Apr 30, 2010

National Humor Month

Hope you enjoyed National Humor Month this month. It was launched in 1976 by humorist Larry Wilde, Director of the Carmel Institute of Humor. He says, "Since April is often bleak and grim and taxes are due on the 15th, it can be one of the most stressful times of the year. Besides, it's the only month that begins with All Fool's Day - a day which has sanctioned frivolity and pranks ever since the 1500s." That reminds me of a joke. . .

Interesting Facts About Your Feet

Did you know that you will walk more than 100,000 miles in your lifetime?

Over 80% of Americans suffer from foot pain.

Medieval Europeans believed that wearing pointy-toed shoes would make witches helpless.

High heels were first introduced in the 16th century by Queen Catherine de Medici of France.

In the same century, Italian women began wearing very strange-looking, two-foot high platform shoes called “chopines”. They were originally designed to keep women 'on a pedestal', so to speak. The shoes were banned because they presented the danger of miscarriage to pregnant women who fell from the that height.

About 60% of the body’s weight is supported by the balls of the feet, not the heels.

The foot measurement began in ancient times was based on the length of the human foot.

By the Middle Ages, the foot as defined by different European countries ranged from 10 to 20 inches.

In 1305, England set the foot equal to 12 inches. (The measurement we still use today)

In animals that walk on all four legs, the ends of the front and hind feet are much the same.

The human foot has 26 bones. There are three sets of bones: the ankle bones (tarsals), instep bones (metatarsals), and toe bones (phalanges).

Bones in the feet are not completely formed until a person is about 20 years old.

The foot has as many muscles as the hand, but the foot’s structure allows less flexibility and freedom of movement than the hand.

Swollen ankles can be a sign of congestive heart failure.

Feet that are insensitive to pain and temperature can be a sign of diabetes.

Cold feet may signify circulatory disease.

Interesting India Fact

India has more cell phones than toilets. About 545 million Indians have cell phones, but only 366 million have access to toilets.

Google Truth

You have probably heard that the Library of Congress is to archive every single public tweet ever made. There are about 55 million tweets sent every day.

Google also revealed how it is going to make the Twitter archive searchable for users. Google unveiled a replay feature that lets users search tweets posted at any given point in time right down to the minute.

Anyone wanting to know what people tweeted about on say the Haiti earthquake or the Oscars can type into the Google search box, select "show options" on the result page and then click "updates". A timeline will appear above the results allowing you to zoom in on tweets by the hour or minute.

Google says, "We think this is pretty significant because up until now the discussion has been about what is happening now and with today's replay button people will be able to go back and see what people were actually talking about around big events."

Currently the replay feature will only cover the last two months of tweets. Google said later this year it hopes to cover the entire archive all the way back to March 2006.

Chuck Norris

OK, I have a weird sense of humor, but this one tickles me. I actually bumped into him a few weeks ago at the local watering hole. He is taller than I expected.

Shaving is Sexy

According to a recent Schick national research poll, men who shave regularly (5 times a week or more) have twice as much sex (15.5 vs. 7.8 times per month). They're also happier (89% vs. 82%), and more likely to report they are living their dreams (76% vs. 64%). (Of course Chuck Norris is the exception.)

Eighty-two percent of women report a preference for cleanly shaven men and another 83% say it's sexy when a man has a smooth touchable face. Additionally:

    * 76% say they love it when their man shaves
    * 76% agree a "cleanly shaven man turns me on"
    * 64% say when their man shaves, they just can't keep their hands off of him
    * 78% would rather kiss a cleanly shaven man than a scruffy man
    * 64% would rather have sex with a cleanly shaven man than a scruffy one

Also, according to the survey, women ranked body odor and dandruff the top two biggest turn-offs in a man. I started shaving three times a day and I feel sexier already.

Apr 27, 2010

Food From the Fifties

This was a decade of food invention.

1953
Sugar Smacks (Kellogg's)
Cheeze Whiz (Kraft)
TV Dinners (Swanson)
Pepperidge Farm butter cookies
Denny's
Star-Kist canned tuna
Eggo Frozen Waffles

1954
Trix (General Mills)
Butterball Turkeys (Swift-Eckrich)
Stouffer's frozen meals (Stouffer)
Nonfat dry milk (Carnation)
Burger King fast food chain
Shakey's Pizza fast food chain
Peanut M&Ms (Hershey's)
Marshmallow Peeps - do people really eat these?

1955
Special K breakfast food (Kellogg's)
Pepperidge Farm cookies
McDonalds
Kentucky Fried Chicken (Colonel Sanders)

1956
Imperial margarine (Lever Brothers)
Certs breath mints

1957
Pam nonstick cooking spray
Refrigerated cookie dough (Pillsbury)

1958
Tang (it went to the moon)
Ruffles potato chips
Rice-A-Roni
Sweet 'n Low sugarless sweetener
Cocoa Puffs (General Mills)
Jif peanut butter
Chicken Ramen noodles
Instant Tea (Lipton)
Pizza Hut
International House of Pancakes

Top Seven Uses for Vodka

Fill a spray bottle with vodka and spray on shower mold. Let set fifteen minutes and wash away.

Use vodka to spray on insects in the yard to get rid of them.

Pour vodka on skin that has come into contact with poison ivy, and the alcohol will wash away much of the itchy urushiol oil. Saw this one on Mythbusters.

Keep your clothes smelling fresher with vodka by spritzing then hang to dry in a well-ventilated area. Vodka kills odor-causing bacteria, but doesn't leave a scent when dry.

Moisten a soft, clean cloth with vodka, then rub chrome or porcelain for a sparkling surface.

Add a few drops of vodka and a teaspoon of sugar to the water in your flower vase to keep your flowers fresh longer. Change with fresh ingredients daily.

Add a jigger of vodka to a 12-ounce bottle of shampoo for squeaky clean and shiny hair.

Of course the best use of vodka is to buy some bacon vodka and make the perfect morning Bloody Mary.

Theft at Best Buy

The remarkable heist of a Best Buy store in New Jersey almost seemed to be from the Mission Impossible movie, as thieves made off with $26,000 worth of Apple notebooks without leaving a trace in the store.

Best Buy employees discovered a hole in the roof, while not a single motion sensor was set off, and no evidence captured on the security cameras.  The thieves employed a “high degree of sophistication. They never touched the floor. They rappelled in and rappelled out” according to a police department spokesman.

They scaled a gas pipe located on the side of the building onto the roof, where they cut a 3-ft wide hole, used some kind of suction to lift the piece out, lowered themselves 16 feet into the store (10 feet off the ground, so motion sensors would not go off).  Everything was planned so store banners would obscure the security cameras. They absconded with the laptops off metal racks, while hanging from the ceiling, Tom Cruise style.

Vegan Dental Floss

Yes, that's correct. Dental floss with "no mint and has a natural Cinnamon Flavor and it is completely free of all animal source ingredients" is being pushed by at least one company.

Use of dental floss with waxed silken thread came about in about 1819, but the use of dental floss was not common because silken thread was too expensive. During World War II, Dupont began using nylon and it replaced silk as the new material for many products, including dental floss. Of course, there are resin-coated nylon and teflon coated floss, but they do not use animal parts either.  Not sure what kind of  "animal source ingredients"   are found in synthetic materials..

Apr 23, 2010

Thinner LCD TV

Researchers at Japanese chemical company Teijin and Yamaguchi University claimed that they’ve come up a new production method to reduce the weight of LCD displays. Compared with conventional LCD displays with silicon solid-state devices placed on glass substrates, the new technology features a thin layer of heat-resistant silicon dioxide on plastic. 

The improvement results in less heat will be generated and TVs that are 50% lighter. According to the researchers, the new tech also leads to clearer images. The LCD TVs should be on the market in 2013.

Reduplication

Adding new words and phrases into English has been greatly enhanced by the pleasure we get from playing with words. There are numerous alliterative and rhyming idioms which are a significant feature of our language. We start in the nursery with choo-choos, move on in adult life to hanky-panky and end up in the nursing home having a sing-song.

The repeating of parts of words to make new forms is called reduplication. There are various categories of this: rhyming, exact and ablaut (vowel substitution). Examples, are respectively, okey-dokey, wee-wee, and zig-zag. The words that make up these reduplicated idioms often have little meaning in themselves and only appear as part of a pair. In other cases, one word will allude to some existing meaning and the other half of the pair is added for effect or emphasis. Is there anything other than a spider that is eency-weency? Is there anything other than a dance that is hokey-pokey?

During the 1920s, following the First World War, when many nonsense word pairs were coined, such as  the bee's knees, heebie-jeebies etc. Willy-nilly is over a thousand years old. Riff-raff dates from the 1400s and helter-skelter, arsy-versy ( a form of vice-versa), and hocus-pocus all date from the 16th century. Now we have bling-bling, boob-tube and hip-hop. Just thought I would razzle-dazzle you with this one.

LED Lights

The U.S. Department of Energy expects to phase out common tungsten bulbs in four years and compact-fluorescent bulbs in 10 years. That will leave LEDs with virtually 100 percent of the market.

LED lights use less energy, contain no mercury as fluorescent use, and produce much less heat than normal bulbs.

Tall Presidents

Did you know that in the past 27 US presidential elections, the shorter candidate has won only six times? Handlers for Jimmy Carter (5' 9") went to great lengths to prevent him from having to stand next to the taller Gerald Ford (6 foot+). It worked, Carter won. Eighteen presidents have been 6 foot or taller. James Madison was the shortest at 5 foot 4.

Did you also know that Napoleon was 4 foot 11 or (5 foot 6, depending on what you read), Paul Simon and Dudley Moore 5 foot 2. Tom Cruise 5 foot 8 (Thomas Cruise Mapother IV) 

Michigan is the only state that has a statute prohibiting height discrimination.