Today I found out the Christmas song Silver Bells was originally called Tinkle Bells. To make matters slightly more humorous, Silver Bells originally appeared in the The Lemon Drop Kid, a 1951 film starring Bob Hope. Needless to say, these two things would have surely resulted in the song getting a few chuckles, had composer Jay Livingston’s wife, Lynne Gordon, […]
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This Day In History: December 13, 1809 On this day in history, 1809, the woman who would soon become the first to survive an oophorectomy was diagnosed as not being pregnant past term, as she had thought, but having an extremely large tumor, which isn’t that different than a baby when you think about it, but you know… bigger, in […]
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This Day In History: December 12, 1901 On this day in history, 1901, Nobel Prize winner Guglielmo Marconi’s radio device became the first such device to successfully transmit a signal all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, from Poldhu, Cornwall, UK to Signal Hill in St. John’s Newfoundland, Canada, a span of about 2100 miles. His receiving device used a […]
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Rob asks: What is eggnog actually made of? Does it really have raw eggs in it? Traditionally, yes, eggnog included raw eggs. However, some countries today, such as the United States, severely restrict the use of raw egg in products, due to health concerns; thus, most commercial eggnog does not include raw eggs. (The FDA actually limits the egg yolk […]
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This Day In History: December 11, 1972 On this day in history, 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan landed on the moon, becoming the last human beings to walk on the moon. Throughout the Apollo missions which spanned from 1961 to 1972, a total of 24 people journeyed to the moon with twelve of them getting to […]
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Milly asks: Where did candy canes originally come from and how did they get associated with Christmas? First, let’s start by dispelling a somewhat popular myth that more or less goes like this: The white base color of the candy cane symbolizes Jesus’ purity; the red stripes symbolize Jesus’ blood when he died on the cross; and the J shape […]
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On this day in history, December 10 1868: The first traffic lights are put in place using semaphore arms during the day time and at night using gas lamps with red and green as the traffic light colors. This was all spurred on because in London, England in 1865 there was a growing concern over the amount of horse-drawn traffic […]
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This Day In History: December 9, 1872 On this day in history, 1872, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback became the first person of African American descent to serve as the governor of a U.S. state. Pinchback was born the son of a freed slave (African-Cherokee-Welsh-German descent) and her former white owner (Scottish-Irish-Welsh-German descent), who married her. His father was reasonably well […]
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This Day In History: December 8, 2010 On this day just two years ago, SpaceX became the first privately held entity to successfully launch a spacecraft into orbit and then subsequently recover it (they were also the first private company to launch something in orbit with a liquid-fueled vehicle around a year earlier when their Falcon 1 rocket put a […]
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L. Stevens asks: What does “Gangnam Style” actually mean? “Gangnam” is an area in South Korea, specifically a small area in Seoul, South Korea, home to about 1% of the population of Seoul and is about the size of Manhattan. It is known for its wealthy, “new money”, inhabitants. (The region has only very recently become extremely upscale, with a […]
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On this day in history, December 7: 1869: Former Confederate guerrilla fighter Jesse James turns to a life of crime, robbing the Davies County Savings Association in Gallatin, Missouri. Over the next 14 years, James and his gang committed a variety of robberies and murders. Despite often being portrayed in his day as a “Robin Hood” type, robbing from the […]
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On this day in history, December 6: 1768: The Encyclopædia Britannica makes its debut in Edinburgh, Scotland, with the first volume being sold for 6-8 pence (varying price based on quality of paper), with each subsequent volume being released in weekly installments. All total about 3,000 copies of the first set of the encyclopedia, comprising 2,391 pages, were sold for a […]
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This Day In History: December 5, 1933 On this day in history, 1933, Prohibition officially ended when Utah became the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment, originally proposed by Congress on February 20, 1933. Once ratified, this constitutional amendment repealed the 18 Amendment. The 18th Amendment, passed in 1919, banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages in […]
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Brenda Mae Tarpley (a.k.a. Brenda Lee and “Little Miss Dynamite”) was born to an extremely poor family in December of 1944. Things took a turn for the worse when her father, a onetime semi-pro baseball player and carpenter, died in a construction accident in May of 1953 when she was 8 years old. Within two years of this happening, the […]
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On this day in history, December 4 1872: The crew of the British craft Dei Gratia spotted the Mary Celeste (originally named The Amazon before being purchased and rechristened) still under sail, but yawning slightly. Upon closer inspection, they observed that no members of the crew were on deck. After several hours of watching from a distance, they finally decided […]
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On this day in history, December 3rd: 1910: The French “Thomas Edison“, George Claude, demonstrates the modern neon light at the Paris Motor Show. Claude designed and developed the neon light as a way to find a financially profitable use for the neon his air liquefaction company ended up with as a byproduct of the liquefying process. Among the significant […]
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This Day In History: Dec 2, 1942 On this day in history, at 3:25 pm CST, 1942, as part of the Manhattan Project, famed physicist and Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi, the “father of the atomic bomb”, and his team successfully started the word’s first man-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction on a racquetball court under the west stands of Stagg […]
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This Day In History: December 1, 1955 On this day in history, 1955, Rosa Parks’ simple act of refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama sparks the Montgomery Bus Boycott which in turn stimulates the Civil Rights Movement. It also vaulted Martin Luther King, Jr. into the national spotlight as a […]
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