There he goes again…chasing after those Happinefs!
From the Declaration of Independence:
(That’s a long s.)
Category: history
historical quacks
Back before people knew what caused bubonic plague (fleas and rodents), plague doctors would dress like this. The beak mask was to protect them from miasmas or “bad air”.
hang loop
I wondered what the little loop on the back of my dork shirts is for. It’s apparently called a “hang loop” and is, as you might have guessed, for hanging the shirt from a hook. Who does that?
What's that picture on the save icon?
The antiquated save icon should probably go away now. Younger people may not even know what that picture is supposed to be. In case you don’t know, it’s a floppy disk. They were plastic squares the size of your palm that held a pitiful amount of data. You could fit thousands of them on a USB stick. They failed all the time and I don’t even install them in my PCs anymore. I’m not sure what tiny, obvious picture should replace it. Hard drive pictures are generally kinda technical and mysterious looking, so they don’t obviously mean “save”. Funny how things you assume to be obvious are actually pretty antiquated. I thought this one was obvious until I saw that someone on the internet was asking the question.
US National Anthem
Apparently, the melody of The Star-Spangled Banner was actually ripped off from “The Anacreontic Song”, which was an older song. Unique national designs are apparently hard to come by, judging from the Liberian flag 
and the Malaysian flag. 
basket case
The komusō were Japanese priests from long ago who wore baskets over their heads.
black teeth
I was watching Sanjuro, an old black and white Japanese movie, and I was thinking…what’s up with that woman’s teeth? Apparently, before 1870 in Japan there was a custom for married women to dye their teeth black. Whoa. Reminds me of the weird ways European men used to dress in the 1700s.
theremin lies the problem
Check out this video of a woman playing a theremin. An instrument invented in the 20s, It’s a couple of antennas that you move your hands next to to control the sound. It looks like the right hand controls pitch while the left hand controls volume. Also, you should apparently act a little bit odd while playing it.
a rapscallion on a velocipede!
The other day at an intersection downtown, I saw a guy on one of those old-style bicycles. The front wheel is just ridiculously tall.
When Test is not the same as Prod
One time, at work, a program I wrote resulted in us having to restore our production database from backup. It turned out there was a process active in the production system that wasn’t in the test system. When my program cleaned up a table, this process started trying to reschedule old jobs as they were deleted. After reading this article about some errors that came up during the Apollo moon landing, it looks like I’m not the only one.