Gary asks: Who invented the common shopping cart that seems to be the exact same design in most stores you go to? With the emergence of the automobile, home refrigeration, and the supermarket in the early 20th century, retailers soon realized they had a problem – people now were willing to purchase large quantities of food at once, but had […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader George and Martha Washington owned hundreds of slaves over the course of their lives. The names of many are known, but most of the details of their lives have been lost to history. Here’s the story of one woman who hasn’t been forgotten. BORN INTO SLAVERY In the early 1770s […]
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In this video from our YouTube channel (click here to subscribe), we look at why certain Asian countries use chopsticks instead of more common eating utensils. To make sure you don’t miss out on many more videos like this, be sure and subscribe to our new daily channel! If you liked this video, you might also enjoy Our Mega List […]
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This Day In History: December 23, 1948 On December 23, 1948, seven Class A war criminals that included the former Prime Minister of Japan, Hideki Tojo, were executed by hanging at Sugamo Prison. The executions were carried out by the American occupation authorities. According to official U.S. documents detailing the procedures, “The execution will be witnessed with due solemnity and […]
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In the Swedish town of Gävle, about 100 miles north of Stockholm, residents have been erecting a giant straw goat in the town center since 1966. The Gävle Goat, also known as the Yule Goat and the Gävlebocken, may be a massive Christmas decoration, but there is never any guarantee that it will still be standing for the holiday. That […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader To date, the Make-A-Wish Foundation has fulfilled the wishes of more than 250,000 kids with life-threatening illnesses. Here’s the story of the wish that started it all. DIAGNOSIS In 1977 an Illinois woman named Linda Greicius made a trip to Phoenix, Arizona, to spend time with her mother, who had […]
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If you’ve noticed the fewer number of articles being published the last couple weeks on TIFO, this post is the cause. 🙂 It now holds the record for the longest time spent researching and writing any single article on TIFO by a very good margin. It turns out there are an awful lot of Star Wars “facts” commonly repeated all […]
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If you’ve never seen A Knight’s Tale, the cliff notes version of the story is that Heath Ledger’s character, William Thatcher, pretends to be a knight to compete in various jousting competitions across Europe for fame, fortune, and the love of a woman. Since Thatcher is a peasant, in order to be able to compete, he claims to be a […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Throughout most of history, if you lost a limb, the replacement of choice was a wooden peg (which only looked cool if you were a pirate). But that all changed after a young soldier lost a leg in the Civil War and refused to take his injury lying down. WALKING […]
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Characterized by a remarkable return of mental faculties and sometimes physical skills to terminal patients who were thought to have lost such abilities, Terminal Lucidity, while extraordinary, is also a very real and extremely mind boggling phenomenon that has largely been ignored by modern scientists, despite references to it going all the way back to Hippocrates. A relatively recent term, […]
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While Danny Trejo might not be a name as many people would recognise as say, Tom Cruise, with over 300 film credits to date since his acting debut in the mid-1980s, not to mention his distinctive hard-as-nails look, he’s certainly one of the more recongisable faces in Hollywood. Unlike most, however, Danny’s trail to becoming one of the hardest working […]
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David S. asks: Here’s one for you, why exactly does Bond, James Bond, like his Martinis shaken and not stirred? A properly made martini is mostly dry gin with a bit of dry vermouth and ice (Epicurious recommends 5 parts gin to 1 part vermouth). All three should be placed into a cocktail shaker, but rather than shaking, they should […]
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According to the National Christmas Tree Association each year in the U.S. alone between 25 and 30 million live Christmas trees are sold. To accommodate this annual chopping fest, at any given time there are around 350 million trees growing on various Christmas tree farms in the United States. As for the other side of things, it’s not clear how […]
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In this video from our YouTube channel (click here to subscribe), we take a look at the real story behind Krampus, the Christmas Demon. “May Krampus not take your child away in a basket!” To make sure you don’t miss out on many more videos like this, be sure and subscribe to our new daily channel! [TRANSCRIPT]
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Chris G. asks: Why are there so many countries that have a name that ends in stan? I was also wondering why we call people from many countries the name of their country ended with an, like Canada and Canadian? Denoting that it is a piece of the earth associated with a particular group of people, the suffix -stan simply […]
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Ryan L. asks: What makes Mexican jumping beans move around? Not actually a bean at all (beans being seeds from the family Fabaceae, also known as Leguminosae), the Mexican Jumping Bean is the seed pod of a shrub called Sebastiania pavoniana that has been implanted with larva from the Laspeyresia saltitans (also called Cydia deshaisiana) moth. When S. pavoniana begins […]
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Jon A. asks: Has there ever been an example of a word being spelled incorrectly in the dictionary and did that then become the new accepted spelling? Despite my sincerest efforts, I could find no documented instance of a misspelled entry name (the word being defined) ever found in a widely circulated, non-user generated English dictionary. (I’m still skeptical it’s […]
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In this video from our YouTube channel (click here to subscribe), we take a look at how Thanksgiving became a national holiday in the United States and what the poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb” had to do with it. To make sure you don’t miss out on many more videos like this, be sure and subscribe to our new […]
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