As recently as February of this year, Russian officials cleared the way for two of its sovereign wealth funds, the Reserve Fund and National Wellbeing Fund, to invest in various foreign bonds, including those issued by the twin towers of American residential finance, Fannie and Freddie.

“The prospect for every GSE bond clearly states that it is not backed by the United States government,” says Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks. “That’s why investors holding agency bonds already receive a significant risk premium over Treasuries.”

The Russians ignored the warnings and grabbed the risk premium. Today, fully 21% of Russia’s monetary reserves are invested in the obligations of Fannie, Freddie and the Home Loan Banks. And the largest holder of Fannie and Freddie debt is another friendly foreigner, China. The middle kingdom, according to the FreedomWorks organization, owns $376 billion worth of U.S. agency bonds. Altogether, foreigners hold $1.3 trillion of them.

Maybe the foreigners didn’t understand what they were getting into. Or maybe they did.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose family had made a fortune in the opium trade, promised the nation a “New Deal” during the Great Depression of the ’30s. But what he gave it was more like the old false shuffle. The president pulled cards from the bottom of the deck, pretending that government bureaucrats could do a better job of allocating capital than private investors. In 1938, he set up the Federal National Mortgage Association, b.k.a. Fannie Mae. Then, as now, the national housing market was in crisis. House prices had been declining for almost a decade. Who wanted to lend money against falling collateral values? Only a fool…or a government.

For the next 32 years, the firm resembled a nationwide savings and loan institution — borrowing from large institutions and lending to smaller ones, keeping a piece of the spread for its trouble. But Fannie Mae was an imposter from the get-go. Lenders knew that it had something no free market business ever had - the full faith and credit of the US government behind it. Fannie was able to borrow at below-market rates; lenders knew they had no risk of losing their money in a default or bankruptcy. Fannie, with the aces dealt her by the Roosevelt administration, dominated the business for the next 30 years.

Then, another crisis came along, followed by another bamboozle, this one perpetrated by Lyndon Johnson. Specifically, the feds were spending too much on wars - the War on Poverty at home…and one against the Viet Cong across the ocean. Victory eluded Lyndon Johnson on both fronts, but his handling of Fannie Mae should have brought him at least a bronze star. Attempting to balance the government’s ledgers (this was in the days when Americans still believed in balanced budgets), he moved the mortgage business off of the Federal government’s books, privatizing it as a ‘government sponsored agency.’ For good measure, he created a competing organization - the Federal Home Mortgage Association, b.k.a. Freddie Mac.

Many are the ham-fisted dictators and sticky-fingered kleptocrats who have nationalized industries. Even without a credit crunch for camouflage, Francois Mitterand nationalized 36 leading French banks in 1982. Robert Mugabe grabbed farmland in the Zimbabwe. Evo Morales took the gas industry. And Hugo Chavez seized the Orinoco oil fields in 2007. But Lyndon Johnson rarely gets credit for his great advance in the history of public larceny: he privatized the profits while nationalizing the losses. This formula has been a honey pot for clever dirigistes ever since, providing countless opportunities for defeated politicians, hacks and hustlers - speaking fees, consulting contracts, board memberships, bonuses, stock options (notably, the $170 million spent on lobbyists over the past 10 years…mentioned above) - things that wouldn’t be possible for a “public” company. In effect, Fannie Mae could pick the taxpayer’s pocket twice - once by sticking him with a mortgage he couldn’t really afford and a second time by raiding the taxpayers’ vault for a bailout.

In the case at hand, by the year 2007, the CEOs of Fannie and Freddie were earning salaries that would have been respectable, even on Wall Street. Fannie’s main man, Daniel Mudd took home $13.4 million in 2007, a year in which the firm lost $2.1 billion. While the Freddie Kruger of mortgage finance, Dick Syron, pocketed $18.3 for helping Freddie Mac to a $3 billion loss and a 33% trim for the shareholders.

As recently as May of this year, Mr. Mudd told the New York Times that he was “seeing the best opportunities since I’ve been in this business.” Two months later, both Fannie and Freddie are “insolvent,” says former Fed governor William Poole.

In a better world, Mudd and Syron would be hanged…and the bondholders would be wiped out along with the shareholders. But last Sunday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced a bailout. And on Monday, an auction of Freddie Mac debt was oversubscribed. The Russians were right; the deck was stacked from the very beginning.

Enjoy your weekend,

Bill Bonner
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Why is it so difficult to sell a plummeting stock or end a doomed relationship? Why do we listen to advice just because it came from someone “important”? Why are we more likely to fall in love when there’s danger involved? In Sway, renowned organizational thinker Ori Brafman and his brother, psychologist Rom Brafman, answer all these questions and more.

Sway introduces us to the Harvard Business School professor who got his students to pay $204 for a $20 bill, the head of airline safety whose disregard for his years of training led to the transformation of an entire industry, and the football coach who turned conventional strategy on its head to lead his team to victory. We also learn the curse of the NBA draft, discover why interviews are a terrible way to gauge future job performance, and go inside a session with the Supreme Court to see how the world’s most powerful justices avoid the dangers of group dynamics.

2. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

What Ariely has done here is shift a lot of the thinking developed by such pioneers as Kahneman & Tversky who worked in behavioural economics, and moved it into the everyday sphere. And he’s done a great, insightful job. Where the behavioural economists are focused on financial decisions (why we buy high and sell low - and confound the assumptions of the classic economists who assume ‘the rational man,) Ariely eschews the technical language and walks us through everyday examples of our often fuzzy and quite irrational decision-making.

3. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

I think “Paradox of Choice” does bring insight into shopping, but its range is actually much wider than that. Schwartz discusses people making difficult decisions about jobs, families, where to live, whether to have children, how to spend recreational time, choosing colleges, etc. He talks about why making these decisions today is much harder than it was 30 years ago, and he offers many practical suggestions for how to address decision-making so that it creates less stress and more happiness. He even discusses how so much additional choice affects children, and how parents can help make childhood (particularly young childhood) less stressful.

4. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“Buy on apples, sell on cheese” is an old proverb among wine merchants. Taking a bite of an apple before tasting wine makes it easier to detect flaws in the wine, and the buyer who does so will not as easily make the mistake of paying more than the wine is worth. Cheese, on the other hand, pairs well with wine and enhances its flavor, so a seller who offers cheese may command a higher price for the wine (and may even deserve it, if the wine is intended to be drunk with cheese). The proverb captures important psychological nuances of choice. The same product - a bottle of wine or a risky medical procedure - may be perceived differently depending on its context, and it is often possible to arrange the context to influence a choice while still maintaining the decision maker’s autonomy.

5. Quirkology: How We Discover the Big Truths in Small Things

Richard Wiseman is an experimental psychologist and professor of “public understanding of psychology.” In this book, he discusses dozens of experiments performed by himself and other psychologists around the world over the course of the last hundred years. All these experiments have in common is unusual research methodology or amusing results.

Topics include studies of personal ads and pickup lines, determining which are most effective, how to detect liars, manifestations of prejudice and hypocrisy (are religious people or priests more honest or generous than others? it has been tested). Wiseman even ran tests to see which experiments in the book are the most interesting, to help the reader know what would be the best conversation starters at parties.

6. Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things

Clinical psychologist Van Hecke has compiled a list of 10 mental glitches that have infiltrated contemporary society, afflicting even the smartest among us, limiting thought, success and relationships. Van Hecke devotes a chapter to each blind spot, including “Not stopping to think,” “Not noticing,” “Jumping to conclusions” and “Missing the big picture.” Examining each in detail, Van Hecke details the root causes of these unconscious habits (”information overload,” “our tendency to habituate”) and tactics for overcoming them, using humorous anecdotes and other real-life examples to drive her points; the key is remaining open to new ideas and taking a step back from our busy lives in order to process information, situations and people. Filling in “the big picture” herself, Van Hecke demonstrates how embracing and understanding our weaknesses can not only improve personal and professional relationships, but also entire communities; this self-help is a welcome, highly readable first step.

7. Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

In “Kluge,” psychologist Gary Marcus looks to the many and varied foibles, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies of the human mind and concludes that our brains are not, in fact, models of brilliance and efficiency, but are rather cobbled-together systems, designed for one purpose and pressed into action for another - the classic definition of a kluge.

The most famous kluge is probably the case of the carbon scrubbers on the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission. Crunched for time, engineers managed to create a system out of duct tape and socks (seriously) that worked adequately enough to clean the air on the space module- even though none of the materials they used were designed for, or optimal for, the job at hand. The result was ugly and inefficient - but it kept the astronauts alive. Likewise, Marcus argues, evolution has endowed humans with a hodgepodge of genetic material - the DNA equivalent of duct tape - with which to build all the sophisticated systems that supposedly set us apart from other creatures, like language, memory, and reason. The result is, for example in the case of language, “a vocal apparatus more byzantine than a bagpipe made up entirely of pipe cleaners and cardboard dowels.”

8. The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

The author writes to the layman, making the language of statistics, probability, randomness a fascinating read. It’s clear that he’s well aware of the fallacies and delusions (and consequent harm) to which most of us are easy prey. But he leaves it to the reader to draw any philosophical-theological inferences about the need for greater humility. His immediate goal is to help the reader understand the distinction between 1. the “common-sense” logic employed by self-serving finite beings coping with problems in the material world and 2. a “scientific method” that takes nothing for granted in a universe of perpetual flux. More miraculous than either the accomplishments of the romantic hero or the intercessions of a supreme being (everyday stuff for most of us) is the rare discovery that two things (or “events” in the spatial-temporal order) suspected of being connected (a hypothesis) in fact cannot be shown “not” to have such a relationship (the proof).

9. Guesstimation: Solving the World’s Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin

Somehow, guessing at numbers is unsettling, even though I’ve done it all my life. John Adam is a professor of applied mathematics, with a degree in physics. Larry Weinstein is a nuclear physicist. Their book is devoted to proving that intelligent guessing is useful and fun. The book lays out some general principles but its great strength lies in the interesting problems, a series of hints to help you solve each problem, and an interesting discussion of the pitfalls and triumphs involved.

10. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Cialdini believes that influence is a science. This idea attracted me. As a rhetorician, I have always thought of persuasion as more of an art. Cialdini, however, makes a first-rate case for the science point of view. But maybe most importantly, he makes his case in a well-written, intelligent, and entertaining manner. Not only is this an important book to read, it is a fun book to read too.

He introduces you to six principles of ethical persuasion: reciprocity, scarcity, liking, authority, social proof, and commitment/consistency. A chapter is devoted to each and you quickly see why Cialdini looks at influence as a science. Each principle is backed by social scientific testing and restesting. Each chapter is also filled with interesting examples that help you see how each principle can be applied. By the end of the book, I had little doubt that these are six important dimensions of human interaction.

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1 Ignore them

If I come into a room and bounce up to Lou-Lou like a clown, trying to amuse and entertain, she blanks me completely. It’s as if I don’t exist. If I walk straight past her, however, I guarantee she will call out my name and want to play with me.

2 Bribe them

Gifts work. Preferably something noisy or sparkly. With Lou-Lou, that means stuffed animals that sing or sequined hair grips. With grown women, I suppose that equates to, say, cars and jewellery.

3 Compliment them

I’ve mistakenly always held that compliments are like diamonds: valuable only for their scarcity. Flood the market and they lose all value. Not so. Lou-Lou poos in her nappy, everyone cheers – as if she just came up with a workable solution to world hunger – and she beams like a lighthouse. The same works with grown women, although, of course, only the general principle applies rather than the specific example given here. (I learnt this one the hard way.)

4 Listen to them

I’ve spent my life trying to preempt what women want. I needn’t have bothered. If I just pay attention, Lou-Lou will tell me exactly what she wants: eat, dance, doll, jump, run, sing, play, read. Then all I have to do is organise it. How much simpler my life would have been if I had listened and acted accordingly.

5 Apologise

It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter if you don’t even know what you’ve done. I might have slighted Lou-Lou by putting the wrong doll in the pram. What seems to you or me like a minor infraction is, to her, on a par with genocide. The best policy is to throw yourself on her mercy and beg forgiveness. But you must sound sincere. You don’t have to be sincere, just sound sincere. This is so elementary, yet how many men ignore this advice?

6 Let them do it

Whatever “it” is. No matter how ridiculous it may seem to you, let her do it. When Lou-Lou gets an idea into her mind, there’s no talking her out of it. In fact, be supportive, encourage her even. Then sit back and hope she discovers for herself that it was a stupid idea. The downside is that she might decide it was an excellent idea. One day, I found myself playing dolls’ tea party for two whole hours and drank so many cups of imaginary tea, I was imaginary peeing all afternoon.

7 Don’t tell them what to do

The best way to guarantee that she doesn’t do what I want is by telling her to do it. The clever thing is to make it seem like her idea – and make it seem fun. One of my proudest moments was convincing Lou-Lou that watching the rugby World Cup final would be more fun than playing in the sandpit.

8 Don’t complain to them

This is a tricky one. What I mean by this is, don’t burden her with your petty problems. When I complain to Lou-Lou about a bad meeting or a sore back, she couldn’t care less, but if there’s genuinely something wrong, she will instinctively sense it and, with one hug, pick me up more than I thought possible.

9 Don’t argue

There’s simply no point. You will never win, and if you do win, it will be a hollow victory because of the mood she’ll be in for a long time afterwards. Quite frankly, who needs the aggro? This leads to my final and most important point:

10 Don’t make them cry

There is nothing more distressing than watching Lou-Lou’s enormous, innocent brown eyes overflow with tears, while her mouth becomes a gaping, drooling, mournful air-raid siren that pierces through to the core of my heart. I’m utterly defenceless when she cries. And there’s no known antidote. Food? Monkey impressions? A pony? Stabbing myself in the eye with a chopstick? I will agree to anything to stop her crying – and doesn’t she.

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Some people collect stamps, others collect comic books. The people on this list, however, collect things that are far, far stranger. Behold, Neatorama’s guide to the 25 Strangest Collections on the Web:

1. Graham Barker’s Navel Fluff Collection

Graham Barker’s Navel Fluff Collection

Some people see navel fluff or bellybutton lint as life’s little annoyances. Not Graham Barker: he began collecting them since 1984, and now has the world’s largest collection of navel fluff according to Guiness Book of World Records:

It was on the 17th of January 1984 that I found myself under-occupied in a youth hostel in Brisbane. The night was steamy and stormy - too wet outside and too hot inside to do very much, and my attention drifted to my belly button. There it was … fluff! I must have seen it before that night, but this occasion was the first time I ever picked it out and wondered about it. I became curious about how much navel fluff one person could generate (enough to stuff a cushion, maybe?), and the only way to find for sure was to collect it and see. My first piece of navel fluff was stored in an empty film canister, and the collection had begun.

Link

2. Air Sickness Bag Virtual Museum

Like its name implies, the Air Sickness Bag Virtual Museum is all about vomit bags. Indeed, it catalogs more than 2,000 photos of air sickness bags from all over the world.

In addition to airplane air sickness bags, the website also has a collection of bus sickness, sea sickness, and even space sickness bags!

Though most are underwhelming in terms of design, some are actually quite artistic. Virgin Atlantic airlines even held a “Design for Chunks” project in 2004, where artists submit their designs to be put as a limited edition barf bags!

Before you check out the website, I’ll leave you with a few of the more unusual bags from the Visitor’s Favorite section:

From left to right: Brooklyn Artist Sarah Nicole Phillip’s Little Brown Barf Bag, a parody of Bloomingdale’s Little Brown Bag; The Space Shuttle Sickness (”Emesis”) Bag; Barf Bag One, unfortunately only a gag gift and not the real thing.

Link

3. Joseph W. Lauher’s Handcuffs

If you want to collect handcuffs, then Joseph W. Lauher is your man, and handcuffs.org is the website to see. Indeed, Joseph has the largest collection of handcuffs (with focus on vintage ones), leg irons, nippers, and thumbcuffs on the Web: Link

What’s a nipper and a thumbcuff? Well, a nipper is a handcuff that locks only one hand, but has a handle for keeping the cuffed person under control (Photo to the left is a 1888 nipper made by Thomas & Smith).

A thumbcuff, like its name implies, cuffs both of the person’s thumbs.

4. Bob Toelle’s Fish Posters

Bob Toelle collects posters - but not any poster, just the ones about fish - and he’s got a lot of it. Currently, Bob has more than 700 fish posters from around the world: Link

5. Medical Antiques by Douglas Arbittier, M.D.

Amputation set by Ferris & Co., Bristol (c. 1885)

Dr. Douglas Arbittier collects old medical equipments, and specializes in cased surgical sets. His collection includes a lot of amputation saws, and bloodletting artifacts (leech jar, anyone?).

When you visit his website, keep what Dr. Arbittier said in mind: “be thankful you live in today’s medical world …“: Link

6. Barney Smith’s Toilet Seat Art

Texan artist Barney Smith has an unusual choice of art medium: toilet seats! For the past 30 years, Barney had created over 700 artistically decorated toilet seat lids. Check it out here: Link

7. Sergei Frolov’s Soviet Calculators

W.T. Odhner Arithmometer (1890)

Sergei Frolov has a fantastic collection of over 150 Soviet-made calculators, as well as vintage computers, watches and slide rules. I’m particularly fond of the old mechanical arithmometers, as shown above: Link

8. Phil Miller’s Sugar Packets

Phil Miller is a sucrologist - meaning that he collects sugar packets and sugar cube wrappers. Indeed, Phil has been collecting since 1978 when he started with the Presidents of the United States sugar packets, and he hasn’t looked back since. Life must be sweet if you collect sugar packets … Link

9. The Asphalt Museum

The Asphalt Museum is actually a real museum in a real building in Sacramento, California, but it’s weird enough that we’ll just have to include it on this list. It has a large collection of (you guessed it) everything asphalt.

The museum was founded by Scott Gordon and Marie Vans in 1991, while both attended Colorado State University.

In addition to asphalt “samples” from famous (like Route 66, Highway I, and the ancient Roman road Appian Way) and not-so-famous roads, the museum also has a recipe on how to make your own asphalt: Link

10. Gideon Weiss’ Back Scratchers

Gideon Weiss must’ve had one really itchy back when he started collecting back scratchers. His online collection has grown to include 236 of the strangest back scratchers I’ve ever seen: Link

11. Michael Lewis’ Moist Towelettes

Michael Lewis welcomes visitors to his website with these warm words: “Welcome to the exciting world of Moist Towelette Collecting.”

Though I’m not sure just how wet naps would rank in the excitement scale, Michael’s collection sure is something: Link

Don’t miss the “Awards” section!

12. Nancy Alford’s Mangles

What is a mangle? You’ll be forgiven if you don’t know what it is: a mangle is a cast iron contraption with two wooden rollers, a spring, and a side wheel with handle. Its function is to wring clothes dry after you wash them, so obviously it’s now obsolete with the invention dryers and all …

A few years ago, Nancy Alford was in a local department store when she saw, and fell in love with, a mangle. For her sixteenth wedding anniversary, Nancy wanted (and got) - you guessed it, a mangle. Her husband thought she was mad.

Since then, she has collected so many of them that they had to build a new house (which she aptly named Mangleten) to fit all her mangles. Link

13. Victor Paul Taylor’s Scratchcard Collection

Victor Taylor is a lotologist (yes, a made up word meaning someone who collects lottery tickets). He has a particular interest in “Instants” Scratchcards, produced by Camelot for the UK National Lottery. As far as I can tell, none of the scratchcards have been scratched, so he’s sitting on a potential goldmine worth bazillions!

Check out his incredibly detailed collection, which starts with the 1995 issues: Link

14. Lydia’s AOL CDs

Younger Neatorama readers may not be familiar with AOL CDs, but the rest of us surely remember getting spammed with tons of these discs from America Online.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, AOL produced over a billion CDs (with over 1,000 distinct designs) for its direct mail campaign. The strategy was a huge success: AOL became the largest dial-up Internet Service Provider in the world (for a while anyway). After its fateful merger with Time Warner and the decline of dial-up as a mean of accessing the web, the company stopped producing the discs in 2006.

But fear not. Lydia of Lydia’s AOL Disks shares with us her collection of over 2,500 unique AOL diskettes and CDs. Check it out here: Link

15. Museum of Burnt Food

The Museum of Burnt Food is dedicated to accidentally burnt food, er … carbonized culinary masterpieces (no intentionally burned artwork there!). The museum was founded by harpist Deborah Henson Conant, who recounted this tale:

The museum was founded in the late 1980’s one night when Deborah put on a small pot of Hot Apple Cider to heat, then received an unexpected . . . fascinating . . . and very long phone call. By the time Deborah returned to the kitchen, the Cider had become a “Cinder” and thus the first, and perhaps still the most impressive, exhibit: “Free Standing Hot Apple Cider” was born.

SINCE THEN, countless other works have entered the museum, such as “Thrice Baked Potato,” “Why Sure, You Can Bake Quiche in the Microwave,” the indestructible “Mmmm……Soy Pups,” and the lovely matching set of Pizza Toast.

Deborah has a tip on kitchen decorating, which I think everyone should heed: “Never scrimp on fire extinguishers and smoke alarms.” She would know now: Link

16. Steve Salcedo’s Street Sign and Traffic Light Collection

From left to right: Auto Club of Southern California Stop Sign (c. 1940); Children “Wanted Alive” sign, the equivalent of “Slow - Children at Play” sign (c. 1950); “T” Intersection with Marble Reflector (c. 1940); Eagle 4-way 12″ Beacons (c. 1930)

Steve Salcedo’s fascination with street signs and traffic lights began when he received a bulletin board about traffic signs when he was just a small boy. Two years later, his collection was well under way.

Currently, Steve has over 350 street signs in his collection - all legal (rescued from street departments before they were scrapped, purchased from antique stores, flea markets, etc.): Link

17. The Chocolate Wrappers Museum

In 1996, Martin Mihál’s began collecting empty chocolate wrappers from around the world with a sizeable collection of 674 wrappers. A decade later, his collection grew to an astounding 38,579 wrappers! Martin has over 8,700 wrappers from Germany alone and even a few wrappers from far-flung countries like Oman and Uzbekistan.

So, the next time you eat a chocolate, think of Martin before you throw away the wrapper! Link

18. Becky Martz’s Banana Labels

In 1991, Becky Martz first noticed banana labels when she put two bunches of bananas in the fruit bowl together. She noticed that the “Dole” labels actually weren’t quite the same: one said Guatemala and the other said Honduras. Later that year, she noticed a particularly festive Chiquita label and decided that she wanted to collect banana labels.

Today, Becky has more than 7,000 different banana labels and even branched out to collect asparagus and broccoli bands.

If you think that this is a strange hobby, well, … it is. But Becky isn’t alone: there are others like her in the world, and they even have their own Banana Sticker Collector Convention. Check out Becky’s collection here: Link

19. Museum of Talking Boards

The Museum of Talking Boards is all about collecting Ouija boards. The site is quite neat: it explains the history of the board, theory as to how it works, as well as things you should never do or ask.

And, of course, it has a fantastic gallery of over 80 antique talking boards.

The board above is the original Ouija board, created by Elijah Bond and Charles Kennard and produced in 1891 by Kennard Novelty Company.

Visit the Museum of Talking Boards here: Link

20. Scott Weed’s Date Nails

Date Nail is exactly that: a marked nail hammered into poles and bridge timbers to identify or date them.

Scott Weed of Nailhunter, who has a huge collection of these nails, wrote that “unlike most collectibles, Date Nails can still be found in the wild. With a couple of tools, some spare time and transportation, the world of Date Nail is open to everyone.”

Indeed, but for now, I presume all of you will just satisfy yourself with visiting his website: Link

21. Dr. Val Kolpakov’s Toothpaste Collection

Dr. Val Kolpakov is a practicing dentist in Saginaw, Michigan, so it’s only natural that he has an unnatural affinity to toothpaste.

Starting in 2002, Dr. Val began collecting toothpaste from around the world. His website, Toothpaste World, categorizes toothpastes according to location, brand name, and year of production. Right now, he has over 1,400 items: Link

I’d be remiss if I didn’t share with you a toothpaste trivia from Dr. Val’s website. Here’s the world’s oldest known formula for toothpaste:

The world’s oldest-known formula for toothpaste, used more than 1,500 years before Colgate began marketing the first commercial brand in 1873, has been discovered on a piece of dusty papyrus in the basement of a Viennese museum.

In faded black ink made of soot and gum arabic mixed with water, an ancient Egyptian scribe has carefully described what he calls a “powder for white and perfect teeth”.

When mixed with saliva in the mouth, it forms a “clean tooth paste”.

According to the document, written in the fourth century AD, the ingredients needed for the perfect smile are one drachma of rock salt - a measure equal to one hundredth of an ounce - two drachmas of mint, one drachma of dried iris flower and 20 grains of pepper, all of them crushed and mixed together.

The result is a pungent paste which one Austrian dentist who tried it said made his gums bleed but was a “big improvement” on some toothpaste formulae used as recently as a century ago.

22. Weird Fortune Cookie Collection

Ever got a strange fortune from a fortune cookie? Well, it belongs in the ever-growing collection at Weird Fortune Cookie Collection. Seriously, head on over there and browse their gallery (preferably after a nice little Kung Pao Chicken meal): Link

23. British Lawnmower Museum

British Anzani Lawnrider (c. 1960)

The tireless curators of the British Lawnmower Museum, Brian and Sue Radam, dedicate their lives to preserving the best example of British engineering prowess: the lawnmower!

The lawnmower was invented in 1827 by English engineer Edwin Beard Budding, who wanted a superior alternative to the scythe. He took a machine designed to cut the knap off cloth and used it to cut grass instead. At the time, people thought that he was mad, so he tested his invention in the middle of the night so no one could see him!

The British Lawnmower Museum’s now has over 200 vintage lawnmowers and part of 400 others: Link

24. Helena Vnouckova’s Napkins

Napkins: you use and throw them away, but Helena Vnouckova collects them. A lot of them - in fact, she has over 16,000 napkins from around the world (with sets of Christmas themed napkins, company napkins, and even airline napkins): Link

25. Museum of Hoaxes

I’m going to end this long list with Neatorama pal Alex Boese’s excellent website: Museum of Hoaxes.

Alex Boese probably has the strangest collection of them all: he collects stories about and examples of scams and hoaxes! In 1997, Alex created the Museum of Hoaxes as research notes for his doctoral dissertation, and the website quickly became popular. So much so that Alex the “hoaxpert” wrote three books which we have featured on Neatorama before: The Museum of Hoaxes, Hippo Eats Dwarf, and Elephants on Acid And Other Bizarre Experiments.

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If you haven’t seen it before (perhaps you’ve been living under a rock), then definitely check out the Museum of Hoaxes: Link - you won’t be disappointed!

If you or someone you know has an unusual collection we should list here, please let me know in the comment section!

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But one man’s problem is another man’s solution. Rather than to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars for a domain name on the aftermarket, an increasing number of web entrepreneurs turn to professional “domain namers??.

While most naming agencies charge a non-refundable fee that can be as high as $1500 for a corporate domain, one service that unites 17 professional domain namers from countries like United States, Russia, Australia and New Zealand, decided to offer a risk-free service that costs only 50 dollars per domain.

After 50 dollars are deposited, clients start getting a list of available domain names via e-mail for a period of 30 days. If they see a domain they like, they register it and notify the service about domain acquired. The individual, who came up with the name, gets $25, the other half going to the service. If no domain is registered, the money is refunded in full.

While the idea is brainlessly simple, it appears that PickyDomains.Com has no competition with its risk-free business model. But that is almost certain to change as more people find out that finding available domain names for other people can be a profitable business.

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Couldn’t be further from the truth, folks. Colour in beer comes purely from the grain used in its creation, with darker beers containing more toasted or roasted barley malt and paler beers containing less or no darker malts. And roasting malt doesn’t make it heavier or more caloric.

Myth #2 – Ale is Stronger than Lager

The funny thing about this popular North American myth is that Brits think the exact opposite, with the perception in the U.K. being that way because best bitters normally sit around 4% alcohol by volume and lagers generally come in around 5%. The truth is that alcohol comes from the amount of sugars provided for fermentation and has nothing to do with whether that fermentation takes place at warmer (ale) or cooler (lager) temperatures.

Myth #3 – Beer Makes You Fat

Inactivity and bad diet make you fat. Beer, when enjoyed in moderation and as part of balanced lifestyle, doesn’t.

Myth #4 – Stout is a “Meal in a Glass”

Most stouts are no more caloric or filling than the yellow lager many people knock back by the pint on a Saturday night. The reason we think otherwise is because we expect something that has a very dark colour to be richer than something that’s pale. See Myth #1.

Myth #5 – Bock is Brewed Each Spring After the Brewing Tanks are Cleaned

This one is so prevalent that it even made it into the pages of the landmark Time-Life book series, “Foods of the World,” in the “Wine and Spirits” volume. The idea is that the brewer cleans his or her tanks once a year and ferments the gunk scraped off the sides into a beer called bock. Suffice to say that any brewer who did this once wouldn’t be in business long enough to do it again. (Bock is simply a Germanic style of strong lager, likely originating in the town of Einbeck, from which the corruption “bock” was formed.)

Myth #6 – Cold-Filtering

Here’s one from the marketing geniuses behind the big breweries. Simply, all beer is cold-filtered, since only a fool would run their beer through a “hot filter,” even if such a thing did exist in a brewery. What the use of this phrase is really saying, usually, is that the beer is not pasteurized, as are many of the world’s biggest selling brands.

Myth #7 – Draught Gets You Drunk Faster than Bottled Beer (or Vice Versa)

Here’s what gets you drunk: Alcohol. Whether it comes from bottled or draught beer, wine, cocktails or straight spirits doesn’t matter.

Myth #8 – Imported Beer is Better than Domestic Beer

Almost every brewer exporting his or her beer to a foreign destination exploits this myth at one time or another, whether implicitly or explicitly. But that fact remains that beer from any given country is not necessarily going to be better than that from another, as witnessed by some of the great beers I’ve tasted from non-traditional brewing countries like Italy and Brazil, or some of the poor ones I’ve had from brewing powers like England and Belgium.

Myth #9 – Wine is More Complex Than Beer

Give me a break! I enjoy wine as much as the next drinker, and I appreciate the complexities and nuances of a truly fine zinfandel or sauvignon blanc, but how can a drink made from a single ingredient, grapes, be necessarily more complex in flavour than one made from a minimum of water, malt and hops and an almost limitless diversity of other ingredients? Ever find coriander or cumin notes in a wine? No? Well, you can in a beer.

Myth #10 – “That Beer I Had last Night Made Me Sick”

Maybe the scallops you ate at dinner made you sick, or perhaps you picked up a contaminant from somewhere else or simply drank too much. But being a boiled and fermented alcoholic beverage, the chances of a beer causing illness is very, very, very slight.

Myth #11 – Fruit Beers Are “Girly Beers”

Get it straight: Hops only started being used in brewing about 1,000 to 1,200 years ago. Up until then, for at least five millennia, beer was flavoured with a wide variety of spices, herbs and, yes, fruits. In fact, archeological research has shown that King Tut drank fruit beer, and he was one dude you could hardly consider “girly.”

Myth #12 – Ales Are Necessarily Better Than Lagers

This common though misguided beer aficionado myth stems largely from the fact that most major brewery brands are lagers, and the vast majority of those lie low on the flavour meter. But as many excellent lager brewers show, cold-fermented beers like Ontario’s King Pilsner, Live Oak Pilz from Texas and the classic Budweiser Budvar from the Czech Republic, sold in North America as Czechvar, can be every bit as flavourful, complex and rewarding as any ale.

Myth #13 – Canadian Beer is Stronger Than American Beer

A popular perception from the bad old days of major brewery domination, this one stemmed from the fact that, until recently, American breweries measured their alcohol contents by weight while Canadians used volume measures. Since 4% alcohol by weight is equal to 5% by volume, north-of-the-border brews were thought to be more potent than their southern cousins. Today, with 1,400 breweries in the States and another couple of hundred in Canada, this shouldn’t even be remotely considered as valid.

Myth #14 – German Wheat Beers Are Flavoured With Bananas and Cloves

The Bavarian Purity Law of 1516, called the Reinheitsgebot, mandates that beer be made from only malted grain, hops and water, with yeast as a given. So no, there are no fruits or spices in the Bavarian style of wheat beer variously known as hefeweizen, weissbier or hefeweissbier. What causes the banana and clove flavours and aromas normally associated with these brews are the particular yeasts used to ferment them.

Myth #15 – Beer and Fine Dining Don’t Mix

With its wealth of flavours and finely nuanced characters, the world of beer has a style to pair with any food, from the commonplace to the extravagant. (See Myth #9 for more on this.) The reason we tend to place wine at the table rather than beer is because that’s what the French do, and the western world learned much of what it knows about fine dining from the French.

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Much as government mandated easy credit propelled home prices to bubble levels, similar forces pushed college tuitions up to the stratosphere. Both systems are currently breaking down along similar lines.

In light of the staggering cost of college education today, it may seem unbelievable that my father in the early 1950s was able to finance his own education with a summer job waiting tables. Like most in his generation, eight weeks of work per year allowed him to graduate debt free. In contrast, the debt burden now heaped on today’s college graduates is so oppressive that the financial challenges are becoming a palpable psychological strain on an entire generation.

The irony is that without easy access to student loans, which have been touted as a means to ease college affordability, tuitions never could have risen so high in the first place. Sadly, it is not students who have benefited, but the educational establishment that receives the proceeds. Colleges collect huge sums of money up front while students get saddled with staggering balances.

Now that repaying loans has become increasingly difficult for home buyers and students (especially since the home equity well has run dry and the employment market has cooled), more debtors are defaulting. As a result, the market for securitized loans, which has completely dried up in the mortgage market, is now equally desolate for student loans. Here again, the government is being asked to pick up the slack by buying existing student loans and issuing new loans directly to students.

In so doing, the government is helping to sustain high tuitions just as similar actions are working to prop up real estate prices. If the government stayed out of the student loan market, students would not be denied educations. Colleges and universities would simply be forced to offer affordable tuitions or go out of business –just the way they used to back in my father’s day. Similarly, if the government allowed real estate prices to collapse, Americans would not have to take on so much debt to buy houses.

To buy up all of these loans, the Fed is running the printing presses non-stop. As a result, prices of other goods, such as food and energy, are spiraling out of control.

Of course, mainstream Wall Street firms and the conventional financial media do not see this obvious connection. While CNBC searches the world for clues to this “mystery”, no one sees the evidence “hiding” in plain sight. Higher prices simply result from all the money printing, both by the Fed and foreign central banks trying to maintain currency pegs to a sinking dollar.

It is amazing how those who were completely blindsided by the surge in food prices are now so quick to come up with ridiculous reasons to explain the phenomenon. However, for those of us who actually understand what inflation is, predicting the current surge in food prices was a no brainer. Read one of my commentaries from Oct. of 2006 and see for yourself.

Similarly, analysts are blaming $120 oil on the hidden machinations of greedy speculators. They buttress these claims by noting that absent a bona fide oil shortage, current prices are not justified by fundamentals. This overlooks that while there is no shortage, there is also no surplus. The market is in perfect equilibrium at today’s price, and recent spikes merely reflect the substantial increase in global money supply. If today’s prices really were artificially high, like house prices, they would be a glut of oil in storage facilities while users, priced out of an inflated market, cut back on their consumption (This is precisely what is happening in the real estate market).

As consumers are getting wise to inflation, they are beginning to stock up on those products showing the most rapid price increases. This week, Cosco and Sam’s Club began to limit bulk purchases of rice. After all, if you have the cash why not by the things you know you will need in the future now, before the prices go any higher. My guess is that if home storage were possible, consumers would be buying as much gasoline and home heating oil as they could currently afford…they might even load up their credit cards to do so. After airfares (which unfortunately cannot be stockpiled), apparel may be next major category of goods that will experience rapid price increases. Why not buy a few extra pairs of socks while they are still cheap?

As the government creates more inflation, and prices for all sorts of consumer goods spiral upward, the authorities, as they always have, will institute price controls and other forms of rationing of consumer staples. My advice is to stock up now, before you end up having to spend hours waiting in line.

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“Da Vinci’s family was indeed a large one. His father Piero married not his mother, but four other women. His mother Caterina was married off to another man and had five children of her own. That’s what you would call an enlarged family,” Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the Museo Ideale in the Tuscan town of Vinci, told Discovery News.

Very little has been known about da Vinci’s mother and the circumstances of his birth. The only account dates to a 1457 tax record in which the artist’s grandfather listed the members of his family and briefly described his grandson:

“Lionardo, aged 5, the illegitimate child of Ser Piero and Caterina, who at present is married to Acchattabriga di Piero del Vaccha da Vinci.”

Beyond this, scholars had very little to go on. While Ser Piero was easily identified as a Florentine notary, nothing was known about Caterina. As legend has it, she was a peasant girl from Vinci.

Now, 30-year-old research conducted by the late director of the Leonardo Library, published by his son Francesco, suggests a completely different scenario.

“Archival research has shown that there isn’t any Caterina in Vinci or nearby villages that can be linked to Ser Piero. The only Caterina in Piero’s life seems to be a slave girl who lived in the house of his wealthy friend Vanni di Niccolo di Ser Vanni,” Cianchi wrote.

Evidence for “the slave Caterina” comes from Vanni’s newly discovered will. The wealthy banker named his friend Ser Piero the executor of his will, and left most of his estate to a religious order. He left the slave girl to his wife Agnola and his Florentine house in via Ghibellina to Ser Piero.

“No official document for the liberation of Caterina exists, but something important must have happened at Vanni’s death in 1451,” Vezzosi said.

The man who would father Leonardo da Vinci did not move into his inherited home right away because Agnola, Vanni’s widow, still lived there. It’s likely, scholars now believe, that Ser Piero agreed to allow Agnola to remain in the house until she died in exchange for the slave girl Caterina’s freedom.

Indeed, records show that Agnola hired a new servant after Vanni’s death.

Meanwhile, no trace exists of the slave girl after 1451; she simply disappeared from documents. According to Cianchi’s research, Ser Piero did not move into his inherited house until Agnola’s death, but there are no records of other inhabitants in the home.

A few months later, on April 15, 1452, Leonardo was born in Vinci. It is known that his mother Caterina married Acchattabriga di Piero del Vaccha da Vinci only a few months after she gave birth.

“The hypothesis that it is the same Caterina that lived in Vanni’s house is very strong,” Vezzosi said.

The claim is supported by recent research suggesting the Italian genius was of Arabic descent, following analysis of his fingerprint.

“It was common in Renaissance Florence to own slaves from the Middle East and the Balkans. At the time of Leonardo’s birth there were more than 550 slaves in Florence, meaning that all the wealthy families had slaves in their houses. The girls were baptized and renamed. The most popular names were Maria, Marta and Caterina,” Agnese Sabato said.

If little is known about Caterina’s life — except that her husband might have had a temper (the name Acchattabriga means “ready to pick a quarrel” ) — researchers have been able to draw a much clearer picture about the private life of Ser Piero.

“Documents tell us that just after Leonardo’s birth, Ser Piero, who was about 26 years old, married a young girl named Albiera Amadori. He then married other three times,” Elisabetta Ulivi, author of the book on da Vinci’s family tree, said.

Ser Piero had at least 16 children — eight of whom were born in the last 20 years of his life.

Da Vinci seemed to have had a difficult relationship with his half-sisters and brothers.

“Many of Leonardo’s travels to Florence were indeed associated with family issues. He had several fights related to money and inheritance,” Vezzosi said.

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Maki Kaji makes 4 million dollars a year … creating sudoku and kakuru puzzles. His private company, with just 20 employees, had annual sales of about $4 million in 2006. The core of his business is 50000 website members who test different versions of sudoku puzzles before the hit the market to determine winners. How many sudoku millionaires do you know?

Books Lambert - http://www.thebeerbelly.com

Books Lambert, who runs TheBeerbelly.com as president of Under Development Inc., is also someone who might have been viewed by some as having a less-than-perfect business model for his venture. But — after the press picked up on his contraption and he got 1 million hits to his fledgling site, as well as about 80 calls from offline media, including CNN and the like — he sold his electronics company, turned toward inventing full-time and his beer belly is jiggling as he laughs all the way to the bank. He just cleared a million. Lambert also uses a potent mix of marketing savvy and passion, spiced with some serendipity, to run his site. The Beerbelly, by the way, is a neoprene bag that fits under a shirt and can be used to avoid paying $9 for drafts at sporting events. This guy is my hero!

Patrick Misterovich - http://www.pezmp3.com

In July 2004, Patrick Misterovich was a stay-at-home dad when he read an article featuring an entrepreneur who had turned Altoid tins into iPod speakers. The idea inspired the 40-year-old ex-IT administrator to make a list of other possible candies and electronics that could be combined: laser pointers, Life Savers, USB drives. But nothing seemed to fit until he noticed “MP3 players” and “Pez dispensers” sitting idly on his list like two lost souls waiting for someone to play Cupid. The response has been positive, and current sales are