OK, this is the last time I am going to explain this to you.....

Toilets DO NOT flush backwards below the equator. With all due respect to my Australian assistant Kim, who swears she has seen it, its a bunch of crap. Read this for details:
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1998-11/910045585.Es.r.html

or this

http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadCoriolis.html

Or do your own damned research!

I know that people have seen this work at the equator. Its a fake. A scam. Michael Palin even got conned by this on one of his PBS series.

I'm sorry to debunk this, but I'm sure you still believe in lots of dumb stuff.

SS Mousetrap - 2 trivia items

The great thing about blogging is you can go back to see what you have written. That way you don't repeat your stories. I was sure I had posted the first of these 2 items, but low and behold, I hadn't.

So, do you remember the game "Mousetrap", shown left? You moved around the board and added pieces to the Rube Goldberg machine that eventually dropped a mousetrap on your opposition.

Any idea who invented it?

Answer: Rube Goldberg.


OK, Item two. This one comes from a guest blogger, my brother David. On May 9, 1961, Newton Minow, then Chairman of the FCC gave a speach in which he decried the television landscape as a "vast wasteland." Click here for an edited version of that speech: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland_Speech

In 1964 Gilligan's Island premiered and the "mighty ship" was named the SS Minnow to express the producer's displeasure with Mr. Minow's assessment of the quality of television.

In Praise Of Spam

Embrace spam. Not the meat, the email. Why? As intrusive advertising goes, its pretty benign. You can avoid it pretty easily. It doesn't waste paper like junk mail. It doesn't take up your time like TV ads. It doesn't interrupt dinner like telemarketers.

So, ignore it. Delete it. Block it.

Get over it.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em

Smoking kills about five million people every year. This is a list of a few of the famous people who have died from tobacco-related diseases or smoking addiction. The list is biased towards older folks. Current smokers have a few more years to go. Still, it doesn’t take a keen sense of history to realize what has been lost.

Stephen Ambrose
Louis Armstrong
Desi Arnaz & Lucille Ball
Mary Astor
Tallulah Bankhead
Count Basie
Leonard Bernstein
Art Blakey
Humphrey Bogart
Bobby Bonds
Walter Brennan
James Brown
Yul Brynner
Anthony Burgess
Prescott Bush
Rusty Burrell, original bailiff on The People's Court
Herb Caen
John Candy
Johnny Carson
Raymond Carver
Lon Chaney, Sr.
Graham Chapman
Grover Cleveland
Rosemary Clooney
Ty Cobb
Nat King Cole
Chuck Connors
Gary Cooper
Noel Coward
Bing Crosby
Bette Davis
Sammy Davis, Jr.
Joe DiMaggio
Walt Disney
Jimmy Dorsey
Morton Downey, Jr.
Dwight Eisenhower
Duke Ellington
T. S. Eliot
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Cotton Fitzsimmons
Ian Fleming
Curt Flood
Errol Flynn
Bob Fosse
Sigmund Freud
Clark Gable
Jerry Garcia
Jackie Gleason
Frank Gorshin
Stephen Jay Gould
Betty Grable
Ulysses S. Grant
Dashiel Hammett
George Harrison
Robert A. Heinlein
Lillian Hellman
Hubert H. Humphrey
Chet Huntley
John Huston
Burl Ives
Peter Jennings
Etta Jones
Spike Jones
Boris Karloff
Buster Keaton
Brian Keith
Eddie Kendricks
Michael Landon
Meyer Lansky - Famous gangster. Possibly related to me on my mother’s side.
Julie London
Roger Maris
Bob Marley
E.G. Marshall
Dean Martin
Lee Marvin
Groucho Marx
Zeppo Marx
Walter Matthau
Roddy McDowall
Steve McQueen
Audrey Meadows
Ann Miller
Robert Mitchum
Claude Monet
Garry Moore
Agnes Moorehead
Pat Nixon
Lloyd Nolan
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Patrick O'Neal
Roy Orbison
Jesse Owens
Robert Palmer
Bert Parks – Mr. Ms. America
Vincent Price
Denver Pyle
Anthony Quinn
Eddie Rabbitt
Jason Robards
Harry Reasoner
Pee Wee Reese
Lee Remick
Cal Ripken, Sr.
Jack Ruby
Babe Ruth
George C. Scott
Rod Serling
Dmitri Shostakovich
Frank Sinatra
Ed Sullivan
Spencer Tracy
John Wayne
Wolfman Jack
Frank Zappa
Warren Zevon