pigpencil

What You Crave

 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 can 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.

A Crushed Coin

Our “Hell Radio” Quiz for mentalfloss.com

It’s here.

No Autographs Please (cough)

Both WJR-AM radio and The Detroit Free Press have requested interviews with us concerning our latest book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fun FAQs. Because interviews require focusing on a subject for an extended period of time, we’re understandably hesitant to do them. While developing our trivia chops since the early 1990s, Kara and I have become masters at taking a narrow subject and finding ways to expand it using tie-ins from pop culture, history, literature, whatever.

And, quite frankly, we do so darned much of it that it’s difficult to distinguish one job from another. When interviewers ask about a particular article done six months ago, we find it very tricky, since we’ve filled our minds with thousands of new bits of information since then. It’s like asking a baseball player about a particular pitch from earlier in the season. There have been so many since then that all you can really say is something generic like, “Yes, well, that was challenging, but I did my best.”

I’m happy to talk about our “craft,” but I even draw a blank when someone asks me for a random interesting fact. There are so many swimming through my head at all hours of the day and night that it becomes more and more difficult to pull out one from the batch. We try to FIND things, and we try to PROVE things, and while we’re at it, we do our best to LEARN things. But they don’t all stick.

A few months back, I calculated our output in 2007, and here’s what I came up with:

• Multiple-choice trivia questions: around 2,500
• Paragraph-length facts: nearly 3,000
• FAQ questions: around 1,200
• Puzzles of varying descriptions: over 500

Combine these with additional things we’ve written (in print, online, and tied to merchandise) and I figure that we ran well over 500,000 words last year alone. Yow. It’s no wonder that the letters keep rubbing off our keyboards. And that doesn’t include the research and fact-checking work that we do for mental_floss, where we have to check every article in each issue for accuracy. That’s a full-time job in itself, with all the checking, reading, calling and digging it takes.

It’s a job that’s usually interesting, sometimes maddening, and often exhausting. But one thing Kara and I both agree on - without hesitation - is that there’s nothing else we’d rather do.

She Who Laughs Last…

Anyone who knows us knows that we’re not heavily into politics, but we couldn’t resist taking part in this project. Several weeks ago, we received a call from Jay Kamhi, founder of a company that has produced popular novelties ranging from stuffed mice to musical gift boxes. He asked us to provide some trivia content for his latest venture, a laughing pen in the shape of 2008 Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton.

Kara and I even added a few extra touches that were incorporated into the final product — such as the graphic of the “audio analysis of Hillary’s voice.” In fact, we composed nearly all the text for the back of the blister package for the pen, which you can view at http://www.hillarypen.com/laugh.html

Only a limited supply of these pens are still available, so if you want to purchase one (and you know you do), visit http://www.hillarypen.com

Just the FAQs, Ma’am

Our newest book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fun FAQs, should appear in stores in early May. Inside, you’ll find more than 1,000 entertaining questions and answers about varying subjects from baseball to Beethoven to bananas. This is our fourth book in the past two years and our third offering for Alpha Books, who also published our gift hardcovers The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Not So Useless Knowledge and The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to More Not So Useless Knowledge.

Click here to get 5 percent off Amazon’s already low price if you order it before the release date of May 6. Thanks!

But… This isn’t Even Odd!

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?

Maybe in Detroit it is…

Hot Box

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 Underwriters Laboratories have any say-so when it comes to furniture to house electronics. I know they approve the electronics themselves… Sadly, we’ve got a deadline looming and I don’t have time to look it up right now. But I will!

Mets math

I didn’t take statistics in college, so maybe I’m missing something. But this article makes me think. If you don’t want to bother to click through, the article cites a Web source containing odds for teams to reach the 2008 World Series. What I don’t get is that five out of the top six teams are American League teams. The Mets are the only NL representative among those top six.

Now, only one AL team and one NL team makes it to the World Series. So how can you have five different AL teams at 7:2, 5:1 and 10:1 odds, but only one NL team at better than 12:1 odds? If the Mets were big-time favorites, I guess it would make sense, but they’re 4:1.

I’m usually good at math, so someone please explain this to me.

Throwing stones

Madonna’s just been inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame? Hmmmm. The definition of rock ‘n’ roll must have changed a whole lot since I was younger.