Frank Buckles

Frank Buckles is the last identified American veteran of WWI. He is 107 years old.

Alaska's budget

85% of Alaska's budget comes from oil revenues.

Google Docs? Is that, like, when I have trouble with the Google a doctor will come and fix it?

A 2007 survey of 600 PC users found that 73% of Americans have never heard of Google Docs. Only 0.5% have abandoned desktop office applications for an online alternative and 94% have never tried a web based productivity suite.

Remunerate

Remunerate means to "to pay for goods provided, services rendered, or losses incurred".

Henry Earl

Henry Earl is a homeless man from Kentucky who has been arrested 1,333 times since his first arrest.

Lefties

There is no difference in life expectancy between left and right handed people.

What can $700 billion buy you?

2,000 McDonald's apple pies for every American.

Neptune

Neptune was the first planet discovered by mathematical prediction rather than regular observation. Perturbations in the orbit of Uranus led astronomers to deduce Neptune's existence. It was discovered on this day in 1846.

Merkle's Boner

Tuesday marks the 100th anniversary of the controversial play that landed [New York Giants infielder Fred Merkle] on the short list of baseball's all-time goats. The beneficiaries were the Cubs, who without "Merkle's Boner" almost surely would not have gone on to win the 1908 World Series.

....

Merkle, only 19, was on first base after hitting a single, and teammate Moose McCormick was on third. With two outs, Al Bridwell singled to center to drive in McCormick with the apparent winning run.

As Giants fans mobbed the field, Merkle headed for the safety of the clubhouse. But Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers noticed Merkle had left the field without touching second base, though it really should not have mattered, as the forceout rule usually wasn't enforced on game-winning hits in those days.

On this day, however, it was. Amid the chaos, Evers convinced umpire Hank O'Day to call Merkle out on a force play, thus nullifying the winning run.

Read the entire story here.

Jocelyn Wildenstein

Jocelyn Wildenstein, also known as Cat Woman or the Lion Queen, is a wealthy socialite who has had numerous cosmetic surgeries over the years to look like a cat.

Here's the most recent photo.

Tonsil stones

I finally found it!

Today I coughed up a nasty, odorous, white substance from the back of my mouth that has been coming from out of there for about 8 years. I've always called it "white shit". In the past I had tried searching on the internet for what it might be but to no avail. How do you search for something like that, anyway? I thought I was one of about 9 people in the world suffering from this obscure oddity. Today, however, I was going to stop at nothing to find out what the hell those little pieces of cheese were. The magic words on Google were "white stuff from mouth smells bad".

Oh damn! People on forums were posting their horror stories about it as well. But no one seemed to know what it was until I read the word "tonsillolith". I googled it and my life thereafter changed (this was a few hours ago).

The first thing I found was a Wikipedia article on tonsollilth a.k.a. tonsil stones. HOLY SHIT!!! A picture of my white shit on the internet!



As you can imagine, I was ecstatic. I read the entire article and googled some more and here's what I discovered.

But first, I'll brief you on what these mushy little things are and how I got them in the first place. I can still remember it: in 8th grade I noticed a long white strip in the middle of the back of my mouth. I ignored it. A few days later while I was drinking my daily iced tea in the school cafeteria, I accidentally swallowed it. I felt something rubbery slide down my throat but I still didn't seem to care that much. It was just something that comes and goes, I thought.

I don't remember how long it was after that but while I was doing my homework one sunny afternoon (it was graphing homework, by the way), I sneezed something that looked like the ball in the picture above. I didn't even hark back to the time I swallowed something weird in the cafeteria - I almost totally forgot about that incident. Actually, even after the sneeze, I really didn't mind or even wanted to look into it. That is, until it happened approximately every month. (Years later, I joked to friends that it happened every 28 days. They looked at me like I was from another planet.)

Now, I'm not one to go to the doctor; I believe you should stick it out until you're teetering on the point of death - at which point you'll squander away your life savings for something that could have been cured and for much cheaper had you gone to the doctor earlier. But I don't care. I let it go for 8 more years and I'm glad I did because it turns out that the tiny stinkballs are harmless. Whew!

And I can't believe they have two whole sites dedicated to this.

Dr. Douglass Hoffman, an ENT specialist who graduated from Stanford, put it this way:

The surface of your tonsils is pockmarked with deep pits, appropriately called "crypts" (since dead stuff accumulates in these pits). Oral mucosa lines the crypts. As this mucosa sheds, normally the dead cells leave the crypts and are swallowed. In some unlucky people...the dead cells accumulate and glom together to form hard little balls. All of this dead stuff makes great food for bacteria, and all kinds of bacteria normally colonize the mouth. Consequently, the [tonsilloliths] are ripe with bacteria. This accounts for the smell.

And yes, the period before the white shit comes out, I have horrible halitosis. To describe what the stones smell like, go to the bathroom, take a shit, and smell it. This is only a small exaggeration of what to expect if someone dared you to put one of those globs to your nose. And here is a video of one that is probably a little big but is not unusual to people with tonsil stones. This guy needs to seriously wash his hand with burning hot water and soap for about a minute and a half.



And here's a guy excavating.



If you have this don't be surprised to go to the doctor and find out that they have no clue what is wrong with you. Doctors are stupid. You go to their office and they give you an antibiotic that may or may not work. It's their way of saying, "I don't know. Take this and come back when you have something I know about. Then I'll look smart." Most of the tonsil stone sufferers who posted on blogs and forums went to their doctors and encountered the same thing. But thanks to the internet, people with similar troubles can share their stories and a real doctor comes by to answer their questions. And that doesn't solely apply to disorders, either. Just google something you have in mind and you can learn something new. Hence, this blog.

Emily Post

Emily Post was an American author who promoted what she considered "proper etiquette". She wrote books surrounding the topic of etiquette.

Jainism

Jainism is a religion prevalent primarily in India with about 10 million followers there, and successful growing immigrant communities elsewhere in the world.

I wonder where the Nazis got their symbol from?

Shortest man in the world

The shortest man in the world is He Pingping of China. He is 2 feet 5.37 inches tall.

Two Dicks

Dick Cheney, before the start of the Iraq War, purported to then House Majority Leader Dick Armey that Saddam Hussein had miniature WMDs. Although Armey had staunchly opposed invading Iraq, he gave the Administration the benefit of the doubt.

Our defense budget

The United States defense budget is more than the rest of the world's defense spending combined.

Lucid dream

A lucid dream is a dream in which the person is aware that he or she is dreaming while the dream is in progress.

Aramaic

There are an estimated 550,000 native speakers of Neo-Aramaic dialects as of 1994.

Sidney Torres

Sidney Torres is president of SDT Waste and Debris which won a $9 million a year contract to clean up the French Quarter and downtown New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte was about 5 feet 6.5 inches tall at the time of his death. That would make him slightly taller than an average Frenchman of the 19th century.

Broccoli

The cultivation of broccoli originated in Italy where it was known as broccolo.

"The surge worked!"

John McCain, during a low point in the Iraq war, urged the State Department to support increasing troops there because he believed that the United States was about to lose its second war in his lifetime.

Memory biases

A memory bias is a cognitive bias that either enhances or impairs the recall of a memory (either the chances that the memory will be recalled at all, or the amount of time it takes for it to be recalled, or both), or that alters the content of a reported memory. Here is a list of memory biases.

Gropecunt Lane

Gropecunt Lane was a name used in English-speaking towns and cities in the Middle Ages for streets where prostitutes conducted their business.

A Gropecuntelane is the earliest citation in the entry for the word cunt in the Oxford English Dictionary, which dates the reference to about 1230.

QubeTV

QubeTV is a conservative-biased alternative to YouTube. The site was founded by former Ronald Reagan aides as a response to what is perceived to be a liberal bias on the part of YouTube.

Peregrinate

Peregrinate means "to journey or travel from place to place."

Tamil

Tamil is an official language of India, Singapore, and Sri Lanka.

San Marino

San Marino claims to be the world's oldest republic. It was founded on this date in 301.

Oberlin College

Oberlin was the first college in the U.S. to regularly admit black students and is also the oldest continuously operating coeducational institution. It was founded on this date in 1833.

Schenectady, NY

Schenectady is pronounced [skuh-NEK-tuh-dee].