Dan Van Oss's Blog

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Known for decades as an attraction for adventure seekers and honeymooners alike, visited by tens of thousands of awe-struck tourists each year who flock to marvel at the majestic, multi-colored tableaus of its unbridled superfluity, Las Vegas is not the home of Niagara Falls, which is what we really came here to talk about.

While most people probably assume that Niagara Falls is just one waterfall, they would be considered dumb for thinking so if I weren...

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a fictional Christmas-time character that first appeared in 1939 as the ninth reindeer pulling Santa’s forced servitude toy-distribution sledge. Known for his glowing red nose and inability to successfully convince his co-workers to allow him to participate in common playtime activities for reindeer, he was the creation of a low-paid advertising copywriter for Montgomery Ward.

Robert L. May was tasked with coming up with a chee...

Helicopters are aviation devices that utilize rotating blades for lift, used primarily for transport and for dumping Bond villains into tall smokestacks. They are also used for military purposes, law enforcement, medical use, and for providing something for Arnold Schwarzenegger to point to while yelling “Get to the choppa!”.

Although helicopters are one of the more recent methods of powered flight, references for vertical flight come from as far back as a...

Smokey Bear is a mythical sentient forest creature with a penchant for wearing jeans but going topless. He has been the official mascot of the US Forest Service (Official Motto: “The Trees… So Many Trees… Everywhere… Who Knew? WHO KNEW?!?!”) since 1947, although he was first introduced on a 1944 poster as part of an advertising campaign for the “Cooperative Forest Fire Prevention Campaign,” the world’s least interesting campaign name containing the word “fire”.

Every American schoolchild is probably familiar with that famous poem about Christopher Columbus, so if some of you schoolchildren out there know it could you please send it to me? Because I can’t think of it right now and I’m too lazy to Google it. In the meantime, let’s take a look at the day behind the man behind the day celebrated as the time Equatorial Guinea declared its independence from Spain in 1968, except we call it Columbus Day, and we celebrate it because a Spanish guy discovered...

Hurtling through space at a speed of 254,000 mph, plowing through the celestial void on its long, lonely, looping mission of futility, lies the quaint Idaho town on the planet earth called Hailey, from which a celebrated chunk of space ice might have taken its name, if it weren’t for some pesky things called correct spelling, facts and the correct use of plural possessives.

Officially designated as 1P/Halley, because astronomers are nerds, Halley’s Comet (co...

Yes, it’s finally here; that time of year when we grab our wallets and write out large checks in order to fulfill the demands of our families as well as support our national economy. But enough about tax season; let’s talk about Girl Scout cookies.

The Girl Scouts of America first had the idea to sell cookies in order to ruin the diets of every living American back in 1917, when cookies were probably made out of sawdust and hope. They were first sold...

Yes, it’s finally here; that time of year when we grab our wallets and write out large checks in order to fulfill the demands of our families as well as support our national economy. But enough about tax season; let’s talk about Girl Scout cookies.

The Girl Scouts of America first had the idea to sell cookies in order to ruin the diets of every living American back in 1917, when cookies were probably made out of sawdust and hope. They were first sold...

Only one author in all of history can claim to have won an Academy Award and depicted Hitler as a turtle. That would be Theodore Giesel, more commonly known as “Dr. Seuss”, much less commonly known as “Jimbo the Cave-Diving Monkey Squirrel”, who sold an estimated 600 million books in his career, many of them containing the word “floob-boober-bab-boober-bubs”.

Giesel began his career as an advertising illustrator for Standard Oil and a product called “Fli...