On Monday, December 14, 1903, the Wright brothers took the Wright Flyer out in their first attempt to fly it. The plane “flew” only for a few seconds, stalling when Wilbur pulled up too sharply as soon as the plane was in the air. Three days later, after repairing the damage done to the craft, Orville took his turn at […]
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In the Swedish town of Gävle, about 100 miles north of Stockholm, residents have been erecting a giant straw goat in the town center since 1966. The Gävle Goat, also known as the Yule Goat and the Gävlebocken, may be a massive Christmas decoration, but there is never any guarantee that it will still be standing for the holiday. That […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader To date, the Make-A-Wish Foundation has fulfilled the wishes of more than 250,000 kids with life-threatening illnesses. Here’s the story of the wish that started it all. DIAGNOSIS In 1977 an Illinois woman named Linda Greicius made a trip to Phoenix, Arizona, to spend time with her mother, who had […]
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Jeremy R. asks: What do the little buttons on Darth Vader’s suit do? It’s said that the best villains are the ones where you know almost nothing about them. However, thanks to the Star Wars Expanded Universe, we know almost everything about Darth Vader, even how he poops, and he’s still consistently voted to be one of the greatest cinema […]
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If you’ve never seen A Knight’s Tale, the cliff notes version of the story is that Heath Ledger’s character, William Thatcher, pretends to be a knight to compete in various jousting competitions across Europe for fame, fortune, and the love of a woman. Since Thatcher is a peasant, in order to be able to compete, he claims to be a […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Throughout most of history, if you lost a limb, the replacement of choice was a wooden peg (which only looked cool if you were a pirate). But that all changed after a young soldier lost a leg in the Civil War and refused to take his injury lying down. WALKING […]
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Characterized by a remarkable return of mental faculties and sometimes physical skills to terminal patients who were thought to have lost such abilities, Terminal Lucidity, while extraordinary, is also a very real and extremely mind boggling phenomenon that has largely been ignored by modern scientists, despite references to it going all the way back to Hippocrates. A relatively recent term, […]
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Christmas music, for the most part, tends to be both non-offensive and fairly generic- two things you can’t really say about the song, Killing in the Name by rap metal band, Rage Against the Machine, which somehow managed to become the 2009 UK Christmas #1 thanks to the efforts of a couple who was really annoyed with the coveted spot […]
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While Danny Trejo might not be a name as many people would recognise as say, Tom Cruise, with over 300 film credits to date since his acting debut in the mid-1980s, not to mention his distinctive hard-as-nails look, he’s certainly one of the more recongisable faces in Hollywood. Unlike most, however, Danny’s trail to becoming one of the hardest working […]
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David S. asks: Here’s one for you, why exactly does Bond, James Bond, like his Martinis shaken and not stirred? A properly made martini is mostly dry gin with a bit of dry vermouth and ice (Epicurious recommends 5 parts gin to 1 part vermouth). All three should be placed into a cocktail shaker, but rather than shaking, they should […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader To some people, the word “corporation” has negative connotations, and not without reason—names like Enron and Lehman Brothers come to mind. But it’s also one of the greatest tools for economic growth ever invented. Here’s a brief, fascinating history of the corporation. BACKGROUND Most of us have a simple understanding […]
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According to the National Christmas Tree Association each year in the U.S. alone between 25 and 30 million live Christmas trees are sold. To accommodate this annual chopping fest, at any given time there are around 350 million trees growing on various Christmas tree farms in the United States. As for the other side of things, it’s not clear how […]
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For those of you interested in nerding up your wardrobe or otherwise finding a great inexpensive gift for someone, our good friends over at Neatorama are wrapping up their Cyber Week sale at their NeatoShop (ending tomorrow) including free world-wide shipping on all their shirts. They have a pretty ridiculous number of designs to pick from, so you’re sure to […]
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Today I found out the “ye” as in “Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe” should be pronounced “the”. The “Ye” here is not the “ye” as in “Judge not, that ye (you) be not judged”, but is rather a remnant of the letter “thorn” or “þorn” (Þ, þ). The letter thorn was used in Old Norse, Old English-Middle English, Gothic, and Icelandic […]
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As of 2014, the SpongeBob SquarePants brand has generated in excess of $13 billion since the pilot episode was released about a decade and a half ago. But have you ever stopped to wonder how on Earth a cartoon about an anthropomorphic kitchen sponge came to exist in the first place and how networks were convinced that it could not […]
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You are most likely aware that a palindrome is a word or phrase that is spelled the same regardless of whether it’s read forward or backward. A few simple examples are noon, race car, dad, mom, and wow. But what happens when a word read backward creates a different word altogether? Welcome to the wonderful world of the semordnilap. One […]
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Reuel Colt Gridley was born and raised in Hannibal, Missouri in 1829, and lived there contemporaneously with Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain), with Clemens claiming Gridley was a schoolmate of his. Leaving Missouri for greater adventure out west as a teenager, Gridley served in the Mexican War (1846-1848) and later joined the great California Gold Rush in 1852. (See: What […]
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Chris G. asks: Why are there so many countries that have a name that ends in stan? I was also wondering why we call people from many countries the name of their country ended with an, like Canada and Canadian? Denoting that it is a piece of the earth associated with a particular group of people, the suffix -stan simply […]
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