Author: Steve DiMatteo

Did you know the tenth-largest pyramid in the world is located in… Memphis, Tennessee? There are few things that scream being American more than the Bass Pro Shops pyramid in Memphis, Tennessee. That’s right – the tenth-largest pyramid in the world is right here in the United States and is the current home of a Bass Pro Shops sporting goods store. That sentence just feels so… right. Also known simply as the Memphis Pyramid, and formerly the Great American Pyramid, it’s very fitting this complex has evolved into such a beacon of capitalism. While it is of course a Bass…

You probably saw this one coming. But after two years of absolute brawling over COVID vaccine mandates, the battle over vaccines has come to the doorstep of schools around the country. Thanks to the misguided parents’ rights advocates out there and their simple fear-mongering messaging tactic, a not-insignificant 35 percent of parents surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation now believe they should have the right to choose whether or not their kids get the vaccines that prevent against diseases such as measles, mumps, and rubella. As you might expect, there is a huge divide among political party lines. In the…

You’d be forgiven (pun of course intended) for not realizing there is an NBA team that performs a pregame prayer for the entire freaking arena. I had no idea of it myself until I saw this tweet from Jason Gallagher: It’s strange enough that we perform the national anthem ahead of sporting events. But to include a full-on invocation in the arena before even the anthem or player intros? Why? Why do such a thing at an NBA game? The Thunder franchise is, of course, a private entity that can do whatever it wants. A team could open every game…

Why exactly is eggnog seasonal? Let’s find out. I’m just going to be upfront and honest with you – I am an eggnog zealot. Once the holidays come around, I’m slurping down this bizarre, creamy concoction for about a month straight, adding all sorts of things to it like a mad scientist. Cinnamon sticks? Let’s go. Bourbon, maybe some scotch? You bet. Does adding chocolate of some kind to the drink make sense? Peppermint?! I have no idea, but I’m probably going to give it a try now. But as Homer Simpson once said, “We only get 30 sweet, noggy…

The US has never recorded this many positive flu tests in one week. That’s a pretty alarming statement, but it’s true – the flu is on a mission this year. In the United States, the bulk of flu season lasts from December through February, but things have ramped up so early, it’s unlike any flu season we’ve seen before. In the week ending November 26, the country reported more than 34,000 positive flu tests, which is the most on record dating back to 1997. To be fair, part of the rise in cases is due to the fact that we…

Americans are quickly becoming a solitary group, and that’s concerning for a whole host of reasons. And before you start pointing to the pandemic of the past two years as a reason for the downtrend, which would be valid, it turns out that time with friends went down between 2014 and 2019 more than it has even during the COVID-19 era. It’s a bleak picture painted by Bryce Ward, an economist and the founder of ABMJ Consulting, in a recent Washington Post editorial. For some reason, in 2014, time with friends really started to fall off a cliff collectively. Coincidentally,…

When people say that children’s toys of previous generations were unsafe, that might be an understatement, and the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory is the perfect example of that. The Atomic Energy Lab was a toy lab set that was promoted as giving kids the opportunity to create their own chemical reactions and put on a “magic show,” so at least there was some educational aspect to it. Perhaps that was why it wasn’t all that successful, selling fewer than 5,000 kits between 1950 and 1951. Part of the reason too could have been the price, which was a steep…

It never hurts to be prepared, even as the world is ending. When CNN launched in 1980, Ted Turner had his cable news station ready for just such a scenario, as he said, “Barring satellite problems, we won’t be signing off until the world ends.” Not many people might have taken him literally, but the “Turner Doomsday Video” is an actual clip that was planned to play in the event of a doomsday event like, say, all-out nuclear warfare or an alien invasion (and assuming the aliens didn’t appreciate baseball). Turner himself instructed the video to be made, and it…

In case you didn’t know, the Toy Hall of Fame is a very real thing, located in Rochester, New York as part of The Strong National Museum of Play. In other words, it’s a perfect road trip destination for the family. And like any good Hall of Fame, the one dedicated to toys inducts new members every year, and in the 2022 class, the Toy Hall of Fame will be welcoming in the classic top, the Lite-Brite, and the Masters of the Universe line of toys, which just so happens to be celebrating its 40th anniversary. While anyone can nominate…

I was recently reading that the city of Cleveland was abruptly suspending its leaf pickup service. It was so sudden, people had of course already begun raking and blowing their leaves to their curbs, thinking the city would be picking them up. And now, these people will be forced to bag all of them up if they want to see them gone. Not exactly the most pressing problem in the world, but hey, it’s all relative. I bring this up because I’ve been fighting the same leaf battle myself for years. I live in a beautiful, tree-lined neighborhood and I…