Author: Steve DiMatteo

Iowa – home of more pigs than humans and that glorious black dirt – could soon also be the home of a world-record number of pencils. Aaron Bartholmey has been collecting wooden advertising pencils since he was a child, amassing a collection he claims to total upwards of 70,000. As Bartholmey says, collecting these pencils really is a neat way to preserve history, because so many of them feature long-gone local businesses with no other record of their existence. The process of evaluating the collection has begun, as counters from the American Pencil Collectors Society have already seen the collection…

Capital punishment in the United States has a long, complicated, and gruesome history, and, well, its methods had to start somewhere. In the case of the electric chair, Martha Place was the first woman to ever be executed by this method. Here is what she did to warrant such a sentence. (As an interesting aside, Place was not the first woman to be sentenced to die by the electric chair. That dubious distinction goes to serial killer Lizzie Halliday, convicted in 1894. Place wasn’t the second, either; Maria Barbella got her sentence in 1895. Both Halliday and Barbella escaped the…

There was… quite a bit happening in 2016, so you’d be forgiven for not remembering the rash of clown sightings that took place that year. But it’s true: Amid one of the most contentious election seasons in American history, there were reports of evil-looking clown sightings all across the United States, with additional reports popping up in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Where Did the 2016 Clown Sightings Begin? There are many possible precursor events throughout the years, though it’s hard to pin down anything as being a direct cause of the 2016 clown sightings. There have been plenty…

You just really can’t make this stuff up. Wendy Rush, the wife of OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who was one of the five people who perished in the Titan submersible attempting to tour the Titanic wreckage, is actually the great-great granddaughter of a couple that died on the Titanic’s maiden voyage in 1912. Rush is the direct descendant of Isidor Straus and his wife Ida, both of whom perished along with more than 1,500 other people aboard the Titanic. Straus was the co-owner of the Macy’s department store, and also served as a U.S. congressman from 1894 to 1895. You…

Recently, a pod of orcas was seen off the New England coast, just 40 miles south of Nantucket, Massachusetts. For the scientists studying these whales, it was a once-in-a-lifetime “unreal” experience, as orcas do not typically congregate in New England waters, and these killer whales seemed to also be swimming in formation, which is even more rare to see. To this point, there is only one orca – known as “Old Thom” – that typically swims in North Atlantic waters. So this really is something to get excited about, if you’re into that sort of thing. But this is just…

The chances of being bitten by a shark in Hawaii are less than one in a million (the same probably goes for humpback whale enthusiasts in the area), but a Netflix docuseries crew nearly defied the odds while filming Our Planet II. While filming at Laysan, one of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, the crew was attacked by two 15-foot-long tiger sharks, who “leapt at the boat and bit huge holes,” according to the show’s director. The original plan was to get some underwater footage with the tiger sharks, but the sharks had different plans, attacking the crew in their inflatable…

When you donate your body to science, you probably expect it to go toward some good cause, not for your skull to end up sitting on a shelf in a store somewhere. But if you’ve had a family member donate their body to the Harvard Medical School over the past five years, there’s a chance their brain, skin, or other body parts have been sold off to the highest bidder on the black market. That’s the information coming to light from federal prosecutors, as a grand jury is indicting 55-year-old Cedric Lodge, the manager of Harvard’s Medical School, and his…

If you were to see this headline ten years ago – hell, a year ago – you might think this is the least newsworthy item of all time. But in today’s culture war climate, things move at a blistering, blinding pace, and today the conservative movement is boycotting Bud Light beer because of the brand’s audacity to advertise with Dylan Mulvaney, a popular transgender influencer and TikTok personality. Conservatives are serious here, too: Kid Rock not only shot up a bunch of Bud Light cases in a video to show he meant business (other conservative personalities have vowed to never…

Our family likes to essentially throw a dart at Airbnb listings to pick where we travel next. This exercise recently took us to Massanutten, Virginia, home to the Massanutten Resort, and just a stone’s throw away from Harrisonburg – the quintessential college town of James Madison University – and the Shenandoah National Park. On the drive to Shenandoah, you pass through Elkton, where you’ll come across the Elkton Brewing Company, right in the heart of the town and down the road from the Miller-Kite House Museum, which was the headquarters of General Stonewall Jackson at the beginning of the Shenandoah…

President John F. Kennedy was one of the key driving forces behind the United States’ entry into the space race and its ultimate conclusion, in which the U.S. landed on the moon in the summer of 1969. In 1962, Kennedy was the one who really pushed the United States into the space race with the Soviet Union, declaring in his famous speech that the country would land on the moon – “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard” – before the end…