On Wednesday, I had this exchange with a Continental gate agent:

Me [being ultra polite]: “My wife is pregnant and she’s been standing on the security line for forty minutes. Is there any chance we can board the plane with the first wave of passengers?”

Her [being ultra condescending]: “Sir, that privilege is reserved for our EliteAccess and OnePass members.”

They let us board with the people needing extra assistance, which is exactly the crew with which I wanted to be lumped. No big deal. But the snobbery was not appreciated. While this certainly doesn’t qualify for any worst-exchanges-with-customer-service lists, it brings us to today’s first question:

1) What was your most harrowing customer service experience? (Here’s mine.)

2) Which author’s next book are you most eagerly anticipating?
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by Graeme Wood

Forget Apple and Pilot Inspektor. If you really want to give your kid a hard time growing up, just pick from the following list.

1. BATMAN.

Venezuelans are among the world’s most creative namers. In fact, according to their own government, they’re too creative. In September 2007, after hearing about babies named Superman and Batman, state authorities urged parents to pick their names from an approved list of 100 common Spanish monikers. Those conventional names (such as Juanita and Miguel) quickly acquired a patrician ring, ironically giving rise to more novel names, like Hochiminh (after the Vietnamese guerilla) and Eisenhower (after the president). There are also at least 60 Venezuelans with the first name Hitler.

2. ECLIPSE GLASSES.

In June 2001, a total solar eclipse was about to cross southern Africa. To prepare, the Zimbabwean and Zambian media began a massive astronomy education campaign focused on warning people not to stare at the Sun. Apparently, the campaign worked. The locals took a real liking to the vocabulary, and today, the birth registries are filled with names like Eclipse Glasses Banda, Totality Zhou, and Annular Mchombo.

3. NAAKTGEBOREN.

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New Scientist, easily our favorite science magazine, has a fascinating piece on how scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have come up with a genius new way of building circuits. While still built from the same old materials (plastic and silicone), these new circuits can both stretch and bend (it’s like your motherboard on yoga!). In fact, they can even be folded around coins. Of course, why the scientists chose to bend them up against coins, the article refuses to reveal. What the piece does suggest, however, is how these new circuits will affect your future. Apparently, the stretchy circuits will play into more elastic-like gadgets, smarter clothes (wearing your computer on your sleeve), and it promises the development of PC’s that will be implanted into the body- or more specifically, the brain. It all sounds pretty crazy. In any case, you can read more for yourself here at New Scientist.

This is an old idea I’m still trying out where I talk about something trivial I just learned about and then act outraged about how nobody told me. Here goes: Last night the WKU Hilltoppers were playing in the Sweet 16, and my roommate claimed it was the best team name he’d heard of since the old Brooklyn Dodgers’ name. So:

Why did no one tell me that the Brooklyn Dodgers used to go by the Brooklyn Bridegrooms?

I’m just a little infuriated that such a funny name has been kept from me for so long. In fact, the Bridegrooms are just one of the many ridiculous names Brooklyn’s favorite team once used. They also went by:

-The Brooklyn Robins
-The Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers
-The Brooklyn Superbas (named after a popular acrobat act)
-and The Brooklyn Grooms
The press gave the team the name. And it wasn’t just because they were big fans of alliteration, either- apparently, most of the players got married in the same season and the press couldn’t help but take notice. Also confusing to me was the fact that the Bridegrooms used to wear starched collars and little nubs of ties. I’m guessing, however, that all the dapper dressing (along with all the mustache wax) helped them attract the lady folk in the first place.

For the only other Things Nobody Told Me on Boy Scout Fashion click here.

By Erik Sass

Construction on the Soviet Union’s secret cities began during the early 1940s, and by the 1980s there were at least 57 secret settlements with a total population of 1.5 million scattered across the nation. Hidden in remote areas, their existence remained a matter of conjecture among ordinary people until the collapse of the USSR. Since 1991 some of the cities have been opened to visitors, but Western security experts believe there are still 15 secret cities whose names and locations the Russian government refuses to disclose. Here’s the scoop on the little we do know.

Hiding from Hitler

After Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union and occupied key industrial areas in 1941, Stalin came up with a crafty solution. He had hundreds of factories disassembled and shipped far from the front, to safe locations beyond the Ural Mountains in Siberia.Stalin’s pre-fab towns established the pattern for later secret cities. People who entered them were totally cut off in self-contained “closed administrative units” that included apartment blocks, clinics, gyms, schools, stores, theaters, restaurants, and power plants. Factory employees, including managers, were forbidden to leave, as all activity was closely monitored by the predecessor of the KGB, the NKVD. Surrounded by fences and guard forces, the cities were identified with only a name and a number indicating general location – and even these coordinates were false since they were changed frequently to deceive spies and saboteurs. Only key officials knew the actual location of the cities, or how to contact them via a secret phone network.

Version 2.0: The Birth of the Atomgrad

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There’s an incredible piece over at the Daily Mail on how filmmaker John Downer was making an animal documentary in Madhya Pradesh in India, and decided to recruit elephants to help out.

“Downer said he came up with the idea three years ago when his team started filming the tigers. He noticed how gently the forest elephants carried firewood to their camp and wondered if they’d be as delicate with a camera. “And they were,” he enthused. “Elephants do not see tigers as a threat, and tigers are comfortable with elephants. So we had the perfect team.”

Downer also placed cameras on the forest floor to amazing effect; just take a look at how the langur monkey stares into the cam below. In any case, the documentary looks like it’ll be pretty amazing. For lots more pics and the full scoop on Downer, click here. Story via the ever-amazing Cellar.

The 5 Most Ridiculously Over-Hyped Health Scares of All Time. These stories, along with the Cold War, are why my youth was so fatalistic.
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The credit crisis is moving beyond subprime mortgages. Next on the agenda: home equity loans.
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Seven Mysterious Disappearances. Read what we know happened, plus the wild speculations of what might have happened to these people who were never seen again.
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A look at some of the problems with a national service program. It may be a way to pay for college, but it may be more discriminatory than useful.
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How dead is dead enough? Modern medical advances have blurred the line between life and death, so the criteria for defining death is somewhat arbitrary.
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A cat is delighted to find he can walk on water! But the ice makes it hard to reach the fish.
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Ganvie, Benin: The Venice Of Africa. The town on the lake was settled to protect residents from slavery, as local religious tradition forbade attacking anyone on the water.
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Most of us carry tunes around in our heads at least part of the time. What’s your default song?

The New York Times has a great piece today on an 1860 phonautogram of the French folk song “Au Clair de la Lune.” Before we go any further, you should make sure there are no children or animals present, and listen to this crazy MP3 clip of the recording. Okay, now that you’re back, are you freaked out yet? The scratchy audio sounds like the warbling of a madwoman to me, and would be a great jumping-off point for some auditory horror piece. Anyway….

So the reason this is important (and not just weird) is that the recording predates Edison’s famous audio recordings by almost thirty years. The phonautograph audio transcription device was invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in the late 1850s. It was intended to record audio waves onto a visual medium (in this case, black paper), and playback wasn’t part of the system — the idea was to visually examine the audio waves to study acoustics. Scott’s (unrealized) goal was to find a way to “write speech,” not record sound per se. (Read more about it at Wikipedia.) Crafty researchers realized that the visual phonautogram could be made audible by applying a “virtual stylus” to the recorded sound waves, so they enlisted scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to decode the audio linked above.

Read the New York Times piece for a nice bit of history and historical detective work!

In January, we discussed Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and one of his paintings, “The Roses of Heliogabalus.” His second wife, Lady Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema, was also an accomplished artist. Since “Feel Art Again” has been suffering a dearth of female artists and spring is almost upon us, now is a good time to take a look at Lady Alma-Tadema’s “Gathering Pansies.”

1. Originally, Laura trained in music and those close to her “thought that she would show some originality as a composer.” She took up painting upon meeting Lawrence Alma-Tadema, though, and became a successful painter instead. Her step-daughter Anna and both her sisters, Emily and Ellen, were also painters.

2. Laura met Lawrence at the home of Madox Brown, under whom her sister Ellen was studying. At the time, Laura was 17 and Lawrence was 33, a recent widower, but he fell in love with her at first sight. After Lawrence relocated to England at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Laura began taking painting lessons with him, and it was during a lesson that he proposed. They married in 1871, two years after they first met. (more…)

The WebUrbanist has posted some deliciously recycled furniture over here. From shopping cart chairs, to bath tub sofas to what to do with all your recycled CD’s (apparently, you should make furniture with them!), there’s plenty of great stuff you probably won’t find at Ikea. Click here to see more.