Dusty

 

Stone

 

Everybody gets lucky now and then

Virginia man's stop for coffee earns him a $250,000 lottery prize

And I found a penny in my laundry yesterday. I'm keeping it, too.

And who says we can't go to Mars?

Longest line of sandwiches record broken in Texas

Sept. 22 (UPI) -- Volunteers with a Texas charity broke a Guinness World Record when they assembled 10,852 sandwiches and placed them into a line.

The charity group said the event may have also broken records for the most sandwiches assembled in an hour and the most people making sandwiches simultaneously.

An off-brand affair

Beyond Meat exec accused of biting man’s nose outside a game

A police report says the 53-year-old Fayetteville man attacked another man who tried to inch in front of him in a parking garage traffic lane and made contact with a wheel on Ramsey’s sport utility vehicle. A police officer responding to the reported disturbance arrived to find “two males with bloody faces,” the report states.

Sometimes beans are not enough. 

Everybody could use a little vacation now and then

Russians rush for flights out amid partial reservist call-up

The price for flights from Moscow to Istanbul or Dubai increased within minutes before jumping again, reaching as high as 9,200 euros ($9,119) for a one-way economy class fare.

And for every picnic?

Scientists have calculated how many ants are on Earth. The number is so big it’s ‘unimaginable.’

Put another way: If all the ants were plucked from the ground and put on a scale, they would outweigh all the wild birds and mammals put together. For every person, there are about 2.5 million ants.

[From The Washington Post (paywalled) via Apple News.]

When days start getting shorter

 

Stick with chocolate

Arizona shop's 266 milkshake flavors earn Guinness World Record

The unusual flavors prepared by the shop include peanut butter and onion ring; banana and chili; and orange and fish burger.

No winning streak lasts forever

 The Bears got beat by some other team last night, so their record now stands at 1 - 1.

It's nuts*

A Nation Tries to Banish Jargon. Leveraging the Pivot Has Yet to Synergize.

A push to pass a law promoting the use of simple language in New Zealand’s government documents is proving complicated. For one thing, no one can quite agree on what plain English actually means.

Meanwhile…

There are 776 plain-language laws across the U.S., but academics haven’t studied the effects of most of them, one scholar wrote in the University of Miami Law Review earlier this year. ​Some advocates are concerned the laws don’t include strong enough penalties for failing to comply.

[If the penalties for poor writing are monetary, the Government will go broke fining itself.]

George Orwell set forth five rules for plain writing, and then added a sixth:

Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.

*Which is as plain as it gets, unless you think I'm talking about nuts. 

A few things you can finally stop worrying about

Research into the mating habits of constipated scorpions wins an Ig Nobel Prize

Does constipation wreak havoc on the mating habits of scorpions? What is the best way to turn a doorknob? And does the world need a moose crash test dummy? If these burning questions have ever troubled you, then this year’s batch of the (in)famous satirical science awards, the Ig Nobel Prizes, has delivered on a promise to honor “the things that make people laugh, then think.”