Explore the surprising history of the American flag—from chaotic early designs to the modern Stars and Stripes. Discover odd layouts, forgotten variations, and how the flag we know today finally took shape.
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In the United States the month of November has been designated as National Good Nutrition Month. Interestingly enough, it is also National Peanut Butter Month, National Pepper Month, and, of course, the month in which Thanksgiving is celebrated — most notably by overeating.
While filming the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark the filmmakers discovered to their chagrin that the snakes used for the Well of Souls sequence weren’t afraid of fire at all. In fact, they would always try to get closer to the fire to warm themselves. At one point director Steven Spielberg was caught on…
In 2013, Oxford researcher Kevin Dutton compiled a list of professions that attract the most psychopaths. It probably won’t come as a surprise that plenty of psychos become police officers, lawyers, and surgeons. However, the number one vocation chosen by psychopaths was “CEO.”
Ever ask how many zeros in the biggest numbers? Find your answer here.
Alan Jay Lerner took two weeks to write the last line of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” for the play My Fair Lady. The concluding words are, “Loverly, loverly, loverly, loverly.”
The original manuscript of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men was eaten by his dog. Steinbeck wrote of the incident to his agent and said, “I was pretty mad, but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically.”
On commercial airliner flights, the pilot and co-pilot never eat the same meal. This is for the safety of the craft: if the pilot is laid low by food poisoning, the co-pilot should still be well enough to continue the flight. source
Peter Capaldi, who plays the twelfth Doctor Who, also played the role of a doctor with the World Health Organization in the zombie movie World War Z. He was credited as “W.H.O. Doctor”.
Torchwood is a spin-off of the highly-successful science fiction television program Doctor Who. The word torchwood is actually an anagram of the words doctor who.
One gigabyte of memory cost $300,000 in 1981. Today, that amount of memory is available at no cost to users through many cloud services.
There’s something fishy going on in the Gulf of California. The fish know about it, but they aren’t talking. You could literally say that something has their tongues. Cymothoa exigua is a species of undersea louse that has adopted a peculiar way to survive. It targets the rose snapper fish and enters its body through…
At the beginning of the song “Roxanne” by The Police, during the intro, you can hear a strange piano chord, then Sting laughing. In fact, during the voice recording, Sting accidentally sat on the piano just behind him. They decided to keep this on the final mix.
The flag of Nova Scotia was only officially adopted in 2013, after 155 years of use, when an 11 year-old girl researching a project realized that it had never been officially recognized in all that time.
