So its christmas, and I was asked to give a shout out to Lindsay, and throw down some random facts, here I am coming through…

- More than 2,500 left handed people a year are killed from using products made for right handed people.
- A meter is defined as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of one second.
- The white part of your fingernail is called the lunula.
- Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.
- If it gets hungry enough, an octopus will eat its own arms.

and for today:

In 1836, Alabama was the first state to recognize Christmas as an official holiday.

Hope you learned something.

Click for Article

This may be an alert to any of us giving out gift cards for this famed christmas season, or to those of us with a stack of them sitting in our top drawer waiting to be plucked and spent.

So get this:

Last winter, Best Buy Co. reported a $43 million gain in fiscal 2006 from cards that hadn’t been used in two or more years.

I’m really confused by this whole idea that you spend money on an item and the card expires. So what you’re telling me is that because these companies don’t want to keep their bookkeeping up to date, my old gift cards are no longer worth anything. That small speck of information that locates my 16 digit card number to a specific dollar amount is too costly to keep more than 2 years?

I understand that maybe you should have spent this money far sooner than the two year limit, but please, they are getting something from absolutely nothing, and if my parents taught me anything, its that there is nothing that comes for free, yet somehow some of us get away with it.

So a word to the wise before or after the holiday season, get out there and spend those gift cards quickly. Or at least keep getting your Omega 3’s so that your memory is enhanced to not forget about what was gifted to you.

NEW DELHI, India — An Indian runner who won a silver medal in the women’s 800 meters at the Asian Games failed a gender test and was stripped of the medal.

Shanti Sounderajan, 25, took the gender test in Doha, Qatar, after placing second.

The test reports sent to the Indian Olympic Association on Sunday said Soudarajan “does not possess the sexual characteristics of a woman,” The Times of India reported. The test was administered by a medical commission set up by the games’ organizers.

Link to Article

It later states that (s)he, whatever it is, had abnormal chromosomes and the test revealed too many Y chromosomes.

My question is, if her gender was in question because of the way she looks have we gone too far in blurring the lines between woman and man, or maybe athletics has nothing to do with this, and this is just an extreme abnormality.

I just thought it was interesting.

Al Jazeera English, the new international news channel from the Qatar-based television network, has begun broadcasting from its main studios in Doha.

The opening broadcast, which was expected to be available in 80 million households around the world, took place at 3pm Doha time (12:00 GMT) and featured a clip introducing the channel.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/17B9CA05-C477-4881-AAE7-E0EE9E44985F.htm

Thought this was interesting. Good to see it will make it to more and more people. I’ve always been interested to find out news from a completely different source. For further Al Jazeera news…

http://english.aljazeera.net/News

Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.
The sale of vodka makes up 10% of the Russian government’s income.
Impotence is legal grounds for divorce in 24 American states.
3% of all mammals are monogamous.
The only king without a mustache in a deck of cards is the king of hearts.

and for your reading pleasure…
When you’re born you have 300 bones in your body, but when you die you only have 206.