fact
The Professional Mourners of Arlington Cemetery
Meet the 150 volunteers—called “The Arlington Ladies”—who have one specific responsibility on the site of the Arlington Cemetery: to see that no soldier is ever buried alone.
The oldest hotel in the world was founded in 705 CE in Japan’s Yamanashi Prefecture and has been run by the same family for 52 generations. That is dedication. Read on for 10 of the oldest continuously operated stores from around the world.
A Brief History of One of the World’s Rarest Plants
The loneliest known plant is the London-based Encephalartos woodii, the only remaining tropical tree of its kind in the aftermath of the Ice Age. Its survival will depend upon researchers finding it a companion.
The United States of America, the great melting pot. We take music, foods, words and traditions from all over the world, shake them up and blend them into something distinctly American. We took “O Sole Mio” and made “It’s Now or Never.” We took pizza and put cheese inside the crust. We take names from places all over the world to give to our towns and cities, and once they’re ours, we’ll pronounce them how we want to, thank you very much. Usually we simply use the English version of the word for a place: we don’t say Par-EE, Texas, the French way, but PARE-iss, because that’s how we say Paris in English. However, some towns that have borrowed city names from elsewhere don’t even get the normal English pronunciation. Here are 20 American towns that have really cut the cord from the sources of their names.
When we talk about Greece, we talk about Athens, cradle of Western civilization, birthplace of democracy. But these towns in Kentucky and Illinois are called EIGHTH-ens.
The German capital Ber-LIN has loaned its name to many an American town, but here we’ve turned it into BER-lin.
If we’re talking Egypt, we’re talking KAI-ro. But in Georgia it’s KAY-ro, and in Illinois, KEH-ro.
There’s a city in New York named after the South American country of Chile, which we would call CHILL-ee or if you want to get fancy, CHEE-lay—but there they call it CHAI-lai.
Right over by Chili is Riga, a name shared with REE-ga, the capital of Latvia, but in New York it’s RYE-ga.
Delhi, the capital of India, gets cities named after it in New York and California, but it’s hard to tell because while we are used to calling it “Delly” the people in those cities pronounce it DEL-hai.
Lebanon? Not in LEB-nen New Hampshire.
The capital of Peru is Lima (LEE-ma). The town named for it in Ohio? LYE-ma.
Spain has Madrid (Ma-DRID). But in Missouri they’ve got New MAD-rid. Or wait, is it Missouruh? I don’t think Missourians even agree on that. New MAD-rid though? That they’re all cool with.
Mantua, beautiful Italian city of culture. Opera and Virgil. No wonder we’ve borrowed its name for towns in Ohio and Utah. Oh, except in those places it’s not MAN-tyoo-a, but MAN-a-way.
Milan is mi-LAN, or if you’re really feeling it, mi-LAHN, and it’s another Italian city we pay tribute to in our town names, everywhere from New York to Tennessee to Illinois to Washington State. Except in those places it’s MY-lun.
Sticking with Italy for a little longer, there’s Palermo (Pa-LER-mo), or, as they say in North Dakota, PAL-er-mo.
Michigan honors the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. It’s pom-PAY right? Not in Michigan, where the locals call it pom-pay-eye. What is that extra ‘i’ doing on the end there anyway? Might as well make sure you pronounce it.
Texas has a town named for the whole country of Italy. Itly. Just two syllables.
The country of Russia is represented by a town in Ohio. ROO-shee, Ohio, to be exact.
From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of … Tri-POH-luh? While the capital city of Libya, has miles of Mediterranean coastline, Iowa’s Tripoli has no shore at all. So it goes its own way name-wise too.
When we speak about the palace in France or the treaty that ended WWI, it’s ver-SAI. For towns from Pennsylvania to Illinois, it’s ver-SAYLES.
There are Montpeliers all over the place in the US. How do you pronounce yours? The Vermont way (mont-PEEL-yer) or the more French-style way people sometimes use (mont-pel-YAY)?
When we talk about the Austrian city, the Chicago all beef hot dog, or even the city in Virginia, vee-EH-nuh is the way to go. But for towns in Illinois and South Dakota, it’s vai-EH-nuh.
The Czech city of Prague is full of old-world charm. The Minnesota city of New Prague has a new-world way of doing things, including pronouncing it PRAYG.
This post originally appeared in 2013.
September 13, 2016 – 9:00am
Over the course of nine seasons, Ray Romano endeared himself to audiences as Ray Barone, a Long Island sportswriter juggling work and family, including his parents and older brother, who live right across the street. Here are some facts about the Emmy Award-winning series, which debuted 20 years ago today.
“I was doing stand-up for 12 years,” Romano recounted to Larry King in 2005. “I did my first stand-up spot on Letterman and then the following week his company called me up to say, ‘We want to try to develop a show based around what we saw.'”
“It was a title that, first of all, the critics … it invites hatred,” Romano explained. “It came about from a sarcastic comment my brother made, who is a police officer. And he said, ‘Look what I do for a living, and look at Raymond—yeah, everybody loves Raymond.’ So we used it as a working title. And it just grew on CBS, and we couldn’t get rid of it.”
Doris Roberts was busy directing a play while the Marie auditions were taking place. The play’s producer made sure to have her available for 3:30 one fateful Monday. She beat out over 100 other women for the part.
Peter Boyle had trouble just getting into the studio lot. He then couldn’t find a parking space. Then he went into the wrong building. By the time he reached Romano and show creator/showrunner Philip Rosenthal he was, in his own words, “enraged”—and perfectly in character for Frank Barone. The topper of it all was that, according to Romano, the CBS president was going to give Boyle the gig anyway.
Jane Sibbett (Ross’s first ex-wife on Friends) declined the role once she discovered Romano was both unaware she had been offered the role by the network, and that Romano was pushing hard for Patricia Heaton to play his on-screen wife.
Maggie Wheeler, who played Janice on Friends, auditioned for the role of Debra, too. She ended up playing Debra’s friend Linda over the course of the series as a consolation prize. Heaton wasn’t officially cast until one week before the pilot began shooting.
Brad Garrett, who played Ray’s older brother Robert, was 36 when the series first started. Romano was a few months shy of his 39th birthday.
Monica Horan—who played Robert’s on-again-off-again girlfriend and eventual wife Amy—was married to the show’s creator, Phil Rosenthal. She got used to her arguments with Rosenthal ending up in scripts. Horan told People about an episode where Debra has PMS: “I’m hearing lines from conversations I had with my husband. Ray was telling Debra to take medication, and she was telling him she needed a hug. I was like, ‘Whoa.’ I was crying, then laughing, then crying. It was surreal.”
“Ninety percent of everything you hear on the show has been said to me or Ray Romano or one of the writers,” Rosenthal admitted in the same article. Horan claimed her favorite line to Rosenthal is, “You can say the right thing on TV, but why can’t you do it in real life?”
In the pilot, the kids were known as Matthew and Gregory, but were subsequently turned into Michael and Geoffrey for the rest of the series. Romano’s own twin sons are named Matthew and Gregory; he decided that art was imitating life a little too closely and asked for the names to be changed. Matthew and Gregory not only got new names, they got new actors to play them: Rosenthal cast Sullivan and Sawyer Sweeten as Michael and Geoffrey, respectively. They were the real-life brothers of Madylin Sweeten, who played their TV sis, Ally.
The inclination to separate fact from fiction never seemed to apply to Ally, who kept her character name despite being based on Romano’s real daughter, also named Ally. Not only that, the real Ally (Alexandra Romano) played TV Ally’s friend Molly on the show.
“Well, my brother was—he is a retired cop now, but at the time he would take a lot of stuff from the other cops,” said Romano. “They think it’s a documentary.” While Garrett put his own spin on the character to differentiate Robert Barone from Rich Romano, there was a point where Ray’s brother—an NYPD sergeant—moved back in with their parents.
Chuck Heaton was a sportswriter for The Cleveland Plain Dealer for 50 years. He’s mentioned in the season one episode “Recovering Pessimist” when Debra runs down a list of Ray’s competition for a Sportswriter of the Year award: “Chuck Heaton’s big story this year was ‘too much violence in boxing.’ Thanks for the scoop, Chuck.”
In “Halloween Candy,” Frank gives the same speech about mortality he famously gave to Robert De Niro’s character in Taxi Driver (1976). He also dressed as Frankenstein’s monster, a nod to his work in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974).
Romano made $1.7 to $1.8 million per episode during the last two seasons of Raymond, surpassing Kelsey Grammer’s $1.6 million per episode salary for Frasier at the time.
“We ran out of ideas,” Rosenthal told The A.V. Club of why the show came to an end. “If you worked for me, I would say to you, ‘Go home, get in a fight with your wife, and come back in and tell me about it.’ And then we’d have a show. But after nine years, if we kept that up, our wives would leave us. And in California, that’s half. So we made sure that we got out before that happened.”
Patricia Heaton fell ill, and by the intended showtime her voice was completely gone. The audience was sent home, and told to return seven days later.
The Voronins, or Воронины, the Russian adaptation which Rosenthal attempted to help, was Russia’s number one comedy, and performed original episodes after going through all 210 of the American installments. Local-language versions of the show were also produced in Egypt (Close Doors); Israel (You Can’t Choose Your Family); the Netherlands (Everybody Is Crazy About Jack); Poland (Everybody Loves Roman, which was canceled after four episodes), and the Czech Republic (Everybody Loves Rudy). In the United Kingdom, a pilot was shot (The Smiths).
September 13, 2016 – 10:00am
Bored with your traditional Rubik’s Cube? You might want to add a few more twists with these challenging variations by Oskar van Deventer. The Dutch research scientist’s spins on the elaborate puzzle promise to stump even the most weathered puzzle solvers.
A longtime puzzle designer, Van Deventer takes the basic Rubik’s Cube pattern and transforms it into a spherical puzzle, a hollow cube, and even a magic gears grid. His creations are sold on Shapeways, meaning they are 3D-printed to order and come in a variety of different materials.
And his creations don’t just baffle users, they also break records. His over the Top 17x17x17 design was recently acknowledged by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest order Rubik’s Cube. The mind-bending design has 1539 parts—to say it’s challenging would be an understatement.
Take a look at some the patterns by Oskar Puzzles below and check out more of his designs on Deventer’s Shapeways page.
September 13, 2016 – 9:30am
Lainey Morse // YouTube
Some yoga studios burn incense or play ambient music to help their participants reach a peaceful state of mind. One yoga class in the Pacific Northwest is doing things a little differently: Sessions include live goats roaming around the premises, The Oregonian reports.
Goat Yoga is held on No Regrets Farm owned by Lainey Morse in Albany, Oregon. The idea originated when yoga instructor Heather Ballenger Davis approached Morse about teaching a class on her property. The farm’s six goats crashed the event, and from that point on, Goat Yoga was a smash success.
Hosting a yoga class with goats in attendance does present some challenges (the goats have been known to get comfortable on the yoga mats), but the therapeutic presence of the animals seems to outweigh any inconveniences. People travel from all over the country just to downward dog alongside Morse’s goats. According to Travel + Leisure, Goat Yoga has become so popular that class slots are booked solid until spring of next year. If you’re not picky about which four-legged friends you do your sun salutations next to, yoga classes with cats and dogs are also options in different parts of the country.
[h/t The Oregonian]
Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.
September 13, 2016 – 9:00am
It’s been proven that owning a cat has real scientific benefits, but it turns out, they’ve also been a benefit to science. Over 40 years ago, a Midwestern feline co-authored a physics paper.
As Atlas Obscura reports, in 1975, Michigan State University professor Jack H. Hetherington had just completed an academic study called Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3He, which focused on atomic behavior at high and low temperatures. He was ready to submit the writing when a colleague noted a bit of a problem: Hetherington had used the plural pronoun “we” throughout, though he was the only author. That might seem like a minor infraction, but the intended publication, Physical Review Letters, would likely not approve.
Hetherington wasn’t too keen to rewrite his work, which had been drawn up on a typewriter, and tacking on another human author was problematic for a number of reasons. So the professor did the only logical thing and employed the identity of his Siamese cat, Chester. The name “F.D.C. Willard” was added (the first name stood for “Felix Domesticus, Chester” and “Willard” was the name of the cat’s father).
The article was successfully published in Physical Review Letters, but the charade didn’t last for long. However, there wasn’t much fallout for the scientist or his feline faux-author. In fact, Hetherington capitalized on it—releasing copies of the paper with autographs in the form of a signature and a pawprint. In 1980, Willard published a paper on his own, written entirely in French. (A real Renaissance man, this cat.)
MSU’s Physics Chairman, Truman Woodruff, even asked Hetherington if Willard would be interested in a full-time staff position, writing: “Can you imagine the universal jubilation if in fact Willard could be persuaded to join us, even if only as a Visiting Distinguished Professor?”
[h/t Atlas Obscura]
Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.
September 13, 2016 – 8:30am
Sarahtarno, Flickr // CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
These days, businesses seem to open and close in the blink of an eye. In some areas, it’s rare to see a store that’s been open for more than a few years—let alone a few decades. But despite the instability of running a business, some stores have managed to stick around for a seriously long time. In some places, shoppers buy books or bicycles from the same store their grandparents and great-grandparents frequented—or eat at restaurants that once fed ancient soldiers and explorers. These stores are some of the oldest continuously operating stores in the world—all have broken some kind of record for longevity, whether they’re the oldest store of their kind in the world or their country, and all are still in their original locations.
Founded in 1745, the Moravian Book Shop in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania is the oldest continuously operating bookstore in America (the Bertrand Bookstore in Portugal opened 13 years earlier, and is generally considered the oldest in the world). While the Moravian started out as a place to buy and print religious texts, it changed with the times, and now sells every book under the sun out of its (significantly expanded) 15,000 square foot shop. Bookstore employees say the shop sometimes feels haunted by its lengthy past—literally. Rumor has it, a friendly ghost haunts the shop, occasionally reminding employees to turn off appliances they’ve left running.
St. Peter’s Stiftskeller claims to have been mentioned in a document published all the way back in 803 CE. If that’s true, it’s most definitely the oldest continuously operated restaurant in Austria—and may even be the oldest restaurant in the world. Located within the walls of St. Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg, the restaurant and inn hosted French troops during the Napoleonic wars and is rumored to have served everyone from Christopher Columbus and Charlemagne to Bill Clinton and Clint Eastwood.
Located in Sutton, London, UK, Pearson Cycles was established in 1860 and has been in the Pearson family for five generations. Founded by Thomas Pearson—who originally opened a blacksmiths, but quickly switched to selling bicycles—the shop is now run by Pearson’s great-great-grandsons Will and Guy Pearson. In 2011, when the historic bike shop opened its second location, Will Pearson told The Telegraph, “We have a slow roll-out program; one store every 150 years.” The shop holds the Guinness World Record for oldest bicycle shop in the world.
Founded in 705 CE in Japan’s Yamanashi Prefecture, Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan has been run by the same family for 52 generations. The hot spring inn, which is located at the foot of the South Japanese Alps, has served everyone from ancient samurai to modern vacationers for more than a millennium. Known for its luxurious rooms and warm mountain streams, the hotel holds the Guinness World Record for world’s oldest hotel.
Temple Slug can’t compete with the other stores on this list for longevity, but it has spent an impressive amount of time selling a product that’s largely considered a passé fad. The futon and waterbed store in Kansas City, Missouri claims to be “the oldest waterbed retailer in continuous business.” They’ve operated out of the same shop under the same management since 1970, and now proudly serve the grandchildren of their original customers. (The other candidate for oldest waterbed store is Odds ’N’ Ends in Richmond, California, which opened in 1969, but that store recently became an online-only company.)
Originally founded as a food stall in 1738, Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba opened its Naples, Italy restaurant in 1830. Widely credited as the oldest pizzeria in the world, the historic restaurant used lava rocks from Mount Vesuvius to line its ovens. Though Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba by no means invented the pizza, its founders helped transform the cheap street food into a fine dining experience.
Established by Dominican monks in 1221, Santa Maria Novella Pharmacy has been providing the city of Florence, Italy with homemade medicines, soaps, and colognes for almost 800 years. Still situated in its original building, the pharmacy features vast painted ceilings, a museum, and of course, plenty of products to sample and purchase. Its most famous product, according to Atlas Obscura, is a smelling salt called Aceto dei Sette Ladri (Seven Thieves Vinegar), which was, according to legend, used by grave robbers to protect themselves from infection during the plague.
There are two stores that claim the title of oldest pharmacy in the United States: Carl’s Drug in Greencastle, Pennsylvania, and C.O. Bigelow in New York City. Carl’s Drug claims to have opened its doors in 1825, and, despite a few ownership and location changes on the way, it still sells to the people of Greencastle. The other contender, C.O. Bigelow, sold medicines and salves from its storefront in New York City’s Greenwich village since 1838. Though it’s not nearly as old as Santa Maria Novella, its nearly 200 years in the heart of the bustling Big Apple mean that plenty of important people have passed through its doors: Over the years, the shop has served the likes of Thomas Edison (who allegedly nursed an injured finger there), Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain), filmmaker John Waters, and the glam rocking New York Dolls.
The Balson family of Bridport, England has been in the meat business since 1515, when John Balson started selling meat at a local market. The family set up their permanent location in 1880, and is still selling meats and specialty sausages from the same shop. The owner writes on the website, “The family joke is that we’ve just never made enough money to be able to retire.” The shop was featured on a 2014 BBC program on Britain’s oldest family businesses.
The appropriately named Oldest Sweet Shop (originally called “The Old Sweet Shop”) was founded in 1827 in the town of Pateley Bridge in England. Today, it’s owned by former bank manager Keith Tordoff, who’s been running the business for a mere two decades. “To me, sweets are all about the memories. You remember sweets from your childhood just like you remember a song. You remember the sweets your grandparents gave you, or giving a packet of Lovehearts to a girl you liked,” Tordoff told The Telegraph in an interview. “We had a 97-year-old woman come in to the shop and say the last time she was here she was 5 years old. She said apart from the position of the counter, it hasn’t changed.”
September 13, 2016 – 8:00am
If YouTube videos have taught us anything, it’s that kids today don’t understand old technologies like rotary phones and Walkmans; nor do they have the patience for old computers. But foods from the past are, apparently, a very different story. Bon Appétit recently recruited a group of kids to test out popular sandwiches from the last hundred years—and, to everyone’s surprise, the kids, by and large, enjoyed them all.
Delving into America’s culinary history, Bon Appétit identified the most popular sandwich of each decade from 1900 to 2013. While most of the sandwiches are still eaten today, each peaked in popularity in a different decade: For instance, the video reveals that, in the 1910s, the French dip was the toast of the town, while the people of the 1950s couldn’t get enough of pastrami on rye. The video provides a fascinating, though brief, history of American sandwich fads, while its crew of kid sandwich-testers show that good food stands the test of time.
[h/t Boing Boing]
Banner Image Credit: Bon Appétit, YouTube
September 13, 2016 – 7:30am
