On this date all the way back in 1915, a French scientist, engineer, inventor and luminary by the name of Georges Claude patented the technology that he’d used to invent neon lights. He was later convicted of collaborating with Axis forces during the Second World War, and went to jail for a little while, but [...]

We used to love getting milk delivered to our house by the kindly milkman, until one day, instead of taking the empties he left with our auntie Lou (or, “the milkmaid,” as he called her), and we never saw either of them again. We’re told that the first ever milk bottle delivery took place on [...]

There aren’t a lot of things we like about the NFL, but we’re totally on board with this tradition: Why doesn’t every professional sports team record a new music video every year? Clearly, looking over mental_floss’s amazing listicle of 7 Painful NFL Team Music Videos, it’s a strategy that can’t go wrong, especially when it [...]

Today is New Jersey Day, which originated as a celebration of the day that New Jersey joined the union back in 1787, so should presumably be celebrated with some kind of historical look back at the state’s important accomplishments. That’s what we started working on until we discovered that nothing important has ever happened in [...]

It’s surprising sometimes how disproportionately evil and scary the bad guys in cartoons often are, like the terrifying and gross Gargamel from The Smurfs. Does he really need to be a creepy old, bald man in black with one tooth? Couldn’t he just be a big red smurf or something? At any rate, while perusing [...]

Fun fact: Ball-bearing roller skates were patented exactly 125 years ago today. Since then, they’ve become something of like pop culture shorthand for all things fun, fast, young and groovy. In addition to frequent appearances in movies, roller skates pretty much make any activity, however mundane, much more interesting. On this special occasion we intend [...]

As far as the hierarchy of cultural artifacts goes, Christmas albums are pretty damn near the very bottom, a widely-held opinion that the designers creating Christmas album covers seem to acknowledge by making truly terrible cover art. In attempting to pay homage to that particularly terrible genre of visual artifact, BuzzFeed assembled a listicle of [...]

We once started writing a song about our favorite blog, Listicles, but it quickly devolved into a ten-minute list of our favorite lists so we scrapped it. Since then we’ve discussed songs that address technology a couple times, but never in quite such broad terms as those at play in Switched’s listicle of the Top [...]

We’re not sure what’s more enjoyable about AdFreak’s listicle of the 10 Best Celebrity Computer Ads of the 80s: It could be the arcane language used to pitch prehistoric computers to a hyper-computer-illiterate audience; It could be the fun of seeing old celebrities hawking really awkward and unsexy products; or it could be some combination [...]

The first jukebox (according to Wikipedia) went into service on this date in 1889 at San Francisco’s Palais Royale Saloon, making today the 120th anniversary of American bars’ most essential non-alcoholic asset. Of course, in the age of digital music the beautiful old boxes of vintage Americana are hard to come by, and their touchscreen [...]