Page 6 - Best of the Week

Will Smith signed agreed to star in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air because he owed the IRS $2.8 million!

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, may just be one of the greatest sitcoms of all time. The humor on the show often consisted of running gags - such as Will making fun of his slightly overweight Uncle Phil's size, Carlton dancing ridiculously on the show, and Will's friend Jazz being thrown out of the house for a range of different reasons. But, before the show became something we all known and love - it was a solution to a problem facing Will Smith.

In 1989, Will Smith was a successful rapper known as The Fresh Prince, although he grossly overspent his money and paid a small percent of income taxes. As it turns out, he was SUPPOSED to be paying a lot more income taxes - and ended up owing the IRS $2.8 million as a result. The agency seized almost all of his belongings, and hijacked his income.

Will was facing the dreaded fate of being bankrupt, when an NBC producer approached him and asked if he would star in a sitcom revolving around himself. 6 seasons and 148 episodes later, we have one of the best sitcoms of the 90's.

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Wanna look buff and muscular? Use hemorrhoid cream!

Do not use as directed, I guess. Bodybuilders have a special secret for looking extra buff when they need to: Hemorrhoid cream. The cream draws water from the skin, which in turn reduces puffiness and swelling. This makes it an ideal topical solution for thinning your skin, and making it cling more tightly to your muscles, making them look more defined.

You can use the cream for other things like: Reducing dark under eye circles, lessen your blemish welling, reducing wrinkles and even treating cold sores! Just remember that if you're using this cream anywhere near your mouth, make sure you don't accidentally ingest any of it.

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Lysol was once advertised as a feminine hygiene product and birth control.

To be clear, unlike products such as Viagra and Kleenex, which were made for one purpose and were discovered to be highly useful for another, Lysol was always a disinfectant.

Never was it specifically made as birth control, yet from the 1920’s until the 1960’s, it was largely marketed for reasons other than cleaning doorknobs or tables like we use it for today.

Advertising suggested that Lysol should be used for feminine hygiene, and that it was a highly effective birth control product due it's supposed ability to kill sperm. Of course, this wasn’t quite an era where one could say anything false for forty years without someone finding out, so Lysol invented European doctors to give credibility to their claims.

What’s shocking is that products like Lysol were the leading contraceptives until 1960, when oral contraceptives were introduced. So did Lysol work? Nope. A study showed that 250 out of 507 women using the disinfectant got pregnant, which was about the same as those using no birth control at all.

What’s worse, Lysol usage as contraceptive could cause severe inflammation, burning, and even death, in several cases.

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'Sonic Hedgehog' is a protein that helps mammals develop. Its inhibitor is called Robotnikinin!

Sonic Hedgehog is one of three proteins in the mammalian signaling pathway family called hedgehog. This particular pathway is shaped like the animal, and that's where it got it's name.

All three proteins were discovered in 1995, and while the other two were named after actual species of hedgehogs, scientists decided to name this particular protein after the Sega character.

Sonic Hedgehog has critical roles in the development of mammalian brains. However, a potential inhibitor has been found, and dubbed Robotnikinin, a play on the name of Dr. Robotnik, Sonic's nemesis.

Some people criticize the naming as being frivolous and a little inappropriate when people have to be told that their child has a serious illness because they have a mutated sonic hedgehog. What do you think?

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60% of the US Military branches have Starship Troopers on their reading list!

Starship Troopers, is an incredibly popular science fiction novel, and it's legacy has stretched into the depths of modern militaries. Over fifty years after it was first publicized, Starship Troopers can be found on the reading lists of the United States Marine Corps, the United States Navy, and the United States Air Force. It is the first science fiction novel recommended on three out of five military branches.

Some of the policies that the military has adopted straight from the book, is the idea that the military should be an all volunteer, high tech strike force. When the book was publicized, military forces were almost all conscripted, and Starship Troopers changed that.

In fact, the book is so influential on the United States military that in 2002, a marine General described the future of marine corps uniforms and equipment as "needing to emulate the Mobile Infantry", the soldiers from the novel!

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