Fun Fact: 15% of all mental_floss employees are now on paternity leave.
It dates back to the Cold War era in the late fifties…a group of Kansas businessmen were seeing a need in the business community to store sensitive and vital records and information underground. It was the height of the Soviet Union and United States' tension in the Cold War. Nuclear warfare was top of mind for everybody, and to get everything that was important underground was a key driving element of the security of the day, and it was that need to find a location that led that group to Hutchinson, to the salt mine. Here we're in a salt mine that has been in operation since the twenties. And space was not a limiting factor--there was plenty of room, controlled access in and out, and a perfect storage environment, so it just kinda came to be that it was the ideal spot.
The company behind the nutty nuptials - Marriage In The Sky - have been inundated with requests from couples desperate to fling themselves off the end of the aisle.
But the ultimate thrill-seekers' wedding doesn't have to end there - once the wedding party have all been lowered back to earth, guests can head skywards again - for a floating reception.
Wedding guests are wowed with a three-course wedding breakfast - all while strapped in to the dining chairs.
The companies who employ prison labour for making dentures and other dental appliances are members of the National Association of Dental Laboratories, so they must have their workers properly trained to do the job. This may actually give a skill that could be used on the outside and keep prisoners from re-offending.
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Suzanne Cleary and Peter Harding perform a mesmerizing hand dance. -via Everlasting Blort
"Preved Medved," though slightly and deliberately misspelled, means "Hello Bear" in Russian. In practical terms, the rules of the meme are the same as for his equally retarded American cousin, Pedobear: take any regular picture, Photoshop Preved Medved into it and it's as good as a joke.
Yeah, this is another one of those Caligornia Girls parodies… but this one is really, really cool. Apart from starring the four sexy geekettes from Team Unicorn, the video also features a rapping Seth Green, Battlestar Galactica’s Katee Sackhoff, and legendary comic book writer Stan Lee.
(YouTube link)
Budget cuts make a librarian's day more hectic than ever! This video was made by Sean Bonney and the employees of the Central Rappahannock Regional Library in Virginia. -Thanks, Sean!
Twenty-four students and four staff members at Kelly Road Secondary School were put into quarantine Friday afternoon after a can of the preserved cabbage exploded in a food sciences class.
Teachers didn't know what was inside the can when it blew up, and called the local fire department and police to prevent an outbreak of botulism, a potentially fatal disease caused by bacteria sometimes found in canned food.
Investigators were soon able to identify the substance as the popular German sausage topping, which had been left to ferment for years.
A Harlem postal employee and civic leader named Victor H. Green conceived the guide in response to one too many accounts of humiliation or violence where discrimination continued to hold strong. These were facts of life not only in the Jim Crow South, but in all parts of the country, where black travelers never knew where they would be welcome. Over time its full title — “The Negro Motorist Green Book: An International Travel Guide” — became abbreviated, simply, as the “Green Book.” Those who needed to know about it knew about it. To much of the rest of America it was invisible, and by 1964, when the last edition was published, it slipped through the cracks into history.
