Category: Weird

For those of you that didn’t have the opportunity to see the lunar eclipse last night, William Castleman has come to the rescue!

Some years ago I had a colleague I’ll call June. It seemed that every time I went to the ladies’ room, June was there, applying mascara, combing her long, dark tresses and chatting. She also spent lots of time out on the sidewalk smoking, and in the cafeteria.

Exceedingly friendly and warm, she knew everyone and devoted much of her day to catching up on their personal news. What she didn’t spend much time on was work. A guy who sat in the cubicle next to hers once told me that he estimated she put in just two hours a day of what could be described as productive labor.

Eric Abrahamson, a professor at Columbia Business School who specializes in leadership and organizational problem solving, calls people like June “Michelangelos of work avoidance.” Abrahamson studies workplace fads and time management and has looked closely at the ways some employees manage to get paid to do nothing. He doesn’t advocate their practices, but he says that understanding them can help managers address office inequities and make their teams more productive.

There are many things to dislike about Christmas: the bloated newspaper ads, the second-rate music repeated endlessly in shopping malls, the inane evangelical bleating that “Jesus is the reason for the season”, and the pressure to conform lest you be labeled a Scrooge, or, even worse, a Grinch.

But there’s one Christmas tradition that my wife and I have never shared: deceiving our kids about the real nature of Santa.

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The Kangbashi district began as a public-works project in Ordos, a wealthy coal-mining town in Inner Mongolia. The area is filled with office towers, administrative centers, government buildings, museums, theaters and sports fields—not to mention acre on acre of subdivisions overflowing with middle-class duplexes and bungalows. The only problem: the district was originally designed to house, support and entertain 1 million people, yet hardly anyone lives there.

A chemical called chromium-6 or hexavalent chromium has been found in the tap water in 31 out of the 35 American cities tested, reports the Environmental Working Group.

Norman, Okla., Honolulu and Riverside, Calif., had the highest levels of the substance, dubbed the “Erin Brockovich chemical.” New York, while far down on the list of cities, still had more chromium-6 in the tap water than what California is proposing as a “public health goal” for safe levels: 0.06 parts per billion.

Marilu Henner was featured on 60 Minutes because it’s a day she’ll never forget — just like every other day.

The Taxi actress, 58, appeared on Sunday’s program since she’s one of the handful of people discovered to have “superior autobiographical memory” after rigorous testing. She can remember almost every day of her life as vividly and accurately as if it was yesterday.

“It’s like putting in a DVD and it queues up to a certain place,” Henner says during her interview. “I’m there again, so I’m looking out from my eyes and seeing things visually as I would have that day.”