Crooked Forest

The Crooked Forest is a grove of oddly shaped pine trees located outside the village of Nowe Czarnowo, in western Poland. The forest contains about 400 pine trees that grow with a 90 degree bend at the base of their trunks. All of the trees are bent northward and surrounded by a larger forest of straight-growing pine trees. The crooked trees were planted around 1930 when the area was inside the German province of Pomerania.

It is thought that the trees were formed with a human tool, but the method and motive for creating the grove is not currently known. It also appears that the trees were allowed to grow for seven to ten years before being held down and warped by a device.

The exact reason why the Germans would want to make crooked trees is unknown, but many people have speculated that they were going to be harvested for bent-wood furniture, the ribs of boat hulls, or yokes for ox-drawn plows.

Swiffer Fixer

If you use a Swiffer, you can save a bundle by using old kitchen towels instead of buying the Swiffer throw away sheets. You can wash and reuse the towels at no additional cost. Micro-weave towels really work great.

Uncle Sam

March 13 was Uncle Sam Day. On this day in 1852, the New York Lantern newspaper published an Uncle Sam cartoon for the first time from Frank Henry Bellew. Through the years, the caricature changed with Uncle Sam becoming symbolic of the U.S. Example of this symbolism were U.S. Army posters that portrayed Uncle Sam pointing and saying, “I want you!”

He always wore red, white, and blue with a hat of stars and he had stripes down both pant legs. How he became known as Uncle Sam has been lost, but one story was about a dock worker wondering what the words “From U.S.” meant on shipping crates.Someone said jokingly, “It is from your Uncle Sam.”

Happy Friday

Man is the only species who plants a crop he can’t eat, but still has to mow it every week.

I am planting the seeds and not cutting short my plan to have a Happy Friday!

Put on Your Thinking Cap

To put one's thinking cap on means to take time to think something over. It likely has its origins in the 17th century when jurists and other scholars commonly wore tight-fitting, square caps. An English judge of this era would put on his "considering cap" (his white wig) before passing sentence in all cases. back then some said it was considering cap.

Follow up - A new paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology finds that ”wearing a white lab coat, a piece of clothing associated with care and attentiveness, improved performance on tests requiring close and sustained attention.”  The researchers found no effects when the coat was identified as a painter’s coat.  “The main conclusion that we can draw from the studies is that the influence of wearing a piece of clothing depends on both its symbolic meaning and the physical experience of wearing the clothes. There seems to be something special about the physical experience of wearing a piece of clothing.” 

Another Use for Old Jeans

Here is a tip to give a bit more life to your safety razor. Place old jeans on a hard flat surface; then run your safety razor up the pant legs about 10-15 times quickly; then repeat running it down the pant legs.  No need to press hard, just a little pressure.

Point the top of the razor in the direction you are rubbing so you do not shave the pants or try to cut them.

The threads on the jeans will fix any tiny bends in the blades and sharpen the blades.  For an already dull blade, you can sharpen it by doing 50-100 swipes both ways.

What's in a Name, Dr. Seuss

 The “Dr.” in “Dr. Seuss” was in homage to Theodore Geisel’s father’s hope that his son would get his PhD. Geisel instead dropped out of the PhD program at Oxford. He did eventually receive several honorary doctorates.

“Seuss” was his mother’s maiden name as well as his own middle name. 

Geisel first used the pen name “Seuss” in college after being removed as the editor of the Dartmouth College’s humor magazine 'Jack-O-Lantern' and being banned from writing for that magazine after he was caught drinking by the dean.

He subsequently started publishing under various pen names, including T. Seuss.   and Dr. Theophrastus Seuss, which was shortened to Dr. Seuss.  He also had an alternate pen name that he also wrote under which was Theo LeSieg.  The “Theo” is short for “Theodor”, and “LeSieg” is “Geisel” spelled backwards.
  
The proper pronunciation of Seuss is actually “Zoice” (rhymes with “voice”) as it is a Bavarian name.  Due to the fact that most Americans pronounced it incorrectly as Soose, Geisel later gave in, stopped correcting people, and decided mispronunciation was a good thing because it is “advantageous for an author of children’s books to be associated with Mother Goose.”

He would have been 108 years old this month. He died in 1991.

Nutmeg and Potatoes

Add just a dash of nutmeg to your next potato dish for a great taste.

Wordology

The only word that consists of two letters, each used three times is the word "deeded."

A hamlet is a village without a church and a town is not a city until it has a cathedral.

The 'v' in the name of a court case does not stand for 'versus', but for 'and' (in civil proceedings) or 'against' (in criminal proceedings).

The word "karate" means "empty hand."