Page 13 - Other Facts

A girl tricked her kidnapper into letting her use his cellphone and managed to get rescued!

Elizabeth Shoaf was abducted after leaving her school bus. Her kidnapper took her through the woods into a hand-dug, 15 foot bunker near his trailer home. There, he restrained and abused her several times each day. Even though he continuously threatened to kill her, Shoaf didn’t lose hope and began planning her escape.

She started to talk to him about his interests and her kidnapper began to view her as a person he could trust. Eventually, he declared that he was in love with her. After 10 days of captivity, he allowed Elizabeth to borrow his cell phone to play games on it. Naturally, when he left, she used it to call her mother.

Law enforcement used the cellphone towers to locate the bunker. She told her kidnapper that the police were coming for him and that he should run away and come back for her later. Once he did so, she was able to leave and yell for help until they found her. Her kidnapper was found and sentenced to 421 years in prison- a sentence too short for his horrendous crimes.

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The word ‘fart’ comes from an Old English word meaning ‘to break wind’

As you may have guessed, ‘fart’ is not the medical word for the gross/hilarious act of passing gas. The medical term for gas released from the intestinal is ‘flatulence.’ ‘Fart’ is a slang term coined in 1632 (yes, even back then people farted). The Oxford English Dictionary defines the transitive verb form of ‘fart’: To send forth as wind from the anus.

The word comes from the Old English word ‘feortan’ which means ‘to break wind.’ The OED mentions that the word ‘fart’ is ‘not in decent use.’ However, it has still been used by many great English poets, like Geoffrey Chaucer.

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Sesame Street produces free DVDs explaining military deployment and injuries to children.

It is often difficult for grown-ups to have certain talks with children; talks about sex, drugs, the general crappiness of the world, etc. The issue of why mommy or daddy has to go off to war or is not the way he/she was before, is an especially delicate one and needs to be handled with care.

So, the Sesame Workshop launched DVDs called “Talk, Listen, Connect: Deployment, Homecoming, Changes” for military families with young children. The programming is engineered to help families communicate better and build understanding issues such as multiple deployments, injuries, etc.

The storyline uses beloved Sesame Street characters (like Big Bird, the Cookie Monster, Elmo, etc.) to emphasize the importance of family and friends “sticking together” and having pride in each other. They also contain clips of real military families talking about their challenges, heartbreaks, and triumphs.

500,000 DVD kits were initially produced. They are free and can be found online at the Sesame Street website.

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There are 1.7 million homeless youth under 18 in the US. The #1 thing most requested? Jeans. Donate yours & help today

There are over 1.7 million homeless youth under the age of 18 in our country each year. The number one item that young people request when they visit a homeless shelter is a pair of jeans. So DO SOMETHING and donate your gently worn jeans! Join DoSomething.org and Aéropostale's Teens for Jeans campaign today.

You run drive in your school and community to collect gently used jeans. They, then drop them off at their local Aéropostale store. Each Aero store is paired with a local homeless shelter.

Last year young people collected over 1 million pairs of jeans - enough to clothe 2 out of 3 homeless youth under the age of 18 in the U.S. Let's beat that and clothe even more this year!

Visit www.teensforjeans.com to sign up and for more information

The guy from Into the Wild could’ve saved himself if he had walked a quarter mile!

Christopher McCandless was an American adventurer who, in 1992, trekked into the Alaskan wilderness with the goal of living more simply. Four months later, his remains were found in Denali National Park. They weighed only 67 pounds; it was apparent that he had died of starvation.

McCandless became famous after Jon Krakauer published his story in an article in Outside magazine in 1993 and then in greater detail in his book “Into the Wild” in 1996. The book was adapted into a film by Sean Penn in 2007 with Emile Hirsch playing McCandless.

Many have criticized McCandless for his apparent lack of common sense and argue that he could have prevented his own death if he had been more prepared. For example, he did not notify anyone that he was going off into the wilderness and lacked any emergency communication equipment.

In fact, McCandless could have perhaps survived if he was able to cross what he believed to be an impassable river and find his way back to civilization. In fact, there was a hand-operated tram only a quarter of a mile down the river from where he attempted to cross. His final months will always remain somewhat of a mystery, but McCandless’s death seems to many a great waste.

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