Joe six packs? Obama colaadas? Candy McCains? All inside Bloomberg’s guide to election night parties.

Volvo takes automobile safety seriously. So seriously that it has set a goal to eliminate in-car deaths and injuries by 2020.

via autoblog

Bloomberg writes that butlers, especially those trained in the English tradition, are experiencing a high demand for their services. A chief factor amongst their increasing demand are the Russian nouveau riche.

While there are no reliable figures for the number of butlers in the U.K., the London-based Work Foundation estimates there are about 2 million people in domestic service in the country, the most since the Victorian era.

Traditionally, the butler is the head of the household, responsible for the hiring and firing of other domestic staff.

Modern butlers have the additional task of mentoring their employers in the rules of English etiquette, such as referring to the “lavatory” when the boss uses the word “toilet,” or remarking upon how much better linen looks on a dining table instead of paper napkins.

“There is a way of behaving in certain circles, and the newly wealthy may not fully understand those ways,” said Dawkins of the butlers’ guild. “Employers look to the butler not only to serve but to show them what should and shouldn’t be done.”

Have you ever been curious about the history of the toothpick? All is revealed over here.

The plain wooden toothpick is among the sim­plest of manufactured things. It consists of a single part, made of a single material, and is intended for a single purpose, from which it takes its name. But simple things do not necessarily come easily, and the story of the mass-produced toothpick is one of preparation, inspiration, invention, marketing, competition, success and failure in a global econ­omy, and changing social customs and cultural values. In short, the story of the toothpick is a par­adigm for American manufacturing.

via Arts & Letter Daily

From the Associated Press:

Change for a million? That’s what a man was seeking Saturday when he handed a $1 million bill to a cashier at a Pittsburgh supermarket. But when the Giant Eagle employee refused and a manager confiscated the bogus bill, the man flew into a rage, police said.

From Wikipedia:

The chocolate chip cookie was accidentally developed by Ruth Wakefield, owner of the Toll House Inn near Whitman, Massachusetts, in 1933. The generally accepted story goes: Mrs. Wakefield was making chocolate cookies but ran out of regular Baker’s chocolate and substituted pieces of semi-sweet chocolate broken apart using a machete, assuming it would melt and mix into the batter. It did not, and the cookie with chips of chocolate was born. (The restaurant, housed in a former toll house built in 1709, burned down in 1984.) Mrs. Wakefield sold the recipe to Nestlé in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate chips. Every bag of Nestlé chocolate chips in North America has her original recipe printed on the back. Today, the chocolate chip cookie is one of America’s favorites.

But according to Carol Cavanagh, of Brockton, Massachusetts, whose father, George Boucher, now residing in South Dennis, Massachusetts, was the head chef at the Toll House Inn, from its opening to its closing, the true story of the cookie’s creation goes like this: Ruth Wakefield was known for her sugar cookies, which came free with every meal, and were for sale in the inn’s lobby. One day, while mixing a batch of sugar cookie dough, the vibrations from a large Hobart mixer against the kitchen’s wall, caused bars of Nestlé’s baker’s chocolate on the shelf above to fall into the mixer, where it was broken up and incorporated into the dough. Ruth thought that the dough was ruined and was about to discard it, when George Boucher stopped her and talked her into saving the batch. His reasoning was out of frugality rather than a prediction of the cookie’s future popularity. Logically, the accepted story of the cookie’s origin doesn’t hold up since Ruth Wakefield was an accomplished chef and author of a cookbook, so would have known enough about the properties of chocolate, and that it wouldn’t melt and mix into the batter to make chocolate cookies, while baking.

With another Super Bowl behind us, why not take a look at this curious entry in wikipedia, the 100 greatest moments in sports. The list, as of my viewing, is heavy on the football (read: soccer) and has not enough hockey. Perhaps it is time for a change to this list.

Hey Simpsons fans, check out this quirky article, by Erica Klarreich, on the use of mathematics in the show.

The Simpsons writers often play on mathematical cultural stereotypes, extracting humor by exaggerating both the mathematical illiteracy of the U.S. public and the nerdiness and self-aggrandizement of the mathematically gifted. In a characteristic exchange, in the third-dimension episode, mad scientist Professor Frink tries to explain to Police Chief Wiggum the nature of the three-dimensional space through which Homer Simpson is wandering.

What I find rather odd is that the site, Science News Online, displayed an ad for season 2 of The Hills when I read the article. I did not think that vain pseudo-reality TV on MTV and science mixed. Little did I know. Little did I know.

According to this page, the world record for the highest number of bonnets worn at the same time was set at 51 on January 18, 1997.

Die is Cast has amazingly thoughtful photo gallery – it features the carpets of the casinos of the world.

via neurastentia

Evidently the Scots have a large disdain for the speed-trap cameras that are located on the roadways of Scotland. The hatred for these devices is so prevalent that vandalism and other attacks on the cameras is a common occurrence. As a result of these attacks, the Lothian and Border Safety Camera Partnership will be installing CCTV (closed-circuit tv) cameras that will be trained on the speed cameras on key roads.

Read the BBC News article on this matter.

Season 2 of the phenomenal HBO mini-series Rome began just over a week ago (not quite a fortnight). If you have been enjoying the show like I have, you just might appreciate this bit of trivia: Lucius Vorenus is played by Kevin McKidd, who played Tommy in the film Trainspotting.

(Kevin McKidd in Trainspotting)

Thom Yorke, lead singer of Radiohead, made the following post on the band’s Dead Air Space page on their website on Friday January 19, 2007:

so we have staRTed up again had a good today
working on a version of 15step and rebuilding our studio
in the wind

and if you live in the uk there is this
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/trident/

x
Thom 

That is it.  I guess we will just have to watch the page for more tidbits of what we can expect.

via prefix magazine

Here is something for your Sunday, the comedy of Fraser Young. Fraser is a very funny guy and storyteller. I have been fortunate enough to see him live on a couple of occasions and had so many laughs that I lost count. Check out his website and myspace page.

Today we kick off a new category for the activitybook: fashion. Although rather than just calling it fashion, I am going to make this an ode to the kicky David Bowie song ‘Fashion’ and call it Fa-fa-fa-fa-fashion.

Inaurgurating the category is this article from the International Herald Tribune about the resurgence of the tie and how it is increasingly being worn just for the hell of it and not because it should be at the office.

What is my take on ties? Check out those by Paul Smith and other British designers like Ted Baker and Duchamp.

Asia Pacific Arts Magazine, run out of UCLA Berkley, has compiled its best of lists for 2006 in regards to Asian entertainment and Asians in entertainment.

via asian wild rose

In 2002, a wonderful little documentary about the national spelling bees, called Spellbound, was released. The narative follows 8 contestants in the 1999 Scripps National Spelling Bee. Last night it was on cable television in Canada and my girlfriend and I got to watch it for our second time. Anyways, if you have watched Spellbound, you might be curious as to what happened to kids. Pop over to the movie’s Wikipedia entry to find out.

Did you know that the Columbus, Georgia is home to the Lunchbox Museum? It is located in the Rivermarket Antique Mall.

The editors of Ms. Magazine have pieced together their list of the top ten victories for women in 2006.

POLITICS: 2006 is the breakthrough year of women leaders in the United States. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) becomes the first woman and first self-identified feminist Speaker of the House. As the third-in-line to the presidency, Pelosi now holds the highest public office achieved by a woman in United States history.

The 110 th Congress will have the largest number of women chairing committees: including Representatives Louise Slaughter, Nydia Velazquez, Juanita Millender MacDonald, and Stephanie Tubbs Jones and Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer will all head committees beginning in January 2007.

Women voters led the way in the 2006 election: the gender gap proves to be a determining factor in electing the new Congress. If only men had voted, exit polls show that the Republicans would have maintained control of the Senate.

A record number of women were elected to Congress (90) and state legislative seats (1,731). However, the U.S. still lags behind many other countries with women comprising only 16.3 percent of Congress and 23.5 percent of state legislatures.

Voters send a pro-women’s rights message when they decisively defeat a draconian abortion ban in South Dakota and parental notification measures in Oregon and California. Women voters led the drive to approve a minimum wage increase in six states (AZ, CO, MO, MT, NV, OH) and to defeat a ban on same-sex marriage in Arizona .

HEALTH: The Food and Drug Administration issues two approvals for women’s health and lives: after a long campaign by women’s rights and reproductive health organizations, emergency contraception is approved to be sold without a prescription for women 18 and over; Gardasil, a vaccine for women and girls that prevents the spread of certain strands of the human papilloma virus (HPV) that can cause cervical cancer, is approved.

EDUCATION: Two major Title IX sex discrimination cases are finally settled in favor of girls’ sports teams that were receiving proportionately less funding than their male counterparts at both a high school in Birmingham, AL and public schools in Prince George’s County, MD.

BUSINESS: Indra Nooyi is named CEO of PepsiCo, becoming the 11 th woman to head a Fortune 500 Company. However, women still hold only 1.7 percent of corporate officer positions at the nation’s largest companies.

TELEVISION: Katie Couric becomes the first woman at any network to anchor the weekday evening newscast alone and Ugly Betty , the first primetime television show to feature a working-class Latina , premiers as one of the hottest shows on network TV.

INTERNATIONAL: 2006 is the year of women leaders worldwide: Michelle Bachelet is elected the first woman president of Chile, immediately appointing a gender-balanced Cabinet and requiring gender parity in all government appointments; Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson is inaugurated as president of Liberia, becoming the first woman to head an African nation; Portia Simpson Miller was elected Jamaica’s first woman prime minister; and Han Myeong Sook became the first woman Prime Minister of South Korea.

Do you think that they neglected to include anything from their list?

Famous/notable people who have experienced homelessness at one time or another in their life.

via growabrain