One of the most delicious-yet-mysterious parts of any salad or baked potato is the bacon bits. You can use them anywhere you might otherwise use real cooked & crumbled-up bacon. But, while they may look & taste a lot like bacon, what are bacon bits really? While ingredients in bacon bits vary from company to…
Catching a ride on the back of a pig isn’t really a thing, right? And yet, people love horsing around & giving others what are called “piggyback rides”. But why are they called “piggyback rides”? I mean, people walk on two feet, right? Pigs, on the other hand, hoof it on four. What gives? Where…
If you’re anything like me, one of the big questions you have about a truck driver anytime you see him or her driving their big rigs is: “where do you guys sleep?” Well, contrary to popular belief, being a trucker doesn’t always mean you’re destined to make long, cross-country trips with nights & nights away…
Thanks to the intricacies of our amazing English language, one thing is all but guaranteed: more often than not, we’re all going to mispronounce a word (or twelve). Because of the complexity of American English, how a word is spelled doesn’t always exactly indicate how it’s supposed to sound. And that can cause some embarrassment…
Shopping for hot dogs can be frustrating, because the dogs, themselves, are usually sold in packs of 10…but the buns are sold in packs of 8! Why in the world do we have to endure this unequal dog-to-bun ratio? The National Hot Dog & Sausage Council (which is a real thing) asserts that the disparity…
It’s Springtime again! And that means it’s time for “spring cleaning”, in the hopes of making your home, car, office, etc., look super clean & like new. Your goal should be to make your place look “spick & span”, you might say. But what does that even really mean, “spick & span”? The full phrase…
There’s nothing soft about the 6 or 7 ounce, 11- to 12-inch ball at the center of the sport of softball. But, if it’s not soft (which it isn’t), why is a softball a softball? It actually all goes back to the “ball” that the game began with. In 1887, a group of Harvard &…
Whenever you gas up your car, you’ll always see a certain set of numbers on each pump…usually 87, 89, and 93. What are those numbers? And what do they mean? Those numbers on the yellow buttons on the gas pumps actually denote each fuel’s “octane rating”. The Regular 87 octane rating gasoline is what most…
Getting caught in a spider web…walking through an abandoned warehouse…getting caught in a spider web while walking through an abandoned warehouse…those might make you feel uneasy, scared, or otherwise upset. Some would call that a case of “the willies”. But what are “the willies”? Who, or what, were they named after? And how did they…
Most of our greetings & farewells are pretty straightforward, especially ones that begin with good (like “good morning”, “good afternoon”, “good night”, etc.). But what about “goodbye”? Are you basically saying, “I hope you have a good bye”? What is a “bye”? Is it some old word once used to reference a certain time of…