A Smart Thought From a Funny Person
“Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.” —Jerry Seinfeld
Daily Dispatch
Happy Summer, Everyone
It is the Summer Solstice, the day with the most hours of sunlight in the year (in the Northern Hemisphere), and the very first day of summer. Bring on the sun, the heat, the bbqs, the parades, the camping trips, the ants, the snakes, the scraped knees and the burnt skin – and don’t forget the swimming!
To get us all in the mood, here’s the great Loudon Wainwright III, with “The Swimming Song.”
Here’s the lyrics, if you feel like swimming along
Ledes We Love
In journalism a lede (also spelled “lead”; rhymes with “need”) is the first sentence or paragraph of a newspaper story, and they’re commonly used to give the major facts or mood of the story to come. And sometimes they can be more fun than the story itself. Like this one:
Shipment of Human Heads Found on Plane
And they won’t even let us take a bottle of shampoo!
A Southwest Airlines employee called police after finding human heads in a package set to be transported to a Fort Worth medical research company, the airline said.
“It wasn’t labeled or packaged properly,” said Ashley Rogers, a Southwest spokeswoman. “They called the local authorities.”
Guess What They’re Talking About: Answered!
Here’s another installment of the regular Uncle John’s Blog quiz that we just made up, “Guess What They’re Talking About.” In this week’s episode you’ll have to determine the subject of one paragraph from a recent BBC article.
Ready?
Okay, here’s the paragraph:
That sound has been unflatteringly compared to a swarm of wasps, even an elephant passing wind.
Australia’s Suicide-Spot Angel
This is one of those stories where the heartwarming rises up and beats the canoles out of the heartbreaking:
For almost 50 years, Don Ritchie has lived across the street from Australia’s most notorious suicide spot, a rocky cliff at the entrance to Sydney Harbour called The Gap. And in that time, the man widely regarded as a guardian angel has shepherded countless people away from the edge.
What some consider grim, Ritchie considers a gift. How wonderful, the former life insurance salesman says, to save so many. How wonderful to sell them life. “You can’t just sit there and watch them,” says Ritchie, now 84, perched on his beloved green leather chair, from which he keeps a watchful eye on the cliff outside. “You gotta try and save them. It’s pretty simple.”
RIP Jimmy Dean
Mr. Jimmy Dean has gone to that great sausage maker in the sky:
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Jimmy Dean, a country music star known for his hit about a workingman hero, ”Big Bad John,” and an entrepreneur known for his sausage brand, died on Sunday. He was 81.
His wife, Donna Meade Dean, said her husband died at their Henrico County, Va., home.
We always admired Mr. Dean hear at the BRI—and not just because of “Big Bad John.” We wrote a little something about him some years ago in an article about people who had made the Big Time—despite not having done a lot of schooling:
The singer-songwriter left school at 16 and joined the Merchant Marines. He knew that fame could be fleeting, so after his prime-time TV variety show ran its course, he founded the Jimmy Dean Sausage Company and kept his TV appearances to folksy sausage commercials. He sold the company to Sara Lee in 1991, but is still chairman of the board.
And oh man, check this out, Jimmy doing that great song must have been just a year ago or so:
Crocodiles Can Surf Ocean Currents
Great. first it was giant flying sharks, now it’s giant surfing crocodiles. What’s next: hyenas on motorcycles?
“Saltwater crocodiles enjoy catching a wave and can travel hundreds of kilometres by ‘surfing’ on ocean currents, a study suggests. […]
During the research, a team led by Dr Hamish Campbell, from the University of Queensland, captured 20 crocodiles living in the North Kennedy tidal river in Queensland, northern Australia, and tagged them with satellite transmitters.
They found that during the period of study, eight of them ventured out into the open ocean. One travelled from the river mouth all the way to the west coast of the Cape York Peninsula, in Queensland’s far north. That amounts to a total of 590km covered over 25 days.”
Not only that—they actually wait until the tide goes out so they can take advantage of the currents:
Tinfoil Hat Warning: Code Weird
Okay hold on to your tinfoil hats, BRI fans, you’re not going to believe this, but…UVB-76…has stopped…buzzing. I know, unbelievable, right?
What’s that? You’re not familiar with UVB-76? Well, don’t worry. Neither were we. So we did a little research. Long story short: It’s a shortwave radio station broadcasting from near Moscow, Russia, that has emitted a pulsed buzzing sound every day, all day, for the past 28 years. Nobody knows why. Sometimes very faint voices can be heard behind the buzz, and twice in all those years it stopped for a few seconds…and a man could be heard saying something Russian.
And now…it has stopped.
Here’s some video, and comments from shortwave radio fans:
Odd Sports News: North Korea in World Cup
I wonder how many people know that North Korea will be having a team in the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. We sure didn’t. It’s only the second time in history that they’ll be in the tournament, and the first time was all the way back in 1966. Fascinating.
Don’t Use Your McDonald’s Shrek Drinking Glasses!
McDonald’s has issued a recall of 13.4 million Shrek drinking glasses—they contain dangerous levels of the heavy metal cadmium. This is in both the U.S. and Canada.
Sunday is the Anniversary of D-Day
A little less-than-light reading on Brigadier General Norm Cota, one of the highest ranking officers to actually fight his way up the beach that June 6 long ago.
Cota was played by actor Robert Mithcum in the epic D-Day film, The Longest Day. Here’s the trailer. (Cota’s character appears for just a second toward the end.)
The Great Hockey FLUSH OFF
Looks like Uncle John’s going to have to get himself a ticket to Pittsburgh, PA:
The Pittsburgh Penguins are looking for 250 students to help with an important task and there’s only one major requirement: You must know how to flush a toilet.
Uncle John totally knows that!
Construction is near completion on the NHL team’s new arena, the Consol Energy Center. But like with any new arena or stadium, officials need to simultaneously flush all the toilets and urinals to make sure everything is working. The Penguins are calling the June 10 event the “Student Flush,” a spinoff of their popular ticketing program known as “Student Rush.”
And they can each take a copy of Uncle John’s Shoots and Scores Bathroom Reader with them when they…go! Woo hoo! Pittsburgh here we come!
This Week in Bathroom News
Someone wrote this bathroom-related story yesterday—and didn’t even mention the fact that the people involved are named “Mooney.” How lame is that? We would have never missed that.
You, too, can have your very own Bubble Wrap Bathroom.
Bathrooms…in Space. (Featuring Uncle John’s dream bathroom:)
Hotel bathrooms are going green. (No, that is not a guacamole joke…)
Stop Everything: It’s Towel Day!
Holy Cow, we almost missed it. (Thanks, Ginger.)
“2001: Two weeks after the death of Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, fans get together and celebrate May 25 as “Towel Day” in his memory. The tradition continues each year since.”
Why towels, for the three non-Hitchhiker fans out there? Take it away, TowelDay.org:
From the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
Ninjas!
If there’s one thing we’re suckers for here at the BRI, it’s stories that have anything to do with ninjas. Or robots. Or zombies. Or Elvis sightings. Or stories involving sightings of ninja-robot-zombie-Elvises. Which is more common than you might think.
Where were we? Oh yeah: Ninjas!
A group of would-be muggers in a Sydney, Australia, met their match Tuesday night in the form of black-clad ninjas.
The three stalked and attacked a German exchange student, 27, in a dimly lit alley that fortunately for the victim ran behind the Ninja Senshi Ryu warrior school…
The Mark Twain Century is Up
“The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.
That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.”
Update: George Washington’s Library Book Returned!
Back on April 20 we ran the story of our first president’s library book problem, and even ran an exclusive photo of the presidential delinquent:
Well the good people running George’s estate, Mount Vernon, have returned a copy of the same edition of the book to the library. (But not the fine—which would be in the neighborhood of $300,000.)
