SLIDE SHOW

Three men who appeared in Marlboro advertisements - Wayne McLaren, David McLean and Dick Hammer - died of lung cancer, thus earning Marlboro cigarettes, specifically Marlboro Reds, the nickname "Cowboy killers". McLaren testified in favor of anti-smoking legislation at the age of 51. During the time of McLaren's anti-smoking activism, Philip Morris denied that McLaren ever appeared in a Marlboro ad, a position it later amended to maintaining that while he did appear in ads, he was not the Marlboro Man, considering Winfield as the holder of that title. McLaren died before his 52nd birthday in 1992

Walt Disney World generates about 120,000 pounds of garbage every day

US scientists calculated that Santa would have to visit 822 homes a second to deliver all the world's presents on Christmas Eve, traveling at 650 miles a second

Many theologians estimate that Jesus wasn't born on December 25 but sometime in September between 6BC and 30AD

During the winter of 1932, Niagara falls froze completely solid, which has happened just six times in history

Onlookers gather in 1932 at the sight of a frozen Niagara Falls

Years in which February lacked a full moon:  1809, 1847, 1866, 1885, 1915, 1934, 1961, 1999. February of 2018, 2037, 2067, and 2094 will all lack a full moon as well

Americans die most frequently in January and February, when in fact you have (as an American) a 1 in 10 chance of dying from disease or accident.  Americans die least frequently in the summer- during the months of June, July and August the odds of death go down to 1 in 13.8 in August from 1 in 12 at the end of May

It’s officially called a ‘transfer accelerator’ by Dutch railway maintenance company ProRail, but everyone else would likely say it’s a slide. Installed next to a stairway at the newly renovated railway station Overvecht in the city of Utrecht, the slide offers travelers the opportunity to quickly reach the railway tracks when they’re in a hurry. But above all, the slide is a great instrument to make the city more playful. The ‘transfer accelerator’ was designed by Utrecht-based firm HIK Ontwerpers, and installed as the final piece of the renovation of the Overvecht railway station

 This video captures what happens in another location for subway riders when given the option to slide

Heavier vehicles are safer for their own occupants but more hazardous for the occupants of other vehicles. Controlling for own-vehicle weight, being hit by a vehicle that is 1,000 pounds heavier results in a 47% increase in the baseline fatality probability. Estimation results further suggest that the fatality risk is even higher if the striking vehicle is a light truck (SUV, pickup truck, or minivan). The value of the external risk generated by the gain in fleet weight since 1989 is approximately 27 cents per gallon of gasoline. The total fatality externality is roughly equivalent to a gas tax of $1.08 per gallon

The odds a male does not groom his back hair are 1 in 1.33  (75%)

In a 2011 survey of Information Technology (IT) professionals who were male, 82% claimed they put their partner's sexual pleasure above their own

In Chinese, the KFC slogan "finger lickin' good" comes out as "eat your fingers off"

Over 1,000 birds a year die from smashing into windows.  Several thousand more die after becoming disoriented flying south for the winter-  in 2010 New York City dimmed lights in office buildings and other features that were not in use at night to help prevent the demise of so many birds, and it is estimated that several hundred birds were able to pass over without being disoriented due to the safety measure

The United States Postal Service handles over forty percent of the world's mail volume

More than 400,000 U.S. houses still lack indoor plumbing

It is illegal for tourists to enter Mexico with more than two compact discs

Antarctica is the only land on our planet that is not owned by any country 

Between the ages of 20 and 70, the average person spends about 600 hours having sex with a partner and about 800 hours masturbating

On average a woman has four sexual partners in her lifetime 

The average woman who wears lipstick uses her height in lipstick every five years 

NEWS FEED:
Berjuan Toys is already selling its Breast Milk Baby online ($70) and expects to have it in stores later this year. The doll works by the child-"mother" donning a halter top with flowers positioned as nipples, and when the baby comes into contact with the a flower, sensors mimic sucking sounds. Although dolls that demonstrate
toileting functions are already on the market, breastfeeding activists are more enthusiastic about this one, hopeful that girls' comfort with breastfeeding will result in decreased bottle-feeding later on.  (Opponents have denounced the doll as forcing girls to "grow up" too soon and with choices too complicated for their age, which according to the manufacturer is as young as 3)

Frances Ragusa, 75, was back in court in Brooklyn, New York in June 2011 claiming child support she said was never paid by husband Philip Ragusa, 77, in their divorce settlement of 33 years ago. (The "children," of course, long ago became adults, but the $14,000 judgment has grown, with interest, to about $100,000.) Frances told the New York Post in July that she called Philip several months earlier to discuss the amount but that Philip merely began to cry. "Don't let this case go to trial," she recalled telling him. "[I]f you think I'm going to forget it, Phil, you're stuck on stupid"

Rules to assure correct, "progressive" behavior were recently proposed by the San Francisco Commission
of Animal Control and Welfare and the Colorado Department of Human Services. The San Francisco agency would ban the sale of all pets in the city limits, from dogs to gerbils to goldfish. ("Why fish? Why not fish?" asked one exasperated Commission member, bristling at criticism.) Animals sold as food for other animalswould be included but not animals sold as food for humans. Day care centers in Colorado would be required, if it made dolls available at playtime, to have dolls of three different races   

GARBAGE PATCH, KIDS

According to a 1995 poll, 1 out of 10 Americns, mostly women but also men, admitted that they will buy an outfit intending to wear it once and return it

In Los Angeles, discarded garments are being recycled as industrial rags and carpet underlay. Such recycling keeps clothing out of landfills, where it makes up 4 percent of the trash dumped each year in that one city

The largest cell in the human body is the female egg  (The smallest is the male sperm)

The average sperm cell swims at 8 inches per hour

After age 30, the brain begins to lose about 50,000 neurons per day - shrinking the brain .25% each year.  Neurons are specialized cells which are electrically excitable, and can use that electric excitability to received and transmit information

On average, men are more likely to suffer heart attacks than are women, but women are more likely to die from a heart attack

Your ears secrete more earwax when you are afraid than when you are calm

The Cinderella theme may well have originated in classical antiquity. The Ancient Greek historian Strabo (Geographica Book 17, 1.33) recorded in the 1st century BC the tale of the Greco-Egyptian girl Rhodopis, "rosy-cheeked", who lived in the Greek colony of Naucratis in Ancient Egypt. It is often considered the oldest known version of the story:  "They tell the fabulous story that, when she was bathing, an eagle snatched one of her sandals from her maid and carried it to Memphis. While the king was administering justice in the open air, the eagle, when it arrived above his head, flung the sandal into his lap. The king, having been stirred both by the beautiful shape of the sandal and by the strangeness of the occurrence, sent men in all directions into the country in quest of the woman who wore the sandal. When she was found in the city of Naucratis, she was brought up to Memphis and became the wife of the king..."
   

Rome has more homeless cats per square mile than any other city in the world

A feral cat stretches amid famous ancient ruins of Rome

Mice, whales, elephants, giraffes, and humans all have seven neck vertebra

The one extra room new-home shoppers want the most is the laundry room, at 95 percent. Only 66 percent of new-home buyers request an extra room to use as an office while a mere 13 percent want a study or library

During the American Revolution, many brides did not wear white wedding gowns; instead, they wore red as a symbol of rebellion

Denmark is the smallest of the Scandinavian nations. It is home to the first Legoland, a 10-hectare theme park built from plastic Lego blocks, and is Denmark's most-visited attraction outside of Copenhagen. The most elaborate reconstruction at Legoland is the three-million-block Port of Copenhagen exhibit, which features electronically controlled ships, trains, and cranes

Copenhagen's Nyhavn canal build in LEGO bricks in Legoland

In Holland, you can be fined for not using a shopping basket at a grocery store

Napoleon constructed his battle plans in a sandbox

Leonardo Da Vinci predicted the mass use of solar energy as long ago as 1447

The oldest glowing lightbulb was first switched on in 1901 and lives in fire stations in Livermore, CA. It is known as the Centennial Light

   
Ancient gladiators were mostly vegetarians

The time interval from first sighting of the iceberg that sank the Titanic to impact was a little over 30 seconds

The flushing toilet was invented in 1596, not by Thomas Crapper as most people think, but by Sir John Harington... but long before that, in 206 BCE, The Arab inventor, Al-Jazari, invented a hand washing device incorporating the flush mechanism now used in modern flush toilets. His device features an automaton by a basin filled with water. When the user pulls the lever, the water drains and the automaton refills the basin

1880s: Thomas Crapper's plumbing company built flush toilets of Giblin's design. Although not the original inventor, Crapper popularized the siphon system for emptying the tank, replacing the earlier floating valve system which was prone to leaks. Some of Crapper's designs were made by Thomas Twyford. The similarity between Crapper's name and the much older word crap is a coincidence 

Until the nineteenth century, solid blocks of tea were used as money in Siberia

Traces of cocaine were found on 99% of UK bank notes in a survey in London in 2000- The same was found to be true of the US dollar the following year

The oldest patented company logo is the red triangle of Bass beers, which was founded in 1777 in England

No one from the Nestle family have run Nestles since 1875     

The last time American Green cards were actually green was 1964 - an American "green card" establishes a person as having permanent resident status in the United States, which allows them to work and seek housing and have access to entitlements such as unemployment insurance and public healthcare such as Medicaid


The great wall of China is 1,400 miles long

NEWS FEED:
In June 2011, the California Court of Appeals threw out the three counts of possession of child pornography for which Joseph Gerber had been convicted, even though what Gerber had done was paste face shots of his own 13-year-old daughter onto ordinary pornographic photos. The U.S. Supreme Court decided in 2002 that a conviction for making "child pornography" requires actual sexual abuse

It is not the most popular fetish, but a few men do don raincoats and climb down into public outhouse pits. Luke Chrisco, 30, was apprehended by police in June in a portable toilet at the Hanuman Yoga Festival in Boulder, Colorado Chrisco actually "slipped" away from police but was arrested days later in nearby Vail. According to his Facebook and YouTube pages (reported by The Smoking Gun), Chrisco offered himself as a male escort (sample rate: $620 for seven days) and recalled in one video that, on the road in April 2011, he once avoided sleeping overnight at a Greyhound Bus station because it "smelled weird"

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has become an increasingly larger and more permanent part of the ocean--plastic and other floatables, along with concentrations of chemical sludge, estimated to measure from 0.4 percent to 8 percent of the entire Pacific and responsible for disruptions of the food chain affecting various
species of aquatic life. Now, thanks to the March 2011 tsunami near Japan, the estimated 25 million tons of debris from cars, homes, appliances, shipping containers, chemicals, etc., from coastal Fukushima that washed back out to sea will soon be caught in the same Pacific swirls, in what a French environmental group forecast would be a pair of ocean-navigating journeys that will last at least 10 years, gradually breaking off and joining (thus substantially enlarging) the two distinct legs of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch