Year: 2011

– NBC reporter Chris Hansen, famous for catching child predators via hidden camera, was busted cheating on his wife recently… by surveillance camera footage. Now he’s gotten caught cheating on his mistress… with another mistress! This time a Las Vegas stripper is alleging that she had a six month love affair while Hansen was cheating on his wife with a young reporter from Florida. Well played, sir!

– In this post I discussed the “London, England” phenomenon, where American media tend to refer to cities by their full name, like “London, England” or “Paris, France”. In the post, I noted how many American cities are named after European cities (there are twenty US cities named “Athens”, for instance), and how many US cities share names (there are thirty US cities named “Franklin”). So while foreigners might laugh at the “London, England” practice, I thought I’d mention one European who isn’t laughing. Bojana Jovanovski, a 19 year-old Serbian tennis star who is currently ranked #54 in the world, was supposed to play in a tournament in Carlsbad, California. However, whoever handles her travel bought her a ticket to Carlsbad, New Mexico. She knew she was in the wrong place when a local at the airport gave her a “WTF look” when she told him she was there to play in a tennis tournament. She managed to make it to the correct Carlsbad with just thirty minutes to spare… and lost.

– It took forever to get started, but the new One World Trade Center is coming along nicely.

– The Daily Mail has this story about an English woman named Kerri Dowdswell, who normally wears size ten jeans. But when she eats, her belly expands so much that she looks like she’s in the last couple weeks of a pregnancy. A little while later, her belly contracts to normal. It’s gotten so bad that she wears maternity pants when she goes out to eat! Even scarier: doctors are stumped as to why it’s happening!

– The Daily Mail also has this collection of cool photos taken with an FEI microscope, which can “achieve 1,000,000 times magnification” of traditional electron microscopes.

– University Challenge is a long-running British game show in which teams from different universities compete in a question and answer game that makes Jeopardy! look like grade school material. In a recent game, host Jeremy Paxman asked “‘which organisation [this] flag represented”:

The team from Homerton College, Cambridge buzzed in and answered “the 13 American colonies”. Paxman said they were wrong, and gave the team from Balliol College, Oxford a chance to answer (they guessed “Canada”, which is unambiguously wrong). As someone with a flag fetish, I know that this flag was the first flag of the United States, and is known here as the “Grand Union flag”. I also know that it was the flag of the East India Company, which was the answer Paxman had on his answer cards. The BBC has insisted that their answer is correct, because they asked what organization the flag represented. A small nerd brouhaha has broken out in the UK.