Besides feet, gallons, kilometers and other such scientifically-accepted terms, there's a whole host of unscientific, colloquial units of measurement we use almost without thinking about it. How many times, for instance, have you heard something's height compared to the Empire State Building? Or been told that something was so many football fields long? This is a look at some of our more unusual units of what I call "folk" measurement -- some more widely used than others. The mickey, for instance, was... READ ON

I'm reading Assassination Vacation right now, a book by Sarah Vowell about her trips across America to visit destinations involved with Presidential assassinations. My description doesn't do it justice, because it's fabulously funny and interesting all at the same time. This type of thing is right up my alley, anyway. A group of us are headed to Chicago for Lollapalooza in August and I'm already plotting out things I want to see on the road trip there "“ Al Capone's grave in Hillside, Ill., for... READ ON

Political battles can dictate what we call our food and friends, and even what games we play. During WWI, sauerkraut was popularly rebranded Liberty Cabbage. When anti-French sentiments began to build a few years ago, "French Fries" were rechristened "Freedom Fries." (Nevermind that Thomas Jefferson may have been the one to first rave about the delicious side item in the U.S.). And while most patriotic terms fade, places like Berlin, Iowa, and Germantown, Nebraska, have ended up... READ ON

Conceptually speaking, air conditioning has been around since the first primitive humans ducked into cool, damp caves to take refuge from summer heat. But aside from fans of various shapes and sizes, the technology of temperature control didn't progress beyond the stone age until the 1830s. That's when John Gorrie, a doctor from Florida, decided to do something about the stifling heat in his hospital, which he reasoned wasn't doing his malaria and yellow fever infected patients much... READ ON