ARIS: Mental Floss Magazine

Another “Abalook Recommended Interesting Site”: Mental Floss Magazine.

In the USA Mental Floss Magazine is an actual magazine (I have not seen it in Australia, but I could have missed it). It is also a Web site.

As can be seen in the grab of their masthead below the Mental Floss catchcry is “Where knowledge junkies get their fix” (Ctrl+Click the masthead to open Mental Floss in a New tab).

The content on the Mental Floss site is vast and varied and includes stuff like:

• a witty blog contributed to by the various ‘staff’ at Mental Floss;
• a semi-regular Brain Game;
• insights to life such as the link to Inforgraphic which points out serious stuff such as waitresses with bigger boobies get bigger tips (apparently a researched and confirmed fact);
• lots of quizzes like ‘The Movie Quote Quizz”, “The Monty Python Phase Quizz”, “Which Came First?”, “Where Is The Bone”, “The Griswald Family Quizz”, and many more;
• little know amazing facts such as ‘the genetic mutation that causes red hair also causes redheads to be more resistant to anaesthetics’; and
• general, almost completely useless trivia, such as ‘The 25 Most Powerful Movies of the Past 25 Years’.

From what I can work out there is stuff on the Web site that is not in the magazine, and there is stuff in the magazine that is not on the Web site.

One of the regular blog postings at Mental Floss is the “Morning Cup ‘O’ Links” posting by Miss Cellania. In this very short almost-daily blog posting Miss Cellania blogs about ten or so links that may, or may not, be of some interest.

There is also a post “Weekend Links” where Allison Keene posts a handful of links for surfing through over the weekend; assuming you have nothing a whole lot better to do over the weekend for about two or so hours.

As you would gather from the masthead the aim of Mental Floss would appear to be to impart knowledge to people.

In a way Mental Floss site is sort of a YALB (yet another linking blog) in that many of the articles and posts contain links to other sites however it is done in such a way that it does not come across as a bland and boring YALB.

I will confess that when I am working away from home and living out of a motel I have spent a number of hours laying in bed with my notebook trawling around Mental Floss waiting to get tired enough to go to sleep.

I have even checked a number of newsagents for the magazine but have not come across it anywhere.