Way back in the year 1 BCE, Ovid published The Art of Love, sort of a how-to guidebook (er, poem) loaded with tips for men interested in picking up women, and women interested in keeping a man. Some 2,000 years later and not much has changed. In 1952, Amy Vanderbilt, Queen of Etiquette, published a book chock-full of advice remarkably similar to Ovid’s in language and intent. And, of course, these days the magazine racks are full of articles offering similar tips for everything from opening pick-up lines, to conquering backnee, again, written with strikingly similar language.

In today’s lunchtime quiz, I present you with 13 actual dating/grooming tips as quoted in The Art of Love, Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette, or a recent issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. Can you figure out the source of each? Give the quiz a whirl and find out.

A lot of flossers have written in to ask how they can get copies of the first few issues of mental_floss. Because those magazines sold out a long time ago, we generally advise people to rub a rabbit’s foot, wish on a shooting star, and then save up enough cash to bribe Santa.

But now there’s another option thanks to this eBay auction! While we have no personal or professional affiliation with the seller, we figured some of you “completists” might appreciate knowing that it includes several sold-out issues, including the almost-impossible-to-find premiere issue from (gasp) 2001. Bidding ends Saturday, it appears.

In any case, if you’ve have any other gaps in your collection (and don’t want to pay eBay prices), you can grab most of the back issues on our store for just $6 a pop. Or you can buy all 31 available issues for a little under $60 by picking up the Complete-As-It-Gets set here.

We’re back with another 5-day trivia hunt!

Again, the rules: Every remaining day this week, I’ll be presenting a specific challenge. Your job: come up with the answers and hold onto them! Why? Because on Monday, next week, you’ll need them to solve a short puzzle. The first person to email in the correct answers and successfully show how you arrived at them (thus the title: How Did You Know?) wins a choice of any TWO t-shirts and book from our store. In addition to the above, we’ll be awarding a t-shirt to one random winner who has all the correct answers. So even if you’re not the first one with the right answers, there’s still a chance to wind up a winner on HDYK?

And remember, we’re also giving away a really big, sa-weeet prize to any winning contestant who can defend the title three months in a row. Peter Dapier and Patrick Corrado are our current champions. You can read about them here.

As with previous How Did You Know? posts, comments have been turned off, but I definitely encourage you to work in teams like our present champions did. Write your friends, send around each daily challenge, conspire, work together, whatever it takes to make sure you’re armed with the right answers going into next Monday’s puzzle. (Questions? drop us an e-mail at: TriviaHunt@Gmail.com)

If you missed Day 1, be sure to check it out here. Day 2 can be found this-a-way and Day 3, right here.

Today we’re playing Name That Extinct Animal. On the following pages you’ll find five extinct animals. Your job? Name them. (We’re looking for detailed names here, not general ones like ‘bird’ or ‘rodent.’

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Anti-litter Leaflets Dumped in Street

Matt Taylor of Walthamstow Village, England found boxes containing was he assumed was rubbish on the street near his home. Leaving boxes of litter on the road could lead to a fine of  £50,000 fine or five years in prison. The boxes contained leaflets issued by the local council to educate the public about illegal dumping and littering! Cabinet member Bob Belam said the boxes were left as part of the planned distribution program, which meant leaflets against litter would eventually be left at each household. In other areas of the world, government leaflets would be considered litter whether they were left in torn boxes or at homes.

770-pound Ray Caught

Ian Welch of Hampshire, England caught the biggest freshwater fish ever caught with a rod. The 770-pound ray was pulled out of the Maeklong River in Thailand. The fish was seven feet wide and had a ten foot tail. It took 13 men to lift the ray out of the water. The catch was weighted, photographed, tagged, and released. A DNA sample was taken also. Welch is a biologist, and was in Thailand working with a project to tag stingrays.

Man Saves Lives, Gets Ticket

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Having trouble figuring out what the Credit Crisis (ahem, Global Financial Meltdown, Great Depression II, Credit Freeze) really means? Media designer Jonathan Jarvis has created a simple video explaining the situation step by step. There’s no alarmism here, just a straightforward explanation of the financial realities leading to our current, uh, predicament.

Discussed: treasury bills, credit, leverage, how banks make their money, mortgages (uh-oh), mortgage brokers, collateralized debt obligations (major uh-oh), credit default swaps, subprime mortgages, underwater mortgages, and more.

To be honest, there are so many steps involved in these transactions that it’s all a little baffling. But I promise, if you have a cup of coffee and devote ten minutes to this video, you’ll learn something.

See also: Let Public Radio Talk You Through the Financial Crisis.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

The latest issue of mental_floss just hit newsstands. Rosemary Ahern’s cover story chronicles ‘The 25 Most Influential Books of the Past 25 Years.’ This week, we’ll be revealing five of those influential books here on the blog. And if this puts you in a subscribing mood, here are the details.

Middlesex

by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)

The Book That Showed Us That Mars and Venus Aren’t the Only Planets

In less enlightened times, the hero of Middlesex, Cal, would have been called a hermaphrodite. But after Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003, the intersex rights movement stepped into the spotlight, and pejorative terms for intersex people slowly began to fade. Like 1 in 2,000 American children, Eugenides’ hero is born with a body that exhibits mixed sexual characteristics. More specifically, Cal inherited 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome, which occurs when the chromosomes indicate one sex and the genitalia indicate the other. People with the syndrome are born looking like girls, but when puberty hits, they begin to look like men. At birth, Cal is every bit as feminine as the next girl. But as testosterone begins surging through his veins at age 12, Cal becomes more and more masculine. When doctors tell his parents that he needs surgery and hormone therapy to correct the problem, Cal runs away.

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Oil rigs are pretty utilitarian structures, but once they’ve pumped all the oil they’re going to pump, they become useless hunks of metal. If that seems more than a little wasteful to you — not to mention an eyesore, considering how many rigs are within sight of shore — you’re not alone. But not to worry: industrious Ecogeeks are coming up with all sorts of ways to repurpose old rigs.

Dive sites

In this case, you don’t need to do anything; the underwater support structures of oil rigs become artificial reefs on their own. There’s one of these not far from my house in LA that’s popular with divers called Oil Platform Grace, which has been inactive for years (but still serves as a pumping station). It was actually the site of a pretty nasty oil spill in its early years, but now all 320 feet of its underwater supports are teeming with fascinating life.

Wind turbine platforms

Winds are high offshore, so it’s a great place to harvest wind energy. Only problem is, it’s much more difficult to build turbines in the water than on land … unless you happen to have a disused oil platform around! A company called SeaEnergy Renewables is planning on doing just this. Pretty cool, right?
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I wonder what percentage of American households don’t have at least one deck of playing cards stashed away? While I’m off looking that up, enjoy today’s Brain Game: Three Questions about playing cards (those from a common 52-card deck). Good luck!

1. The names of what two specific cards in
a 52-card deck contain the letter “U” twice?

2. What is the most obvious difference between
the two jokers included in a typical deck of cards?

3. What is the only card in the diamonds suit whose
design is NOT identical upside-down and right-side-up?

NOTE: The text of question #3 was tweaked after readers pointed out some issues. Thanks!

Here are the ANSWERS.

Most incompetent people can’t recognize that they are incompetent. Doesn’t that make you just a little nervous?
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10 Geeky Tricks for Getting Out of Bed in the Morning. Now I’m looking forward to tips on getting out of bed in the afternoon. (via the Presurfer)
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Can you hear the “mosquito frequency” in the Teenager Audio Test? Be warned that it gives some people headaches, but I can’t hear it at all.
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Rabbits are shy and gentle animals, but there are always exceptions. This one won’t take a backseat to anyone!
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The art of handwriting is dying out. No one seems to care enough to mourn its passing, she types.
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The Science Behind Your TV Sound System. Be careful how fast you adjust your settings!
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Six Unexpected Uses For Animal Dung. Is there anything that we won’t research for you?

Reader Wanda requested a post on the Group of Seven, a group of Canadian painters who are most well-known for their landscapes.

The group members often painted together, both in their Studio Building and on excursions into the wilderness. They didn’t call themselves the Group of Seven until 1919, and they didn’t hold their first exhibition until 1920, but they got their inspiration in January 1913. After seeing an exhibition of Scandinavian art, Lawren Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald were impressed with the depictions of northern light and landscapes, and thought, “This is what we want to do to Canada.” Although the group originally had seven members, it later grew to nine, with the loss of one member (Frank Johnston) and the addition of three more (A.J. Casson, Edwin Holgate, and LeMoine Fitzgerald).

A brief run-down on the original members:

1. Lawren Harris (1885-1970)

Lawren Harris was perhaps one of the most independent members of the group, in large part because he was financially stable. He was a co-financer of the group’s Studio Building, and he never needed to work as a teacher to help support himself. He was also the only member to turn to abstract painting. During the 1920s, he stopped signing and dating his work, as he wanted it judged on artistic merit, not by the artist or the date. In 1934, Harris caused a scandal when he left his wife of 24 years to marry Bess Housser, the wife of his friend, a fellow artist.
Shown is Harris’ “Lighthouse, Father Point” (1930). To see more of Harris’ work, check out his galleries at Art in the Picture and Museum Syndicate.
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