Category Archive

Last week, the world’s oldest living person, 115-year-old Emiliano Mercado del Toro of Puerto Rico, passed away. That meant that the oldest living person in the world was an American — Emma Faust Tillman of Connecticut.  Ms. Tillman was the son of a slave, and was born in 1892 in North Carolina. Last night, after being the "world’s oldest living … Read More

How about a boy whose scream can kill chickens? Hundreds of chickens have been found dead in east China — and a court has ruled that the cause of death was the screaming of a four-year-old boy who in turn had been scared by a barking dog, state media reported on Wednesday. The bizarre sequence events began when the boy … Read More

Dear Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority: It’s come to my attention that you have now implemented "Charlie Cards" and "Charlie Tickets" to commuters in order to ease and speed up the whole fare-buying thing.  This, I think, is good, because those tokens were a pain in the ass. One thing though. Your mascot, Charlie, no doubt comes from the folk song … Read More

Well, why not? That cup of coffee just not getting it done anymore? How about a Buzz Donut or a Buzzed Bagel? That’s what Doctor Robert Bohannon, a Durham, North Carolina, molecular scientist, has come up with. Bohannon says he’s developed a way to add caffeine to baked goods, without the bitter taste of caffeine. Each piece of pastry is … Read More

Thanks, L.A. Times: BELATEDLY, I’VE LEARNED that LOL means Laughing Out Loud, and POS means Parent Over Shoulder (i.e., change the subject, fast). Young people invented this shorthand for e-mail and instant messaging, and you can hear their attitudes and concerns in it — for example, DYHABF (Do You Have A Boyfriend?), W/E (Whatever) and UW (You Wish). I haven’t … Read More

AP Photo. How did that happen? Oh, my….

(1)  A geostationary banana over Texas Yup.  There’s an art project underway to place a banana (not a real one, but a large one made from balsa wood and fabric) into space, where it will float, visible to all (in Texas) for about a month before its orbit decays and it burns up re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Read more about … Read More

CNN: After 10 years of research on a project that was supposed to take only five years, a Canadian industrial psychologist found in a giant study that not only is procrastination on the rise, it makes people poorer, fatter and unhappier. Something has to be done about it, sooner rather than later, University of Calgary professor Piers Steel concludes… Yeah.  … Read More