fact
Older forms of English kept Latin’s gender specific suffixes -tor and -trix, -tor is for men and -trix is for women. So a male pilot is a aviator and a female pilot is a aviatrix. A male fighter is a gladiator and a female fighter is a gladiatrix. 00
During a 1989 Christmas television broadcast, Santa Claus encouraged all children to hold the phone to the TV, tricking them into dialing a 1-900 number that automatically charged several dollars to their parents’ phone bill. 00
Die Hard was a sequel to the 1968 movie “The Detective” starring Frank Sinatra. As such, 20th Century Fox were contractually obliged to offer Sinatra the leading role. He turned it down due to his age. 00
In 1935 the Nazis held a competition in which baby pictures were sent in and the “most beautiful Aryan baby” was chosen by Joseph Goebbels. The baby they picked, and used in propaganda for years, was actually Jewish; the photo had been sent in to make the Nazi party look ridiculous. 00
An actor in Nazi Germany lost his job for being Jewish. He went to the Alps, grew a beard, and dyed all his hair by bathing in diluted hydrogen. He returned to the stage claiming to be a self-taught peasant actor and was praised by the Nazis as “proof of the superiority of Aryan blood.” […]
Upper Peninsula of Michigan is the only region in the US where Finnish Americans make up a plurality of the population. Even the local English dialect is influenced by Finnish. 00
Piggly Wiggly was the first true self-service grocery store. Before their founding in September 6, 1916, grocery stores did not allow their customers to gather their own goods. Instead, a customer would give a list of items to a clerk, who would then go through the store, gathering them. 00
Mythbusters has saves lives: a woman trapped in her car as it filled with water recalled the episode with the Underwater Car Myth and waited until the pressure equalized to open the door. 00
A Japanese company (Gatebox) had created a “digital wife”… a device that created a holographic companion for lonely people. Now 35-year-old Akihiko Kondo has married his hologram companion. Since March, Kondo has been living with a moving, talking hologram of Miku that floats in a ShSh280,000 ( $2,800) desktop device. Gatebox, the company that produces […]
A school suspended 9-year-old boy for pretending to be Bilbo Baggins. He brought a toy ring and told a classmate that he would make him disappear. They considered the child’s action to be a threat, under the premise that no threat would be tolerated, whether real or imagined. 00