In the 1400′s a law was set forth in England that a man was allowed to beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb. Hence we have “the rule of thumb”

Many years ago in Scotland , a new game was invented. It was ruled Gentlemen Only..Ladies Forbidden”…and thus the word GOLF entered intothe English language.

The first couple to be shown in bed together on primetime TV were Fred and Wilma Flintstone.

Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the U.S . Treasury.

Men can read smaller print than women can; women can hear better.

Coca-Cola was originally green.

The State with the highest percentage of people who walk to work:

Alaska

The percentage of Africa that is wilderness: 28% (now get this…)

The percentage of North America that is wilderness: 38%

The cost of raising a medium-size dog to the age of eleven: $ 16,400

Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.

The first novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer.

The San Francisco Cable cars are the only mobile National Monuments.

Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history:

• Spades – King David
• Hearts – Charlemagne
• Clubs -Alexander, the Great
• Diamonds – Julius Caesar

111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

Q. Half of all Americans live within 50 miles of what?

A. Their birthplace

Q. Most boat owners name their boats. What is the mostpopular boat name requested?

A. Obsession

Q. If you were to spell out numbers, how far would you have to go until you would find the letter “A”?

A. One thousand

Q. What do bulletproof vests, fire escapes, windshield wipers, and laser printers all have in common?

A. All were invented by women.

Q. What is the only food that doesn’t spoil?

A. Honey

In Shakespeare’s time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes.

When you pulled on the ropes the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. Hence the phrase……… “goodnight, sleep tight.”

It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride’s father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the honey month, which we know today as the honeymoon.

In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts… So in old England ,when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them “Mind your pints and quarts, and settle down.” It’s where we get the phrase “mind your P’s and Q’s”

Don’t delete this just because it looks weird.
Believe it or not, you can read it.

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

YOU KNOW YOU ARE LIVING IN 2010 when…

1. You accidentally enter your PIN on the microwave.

2. You haven’t played solitaire with real cards in years.

3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three.

4. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.

5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don’t have e-mail addresses.

6. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in the groceries.

7. Every commercial on television has a web site at the bottom of the screen

8. You get up in the morning and go on line before getting your coffee.

10. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. : )

11. You’re reading this and nodding and laughing.

12. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to tweet or facebook this post to.

13. You are too busy to notice there was no #9 on this list.

14. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn’t a #9 on this list.

~~~~~~~~~~~AND FINALLY~~~~~~~~~~~~

NOW U R LAUGHING at yourself.

Mary and her husband Jim had a dog named ‘Lucky.’ Lucky was a real character. Whenever Mary and Jim had company come for a weekend visit they would warn their friends to not leave their luggage open because Lucky would help himself to whatever struck his fancy. Inevitably, someone would forget and something would come up missing.

Mary or Jim would go to Lucky’s toy box in the basement and there the treasure would be, amid all of Lucky’s other favorite toys. Lucky always stashed his finds in his toy box and he was very particular that his toys stay in the box.

It happened that Mary found out she had breast cancer. Something told her she was going to die of this disease…. in fact, she was just sure it was fatal. She scheduled the double mastectomy, fear riding her shoulders. The night before she was to go to the hospital she cuddled with Lucky.

A thought struck her… what would happen to Lucky? Although the three-year-old dog liked Jim, he was Mary’s dog through and through. If I die, Lucky will be abandoned, Mary thought. He won’t understand that I didn’t want to leave him. The thought made her sadder than thinking of her own death.

The double mastectomy was harder on Mary than her doctors had anticipated and Mary was hospitalized for over two weeks. Jim took Lucky for his evening walk faithfully, but the little dog just drooped, whining and miserable. Finally the day came for Mary to leave the hospital. When she arrived home, Mary was so exhausted she couldn’t even make it up the steps to her bedroom. Jim made his wife comfortable on the couch and left her to nap. Lucky stood watching Mary but he didn’t come to her when she called. It made Mary sad but sleep soon overcame her and she dozed. When Mary woke for a second she couldn’t understand what was wrong.

She couldn’t move her head and her body felt heavy and hot. But panic soon gave way to laughter when Mary realized the problem. She was covered, literally blanketed, with every treasure Lucky owned! While she had slept, the sorrowing dog had made trip after trip to the basement bringing his beloved mistress all his favorite things in life.

He had covered her with his love.

Mary forgot about dying. Instead she and Lucky began living again, walking further and further together every day. It’s been 12 years now and Mary is still cancer-free. Lucky? He still steals treasures and stashes them in his toy box but Mary remains his greatest treasure.

Remember…. live every day to the fullest. Each minute is a blessing from God. And never forget…. the people who make a difference in our lives are not the ones with the most credentials, the most money, or the most awards. They are the ones that care for us.

Here Is A Story For You…

A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud toward him. The driver, a young man in a Broni suit, Gucci shoes, YSL tie and Ray Ban sunglasses leans out of the window and asks the shepherd, “If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?”

The shepherd looks at the man who is obviously a Princeton grad, then looks at his grazing flock and calmly answers, “Sure, why not?”

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Sony notebook computer, connects to his AT&T cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the Internet where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location. He feeds that data to another NASA satellite which scans the area in an ultra-high resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility located in Hamburg, Germany.

Within seconds, he receives an e-mail on his “Palm Pilot” that the image has been processed and the data stored.

He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an e-mail on his “Blackberry” and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP Laser jet printer and turns to the shepherd and states, “You have exactly 1,586 sheep.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep,” says the shepherd.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on, amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the shepherd says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep?”

The young man thinks about it for a second and replies, “Okay, why not?”

“You’re a consultant,” says the shepherd.

“Wow! That’s correct,” answers the yuppie. “But how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required. You showed up here even though nobody called you… you want to get paid for an answer I already knew to a question I never asked… and… you don’t know shit about my business.

“Now Give Me Back My Dog!”

It’s a sad day for YouTube users in the United Kingdom. The phenomenally popular video site has starting to pull all copyrighted music clips from its UK website, with most videos expected to be blocked from the site within the next two …CarpetDog in, Today in Music | Music News Review

You should read the whole article.

This question prompted the guys at Animoto Productions, a bunch of TV/film producers and techies, to lock themselves in a room and nerd-out. Their mission? To make the type of stuff they did while producing shows at MTV, Comedy Central & ABC available to everyone. Their first release, Animoto, does just that.

Animoto users simply choose which images they’d like to display and a song. Animoto then produces a fully customized & unique video to them. Produced in a widescreen format, the result is a video that has the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.

Welcome to the end of slideshows.

Best of all, no two videos are ever the same. Ever. Even videos generated with an identical set of images and music selection will each have an entirely distinct set of motion design. Sharing them is easy too, as they can be emailed, downloaded, and embedded on websites including social network sites like Facebook and MySpace.

The heart of Animoto is its newly developed patent-pending Cinematic A.I. technology that thinks like an actual director and editor. The technology takes into account every nuance of a song – the genre, song structure, energy, rhythm, instrumentation, and vocals. Whether it’s punk, pop, hip-hop or a classical Mozart piece, every Animoto video is totally customized.

Animoto is inspired by the digital camera revolution where taking dozens, even hundreds of pictures at a time gives people the ability to think more like a video producer capturing an entire experience, not just individual moments. As users are discovering the limits of traditional photo services, the guys at Animoto are innovating new ways for people to share their stories and express themselves through media.

Animoto is also dedicated to supporting new artists and music. So while users can upload their own music, the guys at Animoto also proudly feature a regularly updated selection of fresh music that they truly dig. No stock music, no cover bands and no elevator music.

Animoto’s front end is built on the open source web framework Ruby on Rails, facilitating rapid “Web 2.0″ (Ajax, etc) application development. Animoto has partnered with Amazon to leverage multiple offerings in their Web Services (AWS) platform which, in conjunction with Animoto’s own render farm, constitutes the Animoto web infrastructure.

Based in New York City with an office in San Francisco, the founders of Animoto have worked in the entertainment industry, studied music in London, and played in indie rock bands. They share a passion for helping people better share their stories and express themselves through online media by innovating technologies in the field of video production.

They plan to acquire Google next year.

St Nicholas, the jovial and benevolent bearer of Christmas gifts
died when his custom-made sleigh collided with a Jumbo Jet just outside the North Pole, newly-impoverished parents reported to their children yesterday.

The man more commonly known as “Father Christmas” (or “Santa” to the offspring of out-of-work American stockbrokers) was out on one of his regular pre-Christmas reconnaissance missions to check which children have been good this year, when chief reindeer Rudolph “got spooked and steered the sleigh directly into the path of a Toronto-bound 747,” distraught kids were told.

“Come on now Timmy, you have to be strong,” said Brian Gough, a recently-laid-off construction worker from Redditch, as his 6-year-old son’s bottom lip started to wobble. “We must give thanks for his life – not cheapen his name by thinking of ourselves on Christmas Day. I know you were really looking forward to that remote control car
, but sometimes cherished memories can be as rewarding as material gifts.”

Jeremy Davis, a 37-year-old HBOS executive whose five-figure new-year bonus was cancelled due to the credit crunch, gathered his two children solemnly in his study as he broke the news. “I know it’s tough, kids, but your mother and I want to make sure you still have the best Christmas ever – so we will fill your stockings with satsumas, socks and other simple gifts to remind you that only Santa was special enough to have been able to find you a Playstation 3.”

“You should probably still leave out that whiskey and plate of mince pies though as a mark of respect. It’s what he would have wanted”

Brave Lauren Cole, 5, said that children everywhere would do their best to keep the memory of Father Christmas alive. “Mummy told me not to worry about Mrs. Claus or the elves because they have stopped making all those presents, and are now busy building a shrine to Santa in Lapland.”

Lauren concluded that she was “happy” Father Christmas was now in heaven playing party games with the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny, who also perished recently in unrelated incidents involving pillow suffocation and death by chocolate respectively.

The size of our world

Well, it does me. Baffles the mind it does…

Google may be doing the rounds again…

It’s been said through the grapevine that Google may be doing the rounds again. What do I mean by ‘doing the rounds’? – updating page rank (or PR)…

What good is PR? I guess for some people who like to sell links on their websites etc, it does give other sites a better chance of getting a higher PR. A bit like a vicious circle – if you have high PR you can give some of it to another site, give too much of it away and you will lose PR. Googles way of stopping or penalising link farms?

Music Video Code by Lyricise.com