—especially on Tuesday, after Germany defeated Turkey for a place in the Euro Cup finals against Spain on Sunday. This beautiful game inspires a fanatical devotion in its fans not seen in any other sport. But it wasn’t always the technical game you see before you today. In fact, soccer boasts a colorful history that has everything from roaming mobs to decapitated heads. Here’s a quick look.

Military training and fertility rites

The earliest recorded evidence of a soccer-type game comes to us from the third century B.C. in China. A military manual from the Han dynasty details an exercise in which a leather ball, filled with either hair or feathers, was kicked into a tiny net fixed on narrow bamboo canes. Similar games have been played all over the world, leading scholars to suggest that the game may have originated in some parts as a pagan fertility rite, with the ball symbolizing the sun. Or people just liked kicking things.
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A hearty congrats to Maggie Wittlin of New York City, who tied the HDYK record for a finished final puzzle in the least amount of time at 9 minutes flat!

In a moment, I’ll introduce you to to our new champion, but first:

WE’RE UPPING THE STAKES for the next How Did You Know?!

Here’s the deal: If any champion can defend his or her title for three consecutive months, he or she will win not only the usual prizes for that month, but… but… BUT… well, we haven’t figure out the ‘but’ yet, BUT, it’ll be pretty darn snazzy, that much I can guarantee (short of A NEW CAR!).

So the pressure is on Maggie, who I introduce to you now – in her own words:

I currently live in New York City, with three wonderful and trivia-knowledgeable roommates. I spent the past three years working with the very awesome Seed Media Group — the folks who produce the equally awesome Seed magazine — performing various editorial duties in print and on the web. I’m now taking the summer off before going to law school in the fall. (This is why I have time to do trivia hunts.) I was born in the Bronx, and I grew up in fabulous and exciting Westchester County. Some of my dorkiest interests include physics, musical theater, and hunting down information, which is truly the most dangerous game. I would like to thank the friends, parents, and friends’ parents who helped me with the puzzle.

[Just to clarify on the Name That Country challenge: for the first one, in addition to Saudi Arabia I would have also accepted Iran, Sudan, Serbia or Spain. And for the last one, Austria and Australia both worked.]

Now on to Maggie’s brilliant, winning solution:

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The Des Moines Art Festival is this weekend, which I am super excited about. It’s one of the biggest in the nation, which I bet a lot of people don’t expect from Des Moines. My amazing brother-in-law has exhibited there so I think I have a bit of a bias for this particular show.

Anyway, however much I love our Art Festival, I’m quite certain it doesn’t qualify for today’s Quick 10 (although it was the inspiration).

10 Strange and Wonderful Festivals

1. The Night of the Radishes – Oaxaca, Mexico. La Noche de los Rábanos goes back more than 200 years. Basically, many years ago, a section of radishes wasn’t harvested when they should have been and continued growing for months. When the radishes were finally pulled up, they were strange sizes and shapes and were brought to be exhibited at the Christmas market. Now this spicy veggie is celebrated every year in Oaxaca with parades, costumes, prizes and competitions.

2. The Chap & Hendrick’s Olympics – London, England. Hendrick’s is a brand of gin, for those of us who aren’t gin connoisseurs. I am decidedly not a gin fan, but I would consider trying Hendrick’s because the brand seems to have an outstanding sense of humor. Last year, the C&H Olympics included the events like the Pipe Smokers’ Relay, a competition to see who could tie a Windsor Knot the fastest, and my favorite: a contest where “six cads approached six ladies and whispered savoury nothings. The winner was the recipient of the loudest slap.” Awesome.

3. The Alien Festival – Roswell, New Mexico. This one is just around the corner – July 3, if you happen to be in the area next week. Events include workshops (“Alien Implants are Real”), an alien haunted house, lectures (“Roswell’s Deathbed Confessions, the Truth Revealed”), parades, shows, and – obviously – costume contests.

4. Mike the Headless Chicken Days – Fruita, Colorado. In 1945, a chicken named Mike, who was intended for dinner, had his head chopped off. An unremarkable story… except that Mike didn’t die. He lived for 18 months and continued to, well, act like a chicken. The good people of Fruita celebrate Mike every May, including the “Run Like a Headless Chicken” 5k. The Web site says “attending this fun, family event is a NO BRAINER.” Ha. Speaking of puns…

5. The O. Henry Pun-Off – Austin, Texas. Crap. As soon as my husband reads this, he’ll be booking out airfare to Austin for next year. Since 1978, people have entered this competition (it’s limited to 32 contestants) to see who can out-pun one another. You can check out some of the winning puns here, but bring your crackers – some of the entries are pretty cheesy.
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Paul Otlet’s work first caught my attention last May due to a 2003 Boxes and Arrows article. Otlet’s work was a sort of conceptual precursor to the World Wide Web, and was in effect an extremely well-organized and mechanized library — but I’d never heard of him, despite having been through a pretty thorough Library Science Bachelor’s program. Now the New York Times has a detailed article, complete with new graphics and a video, on Otlet’s efforts. Here’s a taste:

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.” …

Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. …

Today, Otlet and his work have been largely forgotten, even in his native Belgium. Although Otlet enjoyed considerable fame during his lifetime, his legacy fell victim to a series of historical misfortunes — not least of which involved the Nazis marching into Belgium and destroying much of his life’s work.

Read the rest — and be sure to check out the infographics and documentary video in the left column.

If you’ve made it this far, I commend you! One more puzzle to solve and you’re home free. First one to send in the correct answer to the challenge below, along with the correct answers found all along the path this week, AND, the logic behind ‘em (which is to say: HOW DID YOU KNOW?), gets a pick of any t-shirt and book from our store.

We’re also adding some special prizes this time around for those who come really close, but don’t get all the answers in time. And last month, we awarded some shirts and books to a couple contestants who impressed us with charts, diagrams, and other complex methods of recording and organizing the clues/answers. So we’ll be on the lookout for the creative among you, as well. This is all to say: it pays to play whether you nab the grand prize or not.

As comments have been turned off for the length of the hunt, please click on the following link and send your answers and logic to us at: TriviaHunt@Gmail.com

If you missed Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday’s challenges, there might still be time to solve them all. No one knows how long it’ll take for one of you trivia junkies to nail down the whole megillah, so make haste, make haste. And now, on the next page, I present the final puzzle, drawing on all the answers you dug up along the trail. We’re doing things a little differently this time around – as you’ll see – the puzzle is in the form of a Who Am I? even though the answer is not a person. Enjoy it!
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We haven’t held a Friday Happy Hour in a while. Let me throw out some questions.

1. Last weekend, we offered up the mental_floss summer reading list. But what about summer DVDs? What out-of-the-ordinary titles are you moving up in your Netflix queue?

2. You might not be enamored with your city or town, but I’m guessing everyone can get somewhere cool (and back) in a day. What’s the best day trip option in your part of the world?

3. If you could invite any living musician to play a concert in your home for you and a few dozen friends, which artist would you choose?
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Because I’m a total geek for trivia, and because I use every magazine as an opportunity to dominate my younger relatives in trivia boardgames (I can crush most of the the ones in elementary school), I wanted to share 8 things I learned from our latest magazine. Amazingly, they also double as 8 great reasons to check out the new issue!
1) Bill Gates’ wife Melinda was the project manager on Microsoft Bob the suite of products that led to Clippy. You know him as “that annoying cartoon paperclip who thinks you don’t know how to write a letter.” (p15)
2) Groucho Marx’s personal cure for insomnia was to telephone people to insult them until he started yawning. (p17)

3) Harold and Kumar were originally trying to get to a Krispy Kreme, but the donut shop didn’t want to be associated with the modern Cheech and Chong. (p20)
4) When Stravinsky’s revolutionary The Rite of Spring first debuted, the performance was so confusing to the audience that it led to riots and a fistfight.
5) The Poincare Conjecture, aka the Hardest Math Problem in History, devastated lives along the way, including the mathematics superstar Edwin Moise. After years of work, Moise was so broken by the problem that “he never did serious math research again, and spent his last few years critiquing poetry.” (p38)
6) In the 1904 Olympic Games, American George Eyser grabbed one bronze, two silvers and three gold medals, all while competing with a wooden leg! (p44)

7) In 1911, the cereal fad was so big that there were “107 brands of corn flakes” being made in Battle Creek alone. (p55)

8) China enforces a 14-inch height limit on all dogs within Beijing. (p61)

Of course, that’s just a little of what’s being offered. The new mental_floss has 72 pages of pure stories and facts guaranteed to delight, so click here to get a copy today!

Some of us were born on notable days like Christmas, or The Ides of March. Some of us weren’t. Same holds true for famous folk. See how well you know who WASN’T born on a notable day in our latest Lunchtime Quiz.