Trivialities
Salon.com’s take on the Emmys
It’s a pretty slow news day (unless you enjoy looking at actors dressed up and graded by magazine and website publishers), and while Dinner Topics doesn’t like to simply regurgitate the news, we’ll make an exception this time so you have something to read and talk about today. Here is a Salon.com article about the [...]
A penny saved is 1.6 cents earned…
Copper prices have been in the news lately, thanks in part to a three week gain. While not quite at the levels seen in the middle of ’06 and the middle of ’08, copper and other metals are becoming quite pricey, which leads us to today’s Dinner Topic. When the smart guys smoking pipes at [...]
World’s Tallest Tent – Camping for Giants
Many people know Kazakhstan only from Soviet era news and the movie Borat. It’s just one of those “cold -stan” countries out in Central Asia, right? Well after reading this article, you will know Kazakhstan for something else from now on: it houses the world’s tallest tent. Technically, the tent, formally called the Khan Shatyry Entertainment Center, [...]
America’s Independence Day – July 2nd?
We all know the story. July 4 is when the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence. For Americans, Independence Day conjures up images of Thomas Jefferson writing the historic document or John Hancock’s famous signature. Many people even remember one of the opening sentences: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [...]
Cereal battle: Trix or Kix?
If you had to settle for a quick bowl of cereal before heading out the door this morning, you might want to offer this bit of trivia to your friends or cereal- loving coworkers. Kix, the “Kid-Tested, Mother-Approved” corn cereal, debuted way back in 1937. Trix, the sugar boasting cereal not intended for rabbits (Silly [...]
Fancy word for human attributes
I must have some smart friends because the word “anthropomorphize” was thrown at me in a Facebook comment over the weekend. In the unlikely event that you encounter that word in the near future, you should know what it means. anthropomorphize – “to ascribe human form or attributes to (an animal, plant, material object, etc.)”1 [...]
Average Life Span
Sunday was a bad day to be a really old person in the United States. Two of the oldest people in the world died within hours of each other, one a 114-year-old woman in New Hampshire and the other a spry 113-year-old woman from Detroit. The rest of the intriguing story can be found here. [...]
RickRolled for internet newbies
I’ve been waiting a long time for this Dinner Topic, and finally I have a reason to include it. The original video used to “RickRoll” people for years has been taken off of YouTube for the old standby of “terms of use violation.” There are still plenty of videos floating around the internet for which to [...]
