Hey guys, I'm Elliott Morgan. You might recognize me from YouTube.com/ElliottMorgan or YouTube.com/Mashable. This is Mental Floss on YouTube and

1. did you know that you could get a job as a planetarium technician? This is the person who is in charge of the sound and projection equipment used in planetarium shows. They create special effects and select music and synchronize the recorded commentary and the visual presentation.

And that is just the first of many unusual occupations that I'm going to tell you about today.

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2. Let's start with something fun: an ice cream taste tester.  Professional testers sample around a pint of ice cream a day. They also brainstorm ideas for new flavors and taste combinations. But, it can get tough at times. Apparently taste testers at Haagen-Dazs spent four years looking for the perfect brownie.

3. For people who hate dairy there is the dog food taster job. A few companies hire humans to taste test pet food for quality control. For this job you actually need pretty nuanced senses: knowing both what animals like to taste and what owners like to smell. 

4. Final taste job there is the poison taster which is not as bad as it sounds. This person tastes food of elected officials for poison. So, for the sake of these workers, let's try to not elect officials who eat kale. Anyway, American tasters actually oversee all food preparation when the President goes out.

5. And while I'm talking about food: a banana room cutter prepares shipments of bananas by cutting hands of them. That's what they call a tier of around twenty bananas from stalks.

If all that food talk made you hungry, I'm going to try to solve that problem by describing the next few jobs.

6. Being an odor tester can earn you thirty-nine thousand dollars a year. These are the people who smell perfume and wine and air fresheners. The downside, if they're working for a deodorant company, the job might involve smelling the occasional armpit. 

7. A Porta Potty cleaner puts on a nose clip and then uses a tank and vacuum wand to suck up the contents of a Porta Potty. They then restock it with supplies and clean its walls. Gross.

8. Another tough job that has to get done: HAZMAT diving. These divers are called when pipes need to be repaired, objects are lost, or bodies need to be recovered. They swim in places like sewage, contaminated ponds, vats of oil sludge, and paper pulp tanks. This is actually giving me a lot of inspiration for some games of would you rather.

9. Let's move on to something a little nicer: a professional LEGO builder is an artist who uses LEGOs to construct projects. On their website, LEGO lists twelve certified professionals, including Sean Kenney who was once commissioned by a LEGO store in Chicago to create three huge replicas of famous Chicago buildings. His Tribune building is four feet tall, the Water Tower Place is six feet tall, and the Trump Tower is ten feet tall. These three contain a combined total of a hundred and twenty-six thousand LEGOs. That's too many LEGOs. I'm just kidding you can't have too many LEGOs. 

10. A professional RC vehicle racer travels the world racing customized radio controlled vehicles on tiny tracks for prize money.

11. Speaking of childhood dreams: an amusement park ride tester, or forensic ride engineer, test drives rides. They point out faults in the rides and check for any potential dangers. I will do that for you for free. 

12. If you prefer circuses to amusement parks: Circus laborers are responsible for the cages of all the big animals. They load and unload animals and equipment on and off the train. Plus, they set up and take down some pretty large tents. 

13. Speaking of animals: A deer urine farmer is someone who collects and sells undiluted white tail pee. The good stuff. People buy deer urine to use as hunting lures. A typical deer farmer makes between ninety-three thousand and three-hundred and three thousand dollars off of one deer each year. So, if you own a deer farm with over a hundred deer, you're doing pretty well for yourself. 

14. Road-kill collectors search roads for carcasses and then play Frogger with traffic and dispose of the bodies at landfills and compost heaps depending on state laws. Some of them just take them home. 

15. Frog picklers work for the biological suppliers who preserve animals like frogs and cats and pigs for students. The animals need to be embalmed and then injected with colored latex. The latex helps students locate arteries and veins. Unless the students are like me in which case they're not even looking at the dead animal because they don't want to barf and that's gross.

16. Another job that's not for the easily queasy: crime scene cleaner. A few of their responsibilities, uh, involve sweeping up gore, breaking down Meth labs, and cleaning anthrax scares. It's also your job if you work for Olivia Pope. Or if you work for Walter White. Jesse. 

17. Today's smaller mattress companies employ people to jump on their mattresses to compress the cotton material and make sure there are no bumps in the layers. They're called mattress jumpers. They used to hire monkeys, but they'd fall off and bump their little heads. 

18. A comic book inspector looks over classic comic and then inspects them for damage. Upon completion, the book is slabbed in a tamper proof plastic case to seal the condition.

19. Speaking of old stuff: a museum technician molds and restores skeletal parts of fossils. They also reassemble fragmented artifacts and then fabricate substitute pieces. 

20. A snow maker makes the snow for ski resorts. This involves using very large equipment like a snow gun or snow cannon which turns water and pressurized air into snow like magic.

21. Speaking of nature: a kelp cutter lowers a mower into water from a kelp harvesting boat. Then, they monitor the mower as kelp builds up in the boat.

22. If you're looking for some acting practice (I know I am), many medical schools will hire fake patients to help future physicians hone their bedside manner. 

23. At a casino, the keno writer takes bets, operates the machines, and then calls the numbers. They also scan winning tickets, calculate the winnings, and then pay the winners. You know, if anybody were to actually win keno. 

24. We have box-toe buffers to thank for our perfectly buffed shoes. They hold shoe parts to an abrasive cylinder or wire roughing wheel which polish the part. Other job requirements include putting a shoe sole between a rubber presser roller and an abrasive covered roller which gets it ready to be added to the shoe. 

25. Moving on to the band salvager profession: cotton bales are bound together with tie bands. The band salvager recycles these so they can be used more than once. This involves straightening the bands with a rubber mallet or power rollers and then cutting them to the required lengths. 

26. And finally I return to the salon to tell you that in 2010, six people in Moscow locked themselves in a mock spacecraft for four-hundred and ninety days. They wanted to see if it was possible to travel in deep space, specifically Mars, without going insane. So they spent two-hundred and fifty days in the craft, thirty days exploring a model of the Martian landscape, and then two-hundred and forty more days back in the spacecraft. That is a total of five-hundred and twenty days of solitude. And thus the fake astronaut profession was born. 

Thank you for watching Mental Floss on YouTube which is made with the help of all these nice people. Every week we endeavor to answer one of your mind blowing questions. This weeks question comes from Danny Harwood who asks "Who invented the straw?" Marvin Stone is the inventor of the modern drinking straw which was patented in 1888. Before his invention, people used natural rye grass straws which were gross because they made everything taste vaguely like grass. The legend goes that Stone was tired of his mint juleps tasting like something other than mint and Bourbon so, he invented a straw made out of paper instead of grass. 

If you have a mind blowing question you would like answered, leave it below in the comments and we'll try to answer it. Thanks again for watching and DFTBA.