Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died yesterday at age 89. Here’s a look back at the gifted and controversial author.
*
10 Fascinating Facts About the Ancient Olympic Games. If the modern Olympics tried some of these customs, the ratings would go through the roof.
*
Can you guess where my accent is from? I scored better than I expected in this game, although I can’t distinguish accents in different cities in England.
*
A new study says parents harm their children’s development if they ban tree-climbing or conkers. I’m all for tree-climbing, but since I don’t know what conkers are, I’m afraid my kids are doomed.
*
A massive colony of ants builds a nest inside a printer/scanner. A little Terro will take care of that, but I’d probably still toss the printer.
*
Tips for getting rid of junk mail before it gets to you. Which beats throwing it in a landfill, like most folks do.
*
A spectator’s guide to the Olympics. A short course on ten events you should check out.
*
Bacon is big, especially on the internet. Here are several ways to feed your hunger for bacony goodness.
Comments (7)
Comment
- subscribe /
- give a gift /
- terms of service /
- about /
- contact us /
- write for us /
- ad info /
- subscriber services /
- press /
- privacy policy /
- rss /
© 2012 Mental Floss Inc. All Rights Reserved. Mental Floss is a registered trademark owned by Felix Dennis. mentalfloss.com is a trademark owned by Felix Dennis.
Disclaimer: All submissions made to mental_floss become the property of Mental Floss Inc and may be used without further permission by the submitter and without compensation to the submitter. If you do not agree to these terms, please do not submit anything to mental_floss.
Conkers is a game played using horse chestnuts, during the autumn when they are plentiful in areas with horse chestnut trees (quite a large part of England). You take the shiny brown nut and drill a hole through the middle, then thread a knotted shoelace through the hole so that you can swing it like a pendulum. Two people with a conker each then face off, and the objective is to strike your opponent’s conker with your own with sufficient force as to shatter theirs.
The risk, of course, is that your conker shatters instead.
Over the years many people have come up with a variety of unsporting tricks to make sure their conker is harder than anybody else’s.
I never played much – I preferred to collect the largest, shiniest conkers I could find and admire them. Drilling a hole in one would have been wrong.
posted by MaW on 8-4-2008 at 4:22 am
I LOVE that accent website…I’ve been wanting to contribute my own video for a long time :)
posted by Liz on 8-4-2008 at 8:20 am
“Massive” colony of ants? More like a handful.
posted by gourry on 8-4-2008 at 8:26 am
the ants colony is so grose! my breakfast almost came up when i saw the eggs. weird how they didnt see any ants anywhere else but in the scanner? i would throw it away too if i were that guy…
posted by nicole on 8-4-2008 at 10:11 am
That accent game was interesting… but it was deceiving! A few people (especially the americans) didn’t have accents from the cities in which they live! I’m from Chicago. I know a Chicago accent. That lady did NOT sound like she’s from here! And same with the Miami!
Oh well. I got 17 the first time… then, surprizingly, I did remarkably better when I tried it a second time!!
posted by Point Special on 8-4-2008 at 10:28 am
Thanks for the explanation, MaW!
I got 36 points on the accent game. I got all the US cities right, but none of the UK cities. I even pegged a South African city!
posted by Miss Cellania on 8-4-2008 at 11:39 am
I like to take my junk mail and stuff it into credit card app return envelopes and send it to the credit card companies.
posted by David on 8-4-2008 at 1:18 pm