Hey there loyal Heroscapers! I know there's been a lot of news about why the country's financial markets have gone to crap, and here's a short summary for those of you who want to know WHY...

Let's start with how FUTURES trading works....

You may have heard of 'speculators' in 'oil futures' and wonder what that means. What this is dates back 400 years to the old corn farmers.

Back in the old days when you wanted to buy corn, you had to go to a farmer's market to do it. Whatever corn sold for that day, that's what you paid. Then someone got the great idea to go to the farmer directly, and buy the corn BEFORE IT WAS HARVESTED at that day's price, expecting that the price would go up when the corn was actually harvested, thereby getting the corn for a lower price the day it was delivered than he would've paid for it if he bought it the same day from a Farmer's Market. That's how buying and selling futures worked. Now what happens is that people buy...

I think I have figured out the reason that people have kids....

Since the American Civil War there has quite rightly been a ban on the use of slaves, and therefore the only ample and legal supply of slave labor is your children.


That is all, carry on...

Hey there all, you may or may not be aware of the groundbreaking achievement that's taking place tomorrow at 8PM GMT in Geneva Switzerland - the firing of the Large Hadiron Collider, a 14 mile or so underground ring that launches gold atoms at one another at 99.9% the speed of light.

The purpose of this undertaking is essentially to learn more about particle physics, quantum mechanics (for the uninitiated, how the smallest of the small building blocks for all matter interact with one another) and to create the Grand Unified Theory, which reconciles the 4 basic principal forces of nature: Gravity, The Strong and Weak Nuclear Force (what keeps atoms together - from spinning apart), and electromagnetism. At this point there are only theories about how these interact with one another on a subatomic level, and the purpose of this grand undertaking is to observe the collisions and 'see what happens'.

The 'scary-ish' part of this is that interesting and unknown things...

Hey there, SuperflyTNT here putting out more innane facts, opinions, and other random stuff than you can possibly care about....

Here's my first thought:

I live in Kentucky, which is not exactly the most "progressive" place on earth, in fact it's pretty much ass-backward in a lot of ways. I travel a lot for work, and as such I see all kinds of things, some interesting, some disturbing, some just plain stupid.

One such event happened not too far back as I was heading south on I-75 toward Tennesee. There's a place called Corbin, Kentucky that's only claim to fame is that the original Kentucky Fried Chicken was there.

I had to stop for gas in the vicinity and so I got off the exit ramp and made a quick right to the local fillin' station. I was dressed in a suit, and so I wasn't exactly fitting in to begin with. As I got out, I noticed a mullet-bearing twentysomething wearing a trucker cap, no shoes, no shirt, and his Levis...