Frane Selak escaped from a derailed train, a door-less plane, a bus crash, a car into flames, another 2 car accidents… and then, one day, won a million dollar lottery!   Read more »

Why are they so irritated by water?

Six years ago, scientists trashed the “eight glasses of water a day” dictum, a standard that, as far as anyone can tell, magically appeared from nowhere.

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I don’t know if this is true or not. It’s a great story, true or not. From Shelly’s Snippets
When I was quite young, my father had one of the first telephones in our neighborhood. I remember the polished, old case fastened to the wall. The shiny receiver hung on the side of the box. I was too little to reach the telephone, but used to listen with fascination when my mother talked to it.
Then I discovered that somewhere inside the wonderful device lived an amazing person. Her name was ‘Information Please’ and there was nothing she did not know. Information Please could supply anyone’s number and the correct time. Read the rest of this entry »

An 84-year-old Shelton, N.Y., man said he is still driving the first car he ever owned – a 1929 Ford Model A with more than 200,000 miles on it.

Clarence Cleveland Curtiss said he was 15 in 1938 when he bought the car, which sold for $400 when new, from a Derby man for $10. It was during the Depression.

He was out of work, and he was hungry, Curtiss said. “I drove it for a year with no license, and the day I turned 16, I got my license with this car.”

Curtiss said the only change he ever made to the car was installing a Hudson Terraplane engine in 1940. The engine raised his top speed from 55 mph to 80 mph.

Part of the car’s allure is that it has never been restored. There is a hole in one of the floorboards, cotton is coming out of the seats and some of the paint is wearing off. Mr. Curtiss has kits to restore it, but he can’t bring himself to use them. “People just love seeing it the way it is,” he said.

Mr. Curtiss also has a strong emotional attachment to the car. He met his wife, Dorothy, shortly after he bought it, when he was 17 and she was 14; they had been married 56 years when she died in 1998. The initials they carved on the steering wheel as teenagers can still be seen. “She was the first and only girl I ever kissed in the car,” he said. “It’s priceless because of that, as far as I’m concerned.”

The New York Times

The New York Times has an infographic on the wealthiest Americans in history. The fortune of each is adjusted for inflation into 2007 dollars. The rankings are based on wealth as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product. Only two are alive today, and although many were born relatively rich, only one made the list soley by inherited wealth. Link

Over the course of eighteen years, Mark Story photographed people who had lived past the ripe old age of 100. The resulting portraits and profiles can be seen on his site. Beautiful.

(found via Neatorama)