Showing results by author "Dan Lewis" in All Categories

EMI was a British music company that once had many different labels under it. But the company's history is more robust than simply putting music onto records, cassettes, CDs and iTunes.

"You can't win if you don't pay"—that's a slogan used by a number of different state-run lotteries in the United States. It's a truism of sorts—the statement is obviously correct (both in the context of lotteries and more generally) and says nothing really interesting, but it makes for good ad copy.

The German town of Bochum is the 16th largest in the country by population; as of 2015, Bochum was home to roughly 365,000 people. In the fall of 2014, though, at least one of those people was in a little bit of trouble.

The 2009 Disney/Pixar movie Up is an animated film and, therefore, was able to take liberties with the truth pretty easily. That's good, because the film's premise centers on the travels of Carl Fredricksen, a 78-year-old widower who ties tens of thousands of helium balloons to his house and, as the title suggests, goes up into the sky. The flight of Mr. Fredricksen is as fictional as it gets.

Robert Campbell served as a captain in the British military in World War I. As the conflict went on, so did the number of prisoners of war held by both sides, and by the summer of 1916, Germany held more than 1.6 million such POWs.

Charles Dodgson was an English mathematician. He taught at Christ Church, a college that is part of the University of Oxford, from 1855 until retiring in 1881, and he remained at the college in residence until his death in 1898.

For the latter part of the 20th century, Vincent Gigante was a household name in his Greenwich Village neighborhood. On any given day, beginning when he was in his mid-to-late-30s, Gigante would walk around the community talking to himself under his breath, incoherently, to either no one whomsoever or figments only he could see.

The term "caloric stimulation" sounds like a medical term, and that's probably because it is one. Unfortunately, the term has nothing to do with eating an absurd amount of apple pie, but on the plus side, it's evidence that our ears can detect differences in temperature, with our eyes serving as their thermometers.

Pineapples are indigenous to South America and were domesticated and spread throughout the tropical areas of the Americas well before Europeans landed in the New World.

Take some paper and various other materials, bundled into one neat package. Light it on fire. Use it for a bit and then, when you're done, throw it away, still lit.

That's a quote from a Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority train rider named Alicia Porter from December 2013. As she and many others told the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, it was best to avoid the Atlanta subway's elevators unless one wanted to take a large whiff of – and this is gross – someone else's urine.

Typhus is a bacterial-borne disease that is transmitted by flea, tick and mite bites. It can be fatal if untreated, but, thankfully, in almost all cases antibiotics, are effective.

George Miller Beard was born in 1839. He attended Yale University, graduating in 1862, and in 1866 he earned a medical degree at the school now affiliated with Columbia University.

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.

In 1984, a Michigan man named Donald Magett won the big one – the Michigan Lottery's $1,000 Cash for Life scratch off game. He was 41 or 42 years old at the time, and while the monthly prize (paid in $12,000 annual chunks) wasn't quite "quit your job" money, it certainly sounded like he was on his way to financial security. Alas, that was not the case. In 2005, the U.S. Department of Labor sued Magett.

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.