pigpencil

Love to my parents, John (Jay) and Dorothy (Dot) Wood of Danielsville, Georgia, who will celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary on September 6. Congratulations!

Kara’s parents, George and Fran Kovalchik, will also hit the half-century-married mark next month.

That doesn’t happen very much any longer, does it?

I’m not certain why, but this is interesting.

Kara and I are always on the lookout for new places and ways to distribute our work. (Yes, we do more than just trivia. In fact, we have several ideas just waiting to be unleashed on an unsuspecting public.) Feel free to contact us at info@pigpencil.com.

We’re still retroactively adding lots of our material to pigpencil.com. Coming soon: video footage of a few segments we scripted for CNN-Headline News, our clips from the "In America" section of Reader’s Digest, and much, much more.

Here’s a photograph of a milk carton issued by Schneider’s Dairy of Pittsburgh in 2003 or 2004, which included some trivia we wrote for mental_floss. If your information is going to appear on the side of a milk carton, we figure this is the best way to do it … rather than a photo and some "Have You Seen Me?" information.

Of course, the sample they sent us was for Skim Milk. Are they trying to tell us something?

Sandy here. Yes, I may be biased since I grew up in Georgia and was an Atlanta Braves fan from a young age. But if someone could PLEASE explain to my why two-time NL Most Valuable Player Dale Murphy has NOT been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, I’d be eternally grateful.

The man is (and always was) a class act, and I’d still be watching baseball if more players were like him. How can a player have a long and distinguished career such as his and not be a lock for the Hall?

Congratulations to three members of the mental_floss team:

Jason English, the assistant web editor of mentalfloss.com, on the birth of his first child. Jason and wife Ellen welcomed a baby girl, Charlotte, on August 18. The couple rejected our suggested first name for the baby, Pidgin. Oh, well.

Terri Dann Osborne, the assistant art director for mental_floss magazine, on her recent marriage. Terri not only does incredible work for the magazine, but she also designs most of the banners for our quizzes on mentalfloss.com. If you see an ugly one, odds are she had the day off and we designed it. Sorry ’bout that.

Toby Maloney, mental_floss’ vice president of business development (and our personal mentor), for reaching a birthday we can only hope to reach someday. Woohoo!

Here’s the neatest thing I’ve received in the mail in quite a while… a coupon for 250 White Castle burgers for $99.99.

Yes, it’s a gimmick. A brilliant gimmick. You can click on the picture to see a larger version. Note the credit cards shown at the top, along with the note about the place being open 24/7. Isn’t it easy to picture five intoxicated college students pooling money very late at night to buy this? Granted, they’ll each eat eight or nine of them, throw up, and the rest of the burgers will be crammed into a mini-fridge until they’re thrown out in three or four weeks.

The point is you KNOW it’ll happen. Just like some hungry guy will brag that he really could eat 250 in a sitting and plunk down his $100. He’ll try and fail, but so what? It’s the challenge that matters.

Nice job, White Castle.

I have several “clip services” attached to my browser’s default page so that I can keep tabs (at least a little) on what’s happening in the real world. One of those is called Odd News from AP, and as you might expect, it collects the most unusual stories recently spat out by the Associated Press. Or so I thought.

Today, this story showed up. Here’s a rundown:

1. Neighbors complain because dog nearly bites them.
2. Officers visit dog’s owner, warns him to restrain dog.
3. The owner fails to do so, and the dog bites the officers.
4. The officers arrest the owner and send the dog to the pound.
5. The end.

Not exactly Twilight Zone or even Mad TV material, is it? Now if one of the officers bit the dog, or the dog bit off one of the officer’s fingers and they had to wait a couple days for nature to run its course so that the cop could get his wedding ring back, then I’d say “okay.” But the police doing what they’re supposed to do? That’s odd?

Then again, maybe it is…

This item was advertised in a recent flyer we received in the mail from Bed, Bath & Beyond. While I have no grudge against the store or anyone involved… I gotta say, doesn’t this device just reek of danger? I know how hot many of the power chargers for my small electronics can get. Can you imagine what it would be like putting four of them in a power strip inside a small box? It seems like that’s just asking for the chargers to overheat and/or start a fire. Yes, I’m sure there’s some ventilation, but still.

It makes me wonder if the Underwriters Laboratories have any say-so when it comes to furniture intended for home electronics. I know they approve the electric and electronic devices themselves… Sadly, we’ve got a deadline looming and I don’t have time to look it up right now. But I will!