Did you know the author of "Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle", Washington Irving, was also the first author to ever engage in a guerilla marketing campaign for one of his published works? Irving - who also created a popular underground satire magazine similiar to today's Mad magazine back in the early 1800s lampooning high society New York culture and politics - wrote A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, which not only created the term "Knickerbocker", which would be stolen by the New York Knicks to birth a woeful basketball franchise, but parodied self-absorbed New Yorkers and how serious they took themselves. Hey just like today! Irving created the fake author name Diedrich Knickerbocker, as well as countless other pseudonyms, and started a fake advert campaign in 1809 to hype his publication. He placed a series of fake "missing" posters all around NYC for "Diedrich", imploring the public to help look for a man that did not exist. This appears to be the first viral marketing ad campaign in American marketing history. If only he had access to Lite Brights and Aqua Teen Hunger Force, he could have fooled the world!

We've had lots of good massacres in the good ole US of A. The Boston Massacre stands as the most crowd pleasing of massacres, but what about this golden nugget from the mid 19th century. The story is important because the situation isn't too unlike the present tensions directed towards immigrants in our country, this time from Mexico and other parts of Central and South America.
Louisville newspaper editor George Prentice was looked up to as the voice of the common folk, the Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann (depending on what side your on) of his day. At the time, a flood of German and Irish immigrants were pouring into the country, inciting the still familiar accusations of the foreigners stealing jobs. Prentice lambasted the newly arrived immigrants and his rhetoric grew in ferocity over time. 



A day after Prentice imparted these words of wisdom onto the town's people, the massacre went down, killing 22, and causing an exodus of the area's German and Irish population. Of course drunken mobs were the culprit because, let's be honest, what else takes part in a massacre?


It's odd looking back on this event, now called "Bloody Monday," not because of the illogical hatred toward immigrants. Nope, we've still got that. No, it's odd because of how normalized our Irish and German population is today, with these two groups being two of the most populous in our country. It goes to show you how times and attitudes change over time and the person you fear today might be the norm tomorrow. Just go back over the story and insert the word "Mexican" everytime you see "Irish" and you'll get an idea of how nonsensical the current debates really are. Or keep hating on them and completely ignore the significance of the story...it's your life.

Despite sounding like a crappy dish at Red Lobster, the Crab Nebula is actually the leftover remants of a supernova explosion that was first documented by Chinese and Arab astronomers waaaay back in 1054 AD. John Bevis ("Heh-heh, shut up Butthead") was the first astronomer to discover the Crab Nebula itself in 1731, but it was the Earl of Rosse Williams Parsons, who built the world's largest telescope at the time in the 19th century, who coined the name crab nebula, because to him, it resembled a crab. At the center of the nebula (an interstellar cloud of gas and dust) is the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star that emits radiation pulses in the form of wavelengths. This leads it to emit light over 75,000 times greater than our shitty little Sun. The energy output of the Crab is different than most celestial entities. Similiar nebula evolve slowly and do not change form for any number of years, but the Crab Nebula changes over a period of days. Equatorial winds push into the nebula causing a shock wave, carrying energy and altering its appearance. In the 1960s scientists believed that the pulsar could be transmitting messages through electronmagnetic radition (aliens!) but the theories were later debunked when it could be explained that the pulsar were formed by supernova explosions. Unfortunately we are still left with shitty sci-fi movies like Contact and The Arrival.

How does an arachnida with the cute cuddly name Banana Spider come to be the most venomous spider in the world? The Banana Spider, more commonly known as the Brazilian Wandering Spider, differs from other spiders in that rather than maintaining a web to catch prey, it "wanders" the jungle floor searching out animals to totally scare the ever living shit out of. During the day they mostly hide among fallen rocks and logs in the jungle, but at night? Oh boy. The Banana comes out to play - hiding out in dark, moist places and, just our luck, in areas where human reside. It is nicknamed banana spider as some of its more popular hiding spots besides houses, cars, and backyards are banana trees, and even banana spiders have been known to accidently get trapped in shipping crates of bananas sent overseas. Its poison, the neurotoxin PhTx3, which not only paralyzes and can asphxiate but get this, can lead to painful erections that can last for multiple hours. I know - I said erections. These poiosn-induced erections can cripple and also lead to impotence. A poisonous spider bite that not only kills you, but gives you the worst boner of your lifetime? What a dick move.

Did you know that one of the largest man-made structures ever created on Earth was a big 'ol pile of garbage? Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island in New York City was a 22,200 acre dumping ground that was at one time the largest landfill in the world. It was opened in 1948 and was only supposed to be operational for 20 years but people just kept dumping their gross shit there and it just kept piling up and piling up, until the amount of waste reached astronomical proportions. At one point, the garbage dump was larger in volume than the Great Wall of China, and its peak was 25 meters higher than the Statute of Liberty. It was finally shut down in March 2001 by the EPA after fears the garbage would actually start to eat New York City. It was used temporarily again after 9/11 as a place to dump and sift World Trade Center debris, and remains of the victims still rest at this spot where New Yorkers hucked their trash for the last half century, which when you think about it is incredibly sad as a resting place for victims of a terrorist attack. Now Fresh Kills is being re-constructed as a state park, and the development, which will take 30 years, will leave Staten Island with a park that will be 3 times the size of Manhattan's Central Park and will be large enough a site to support park programs including nature trails, horseback riding, mountain biking, community events, outdoor dining, sports fields and canoeing. Except everything will smell a kinda bit like garbage.

Some tiny islands have the strangest stories. Kanton Island is the largest and northernmost island of the Phoenix Islands, a string of failed colonial settlements established by the British in a last ditch effort to expand their naval empire in the early 20th century. Kanton also played a key role in WWII as an important air strip was erected that Allies forces used to combat the Japanese in the war in the Pacific. After WWII, it became a stop-over spot for airliners traveling to Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii.
But once airliners invented long-range jumbo jets, stop-overs to refuel were no longer neccessary and Kanton was again abandoned. The 60s and 70s saw the US Air Force and space progam use Kanton as an island base for missile research. But by 1976 they had abandoned the island as well. By the end of the 1970s, the republic of Kiribati, an island nation in Micronesia, had claimed the island and populated it with natives. All remained quiet with Kanton until May 2010, when a British sailor stumbled upon the island and found 24 island natives (14 adults and 10 children)  malnourished and forced to hunt for fish and eat coconuts Tom Hanks-Castaway style when a supply ship that was due never arrived. No one was ever aware that there were even natives still on the island. And people think the Lost island has a history.

Did you know that under the Presidency of Ulysses S Grant, there was a massive, multil-million dollar scandal involving alcohol, tax revenue, and mutliple Republican politicans? The Whiskey Ring of 1875 involved politicans diverting millions of dollars of tax revenue from liquor sales, and involved a complex web of bribes from everyone from distillers to liquor salesmen to government officers to IRS agents.  Raids conducted by secret agents and the Us Secretary of the Treasurer contributed to bring down the scandal and arresting some high-profile politicans, including members of Grant's own Cabinet. The whole incident furthered emphasized a dark mark on the Republican party in the years after the Civil War, and led to much governmental distrust by many American citizens. Grant himself even has his own wiki on scandals during his Presidency. And yet this guy gets the $50 bill. I guess that George W Two Hundred Dollar Bill can't be far behind.

In 2002, computer programmer Ivan Bowman was forced to relocate from his position at Sybase iAnywhere software company in Ontario when his wife was transferred to Halifax. But he got fed up with conducting meetings speakerphone, webinar and webcam, and the interpersonal shortcomings of being elsewhere while his company thrived. So what did his bosses do? They built a robotic version of Ivan, that's what. The IvanAnywhere was created as a motorized, fully functional telepresence robot with a webcam, speakers, microphones, a 24-volt motor, and a PC tablet, as well as proximity sensors so it can avoid banging into doors, walls, and other cubicles. It was also fitted with a digital camera, so Ivan, from his cozy home office, could take snapshots of Power Point presentations, charts and graphs, or just the parking lot if he was bored. Ivan also "drives" his robot to work everyday, like some kind of dorky racing video game, from his home in Halifax. The robot functions as if Ivan is there, at the office, and has become a popular attraction during walking tours of the Sybase building.

And ladies and gentlemen, this is how it begins. OF COURSE you would love to send a robot to your work place so you don't have to interact with your co-workers. Who wouldn't want to do that? Most co-workers suck the life from your very being. And now, we can replace that life esssence with iYou. Today, IvanAnywhere. Tomorrow, tSkynet. And then, before know it - you got this. Be sure to thank lazy Ivan who didn't want to try and find a new job when our world becomes a mushroom cloud.

Remember that kind of hot chick from those Honey I Shrunk the Kids movies? Amy O'Neill played Amy, the sort of attractive older daughter of Rick Moranis's zany Wayne Szalinksi and she had a cutesy PG romance with boy next door Russ Thompson. She didn't really do anything with her acting career beyond Honey I Shrunk the Kids movies and decided to quit acting in 1994 because the only scripts she was getting were roles that required her to shows off her Szalinksi's. So she did what any actress would do when all the legitimate acting roles have dried up - she joined the circus. She joined an all-girls stilts group, appropriately titled "Girls On Stilts". They have toured across the world performing weird stilt acts and creeping out people worse than any movie about shrinking kids or giant babies ever could. She also noted in her wikipedia that she is not married and "hoping to start a family with someone who isn't intimidated by her work as a performer." Riiiight.