Stream of Facts
100 meters beneath the surface of the earth, straddling
the France-Swiss border, CERN (European Organization for
Nuclear Research) is performing its final tests on the world’s
largest particle accelerator. Once the tests are complete, and
the accelerator (also known as the Large Hadron Collider, or
LHC) is synchronized, the FIRST beam will be launched, using
a 2,000-ton electromagnet that will produce energies
comparable to those present during the Big Bang.
Des Plaines, Illinois was the site of the FIRST McDonald’s restaurant.
In 1954, Ray Kroc, recent investor and sole distributor
of a milkshake mixer known as the Multimixer, was impressed
by the speedy service of Dick and Mac McDonald’s
hamburger stand. Kroc convinced the McDonald brothers to
go public and open more stores so that he could, in turn, sell
them more Multimixers. What started out as a sales pitch
for his MILK product machines, became the 62.13-a-share
corporation of yellow arches that spans the globe today.
Actors snorted powdered MILK in the cocaine scenes in the
film Blow, starring Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz, based
on the book by Bruce Porter about the true life of drug entrepreneur,
George Young. The last line of the film, “There
are no more WHITE horses or pretty ladies at my door,” is a
reference to the song Lucky Man by the classic rock band
Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
If you have a goldfish in your dorm room this year and it
happens to turn WHITE on you, don’t freak out. It’s probably
because you have your shades pulled down. Goldfish, along
with many other scaled animals, change color in response
to sunlight levels. Fish produce their pigment through cells
known as chromatophores; the same cells that enable chameleons
to change color.
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Reporter Recommends
Subscriptions as gifts. Do you have a sibling,
cousin, or neighbor whom you don’t particularly
know a lot about, but has birthday coming
up? Are you panicked, with beads of sweat
beginning to run down your forehead as you
surf Amazon and ebay for a miracle? Relax,
friends; we’ve got you covered. You’re one click
away from the easiest cop-out gift solution ever.
Remember that New Yorker you think you saw
on their table a couple years back? Maybe it was
Rolling Stone, or even Time. Whatever the case,
you’ve found your antidote. (Really, don’t worry
if you can’t remember if it was Cosmopolitan or
Consumer Reports; they’ll probably like it either
way.) You can even go a step further and run
out for the latest edition to give to them on their
special day as a forecast of their fabulous year of
subscriptions to come. It’ll really show you care.
Or, another route is to just send them a Reporter
every week and fake a subscription. Just don’t
tell them it was free.
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Overseen and Overheard at RIT
Have you ever been walking on campus and heard
or saw something that made you do a double-take?
You say to your friend next to you in awe,
“Did that really just happen?” Well, chances are it
did, and chances are it’ll end up here, in Overseen
and Overheard, a dumping ground for all those
embarrassing moments you wish you could
forget, published weekly for the entertainment of
everyone else. So be careful, everyone. You never
know when we could be watching.
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