American Airlines saved $40,000 a year by taking out ONE olive from each salad they served.

When it comes to cutting costs, taking out a single olive might not seem like the most effective way to go. But for American Airlines in 2001, it worked out quite well. Following 9/11, airlines were having some difficulty. There were numerous other factors involved, but the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon had left people a little uneasy about airplane travel, in the same way that movie ticket sales have been down following the recent shooting in Colorado.

To show an example, American Airlines’ then rival, United Airlines, was doing so poorly that they would have needed to fill 103% of their seats just to break even. So Bob Crandall, the former chief of AA, made many cost cutting decisions- including removing one olive from each salad.

While one olive might not seem like much cost saving, all the olives taken out made up a $40,000 drop in in-flight meal costs per year.

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Douglas Adams, author of "The Hitchhikers Guide.

.." series, only told one other person his secret for choosing the number "42" as the "Ultimate Answer,” and that person refuses to say what it is.

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If you’ve ever read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (or at least seen the movie) then you know about the phenomenon it started revolving around the number 42. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the number 42 is the answer to “the ultimate question,” the answer to “life, the universe, and everything.” What the number means or why it was chosen has puzzled fans for decades.

Only one man knows, and he refuses to tell it. Adams, the writer of Hitchhiker’s Guide (which was originally a radio broadcast) died at 49, so it certainly won’t be coming from him. The only man who knows is actor/writer Stephen Fry, and he says he’ll take the secret to his grave.

There have been many theories, though. Some people think it was chosen because when the syllables in “forty two” are rearranged, they make “tea for two,” which would be a sensible answer to “life, the universe, and everything.” Any theories of yours?

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Image: http://api.ning.com/files/FvYye5KOfg1-MXA2nX6B7CscFTYJ5JA75CrcqjFcq16ZozuNwsI72wi7aVflTiQw7clg7OJ-WDvPzCF8t99do9EjUHZOa7Eo/42.jpg

Source:
http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/03/douglas-adams-42-hitchhiker?cat=books&type=article

A leopard once killed over 400 people.

 

The Leopard of Panar was a male leopard that killed and ate more than 400 people over several years in the Panar region of India. The leopard was hunted down and killed in 1910 by famed big game hunter and author Jim Corbett. In his book “Man-Eaters of Kumaon,” Corbett mentioned that the only reason leopards will eat people is that they have acquired a taste for human flesh from scavenging on corpses thrown into the jungle during an epidemic.

The leopard will begin to eat the corpses, and eventually will grow a taste only for human flesh, creating mass killers like this one. Corbett tracked and killed 33 man-eating tigers and leopards over his career as a wildcat hunter. Eventually he became a conservationist, and he passes away in 1955.

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Twitter, Wikipedia, and AIM all crashed at 3:15pm the day Michael Jackson died.

Michael Jackson’s death is still pretty fresh in the American public’s memory. On the day he died three years ago, there were at first numerous news reports saying different things. One said Michael had a heart attack in his hotel, while another said he was in a coma.

The first reports that he died came from TMZ.com. Doctors at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center pronounced Jackson dead at 2:26 pm, and the story went up on TMZ 18 minutes later. The LA Times confirmed it at 2:51. The news spread very quickly, resulting in both TMZ and the website for The LA Times crashing. So many people were Googling Jackson’s name that Google first thought the search engine was under attack.

Twitter and Wikipedia both crashed at 3:15 pm, while AOL went down not long after for 40 minutes. It goes to show you just how feverishly people can react when a beloved pop idol passes away.

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Finnegans Wake is considered the hardest fiction to read. There's not even consensus on who the characters are!

Finnegans Wake is a work of fiction by James Joyce that’s famous for its unique style of writing and its difficulty to read. It was written in Paris over a period of seventeen years before being published in 1939. Finnegans Wake is generally avoided by many readers due to the heavy linguistic experiments it includes, as well as the stream of consciousness writing style used and its abandonment of usual plot and character structure.

No two summaries have interpreted the plot in the same way, in part because of the nonlinear, unconventional style of storytelling the book features. Actor/director David Hayman has said "For all the efforts made by critics to establish a plot for the Wake, it makes little sense to force this prose into a narrative mold." If you find some spare time and have an interest in attempting to best the beast that is Finnegans Wake, you should check it out.

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