Jul 6, 2018

National Hot Dog Day

It is celebrated on the third Wednesday of July, except when Wednesday falls on July 1st, then it is held on the 4th Wednesday. This year it is July 18.
According to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, Americans eat more than 20 billion hot dogs every year. More than 155 million hot dogs will be eaten during the Fourth of July weekend. The Council estimates each American eats 60 hot dogs every year on average.
Favorite hot dog add-on for adults is mustard. Children prefer ketchup.

The annual Nathan's Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest is the world's most famous hot dog eating contest. It has also become an Independence Day tradition for many. Each year, more than 40,000 people come to Coney Island to watch the contest.

During the contest, 20 people compete to see who can eat the most hot dogs with buns in just 10 minutes. The winner gets to wear a special jeweled mustard-yellow belt and receives a cash prize.

Miki Sudo held onto her title as the top women's competitor at the 2018 contest, downing 37 franks and buns to take home her prize for the fifth consecutive year.

Joey Chestnut of San Jose, California, holds the world record for hot dog eating. In 2016, he ate 73.5 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes. He also won during 2017. He broke his own world record on July 4, 2018 by eating 74 hot dogs in 10 minutes to claim his 11th Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest title. Yikes!

Bell Pepper Myth Debunked

Myth, flip the bell peppers over to check their gender. The ones with four bumps are female and those with three bumps are male. In fact, some have two and some five lobes. Bell peppers do not have gender. Some things never go away and there are many errant web sites still propagating this myth.

The number of lobes of a bell pepper is determined by its variety. Different varieties produce different numbers of lobes, between two to five. The most popular variety of bell pepper in the US produces four lobes, so many plants have been bred for this characteristic. There is no difference in the peppers number of lobes or bumps for sweetness or number of seeds.

Election Day Factoid

France, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, and more hold their national elections on Sunday.

Amazon and Charity

Approximately 64% of American households had a Prime membership in 2017.

One of the least-known and best perks of Amazon is that you can use your leftover boxes to ship donations to local charities for free. Go to GiveBackBox.com, click on the logo of the participating company you have a box sitting around from, type in your zip code and email address, and you'll get a prepaid shipping label emailed to you. After you fill the leftover box with your donations, attach the label and schedule a UPS pickup. There is no cost. Plus, GiveBackBox will email you a tax receipt for your records once your box is received.


Also, Amazon will give 0.5% of your purchase price to local organizations when you shop through Amazon Smile.

Wordology, Intergluteal Cleft

That is the medical term for butt crack. I know, too much information.

First Cell Phone

The Nokia 3310 was its first ever GSM cell phone, when it came out in 2000. It had a battery life of 2 h 30 min to 4 h 30 of talk time and 55 to 245 hours of standby charge. It had features such as SMS messaging, a calculator, Nokia network monitor, stop watch, and a reminder function. It also had four games: Pairs II, Space Impact, Bantumi, and the hugely popular Snake II.


It is also back in production. The new Nokia 3310 takes the iconic silhouette of the original and reimagines it. The custom designed user interface brings a fresh look to a classic. It has a 2.4” polarized and curved screen window, which makes for better readability in sunlight. It offers 22 hours of talk time off a single charge and should keep running for 31 days in standby mode.

Fore, Golf

This word is shorthand for “watch out ahead” or ‘watch out before.” In other words, yelling out fore allows bystanders to be forewarned of a fly ball.

Jun 29, 2018

Happy Friday

No one ever died from an overdose of happy.
Soak it up, devour it, and bathe in it, especially on a Happy Friday!

Netflix Tidbits

Have you noticed that movies and shows from Netflix look bad for a few seconds? That is because Netflix will start playing a stream sooner than it can be played at its full quality and buffers for the full-resolution version as it is ready then the stream will be displayed at full resolution.

If your bandwidth slows down (like when sharing WiFi), video resolution will drop until the full-res stream is sufficiently buffered again. Netflix does this to keep the load times short so you see less buffering circles instead of the show. This is effective use of technology others might do well to emulate.

Western Wedding Dresses

As we finish up the month of June, the traditional month of marriages, which dates back to Roman times when they celebrated the festival of the deity Jupiter and his wife Juno, who was the goddess of marriage and childbirth. In Victorian times, the tradition is thought to have continued because there were flowers available for wedding décor, and the scent of the flowers masked body odor.

The common form of white dresses for those in the west began during the 1800s, especially when Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840. Before that any color would do, based on wealth or personal preference. The white dress practice spread quickly to the broad reaches of the British Empire. Back then, no woman, not even royalty was expected to wear her wedding dress only once and then never again. This practice also changed after the marriage of Queen Victoria.

After that, wedding dresses were adapted to the styles of the day, such as during the early 1900s, they included lace or frills. During the 1920s, they were typically short in the front with a longer train in the back and were worn with cloche-style wedding veils. Following current fashions continued until the late 1960s, when it became popular to go back to long, full-skirted designs reminiscent of the Victorian era. These days the majority of wedding dresses are strapless dresses or sleeveless.

White wedding dresses had been used for many years before that, but it was not the dominant color. Also, white dresses did not have a symbolic meaning of virginity or purity, but rather were costlier and harder to keep clean, and thus were status symbols of wealth for the wearer. Victorian ideals of weddings, romantic love, and purity were projected backwards to rewrite the white dress as a symbol of innocence and virginity rather than wealth.

Many other cultures also have specific, although usually unwritten rules for wedding attire, including color and style.

Five Animal Factoids

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
A cow gives nearly 200,000 glasses of milk in a lifetime.
Bats are the only mammals that can fly.
A single elephant tooth can weigh up to nine pounds.

Ants never sleep as we know it. They take hundreds of power naps each day.

Google Tabs

Many of us use Google search by typing in some word or phrase and usually find what we want on the first page and go no further. Google search has become much better at anticipating our needs, including fixing typos for us.
However, there are times we are looking for specific information and do not wish to wade through the swamp of irrelevant and overlapping pages.
My biggest problem with searching, other than relevance, is dates. Seems like nothing ever leaves the web and as information changes, the web just adds more, rather than fixes incorrect information.
My favorite tab is the Tools tab. When you click on it there are two options, Any Time and All results. Using the Any Time button there are options for various time periods, including custom. For technical information, I like to use past week or past month. For other things, past year usually weeds out most of the old garbage. All results is the default, but also offers verbatim (in case you forgot to use quote marks in your search).

On the top of every search results page there are a number of tabs. Usually you will see Web, Images, News, Videos, Shopping, More, Settings, and Tools. Using these tabs can help define what kind of search you need to do. If you need images, use the Image tab. If you are looking for a recent news article, use the News tab. If you click on More, then choose advanced search, Google offers boxes to help refine your search criteria. You can forget many of the tips I have offered by using this Advanced Search as it shows boxes to fill in and offers examples. Advanced search is particularly good for very specific searches.


Find pages with... To do this in the search box
All these words:...Type the important words:  tricolor rat terrier
This exact word or phrase:...Put exact words in quotes:  "rat terrier"
any of these words:...Type OR between all the words you want:  miniature OR standard
None of these words:...Put a minus sign just before words you don't want:  -rodent, -"Jack Russell"
Numbers ranging from:...to Put 2 periods between the numbers and add a unit of measure: 10..35 lb, $300..$500, 2010..2011.

Michael Phelps Gold Medals

Michael Phelps has won more Olympic gold medals than India, Nigeria, North Korea, Portugal, Taiwan and Thailand combined.

Slugs and Snails

Slugs and snails are both part of the same class of gastropods. Gastropod comes from the Greek words gastros (stomach) and podos (foot). Most gastropods live in water. Snails and slugs are the only gastropods that can also be found on land, but the majority of snails and slugs live in water.
The most obvious difference between snails and slugs is snails have shells. Their only other differences are in habitat and behavior. Without those big shells to carry around, slugs can squeeze themselves into many different habitats that snails cannot.

As they move along, leave behind a slimy trail, called mucus. Snails and slugs make mucus so that they can move on the ground and keep their bodies from losing moisture to the dry soil beneath them. It also protects them from being cut by sharp objects in the soil. Snails and slugs can completely destroy gardens by eating plants and fruits, including their roots, leaves, and stems. One redeeming feature is that escargot, which is made from land snails, tastes great.