New Personal Robot

Coming in May, this thing is sure to be a hit. It is rumored to actually be affordable, for some. Helpful around the house. May not be completely affordable to everyone, right now. Kind of like the expensive HD TV when it first came out.

You saw it here first.

Rosemary Makes You Smart

Rosemary is one of many traditional medicinal plants that yield essential oils.

The Brain, Performance and Nutrition Research Centre at Northumbria University, UK designed an experiment to investigate the pharmacology of one of rosemary's main chemical components.

The investigators tested cognitive performance and mood in 20 subjects, who were exposed to varying levels of the rosemary aroma. Using blood samples to detect the amount of 1,8-cineole participants had absorbed, the researchers applied speed and accuracy tests, and mood assessments, to judge the rosemary oil's affects.

Results indicated that concentration of 1,8-cineole in the blood is related to an individual's cognitive performance, with higher concentrations resulting in improved performance. Both speed and accuracy were improved. The oil did not appear to improve attention or alertness.

The same 1,8-cineole is also found in aromatic plants, such as eucalyptus, bay, wormwood, and sage.

Four Little Known Business Facts

Fifty percent of Domino's Pizza was once traded for a used VW Beetle.
The owner of Fedex once gambled his last five thousand dollars to win 32 thousand in Vegas to save the company.
SOS in SOS pads stands for 'save our saucepans' and was thought up by the owner's wife.
Ben and Jerry's was originally going to be a bagel company.

Enhancing Tomato Flavors

When cooking tomatoes, add a piece of the branch to really heighten the flavor. Also, when eating tomatoes, salt adds to the already natural acidity, try a pinch of sugar instead to really bring out the taste of the tomato.

How 7 Companies Chose Their Name

Pepsi is derived from the digestive enzyme pepsin.
Starbucks is named after Starbuck from the book Moby Dick.
Amazon is named after the Amazon, because Bezos wanted a name that began with A and the Amazon is the largest river in the world.
eBay was named because the original name Echo Bay was already taken as a dot com name.
Nike is named for the Greek goddess of victory.
Verizon is named after veritas (truth) and horizon.
Reebock is named after an African Antelope, Rhebok.

Better Bacon Book

The Better Bacon Book, which costs five dollars has been designed especially for the iPad and is an interactive book offers instructions on how to make your own bacon, build your own smoker, and find the best bacon to order.

It also has 31 interactive bacon recipes and 20 HD videos, 150 photos, and more tastiness than any human can handle at one time. Now we know why the iPad really sizzles. Disclaimer, I am not the author, although I wish I was.

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.