mental-post: 2013-10-27

David McConnell started the California Perfume Company (CPC) in 1886. Today the company is known as Avon, which he named after his favorite playwright William Shakespeare, and Stratford on Avon

As of 2010, Avon had annual sales of $10.8 billion worldwide. It is the fifth-largest beauty company and largest direct selling enterprise in the world, with 6.4 million representatives. Avon Products is a multi-level marketing company. Their “Ding Dong Avon Calling” advertising campaign, which ran from the mid-1950s to 1967, has been called “one of the most deeply ingrained brand identities of the past century”. The company’s CEO is Sherilyn S. McCoy, who was appointed to that position in April 2012. The former CEO, Andrea Jung, became the executive chairman of the board. Jung was the longest tenured female CEO among Fortune 500 companies.

Ninety-nine percent of pumpkins sold in the United States are for the sole purpose of decoration

Pumpkins are commonly carved into decorative lanterns called jack-o’-lanterns for the Halloween season in North America. Throughout Britain and Ireland, there is a long tradition of carving lanterns from vegetables, particularly the turnip, mangelwurzel, or swede. The turnip has traditionally been used in Ireland and Scotland at Halloween, but immigrants to North America used the native pumpkin, which are both readily available and much larger – making them easier to carve than turnips. Not until 1837, does jack-o’-lantern appear as a term for a carved vegetable lantern, and the carved pumpkin lantern association with Halloween is recorded in 1866.

In the United States, the carved pumpkin was first associated with the harvest season in general, long before it became an emblem of Halloween. In 1900, an article on Thanksgiving entertaining recommended a lit jack-o’-lantern as part of the festivities that encourage kids and families to join together to make their own jack-o’-lanterns.

Pumpkin chucking is a competitive activity in which teams build various mechanical devices designed to throw a pumpkin as far as possible. Catapults, trebuchets, ballistas and air cannons are the most common mechanisms. Some pumpkin chuckers breed and grow special varieties of pumpkin under specialized conditions to improve the pumpkin’s chances of surviving a throw.

Pumpkin growers often compete to see whose pumpkins are the most massive. Festivals are often dedicated to the pumpkin and these competitions.

The Ohio towns of Barnesville and Circleville each hold a festival every year, the Barnesville Pumpkin Festival and the Circleville Pumpkin Show respectively. The town of Half Moon Bay, California, holds an annual Art and Pumpkin Festival, drawing over 250,000 visitors each year and including the World Champion Pumpkin Weigh-Off. Farmers from all over the US compete to determine who can grow the heaviest pumpkin. The winning pumpkin regularly tops the scale at more than 1500 pounds. Leonardo Urena, from Napa, California, grew the winner of the 2011 Weigh-Off with a 1,704-pound Atlantic Giant, setting a new California State record. The record for the world’s heaviest pumpkin was broken September 30, 2012, at the Topsfield Fair in Massachusetts. Ron Wallace of Greene, Rhode Island, entered a pumpkin weighing 2,009 pounds. A few days earlier on September 27, a pumpkin grown by Steve Geddes of Boscawen, New Hampshire, weighed in at 1,843.5 pounds at the Deerfield Fair in New Hampshire. That one held the world record for just five days. Prior to that, Guinness World Records had the world’s heaviest pumpkin set in 2010 by Chris Stevens, at a weight of 1,810 pounds, 8 ounces, at the Stillwater Harvest Fest in Stillwater, Minnesota. The town of Morton, Illinois, the self-declared pumpkin capital of the world, has held a Pumpkin Festival since 1966. The town, where Nestlé’s pumpkin packing plant is located (and where 90% of canned pumpkins eaten in the US are processed), held for several years a record for the number of carved and lit pumpkins in one place, before losing it to Boston, Massachusetts, in 2006. A large contributor of pumpkins to the Keene Pumpkin Fest in New Hampshire is local Keene State College, which hosts an event called Pumpkin Lobotomy on its main quadrangle. Usually held the day before the festival itself, Pumpkin Lobotomy has the air of a large party, with the school providing pumpkins and carving instruments alike (though some students prefer to use their own) and music provided by college radio station WKNH.

Ireland’s only Pumpkin Festival takes place each year in Virginia, County Cavan to find Ireland’s biggest pumpkins. This year the biggest pumpkin topped 1300 pounds. The event takes place over a holiday weekend, along with other entertainment and festive parades.
The city of Elk Grove, California, has held an annual Pumpkin Festival since 1995.

There are more than 2,400 flea species in the world

The large number of flea species may be attributed to the wide variety of host species they feed on, which provides so many specific ecological niches to adapt to. In any case, all these groups seem to represent a clade of closely related insect lineages, for which the names Mecopteroidea and Antliophora have been proposed.

Flea systematics are not entirely fixed. While, compared to many other insect groups, fleas have been studied and classified fairly thoroughly, details still remain to be learned about the evolutionary relationships among the different flea lineages.

The Canadian province of New Brunswick had a bloodless war with the US state of Maine in 1839

New Brunswick (French: Nouveau-Brunswick), is one of the three Maritime provinces in Canada, and the only officially bilingual province (French and English) in the country. The history of New Brunswick can be viewed according to four periods: pre-European contact, French colonization, British colonization and finally, New Brunswick since Confederation.

The aboriginal nations of New Brunswick include the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet/Wolastoqiyuk and Passamaquoddy. The Mi’kmaq territories are mostly in the east of the province. The Maliseets are located in the northwest and the Passamaquoddy tribe is situated in the southwest, around Passamaquoddy Bay. Amerindians have occupied New Brunswick since about 6000-8000 BCE.

Actor John Travolta was offered the role of Billy Flynn many times for the movie "Chicago." Richard Gere ended up playing the role

Travolta first became known in the 1970s, after appearing on the television series Welcome Back, Kotter and starring in the box office successes Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Travolta’s acting career declined through the 1980s. His career enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s with his role in Pulp Fiction, and he has since continued starring in Hollywood films, including Face/Off, Ladder 49, and Wild Hogs. Travolta was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction. He won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for his performance in Get Shorty.

Lake Ontario was originally named Lake St. Louis

The lake was previously identified in some maps under different French names. In 1632 and 1656 is was referred to as Lac de St. Louis or Lake St. Louis by Samuel de Champlain and cartographer Nicolas Sanson respectively (likely for Louis XIV of France) In 1660 Jesuit historian Francis Creuxius coined the name Lacus Ontarius. In a map drawn in the Relation des Jésuites (1662–1663), the lake bears the legend “Lac Ontario ou des Iroquois” with the name “Ondiara” in smaller type. A French map produced in 1712 (currently in the Canadian Museum of Civilization), created by military engineer Jean-Baptiste de Couagne, identified Lake Ontario as “Lac Frontenac”. Iroquois people called the lake “Skanadario”.

The Angel Falls in Venezuela were named after an American pilot, Jimmy Angel, whose plane got stuck on top of the mountain while searching for gold

The falls, which cascade from the top of Auyantepui in the remote Gran Sabana region of Venezuela, were not known to the outside world until Jimmie Angel flew over them on November 18, 1933 while searching for a valuable ore bed.
On October 9, 1937, Jimmie Angel returned to the falls with the intention of landing. On board his Flamingo monoplane that day were his second wife Marie, Gustavo Heny, and Miguel Delgado, Heny’s gardener.
Jimmie Angel attempted a landing but despite a successful touchdown, his El Rio Caroní aircraft nose-dived when it hit soft ground at the end of its landing run. The wheels sank in the mud making take-off impossible.
The occupants were unharmed but had to trek across difficult terrain and with low food supplies for 11 days to make their way off the tepui and down to the nearest settlement at Kamarata.
When word got out of their exploits, Angel received near-legendary status in Venezuela.
His aircraft remained atop Auyantepui until 1970, when it was disassembled into parts and lifted down by Venezuelan military helicopters. Today an El Rio Caroní can be seen outside the airport terminal at Ciudad Bolívar. The airplane was re-assembled in the city of Maracay’s aviation museum.

There are no two zebras who have stripes that are exactly the same

It was previously believed that zebras were white animals with black stripes, since some zebras have white underbellies. Embryological evidence, however, shows that the animal’s background color is black and the white stripes and bellies are additions. It is likely that the stripes are caused by a combination of factors.
The stripes are typically vertical on the head, neck, forequarters, and main body, with horizontal stripes at the rear and on the legs of the animal. The “zebra crossing” is named after the zebra’s black and white stripes.
A wide variety of hypotheses have been proposed to account for the evolution of the striking stripes of zebras. The more traditional of these (1 & 2, below) relate to camouflage.

1. The vertical striping may help the zebra hide in grass by disrupting its outline. In addition, even at moderate distances, the striking striping merges to an apparent grey.

2. The stripes may help to confuse predators by motion dazzle—a group of zebras standing or moving close together may appear as one large mass of flickering stripes, making it more difficult for the lion to pick out a target.

3. The stripes may serve as visual cues and identification. Although the striping pattern is unique to each individual, it is not known whether zebras can recognize one another by their stripes.

4. Experiments by different researchers indicate that the stripes are effective in attracting fewer flies, including blood-sucking tsetse flies and tabanid horseflies. A 2012 experiment in Hungary showed that zebra-striped models were nearly minimally attractive to tabanid horseflies. These flies are attracted to linearly polarized light, and the study showed that black and white stripes disrupt the attractive pattern. Further, attractiveness increases with stripe width, so the relatively narrow stripes of the three living species of zebras should be unattractive to horseflies

There was an army general during the Liberia Civil War who used to lead his army into battle naked. His nickname was "General Butt Naked." Joshua Milton Blahyi (his real name) is now an evangelical preacher in Monrovia

Joshua Milton Blahyi (born September 30, 1971), better known by his nom de guerre General Butt Naked, is a former leader for the Liberian warlord Roosevelt Johnson in the First Liberian Civil War known for his fierce, violent, and eccentric measures in the first years of the 1990s. He was originally a tribal priest, and since the war he has converted to Christianity and become a preacher.

Blahyi’s rampage ended in 1996, when the civil war in Liberia was coming to a close. He credits his conversion was bolstered by a church in Liberia where a Bishop Kun Kun is pastor. They claimed to have heard from God to fast 54 days for his deliverance. After the fast they claim God gave them spiritual powers to infiltrate his coven in the city of Liberia and preach to him. Shortly after, he had a theophany in which Jesus Christ appeared to him as a blinding light, spoke to him as a son, and told him that he would die unless he repented his sins. In 1997 Blahyi traveled to the Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana. It was at the camp, he recounts, that he made confession for his sins at a church and “had his life saved”. When he goes out to preach now, he says he sometimes encounters relatives of his victims. “I feel very bad, so bad”, he said, but he insists it was satanic powers that possessed him in the past and he cannot be held responsible. He has since expressed willingness to be tried for war crimes at the Hague.
Blahyi is now the President of the End Time Train Evangelistic Ministries Inc., with headquarters in Liberia. He is married to Pastor Mrs. Josie and has four children: Michaela, Joshua Milton Jr., Janice Marva and Jackie MaryBeth. For a few years he was estranged from his family and hiding in Ghana, due to his fear of reprisals from his victims and/or their relatives. In 2004 Liberian-American director Gerald Barclay traveled to Buduburam to shoot a documentary which included interviews with Blahyi. In January 2008 Blahyi returned to Liberia from Ghana and claimed before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia that between approximately 1980 and 1996 he and his men were responsible for the deaths of more than 20,000 people. Although the TRC accepted that figure, Norris Tweah, the Information Minister of Liberia, has since disputed that Blahyi was responsible for that many deaths. Blahyi was the subject of a 2010 documentary film: True Stories: The Redemption of General Butt Naked by the Sundance Institute, produced and directed by Eric Strauss and Daniele Anastasion.

In 1783, the hot air balloon was invented in France.

The hot air balloon is the oldest successful human-carrying flight technology. It is part of a class of aircraft known as balloon aircraft. On November 21, 1783, in Annonay, France, the first untethered manned flight was performed by Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d’Arlandes in a hot air balloon created on December 14, 1782 by the Montgolfier brothers. Hot air balloons that can be propelled through the air rather than just being pushed along by the wind are known as airships or, more specifically, thermal airships.
A hot air balloon consists of a bag called the envelope that is capable of containing heated air. Suspended beneath is a gondola or wicker basket (in some long-distance or high-altitude balloons, a capsule), which carries passengers and (usually) a source of heat, in most cases an open flame. The heated air inside the envelope makes it buoyant since it has a lower density than the relatively cold air outside the envelope. As with all aircraft, hot air balloons cannot fly beyond the atmosphere. Unlike gas balloons, the envelope does not have to be sealed at the bottom since the air near the bottom of the envelope is at the same pressure as the air surrounding. For modern sport balloons the envelope is generally made from nylon fabric and the inlet of the balloon (closest to the burner flame) is made from fire resistant material such as Nomex. Beginning during the mid-1970s, balloon envelopes have been made in all kinds of shapes, such as rocket ships and the shapes of various commercial products, though the traditional shape remains popular for most non-commercial, and many commercial, applications.

Women are four times more likely to have foot problems than men

Due to their position and function, feet are exposed to a variety of potential infections and injuries, including athlete’s foot, bunions, ingrown toenails, Morton’s neuroma, plantar fasciitis, plantar warts and stress fractures. In addition, there are several genetic disorders that can affect the shape and function of the feet, including a club foot or flat feet.
This leaves humans more vulnerable to medical problems that are caused by poor leg and foot alignments. Also, the wearing of shoes, sneakers and boots can impede proper alignment and movement within the ankle and foot. For example, High-heeled footwear are known to throw off the natural weight balance (this can also affect the lower back). For the sake of posture, flat soles with no heels are advised.

An artificial Christmas tree lasts up to six years in a home

An artificial Christmas tree is an object made to resemble such a tree, usually made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC).
The tree was traditionally decorated with edibles such as apples, nuts or dates. In the 18th century, it began to be illuminated by candles, which with electrification could also be replaced by Christmas lights. Today, there are a wide variety of traditional ornaments, such as garland, tinsel, and candy canes. An angel or star may be placed at the top of the tree, to represent the host of angels or the Star of Bethlehem from the Nativity.
The custom of the Christmas tree developed in early modern Germany with predecessors that can be traced to the 16th and possibly the 15th century, in which “devout Christians brought decorated trees into their homes.”. It acquired popularity beyond Germany during the second half of the 19th century. The Christmas tree has also been known as the “Yule-tree”, especially in discussions of its folkloristic origins.

Keeping Warm With an Axe, is the title of a real how-to book.

Keeping Warm with an Ax is a thorough guide to cutting wood with hand tools. Mr. Cook takes a subject that could be pretty boring and makes it very interesting. He explains how to use various types of axes, hatchets, mauls, saws and wedges to take down trees and prepare firewood. In addition he shows every aspect of dealing with wood from the forest right to the hearth or stove.

The #1 peanut producing state is Georgia

Widespread farms produce peanuts, corn, and soybeans across middle and south Georgia. The state is the number one producer of pecans in the world, with the region around Albany in southwest Georgia being the center of Georgia’s pecan production. Gainesville in northeast Georgia touts itself as the Poultry Capital of the World.

The name "Snickers" for the popular candy bar was named after a horse that the Mars family owned

Snickers is a brand name candy bar made by Mars, Incorporated. It consists of nougat topped with caramel and peanuts, enrobed in milk chocolate. Snickers has annual global sales of $2 billion.
In the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man and Ireland, Snickers was sold under the brand name Marathon until 1990. More recently, Snickers Marathon branded energy bars have been sold in some markets.

Americans write approximately 50 billion checks a year making it the second most frequent payment method used after cash

There are two types of payment methods; exchanging and provisioning. Exchanging is to change coin, money and banknote in terms of the price. Provisioning is to transfer money from one account to another. In this method, a third party must be involved. Credit card, debit card, money transfers, and recurring cash or ACH (Automated Clearing House) disbursements are all electronic payments methods. Electronic payments technologies are magnetic stripe card, smartcard, contactless card and mobile handset. Mobile handset based payments are called mobile payments.

In Australia, a dust-devil is called a "willy-willy

A dust devil is a strong, well-formed, and relatively long-lived whirlwind, ranging from small (half a metre wide and a few metres tall) to large (more than 10 metres wide and more than 1000 metres tall). The primary vertical motion is upward. Dust devils are usually harmless, but can on rare occasions grow large enough to pose a threat to both people and property.

They are comparable to tornadoes in that both are a weather phenomenon of a vertically oriented rotating column of air. Most tornadoes are associated with a larger parent circulation, the mesocyclone on the back of a supercell thunderstorm. Dust devils form as a swirling updraft under sunny conditions during fair weather, rarely coming close to the intensity of a tornado.

Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise located in Paris is the most visited cemetery in the world. The cemetery opened in 1805 and has over one million people buried there, including rock star Jim Morrison

Père Lachaise is in the 20th arrondissement, and is reputed to be the world’s most visited cemetery, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors annually to the graves of those who have enhanced French life over the past 200 years. It is also the site of three World War I memorials.

The cemetery is on Boulevard de Ménilmontant (fr). The Paris Métro station Philippe Auguste on line 2 is next to the main entrance, while the station called Père Lachaise, on both lines 2 and 3, is 500 metres away near a side entrance. Many tourists prefer the Gambetta station on line 3, as it allows them to enter near the tomb of Oscar Wilde and then walk downhill to visit the rest of the cemetery.