Okay, it doesn’t have the same ring as “Juneteenth,” but today is also a little-known holiday commemorating the freedom of black people historically oppressed by white people, the independence day of my very favorite former French colony, liberated in 1977: Djibouti. How can you not love a country with a name that evokes Lil Jon? Alas, all most people know about Djibouti is its amusing moniker. Let’s remedy that:

* Djibouti’s motto is “Djibouti by Choice.” 

* Djibouti’s capital is called… Djibouti.

* Djibouti used to be called something far less fanciful: “The French Territory of the Afars and the Issas.”

* If you’re looking to get a tan, Djibouti’s the place: Mostly desert, it’s one of the hottest countries on earth. Average annual temp is in the 90s.

* Like America, Djibouti has a presidential dynasty: Its second president, Ismail Omar Guelleh was first elected to office in 1999, taking over from his uncle, Hassan Gouled Aptidon.

* Also like America, the president’s actual election has been called “ridiculous, rigged, and rubbish:” In his second campaign last year, Guelleh was the only candidate on the ballot.

The only thing scarier (or ”awesomer” if you’re my reptile-loving wife) than a snake is a snake that can change colors. Two Kapuas mud snakes that can do just that were found in Indonesia this week.

“I put the reddish-brown snake in a dark bucket. When I retrieved it a few minutes later, it was almost entirely white,” says Mark Auliya of the Alexander Koenig Museum in Bonn, Germany, and WWF consultant. Auliya was part of a team that discovered the snake while conducting a survey of reptile diversity in the park in 2003.

Check out the rest of the New Scientist article here.

Okay guys, I’ll admit it, I’m getting into the World Cup! The more I watch, the less I complain, the more I’m on the edge of my seat, rooting for teams and players I know almost nothing about. Yes, I’ve hopped on the football wagon. I even spent some time over the weekend looking for good (read: free) flash games with a soccer angle.

Here’s the one that helped me kill a whole hour or so. Careful if you click over though, it’s pretty addicting — sort of like the way hacky sack was in college, which helped me kill entire days when I was procrastinating.

Speaking of hacky sack, ever wonder what its origins are? Well I did. So now, thanks to this little article over on About.com, you get to kick the question around, too. Here’s a highlight:

The co-operative kicking sport has ancient origins from China, Thailand, Native America and nearly every country. Hacky Sack or Footbag, as we know it today, is a modern American sport invented in 1972, by John Stalberger and Mike Marshall of Oregon City, Oregon. Marshall had created a hand-made bean bag, that he was kicking around. Stalberger was recovering from knee surgery and was looking for a fun way to exercise his knees. Together, they called the new game “Hackin’ the Sack.” The two decided to collaborate and market their new game under the trademark of “Hacky Sack®”.

Research on birds has shown that female canaries are more devoted to their young when they hear Al Green – er, a ”sexy” male serenade prior to reproduction:

Researchers discovered that certain phrases in a canary’s song are “sexier” than other syllables. … When the researchers played female canaries a recording of males singing sexy syllables, the females laid significantly larger eggs than birds that heard recordings of normal songs. “It may be that this is a difficult kind of vocal gymnastics to achieve; it may be that males who do this are in very good condition,” said Roderick Suthers, a biologist at Indiana University who studies avian song production. “Maybe the female canaries pay attention to this particular kind of syllable because it tells them something about male quality—if these syllables are more difficult to produce, only the most competent males could produce them.”

This, folks, is why songbird Britney Spears is such a negligent mother to the spawn of Kevin Federline — no competent male would have produced a song like ”Popozao.”

… comes courtesy of the brilliant interactive public radio show Open Source, which is focusing today on a subject it knows all too well: The Limits of Crowds. The hook for the show is an essay by all-around guru Jaron Lanier that’s been making the rounds among the digerati (yeesh, what a silly word); it critiques and to a large degree criticizes comprehensive wiki-ish projects like, er, Wikipedia, MySpace, and (for some reason) the New York Times. To try and summarize it would do it a great disservice, but here’s a kernel:

It’s safer to be the aggregator of the collective. You get to include all sorts of material without committing to anything. You can be superficially interesting without having to worry about the possibility of being wrong.

In the spirit of being superficially interesting, I’m going to stop here and let you read the actual piece — but I do want to point out that Lanier (who you know as the coiner of the term “virtual reality”) starts the piece by complaining that Wikipedia misidentifies him as a film director. Then he ends the piece with a short bio: “Jaron Lanier is a film director.” Holy intentional irony! His Wikipedia entry doesn’t say that anymore — but how long do we give it before someone fails to read the essay and “corrects” the entry based on that bio?

LiveScience reports today on a Smart Pill in development that may be able to take various medical measurements inside the body and transmit those to a computer on the outside for analysis. The device is used to diagnose gastroparesis, which causes a slow emptying of the stomach and can lead to serious gastrointestinal problems.

As the plastic-sheathed pill passes through the stomach, intestines, and bowel, it transmits critical diagnostic information—such as pH, temperature, and the amount of pressure in the stomach and intestines—to a receiver that a physician later connects to a computer. Included in the digital signal is the pill’s position in the body, giving doctors a clear picture of how effectively the stomach and other GI-tract components are pushing food toward the final destination.

It’ll be interesting to see how many other types of Smart Pills hit the market in the coming years.

I’m always looking around for something interesting to drink (I think there’s a word for that?), particularly in the hot, sticky summer when my beloved Highland Park scotch loses some of its toasty, smoky appeal. As soon as I get some free time I’m going to try out this recipe for “fake grappa,” courtesy of the Village Voice:

Cherries, which are just coming into season now, are sprinkled with sugar and soaked in vodka for a few months. … The cherries, which lose their bright color and turn brownish, absorb a dangerous amount of alcohol over the months of soaking—we call it lethal fruit, and it’s always what puts me over the edge after a long, wine-fueled holiday feast.

Real grappa, of course, is made from grape leftovers and was designed as a sort of “waste not, want not” drink. In Italy they use it to chase espresso, in which case it’s called “Amazza Caffè:”  literally, the “coffee killer.”

Actually, I’m celebrating two birthdays today: My brother, Marc’s, who’s turning 36 (For he’s a jolly good fellow…) and my favorite soundtrack album of all-time, the Beatles’: A Hard Day’s Night, which, can you believe turns 42 today?!?

Packed with the hit singles, “And I Love Her,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and, of course, the title track, “A Hard Day’s Night,” the album was the first by the fab-four to contain songs entirely written by Lennon and McCartney. But for the phrase itself, “A Hard Day’s Night,” we have Ringo Starr to thank. (Curiously, the movie went through several title changes before folks over at United Artists settled on Ringo’s coinage. Beatlemania #1 was the working title for a while and then Off the Beatle Track.)

In Ringo’s own words:

We went to do a job, and we’d worked all day and we happened to work all night. I came up still thinking it was day I suppose, and I said, ‘It’s been a hard day…’ and I looked around and saw it was dark so I said, ‘…night!’ So we came to ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’

And while my brother doesn’t have his own website I can link to, there are, of course, thousands on the Beatles. One of my favorites is a trivia website called I am the Beatles, which, when said aloud, sounds to me like you can actually Instant Message with John and Ringo… Alas, you can not. But you can discover that the working title for the song “Yesterday” was originally “Scrambled Eggs.”

We did a story on the International Federation of Competitive Eating (IFOCE) in our Jan/Feb issue. One of the eaters featured in that story has successfully grossed me out once again by eating 60 ham biscuits to win another IFOCE event. And to make things more impressive, Sonya Thomas (a.k.a. ’Black Widow’) only weighs about 100 lbs. What’s frustrating to me is that they never share their pre-contest and post-contest weights. I mean this woman must weigh a good bit more after she’s eaten 60 biscuits. 

Her other records include eating “46 dozen oysters in 10 minutes, 11 pounds of cheesecake in 9 minutes, 48 chicken tacos in 11 minutes and 56 hamburgers in 8 minutes.”

I love her quote regarding dunking all the biscuits in water to help them go down easier. She says “Sometimes the water taste makes me feel a little bit sick.” It’s the water, not the 60 biscuits.

According to this month’s Wired magazine, speed enthusiast and self-described “inventrapreneur” Brian Walker is planning on shooting himself into space (or at least 20 miles into the atmosphere) via an enormous home-made crossbow. The plan is simply to “stretch a carbon-fiber bowstring 24 feet along a rail, fire up a jet turbine with 1,350 pounds of thrust, hit a trigger and pull 10 G’s.” Easier said than done, of course. Aside from catapulting himself, Walker is also hoping to catapult a new craze marketed to sky divers, base jumpers and other adventurous sort. Of course, the cleverly-named Project RUSH (a.k.a. “Rapid Up Super High”) is just one of the man-child’s many ridiculous/borderline genius ideas. Walker is still working to perfect his 300-gallon water balloon launcher aimed at putting out forest fires, and he’s putting the finishing touches on his Taser gloves meant for, well, Tasering people.