From Nipple Ring History.

Years later, during the Victorian period around 1890, the fashion evolved again. It became popular to apply Anneux De Sein, small diamond rings or gold chains, to the nipples. Before this trend was popularized, it was mainly practiced by the upper class.

The linked page contains pictures of bare female nipples. Safe for babies, but not necessarily safe for work.

Barbara Ann Parodies

The song was later parodied as “Bomb Iran” by Vince Vance and the Valiants, written during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. A different parody version was a viral during 2006, courtesy of Adam Kontras, and the idea was sourced into a number of flash animations that same year. John McCain referenced the song, and attempted a line or two of the refrain as “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” in an answer to a question at a campaign stop on April 19, 2007; there was considerable criticism of the witticism.

Exploding Head Syndrome

Exploding head syndrome is a condition that causes the sufferer to occasionally experience a tremendously loud noise as originating from within his or her own head, usually described as the sound of an explosion, roar, waves crashing against rocks, loud voices, or a ringing noise.

Fark sometimes has the best headlines:

A 73-year old widow in Manila, Philippines was hypnotized and robbed in the street by a short woman who pretended to be lost. Baffled local police are on the lookout for a small medium at large

Because Ted doesn’t like to read, I’ve created a Text-to-Speech version of my recent blog post on authority using SpokenText.net.

It’s a 1.3 MB MP3 file, so download with caution. If it starts eating up too much bandwidth then I’ll kill it, so if you’re interested please grab it sooner rather than later.

The actual article is full of common-sense reasoning, but it was this part that caused me to post:

And while the zero-emission cars, are a big hit with environmentalists, the Canadian Federation of the Blind says the cars are a hazard for those who can’t see.

“For us, they are invisible,” Mary Ellen Gabias, the federation’s vice-president, told CBC News this week.

Think about that statement for a second.

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to construct complicated constructs.

…

The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word “buffalo”. In order of their first use, these are:

• c. The city of Buffalo, New York (or any other place named “Buffalo”), which is used as an adjective in the sentence and is followed by the animal;
• a. The animal buffalo, in the plural (equivalent to “buffaloes”), in order to avoid articles (a noun);
• v. The verb “buffalo” meaning to bully, confuse, deceive, or intimidate.

Thus, the sentence when parsed reads as a description of the pecking order in the social hierarchy of buffaloes living in Buffalo:

…

Bison from Buffalo, New York who are intimidated by other bison in their community also happen to intimidate other bison in their community.

From Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. More good ones at List of linguistic example sentences.

From the Same Wikipedia article on Jeanne Calment:

In 1965, aged 90, with no living heirs, Jeanne Calment signed a deal, common in France, to sell her condominium apartment en viager to lawyer François Raffray. Raffray, then aged 47, agreed to pay a monthly sum until she died, an agreement sometimes called a “reverse mortgage”. At the time of the deal, the value of the apartment was equal to ten years of payments. Calment lived more than thirty additional years. Raffray died of cancer in December 1995, at the age of 77, leaving his widow to continue the payments for twenty more months.

I’ve only got one wrinkle, and I’m sitting on it.

From Quotations by Jeanne Calment, the human with the longest confirmed lifespan.

Revision history of Revisionist history