March 7th, 2010
Shivani Ghai is an English actress of Indian decent. She recently appeared on the just-ended BBC miniseries Five Days and was also seen in the 2008 BBC-HBO miniseries House of Saddam, where she played Saddam Hussein’s daughter Rana.
She’s also famous in the UK for appearing on an Italian drama called Medico In Famiglia. The show’s producers wanted a female Indian character, but couldn’t find one who could speak Italian. It was so difficult, in fact, that runners gave up and hired an Anglo-Indian actress and taught her Italian instead of finding an Italian-born Indian actress!
(click to enlarge)
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Girls | No Comments »
March 6th, 2010
- London, England, is farther north than Amatignak Island, Alaska
- King Narmer, an Egyptian pharaoh who ruled in the 32nd century BC, is generally thought to be the oldest known historical figure. There are certainly mythological people (like Adam & Eve) who are older than Narmer, and there are fossils of early humanoids (like “Lucy”) who predate him by thousands of years… but Narmer is the first person we can actually date and know a bit about his story.
- If you took a piece of string and wrapped it around a basketball, then took a another piece of string and “wrapped” it so that it hovered 1 inch above the first string, the second string would be 6.28″ longer than the first string. If then you took a string and wrapped it around the earth, then took a second string and “hovered it” an inch above the first string… it would also be 6.28″ longer than the first string.
- The largest countries, in terms of geographic size, are (in order): Russia, Canada, China, USA, Brazil, Australia, India and Argentina. The next country on the list? Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is also the world’s largest landlocked country, and is larger than Western Europe.
- The Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints wore black helmets for the 1969 pre-season. The only problem was that the Saints’ front office hadn’t run the new helmets by the NFL to see if they approved. The league objected to being left out of the loop, and thus put tremendous pressure on the team to change back to their original gold ones. When team ownership found that fans hated them, they quickly went back to the gold helmets we’re familiar with today.
Posted in Sports, Trivia | No Comments »
March 5th, 2010
I won’t say I love this song yet, but all week I’ve been grooving on the tune “Cherry Tulips” from Champaign, Illinois-based indie rockers Headlights. This song – from the 2008 album Some Racing, Some Stopping – is just the sort of lush, poppy tune I can get into!
Have a listen and tell me what you think!
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Posted in Music | No Comments »
March 5th, 2010
I caught all kinds of hell for this post about how Terminator star Linda Hamilton was aging… well, let’s just say “less than gracefully”. Several people left nasty comments, the worst of which I deleted before they ever went public. And so, in order to counter the claims of ageism from that post, let me show you how 80s pop star Samantha Fox is getting along these days.
First off, a picture from her Page 3 Girl glory days, not too long before “Touch Me (I Want Your Body)” became a hit in the UK and US:
(click to embiggen)
After the jump, a picture of her now.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Girls | 1 Comment »
March 4th, 2010
- Ever wonder what life’s like for people who pirate Windows? Windows expert Ed Bott decided to “go underground” and see how pirated copies of Windows 7 actually work. The results are pretty interesting and worth a read, even if you’re not a tech person.
- Starting St. Patrick’s Day, Continental Airlines will offer flyers “a new option allowing you to purchase seat assignments for unreserved, Economy Class seats that feature extra legroom.” In other words, they’re going to start charging more for exit row seats.
- Speaking of St. Patrick’s Day, head over to this site to find a McDonald’s near you that offers Shamrock Shakes!
- The NFL has released their new conference logos, playoff logos, pre- and post-season logos, Super Bowl logos, and conference championship trophy designs. And they’re absolutely horrible. The new AFC logo, in particular, is pretty awful. What say you?
- Research in the academic journal Psychological Science shows that darkness increases dishonest behavior. It’s not just that darkness provides practical advantages (like “cover” for criminal activity); people genuinely think that the darkness can provide a measure of anonymity and invisibility… like a kid closing her eyes whilst hiding in a game of “Hide and Seek”.
- Lots of movie and TV stars get their starts in corporate training videos. Here’s a clip of Lost’s Michael Emerson… in a prison training video from 1992!
Posted in Food, News, Sports | No Comments »
March 2nd, 2010
… in with the old!
As you can see, I have reverted back to the previous theme for the site. Hopefully, this will be a temporary change.
The new theme had a couple of bugs in it, and I’ve been in touch with the theme’s author to see if I can get them fixed. The author apparently works full-time for Facebook, so I don’t know how quickly a fix will come.
Posted in Website News | No Comments »
March 2nd, 2010
As mentioned in this post, I have a ton of trivia items to share… so here’s today’s Amazing Trivia Bonanza:
- John Tyler (born March 29, 1790) was tenth president of the United States, holding the office from 1841–1845. Amazingly, Tyler has two living grandsons: Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr., (born 1924), and Harrison Ruffin Tyler (born 1928).
- One of the very last “Confederate widows” died in 2008. This one’s a bit of a trick, though: a girl named Maudie White Hopkins did the laundry and housekeeping chores for Civil War veteran William M. Cantrell. She was 19 and he was 86. Cantrell told Maudie that he would give her his land and house if she would marry and take care of him. Being one of ten children from a dirt-poor Ozark family, Maudie agreed. Cantrell, who enlisted in the Confederate Army at age 16 and served with the Virginia infantry, died in 1937 after the couple had been married for three years. Maudie lived on until August 17, 2008. Read more here.
- If you took a piece of paper .1 millimeter thick and folded it in half 100 times, the resulting stack of paper would be 13.4 billion light-years tall – almost as large as the entire observable universe! It sounds incredible, but it’s really basic math: .1mm (the height of the paper) * 2100 (the effect of doubling the height of the paper 100 times) / 1000 (to convert mm to m) / 9,460,536,000,000,000 (the number of meters in a light year) = 1026 meters, or 13.4 billion light years.
- William Moulton Marston was not only a psychologist, feminist theorist and inventor, he also wrote comic books, too! He’s mostly remembered for creating the systolic blood-pressure test, which detects deception and is still an important component of the modern polygraph machine. Oh, and he also created a comic book character known as Wonder Woman. Read more about him here.
Posted in Trivia | No Comments »
March 1st, 2010
Now this is just 29 different kinds of awesome! From si.com:
On Friday night, the Saints’ staff at the combine gathered in a private room at St. Elmo Steakhouse, an 108-year-old Indy landmark, for a final celebratory nod to the Super Bowl win over the Colts. This is a group that likes its wine, and likes to have fun.
At the restaurant, word passed that Dallas owner Jerry Jones would have his Dallas group in this exact room Saturday night for a team dinner. Jones had even phoned ahead, according to a waiter, to make sure a magnum of a wine he loved, Caymus Special Selection cabernet sauvignon, was ready to be served at dinner.
Sean Payton told the waiter he’d like to have that wine, too. The waiter told him: Sorry, sir. We have only one bottle left, and it’s reserved for Mr. Jones.
Payton said he’d like to have the bottle nonetheless. I assume there was much angst on the part of the wait staff at that point. My God! Who do we piss off? One of the most powerful owners in the NFL, or the coach who’s the toast of the NFL, the coach who just won the Super Bowl?
Here came the bottle of Caymus Special Selection, and the Saints’ party drained it.
But drinking Jones’ wine wasn’t enough. Payton gave the waiter some instructions, took out his pen … and, well, the Cowboys party found at the middle of their table the next evening an empty magnum of Caymus Special Selection cabernet sauvignon, with these words hand-written on the fancy label:
WHO DAT!
World Champions XLIV
Sean Payton
That’s the kind of thing Jones will get a big laugh out of. And remember.
Posted in Sports | No Comments »
Look! It’s me!
March 2nd, 2010Check it out: my tip – about how to make a Pledge Fabric Sweeper reusable – made it to The Consumerist today!
Woo-hoo! I’m an Internet celebrity!
Posted in Commentary | No Comments »