Sure, you probably watch it every year (or at least flip past it in pursuit of something else), but how much do you really know about the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade? Test your knowledge with our Parade quiz, then impress (or annoy) your family with all of your smarts tomorrow morning.

Take the Quiz: Macy’s Parade

• From what I can gather, “The cranberry, along with the blueberry and Concord grape, is one of North America’s three native fruits that are commercially grown. Cranberries were first used by Native Americans, who discovered the wild berry’s versatility as a food, fabric dye and healing agent.” Now, of course, cranberries have become a staple of traditional Thanksgiving dinners. Though it is debatable whether cranberries were present at the “first Thanksgiving,” if they were it’s likely they were not served in a sugar-sweetened sauce to which we have so wonderfully grown accustomed.

• According to NPR, “natural bogs evolved in Massachusetts from glacial deposits, which, over time, filled up with water and decaying matter. The resulting layers of sand and organic material comprise the ideal soil for cranberries. Last month in Plymouth County, Mass., the red-dotted landscape was evidence of thousands of years of geological evolution.” Although perhaps not for long.

• Early cranberry innovator John Webb (a.k.a. Peg Legged John) would pour the cranberries down the stairs rather than carry them (on account of his havin’ a peg leg an’ all). The good cranberries would bounce down the stairs while the bad berries that were soft wouldn’t – voila! The “bouncing principle” is still used to this day to separate the good cranberries from the bad (a process currently untested on humans).
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I think today’s Q10 is pretty self-explanatory, no? So, I’ll just wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving (or just a wonderful rest of the week if you’re not celebrating) and be on my way to visit my parents. Mmm, homecooked food that I didn’t have to make.

Quick Edit: You guys are totally right, I forgot Delaware – THE FIRST STATE! When I combined the Carolinas as 12 and 13 I guess I stopped counting. Wayne Campbell would be so disappointed in me…

1. New Hampshire started out at the Province of New Hampshire. It was named by John Mason after the county of Hampshire in England (home of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens).
2. Likewise, Massachusetts was originally the Province of Massachusetts Bay. It was named after an Algonquian tribe, the Massachusett, which translates to something along the lines of “people of the great hill” or “at the place of large hills”, referring to the famous Blue Hills.
3. The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations is sure a mouthful, so I’m glad it’s been shortened to Rhode Island. That’s just a colloquialism, though – the official name is still The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Basically, Italian explorer Giovanni Verrazano compared what is now Block Island to the Island of Rhodes in size. And in 1636, Roger Williams was given some land at the top of Narragansett Bay by Indian chiefs Canonicus and Miantonomi. Williams decided to call the land “Providence Plantations” because he felt that God had guided him there. The story is longer than this, and it’s actually really interesting. You can check it out at the Rhode Island Office of the Secretary of State.

4. Connecticut Colony got its name thanks to the Connecticut River (which obviously wasn’t named that at the time). (more…)

 

HERE is the solution.

Some of you who’ve been with us from the beginning might recall Mangesh’s post a couple years back about Tesla’s high-end electric sports car, made in Silicon Valley. In the post, Mango wrote mental_floss’ favorite inventor Nikola Tesla, who famously dreamed up AC current amongst a million other things, and inspired the names for the rock bands Tesla and AC/DC (or at least the first-half of the name AC/DC), now has a ridiculously cool electric car named for him…[Tesla] even plans on releasing a family sedan by 2008.

And while the sedan is still a couple years off, the Roadster, which Mangesh referred to, is not only selling pretty well (for a vehicle with a base sticker price that’s more than $100K), but showrooms are slowly starting to open outside Silicon Valley. One opened in L.A. not too long ago and I had the privilege of interviewing the guy who runs it, Jeremy Snyder. So if you’re into really fast cars, really expensive cars, or just environmentally friendly cars, read on for the lowdown on Tesla, right from the manager’s mouth.

DI: So where exactly is Tesla based?

JS: San Carlos, California, though the cars are assembled in Menlo Park.

DI: The parts are made here too?

JS: The final assembly is here in California. We’re an American car company. While the parts are from all over the world, the battery pack, which is a big part of the car, is made here in California.

DI: And how many different models are there at the moment?

JS: Just the Roadster right now, which is our flagship model. But we’ve got a four-door, five-passenger sedan coming out called Model S, which will be available in a couple years.

DI: So let’s talk about the Roadster. What’s all the hubbub?

JS: It’s a very important car because it’s 100% electric. We wanted to enter the market place and shatter any preconceived notions. Efficiency and performance need not be mutually exclusive. The car was designed with three principles in mind: Great design, ultra-high performance, while being the most efficient car in the world. It does 0-60 in 3.9 seconds, has a range of 244 miles per charge, charges in 3-4 hours, and costs about two cents per mile to operate.

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A Shell oil company ROV (remotely operated vehicle) caught video footage of a Magnapinna (big fin) squid near a deep oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. It is the weirdest animal you will see today.
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The Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction award was handed out last night. Here are excerpts from the finalists. (via Metafilter)
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A man carries twenty bricks on his head. I need an aspirin just to watch him.
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AskMen has the results of The Great Male Survey of over 75,000 men. Then check out The Great Female Survey with fewer participants and fewer questions. (via Neatorama)
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How science supersized your Thanksgiving dinner. The turkeys are larger, the corn is sweeter, but we enjoy it about as much as our ancestors did.
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Five Centuries of Board Games. What is most surprising is how little they have changed. (via Cynical-C)
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The (Somewhat Dark) History of Presidential Turkey Pardoning. Pardon me?

Today’s artist, László Moholy-Nagy, is at the request of reader Lauren. The Hungarian-born artist passed away 62 years ago yesterday, but his influence on the art world is still felt today.

1. László Moholy-Nagy took a break from his law studies to serve as an officer in the Hungarian army during World War I. In 1917, though, his left thumb was shattered by shrapnel, resulting in an extensive hospital stay. Moholy-Nagy had begun drawing and writing poetry on the battlefield, and continued during his recuperation. By the end of his service, he had created “more than 400 drawings on military-issue postcards.”

2. The artist was born László Weisz, but changed his surname to Nagy, his uncle’s surname. The name change may have been partly influenced by his father’s desertion of the family when László was still a child. Later, he added Moholy to the beginning of his surname after the town, Mol, in which he grew up.

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It’s time for another edition of The First Time News Was Fit To Print, where we head into the archives of The New York Times and find the first time the paper covered a particular subject. If you have a suggestion for a future installment, leave a comment. Here’s what we dug up this week:

Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade

November 26, 1924

Santa to Lead a Parade: Will Be Accompanied by Toyland Notables
Santa Claus, accompanied by several bands and a circus contingent made up of professionals and employees of R.H. Macy & Co., will parade six miles through the city Thanksgiving morning.
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Santa, with his retinue of clowns, and prominent personages in toyland, such as Mother Goose, Little Red Riding Hood, Little Miss Muffet and the Three Men in the Tub, then will be escorted to the ground floor [of Macy's], where he will be crowned. Thereupon he will unveil Macy’s Christmas spectacle, “Fairyfolk Frolics in Wondertown.”

Jimmy Buffett

June 18, 1973

Andy Pratt Is Heard At Max’s Kansas City
Andy Pratt came in from New England to Max’s Kansas City, Park Avenue South, on Wednesday with a strong reputation as singer-songwriter. The unknown-genius-of-the-week spot is always a rough one, but by the end of Pratt’s first set that reputation of his had taken some bruising.
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By contrast, the imagery of the country singer (and writer) Jimmy Buffett was clear and clean, rooted firmly in Buffett’s own existence. Buffett, who was backed up by a good harmonica player and a low-phosphate washboard scrubber, also dropped in some humor. Buffett looks outside and takes notes—Pratt takes the inner view and long way around.

Keep reading for Trivial Pursuit, Kwanzaa, the Dustbuster and more.
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Get ready to bookmark this, people: Turkey Tracker is a collaborative webcast of a Thanksgiving turkey being cooked in a smoker in Portland, Oregon. The smoking starts at 9am (Pacific time) on Thanksgiving Day, and involves:

• Two cameras trained on the smoker, broadcasting live video (via Ustream)
• A USB thermometer inside the turkey that automatically posts its temperature readings to Twitter (read more on this at MAKE)
• Live chat alongside the video (also via Ustream)
• Flickr photos of the bird taken throughout the day
• Community photos of other turkey cooking events happening at other locations
• A Turkey Tracker Blog with more details and an FAQ.

This isn’t your parents’ Yule Log, folks. The turkey revolution will be televised. Now you can talk turkey…online. Okay, the puns will stop now. But I’m telling you, it will be worth your while to check out TurkeyTracker.com on Thursday. Whether you just sit back and watch the Portland turkey smoke or you join in the chat, Twitter experience, or Flickr pool — this is definitely the wired way to enjoy Thanksgiving. Here’s a snippet from the Turkey Tracker FAQ that shows some serious geek cred (pictured: graph from a test run of the USB thermometer):

7. How do you track the temperature?

This year, we’re using Type-K thermocouples from Omega Engineering in Connecticut–they’re a provider of industrial sensors and process control equipment. Our ambient and smoker temperature sensors are bolt-on thermocouples with glass-insulated wire rated to 480degC (900degF). The probe for the turkey itself is a custom ordered probe that has a advanced ceramic insulation made by 3M that’s rated to 1200degC (2200degF). The thermocouples generate a current proportional to the temperature, which we amplify with an Analog Devices AD595 chip. The AD595 is then connected to an Arduino microcontroller board that is programmed to output the temperature, in Celsius, over USB. We have a ruby script that collects the data on the serial line and converts it to Fahrenheit. For graphing, we use RRDTool. The data is polled every minute. The steps you see in the graph also depict minute intervals.

Our obsession with high-temperature rated materials is due to events last year that caused us to lose sensors twice during the cooking process in a very dramatic fashion. Besides, we haven’t had a chance to buy export-restricted thermally-insulated sensors before.

Where I come from, a little green patch of LA by the sea called Santa Monica, the streets and parks are the equal domain of the down-and-out and the well-off alike, the latter of whom are out, more often than not, to exercise. Many of our avenues boast verdant, wide, tree-lined medians perfect for jogging, stretching or — as is the fashion lately — being shouted at by hyper-muscular “boot camp” trainers at the crack of dawn. It’s that last activity which is causing some consternation around here, with nearby homeowners calling the cops and longtime exercisers asserting their right to do crunches where they please — and sometimes getting arrested for it. None other than the New York Times today ran a front-page feature about this problem in my neighborhood:

James Birch, a music executive from the neighborhood, is among those Santa Monicans who have not taken well to enforcement of the law, which was passed in the 1970s and, it is believed, was intended to keep vagrants away.

After 15 years of working out on the median, Mr. Birch arrived there one day in mid-September and saw five officers. “I went up to them,” he recalled, “and said, ‘What’s the deal here?’ They put up these trendy new yellow signs. The cops just looked at me and said, ‘We’ve been told by the watch commander that we’re supposed to run people off here.’ I told them I was going to break the law.”

So he did. One morning he showed up at the median, video crew in tow, and refused to cease doing situps. The exchange that followed was posted on YouTube. “They let me do it for about three minutes,” said Mr. Birch, 63, “and then came over and said: ‘If you continue doing this, I will arrest you. It’s not allowed here.’ ”

Though he was arrested, he said, the officers did not handcuff him, to his chagrin. “I asked them to,” he said. “But they found out they could only do what was procedurally appropriate.” He did get a ticket, though, and now awaits his day in court. “I just want to go and do my push-ups and situps that I have been doing for 15 minutes three times a week for the last 15 years,” he said.

So my question is this: who owns the public space, and how strictly should it be controlled? The homeowners who live nearby, or the local residents who want to use it, as loudly and as early as they please? Are Pilates practitioners the new skateboarders? What do you think?

Photo by Monica Almeida/The New York Times.