You know how everyone looks like a goof riding a Segway?  Turns out they don’t care, because it’s awesome.  We played tourist in SF last weekend, thanks to Bryn and her savvy Groupon-ing.

Look, no hands!

Along the route we learned some interesting trivia, some of which was even new to semi-locals like us.

• In a period of 8 months in 1849, San Francisco’s population grew from 500 people to over 100,000.
• Upon arriving in port, ship captains could lose their entire crew to gold fever.  To recruit new crewmembers, they would go to the taverns and restaurants and look for big guys eating with their elbows on the table, which apparently was a habit of sailors to keep their meal in one place on a rough sea.  The captains would get these former sailors good and drunk and essentially kidnap them to work on the ship.  Eventually people caught on and mothers began to warn their children to keep their elbows off the table.
• Much of the Embarcadero and Fisherman’s Wharf area is built on fill and abandoned ships.
• Because of this, the name of the now-landlocked neighborhood of North Beach makes much more sense.
• Joe DiMaggio grew up and learned to play baseball in North Beach.  He and Marilyn Monroe got married at City Hall, just like us.
• Domingo Ghirardelli and Levi Strauss were buddies.
• In a time before OSHA and harnesses, several workers building the Golden Gate bridge fell to their deaths, so eventually they put up a safety net.  The net saved 17 more.
• No Great Whites have been spotted in San Francisco Bay in over 50 years.  They prefer the saltier water beyond the Golden Gate.
• Pier 39 is the 3rd most visited tourist attraction in the US, behind Disneyworld and Times Square.
• The seal lions didn’t start lounging there until after the 1989 earthquake.

I fact-checked none of this.

-Nick

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Is Valentine’s Day just a corporate-created “holiday” designed to part us from money?

No.  While Hallmark has certainly capitalized on the popular holiday, Valentine’s traditions long predate the company’s 1910 founding.

The origins of Valentine’s Day can be traced all the way back to the Roman empire, when two Christian priests named Valentine were martyred.  Both were apparently killed on or around February 14th.

Still, there was no connection between these martyrs and romantic love worthy of a holiday.  So people starting mixing their stories and traditions.  A thousand years after his death, Saint Valentine was a much more romantic figure than we was in real life.  According to wikipedia:

“Since Legenda Aurea still provided no connections whatsoever with sentimental love, appropriate lore has been embroidered in modern times to portray Valentine as a priest who refused an unattested law attributed to Roman Emperor Claudius II, allegedly ordering that young men remain single. The Emperor supposedly did this to grow his army, believing that married men did not make for good soldiers. The priest Valentine, however, secretly performed marriage ceremonies for young men. When Claudius found out about this, he had Valentine arrested and thrown in jail.

There is an additional modern embellishment to The Golden Legend, provided by American Greetings to History.com, and widely repeated despite having no historical basis whatsoever. On the evening before Valentine was to be executed, he would have written the first “valentine” card himself, addressed to a young girl variously identified as his beloved, as the jailer’s daughter whom he had befriended and healed, or both. It was a note that read “From your Valentine.”

That story, combined with existing Greek and Roman February holidays dedicated to love and fertility, meshed together to form our Valentine’s Day tradition.

The earliest known Valentine’s “card” was a 15th century poem written by Charles, the Duke of Orleans, to his wife.  From then on, handwritten cards with romantic verses became very popular until the age of mass-production and the industrial revolution.

After that, companies like Hallmark were well-positioned to take advantage of the then-longstanding Valentine’s tradition.  But Hallmark’s relationship to the commercialization of Valentine’s Day is no different than the Christmas-tree farmer’s relationship to Christmas; they didn’t invent the holiday, but are happy to sell to those who celebrate it.

-Nick

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There’s no question, Thanksgiving is a great holiday.  You get to down piles of food with friends and family and be thankful for all the opportunities that made it possible.  But I wanted to address some common Thanksgiving “legends” to see if they were true or not.

1. The tryptophan in turkey makes you sleepy.

This is partially true…  Turkey does contain tryptophan, an amino acid that indirectly helps regulate sleep.  However, all meat contains tryptophan, and in roughly the same levels as turkey.  Turkey is not loaded with the stuff any more than chicken, beef, or pork.  In fact, by weight, cheddar cheese contains more tryptophan than turkey.  It’s more likely that the large amount of food, especially carbs (potatoes, stuffing, bread, pies, etc), is what really induces the “food coma.”

2. The Pilgrims invented Thanksgiving.

Not exactly.  We traditionally recognize the 3-day feast at the Plymouth Plantation colony in 1621 to be the “first” Thanksgiving, but there is evidence to suggest that similar harvest celebrations were common in Europe during that time period.  There is also growing support for a Florida Thanksgiving that took place in 1565, where 600 Spanish settlers feasted and held a Thanksgiving Mass to celebrate their safe journey across the Atlantic.

3. Abraham Lincoln invented Thanksgiving.

In 1863, Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday, set on the last Thursday of November.  The thinking was that we could use a day of celebration and reflection during the midst of a bloody civil war.  Prior to his proclamation, Thanksgiving was primarily celebrated in New England.

But other presidents issued their own Thanksgiving proclamations before Lincoln:

• George Washington in 1789 and 1795
• John Adams in 1789 and 1799
• James Madison in 1814

For whatever reason, these were considered “one-time” deals and Thanksgiving didn’t take hold as a national, ongoing holiday until Lincoln.

4. Today’s Thanksgiving Date

In 1939, amid a bleak economy and war in Europe, President Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving to the second-to-last Thursday in November.  Why?

The reasoning was that a one-week change wouldn’t offend anyone, and would have the added benefit of giving shoppers an extra week to buy Christmas presents.  During that time, it was considered inappropriate to advertise Christmas items before Thanksgiving.  So the change really demonstrated the power of the retail sector in influencing policy!

Apparently some folks weren’t too happy with FDR’s break with Lincoln’s tradition, especially given this ulterior economic motive, and took to calling the new holiday “Franksgiving.”  A couple years later, Congress officially set the date of Thanksgiving to be the 4th Thursday in November.

-Nick

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We’re off to the Happiest Place on Earth, so here’s some trivia I found interesting about Disneyland.

• Disneyland opened in 1955, after a year of construction.  The price tag for the entire project was $17 million.
• Opening day was somewhat of a disaster.  Double the expected crowds showed up, water fountains didn’t work yet, the pavement on Main Street USA hadn’t completely set, and some bathrooms weren’t functioning.  And it was 90+ degrees.
• The castle centerpiece is 72 ft. tall, and uses “forced perspective” to give it the illusion of being taller.  This technique makes dimensions smaller the higher up they are, so they look farther away.
• Before the castle walk-through was built in 1957, the castle had become home to dozens of feral cats.
• Main Street USA is based on Walt’s hometown of Marceline, MO.
• The cannons in Town Square were actually used by the French Army in the 1800s.
• There is a half-basketball court inside the Matterhorn.
• The nightly Fantasmic show reportedly costs $30,000 to put on.
• The first Tinkerbell to fly from the top of the Matterhorn was a 71 year-old former circus performer.
• Thirteen guests have died at Disneyland; most would be strong Darwin Award candidates.
• Disneyland has seen more than 515 million visitors (so that mortality rate really isn’t that bad).

For more information on Los Angeles-area travel, including a guide to Los Angeles hotels, bars, and museums, visit LosAngelesZone.com.

-Nick

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Location, location, location.

On the Internet, a good domain name is the online equivalent of that corner lot in the neighborhood with good schools.  The problem is, all the good names are taken and only “fixer-uppers” are left.  That’s why you have companies called Flickr, Rowdii, Weebly, and Sedo — which auctions off domain names to the highest bidder.

Did You Know?

• According to GoDaddy.com, there are 456,976 possible 4-letter .com domain names.  Of those, only 0.7% remain unregistered.
• Sex.com holds the record for the most expensive domain name ever. It sold for $14 million in 2007.

“Domaining” is the art and science of domain-name speculation.  It turns out that online real estate is much cheaper than the real thing: you can register domains for under $10 a year.  And with the potential to strike it rich by selling to some individual or company with deep pockets, it’s easy to understand the appeal.  No lawns to mow, no rent to collect, only 1′s and 0′s in the ether.

But those kinds of large price tag sales are rare.  A more common way to monetize your domain is to place some text ads or directory ads that look like search results.  Most of these worthless sites won’t show up in Google’s index, but instead rely on “type-in traffic” — where the user just types the domain name into his browser to see what’s there.  For more obscure names, traffic is undeniably low, but it doesn’t take much to cover your cost.  And for a common misspelling of a popular site, it could be a big moneymaker.

I haven’t played these games, but do own a handful of domains.  Most are bookmarked for future projects.  Some I’ll let expire when I realize I’m never going to do anything with it or when I think of a better one to replace it.  My favorite?  BetterThanDuctTape.com is going to be your future source for all spare car parts.

Dot-coms are much more valuable than dot-nets, but it’s hard to quantify how much more valuable they are.  The owner of shoesrus.com had an idea: $5000.  That was three years ago when I said, “no thanks.”  I’ve made a number of attempts to contact him since to make a counter-offer but haven’t had any luck.  Oh well, you live and learn on your first big project.

One of my first domains was NJLEnterprises.com, a quick site built in college for my company at the time.  After moving across the country and changing company names, it had fallen out of use.  Then some guy called me randomly one day and wanted to by it for $100.  Deal.

-Nick

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These numbers are adapted from the June issue of Fast Company.

More than 2,190,000 couples got married in the US last year.  The average cost of these weddings was $28,704, making the wedding business a $62,861,760,000 industry.

Is that money better spent elsewhere?  What else does $62 Billion buy?

• Bednets for literally everyone living in a malaria-risk area, potentially saving 1 million lives a year.
• Zero gravity flights for 12.5 million people.
• Three more years of life for GM and Chrysler.
• A life above the poverty line for more than half a million American families.
• 30,000 private islands.
• Another seven months in Iraq.
• 2 million new loaded Ford Fusion Hybrids.
• 62 billion junior bacon cheeseburgers.
• 4 pairs of shoes for everyone in the country.

More Wedding Trivia

Of that $62 Billion, $700 million was spent on cake.  Mmm frosting.

In 1960, the typical bride was 20 years old and the groom was 23.  Today, they’re 27 and 29 respectively.  In 2060, if the pattern continues, will people wait until their mid-thirties?

Citizens of six countries have more freedom than we do in the “land of the free.” Belgium, Canada, The Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, and Spain all allow same-sex marriages.

-Nick

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No trip to Seattle is complete without a visit to Dick’s!

Since 1954, Dick’s has been clogging Seattleites’ arteries with their delicious cheeseburgers, smooth shakes, and soggy fries.   At UW, it was much better late-night dining choice than Jack-in-the-Box or Pizza Ragazzi although a location closer to the Ave would have been clutch.

We would always stop there after late night flights from the east coast.  Yeah I’d already eaten dinner but that was hours ago.  And with a 5-hr flight and a 3-hr time change it was time to eat again.

Trivia Time

Q: Are you a true Seattleite?  Can you name all 5 Dick’s locations?

A: Wallingford, Capital Hill, Queen Anne, Lake City, and Holman Road.

Check out my bright orange Dick’s shirt from back in the day.  Best $9 I ever spent.

-Nick

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