Another piece of old news that’s new to me: There is a giant cloud of alcohol in space. It contains enough alcohol to make 400 trillion trillion pints of beer.

The discovery of the cloud, called G34.3, happened in 1995.

In 2006, a cloud of methyl alcohol (the non-drinkable kind) was discovered in a different part of space.

It seems that alcohol is one of the key ingredients of the universe. Who knew?

Source: History Channel, then the NY Times and RedOrbit for follow-up.

Update: I misread the referring article and totally botched the story on this one. What follows is the updated version. The original version is lost to the ages.

I guess this is old news, but it’s new to me… There is no longer a dinosaur called the Brontosaurus. It’s now called the Apatosaurus. Or, more appropriately, the LameNameASaurus.

Here’s what happened:

In the late 1800′s two paleontologists (Marsh and Cope) hated each other, and were in a race to discover more new dinosaurs than their rival.

In his haste to find more dinosaurs than the other guy Marsh discovered a few bones of a 50 foot long dinosaur and called it the Apatosaurus (which translates to “deceptive lizard”).

A little later, he discovered almost a complete skeleton of a 80 foot long dinosaur and called it Brontosaurus (which translates to “thunder lizard”).

Later on, it was discovered that the first dinosaur was really just a baby Brontosaurus, so by the rules of scientific naming, the first (and lamer) name took precedence.

This all came to a head about 20 years ago when the Post Office issued some dinosaur stamps with the name Brontosaurus and was accused by the “scientific community” of promoting scientific illiteracy.

First Pluto, and now the Brontosaurus. The science of my childhood is slowly dying. Pretty soon they’ll be telling me that drinking Lithium is not a cure-all.

He’ll always be Brontosaurus to me.

Incidentally, Brontosaurus is in the spell check dictionary, while Apatosaurus is not.

Source: The UnMuseum

This came up in the comments of another post, so I thought I’d post the complete story here.

In 1995, Pepsi ran a promotion where you could collect Pepsi Points (something like 10 points for a 12 pack and 5 points for a 20 oz. bottle) and use them to buy things.

There was a catalog that offered things like a Pepsi Leather Jacket for 1450 points or a T-Shirt for 75 points.

There was also a commercial that showed a Harrier Jet with the caption 7,000,000 points.

The rules of the promotion stated that if you didn’t have enough points, you could buy the remainder for 10 cents each.

So a guy in Washington raised money from his friends and submitted 15 Pepsi Points and a check for $700,008.50 (for the remaining 6,999,985 points, plus $10 shipping and handling) to Pepsi and waited for his jet.

When it was not forthcoming, he sued. Pepsi counter-sued claiming that everyone knew it was a joke.

The court agreed with Pepsi, and the case was eventually dismissed. The guy never got his jet, which is super lame. I hope he got something. At least a Pepsi Leather Jacket.

Source: Court TV and This Site

Update: I found the ad. Here for your enjoyment:

I had assumed that the word bygone in the phrase “let bygones be bygones” was some sort of insult like saying “let those idiots be idiots…” kind of like “boys will be boys.”

A bygone is actually just something that has already happened. So “let bygones be bygones” means like “let things in the past stay in the past.”

My source also says “LBbB” is similar to “forgive and forget.”

The story goes that a school teacher in Ashland, OH gave his students individual squares of paper so that the single towel in the lavatory would spread their germs. Then the CEO of Scott Paper Towels heard about this, and tried to sell a load of toilet paper, that had accidentally been made too thick, as paper towels. This also lead to the invention of Sani-towels, which I believe are the predecessor to Kleenex.

Also, paper towels are called yumyum towels or ea-z rolls in the UK.

Source: Wiki while researching paper towel brands for a comment on the Vince/ShamWow! imitator post.

Vince always warned me to beware of imitators, but I’d never seen one. Until Today.

It’s called the Sham Sorb. They should be ashamed.

They’ve recrunched the numbers, and now it looks like we may all die after all. Or maybe not.

Don’t worry, just a few more months until it’s back online and ready to go.

While at Rotten Tomatoes for lunch today, they had a little sign above the bean soup that referred to a legend involving bean soup and the US Capitol.

Internet info is sparse, but I’ll pass this along as fact anyway, and you can decide whether or not to believe it.

One day between 1903 and 1911 Joseph G. Cannon, who was Speaker of the House at the time, had a hankering for some bean soup. He went to the cafeteria and was dismayed not to find any. He is reported to have exclaimed the following:

“Thunderation, I had my mouth set for bean soup! From now on, hot or cold, rain, snow or shine, I want it on the menu every day.”

And so it came to be. Ever since, each of the 11 eating spots in the capitol have bean soup on the menu every day.

I was confused, however, as to why the recipe would be called “Senate Bean Soup” if it was the Speaker of the House who was doing the bellowing. Alternate versions of the story credit Senator Knute Nelson of Minnesota as the disappointed soup-seeker, but that doesn’t fit in with the Minnesota Nice image.

Whether the story is true or not, +350 points for use of “Thunderation” in a legend.

Source: This Site, which seems to be dedicated to soup.

Update: Joey G’s wiki site characterizes him as something of a tyrant, so I’m thinking he’s the soup guy. As a related tidbit, Joseph G. Cannon was on the first cover of Time Magazine.

I always figured, little sandwich = little fish. I guess not.

I was reading this article, about a fish market in Japan having to ban tourists because they were hugging and licking the fish, and noticed the price tags that some of these fish were selling for.

One sold for ¥9,600,000 (about $107,000). That’s a big fish.

It’s apparently not atypical for a fish to catch over ¥1,000,000 ($11,000).

The picture shows a bunch of fish in a warehouse. Yummy!

For Now. Actually, they are going to start publishing quarterly instead of monthly, you know, due to the economy and all. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that there are thousands of funnier websites available for free online.

I used to love MAD. Actually, that’s not true. It was OK. Spy vs. Spy was cool. Most of the time they were a little over the top.

Looking at this cover, I can’t believe that they passed on the ears bit. Obama has made an Alfred E. Neuman quip himself a few times.

Actually, the more I look at this cover, the more I am disappointed. Isn’t this rife for a “What, Me Worry?”

Source: Swamp Politics, where I can imagine that the tech guys are not happy that Drudge linked to them. The site’s been down all morning.