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🔗 Internet 🔗 Internet culture

The Society for Preventing Parents from Naming Their Children Jennifer (SPPNTCJ) was a popular and sometimes controversial website that contributed to early web culture, online from 1996 to 2000. The SPPNTCJ home page was created and updated by Jennifer Farwell, one of the three founding members of the SPPNTCJ. Other founding members were Jennifer Rich and Jennifer Ang.

The SPPNTCJ began as an inside joke on an email discussion list that both Farwell and Rich subscribed to, which included five or more Jennifers who actively posted at that time. One of the Jennifers tossed out the comment that there should be "a society for preventing parents from naming their children Jennifer." The idea took off, and Farwell created the SPPNTCJ's website. It welcomed more than 2 million visitors while online.

During its run, the SPPNTCJ was noted by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Yahoo! Internet Life magazine, Thunder Bay Television News, 580 CKPR radio program Tech Talk, California State University, Chico, SignsOnSanDiego.com, WebMD and more. It received several Internet "cool site" acknowledgments, from Cool Central, Seven Wonders, Twoeys, Fallen Thinkers, and Secret Einstein.

🔗 Numbers 🔗 England 🔗 Time 🔗 Measurement

The long hundred, also known as the great hundred or twelfty, is the number that was referred to as "hundred" in Germanic languages prior to the 15th century, which is now known as 120, one hundred and twenty, or six score. The number was simply described as hundred and translated into Latin in Germanic-speaking countries as centum (Roman numeral C), but the qualifier "long" is now added because present English uses the word "hundred" exclusively to refer to the number of five score (100) instead.

The long hundred was 120 but the long thousand was reckoned decimally as 10 long hundreds (1200).

🔗 Environment 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Energy 🔗 Pennsylvania 🔗 Mining

The Centralia mine fire is a coal-seam fire that has been burning underneath the borough of Centralia, Pennsylvania, United States, since at least May 27, 1962. Its original cause is still a matter of debate. It is burning in underground coal mines at depths of up to 300 feet (90 m) over an 8-mile (13 km) stretch of 3,700 acres (15 km²). At its current rate, it could continue to burn for over 250 years. It has caused most of the town to be abandoned: the population dwindled from around 1,500 at the time the fire started to 7 in 2013, and most of the buildings have been levelled.

🔗 Death 🔗 Lists 🔗 Invention

This is a list of inventors whose deaths were in some manner caused by or related to a product, process, procedure, or other innovation that they invented or designed.

🔗 Poetry

A clerihew () is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line is the name of the poem's subject, usually a famous person put in an absurd light, or revealing something unknown or spurious about them. The rhyme scheme is AABB, and the rhymes are often forced. The line length and metre are irregular. Bentley invented the clerihew in school and then popularized it in books. One of his best known is this (1905):

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Crime 🔗 Lists 🔗 Novels 🔗 Correction and Detention Facilities 🔗 Popular Culture 🔗 Novels/Crime

A helicopter prison escape is made when an inmate escapes from a prison by means of a helicopter. This list includes prisoner escapes where a helicopter was used in an attempt to free prisoners from a place of internment, a prison or correctional facility.

One of the earliest instances of using a helicopter to escape a prison was the escape of Joel David Kaplan, nicknamed "Man Fan", on August 19, 1971 from the Santa Martha Acatitla in Mexico. Kaplan was a New York businessman who not only escaped the prison but eventually got out of Mexico and went on to write a book about his experience, The 10-Second Jailbreak.

France has had more recorded helicopter escape attempts than any other country, with at least 11. One of the most notable French jail breaks occurred in 1986, when the wife of bank robber Michel Vaujour studied for months to learn how to fly a helicopter. Using her newly acquired skills, she rented a white helicopter and flew low over Paris to pluck her husband off the roof of his fortress prison. Vaujour was later seriously wounded in a shootout with police, and his pilot wife was arrested.

The record for most helicopter escapes goes to convicted murderer Pascal Payet, who has used helicopters to escape from prisons in 2001, 2003, and most recently 2007.

Another multiple helicopter escapee is Vasilis Paleokostas who on February 22, 2009 escaped for the second time from the same prison. Because of this, many prisons have taken applicable precautions, such as nets or cables strung over open prison courtyards.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of language 🔗 Linguistics/Philosophy of language

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct, but semantically nonsensical. The sentence was originally used in his 1955 thesis The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory and in his 1956 paper "Three Models for the Description of Language". Although the sentence is grammatically correct, no obvious understandable meaning can be derived from it, and thus it demonstrates the distinction between syntax and semantics. As an example of a category mistake, it was used to show the inadequacy of certain probabilistic models of grammar, and the need for more structured models.

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Professional wrestling

In professional wrestling, kayfabe (also called work or worked) is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true", specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not of a staged or predetermined nature of any kind. The term kayfabe has evolved to also become a code word of sorts for maintaining this "reality" within the direct or indirect presence of the general public.

Kayfabe is often seen as the suspension of disbelief that is used to create the non-wrestling aspects of promotions, such as feuds, angles, and gimmicks in a manner similar to other forms of fictional entertainment. In relative terms, a wrestler breaking kayfabe during a show would be likened to an actor breaking character on-camera. Also, since wrestling is performed in front of a live audience, whose interaction with the show is crucial to its success, kayfabe can be compared to the fourth wall in acting, since hardly any conventional fourth wall exists to begin with. In general, everything in a professional wrestling show is to some extent scripted, or "kayfabe", even though at times it is portrayed as real-life.

Kayfabe was fiercely maintained for decades, but with the advent of the Internet wrestling community, and the sports entertainment movement, the pro wrestling industry has become less concerned with protecting so-called backstage secrets and typically maintains kayfabe only during the shows. Kayfabe is, however, occasionally broken during shows, usually when dealing with genuine injuries during a match or paying tribute to wrestlers.

🔗 Africa 🔗 Geology 🔗 Africa/Central African Republic

The Bangui magnetic anomaly is a local variation in the Earth's magnetic field centered at Bangui, the capital of Central African Republic. The magnetic anomaly is roughly elliptical, about 700 km × 1,000 km (430 mi × 620 mi), and covers most of the country, making it one of the "largest and most intense crustal magnetic anomalies on the African continent". The anomaly was discovered in the late 1950s, explored in the 1970s, and named in 1982. Its origin remains unclear.

🔗 Books 🔗 Mongols

The Tartar Relation (Latin: Hystoria Tartarorum, "History of the Tartars") is an ethnographic report on the Mongol Empire composed by a certain C. de Bridia in Latin in 1247. It is one of the most detailed accounts of the history and customs of the Mongols to appear in Europe around that time.