… creates quite a stir on The Milton Berle Show! On this day in 1956, Elvis Presley shook things up when he appeared on TV to perform “Hound Dog”. It was the first time The King performed the song for a television audience, and his now-famous gyrations – very shocking at the time – created…
We’d like to emphasize the gravity of the situation: cat. Door. And if you’re a cat owner, you know that whichever side of the door the cat’s on is decidedly the wrong side. When he wasn’t busy formulating the laws of gravity and making countless discoveries in the worlds of optics and mathematics, Sir Isaac…
Today’s the anniversary of the 1453 fall of Constantinople. But was it Istanbul? Or Constantinople? (And, hey – how did Constantinople get the works? Guess that’s nobody’s business but the Turks’.) We’re risking a pretty severe case of earworm to make a point: sometimes something that’s very familiar can have two different names. A great…
If you were like us in 1980, you certainly did. That game involved dots, cherries and a coven of ghosts, and only about 10 folks have ever achieved the arcade version’s maximum score of 3,333,360. Today’s the 33rd anniversary of the release of Pac-Man. If that makes you hungry for some pellets, well, rest assured that…
You might say that May 20, 1899 was a bad day for Jacob German. The New York City cab driver was issued a speeding ticket. In fact, it was the first traffic ticket issued in he United States. German was cited for driving down Lexington Avenue at a whopping 12 MPH (the speed limit at…
Notice, friends, that we didn’t say “socks it to you”; May 9th is Lost Sock Memorial Day. Today we take a moment to consider the tragedy of the thousands of socks lost every year (and the unfortunate mates that are left behind). Like the meaning of life and the quandary of chicken and the egg,…
On May 6, 1889 the Paris Exposition opened. Its headlining act? A nifty 984′ metal tower that had just been completed. And that tower (the one we know as the Eiffel Tower) was the world’s tallest building until New York’s Chrysler Building stole its thunder in 1930. We bring this up not because we think…
Happy International Tuba Day! As advertisers of musical instruments, we’re more than happy to observe any holiday that salutes musicians. Since it’s the first Friday of May, we tip our hats to the tuba players of the world. Kudos, tuba people! When you think of the tuba, you likely remember it as the backbone of…
It’s a worldwide celebration of spring. But remove that space between the words and it becomes a distress signal. Ever wonder why? While searching for an easily understood phrase to signal life-threatening distress, in 1923 a Senior Radio Officer at London’s Croydon Airport proposed the word “mayday” (to be repeated three times). It was an…
We could communicate with a series of dashes and dots, but we think we’ll stick with our current means of helping you sell: our weekly printed edition, our website and our radio show, Paper Shop Live! Samuel F. Morse was born on this day in 1791, and aside from his talent as an artist and…