When you see a town like Tightwad, Missouri, you have to wonder how that ever came about.
This small town got its name from an incident in which a store owner cheated a postal worker by charging him an extra fifty cents for a better watermelon. Certainly they are much more hospitable these days, though it appears they all are still pretty tight with their money: none of the families counted in the 2006 census were living below the poverty line. And most of them keep their money in the Tightwad Bank.
Read about twenty other strangely-named places and the stories behind them. Link -via J-Walk Blog
David Thorne, who once paid a bill with a picture of a spider and crashed a party now gives the office manager an idea about washing coffee cups. The email trail will no doubt remind you of situations you’ve encountered in your workplace.
Due to there being an unprecedented twelve coffee cups needing to be cleaned in the sink at work, it is understandable that Shannon would be outraged by this intrusion on her facebook and looking out the window time.
Though kitchen duties may be an expected part of her job role, there is no reason why everyone should not reschedule work/client commitments and help out to ensure Shannon's social networking and looking out the window time is not interrupted.
Check out Shannon’s time sheet in the sidebar as well. Link -via reddit
Arjan Verweij collects dice of all kinds, including this Egyptian pair made of bone which is around 2,000 years old. See other ancient dice made from ivory, lead, horn, wood, bronze, and stone. Dice are also categorized by geography and by configuration. Link -via J-Walk Blog
RTOOT stands for Really Terrible Orchestra Of the Triangle. Membership is open to anyone in the Raleigh/Durham area who is not competent enough to play with other orchestras.
Who are we? The Really Terrible Orchestra Of the Triangle exists to encourage those who have been prevented from playing music together with others, either through lack of talent or some other factor, to rehearse and perform in an ensemble of similarly afflicted players. From a humble beginning in May 2008, we have grown into a 75-piece symphony orchestra worthy of its role as one of the premiere cultural gems of the Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill NC (USA) region known as the Research Triangle. Except that we’re pretty terrible. Terrible, in the French sense of Des Enfants Terribles ... in that while we haven’t made fun of Bach or Mozart yet, we certainly have had a naughty excursion or two with Strauss and Tchaikovsky.
Angelo Cammarata is finally retiring. The 95-year-old bartender has been serving customers at Cammarata's in Pittsburgh for 77 years. That puts him in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest-serving bartender ever. The family bar has been sold and will be under new management in a few weeks. The new owners asked Cammarata to stay on, but he is looking forward to taking it easy.
"Camm," as people call him, started serving beer at his father's North Side grocery the moment Prohibition ended at midnight on April 7, 1933. The memory is as clear to him as the strike of the library clock that signaled it was time to start opening bottles of Fort Pitt. His immigrant father built a bar on that site in 1935 and Angelo kept working there, taking a break to serve in the Navy in World War II.
Cammarata says the work kept him young. Link -via Fark
U.S. News and World Report surveyed cities across the US to determine the best places to raise kids. They took into account crime rates, school system ratings, cultural opportunities, recreational activities, child-friendly policies, and other factors. The results:
Virginia Beach, Virginia Madison, Alabama San Jose, California Overland Park, Kansas Boston, Massachusetts Denver, Colorado Rochester, Minnesota Cedar Rapids, Iowa Plano, Texas Edison, New Jersey
The advantages of each city are listed in the story and slide show. Link -via Digg
In the world of radio journalism, there's nothing better than "This American Life." With their remarkable focus on everyday people and their indescribable story selection, the hipster-friendly show is a unique radio magazine.
Try your luck on ten questions about the PRI show and its television counterpart in this Lunchtime Quiz from mental_floss. Link
An oak barrel of butter has been found in a bog near Gilltown, Ireland. Two workers, John Fitzharris and Martin Lane, noticed a white streak in the peat and uncovered the barrel, estimated to be 3,000 years old. Pádraig Clancy and Carol Smith of the National Museum of Ireland took charge of the barrel.
"It's rare to find a barrel as intact as that," Mr. Clancy explained, "especially with the lid intact, and attached. It's a really fine example."
He estimates that the barrel is approximately 3,000 years old, from the Iron Age.
At the moment it is being dried out by staff at the Conservation Department. Once dry it will be soaked in a wax-like solution which preserves it.
"At 35ks, it's a pretty big one," Ms. Smith explained. Other examples of bog butter they showed tended to be less intact and much smaller.
In 2000, Rich Hughes was diving near a shipwreck off the coast of Pembrokeshire, Wales when he spotted a shiny object under the sea. He retrieved a pocket watch with "Richard Prichard 1866 Abersoch North Wales" engraved on the casing. After nearly ten years of detective work, Hughes reconstructed the story of the pocket watch and its owner. Ship captain Richard Prichard died during a voyage of the Barbara and was buried at sea. A man named Jones took over both the ship and the captain’s effects, but did not have the necessary navigational skills. The ship sailed into the wrong channel and sank during a storm in 1881. The crewmen were rescued, but captain Jones went down with the ship, and presumably had the watch on his person. Hughes enlisted the help of an amateur historian to track down Prichard’s family.
The watch, which was seized up and will never work again, will be handed to Mr Cowell later this month.
His grandmother was Captain Prichard's cousin, making him the closest surviving family member.
He said: "I am delighted the watch has come home after all these years.
"It has come as a complete surprise to me that my ancestors had such a colourful, seafaring past."
The watch will go on display at the Porthmadog village hall. Link -via Arbroath
Etsy seller GEEKitty hand crafts cat toys of felt with no metal or plastic parts. You can have a speech bubble made with up to four characters of your choice, or buy one ready made with “meh”, “srsly”, or “lol”. Link -via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
San Francisco’s Lombard Street, full of hairpin curves and known as “the crookedest street in the world” was turned into Candyland Wednesday to celebrate the game’s 60th anniversary. Children from from UC San Francisco Children’s Hospital and the organization Friends of the Children formed teams to play the oversized game. They also interacted with game characters and enjoyed birthday cake. http://www.examiner.com/x-5494-SF-World-Travel-Examiner~y2009m8d18-Lombard-Street-in-San-Francisco-becomes-Candy-Land-for-a-day -via Metafilter
(image credit: Flickr user calmenda, who has more pictures)
Maybe bacon as an internet meme has jumped the shark, but it still makes all kinds of food taste fabulous!
Fine, the bacon lube and bacon bras are a little creepy. Maybe we’ve gone too far when we’re literally trying to screw bacon. But I steadfastly refuse to stop eating it in every form imaginable. So to celebrate the endless survival of bacon, I’ve compiled this handy chart of 100 Ways to Use a Strip of Bacon. From bacon apple pie to bacon guacamole, bacon pickles, bacon marshmallows, and yes, even bacon-wrapped tofu, here are the 100 most glorious ways to enjoy god’s greatest gift to tastebuds.
Click on a picture at Endless Simmer to go to any of 100 recipes from all over. Link-Thanks, Brendan!
Personas is an application that searches your name on the web and returns a profile of what it finds. Mine is pictured.
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.
I was surprised to see I had more "sports" in my profile than anything else -must've been the Olympics. And it's nice that my "legal" was bigger than my "illegal"! But the most interesting part was seeing all those things people said about me while it was processing. The one that stands out was "Your inquiry ‘Miss Cellania is an idiot' did not return any results." Ha! (Of course, now that I’ve written it out, there will be results for that query.) Try your own name and puzzle over the results. Link -via the Presurfer
