I’ve lived in Los Angeles for five years. I’ve also been writing for mental_floss for five years. Somehow it took five years to spot my first _flosser on the streets! I was parking my car on Beverly Blvd when I saw this nice, young gal walking toward me in one of our best-selling tees. Her name is Jennifer and she has this to say:

Great to meet you yesterday. I bragged about my near-Hollywood encounter all day!
I tell my dentist I floss daily thanks to you (I’m sure that cheesy joke doesn’t get old)

The moral? It pays to wear our shirts out in the real world! If we spot you, we might just grant you 15 minutes of online fame. ;-)

It’s a tough job market out there, especially if you majored in Classics (hey, steady now…), so maybe it’s time to consider one of these 9 Undesirable Jobs That Pay Surprisingly Well (all of these pay way better than all my jobs combined!)
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Who doesn’t love a good super-slow-motion lightning video?
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Bizarre, but true.  ”A few years ago scientists discovered that the larvae of the Sand dollar are able to clone themselves.  When they were exposed to the mucus of their natural enemies – fish – they demonstrated a unique defense mechanism.  They cloned themselves, which meant more or less that they halved their size.  It is thought that this new smaller size helps them to avoid detection by fish and so increase their survival chances.”
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A bear broke into a house in New Hampshire this week. Guess what he stole?
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Watch Ian McKellan do a dramatic interpretation of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. (ok, it’s not really Ian McKellan, but it’s a guy who sounds very much like him, and the results are still amazing!)
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From Burbia, a simple way to spoil an office surprise party.
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Goal celebrations can be controversial – do they showcase unsportsmanlike behavior? Do they detract from the gravitas of the game? As far as this best-ever goal celebration goes, I don’t care, it’s fantastic (the sheer planning and theatricality! I love it).
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Many of you have probably seen this already, but just in case, here’s the masterpiece that has been flying into inboxes all over the world this past week: Jane Austen’s Fight Club. No corsets, no hatpins, no crying. One of my favorite Flossy readers Rebecca sent in the link.
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I’ll end with a game — Pukis are adorable little critters who just want … to eat you. With their vampire teeth. And they multiply, quickly. It takes a little while to get used to the controls, but once you do it’s pretty fun!
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More links tomorrow, and remember to send all your submissions to Flossylinks@gmail.com!

We can zoom in and we can zoom out, but we can’t zoom infinitely because these are videos instead of loops. But you can get the idea with a few minutes of each. Cosmic.

Zoom Out

This is the opening sequence form the Jodie Foster movie Contact.

Fractal Flight

Fractals are a math concept in which the pieces are all copies of the whole. No matter how many times you break the whole into pieces, they are copies of the whole, infinitely.

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YES! You can play this challenge/contest without knowing a thing about the weekly hunt! It’s sort of a one-off – a stand-alone if you will. Will you?

Answer the Level 3 bonus-round question correctly and you may win your pick of anything you want from the neatoshop (valued under $25). Ready? Set. GO!

Oh, and don’t forget, even if you’re not the winner, you still need to solve the challenge to compete for next week’s Day 5 final challenge!

I’m going to see a Beatles tribute band tonight. I know; it will never come close to the real thing, but it’s probably as close as I’m going to get. Sadly, with such a huge catalog of song titles to create an awesome, punny band name from, this band is simply called “The Fab Four.” But there are plenty of other sweet tribute band names out there – here are a few of them.

1. Pete Loaf. I heard Meat Loaf sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at a Phillies game a few years ago, and I contend that Pete Loaf actually sounds better than Meat Loaf does right now. Also, his name is awesome. “Hey guys, I’m going to see Pete Loaf tonight.” “Meat Loaf? Sweet, I loved Bat Out of Hell.” “No, Pete Loaf. No relation.”

2. The Smiths Indeed. A Smiths cover band, of course.

3. Nearvana.

4. Gabba. I admit it – I didn’t so much choose this one for the weird name as I did for the weird premise: ABBA songs, Ramones-style. Here they are doing “Mamma Mia.”

5. Beatallica. In a similar vein, Beatallica does Beatles songs Metallica-style. Here’s “All You Need is Blood.” Does it make me a bad Beatles fan that I kind of like it?

6. No. I’ll let you guess in the comments what band this group is paying tribute to. I question the need for a tribute band for these guys, but maybe they’re just not my thing…

7. We Got the Meat. Yeah… it’s the GoGos, but male.

8. Coverboy (Loverboy). Another one I wonder about the demand for…

9. Alanish. A great name from a band that does Alanis Morissette covers. Although if you tell people you’re going to see Alanish, they might think you really paid the money to go see Alanis but have recently developed a lisp.

10. Austrian Death Machine. Kind of like Gabba, this one was picked more for the entire idea of the band. They sing in the distinctive style of Arnold Schwarzenegger and take their songs from The Governator’s movie one-liners. My favorite? “It’s Not a Tumor” from the band’s first album Total Brutal.

Know any other great tribute band names? Or do you have one you’re holding back for the day you form a tribute band? Let us know in the comments.

Ian Fleming is best known for his terrific series of twelve novels and two short story collections detailing the adventures of British spy James Bond, and he also wrote the children’s classic Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Let’s take a look at five things you might not know about the author.

1. He Had a Lot in Common with Bond

Fleming was no Double-0 agent, but he wasn’t a total slouch, either. During World War II he worked as an assistant to the Royal Navy’s Director of Naval Intelligence, and he eventually rose to the rank of Commander, just like Bond.

Fleming wasn’t just working in back rooms, though. He hatched a plan for a complex mission called Operation Ruthless that was aimed at capturing a German naval Enigma code machine. The basic gist of Fleming’s plan was this: the Royal Air Force would capture a German bomber, staff it with a German-speaking British crew, and stage a crash in the English Channel. When the Nazi rescue boat arrived, the “German” flight team would kill the ship’s crew and sail it back to England.

Fleming actually took a crew to Dover to wait for an opportunity to try this plan in 1940, but the operation fell through when logistical concerns over finding the right ship to commandeer and floating a stolen German bomber in the channel proved too complicated.

2. JFK Was a Fan

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Soft drinks, which originated as flavored and carbonated elixirs in the late 1800s and became especially popular during the Prohibition era, have long been associated with the region in which they were first developed. While some brands have branched out from their humble beginnings — Coca-Cola is sold in more than 200 countries and territories throughout the world — others have maintained a more localized appeal. Here are 11 lesser-known soft drinks and the stories behind their regional ties.

1. Cheerwine

When a sugar shortage at the start of World War I made it difficult for L.D. Peeler to sweeten his Salisbury, NC-based bottling company’s popular Mint Cola, Peeler began looking for a less sweet, but equally tasty, alternative. The local businessman purchased a wild cherry flavor from a St. Louis salesman and developed the formula for Cheerwine in the basement of his grocery store in 1917. Cheerwine was an instant success and was outselling Mint Cola by the early 1920s. Shortly thereafter, Peeler changed the name of his business to the Cheerwine Bottling Co. The red-colored Carolina staple was distributed locally until 1981, when it expanded into Tennessee, Georgia, and Virginia. While Cheerwine’s reach continues to grow, it remains most popular in the Carolinas and parts of Virginia. This year, Cheerwine partnered with a fellow Tar Heel State company, Krispy Kreme, to offer Cheerwine-infused doughnuts in stores throughout the Carolinas.

2. Moxie

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Every week, Miss Kathleen provides links to a variety of library-related items. If there’s something fun going on in your local library, leave us a comment!

Libraries are the hot new thing, at least according to that arbiter of popular culture, NPR. I’ve always thought a TV show set in a public library, a la The Office, would be hilarious! And cupcakes are definitely over.
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I mean, come on, look what an impact reading has on Tracy Morgan!
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Best headline ever: Boys trail girls in reading; can fart jokes help? If you’ve ever met a boy between the ages of 4 and 12, you’ve got to know that the answer is yes! We cannot keep good old Captain Underpants on the shelf at my library, they are so popular!
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It’s an all-new 5-day trivia hunt!

Co-puzzle Master Josh Halbur and I are happy to bring you the next How Did You Know? sponsored by our friends over at neatorama.com.

Here’s how it works: Starting today, and every day the rest of this week, we’ll be presenting two challenges at noon ET. They’ll be very similar to the kinds of puzzles you’ve come to expect from me and Josh, and, yes, they will feed into the Day 5 puzzle, as normal. Each evening, at 8pm ET, we’ll be putting up a third challenge loosely based on the day’s previous two challenges. You won’t need to solve the first two to solve the third, but knowing the day’s theme might help you be the first to crack Level 3. Also: note that you’ll have to solve Level 3–the bonus–to compete on Day 5

>> Prizes! Each day, one person will win one item from the neatoshop worth $25 or less. Shipping is on the house but the item you pick must be in stock. Oh, and no credit if you don’t use up the full $25. To be eligible for the prize, you need to leave the correct answer to Level 3 on the correct neatorama page before 10pm ET. You also need to tell us in that comment what you want if you’re selected at random.

>> So what’s in it for the person/team who finishes first with all the correct answers? Bragging rights, as always, with your photo/bio posted on our site. But also the chance to win the Day 5 neatorama prize, and, as has been tradition here for the last 28 months of HDYK?, your pick of any one of the amazing t-shirts from our store.

As always, if you’re not a Fan of our Facebook page, be sure to add us so we can keep you updated, and you can get in on some additional nifty clues throughout the week. If you’re new to our five-day hunt, you can read up on our new Rules page here. Oh, and if you missed the two previous day’s challenges, they can be found here. Okay, ready to get your Hunt on? Click on through.