Showing results by author "Dan Lewis" in All Categories

In September 2013, a New York City man named Antonio Ciccarello died as a result of a stab wound. About five days prior to his death, Ciccarello was commuting to work like he normally did, traveling from Manhattan's Lower East Side to Times Square. But this trip was different.

Paninis with ham and Colby cheese; Moroccan roast chicken breast; lentil, quinoa and eggplant salads; a make-your-own-gourmet-burger bar; chipotle pulled pork over brown rice; poached pears; porridge; and balsamic strawberry craft sodas – according to various news reports, those are some of the items on the menu at The Corner, a cafe in Sydney, Australia.

The French Alpine town of Albertville sits in the southeast of the country, near the border of Italy, and is home to only about 10,000 people. Like most French communities, the people of Albertville rely on cheese. But unlike most other French areas, cheese is more than just a snack or part of a meal for the residents of Albertville. It, quite literally, powers part of the area.

There's a teensy problem with the Lincoln Memorial – one that spelling sticklers might have the biggest problem with. Explore this little-known fact on this episode of Now I Know. The Lincoln Memorial is one of Washington, D.C.’s top tourist attractions. The monument, erected to honor the 16th President of the United States, is a painstaking work of architecture and sculpture. It features a 19-foot high sculpture of Abraham Lincoln himself, and the attention to detail is breathtaking.

In 1983, a woman named Rita Quintero was found in a small Kansas town, wearing eccentric clothing and rummaging through trash cans for her next meal. Officials approached her, aiming to take stock of the situation, but Quintero appeared uncooperative.

As of this writing, the Gobi Desert in northern China/southern Mongolia encompasses about half a million square miles (about 1.3 million square kilometers) – and that's "as of this writing" because the Gobi Desert is growing.

At a few hundred dollars a ton, scrap metal is decently valuable – and it's most certainly a good source of extra revenue for those who run body shops, construction sites, junkyards and the like. And if you're a thief, it's also a pretty good thing to steal – not only is the demand for scrap metal rather robust (therefore making it pretty easy to find a willing buyer), but scrap metal also looks like any other metal, making tracing it back to its true owner very difficult.

As haircuts go, few in the mid-1980s were more famous than Brian Bosworth's. A mix of mullets and mohawks and lines, it really didn't matter.

Question: What was the first song ever played on the planet? Fair warning: the answer may surprise you.

If you're a dog owner, the first rule is – or, should be – to pick up after your dog. If you don't, bad things can happen, especially to the under soles of your neighbors' shoes – and, if they're neither observant nor careful, to their carpeting.

The Kiss Cam is a time-honored tradition of American sporting events. During time outs and other stoppages of play, the stadium events team – having already scoured the crowd for a target – focuses the cameras on a couple and puts their picture on the scoreboard.

Air travel can be fun – but it can be maddening, too. One of the more frustrating aspects is the boarding process, during which everyone tries to stow away their carry-on bags and get their bodies into their seats, seemingly all at the same time.

The typical LSD "hit" contains about 100 micrograms of the drug – at the high end, that means a gram holds about 10,000 doses.

Every so often, the Roman Catholic Church has to choose a new pope – and it's a big deal when that happens, capturing the attention of millions of people (even non-Catholics) around the world. The meeting, called a "papal conclave," has a procedure which has been around for centuries.

The marbled murrelet is a seabird native to the coasts of the Pacific Ocean and is often spotted around Oregon, Washington, Northern California, British Columbia and Alaska (as well as somewhat in Russia and northern Japan). They thrive in old-growth forests, and if you're a human, it's rare to find one of their nests, as they tend to build them hundreds of feet off the ground.

If you're a professional writer, having command of homophones – two or more words with the same pronunciation but different meanings and/or spellings – is critical. Sure, the occasional error is okay, but if you write sentences like "The boy's ants new the write weigh two go," you're probably not going to keep your job for too long.

You already know the story of the RMS Titanic. On April 10, 1912, it set out on its maiden voyage from Southampton, United Kingdom to New York City, but late on the evening of April 14th, it struck an iceberg.

A heroin addict – we'll borrow NPR's nomenclature and call him "John" – needs help. Maybe he can't afford the price of a hit. Maybe he's unable to work because he's focused on getting high instead of getting paid.

Charles Schulz, creator of the iconic comic strip Peanuts, saw the stripe's protagonist, Charlie Brown, as a laughable loser. According to the Peanuts Wiki website, Schulz once said that "Charlie Brown must be the one who suffers, because he's a caricature of the average person. Most of us are much more acquainted with losing than winning. Winning is great, but it isn't funny."

If you ask a musician about flying with their instruments, what you'll invariably hear is how bad of an idea it is to check one's instrument-carrying luggage. Lost baggage, a relative lack of climate control, a less-than-gentle inspection process, and the often haphazard way bags are handled when loaded and unloaded from the airplane are among the common concerns.