Showing results by author "Dan Lewis" in All Categories

If you live in an area where Halloween is celebrated, there's a very good chance you'll have a bucket of junk in your house on October 31st. You also probably have someone in your house – kids, adults, perhaps even part of your own internal monologue – begging to eat some of that loot. But nutrition should come first, of course …right?

Matthew Broderick's best movie was Ferris Bueller's Day Off. In the film, Broderick's character, a teen named Ferris Bueller, was able to skip school while avoiding the consequences of an absenteeism policy he ran afoul of many times over.

The goal was simple: listen to music – specifically, Western rock 'n' roll. The problem: Those striving to reach that goal weren't in the United States or anywhere else where rock was popular – they were in the Soviet Union, and it was the 1950s.

The Supreme Court of the United States reconvenes after its summer recess on the first Monday in October. Over the following months, the Court hears many cases, some of which are seen as more important than others.

Crack – a smokable form of cocaine which is all too common – is highly addictive and very dangerous. At $50 to $100 per gram on the street (that's a Google-fueled guess by the way; sorry if I have that wrong, but I've never been in the market for crack), it's also a lower-cost alternative to those cocaine addicts who need a hit but don't have the dollars for the straight, snort-able kind. Oh, and in most places, it's illegal – including in the United States, which includes the state of Tennessee.

Here's a simple experiment you can try at home – and, probably will in the near future, whether you'd like to or not. Call a customer support hotline, try to talk to a real human and, well, you don't have to do much else. In many cases, you'll be put on hold, and you'll get to experience hold music. It's almost a given that this will happen, as hold music has become a very common feature of such phone systems. But it has a very uncommon history.

Checks are, basically, IOUs. The person writing the check promises to pay the check's recipient at some point in the very near future. The check writer isn't even part of the transaction at that point – the writer's bank is instructed, literally, to "pay" the amount specified "to the order of" the person to whom the check is made out. The bank plays a critical role in the transaction beyond the delivery of cash, too – it helps ensure that the check writer is good for the debt now owed.

Choco pies are two pieces of cake with a marshmallow-y filling in between, all covered with a layer of chocolate. In the US, at least, you can find them for about a buck a piece, but they're not very popular there – or in most of the West, for that matter. But in parts of Asia – China, Vietnam, and South Korea in particular – Choco Pies are a staple of snack time.

Okay, before we start this one, a warning: the fact and story are from hundreds of years ago, and the sources at the time were mostly oral, so there's a good chance this is more legend than truth.

Should I stay or should I go? Find out why a large-scale effort to improve crosswalk safety in the U.S. and Canada crashed and burned, on this episode of Now I Know. About five years ago, municipalities across the United States, Canada, and likely points elsewhere began installing new technology for crosswalk safety. Gone were many of the simple “WALK” or “DON’T WALK” signals.

Learn about the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Minister for Foreign Trade who never existed in the first place – or did he? – on this episode of Now I Know. In the summer of 2006, the Democratic Republic of the Congo held its first true election in more than a generation. Many different parties fielded candidates, including one called the Union of Congolese Nationalist Federalists. And while UNAFEC didn’t earn enough votes to take the Prime Minister’s seat, they did well enough to get at least one spot in the cabinet.

Proof that nothing is free (there's usually a catch): Learn about the Alabama sting operation disguised as a football ticket giveaway, on this episode of Now I Know. In the state of Alabama, one of the year’s more important events – the Iron Bowl, a college football game pitting in-state rivals Auburn University and the University of Alabama against each other – is traditionally held the day after Thanksgiving.

Nevada is a nice insurance policy for a presidential hopeful – in fact, that's why Nevada became a state in the first place. Explore the state's unbridled history on this episode of Now I Know. The United States is in the throes of its presidential campaigns season and, over the last week or so, candidates from both major parties have focused their sights on Nevada. Come November, that will again be true as Nevada can be a bellwether state – in each of the previous nine election cycles, Nevada voters supported the overall winner.

In China, millions of women regularly gather for morning square dancing – despite the government's attempt to stop them. Get the step-by-step story on this episode of Now I Know. Today millions of Chinese women aged 55 and older regularly gather for morning square dancing – even though the Chinese government tried to stop them. Square dancing in China, at least among middle-aged and older women, became a trend in the mid-1990s.

When George M. Stratton made himself a pair of “inverting glasses," his world turned upside down – and the scientific community gained some interesting new perspective. Learn more on this episode of Now I Know. George M. Stratton was born in 1865 in Oakland, California. By his early thirties, he was a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, but he took interest in psychology.

Natural gas is odorless. And gas leaks are very dangerous. Is the solution a scratch-and-sniff sticker? Decide for yourself on this episode of Now I Know. Natural gas is odorless. As gas leaks are very dangerous – even the smallest spark can turn a peaceful, gas-filled room into a flaming inferno – gas companies give us a way to detect a leak. They add a colorless, flammable gas called mercaptan to the mix, which smells like rotten eggs or rotten cabbage.

Did you know that stop signs weren't always red? Explore the stop sign's colorful past on this episode of Now I Know. Ask enough people to describe a stop sign and you will get some pretty common answers: it has the word STOP in white lettering (at least in the United States), it has eight sides, and – of course – it’s red. Everyone knows that.

With a list price of $18.95, the Casio F91-W digital watch is cheap – and selling for $10.72 on Amazon as of this writing. It's well-regarded, with well over 1,000 reviews on Amazon, nearly 90 percent of which are for four or five stars.

The internet has made newspapers' "Help Wanted" ads a thing of the past. But in 2001, before this form of advertising was sent into obsolescence, an entrepreneurial (and seemingly desperate) job seeker named Brian O'Dea used the medium to reverse things.

In 1999, a 22-year-old Missouri man named Cornealious Michael Anderson held up a Burger King at gunpoint, making away with more than $2,000 in cash. He was captured two months later, and in July 2000, Mike Anderson was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to 13 years in prison.