After last week’s post on Flo and Kay, the world’s only female autistic savant identical twins, I’ve been really interested in savants and all the amazing things they can do. So I dug up some videos that demonstrate savants’ abilities, and hopefully you’ll find them as impressive as I do.

This is the amazing story of Leslie Lemke, narrated by his colorful foster mother. Your jaw will drop:

This savant, known as “the human camera,” accurately reproduces an aerial view of Rome five yards wide after just a 45-minute helicopter ride.

This three-year-old Chinese girl solves a Rubik’s Cube in 114 seconds.

Kim Peek is kind of the savant’s savant — he was the inspiration for Rain Man and his photographic memory is astounding. It’s said that before he died in 2009 he had read and memorized more than 50,000 books.

When Kim Peek met British savant Daniel Tammet, he told him, “one day you’ll be as great as me.” I’m not sure what he meant by that, exactly, but Daniel’s skills — especially when it comes to mathematical calculations — are breathtaking.

Kyle has a collection of more than 100 rare and notable vacuum cleaners. In some circles he’s known as “the vacuum savant.” He may be obsessed, or borderline Aspergian, perhaps, but you can decide for yourselves whether or not he’s a savant.

Matt Savage taught himself to play the piano overnight and has perfect pitch.

Hello, Americans (and _flossy readers from everywhere else)! Two years ago today, Paul Harvey died at the age of 90, having been on the radio for over 70 years. For what it’s worth, here are ten interesting tidbits about the legend of radio.

1. He would want us to mention his name. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on September 4, 1918 as Paul Harvey Aurandt, the newscaster was the son of a police officer and a Danish immigrant. He dropped his surname when he began his radio career at KVOO in Tulsa.

2. He wasn’t into long courtship, apparently. Harvey met Lynne “Angel” Cooper at KXOK-AM in St. Louis, where they were both newscasters. He proposed on their first date, she accepted a year later, and the couple married in 1940. The rest, as they say, is history.

3. He was a friend of the animals. Paul and Angel were members of the Humane Society from the group’s founding in 1954. Later, son Paul Jr. became involved as well. Harvey discussed issues of animal cruelty in his broadcasts and publicly endorsed animal protection initiatives in Arizona and California.

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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 the previous days’ challenges can be found here if you missed it. Okay, ready to get your Hunt on? Click on through.

After more than 55 years in business, Disneyland has attracted more than 600 million guests from all over the world. You may have bought the tickets and been on the rides, but what do you know about the park itself?

Take the Quiz: Disneyland

Money Talks. And it says some pretty interesting things to Dan Tague – whose art show LIVE FREE OR DIE is a collection of popular, and sometimes ominous, phrases composed out of the words found on American currency.

Here’s a sampling of the carefully crafted messages:

(Via The Awesomer)

“For two (2) dollars I will call your friend or enemy or boss or whoever and pretend to be a turtle for up to two (2) minutes. I am the first and best company for your turtlecall needs — the copycats may be cheaper but they barely even sound like real turtles.” This is the sales pitch for a totally real service called turtlecalls.com. Think of it as a time-limited, targeted prank call. Below is an example, in which “Skip in Texas” receives a turtlecall paid for by a friend (or enemy, or employee — who knows). Skip is a wildlife cameraman who has more important things to do than talk to a fake turtle, though he does hand out some very reasonable diet tips regarding turtles eating at Wendy’s.

Here’s a sample line. Pretend Turtle: “Dude, you can wash your camera later, you only get one chance to talk to a turtle.”

In addition to the regular $2 turtlecall, there is a $3 cheadlecall, “where i will call and pretend to be a turtle pretending to be Don Cheadle” (the turtle has also done at least one call as Beyoncé Knowles); and a $10 super turtlecall: “this turtlecall has advanced features like that I will keep calling until I do not get a voicemail, even if it takes weeks.”

There are many, many more on turtlecalls.com. This is one busy turtle. In my opinion, the best thing about the turtlecalls is that most turtlecall recipients kinda go with it. There are clear stages to most conversations: first, trying to identify who the caller is; second, dealing with the clear fact that this is not really a turtle talking; third, small talk as the pretend turtle tries to engage the recipient in two minutes of conversation; finally, the recipient tries to get the pretend turtle off the phone, with the primary excuse being some poorly defined job responsibility.

(Via Waxy.org.)

Dan Lewis runs the popular daily newsletter Now I Know (“Learn Something New Every Day, By Email”). To subscribe to his daily email, click here.

In 1969, the movie Death of a Gunfighter debuted starring Richard Widmark, Lena Horne, and Carroll O’Connor. The reviews were OK — IMDb gives it a viewer-powered 6.4 stars (out of ten) while Roger Ebert gave it 3.5 (out of 5). The New York Times made special mention of Gunfighter‘s director, noting that the film was “sharply directed by Allen Smithee who has an adroit facility for scanning faces and extracting sharp background detail.” Ebert also lavished praise on Smithee:

“Director Allen Smithee, a name I’m not familiar with, allows his story to unfold naturally. He never preaches, and he never lingers on the obvious. His characters do what they have to do. Patch gradually gets in deeper and deeper. There’s another killing. The county sheriff is called in. The town council finds its self-respect threatened by this man who will not bend. The film ends in an inevitable escalation of violence, and in a last sequence of scenes that develops with horrifying understatement.”

All of this is high praise for the director. Only one problem: Allen Smithee isn’t real.

During the making of Gunfighter, the actual director — Robert Totten — and lead actor Widmark came to creative differences. In the middle of the shoot, Widmark successfully stumped for Totten’s removal; he was replaced in the director’s chair by Don Siegel. Siegel did not want to take credit for directing the film, having worked on less than half of it and, in his eyes, being something of a yes-man to Widmark (who Siegel believed was the de facto director). Totten, for his part, refused to take credit for the film. The Directors Guild of America (DGA) agreed, and instead associated the film with a made-up director, “Al Smith” — a name quickly revised to “Allen Smithee” in order to avoid confusion with real people with that common name.

The DGA used the name (and more commonly, “Alan Smithee”) officially through 2000, in order to disassociate directors and films as need be. Credited with the disuse of the Smithee name goes to another movie, An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, in which the protagonist is a director named Alan Smithee. The rarely seen and poorly received movie managed to attract enough attention to the Smithee legend that the DGA decided the Smithee moniker had outlasted its value.

To subscribe to Dan’s daily email Now I Know, click here. You can also follow him on Twitter.

My wife made a delicious ice cream cake yesterday, which got us talking about ice cream cakes in general, and inevitably, the formidable king of all ice cream cakes — Cookie Puss. If you grew up a poor chimneysweep who never got to have ice cream cakes and have no idea what I’m talking about, Cookie Puss is the venerable flagship of the Carvel Ice Cream Company’s frozen cake line. Created in the 1970s, it’s one of several anthropomorphic ice cream cake characters that Carvel has borne — the other two were Hug-Me Bear and Fudgy the Whale. (There was also Dumpy the Pumpkin, which has to be the worst-named character of all time. Dumpy has since faded into obscurity.) I didn’t realize there was so much to know about Cookie Puss, until I started digging. Here’s what I discovered.

Cookie Puss isn’t just a cake with a face — it (he?) is an alien from Planet Birthday. His real name is “Celestial Person,” not Cookie Puss. I guess I would’ve known this if I’d seen the old commercials, where Puss floats around the screen as if in zero gravity:

Though it’s unclear whether he hails from Ireland or Planet Birthday, Cookie Puss’ “friend,” Cookie O’Puss, was introduced a few years later — the world’s first St. Patty’s Day-themed ice cream cake.

The Beastie Boys were nearly sued because of a profane track they included on one of their early albums, in which they prank call a Manhattan Carvel store, pretending to be looking for a girl named “Cooky Puss.” It’s NSFW, and it’s here. Carvel founder Tom Carvel threatened to sue, but his nephew Kevin talked him out of it. According to Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, the band subsequently became friends with Kevin.

Cookie Puss sparked a minor revolt amongst Carvel franchise owners. In an effort to give Cookie Puss a consistent look across all Carvel stores, HQ designed a wafer with Puss’ face drawn on it in edible ink, which the stores were required to buy. A group of franchisees led by Liam Gray of Schenectady, NY rallied against this draconian measure, and created a new variation using items that his store already stocked, like ice cream cones and ice cream sandwiches. His design caught on, corporate HQ caved, and since May 1974 it’s been the official look of Cookie Puss.

According to a possibly specious entry in urbandictionary.com, “to cookie-puss” is a verb referring to a rather obscure sexual practice. Here’s the NSFW definition.

Cookie Puss has gotten many shout-outs in pop culture over the years, but one of the weirdest was on The Critic:

Well, this one’s pretty weird, too. A few years ago Denny’s made this commercial, which aired during the Superbowl, parodying Cookie Puss. “Nannerpuss” quickly became an internet meme to be reckoned with.

If any of you have Cookie Puss stories to share, now’s the time to let ‘em fly. For more pointless pop culture musings, follow me on Twitter.

Have you ever wondered just what makes beer batter so delightfully wonderful? Scientific America explains the science behind the crispity crunchity wonder:

Beer is saturated with CO₂. Unlike most solids, like salt and sugar, which dissolve better in hot liquids than they do in cold, gases dissolve more readily at low temperatures. Put beer into a batter mix, and when the batter hits the hot oil, the solubility of the CO₂ plummets, and bubbles froth up, expanding the batter mix and lending it a lacy, crisp texture.

The beer also insulates whatever you’re frying, which allows the exterior to get nice and golden brown while the food inside the batter gently simmers.

[Image courtesy of avlxyz's Flickr stream]

It’s Monday, probably the best day of the week for the Monday Math Square. Good luck!

The nine white squares inside the main red grid should be filled with the digits 1 through 9. Each digit should appear only once in this red grid. Place the digits 1 through 9 in their correct spots so that the mathematical equations are correct both across and down.