We’re proud to announce four new additions to the mental_floss line:

Scuba Diving: Keep Your Friends Close and Anemones Closer
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Ambiguity: What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness
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I Avoid Clichés Like the Plague
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Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally

[Also available in fitted women's shirts.]

Whether you’re looking to get a head start on your holiday shopping or you’d like to stick one of these in your own t-shirt drawer, now’s the time to buy. This week, all shirts are $14.90. Just enter the coupon code NEWTEES before checkout. (And get a free mental_floss tote bag with all orders over $50!)

The 9/11 Squeegee

On September 11, 2001, a window washer named Jan Demczur found himself in a perilous spot. He was riding an elevator in the World Trade Center’s North Tower when a jet struck the building and the elevator stalled out at the 50th floor. Luckily, Demczur and his five fellow riders had the foresight to pry open the elevator doors. But when they finally got them open, they found something grim on the other side: a solid wall. Rather than give up, Demczur grabbed his brass squeegee and began hacking at the wall. He eventually broke through, and all six passengers escaped to safety. Demczur’s tool, meanwhile, ended up in the Smithsonian.

The Swiss Army Scalpel

While most Swiss Army knives are relegated to a mundane existence of tightening screws and opening beer bottles, Dr. John Ross’ pocket knife has some better stories to tell. In 1989, the Canadian surgeon had a spot of bad luck when he arrived in Uganda. Before he could start practicing medicine, thieves stole his surgical saw. Thankfully, he’d also packed a Swiss Army knife. Whenever Ross needed to perform an amputation, he sterilized his trusty tool in boiling water and then used the saw blade to take off the injured limb. Ross praises the knife’s high-quality steel for working “faultlessly,” and by his count, he used the tool to perform at least six Swiss Army amputations.

In any case, there’s tons more great stuff in the issue. Make our editors happy and pick up an issue on the newsstands. Or better yet, pick up a t-shirt and a subscription for a very low price here.

In fact, we’re so excited that we’re offering a great new deal: If you pre-order the book before October 31st, we’ll throw in a FREE second book, Cocktail Party Cheat Sheets. That’s two great books delivered to your doorstep for just $14.99.*

Here’s how it works:

Step 1) Order our new paperback from any online retailer: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million, Borders, etc.

Step 2) Send an e-mail to freecocktail@mentalfloss.com with your home address and your proof of purchase (e.g. the e-mail confirmation from the online bookseller).

Step 3) Sit back and relax! We’ll mail you a free copy of Cocktail Party Cheat Sheets; the online bookstore will send you your copy of The Mental Floss History of the World. In no time, you’ll have two wonderful paperbacks to keep you company on your favorite lounge chair.

*Please note, this deal applies to US and Canada orders only!

One of our favorite things in the latest issue of mental_floss is Chris Higgins’ wonderful MacGyver Fact Check. We had him analyze a whole bunch of episodes and determine just how plausible the escapes were. Here’s just one of the stories that surprised us.

JUMPING OUT OF A PLANE (IN A CAR!)

EPISODE: “The Heist,” Season 1, Episode 5

Sticky Situation: A diamond-mogul villain has captured Mac and his most recent love interest in the cargo hold of an airplane. The villain cackles, “Take it up to 30,000 feet. The lack of oxygen will kill ’em!”

MacGyverism: Conveniently, the cargo hold also contains a sports car and a comically oversized parachute. Mac attaches the parachute to the roadster (with its top down, of course), and then drives the car out of the airplane. The parachute releases just when oxygen levels are high enough to breathe. While gently floating to the ground, Mac makes out with his girlfriend and the credits roll.

Plausibility Meter: Surprisingly high!

First of all, the bad guy knows his science. At 30,000 feet, humans aren’t getting enough oxygen and can suffer from hypoxia, a medical condition that can have fatal results. Climbers trying to reach the top of Mt. Everest (summit: 29,029 feet) often succumb to hypoxia, and that’s after they’ve had days to acclimatize. As for the parachuting with the car, let’s run the numbers: A sports car plus two passengers will add up to about 1.4 tons, and a large cargo parachute can easily handle two tons if dropped from that height. MacGyver and his lady friend can even put on a few pounds and still make the thing work.

Best For: Lovers

If you’re interested in seeing what other surprises the issue has (both about and not about MacGyver) be sure to pick up a subscription here. You’ll make our mothers very happy.

The caged rodents in today’s labs aren’t the guinea pigs of yesteryear. They’re specifically bred and highly standardized. Need a mouse that’s resistant to anthrax but will get drunk easily? There’s a lab mouse designed for that. Need a mouse that can get Parkinson’s disease but will never catch polio? There’s a mouse for that, too. Writer Maggie Koerth-Baker did some serious digging to reveal the strange story of Clarence Cook Little, the visionary researcher who saw the potential in an overlooked rodent and revolutionized biology in the process. Of course, you’ll have to pick up a copy of the issue to read the full story, but here’s a tidbit:

Little Big Man

The son of a dog-show judge, C.C. Little arrived at Harvard in 1906, set on studying man’s best friend. But one day during class, Professor William Castle gave him some career advice. He slid a mouse across his desk to Little and told him to find out everything he could about that organism. “This,” he said, “will be the one to watch.” Castle, a founding father of genetics in America, was not the kind of person you ignore. Fortunately, Little listened. Between 1909 and 1914, C.C. Little toiled in the biology labs of Harvard’s Bussey Institute, using mice to learn how mammals inherit traits from their parents. But when he ran his experiments, Little found that the creatures lacked the sort of standardization expected of other lab subjects. At the time, experimenting on mice usually meant catching a bunch in the basement of some campus building and carting them over to the lab. While certainly fresh and feisty, Little’s test subjects were difficult to obtain and differed greatly from one another. So he began to dream of mice strains that were identical and docile, “like newly minted coins.” Little’s solution? Inbreeding.

The story only gets better from there. Be sure to pick up a copy. Or better yet, go ahead and subscribe here!

Our new cover story on leaders is filled with the bold ideas and strange measures that politicians have taken to try and better their countries. But part of what makes the piece so fascinating is that all of these men and women have had unbelievable lives. Their stories sound so unlikely– from a hippie, folk-singing doctor who escaped torture to become president, to an East German scientist and daughter of a pastor who walked over the Berlin wall and was so moved that she felt compelled to go into politics. The stories are incredible, but my favorite is that of Lula da Silva. This is just an excerpt from one of the profiles in that story.

The End of Poverty: Lula da Silva

President of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva goes by one name, Lula. Because, like Beyoncé and Bono, he’s just that popular. With an approval rating approaching 80 percent, he is the most beloved president in the history of modern Brazil. Of course, he is not without his critics. Lula’s detractors call him an uneducated rabble-rouser, who curses, drinks, and smokes on airplanes—all of which is true. But to his adoring fans—the millions who chant his name over and over like a crowd at a soccer match—Lula is a hero who vowed to end poverty and then stayed true to his word. This is how he waged his war, and why China and India are copying his battle plan.

The Miraculous Bag of Money

Born to illiterate parents in 1945, Lula started out life in a hut with no electricity and only dirt floors to sleep on. At age 7, he sold peanuts on the streets of Sao Paulo to help support his family. They often went hungry, mostly because his father was an abusive alcoholic who had a second family and a total of 23 offspring. When Lula was 10, his mother, Lindu, decided she’d had enough. She gathered her seven children and moved them to a single room in the back of a local bar. But she still couldn’t keep up with the rent.

The situation looked dire until a miracle occurred: Lula’s brother found a package lying on the ground at the market. Inside was more money than a minimum-wage laborer could make in three years. After waiting a week for someone to claim it, Lula’s brother gave the package to Lindu. She used the extra cash to move the family to a nearby industrial suburb. Life was still hard, but the move brought opportunities. Lula learned to read and eventually received vocational training as a metalworker.

Want to read the rest? Pick up a copy of mental_floss at your local newsstand, or subscribe here.

As the economy sputters, everyone’s looking for new ways to save on food. That’s why, we asked David Clark to collect a whole bunch of no-budget meal ideas for the new issue. Here are his tips for chowing down on tree bark.

A Nice Slice of Tree Bark

A classic meal of human desperation, tree bark has become a must-have during periods of scarcity. But you don’t have to eat it al dente the way termites and beavers do. Inhabitants of the Lapland in Finland, for example, are known to make bread with ground tree bark during cruel winter months, and several Native American groups use tree bark as a dietary supplement. In fact, the Adirondack Mountains derive their name from a derisive term for the Algonquin Indians that means “tree eaters.” Not all bark is equally edible, so you’ll have to experiment with your neighborhood flora. Some popular favorites include aspen, birch, willow, maple, and pine—trees common in cities and forests alike. So sharpen your teeth and dig in!

How to Prepare It

For the choicest strips of bark, be sure to go for the nutritious, tender inner layer known as the cambium. (Eating the outer bark would be no more pleasant than chomping into your bookshelf.) If some resin or gum oozes out as you pry off the main course, be sure to lap it up for quick energy. Here are a few fun ways to serve tree bark:

• Raw. Shred finely and chew thoroughly.
• Slice it into strips and boil it to make a rustic pasta. Top with sap, dandelion greens, or insect parts (see entry #2). Alternatively, you can add the noodles to a stew.
• Dry and grind into flour. The ground bark is pretty versatile and can be mixed with water into a breakfast gruel, baked into bread, added to soup for extra body, or even guzzled straight like a Pixy Stick.

Of course, that just scratches the surface. The piece covers everything from how to cook leather, to eating and preparing insects, to a beginner’s guide to scarfing down dirt! Make our editors happy and subscribe here.

(PS: The frying pan photo above comes from this great page on bark eating.)

If you’d rather not schlep all the way down to the newsstand, you can also get the magazine delivered right to you. Just click here, for a full year’s subscription AND a mental_floss t-shirt for a very, very low price. Go ahead and subscribe. Your expanding mind (and your friends here at the _floss) will thank you.

Make room in your t-shirt drawer, because today we’ve added three new shirts to the mental_floss store: “I’d Give My Right Arm To Be Ambidextrous,” “Thomas Aquinas: The Original Deep Fat Friar” and “The Comma Sutra: Making Grammar Sexy since 1875.”

To celebrate their arrival, all our shirts are currently 15% off. Just enter the coupon code “moretees” before checkout. (Discount doesn’t apply to package deals or Outlet Store items.) If you’re pondering a shirt purchase, consider adding a subscription to mental_floss magazine, which is like a witty t-shirt, only rectangular and with more pages.

There’s a lot of horrible, terrible, no good, very bad news out there. And it’s definitely dominating the headlines (just take a look at the pic that Terri took at the local Books-a-Million). But that’s exactly why mental_floss decided to print up a new issue, 100% full of stories guaranteed to make you smile! 

Our Good News issue is filled with weird and funny and incredible tales that are bound to put you in a better mood. In fact, if you asked us to tell you our favorite story from the issue, it’d be like 72 pages of Sophie’s choices. But since you (hypothetically) asked, here are a few of the top contenders:

* Nabokov’s New Novel (Seriously! It’s coming out this year.)

* A Man from Wales who Foot Races against Horses… and Wins! 

* A (Very) Loving Way to Get Rid of  your Allergies (The strangest, funniest theory we’ve ever seen on the subject.) 

* Bulletproof Underwear

* The daring story of two East German families and their incredible hot air balloon ride/escape from communism.  

* And why the Joy of Cooking is one of the most important books in American history (We didn’t believe it till we read it).  

But that just scratches the surface. There’s also the story of how klutzy Arthur Conan Doyle was (the young adventure-seeker kept falling overboard while on a Arctic cruise), or the Little Houdini who keeps breaking out of prison again and again and hot wiring trucks to see his parents, and tons, tons more. So make yourself (and our editors!) happy and pick it up today. Oh, and if you’d rather have it delivered to your house, we can do that for you too! Just click here.