Margarine is a substitute for butter, which makes it a fighting word for the dairy industry. Butter producers and margarine producers battled back and forth for the better part of a century to capture the market for spreading our bread.
Butter was big business, and the notion that a cheaper substitute, even one made in part with milk, might storm the market terrified dairy farmers. They didn’t take the threat lying down, though, and convinced legislators to tax margarine at a rate of two cents per pound—no small sum in the late 19th century. Dairy farmers also successfully lobbied for restrictions that banned the use of yellow dyes to make margarine look more appetizing. By 1900, artificially colored butter was contraband in 30 U.S. states.
Several states took even more extreme measures to turn consumers away from margarine—they required the product to be dyed an unappealing pink color.
The margarine industry fought back, however. Read the whole sordid story at mental_floss. Link
New York artist Sally Davies bought a plain hamburger Happy Meal from McDonalds. She didn't eat it, but took pictures of it every day -for 137 days so far. The project will likely continue at least until the meal starts to look different. Link -via Cynical-C
I know some people who would rather rebuild something ten time than read the directions! Of course, putting something like a deck chair together is infinitely easier when the directions are written by someone who is fluent in your language. This video is the latest from SheepFilms. -via b3ta
BrickExpo 2010 will be held in Cincinnati the weekend of September 11-12. One of the displays will be a recreation of the 2009 plane crash in New York in which an airliner safely landed in the middle of the Hudson River, which became known as "the Miracle on the Hudson" as all passengers and crew were rescued from the water. Ken Osbon of Goshen Township, Ohio created the Lego version of the incident. Osbon, one of the event's organizers, said other Lego displays will depict a farm, a city with a train running through it, a pirate tableau, and even one recreating a scene from the TV show The Deadliest Catch. Link -via Fark
Aaron "Wheelz" Fotheringham {wiki} has spina bifida and began using a wheelchair when he was three yers old. He has been confined to a wheelchair since the age of eight. Fotheringham achieved the double backflip last weekend. -via the Daily What
Restroom signs say much the same thing all over the world, but the way they say it says a lot about how view the differences between men and women. Why are women so often depicted as wearing skirts? And why do we have to use separate bathrooms anyway?
Women’s and men’s washrooms: we encounter them nearly every time we venture into public space. To many people the separation of the two, and the signs used to distinguish them, may seem innocuous and necessary. Trans people know that this is not the case, and that public battles have been waged over who is allowed to use which washroom. The segregation of public washrooms is one of the most basic ways that the male-female binary is upheld and reinforced.
As such, washroom signs are very telling of the way societies construct gender. They identify the male as the universal and the female as the variation. They express expectations of gender performance. And they conflate gender with sex.
For the HELP! photo shoot, photographer Robert Freeman warmed up by shooting publicity stills of the band playing around in the Austrian snow. In the process, he realized that their arm motions reminded him of semaphore, a system of emergency naval communications using waving flags. Because the album title was conveniently four characters long, the photographer had each member of the group spell out a letter using the code. However, Freeman found that the arm motions for H-E-L-P were much less aesthetically pleasing than the positions for N-U-J-V, so he decided to use those letters instead.
SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND
The Beatles spared no expense for this 1967 cover, shelling out more than $60,000 to produce, arrange, and shoot dozens of cutouts and images. Among the celebrities included on the album cover were Marilyn Monroe, boxing champ Sonny Liston, and wax models of the Beatles borrowed from Madame Tussaud's collection. They even commissioned images of Jesus, Hitler, and Gandhi, but decided to leave them out for fear of offending fans.
THE BEATLES
After the circus that was the Sgt. Pepper album cover, the Beatles wanted to simplify things for their next record. The following year, they collaborated with pop artist Richard Hamilton to create what's now known as The White Album-a completely white surface embossed with the Beatles stamp. To add a layer of irony, Hamilton suggested that each copy be individually numbered, even though it was hardly a limited edition. (At least 600,000 U.K. copies were numbered.) McCartney remembers that Lennon grabbed No. 0000001. Typical.
ABBEY ROAD
The iconic crosswalk scene was shot in just minutes outside the Beatles' recording studio in 1969. The cover is a darling of conspiracy theorists, who claim that Paul McCartney died prior to the shoot and that he was replaced by a look-alike. Supposedly, the band dropped clues on the cover by dressing up as a funeral procession.: Lennon in white as the preacher, Starr in black as the undertaker, Harrison in jeans as the gravedigger, and McCartney shoeless, with the wrong foot forward, as the corpse.
However, the person who's truly out of step in the photo isn't Paul McCartney but Paul Cole, a visiting Floridian who was captured in the background. Cole didn't find out about the picture until months later, when his wife brought the album home from the store.
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The above article is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the September-October 2010 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss' entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
Charlotte Carrington of Sawston, Cambridgeshire, England took her driver's license test test for the third time and passed. The 19-year-old's car was totaled within an hour. The kicker is -she wasn't driving it! The car was parked on the road in front of her home.
"I heard a bang and I looked out and the lamppost was lying on the floor but it had snapped in half. It had slid down the side of my car.
"It damaged the back of the roof and it smashed a window and scratched the frame."
She said the grass cutter, an employee of firm CGM (Commercial Grounds Maintenance and Garden Services for Norfolk Suffolk and Cambridgeshire), had driven into the lamppost causing it to fall.
Miss Carrington, a student, said the car, which is 11-years-old, had just passed its MOT, adding: "I bought it myself out of my savings. "I was really angry. We had to ring the number on the lamppost as wires were hanging out and it was still sparking."
Insurance will cover the cost of the car, which was worth less than the repair bill. http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Home/Teen-passes-test-then-lamppost-crashes-down-on-car.htm -via Arbroath
Skill, timing, and the sun came together in this air show photograph by Bernardo Malfitano
An F-22 at Miramar at the top of a loop. He is pulling so many Gs, the low pressure air over the fuselage (that is "sucking" the airplane into the loop) gets cold enough for the water to condense... And the angle is just right for sunlight to undergo total internal refraction and make rainbow colors around the airplane (although I had to under-expose quite a bit for the effect to be visible).
The picture won second place in the Museum of Flight photo contest. Link -via reddit
Yes, there are some countries in which the consumption of beer, along with other alcoholic beverages, is prohibited. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is brewing, selling, and imbibing the ancient drink.
Mesopotamia: Beer dates back to at least 4,000 BC. The earliest Sumerian writings mention it. The earliest recorded recipe for brewing beer found so far is from the ancient Babylonians. It is thought that the drink arose independently in several locations during the switch from hunting and gathering to agricultural communities, as stored crops fermented naturally and produced alcohol.
New Zealand: Beer was unknown in New Zealand until introduced by Europeans in the 1800s. The first beer brewed on the island was made from an indigenous evergreen tree and was intended as a cure for scurvy. Captain Cook brewed it himself in 1770, and it worked.
Mongolia: In the 2010 World Beverage Competition, the top beer prize went to the United States. However, Mongolia won both a gold medal and a silver medal for Fusion Beer and Borgio, both brewed by the Mongolian beverage company APU.
Peru: When drinking beer with a group in Peru, one person buys a bottle, pours a glass, passes the bottle on to the next person, drinks it, pours the dregs on the floor, then passes the glass to the next person, who repeats the process. The last person to get a drink from the bottle usually buys the next bottle. Sometimes shenanigans result as some try their best to avoid taking the last drink!
Ireland: In 1756, Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000 year lease on a building in Dublin that has been producing beer ever since. Guinness, still run by Arthur's descendants, is now produced in more than forty countries.
South Africa:Umqombothi is an ancient South African beer made from corn and sorghum. It is also the title of a song about beer sung by South African singer Yvonne Chaka Chaka, that was featured in the 2004 movie Hotel Rwanda.
Czech Republic: According to global statistics for 2004 (the most recent year available), the Czech Republic leads the world in per capita beer consumption. Over 156 liters per year are consumed per person in that country. That's 41.5 gallons for every man, woman, and child!
Australia: All the large breweries in Australia are owned by only three companies. The one most familiar to Americans is Foster's, which is brewed mainly for export and isn't all that popular in its home country!
China: The biggest beer market in the world is China, which consumes more beer than any other nation. However, that doesn't mean the Chinese are big beer drinkers; only that there are more people in China than anywhere else. Beer companies are trying to take advantage of that market by making beer a popular social drink instead of "something you only drink to get drunk."
Denmark: In April of 2010, workers at the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen went on strike to protest new rules limiting their workday beer consumption to lunchtime only. The strike ended a few days later when management promised to meet with the union.
USA: The US state with the highest per capita beer consumption is Nevada, at 44 gallons a year per person. However, you can imagine a lot of that is consumed by tourists. The next highest state is New Hampshire at 43 gallons per person per year.
Germany: The beer brewed in German homes for thousands of years was ale, until about 500 years ago when lager became popular. There is no written evidence of the earliest beer, but a Bavarian grave dating to about 800 BC contained beer made from bread. When the Roman Empire invaded Europe, soldiers found the residents of what would become Germany were already mass-producing beer.
Antarctica: The McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica has three bars, although only one, Gallagher’s Pub, serves beer year-round. In December, as new supplies come in, old or spoiled beer is destroyed by driving nails into the cans. There are competitions to see who is the best nail-driver!
The bravest among the brave, some soldiers stand head and shoulders above the rest for war exploits that will make your jaw drop. For example, Audie Murphy's actions in World War II that won him a Medal of Honor:
Murphy's unit was down to 19 men out of 128. They couldn't fight, they needed to rearm, and they needed somebody to hold the line. So Murphy stayed behind, shooting Germans until he ran out of ammo. Then, deciding he wasn't done killing Germans, he jumped onto a burning tank and starting using its .50 caliber machine gun. He even killed an entire squad of Germans trying to sneak up on him. Oh, and he did this for almost an hour, while wounded in the leg. And then his men showed up, and Murphy led them on a forward action. Translation: after spending an hour in the freezing cold on a burning tank spraying Germans with machine gun fire, he decided that wasn't enough and decided to get close and personal.
And he is just one of ten soldiers from all over the world listed as the most badass. Link -via Unique Daily
Isn't he cute? And he talks, too! Of course, anyone who ever watched a Star Wars movie knows what Chewbacca says, and you won't understand it -unless you have the imagination of a child! Available now at the NeatoShop. Link
Improv Everywhere took a group of several hundred people to the beach at Coney Island in formal wear, just to see how people would react. If I saw this, I would have assumed it was a wedding reception where they served a bit too much champagne. Read about it at the site. Link -via The Daily What
Shomer-Tec has a page of merchandise for sale called "Revenge Products." There are gadgets that disable electronics or just annoy people, and bottles of nasty things like Liquid Roadkill.
These "special ingredients" are just what you may need in some "special situations". Manufactured under contract by DSG Laboratories to fulfill the occasional unusual operational requirement of CIA and other federal agents, these products are now available for non-governmental sale. Use only with utmost discretion.
Before you use this incredibly foul putrifier, take a moment to reflect on all the roadkill left out in the scorching sun. With this nice little vial, you now have the ability to creatively re-create this special odor at a time and place of your choosing.
I wouldn't use this on my worst enemy. Link -via J-Walk Blog
