Friday Diversion

Do you ever turn to the person who just yelled at you and say… thank you?   Glutton for punishment James Parker sure does. The occasional dressing-down is really an honor… and you probably deserve it, he reasons.  Behold! A yeller “pulsing with wrathful radiance” and you,…

Big news: The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists is always accepting applications, according to Mental Floss.  

Last week: We memorialized a

We only wish our extra lockdown pounds were billed as a “celebration of success and survival”… but we aren’t the brown bears of Katmai National Park.  

Do X, and enjoy a lifetime supply of Y.     We’ve all wondered what happens with deals like this one.   22 years ago, the Mexican restaurant Casa Sanchez in San Francisco promised a lifetime of free food to those tattooed with its logo. Now, we know what happened. Casa…

Over the years, some people have just been plain wrong.   And sure, we could have let them wither anonymously into the abyss.   But what fun would that be?   Instead, the Congressional Research Service in the 1960s blessed us with a wrongness Hall of Fame,…

Cockatoos have already impressed us once in the past month with their remarkable trash-picking cliques.   This week, we learned that the enterprising parrots also make their own cutlery—presumably with which to eat said trash?  

Many people, should they happen upon a horde of square-dancing grannies, would think, “How charming!” For their neighbors—and Chinese regulators—it’s “let’s slap a fine on that.”  

If it weren’t for a mechanical failure at a Kansas Dairy Queen in 1958, the iconic ICEE may never have been.   Luckily, enterprising DQ employee Omar Knedlik knew an accidental million dollar idea when he saw it, and soon his slushy frozen sodas were a hit.     Then came…

Cockatoos haven’t made headlines like this since Snowball the avian dancing sensation.