Proving that even bad ideas can be copied, the Russians had their own space shuttle.

Called the Buran, the Russian shuttle was somehow even less successful than its American counterpart. It only made one unmanned flight in 1988 before the program was canceled.

In 2002 the hangar that held the Buran collapsed, and the shuttle was destroyed.

The first of two posts inspired by a particularly interesting episode of Build it Bigger.

I’ve always known that the US Military is the coolest, but here’s another fun fact to give it some more cool points: We can parachute drop tanks from an airplane.

The cargo bay door opens and the tanks are pushed out.  An array of parachutes on the tanks open, and the tank glides slowly to the ground.

How cool is that?

The Wife^® apparently doesn’t drink Snapple anymore because I haven’t seen any Snapple Cap posts in a while. That, compounded with my Trivial Pursuit calendar from yesterday, let me to investigate some Snapple Trivia.

The Unadulterated Food Corporation was founded in 1927 in New York by 3 Jews. Snapple is kosher; there is a small “K” on the label because of this.

One of its first products was a carbonated apple juice, which was described as having a “snappy apple taste.” Snappy apple lead to the name “Snapple,” which replaced their even worse name in the early 80’s.

The brand became popular in the early 90’s because of “the Snapple Lady” commercials. Her name is Wendy Kaufman. The story goes that when she was young, she sent a letter to Greg Brady that went unanswered, which inspired the commercials.

Wilford Brimley’s favorite company, Quaker Oats, bought Snapple in 1994 for $1.7 billion (at which time, Wendy was fired for some reason), but then sold it to Triarc in 1997 for $300 million (ouch!). Triarc sold it to Cadbury Schweppes for $1.45 billion in 2000, and was spun off into the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group in 2008.

In 2003, Snapple paid off the city of New York to put Snapple machines in all New York schools and public buildings. Snapple is the official drink of New York City.

According to wiki – which is always true – about 28 of the Snapple cap facts are wrong. At least 3 of them were debunked by Mythbusters, and 1 by Snopes (see next post). Reading some of them, though, I wouldn’t call the caps “wrong” per se.

I personally find Snapple overpriced and pretentious… That’s about it.

Source: My TP calendar, wiki, and briefly wiki.

Pitchman William “Billy” D. Mays, Jr., Oxy-Clean Spokesman, and Vince from ShamWow rival, passed away on 6/28/09.

He started his career selling portable washing machines on the Atlantic City boardwalk before being hired by OrangGlo to promote their various cleaners.

He went on to pitch for the following products: OxiClean, Orange Glo, Kaboom, Engrave It, Handy Switch, iCan, Mighty Mendit, Mighty Putty (regular) & Mighty Putty Wood, Hercules Hook, AwesomeAuger, Steam Buddy ,Zorbeez, Big City Slider Station,The Ding King, ESPN 360, Energize, Impact Gel Insoles, Omni DualSaw, Jupiter Jack, What Odor?, Tool Bandit, SIMONIZ Instant Shine, SIMONIZ fix it! (regular) & fix it! PRO, Gopher, Samurai Shark, Grater Plater, Ragazzi’s Pizza, and Green Now!

He also recently got a show on Discovery, but I didn’t think it was that good.

He was on an airplane flight the day before his death where the tires blew out on landing. Though no one on board was thought to suffer severe injuries, it is unclear if this incident had anything to do with his death.

Update: Preliminary autopsy results indicate heart disease is a likely cause of death.

Source: Wiki

Take this with a grain of salt, because it was only explained in passing, but it was on Discovery, so if it was wrong I think they’d edit it out. Anyway…

Motion sickness, such as that caused by reading while driving, is caused because your eyes are telling your brain that you are not moving, while your ears are hearing the sounds of movement.***

The disconnect makes your brain go haywire, and it responds by sending you a queasy feeling.

Source: Time Warp on Discovery.

If you’ve never seen it, it’s the show where they use high speed cameras to capture slow motion video of interesting things. I usually don’t watch it because I don’t find the hosts likable, but last night they were in Las Vegas getting slow-mo video of Penn & Teller magic tricks and Cirque de Soleil performers.

Penn & Teller were amazing. They did a cup and ball trick with plastic see-through cups, and even in slow-mo they had to highlight the “trick” part of the trick before I could notice it.

Also, they had slow-mo video of chicks from The Fuel Girls getting set on fire.

And yes, that last part, while true, was a shameless ploy to generate traffic.

*** A more accurate description of the reason from the comments:
The inner ear is filled with fluid and lined with little hairs. As you move the fluid sloshes around and stimulates the hairs. The brain then interprets this to determine which direction the motion is in. This is why you cannot walk a straight line after spinning in a circle; the fluid in your inner ear is still spinning, telling your brain that you are still spinning (which can be solved by spinning the other direction).

So, the inner ear feels the forward motion of the car, the eyes see a motionless page of a book, and you end up puking your guts out on the side of some AZ highway that uses the metric system.

The Comfort Wipe!

For over a hundred years we’ve been using toilet tissues the same old way. Now there’s a better way with the extended reach and comfortable to use Comfort Wipe™. It grabs and holds the toilet tissue in perfect postions so you can easily wipe yourself. When you’re done, just dispense the soiled tissue right in the toilet with the press of a button. Comfort Wipe™ extends your reach a full 18″ while the anotomical design follows the contours of your body for perfect cleaning. It’s perfect for everyone, especially if you have trouble easily reaching because of physical limitations such as bad shoulder or other mobility litimations. Now you’ll never have to touch a dirty toilet tissue!

I wonder if we’ll see this one on Pitchmen.

Source: Dave Ryan

I caught an episode of PitchMen on Discovery last night… if you haven’t seen/heard of it, it’s a reality type show featuring Billy Mays and another guy (Anthony Sullivan) and shows a behind-the-scenes look at how infomercials are made.

Like most reality TV, it’s like a train wreck, so you can’t really change the channel once you’ve landed on it.

Seeing the show reminded me that was overdue with a post about Billy Mays and Vince from ShamWow! based on an article I read a few weeks ago in Fortune magazine.

It seems that the two have something of a rivalry. You see, Mays feels that Vince has violated some type of pitchman code by hawking the ShamWow! after Billy had previously hawked a similar product called Zorbeez. And, to add insult to injury, Mays feels the Slap Chop is a rip-off of Mays’ Quick Chop.

“You know what, rip me off once, shame on me. But twice? I’m coming after you and taking back what’s mine”

According to Mays, he and Vince “exchanged words” during the super bowl (they were both guests in the same suite). That lead to Mays going on the Adam Carolla show challenging Vince to a “pitch off.”

As for Vince, he says the Super Bowl altercation never happened, and accuses Billy of posturing to increase his ratings.

The totality of the Fortune article and the Discovery show did lead me to one important conclusion: Billy Mays is a world-class douchebag.

(I know – who would have thought that in an altercation with Vince from ShamWow! the other guy would come off looking like the douchebag.)

If you had any lingering doubt about Mays’ level of douchebaggery, let it be solidified by the fact that he refers to himself in third person.

“When I’m up against a wall, that’s when Billy Mays performs his best.”

But, alas, he’s a rich, Bentley driving douchebag, so more power to him, I guess.

Source: Fortune Magazine

10% of the people who attempt to climb Mount Everest die in the process.

Source: Planet Earth on Discovery

I was wondering where this clever phrase came from and got some help from deadkytty9.

deadkytty9Feb 12 2007, 12:01 PM

From here:
“Since the early 1500s there have been similar expressions to
describe things difficult to find: “like finding a needle in a meadow of hay”
and “like finding a pin’s head in a cartload of hay.” In the mid-1800s the
expression became “needle in a haystack.”"

And from here:
“needle in a haystack – impossible search for something relatively tiny,
lost or hidden in something that is relatively enormous – the first use of this
expression, and its likely origin, is by the writer Miguel de Cervantes, in his
story Don Quixote de la Mancha written from 1605-1615. According to Bartlett’s,
the expression ‘As well look for as needle in a bottle of hay’ (translated from
the original Spanish) appears in part III, chapter 10. ‘Bottle’ is an old word
for a bundle of hay, taken from the French word botte, meaning bundle. Brewer
(1870-94 dictionary and revisions) lists the full expression – ‘looking for a
needle in a bottle of hay’ which tells us that the term was first used in this
form, and was later adapted during the 1900’s into the modern form.”

MythBusters had a clever episode on this. They suggested that if you really do need to find a needle in a haystack, try using a metal detector or other strong magnet, or throw the haysack in a swimming pool. The needle will sink, while the hay will float!

Source: This forum and Wiki

It’s called a Nautilus. That thing near the bottom is its jet. It uses the jet to move forward, and pockets of gas under its shell to float up and down.

Oh, and it swims backwards (shell first). The eyes are by the jet. But it doesn’t really use its eyes. It depends on smell instead.

Source: Planet Earth on The Discovery Channel