March 2011
24 posts
Now That's a Book Title
Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them
Chris Farley: The Original Shrek?
Chris Farley was the original voice of Shrek. Almost a year after Farley died, Mike Myers took on the role. Locked away in some Hollywood vault are the audio recordings of Farley as the giant green ogre.
[by Colin Perkins]
7 Other Crafty Zoo Escapes
The Reptile House at the Bronx Zoo has been closed following the escape of an adolescent Egyptian cobra. The snake certainly isn’t the first zoo resident to make a break for it—check out these examples of crafty animal escapes we rounded up in 2008.
1. No Cage Can Hold Fu Manchu
You may be impressed by escape artists like David Blaine, but orangutan Fu Manchu scoffed at such escapades. (Or...
The Tonsillectomy: A Massive Pain in the Neck
Tonsils, those oval-shaped masses of tissue in the back of your throat, have been the targets of surgeons from the earliest days of medicine. Around 1000 BC, doctors in India practiced partial tonsillectomies. In the days of Jesus, a Roman physician named Aulus Cornelius Celsus recorded performing tonsillectomies by holding on to the tonsils with “a blunt hook” and excising them. But even...
Imaginary Friends: The Fantasy Hockey Player
Like many hockey players drafted in the 11th round of the 1974 NHL Draft, Taro Tsujimoto never actually made it to the big time. But unlike the other players drafted with him, Tsujimoto didn’t exist.
His name is in the record books because of Punch Imlach, the former general manager of the Buffalo Sabres. Imlach was so fed up with tedious late rounds of the draft that he decided to poke some...
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: 100 Years...
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, March 25, 1911
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory occupied the top three floors of a 10 story building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place in New York City. The garment factory, which specialized in manufacturing women’s blouses, would be called a “sweat shop” in today’s terminology. The workers were mainly immigrant women (some as young as 12...
In Case Someone Asks You Who Edited Michael...
Michael Jackson’s 1988 autobiography Moonwalk was edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
What's the Difference? En Dash vs. Em Dash
The Dilemma: You’re writing an important memo/term paper/mental_floss book, and you need a dash. But not just any dash. People You Can Impress: Almost no one, really.
The Quick Trick: It’s almost always an em dash. No document can ever contain too many em dashes.
The Explanation: An en dash (–) is bigger than a hyphen but shorter than an em dash (—). The names come from an obscure...
The 8 Vs in V8
The eight juices in V8 are tomato, spinach, celery, carrot, beet, lettuce, watercress and parsley.
The Beanie Babies Bubble
© Kevin Horan/Corbis
Nothing says “Destined to hold its value indefinitely” quite like a teddy bear stuffed with plastic pellets. Or so collectors thought in the late 1990s, when Beanie Babies, the plush stuffed animal brainchild of Ty Inc. founder Ty Warner, were sweeping the national collecting market. But what made these little stuffed critters a billion-dollar industry that sucked in...
Why Do People Sneeze in Sunlight?
[by Chris Higgins]
Growing up in Florida, I had a weird allergy: the sun. Walking outside, coming from from a typically cool, dark indoor place, I’d invariably sneeze — sometimes twice. It happened to my father too, causing a strange family multi-sneeze spectacle whenever we’d leave a movie. For me it was just one or two sneezes, then all better. What caused this? I always assumed...
Why Does Hawaii Have Interstate Highways?
A reader writes: “I have a stupid question. How is it that Hawaii, which obviously borders no other states, has interstate highways?”
While we’d like to believe Hawaii’s Interstate system was created for the sole purpose of annoying the late George Carlin, the name is actually a misnomer. Not all Interstates physically go from one state to another; the name merely implies that the roads...
Fredric Baur invented the Pringles can. When he died in 2008, his ashes were buried in one.
Can Men Breastfeed?
Odd as it seems, men can lactate. In their 1896 book, Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, Dr. George Gould and Dr. Walter Pyle recount several occurrences of men breastfeeding their young. The stories include a sailor who put his son to his breast to quiet him and started producing milk; a South American peasant who sustained his child with his own breast milk during his wife’s illness;...
Brother Against Brother: The Great Confederate...
History lessons on the American Civil War tend to focus on its depressing aspects: a divided country, rampant gangrene, and Ken Burns appear prominently in most classes. However, despite schedules packed with receiving shoddy medical care and standing still for minutes on end to have their photos taken, some Confederate soldiers found the time to stage what sounds like one of the most...
Blinding You With Science: Hypercolor Explained
Some of you might remember Hypercolor or Hypergrafix clothing,* the color-changing T-shirts produced by Generra that were all the rage in the early ’90s. Now that the ’90s are back and high-end Hypercolor-esque items are popping up everywhere (for example: scarves from LA-based Anzevino and Florence, T-shirts and denim shorts from British designer Henry Holland, T-shirts from American...
Spell It Out: 16 Abbreviated Company Names...
Dozens of companies use acronyms or initials in their names, but how well do you know what the abbreviated letters mean? Let’s take a look at the etymologies behind a few abbreviated company names.
1. CVS
Sorry, drugstore fans, there aren’t three fatcat pharmacists with these initials running around out there. When the pharmacy chain was founded in Lowell, MA in 1963, it was known as...
A List of Grammar Myths We Probably Should Have...
Today is not National Grammar Day. That was Friday. But this article by the great Patricia T. O’Conner, which first ran on mentalfloss.com in 2008, is still worth reading.
When I think about the rules of grammar I sometimes recall the story—and it’s a true one—about a lecture given in the 1950s by an eminent British philosopher of language. He remarked that in some languages two negatives...
5 Pret-ty Good Facts About Larry David
Here are some of the things I learned reading Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good, Josh Levine’s biography of Larry David: 1. Larry was a history major at the University of Maryland. “You never know when you might run into a discussion of the Franco-Prussian War,” he joked. 2. He once worked for bra wholesaler E.D. Grandmont, though he says he never actually made a sale. 3....
The Confederacy’s Plan to Conquer Latin America
In the years leading up to the Civil War, many Northerners and Southerners alike wanted the federal government to take a more aggressive approach toward acquiring new territory. In fact, some private citizens, known as filibusters, took matters into their own hands. They raised small armies illegally; ventured into Mexico, Cuba, and South America; and attempted to seize control of the...
Asymptotic High Fives: The Fun Never Ends
The asymptotic high five is the closest thing we at mental_floss have to a secret handshake. Choreographed by Senior Editor Jenny Drapkin, it’s fun and nerdy and allows us to greet each other when we’re sick. And now it’s on a t-shirt!
Now that the secret is out, there are three ways you can support the asymptotic high five:
1. Start giving people asymptotic high fives. (Try it. You’ll like...
Laura Buxton, Meet Laura Buxton
In June 2001, Laura Buxton (almost 10) released a red balloon into the air over her hometown of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England. On one side of the balloon, she had written “Please return to Laura Buxton,” and on the other side, her home address. A few weeks later, a man 140 miles away in Milton Lilbourne found the balloon stuck in the hedge that separated his farm from the...
Andrew Jackson’s Big Block of Cheese
There’s a great scene in an early episode of The West Wing (“The Crackpots and These Women”) in which White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (John Spencer) tries to invigorate his exasperated team with a story about how Andrew Jackson kept a two-ton block of cheese in the foyer of the White House. According to Leo’s story, Jackson left the cheese there as a populist symbol; anyone who was...
Winston Churchill’s Prison Break
In 1899, Great Britain found itself in South Africa warring with the Boers—South Africans of Dutch descent. One of the British journalists covering the war was an adventurous 24-year-old named Winston Churchill, who loved combat so much that he became a war correspondent after his discharge from the army. On November 15, the Boers captured Churchill and threw him into a POW camp in Pretoria....
