Fish Snacker Sandwich to Save Your Soul
There are about 75 million Roman Catholics living in the United States. And Kentucky Fried Chicken has its sights set on their appetites.

This week KFC began selling fish — something that it's never sold nationally in its 5,500 U.S. locations, according to Forbes.

Its deviation from chicken is just in time for the Christian holy season of Lent, a 40-day period of repentance that began (Ash) Wednesday and ends on April 8, Easter Sunday. During Lent, Christians traditionally refrain from eating meat, including chicken, on Fridays.

KFC announced Wednesday that KFC President Gregg Dedrick sent a letter to Pope Benedict XVI soliciting his personal seal of approval for the new Fish Snacker Sandwich "as a way for members of your flock to keep a holy Lenten season."

Fishy Creation
McDonald's Filet-O-Fish inventor never got a cut of the profits. "Not a penny," says Lou Groen.

In 1962, Groen was looking for a way to save his floundering hamburger restaurant, The Cincinnati Inquirer reports. His restaurant was the Cincinnati area's first McDonald's, and his clientele was heavily Catholic. Back then, most Catholics abstained from meat every Friday, not just during Lent. So he created what would become the McDonald's Filet-O-Fish.

"My fish sandwich was the first addition ever to McDonald's original menu," he says.

By the time he sold out in 1986, Groen owned 43 McDonald's restaurants. But his prosperity didn't include a slice of the Filet-O-Fish's national sales.

'Yeah, I Invented the Microprocessor. My Bad.'
The man who invented the microprocessor apologizes for it. "I am deeply ashamed of the problems we've let come through," says Stan Mazor, surveying the nearly 40 years of computer development since he joined the team creating the Intel 4004 microprocessor in 1969.

"I am always very apologetic for what we have brought to the public," The Inquirer quotes Mazor as having said. (This may explain why Microsoft founder Bill Gates only allows his kids on the computer for 45 minutes.) Chief among these problems: "Computers are much too difficult to use."

Anyhow, it's not like the guy created and introduced to the world what would become that damnable "monolithic insanity" THE CUBICLE — only to disown it later.

Coffee is a Lifesaver…Really!
Drinking caffeinated beverages on a regular basis may provide significant protection against death from heart disease in the elderly who have normal levels of blood pressure, according to data from a large U.S. health and nutrition study.

Reuters reports:

Drinking caffeinated beverages may induce a "healthy" rise in blood pressure that counteracts the drop in blood pressure that occurs after a meal, a phenomenon that becomes more pronounced as people age, researchers note.

So, you're saying this blogger may live forever?

'Custodian of History'
Socks: that's what a 41-year-old engineer in suburban Toronto collects. Not in a weird fetishy way, but in a weird historical way.

The man has accumulated about 800 pairs of sports socks over 15 years — half of them off the feet of professional athletes — according to a lengthy profile in Canada's National Post, which did not reveal his name. And he wears them.

The worst part of his "hobby" (besides having to keep it secret from his wife, he said) is not the athlete's foot or other fungi that must come with professional athletes' footwear. No, the worst part, he said, is that he is often contacted by foot and sock fetishists, which he denies that he is. Rather, he prefers to think of himself as a sort of "custodian of history," wrote the Post (via GovPro).

People have some bizarre hobbies, indeed. We're curious about what "unique" hobbies or collections our readers pursue. Let us know.

Tourism-Booster: Island of Women
Two weeks ago, we discussed a little bit about what members of a Native American group based in a remote region of Arizona are doing to entice more tourists (the Skywalk — a giant steel-and-glass walkway jutting out of the rim of Grand Canyon) (5th item down)).

Here's another way to boost tourism, which, to some, may immediately invoke visions of a mythical place, one where natural streams flow with beer and where electronic toys grow on trees and where football is featured on HD theater-size screens 24/7…

Iran plans a female-only island to boost tourism in a northwest province, according to Reuters. Unlike Mexico's Isla Mujeres ("The Island of Women"), there will be no men on the Arezou (Wish) island in Iran, and only women will staff public transport, restaurants and other facilities.

Iran's strict Islamic law forbids mixing with men in public. Parts of Iranian beaches are reserved for women, where they can remove their headscarves and wear swimming costumes, and there are several parks for women only.

This will surely be a boon for the province's tourism…if the Bush administration's claim that Iran is bent on acquiring nuclear weapons and killing American troops by supplying explosives to Shi'ite militias in Iraq doesn't entice you to vacation in Iran.

It Must Be Their Silly Walks
Britons are the funniest people to executives, according to the latest UPS Europe Business Monitor.

In the survey about European humor, some 34 percent of respondents said the British have the sharpest wit. Italy and Spain placed second and third overall, with 18 percent and 15 percent of votes, respectively, in the laughter poll of 1,450 executives in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Britain. Only three percent backed German claims for most appealing humor.

Laughter is indeed great workplace medicine.

Ear Hair-Powered Spacesuits
NASA is investigating the use of a protein found in human ear hair as a means of powering spacesuits.

According to New Scientist:

They are focusing on a protein called prestin, which is found in the outer hair cells of the human ear. In the cell membranes of these cells, prestin converts electrical voltage into motion, elongating and contracting the cell. This movement amplifies sound in the ear.

The protein converts motion into electrical energy — and if it is augmented with an electricity-conducting microbe, it could form self-healing, semi-living "skins" that convert Martian wind and even the jogging and walking of astronauts into juice.

Rosetta and the Red Planet
A European comet-chasing spacecraft is set for a nail-biting close encounter this weekend with Mars.

Using Martian gravity to correct its course — in one of the longest and costliest treks in the history of unmanned space exploration — the $1.3 billion probe Rosetta will come within 250 kilometers (156 miles) of the Red Planet's surface.

The European Space Agency (ESA) probe, launched in March 2004, is designed to rendezvous with Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014 after a voyage of 7.1 billion kilometers (4.4 billion miles).

Google Mars
Google vice president and Internet evangelist Vint Cerf is overseeing efforts by NASA to build a permanent Internet link to Mars by 2008.

According to IT Wire (via Fark):

InterPlaNet (IPN) will serve as a backbone for a future inter-planetary system of Internets, said Cerf during a visit to Bangalore, reports Indo Asian News Service. [Cerf] co-wrote the TCP/IP protocol which underpins the Terran internet in the 1970s and began work on the InterPlaNet in 1998.

The InterPlaNet protocol is "designed to cope with delays caused by the vast distances of space, with data taking up to 20 minutes to travel between the Earth and Mars depending on how far apart the two planets are," says IT Wire. The InterPlaNet project, a collaboration between NASA and the Advanced Research Project Agency, is underway at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Houston, Texas.

Joe Kittinger Parachutes from 102,800 ft.
Project Excelsior was a series of high-altitude parachute jumps made by Colonel Joseph Kittinger of the United States Air Force in 1959 and 1960. In one of these jumps, on Aug. 16, 1960, Col. Kittinger not only became the first person to exceed the speed of sound without an aircraft or space vehicle (714 mph during free-fall), he also set two world records: the highest parachute jump (102,800 feet) and the longest parachute free-fall — both of which, as of today, still stand.

As one commenter put it best, don't you just long for the day when this footage is shown before every movie in American theaters? Pure awesome.


Cheers.