I’ve been a long time user of Booking.com, and they’re doing a delightful 11.11 Sale right now. Despite the name, the deal is actually running until November 16.

Get up to 30% off stays at hundreds of hotels around the world, from U.S. hotspots like New York and Miami to international destinations like Kuala Lumpur (stunning, hotels starting at $12), Bangkok (magical, hotels starting at $8), and Dubai (I hear their chocolate is pretty good).

Even better, though the deal runs until November 16, you have until the end of 2027 to travel. If you’ve been eyeing checking out a new spot, this is an excellent nudge.

Does clicking on this link and then booking something earn Fun Fact Friyay a lil’ extra moolah? It sure does. Does it also save you many, many dollars no matter where you stay?

Check out featured deals or browse on your own for your next stay. You’ll see why the tagline is “booking dot com, booking dot yeah.”

The STS-43 Atlantis crew sent the first email from space in 1991, with a message that included a Terminator reference.

Yesterday, Microsoft had a major global outage that is still going on in parts of the world today. The company attributed the outage to an “elevated load” of traffic, rather than any cybersecurity incident.

Still, it was panic and/or jubilation across offices. Outlook was down, so people weren’t getting emails. Teams was down, so people couldn’t chat with each other. Copilot was down, so you couldn’t summarize a meeting you weren’t paying attention to. Even Minecraft was down, which I did not even realize had an association with Microsoft.

Perhaps most devastating of all, Clippy was nowhere to be found.

The memes and witty comments came a la Vin Diesel, i.e. fast and furious. My favorite was this gif from The Simpsons with no additional commentary.

Magnifique. 😚👌

The first email dates back to 1971, when ARPANET employee Ray Tomlinson was tinkering with ways humans and computers could interact.

At the time, the telephone was the primary method of communication. Tomlinson developed several elements of email still in use today, such as the “@” symbol and fields for the sender, date, subject line, and body.

Tomlinson wasn’t sure what his first email message was, because at the time, he thought he had just made something kind of neat.

“I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the other. The test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them,” he said.

It turns out he was creating the most ubiquitous form of communication around the world.

Twenty years later, the STS-43 Atlantis was undergoing a trip of a little less than nine days. They did a handful of experiments on the flight, but we’re most interested in one thing.

On August 9, 1991, astronauts Shannon Lucid and James C. Adamson sent the first-ever email from space.

They composed their prose on an Apple Macintosh Portable and sent it over the AppleLink network. Their recipient: Marcia Ivans, who was at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, USA.

Unlike Tomlinson, we have an accurate record of what the message said:

“Hello Earth! Greetings from the STS-43 Crew. This is the first AppleLink from space. Having a GREAT time, wish you were here, … send cryo and RCS! Hasta la vista, baby, … we’ll be back!”

“Cryo” is not a typo for “crypto,” thankfully. It’s cryogenics, the super-cold liquid gases that help propel spacecraft. Similarly, RCS (Reaction Control System) is a system of thrusters that control a spacecraft’s orientation, rotation, and minor movements.

So, uh…perhaps a bit of a dire message if the spacecraft was lacking both of those elements? Thankfully, STS-43 Atlantis landed safely two days later, on August 11, 1991.

Of course, the most notable part of this message is the reference to Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the titular Terminator, delivers “Hasta la vista, baby” after John Connor teaches him how to use it. He also says “I’ll be back” when a police station won’t let him in, and then he drives a car through the front door.

Both of those lines have become commonplace in pop culture, and one of them almost didn’t happen.

Schwarzenegger has said he had trouble pronouncing “I’ll” and asked director James Cameron if he could say “I will be back.” Cameron said no, but he offered Schwarzenegger as many takes as he needed to get it right. It’s nice to be accommodating.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day came out on July 3, 1991, less than a month before the flight initially took off.

That means that it’s been at least 35 years of men endlessly reciting movie quotes with each other.

May your weekend have at least one memorable moment you recall fondly down the road.

Before we dive into this fact, a bit of self-promotion! I was recently a guest on the excellent podcast “You, Me and an Album” hosted by Al Melchior. Each episode features a guest talking about an album that means something special to them.

I joined the show to chat about The Gaslight Anthem’s “The ‘59 Sound,” which is somehow approaching 20 years old. I do not like that one bit.

HOWEVER, I do like this conversation a lot, and I learned plenty of new fun facts about the album during the preparation process. Perhaps you’ll discover something new, too! Or maybe you’re simply sick of reading Fun Fact Friyays and would rather hear a voice. Your listen is welcome either way.

Here’s the Spotify link, and here’s the Apple Podcasts link, though you can find the episode on your podcast platform of choice.

Thank you for supporting. Now, onto the fact!

If you type the word “askew” into Google, the search results page will have a slight tilt.

When I was a child, I would sometimes simulate basketball games while playing at the park.

This typically happened when I was just shooting around, since it’s hard to simulate a game while you’re actually playing in another one (talk about multitasking!).

But when it was only me? Turning what is essentially throwing a ball at a basket and then chasing after it into a full-fledged, pressure-packed game made things all the more entertaining.

While plenty of kids around pretend they’re Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Steph Curry, or any number of elite players, I was always drawn to some of the more fringe NBA guys. The ones who might not appear in all the games or only get a few minutes here and there.

I also quite enjoyed players with unique names. Sedale Threatt. Walt Hazzard. Pooh Richardson. I’ve even written about this very subject.

Vincent Askew is another one of those players. The list of teams he played for during his professional career is among the longest you’ll find. Sure, he had several NBA seasons, most notably with the Seattle SuperSonics, but he also appeared for excellently named non-NBA squads like Formula Shell and Cocodrilos de Caracas.

Over his NBA career, Askew played in 467 games. He never scored more than 21 points in a single contest, and he had pretty pedestrian shooting stats across the board. But he was a solid defender and good team player, which can make for a lengthy career.

During the 1996-97 season, Askew was traded from Seattle to the New Jersey Nets. He played one game in New Jersey before the team traded him to the Indiana Pacers. Later that season, the Pacers traded Askew to the Denver Nuggets. He played in one game for the Nuggets. That’s a fun bit of seasonal symmetry!

Early in his career, he was a member of the Continental Basketball Association, then a minor league of the NBA. He’s the only player to win back-to-back MVP awards in that league (and it ran for 63 years).

He also had a pair of terrific nicknames: The Fiddler and ‘Skew.

Though the name Askew has Old Norse origins, the word itself means something out of line or at an angle. Google’s search engine knows this definition, and it’s got a good bit of humor as a nod.

Type “askew” into your Google search bar. The resulting page will be a little bit tilted.

Go ahead and try it, right after you share this post with a friend. Optional bonus if you want to tilt your head while you’re recommending Fun Fact Friyay.

Junior Mints got its name from Junior Miss, a collection of short stories that later became a Broadway play.

As I write this, I’m mere steps away from the big bowl of Halloween candy I have ready for this year’s trick-or-treaters.

Do I always wind up buying far more candy than is necessary? You bet!

Do my dogs get nervous about all the people coming up to the door, and I wind up proactively just leaving candy on a bench so they don’t knock? Absolutely.

Did I previously leave candy in a bowl, only for someone to steal said bowl? And then did I leave a sad note informing additional trick-or-treaters that someone stole my bowl, and I liked that bowl, so maybe they’d be kind enough to return it? And did that kid’s parents (probably) scold them to return the bowl, and it was a glorious reunion? Yes, yes, and yes.

You likely have a favorite Halloween candy. I made a ranking years ago; looking at it now, I’d certainly make some adjustments. However, having 100 Grand in the top three was spot on. What an underrated candy bar. Makes you feel like a million bucks, or at least $100,000.

Yet isn’t it strange that certain candies have their moments during Halloween, whereas other ones barely get any recognition?

For example, if you were to head to the movie theater to see, say, You Can See Everything, you’d see things like Buncha Crunch or Junior Mints. But the odds of finding them in your plastic pumpkin trick-or-treat cauldron are far lower.

And that’s a shame, because Junior Mints are tasty. And after consuming so much sugar, the mint burst feels quite refreshing.

Junior Mints are also the only candy to have an entire Seinfeld episode named after them. (We’re not counting “The Pez Dispenser,” because that’s the vessel for the candy, and I love a good semantic.)

The name makes sense logistically. These are minty-flavored chocolates, and they’re not so big that you have to unhinge your jaw. Mint + small = junior mint!

But the name is actually a reference to Junior Miss, a Broadway play that ran from 1941 to 1943. The play itself is based on a collection of short stories by Sally Benson published in The New Yorker between 1929 and 1941.

Junior Miss had quite a run during the 1940s. It became a feature film and was adapted for radio several times, including one series starring Shirley Temple (the actress and singer, not the drink).

In 1949, James O. Welch, head of the appropriately named James O. Welch Company who was producing the new candy, thought “Junior Mints” was a fun allusion to the pop culture phenomenon. By then, the play had long since stopped running and the radio shows had mostly dwindled down, but it was still a nice nod.

Junior Miss also got some TV shine. On Dec. 20, 1957, the show was adapted into a television musical as part of CBS Television’s DuPont Show of the Month. The show was directed by Ralph Nelson and starred Carol Lynley, Don Ameche, Joan Bennett, and Jill St. John.

In fact, you can watch a portion of the show right here! Perhaps while indulging in a nice junior (or large, live it up) box of Junior Mints.

There’s a genus of tiny microhylid frogs called Mini, and all species under it are wordplay about being small.

If you gave me a blank canvas and said, “Draw me a picture,” I could deliver you approximately four things.

One would be a sun with sunglasses. If I didn’t have any color at my disposal, it might look more like a spider with sunglasses. In any case, it’d be very cool.

The second option would be a Pac-Man. We could go the classic route of just a pizza shape with a slice cut out of it and an eye, but I find it more fun to add accoutrements, such as a bow, a goatee, an angry eyebrow, and a long lizard tongue.

The third thing is a cube. I’d draw one square, another square where half of it is in the first one, and then some lines to connect the two. Voilà, it’s (almost) a perfect cube!

My final drawing is that of a frog. I took the basic design of this frog from Ed Emberley. He has a series of books that teach you how to draw just about anything. Clearly, the only thing I’ve retained is a frog.

I’ve never clarified what type of frog it is, but I think I’m going to start referring to it as a tiny microhylid frog.

Why? Because I love wordplay, and this frog is ribbiting with its punnery.

A brief break in the frogs to give a shout out to Fun Fact Friyay subscriber Helene, who just celebrated a very hoppy birthday! (In the frog sense, not the IPA sense.) One fun fact about Helene is that she is an ice cream enthusiast (or perhaps savant?). Between a good solid cone and an evening popsicle, she averages one frozen treat per day. What excellent taste.

In 2019, Mark Scherz, a herpetologist and evolutionary biologist who primarily studies reptiles in Madagascar, discovered a new genus of frog. These frogs are a robust 0.31 to 0.45 inches in snout to vent length. In other words, they are tiny.

Or, as Scherz so eloquently described them, they’re Mini. This variant of frog lives among leaf litter in the forests. Each species is a play off Mini:

• Mini ature

• Mini mum

• Mini scule

Scherz highlighted that these are “REALLY REALLY SMALL FROGS,” close to being the smallest in the world. But interestingly enough, these REALLY REALLY SMALL FROGS are “sister to the largest members of their family,” the Plethodontohyla inguinalis.

Unfortunately, two of these frogs are critically endangered, while Mini ature is data-deficient and can’t definitively say it’s also endangered.

Researchers and conservationists are doing their part to try and stabilize the population across Madagascar.

In the meantime, here are several pictures of Mini frogs, including a few on human thumbnails for scale. They are, in fact, REALLY REALLY SMALL FROGS.

One other shout-out, unrelated to frogs: Lex Roman, the mind behind Revenue Rulebreaker (and many other fantastic resources for small businesses and independent creators), has launched the Legends Book Fair.

If you’re in Lex’s circle, you’re a Legend. And being a Legend comes with all kinds of fun perks. Among them, multiple events per year, including virtual meet-n-greets that feature a live musician in between sessions. You ain’t finding that on your typical Zoom call!

I was delighted to see my book Kind, But Kind of Weird: Short Stories on Life’s Relationships on the digital bookshelf. It is but one of MANY good reads on there, so if you need a page-turner, I highly recommend checking out the book fair. It’s neatly organized by genre/style, as well, which is just a delight.

However many pages of a book you read this weekend, I hope your mind wanders and your papercuts are non-existent. Unless you listen to the Linkin Park song “Papercut.” In that case, I hope your papercut lasts for about three minutes.

The Linkin Park No. 1 rock hit “Faint” samples a scene from the James Bond movie From Russia with Love.

Every once in a while, I go down a rabbit hole of songs and music videos that I used to play regularly as a kid.

I’ll let you define “every once in a while,” but let’s just say it happened earlier this week.

Sometimes, I’ll choose the videos to cue up. Other times, I just let a YouTube auto-play algorithm be my guide. That’s how I wound up listening to “Faint” by Linkin Park.

My band, Burning Years, which has many original songs that you should totally check out on Spotify, Amazon Music, Bandcamp, or wherever you listen to your music, once played a set that almost entirely consisted of Linkin Park songs.

We loved it. The crowd apparently did not have the same appreciation for early-2000s nu metal that we did. I would change nothing.

“Faint” came out in 2003, the seventh track on Linkin Park’s second album, Meteora. It hit No. 1 on the Modern Rock charts (now known as Alternative Airplay). It still rocks today, over two decades later. But it wasn’t until 2025 that someone noticed the sample in the beginning of the song sounded somehow familiar.

In February 2025, a Redditor named Hgggx posted that they had found the sample from the beginning of “Faint.” The source: From Russia with Love, the second James Bond movie that was released in 1963.

The portion of the movie features a scene where Tatiana, or “Tania,” played by Daniela Bianchi, meets a character named Rosa Klebb, played by Lotte Lenya.

Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park’s rapper and guitarist, arranged “Faint” with co-producer Don Gilmore. He handled the sampling and discovered a lil’ track appropriately called “Tania Meets Klebb” from the movie’s soundtrack.

When From Russia with Love was released, the James Bond franchise was still in its infancy. Only two movies had come out! By the time Shinoda and the Linkin Park crew were working on “Faint,” Bond and Co. had dropped 20 films.

And in case you’re curious, the most recent Bond film during the making of “Faint” was Die Another Day, which came out in 2002.

Shinoda took the string section that appeared in the scene, reversed it, adjusted the pitch and tempo up a bit, and then layered it over a fantastic drum intro. The result: One of the more iconic rock intros of the 2000s.

See the sample in action below. It’s a great reminder that you don’t always have to completely invent a brand new thing to create something cool.

Austin, Texas is the only city in the world with functioning moonlight towers, or moontowers.

This is the second weekend of Austin City Limits, the music festival better known as ACL.

Every fall, hundreds of artists and what feels like approximately 26 million people (last year’s attendance was actually about 450,000) descend on the Lone Star State’s capital for some good tunes, fun vibes, and overpriced food items.

This year, Weekend 1 of ACL included a torrential rainstorm that turned the grass of Zilker Park into an absolute mud pit of a time.

While attendees tried to say they were having fun (I would too if I had paid hundreds of dollars for a ticket), I was very pleased to watch the festivities from the comfort of my home.

Also, to the people who were doing splits and cartwheels and faceplants in the mud, I hope your week has not been filled with bacteria.

ACL has been around since 2002, but there’s another Austin landmark that far predates it.

Back in the 1880s and 1890s, moonlight towers (or moontowers) became a trendy installation in U.S. cities. Austin built a collection of 31 towers beginning in 1895.

At the time, standard street-lighting was either too expensive or too impractical to install. Cities used moontowers, tall, scaling structures with arc lamps that could light up several blocks at once.

Over time, moontowers fell out of favor. Incandescent electric street lighting took hold, and most cities removed all their moontowers.

Austin is hanging onto (some) of theirs, though.

Today, you can still find 15 of these beauties around the city. They’re 165 feet tall, have foundations that are 15 feet wide, and can illuminate a radius of 1,500 feet.

The moontowers were recognized as Texas State Landmarks in 1970 and have gotten upgrades over the years. Notably, as of 2024, all of the moontowers have swapped out 400-watt bulbs and replaced them with more energy efficient 80-watt LED bulbs.

But which moontower is the most famous?

Perhaps the most popular moontower is the one at Zilker Park, coincidentally the site of ACL.

During the holiday season, the moontower becomes the base of a massive Christmas tree of lights, and people spin underneath it. How they do so without getting dizzy is beyond me. I envy them.

The Zilker moontower is also referenced in the movie Dazed and Confused, which features numerous Austin locales and shout-outs. Alas, the filming of the keg party scene was not done in Zilker Park. It was just a bit of movie magic trickery.

A documentary called The Last of the Moonlight Towers was released in 2017, illuminating the history of those iconic towers. I wish I could take credit for that wordplay, but KUT got there first.

You can also do a tour of the Austin Moonlight Towers, with handy maps like this one guiding your way.

And they all generally get rave reviews! Here’s a smattering of comments:

“Went to this moonlight tower. It was towering and moonlighty.”

“Not exactly a ‘must-see’ attraction; but for a tower with lights on it, it’s pretty great.”

“Accessible and visible, with not much else to say.”

If that doesn’t get you fired up for the weekend, I don’t know what will. And if you want to follow along with the ACL magic without attending, you can throw on a playlist or watch the festival live on Hulu.

In what would be his final professional baseball game, catcher Dave Bresnahan threw a potato to confuse a runner before tagging him out with the actual baseball.

The very first recorded baseball game dates back to June 19, 1846. In an all-New York matchup (played at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, NJ), the New York Nine beat the New York Knickerbockers. The final score was 23-1 and the game lasted four innings. How competitive!

From that very first game to the playoffs of today, teams have always looked for ways to win. Sometimes, those ways bend the legality of rules.

There’s an excellent book called Intentional Balk: Baseball’s Thin Line Between Innovation and Cheating that dissects some of the more creative ways teams and players have sought to gain advantages over the years.

We’re talking things like elaborate underground wiring systems that drew from the ol’ “two tin cans and a string” foundation or intentionally kicking dirt onto the plate to make it harder for pitchers to see during twilight games.

One of the most clever moments, however, comes from an August night in 1987. Dave Bresnahan was a catcher on the Double-A Williamsport Bills. The season had been a disappointing one, and heading into the final weekend, Bresnahan put an idea into motion that he and his teammates had been talking about for weeks.

"I was the backup catcher, and when you're sitting in the bullpen, you have to do something to break the boredom," he said. "So we had a lot of discussions from baseball to politics. We talked about all kinds of tricks people had done, whether they were in college or high school. We talked about bringing a potato or a roll of tape onto the field.

"And my teammates challenged me. They said why don't you do it. It took me about two weeks to get the nerve, but I finally decided to do it. I'm not really a class clown type but I have a great sense of humor, and I was just trying to break the monotony of a poor season for me and the team."

With his teammates supportive of the prank, Bresnahan brought several potatoes to the ballpark for the final weekend of the season, which included a doubleheader against Reading.

Still, he needed the right scenario to make this potato caper happen. And in the fifth inning, the perfect setup unfolded.

Reading’s Rick Lundblade got onto third base with two outs. Bresnahan told the home plate umpire, Scott Potter, that there was an issue with his glove and he needed to replace it.

The second glove had a potato in it, peeled and shaped to look similar to a baseball, that quite literally would change Bresnahan’s life.

Bresnahan returned to his place behind home plate and called for a pitch low and away. As the ball was coming to him, Bresnahan transferred the potato to his throwing hand, then leapt up and chucked the potato well over third baseman Rob Swain’s head.

Lundblade, the runner on third, saw what he thought was the ball rolling around in the outfield, so he sprinted for home. He found Bresnahan standing there with the ball and was tagged out.

It’s straight out of the Little Big League playbook!

“I started to run to the dugout and I hear the third-base umpire yelling that it’s a ‘bleeping’ potato,” Bresnahan said. “My roommate had a close friend who had an umpire for a close friend and we had called him about a week before to see how he would rule. He said he felt they’d just send the runner back to third and kick me out of the game.”

Bresnahan was fine with that outcome, only it didn’t happen. Potter, the home plate umpire, was being graded by his supervisor, who was sitting in the stands. And suddenly, he had to make a decision on something that is not in any baseball rulebook. Potter allowed the run to count.

Williamsport manager Orlando Gomez, like Potter, was not pleased by the antics. Gomez pulled Bresnahan from the game and later fined him $50. The following day, Bresnahan was released from the team.

That wound up being his final professional baseball game. He had offers from other clubs, but they all wanted him to start at High-A ball, which was a step down from the league he had just been playing in. It became clear that any team that wanted his services was more interested in the stunt side of things, so Bresnahan retired.

Within the next year, he met his wife and eventually had three children before moving into a successful real estate career. None of that would have happened if not for one fateful potato.

As for that potato? It got thrown into a trash can during the game. However, thanks to some collector sleuthing, it now sits in a specimen jar at the Baseball Reilquary in Southern California, preserved by denatured alcohol. Now that’s a tasty piece of baseball history.

Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. President, is the first known American to create an ice cream recipe and helped popularize it throughout the country.

Back when I started Fun Fact Friyay, this newsletter had very few subscribers. Thanks to you charming readers, it’s continued to grow. Now, many people have their days improved (or ruined, if you hate fun facts) with a little whimsy.

Some of the earlier facts I’ve shared never got their proper place in the sun, so with this week including National Ice Cream Cone Day (September 22), I wanted to revisit a fact. Coincidentally, if it had its place in the sun, it would melt quite quickly.

Incidentally, I celebrated National Ice Cream Cone Day at OMG Squee, a place with a name that’s just as much fun to say as the ice cream is to eat.

Look at this cute taiyaki cone!

Ice cream has evolved over centuries and across cultures. This cone above being a swirl of cereal milk and ube flavor, topped with Oreo dust and filled with sweet red bean, is a testament to that. And I am always up for giving a unique flavor a try.

Turns out my fondness for this treat makes me aligned with Thomas Jefferson, America’s third President, who was QUITE the fan of ice cream.

He likely discovered it while in France in the 1780s, and he’s credited as the first American to write a recipe down. His recipe is for a much more classic flavor (vanilla), and it’s on display at the Library of Congress.

Jefferson’s Monticello home featured multiple molds of ice, an ice cream freezer, and an ice cream ladle.

While in the White House, Jefferson served ice cream on at least half a dozen documented occasions. He often paired it with a pastry or crust, because every good ice cream dish could use a little extra crunch.

His guests offered positive reviews of the experience. Let’s see a few highlights:

“Ice cream very good, crust wholly dried, crumbled into thin flakes.” -Mannaseh Cutler, Massachusetts Senator

“Balls of the frozen material enclosed in covers of warm pastry, exhibiting a curious contrast, as if the ice had just been taken from the oven.” -Samuel Latham Mitchill, New York Representative

“[I’m going to serve] ice creams on Sunday next, and afterwards, every Wednesday and Sunday, during the season.” -Honoré Julien, Jefferson’s cook in the White House

Word spread fast at the start of the 19th century. Mary Rudolph, who was related to Jefferson through marriage, included more than 20 ice cream recipes in her cookbook, The Virginia Housewife; Or, Methodical Cook.

Rudolph’s book is quite the goldmine. It features over 500 recipes, including the first curry recipes in America. You’ll also learn how to make household items, such as soap and cologne, and it’s an interesting look at early American cooking.

Of course, you came here for ice cream, so if you don’t have time to make 500 things, we’ll start with one: Here’s Jefferson’s ice cream recipe.

The term “rock and roll” was popularized by Cleveland DJ Alan Freed, who started using it in 1951 to promote the music he played on the radio.

I recently visited Cleveland, with one of my goals being to check out the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Notably, I wanted to experience the temporary exhibit on 50 years of Saturday Night Live music, which was even better than I could have imagined.

It was delightful to see costumes, props, and facial molds from years of hit SNL bits, such as The Lonely Island digital shorts, Fred Armisen as Prince, and Will Ferrell and Ana Gasteyer as Marty and Bobby Culp.

Beyond specific SNL characters, the collection also includes just about every musical performance from the show’s lengthy history.

I helped a man scroll through a screen to put on James Brown, and then we bopped along to his song and dance moves. I watched Shakira do an impressive back-bridge while singing “She Wolf.” I saw Fall Out Boy dress exactly like my friends and I did in 2005, complete with Pete Wentz having an extremely popped collar on his polo shirt. What a treat!

The Rock Hall also has a “Jamroom,” where you can play with studio musicians. I happened to be walking by as the room opened, so I was the first one up onstage! I said I’d play guitar, and another guy who was interested was told to wait, but I said, nah, he could be the vocalist if he wanted.

Since we were doing Green Day, he was the Billie Joe Armstrong to my…uh…Billie Joe Armstrong. (Billie plays guitar and sings for the band.)

In any case, we did great. I mostly remembered how “American Idiot” goes on guitar, and I nailed the end of the solo, truly the most important part for any rock legend. We even drew a crowd of about 25 people. I think that’s pretty good, considering all the other entertaining exhibits to check out.

Without one Cleveland disc jockey, however, rock and roll could perhaps be known by some other name. Or maybe it would have continued on as an existing genre like rhythm and blues.

Alan Freed wasn’t the first person to ever put rock and roll together; in 1923, Trixie Smith used the term in her song “My Man Rocks Me,” though it meant something different in that case.

However, it was Freed who popularized “rock and roll” as a musical genre. He said that rock and roll is “a river of music that has absorbed many streams: rhythm and blues, jazz, rag time, cowboy songs, country songs, folks songs. All have contributed to the big beat.”

Freed was working at WAKR in Akron in the late 1940s when he met Leo Mintz, a local record store owner. Mintz had started selling R&B records and noted more people were becoming interested in them, so he said Freed should play those records on the radio.

In 1951, Freed was hired by WJW radio in Cleveland. He hosted a midnight radio program where he used cool, hipster language to communicate with his listeners. Mintz bought AM radio airtime to devote an entire show to R&B, with Freed taking control of hosting duties.

On July 11, 1951, Freed played R&B on WJW, believed to be the first time that genuine R&B tunes were heard on a major radio station broadcast to mass audiences. Freed dubbed his show “The Moondog House,” referring to himself as “The King of the Moondoggers.”

Freed likely came up with “rock and roll” as a way to avoid referring to “rhythm and blues,” because segregation was still commonplace in the 1950s. White artists and bands had long been covering songs from Black musicians. Unlike other mainstream radio DJs, Freed played the originals, not the covers, helping introduce a wider (and primarily younger) audience to the music.

The musical trend continued, and Freed eventually hosted TV shows like The Big Beat and was in some of the earliest rock and roll movies, including Don’t Knock the Rock and Go, Johnny, Go!

Though Freed died at just 43 years old, his legacy continues to live on. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, among numerous other honors.

And as the poet laureates Reel Big Fish say in the opening of their song “Good Thing”: “You and I are mortal, but rock and roll will never die.”

I hope you put on a song today that rocks your socks off. Happy listening!

During the September 11 attacks, a guide dog named Roselle led her blind owner down 78 flights of stairs to safety.

It’s been 25 years since the September 11 terrorist attacks, when 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four U.S. passenger planes. Two planes struck the World Trade Center towers in New York City. Another plane hit the Pentagon in Arlington, Va. The fourth plane was headed toward the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., but its passengers revolted against the terrorists, and the plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.

There are countless stories of tragedy, grief, and sorrow from September 11. If you were alive then, you almost certainly vividly remember where you were and what you were doing.

Will Jimeno, then a rookie Port Authority police officer, was trapped under rubble for 13 hours. He recalled the situation as “literally hell” and said he was buried, crushed, and “just wanted to die.”

Yet he and one other colleague made it out alive. And he shares not only his story, but the stories of those who weren’t as fortunate. He says he gets asked all the time what he saw the most on that day. His response?

“Love. In all that darkness, there was love. I want people to understand that on September 11, the darkest day in U.S. history, there was a lot of good that day. There was a lot of light that day.”

Those stories are what give us hope. People banding together to help each other. And in some cases, we saw animals offering a hand (or paw).

Roselle the Guide Dog

Michael Hingson was born blind. In 2001, he was working as a regional sales manager for a computer-storage company. He and his coworker, David Frank, were on the 78th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. They were preparing to lead a seminar, when they heard a muffled explosion.

Frank noticed fire and smoke billowing above them. The building also plunged several feet. “We got to get out of here—right now.”

Frank, Hingson, and Roselle, Hingson’s yellow Labrador retriever guide dog, did a quick sweep of the room to make sure no one else was there, then headed to the stairwell.

Descending 78 flights of stairs is exhausting and difficult on a calm day. In the midst of panic and chaos, while navigating fire, smoke, loud sounds, uneven footing, and people running by you in all directions? That’s a whole other story.

Yet Roselle was determined to guide her group out of the building and into safety. She sometimes walked beside Hingson, but since the stairwell was narrow and space was tight, she often walked at his heel, helping guide him down while he held onto the railing.

“Good dog, Roselle. You’re doing a great job,” Hingson kept telling his companion. He explained later: “I knew she was going to sense the fear in everyone else, so I needed to let her know I was okay.”

Along the way, Roselle offered kisses to comfort other people who were in the stairwell. And despite unnerving moments as they traversed down, Hingson, Frank, and Roselle made it to the lobby. The trio crossed Broadway, and then a police officer yelled that the south tower was coming down.

Everyone turn and ran. Roselle led Hingson to shelter in a subway station.

“Roselle had done her job perfectly,” he said.

When they were told it was safe to leave, Hingson, Roselle, and Frank emerged back at street level, and Frank reported that the towers were no longer standing.

Hingson returned home to New Jersey that night. Roselle, just being a wonderful dog, began playing with her favorite toy.

Shortly after the attacks, Hingson moved to California and worked for Guide Dogs for the Blind. He’s become a public speaker and has published several books, including his 2011 best-selling memoir, Thunder Dog, Live Like a Guide Dog, and Running with Roselle, a children’s book.

Roselle received the service dog Award for Canine Excellence in 2002. She lived a good, happy life of 14 years. Hingson now lives with his guide dog Alamo (who also attends events).

One of the outcomes of the attacks is that it stopped people from traveling, or made them more afraid to see other parts of the world.

That makes me sad, because the world is incredible. I’ve continued to travel and encourage other people to do the same when they can (and I still very much love a good deal). Some things have irrevocably changed since 9/11, and it will always be a day that lives with us.

Hingson has a good reminder about that, too.

“If we allow ourselves to be blinded by fear, all we’re going to do is make it harder for ourselves to live.”

A year after the attacks, Roselle (alongside Hingson) made an appearance on Larry King Live. King called her ACE award “a big doggie deal,” but she remained cool as a cucumber throughout. Truly a natural.

The first cellphone call was made by Martin Cooper in New York on April 3, 1973. Cooper, who worked at Motorola, called his rival at Bell Labs to tell him he had invented the cellphone.

I love a bit of good-natured trash talking. If you pull off something cool, it’s fun to celebrate it!

Steph Curry uses a “night-night” celebration when he hits a particularly devastating shot at the end of the game. The entire world got to see it during the 2024 Olympics, after he made four threes in a row in the closing minutes of the gold medal game against France.

John Carpenter, the first million-dollar champion on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, famously only used one lifeline during his run, and it was to call his dad to tell him he was going to win a million dollars.

Rosa Parks had some of the most impressive “trash talk” ever by standing her ground and refusing to give up her seat, leading to the passing of a law preventing racial segregation on buses.

Martin Cooper, the head of the communications division at Motorola, couldn’t help himself when he and his team invented the first cellular phone.

You just created this cool new technology that you believe will change the world forever. Who would you call? A parent, sibling, or partner, so you can celebrate together?

Perhaps you would, but Cooper had a different idea.

While standing next to the Hilton Hotel on 6th Avenue in New York City on April 3, 1973, Cooper pulled out his new invention.

“New Yorkers were passing by,” Cooper said in 2023. “You know how blase they normally are, but they were startled because there were no cordless phones at the time.”

In 1973, the only type of portable phones were in the car. Bell Labs, Motorola’s competitor, believed car phones were the wave of the future. Cooper thought differently; cellphones should be an “extension of the person” and with them at all times.

Okay, Mr. Prognosticator. We see you!

Of course, the OG cell was a bit larger than the ones that easily fit into pockets and purses. It was 10 inches tall, 1.5 inches wide, and 3 inches deep, weighing 2.5 pounds. Still, you didn’t need to be attached to a cord or wall to use it.

With that first phone call, Cooper dialed up his fellow counterpart at Bell Labs to deliver a bit of a good-natured ribbing.

“I said, ‘I’m calling you from a cellphone but a real cellphone. The personal, handheld, portable cellphone.’ You notice I was not averse to rubbing his nose in our achievement.”

And you know what? I fully support Cooper’s move. He built something that has changed the world. Sure, in some ways, having a phone nearby 24/7 is a bad thing and perhaps a key component of the gradual deterioration of society? On the other hand, I sure do appreciate having directions on my phone when I visit a new place, like Alaska!

So, kudos to you, Martin. I hope this inspires you to pick up your phone and actually call someone this weekend. Even better if you tell the person on the other end that you’re calling from a real cellphone, since it will almost certainly confuse them.

Ranch dressing was created by a plumbing contractor and his wife in Alaska.

I just spent a week in Alaska, and my goodness, what an incredible place.

It’s pretty wild to feel your jaw drop as you turn every corner. The state’s nickname is “The Last Frontier,” and it’s clear why. There’s a vastness you simply don’t get in any other state.

At any given moment, you could come face-to-face with a bear.

Or a moose could decide the road directly in front of you is now a pedestrian crossing.

Or you can realize you’re the only person within shouting distance, even amongst an echo-y mountain range. That’s a very calming feeling.

In most of these situations, you likely won’t have ranch dressing on your person. But in all of those settings, you’d be in the home of the versatile condiment.

Back in the 1950s, a plumber named Steve Henson and his wife Gayle were living in Anchorage, Alaska. When Steve wasn’t plumbing, the duo liked coming up with concoctions to feed the work crews.

They experimented with a nameless dressing mixed with buttermilk and mayonnaise. It soon became a go-to for many meals, pairing nicely with lots of different foods.

The Hensons moved a few years later, eventually purchasing a 120-acre ranch outside of Santa Barbara, California. He retired by age 35 (a dream) and named his new ranch Hidden Valley Ranch. Steve and Gayle brought their dressing with them to serve at the ranch’s steakhouse.

A Los Angeles Times story from 1987 includes a letter from Alan Barker, who lived and worked at the Hidden Valley Guest Ranch in Santa Barbara from 1959 to 1963. Barker adds more detail about the Hensons’ creation.

“We ate it on everything from steaks to, in a comical moment, ice cream. The guests at the ranch first began asking for jars of it to take home for themselves, and then wanted larger quantities for their friends. They took it in liquid form in mayonnaise jars. The impracticality of this led to packaging the mix as a powder,” Barker wrote.

Corroborating Barker’s story, by 1957, Henson was selling packages of his dressing mix in stores. He later offered the dry ingredients via mail for a modest price of 75 cents per package.

The guest ranch was closed by the 1960s, but the “ranch dressing” mail order business was better than ever.

In October of 1972, Clorox purchased the Hidden Valley Ranch brand for $8 million, or nearly $64 million in today’s money. Henson once again got to retire.

Today, you’ll find ranch incorporated in just about everything. Clorox developed a bottled version in 1983 that didn’t need to be refrigerated. One of my friends enjoyed drinking straight from the bottle in high school.

I believe he has since kicked this habit, though maybe he still savors a sip or two. I prefer using ranch more as a dip, but to each their own.

In any case, whether you’re indulging in a bit of ranch dressing, eating some Cool Ranch Doritos, heading to a ranch for a weekend getaway, or listening to the Blink-182 album Dude Ranch, I hope you have a splendid time.

Pine cones can “predict” when it’s going to rain.

In the movie “Mean Girls,” the character of Karen Smith (played excellently by Amanda Seyfried) has a “fifth sense”: she can tell when it’s going to rain.

“It’s like I have ESPN, or something,” she claims.

Of course, her psychic abilities are more “in the moment.” She can tell you when it’s currently raining.

Still not a bad talent, considering some of those quick showers that douse areas in California and Florida and end before you’ve had a chance to say, “We really needed it.”

Karen’s predictive skills have nothing on pine trees, though. Despite having no living cells, muscles, or nerves, pine trees (and more specifically, pine cones) can indicate when rain is around the corner.

Pine cones release their seeds when weather conditions are optimal, and wet weather ain’t that time. The seeds require dry air with nice gusts of winds to spread them across the land.

When the environment is dry, pine cones on the ground appear more open, with their scales moving down, similar to the motion of uncurling a fist. When the air is humid, which often indicates rain is on the way, the pine cone’s scales clamp up to seal the cone into a tightly-wound ball.

Pine cone scales have multiple layers. The outermost layer consists of stretchable cells, while the inner layer is full of stiff fibers.

In dry weather, when the cone is open, the cone’s stiff fibers and stretchable cells are the same length and sit parallel to each other.

When there’s more moisture hanging around, the stiff fibers maintain the same length. However, the stretchable cells absorb water drops, causing them to expand and sending the scales curling upwards toward the rest of the cone.

This process usually occurs when humidity levels hit around 20 percent. The water moves toward the cone’s central stalk and then flows toward those interior parts of the scales. As the water fills up the empty spaces between cells, it causes the cone to curl until conditions become drier once again.

Some folks also believe oak and ash trees can let you know what kind of weather is on the way, though there’s not nearly as much evidence of that. They’ll just have to keep pining for pine cones.

Now, let’s dance!

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