Page 56 - Best of the Month

The world's oldest cake pre-dates modern flight and cars!

The world's oldest cake is a wedding cake baked in 1898 by a British pastry maker, and it holds the Guinness World Record as the oldest intact wedding cake. It was proudly displayed in the window of a family bakery in Basingstoke UK for more than 65 years.

When the bakery closed in 1964, the cake was moved to the attic. It remained there until 1995, when the cake was handed over to the Willis Museum of Basingstoke where it is currently on display.

The cake is still in one piece, but it has some damage: A crack on it's side is the result of vibrations from a bomb blast during World War II. The cake also now looks yellow, although that is because the white icing it was made with has been taken over by sugar seeping to the surface.

Most interestingly, tests have shown that the fruit cake behind the icing ornate is still moist! The daughter of the baker who made the cake donated it towards the end of her life because she feared someone might discover it in the attic and think she was dumped at the altar.

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If you're a heavy drinker, you should exercise to protect your brain!

Heavy alcohol drinkers are more likely to display damage to their brains' white matter. Exercise, we know, helps the brain. A study recently showed that heavy drinkers who regularly exercised showed no link between drinking and brain damage.

However, the people who conducted this study warn that it doesn't give people a license to drink. Drinking damages other organs and they also warned that they need to study subject in the future to make sure there's no long term damage.

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Beards keep you healthy!

A study from the University of Southern Queensland published a study in which they found that beards block 90 to 95% of UV rays. Beards slow down the aging process and reduce the risk of skin cancer.

Not just that, they found that beards also reduce the number of pollens and dust that cause asthma attacks. Beards also protect your face from the wind, keeping you looking young.

Other studies have also shown that women are more attracted to men with beards than without. Although those claims might not be 100% scientifically proven, it seems like there's a pretty good case for all you guys out there to grow out that facial hair.

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Stalin and Hitler were both nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize!

Unbelievable as it may sound, both of these shady characters were nominated for the most prestigious award given to people who work towards world peace. Stalin was nominated in 1945 and 1948 for his efforts to end World War II.

Hitler's nomination, however was supposed to be a joke. In 1939, a member of the Swedish parliament, EGC Brandt, nominated Hitler for the peace prize. Brandt never intended for the nomination to be taken seriously.

Brandt intended for the nomination to be satiric criticism of the current political climate in Sweden. The nomination was, obviously, not well received and was swiftly withdrawn.

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Mickey Mouse's trademark white gloves have racist origins!

Mickey's Mellerdrammer is a short film released by Disney in 1933. The premise is that of Mickey and friends putting on a stage production of Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

In the production, Mickey plays Uncle Tom. Mickey was dressed in blackface: Exaggerated orange lips, bushy sidewhiskers made out of cotton, and his now-famous white gloves.

This film, along with other films released by Disney, led to the belief that Walt Disney himself was racist. However, most Disney scholars agree that Disney was not racist, but rather racially insensitive, as many people from his time were.

In either case, now you know where Mickey got his white gloves. The cartoon was probably not controversial at the time, but the perception changed as time passed and people's attitudes towards racial insensitivity changed.

<a data-cke-saved-href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey" s_mellerdrammer'="" target="_new">(Source)