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Because I’m a total geek for trivia, and because I use every magazine as an opportunity to dominate my younger relatives in trivia boardgames (I can crush most of the the ones in elementary school), I wanted to share 8 things I learned from our latest magazine. Amazingly, they also double as 8 great reasons to check out the new issue!
1) Bill Gates’ wife Melinda was the project manager on Microsoft Bob the suite of products that led to Clippy. You know him as “that annoying cartoon paperclip who thinks you don’t know how to write a letter.” (p15)
2) Groucho Marx’s personal cure for insomnia was to telephone people to insult them until he started yawning. (p17)
3) Harold and Kumar were originally trying to get to a Krispy Kreme, but the donut shop didn’t want to be associated with the modern Cheech and Chong. (p20)
4) When Stravinsky’s revolutionary The Rite of Spring first debuted, the performance was so confusing to the audience that it led to riots and a fistfight.
5) The Poincare Conjecture, aka the Hardest Math Problem in History, devastated lives along the way, including the mathematics superstar Edwin Moise. After years of work, Moise was so broken by the problem that “he never did serious math research again, and spent his last few years critiquing poetry.” (p38)
6) In the 1904 Olympic Games, American George Eyser grabbed one bronze, two silvers and three gold medals, all while competing with a wooden leg! (p44)
7) In 1911, the cereal fad was so big that there were “107 brands of corn flakes” being made in Battle Creek alone. (p55)
8) China enforces a 14-inch height limit on all dogs within Beijing. (p61)
Of course, that’s just a little of what’s being offered. The new mental_floss has 72 pages of pure stories and facts guaranteed to delight, so click here to get a copy today!
Comments (4)
Comment
This was a fantastic issue. I devoured it! I’m going to start rationing myself to one article a day.
posted by Liz on 6-27-2008 at 2:07 pm
As an insomniac I personally enjoyed each and every cure to insomnia, I am not sure which one I shall try first……
(I also enjoyed the little cap’n crunch tid bit, that was most interesting)
The newest (and the first issue I have not had to run to a borders to buy, thanks to my uncle buying me a subscription!) issue gave me some topics for the weekly conversation I have with my brother. I usually have nothing really interesting to go over with him, we have NOTHING in common and before he joined the Air Force we hardly spoke. Now I got to discuss the “next generation of killer robots” with him, his personal favorite is the predator, I am quite partial to the X-47 Bombers. Thank you for that one, for once we had a discussion that interested both of us!
I must say I was a little disappointed in the product placement article, I mean it was interesting and I loved it, just some of the information could already be found in one of your blogs. :/
all in all, I am soooo happy to finally have a Mental_Floss subscription of my very own! I have waited almost two years, asking every Christmas, Hanukkah and birthday. Who would have thought Passover would be the holiday to bring the magazine to my doorstep (thought I have a feeling the manischewitz might have influenced my uncle handing me his credit card and telling me to order it). Thanks for writing such a great magazine!
:D
posted by C.Bukowski. on 6-27-2008 at 4:01 pm
Thanks so much, C. and Liz… I know the staff worked hard on it, so it’s very much appreciated. As for the best of the blog piece in the magazine, we just wanted to make sure that more people who read the magazine knew about the blog. It’s odd how a lot of people who read the blog don’t know we have a magazine, and vice versa, so we were hoping to change that trend!
posted by Mangesh on 6-27-2008 at 4:07 pm
I’m not sure that you have your history right on Stravinsky…while it is fun to think those things, there was also a history of audience discontent in Paris at the time, particularly with the owner of the concert hall and Sergei Diagalev, head of the Ballets Russe (Le Sacre was accompanied by a ballet). Reportedly, the hall was hot and stuffy and the audience had felt cheated by a canceled performance earlier in the week, so they came ready to complain, so to speak.
There was confusion at the premiere - apparently the group did the whole thing over, as the cheers and jeers (some people tried to cheer louder than the complainers) masked the music, so they did it again.
The music itself was well received, at least by professional critics, and it became a sort of instant classic, playing around the world in just a few short years. I’m not sure that a confusing piece of music that caused people to resort to fisticuffs would get such a warm worldwide response…
posted by KT on 6-29-2008 at 7:55 am