I don’t particularly like iced coffee. More of a 44-ounce, 600-calorie smoothie kind of guy. But when this coupon found its way into my Gmail, I was willing to expand my beverage horizons. With an expiration date of 9/30, I could hit all fifty-three Starbucks within walking distance without sheepishly presenting my coupon to the same barista twice.

It’s been printed out on my desk all week. Actually, I’ve got a whole pile. And today was the big day. And then I read this:

An email offering a free Starbucks iced coffee was distributed to a limited group of Starbucks partners (employees) in the Southeast United States on Wednesday, August 23, 2006 with instructions to forward to their group of friends and family. Unfortunately, it has been redistributed beyond the original intent and modified beyond Starbucks control. Effective immediately, this offer will no longer be valid at any Starbucks locations.

What a bummer. Thanks to the good people at Snopes for saving me the trip.

Rather than end this post on a sour note, here are a few legitimate free stuff offers:

• If you’re a soldier returning from Iraq, enjoy a free, um, session at a Nevada brothel.

• If past performance is any indication of future returns, you can enjoy a free stack next National Pancake Day (February 2007).

• A free haircut, craigslist-style.

• Free lawn irrigation gauge. Though this only applies if you’re in Western Missouri.

• And free horse manure. Why pay full price?

We have quite a few readers in England, and I am intensely jealous of them, partly because of their access to ready-made scotch eggs and partly because they’ve had the chance over the last month to watch Blizzard: Race to the Pole, a documentary in which two small groups of lunatics brave explorers recreated the famous British/Norwegian scramble for the South Pole in 1911-12. (U.S. readers not blessed with BBC2 can check out the accompanying book.) The teams traveled over 1,500 miles using only the cold-weather technology their predecessors had: fuzzy hats, wills of steel, and a sparse list of basics you’ll find after the jump. Thankfully, there were three rather important differences in the modern day expedition:

1. The leader of the original Norwegian team, short on food, ended up killing and eating his sled dogs as he approached the Pole. The modern dogs suffered no such indignity; they were flown out by helicopter, and the teams chowed down on beef and seal meat instead.

2. Dogs aren’t allowed on Antarctica anymore, so the race to the South Pole became a race across Greenland. Hey, cold is cold.

3. Unlike poor Robert Scott, the leader of the Brits’ original team, everyone on the modern teams came back alive.

Disclaimer: One of these nutcases the British team doctor is a dear friend.

(more…)

The two Munch paintings that were stolen from a museum in Oslo two years ago have been found, and in pretty decent condition at that:

“We are 100% certain they are the originals. The damage was much less than feared,” police said.

They had been missing since two armed men ripped them from the wall and threatened staff at the Munch Museum in the Norwegian capital in August 2004. Three men were found guilty of charges relating to the theft in May.

BoingBoing notes that “the paintings were found just days after Mars, Inc. offered 2 million dark chocolate M&M’s for the return of The Scream.” The M&M website holds the key to why — although it doesn’t seem to have weighed in on the good news yet, much less ponied up the candies.

I’ve written about Bruno Bozzetto before, but with the passing of Pluto (didja see our nifty tee?), I thought it might be a good time to revisit the master, and check out his wonderful little piece called “Life.”

For those who aren’t yet familiar with his work, Bruno Bozzetto was born in Milan in 1938, and is one of Italy’s most talented animators and cartoonists. As you’ll see in “Life,” or any of the others on his website, his forte is satire, often of a political nature. (To see all his flash films, go here.)

In addition to loving his cartoons, I also happen to be a big fan of the composer he often works with, Roberto Frattini, who scored “Life,” as well as nine others.

For some reason, one of the questions I’m asked most frequently in radio interviews is “So, your latest book claims the story about Catherine the Great dying while being a bit too intimate with a horse is actually a myth. So it’s not really true?” And it’s pretty funny because most of them seem disappointed to learn that it might be myth. So I explain that no, it’s not true, but that she most likely still died in a pretty embarrassing way – while on the toilet.

Then they ask about other famous people who have died on or near toilets. Well thank goodness I can now just refer people to this Wikipedia article, dedicated to toilet-related injuries and deaths. There’s even a list of occurrences of toilet-related injuries in pop culture. From Doc Brown gaining inspiration after hitting his head on a toilet in Back to the Future to Austin Powers drowning one of Dr. Evil’s henchmen in a toilet, the list is pretty long.

So thanks to Wikipedia I can now retire from answering toilet-related injury questions.

Today is International Navel-gazing Blog Day, and despite the current poetically sad state of the Blog Day site…

… I thought I’d participate anyway. According to Global Voices, the point of this exercise is to recommend five blogs your readers might not already know about. So:

1. My Heart’s in Accra. Run by Ethan Zuckerman, a tech-culture guru and friend of mental_floss. (He’ll be on our panel at the Idea Festival this fall.) Brilliant thoughts on international news, with a focus on Africa. Ethan’s on vacation until September 4th, but the archives are worth a look in the meantime.

2. Idle Musings. If you like what we do, you’ll like what “punkinsmom” does — not only is she one of our readers (hi there!), she has the same kind of quirky news and, well, idle musings you’ll find here.

3. Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society. If we had a three-way with McSweeney’s and Wes Anderson, the result might look a little like this — a blog devoted to curiosities, inquiries, and artifacts, like this 19th-century mounted flamingo.

4. Aetiology. Not a science-blog fan, you say? We challenge you to resist this one, with recent posts titled “Cervical cancer, vaccines, and jackalopes” and “Some good news about sex.”

5. The Liam McEneaney Experience. And this one’s just funny.

 The Wired NextFest is coming up September 29th and the current issue has bits on some of the featured inventions. One of these inventions, the LifeStraw, gives us hope that it might actually be possible to significantly reduce the number of people suffering from waterborne illnesses like Typhoid, Cholera and Dysentery. This could be huge for the one billion people in the world who have no access to safe drinking water. According to the developers of the device, the LifeStraw kills 99.9% of the disease-causing micro-organisms that are found in drinking water. One person could use a straw for up to a year.

Here at mental_floss, we do love all things Einstein, so I couldn’t resist posting this great video of his doppelganger from Hanson Robotics, who walks, talks, and makes amazingly realistic facial expressions. (As far as I know, the robot has not yet formulated a Unified Field Theory.)

For comparison, here’s the real thing:

Thanks, Sandy!

To continue the lineage of our ever-developing themes, let me introduce a new one called Thingamajig Thursday. The idea here is that I’ll be taking a close look at some interesting thingamajig – or thingamabob, if you prefer – and letting you know the real name for it so you can appear a tad smarter than the next guy, who’s still foolishly calling the thingamajig a thingamajig.

Simple, right?

So then let’s start with something equally simple: the aglet or aiglet, as it’s sometimes spelled. An aglet is that funny plastic or metal cap thingamajig at the end of your shoelace, which is supposed to keep the lace from unraveling. (Though try telling that to my 4-year-old nephew, Theodore.) The word itself, which can be traced back to the Latin, acus, or needle, is pronounced AG-let, with the accent on the first syllable, not ag-LET. Were the accent on the second syllable, it might be fun to substitute the word into that Frank Sinatra song and sing, “Aglets, I’ve had a few….”

Now: if you’ve got a heck of a lot of free time on your hands, you might want to learn how to repair broken aglets here, at Fieggen.com.

And I’ll leave you with Wiki, who has some additional interesting info on the little aglet, as well:

Before the invention of buttons, [aglets] were used on the ends of ribbons to fasten clothing together. Sometimes they would be formed into small figures. Shakespeare calls this type of figure an “aglet baby” in The Taming of the Shrew.

I’m sorry, I can’t help myself, but shouldn’t that read, The Taming of the Shrewlace?

What if we told you Ford had condemned the combustion engine as a dirty, noisy thing of the past, and designed a car that ran silently, boasted zero harmful emissions, and could drive 5,000 miles without stopping for a re-charge? Given the difficulty they’ve had selling trucks and SUVs lately, sounds like a no-brainer, right? In fact, they came up with the idea more than 50 years ago. It was the halcyon days of the atomic age, and Ford’s new prototype, the Nucleon, seemed poised to become yesterday’s car of tomorrow. But as the folks at Damn Interesting point out, it didn’t quite work out that way:

The Nucleon’s design hinged on the assumption that smaller nuclear reactors would soon be developed, as well as lighter shielding materials. When those innovations failed to appear, the project was scrapped due to conspicuous impracticality; the bulky apparatus and heavy lead shielding didn’t allow for a safe and efficient car-sized package. Moreover, as the general public became increasingly aware of the dangers of atomic energy and the problem of nuclear waste, the thought of radioactive atomobiles zipping around town lost much of its appeal. Atoms had broken their promise; the honeymoon was over.

But is the Nucleon merely a relic of the past, or could it provide a glimpse of the future?

A safe atomic vehicle may not be entirely beyond our reach, as the US Navy has demonstrated with its perfect record of nuclear safety. Perhaps one day fossil fuels will wither under the radioactive glare of the mighty atom, and our highways will hum with the steam turbines of mobile Chernobyls.