From the Wikipedia: James Gordon Bennett, Sr.

James Gordon Bennett Sr. was an enterprising businessman, a pioneering newspaperman, a groundbreaking journalist and something of an asshat. That last part is not stated explicitly on his Wikipedia page.

Bennett was born to a prosperous Catholic family in Scotland in 1795 and entered the seminary, but dropped out to read a bunch, flit about and do nothing particularly interesting for about 15 years.

In 1835, after a recent drop in newspaper production costs, Bennett began editing the New York Herald, one of several new penny papers aimed at broader audiences than earlier five-cent papers. Not much of this is in the Wikipedia, incidentally.

Bennett, desperate to distinguish his paper from the rest, introduced illustrations and established the first foreign correspondents in newspapers.

He also essentially invented the gossip column — the first “society pages” — and began, as early as the 1830s, the sensationalism we still associate with the struggle to sell papers in competitive markets. Bennett exploited every angle of the high-profile murder cases of Helen Jewett and Mary Rogers, even doubling back on his stories and contradicting his reporting, to keep headlines astonishing. And he sold a whole lot of papers.

The New York Herald, under Bennett’s watch, was essentially the O.G. New York Post.

Needless to say, he pissed some people off in the process. Namely just about every other newspaper editor in the city, none of whom had quite yet figured how to spin the news as wildly as Bennett could.

Oh, but since all the papers were new and basically all the brainchildren of single editors, they all fought in print (and sometimes in the streets). Here’s how the editor of the New York Aurora, young Walt Whitman — that Walt Whitman, the Leaves of Grass guy — described Bennett:

A reptile marking his path with slime wherever he goes, and breathing mildew at everything fresh or fragrant; a midnight ghoul, preying on rottenness and repulsive filth; a creature, hated by his nearest intimates, and bearing the consciousness thereof upon his distorted features, and upon his despicable soul; one whom good men avoid as a blot to his nature — whom all despise, and whom no one blesses — all this is James Gordon Bennett.

Anyway, obviously a lot of this isn’t from the Wikipedia. Feel free to add it if you’d like — cite the excellent book The Sun and the Moon by Matthew Goodman. I bring it up only because it seems like when people mention newspapers blowing things out of proportion to sell papers — or blogs doing it to draw clicks, for that matter — they act as if it’s something new.

But it’s as old as newspapers themselves. It’s part of the business. Obviously if the headlines get too absurd, the paper will become a joke and not as many people will buy it. There’s got to be a balance. But it’s been like that forever.

Apparently in Great Britain, “Gordon Bennett” is an expression of incredulity, and one I plan on using from here on out on this blog because it is amazing. That has nothing to do with James Gordon Bennett, Sr., but rather his son, who used the paper’s profits to go to Europe and behave flamboyantly. The younger Bennett also had an excellent mustache. Gordon Bennett! Look at that thing.

Humans and bears have reached a tenuous detente. Most of our kind is now educated enough to know better than to mess with bears, and bears, in turn, probably see humans as too big to bother destroying. I mean, granted, one-on-one a bear could almost always take a dude, but the dude is big enough to be a pain in the bear’s ass to kill, and why would the bear bother when there are so many delicious fish available for so much less effort.

Plus humans have access to guns, and guns can kill bears, so if bears started overstepping their bounds people would probably clamp down on them pretty quick. This arrangement should hold until bears develop guns, at which point we’re pretty much f***ed.

Anyway, there was a time in the not-too-distant past, when our race was still manifesting its destiny and forging new frontiers and all that stuff, when our ancestors still had to live in fear of bear attacks.

And in our history, no series of bear attacks I know of has been as bloody, calculated and downright terrifying as the those that occurred in the small pioneer village of Sankebetsu in Hokkaido, Japan in the snowy December of 1915.

From the Wikipedia: Sankebetsu brown bear incident.

The Wikipedia page is a bit — pardon the pun — grisly for TedQuarters, so in lieu of a comprehensive summary I tried to just provide a timeline here. But then midway through I realized that even just a timeline was a bit more disturbing than I’d like to be on this site. Read the article only if you’ve got the stomach for horror.

The moral of the story: Bears are terrifying. This particular bear weighed 836 pounds, menaced a village for nearly a month and killed seven people — eight if you count the attack victim who died of complications three years later. It also outsmarted multiple teams of hunters. When they went so far as to bait it with a dead body, it appeared to recognize the trap and ran away.

Also, they had to talk an old, drunken bear hunter out of retirement to finally kill the thing. And the hunter maintained that he knew the bear, and that it had previously killed three women.

Over the course of the incident, the bear was shot six times, and finally died only when the old, drunk bear hunter found it sleeping and shot it twice.

Do not mess with bears.

I started this yesterday for Memorial Day but ended up spending most of the day in car dealerships trying to take advantage of some Memorial Day sales. From the Wikipedia: Tadeusz Kosciuszko.

In English, he is Thaddeus Kosciusko. In Lithuanian, he is called Tadas Kosciuška. In Belarusian, his name is Tadevush Kasciushka. On TedQuarters, he is known as a complete badass.

Kosciuszko was born to parents of modest nobility in the mid-18th century near the now-abandoned village of Mereczowszczyzna in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He was educated in Warsaw, and when civil war broke out in his homeland, he left for Paris to continue his studies. He returned to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1774 and took a position as a tutor for the family of a provincial governor. Kosciuszko fell in love with the governor’s daughter, Ludwika, but got jumped by her father’s goons when they tried to elope.

Jilted by forbidden love, Kosciuszko emigrated to the British colonies in North America to join the struggle for independence. He read the Declaration of Independence shortly after his arrival and was so impressed with the document that he went to discuss philosophy with Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, because apparently Thomas Jefferson was a pretty accessible dude.

Congress appointed Kosciuszko an engineer in the Continental Army, and he went about employing all sorts of battle and defense tactics that the Wikipedia explains in great detail. Kosciuszko was a smart guy, and was credited with choosing the Americans’ position at Saratoga and setting up an impregnable defense that helped the young nation win the battle widely considered the turning point of the war.

Kosciuszko continued to serve the Continental Army until the war’s end, and supposedly set off a fireworks display in Charleston to celebrate the signing of the Treaty of Paris, because Tadeusz Kosciuszko appreciated some good pyrotechnics. He was promoted to brigadier general and granted American citizenship shortly after the war, and given a tract of land in Ohio for his efforts in the revolution.

Kosciuszko didn’t remain in his new homeland for long, though. He soon returned to Europe to advocate for serfs’ rights and fight against the Russian occupation of his homeland. He emigrated again to the United States before the turn of the century, but once more returned to Europe to work for Polish independence.

Jefferson called Kosciuszko “as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known,” and indeed, Kosciuszko was apparently more dedicated to the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence than even Jefferson himself. Kosciuszko named Jefferson the executor of his will and left his American property to be used to buy the freedom of Jefferson’s slaves and pay for their education. For some reason not stated on the Wikipedia, Jefferson claimed he was unable to act as the executor, and none of the commodities that Kosciuszko earmarked for freeing and educating slaves were ever used for either purpose.

Kosciuszko’s name is familiar to Brooklyn-Queens Expressway riders because of the bridge in his honor linking, well, Brooklyn and Queens. I have long held that a roadway — especially in this area — is a terrible way to pay tribute to a hero of Kosciuszko’s stature, since the name will inevitably be cursed far more often then it is praised. No one ever says, “oh, what a touching tribute to Major Deegan.” And indeed, though the Kosciuszko Bridge offers perhaps the area’s most spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline, it is more often linked with perpetual traffic.

That’s unfortunate, because Tadeusz Kosciuszko was a great war hero and champion of social reform, an immigrant who made enormous contributions to the foundation of the United States, and a man who appropriately appreciated the awesomeness of fireworks.

I don’t believe this requires an introduction during Awesomestock. I apologize in advance to all those who avoid pork for religious reasons. From the Wikipedia: Bacon.

The Wikipedia defines bacon as “a cured meat prepared from a pig.” The USDA defines bacon as “the cured belly of swine carcass.” I define bacon as completely and ineffably amazing.

The Wikipedia insists that there are many meat products that can be legitimately deemed bacon, because the Wikipedia has its head up its ass, presumably because it’s delirious from so much pork. Bacon should be made from the belly or in rare instances the jowl of the hog. Anything else masquerading as bacon — looking at you, turkey bacon — is b.s. It might still be good but it’s not bacon. On this I am resolute.

Elsewhere, the bacon we’re familiar with here in the States is called “fatty bacon” or “American-style bacon.” Damn straight. U! S! A!

The word “bacon” comes from the Old High German word “bacho,” meaning buttock, likely because eating a lot of bacon will give you a large one. Worth it.

Bacon is often prepared with saltpeter, which I’m guessing helps give it explosive flavor. Saltpeter is also found in fireworks, meaning it is an important element of two of humanity’s greatest products. Clearly potassium nitrate is the world’s most important and best chemical compound. When the time comes, I may name my first born Saltpeter. Saltpeter Berg. That kid is delicious dynamite.

In the early days of the United States, curing bacon was one of the few cooking processes known to be gender-neutral, because bacon is for everyone. I never watched enough Little House on the Prairie to find out, but I assume Michael Landon and Laura Ingalls Wilder forged their tight familial bond over the sweet smell of hickory-smoking pork.

Did you know that Canadians don’t just call Canadian bacon “bacon” as I always surmised? Apparently they call it “back bacon” and call regular bacon “bacon.” Good work, Canada. For so long I thought you were trying to pass off something that is clearly ham as bacon, but it turns out that’s just something we blame you for, like curling and Celine Dion.

Bacon has been an important part of American food culture since Colonial days. A 1708 poem by Ebenezer Cooke complains about too many things being bacon-flavored, a massive and embarrassing lapse in judgment that likely explains why no one has ever heard of Ebenezer Cooke.

Guess what, Ebenezer Cooke: The only thing I know you’ve written I staunchly disagree with. Your entire legacy is foolishness. Never, ever doubt bacon. There’s no such thing as too much bacon, only too many weenie 18th-century poets who can’t handle awesome meat. It’s a damn shame Nat Bacon died of dysentery before he could whip some sense into you. If the two of you co-existed for more time, maybe Nat Bacon would have set his sights on more noble pursuits instead of just being a tremendous jackass. Mmm, Nat Bacon.

More recently, this nation has been swept by something the Wikipedia calls “Bacon Mania,” a fervent drive toward reason in an often irrational world and a trend so widespread and excellent that it earned its very own Wikipedia page. Bacon Mania is alternate attributed to both patriotism and rebellion.

“Loving bacon is like shoving a middle finger in the face of all that is healthy and holy while an unfiltered cigarette smolders between your lips,” writes Sarah Hepola. She’s wrong, though. Loving bacon is just loving bacon, which needs no rationale. And don’t smoke before you eat bacon, as it will just dull the delicious bacon flavor.

Thanks in part to Bacon Mania, there are now tons of available consumer products centered on bacon, like bacon hot sauce, bacon peanut brittle and bacon vodka.This makes sense because just about everything is better with bacon. For a long time I thought peanut butter and bacon sandwiches wouldn’t be good even though I love peanut butter, bacon and sandwiches. They’re delicious though. I never should have doubted you, bacon.

One time one of my friends tried to one-up me at dinner by ordering cake with a side of bacon for dessert, then draping the cake with bacon before he ate it. The joke was on him though because it turned out Cake n’ Bacon is amazing, and he let me eat a bunch of it.

Sometimes fads are stupid, sometimes they’re meaningless, sometimes they’re f@#$ing unbelievable. Maybe Bacon Mania is a passing fancy, but I will surf this wave until it crashes, then keep loving bacon after all its fairweather fans have moved on. Consider me a Bacon Maniac for life.

From the Wikipedia: Dreams.

The Wikipedia defines a dream as “a succession of thoughts, images, sounds or emotions which the mind experiences during sleep.”

No one is entirely sure why we dream. People theorize that we dream when we convert short-term memories to long-term ones, or maybe when we eliminate useless memories from our subconscious. Some say dreams are our way of sorting out the emotions we repress, others say dreams are a method of understanding or elucidating the emotions that are difficult to express rationally. Some maintain that dreams help us connect conscious thoughts, others claim they help us dissociate our irrational selves from reality.

We know for sure that we do dream, and we even know at what point in our sleep it happens — every night during R.E.M. sleep, even if we don’t remember it at all. No one is certain what part or parts of the brain initiate dreams. A couple of people had decent theories, but all they wound up with when they tried to test them were a bunch of dead monkeys.

The Wikipedia, and, I suppose, humanity, knows frighteningly little about dreams, considering how often they happen. They can be silly or sexual, stressful or happy. Some think dreams should be analyzed psychologically to root out their meanings, others argue they are themselves a method of internal, personal psychoanalysis.

When you think about it, though, dreams are incredible. Somehow, in sleep, we create a series of images, conversations, actions and decisions that can seem so damn real they’re almost cinematic. That’s nuts. It’s mind-boggling that we even have that capacity, especially since it serves no obvious evolutionary purpose.

I suppose I should say that I create those things. I can’t speak for you. Part of the problem with studying dreams is that we can never experience another person’s dream, so we can’t be sure what a dream is like for anyone else, kind of like colors and pain. I’ve recapped some of my stranger or more interesting dreams to people and had them tell me I was lying, and that nobody has dreams so silly or so weird or whatever.

Well I did, bub. Sorry if your dreams are lame.

A couple of months ago, for the first time in my life, I had a dream so funny I actually laughed myself awake. The details are so odd that I won’t explain them all here, but it culminated in some sort of goat-buffalo hybrid headbutting a pain-in-the-ass teenager down a mountain, and the comedic timing was impeccable. The next day I wished I could consciously come up with and film a situation so hilarious, since it would certainly make me a Hollywood legend.

I have some pretty mundane dreams, too, of course. A week ago I dreamed the Mets traded for Kevin Millwood.

My dog — the late, great T. Captain Dog — used to dream all the time. He’d enjoy what seemed to be happy dreams, based on the various thrilling dog noises he’d make throughout, but also what seemed like anxiety dreams, which were both pathetic and hilarious at the same time. What could be stressing you out, Captain? You just lay about all day, living the easiest life conceivable. Did you imagine that one day the food bowl just wasn’t there? That the local squirrels finally ganged up and started chasing you back?

I bring up dreams today because I’m still thinking about last night’s Lost finale. That show always struck me as dreamlike: Hey, we’re lost on an island, and there’s some black smoke that keeps killing people, oh and also there are other people here living in a quaint little village, and they won’t let us leave the island, and also almost everyone here is really hot.

And just like most dreams, the show failed to come to a satisfying, definitive conclusion. But I guess — as with dreams — the various plot holes, unexplained mysteries and unclear connections in the show don’t necessarily make the insights gained or emotions explored any less real.

I seen it! From the Wikipedia: Stone Mountain.

Stone Mountain is a quartz monzonite dome monadnock in Georgia. If you care to learn what any of that means, geologically, I recommend the Wikipedia. If you need to be reminded that the word “monadnock” is funny, here’s that: Monadnock.

I’m pretty sure “quartz monzonite dome monadnock” means, roughly, “big, big rock.” Thing stands 1,686 feet high, and since it’s on reasonably flat ground, it looms pretty huge over the outskirts of Atlanta.

The rare fairy shrimp may breed on the mountain’s summit, but it may not if it is extinct, as many scientists now believe. In either case, “fairy shrimp” is a terrible name to call any of the mountain’s many school-aged tourists.

The chiefly notable thing about Stone Mountain, beyond its huge rock qualities and the debatable presence of fairy shrimp, is that it features the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world.

The subjects? Why, Confederate heroes Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.

As a total yankee, my first reaction to seeing something like that falls somewhere between abject terror and sarcastic, holier-than-thou bemusement, especially when I read about how the Ku Klux Klan was revived at the base of Stone Mountain — before the bas-relief even started — in 1915.

Then I think about it more and try to write the whole thing off as history. The Civil War happened a long time ago now, and the sculpture was commissioned a long time ago too, even if it wasn’t finished until 1972 (!). While the men memorialized on the side of that rock fought on behalf of despicable things, I couldn’t exactly ask the people of Georgia to blow the whole thing up and erase it. Besides, as long as Andrew Jackson’s on the 20-dollar bill no one should pretend the U.S. is above commemorating guys who did atrocious things.

Then I go see the laser light and fireworks show projected on Stone Mountain on Saturday night and I just get really confused. The spectacle, mostly a tribute to Georgian music, includes a segment on the Civil War that glorifies Lee, Jackson and Davis and concludes with the trio apparently deciding its foolish to continue fighting and that unification is in the nation’s best interest. It’s a bit weird, especially since, you know, that’s not how it happened.

A few of my buddies were pretty freaked out by the whole affair, and I’ll grant that there’s something unsettling about flagrantly rewriting history in 100-foot tall laser beams.

But judging by the crowd, no one was there for a history lesson anyway, and the “Devil Went Down to Georgia” segment drew a way more enthusiastic reaction than the Civil War nonsense. Plus the whole thing ended, predictably, with a politically correct and syrupy-sweet laser-light tribute to patriotism and, of course, explosives.

And fighter pilots. A whole lot of fighter pilots.

It was a good show, really. They played Ray Charles and James Brown and OutKast. Like I said, it was a tribute to Georgian music. It just so happened to be projected on a monument to three leaders of the Confederacy. It sure didn’t seem like anyone in the crowd was there to foster hatred or forward revisionist history. They wanted to witness an awesome onslaught of lights and fireworks, and this huge rock provided a really striking natural amphitheater.

Things like Stone Mountain used to get me so upset. I don’t really know why they did, and I don’t really know why that stopped happening. Maybe I’m losing my edge.

Or maybe I’m coming to grips with the knowledge that inexplicably awful things are near-universal in history, ignoring them is dangerous, all the information anyone needs to inform an opinion on them is pretty readily available, and failing any better ideas, we might as well use their monuments for laser light spectaculars.

You’ve all heard the phrase by now, and I’m sure you all know the derivation. But I’ve got a lot of opinions I’d like to share.

From the Wikipedia: Jumping the shark.

The idiom “jumping the shark” refers to the moment a once-successful enterprise goes permanently and irreparably wrong. It was invented by the roommate of someone named Jon Hein in 1985 to refer specifically to the point in television series when plots and characterizations begin spiraling towards the absurd, unlikely and downright terrible.

The phrase specifically refers to a moment in a 1977 episode of Happy Days when Fonzie jumped over a shark on water skis.

For a while, jumptheshark.com was a popular website¹ that allowed users to vote on when various TV series jumped the shark. The site has since been swallowed up by TVGuide.com, and indeed, the phrase has fallen out of popular favor.

This part is not on the Wikipedia, but nowadays, whenever anyone uses the phrase “jump the shark,” someone else will counter that the phrase is overused, and probably joke that saying something has jumped the shark has itself long since jumped the shark. I would — and have — argue that joking that the phrase jump the shark has jumped the shark has also jumped the shark.

It’s a shame, though. Whether or not the phrase is trendy, it describes a real phenomenon, and one I don’t think is limited to television series at all.

I’ll confess I still use the idiom pretty frequently, and I have certainly blurred its meaning beyond Hein’s original intent. To me, “jumping the shark” refers to anytime a creative process of any type has been dragged out longer than it should be, and I rarely identify a specific moment. I can remember pointing to bands, writers, classes, and even friendships that jumped the shark.

Basically, anytime it becomes clear that someone is trying too hard, working either to recapture and imitate past successes — thus often drifting into self-parody — or pushing to create in a realm too many steps beyond the limits imposed by reality, he is probably jumping the shark.

Of course, maybe that’s not jumping the shark at all, per its original definition. But that’s the best term I’ve got for the thing I’m talking about, so it’s the one I go with.

And I bring it up now because it strikes me as very likely that the Omar Minaya/Jerry Manuel administration jumped the shark Friday night, if it hadn’t already.

¹- Big news for editors, as of Friday. Web sites are now websites.

The end of a long, strange Wikipedia journey.

From the Wikipedia: Piggy Bank.

I assume everyone here knows what a piggy bank is so I’m not going to bog you down with too many details: It’s a pig-shaped receptacle for storing money. Some people collect them, because some people will collect just about anything.

What I didn’t know until I checked the Wikipedia was that the piggy bank is apparently meant to be a pedagogical tool. That’s why, with traditional piggy banks, you can’t ever take money out until you smash them because you’re ready to take all the money out. Piggy banks with rubber stoppers on the bottom so you can open them are newfangled b.s.

So what lesson are we trying to teach our children with piggy banks? A massively important one: Scrimp and save to slowly compile a sizable nest egg, then blow it all in one fell swoop. Literally break the bank, children.

Also, maybe there’s some lesson in there about how it’s wise to tie up your fortune in hog futures. I think back in the day swineherds had something to do with fostering the popularity of the piggy bank.

Oh, and whose bright idea was it to start storing coins in pigs? Someone who mistranslated something. According to the Wikipedia, in Middle English the term “pygg” referred to a type of clay used to make kitchen pots and jars, some of which were used to store change, or pieces of eight, or whatever the hell they called coins when people spoke Middle English.

At some point along the line, someone thought “pygg jar” meant “pig jar” and they started making jars shaped like pigs, and I guess, I don’t know, one thing led to another and we ended up with piggy banks. Sounds like a pretty stupid story, to be honest.

What’s bizarre is that Indonesian people, totally unrelated to the Middle English translation mishap, stored their money in terracotta likenesses of wild boars as far back as the 15th century A.D.

Wild Boary Banks, of course, are the far more badass cousins of the Piggy Bank, but I’m honesty skeptical that Indonesian people and English people both decided to start stuffing coins in clay swine without somehow consulting one another at some point along the way.

I mean, there’s just not enough about a pig or a wild boar that says, “make a statue of me and stick money in it” that would entice two cultures half a world apart to independently start doing so.

I don’t mean to doubt the Wikipedia, but though there’s a picture of something that looks a hell of a lot like an Indonesian Wild Boar Bank from the 15th century, there’s no real citation for the fact, it could just be a small, clay wild boar statue, and furthermore, I mean, c’mon.

I like nature as much as the next guy, but I’m not generally one to get all broken up about extinct animals because, you know, survival of the fittest and all. But I do always wonder what those extinct animals would have tasted like.

The subject of today’s From the Wikipedia was almost certainly delicious. In fact, it was partly our ancestors’ ravenous consumption of the species that led to its demise, because our forefathers lacked the foresight to leave even a few of them behind for us to breed and subsequently barbecue.

From the Wikipedia: The Great Auk.

The Great Auk was a species of flightless bird that lived on islands off eastern Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Ireland, and Great Britain up until the 19th century. It stood about 30-33 inches high and vaguely resembled a penguin. Under its down, it had a thick layer of fat, which served the dual purpose of protecting it from the cold Northern air and preventing its meat from drying up when cooked over an open fire.

Besides its deliciousness, the Great Auk’s most notable characteristic, by far, was its naivete. For some stupid reason, it was not afraid of humans, even though it clearly should have been.

In fact, on a 1622 expedition to Funk Island — which is not nearly as awesome a place as it sounds — a British crew was able to drive the succulent poultry right up the gangplanks and onto their boat. Sir Richard Whitbourne described it, “as if God had made the innocency of so poore a creature to become such an admirable instrument for the sustenation of man.”

But man, being man, was obviously not an admirable instrument for the sustenation of so poore a creature.

Hint to animals: Fear humans or figure out how to make humans fear you. Otherwise, you’ll endure species-wide humiliations like the ones that eventually spelled the demise of the Great Auk.

As long ago as 2000 B.C., someone was buried in Newfoundland wearing a coat made of 200 Great Auk skins with the heads left on for decoration. The Great Auk jacket was the O.G. mink coat.

The Beothuk people of Newfoundland made pudding out of Great Auk eggs. (It should be noted, here, that the last surviving Beothuk died about 15 years before the last Great Auk, so the Great Auk had the last laugh in that storied rivalry.)

But more than anything, it is the treatment of the last few Great Auks that underscores humanity’s lack thereof.

By the turn of the 19th century, after centuries of being hunted for its meat, eggs and down feathers, the Great Auk was nearly extinct, and in 1794 it became illegal to kill Great Auks in England.

That didn’t stop the 75-year-old Scotsman who caught the last Great Auk ever seen in the British Isles, though. He tied the bird up for three days then beat it to death with a stick. Why? Because he thought it was a witch, obviously.

The last remaining colony of about 50 Great Auks lived on an island inaccessible to humans until 1830, when the island submerged and they were forced to move to another island that was barely accessible to humans.

Just accessible enough, it turned out, for preservationists — I kid you not — to kill the remaining birds for displaying their skins and eggs in museums.

In July, 1844, the last pair of Great Auks sat incubating an egg, still somehow not fearing humans even though humans had killed all the other Great Auks. Three humans approached and the two Great Auks just sat there on the egg, so two of the humans strangled the Great Auks while the third smashed their egg with his boot.

That was all for the Great Auk.

This  uncited bit of info from SportsCenter anchor Linda Cohn’s Wikipedia page, can’t possibly be true. Can it?

Sorry if that’s a bit small. I had to post a screengrab in case it goes away anytime soon. If you can’t read that, click it. It says, “In an interview on WFAN with Mike Francesa, Cohn admitted she occasionally sings backup at REO Speedwagon concerts.”

Not sings “along” at REO Speedwagon concerts. Sings backup.

In a related story, apparently REO Speedwagon still has concerts. Terrible, terrible concerts.

I’m assuming this is some hilarious and creative Wikipedia editing by someone. Good job, someone.

Hat tip to Jake Rake for the find.