The U.S. Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist Baptist minister named Francis Bellamy in 1892. It was published in a popular children’s magazine of the time called The Youth’s Companion as part of the 400th anniversary celebration of Christopher Columbus arriving in the New World. The celebration itself was the brainchild of James B. Upham, a marketer for the […]
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Today I found out why storks are associated with delivering babies. We all know how babies are made. The stork can be seen flying over rooftops with a little cloth bundle before landing at the doorstep of a happy couple who then unwrap their precious, smiling newborn—right? This myth was once a common story to tell children who were deemed […]
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Byron H. asks: How is the Dalai Lama chosen? Actually, the Dalai Lama is not technically chosen; rather, he is found. But to understand how it works, you first have to learn the basics of Tibetan Buddhism and its belief in reincarnation. Tibetan Buddhism A unique variant of Buddhism, the Tibetan form draws on ancient Tibetan Bon and the Mahayana […]
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Most people are familiar with the “Morton”s Salt girl“. With her bright yellow dress, oversized umbrella, and leaking container of table salt, she’s an iconic figure in American grocery stores. But who is the Morton’s girl, and where did she come from? The Morton’s story begins in the 1880s, when a man named Joy Morton invested in a Chicago-based salt […]
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Today I found out how shrunken heads were made. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, a shrunken head is a decapitated human head that is shrunk through a cooking process by members of the Jivaroan tribes of the northwestern region of the Amazon rain forest in Ecuador and Peru. Why do this? Tribal members believed in the […]
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The woman was Huang Yijun from China. When she was 31 in 1948, she became pregnant only to find out that she had an ectopic pregnancy, meaning the egg had not attached in the uterus. In most ectopic pregnancies, the egg will implant in the Fallopian tubes, but in Huang’s case, the egg implanted just outside her Fallopian tubes causing […]
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One of the first challenges that firefighters face when they arrive at a fire is finding a suitable water source that provides enough water for the type of fire they are fighting. Common sense tells us a car on fire will require much less water than a burning apartment building. There are formulas used by firefighters that will tell them […]
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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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It’s been called a voluntary tax on the poor and under educated, with people spending a whopping $60 billion a year in the United States alone on lottery tickets, most of which are purchased by low income individuals. (All total, about 20% of Americans play the lotto). Despite the high number of lotto tickets purchased annually, when playing the lottery […]
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Humans have invented a variety of amazingly cruel and unusual ways to kill or maim one another (often for shockingly arbitrary reasons). And, of course, wars tend to bring out the worst in people; so it’s not surprising that war-time executions can occasionally be among the most bizarre and cruel. On that note, I was recently reading the first volume […]
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One of the great things about baseball is that it’s amazing with how many games there are per season, even lifelong fans frequently see things during games that they’ve never seen happen before. With that in mind, here are a few of the stranger feats in Major League Baseball history that have only happened once to date: Pitching a no-hitter […]
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This is a guest post by Stacy Jameson Today I found out Hawaiian Punch was originally supposed to be used as an ice cream topping. The brand was originally “Leo’s Hawaiian Punch” sold under the company name Pacific Citrus Product Company. The recipe for the confectionery was created by Tom Yates, A.W. Leo, and Ralph Harrison in a garage in […]
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Today I found out the man responsible for the modern Frisbee design and the “Father of Disc Golf” was cremated and had his ashes molded into Frisbees to give to friends and family. While man has been throwing Frisbee-like objects around for many thousands of years, the Frisbee itself is something of a modern “invention”. The tale of the Frisbee […]
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Today I found out the United States doesn’t have an official language. President Theodore Roosevelt stated in 1907, “We have room for but one language in this country, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.” […]
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Today I found out many public toilets used to be pay as you use. Or, for those of you like me who’ve been around for more than a few decades, “Today I found out what happened to pay toilets.” Going to the bathroom might be the one and only activity in America that’s cheaper than it used to be. Pay […]
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Today I found out there once was a MLB player who stole first from second. We’ve all seen the occasional child playing football accidentally run the wrong way on the field, and if you watch enough T-ball, you might even occasionally see a kid run the wrong way on the base paths. It turns out, there was once a Major […]
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Today I found out thermostat controls in large buildings, such as many office buildings, don’t usually do anything. These placebo controls for large HVAC systems do nothing but make you think you are adjusting the temperature. In some cases, the system even includes white noise generators to make you think that the temperature controls are working, when in fact the […]
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Today I found out many crosswalk signal buttons actually don’t do anything when you press them. They are only there to give you something to press, called “placebo buttons”. In New York City, for instance, an estimated 90% of these pedestrian crossing buttons do nothing. You’ll find the same trend in most major cities, particularly in the United States. The […]
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