1. Bequest Puts Jocks on the Ropes

In 1907, fledgling Swarthmore College received a bequest that was estimated to be worth somewhere between $1 and $3 million. If the school wanted the cash, though, it would have to stop participating in intercollegiate sports. Swarthmore badly needed the cash—its entire endowment was only in the $1 million range—but in the end, the school turned down the gift and the sports survived.

2. Ivy League Has to Produce Homemakers

When former Massachusetts Attorney General A.E. Pillsbury gave Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia $25,000 apiece in his 1931 will, he had a catch in mind: the schools had to use the bequests to combat the feminist movement that had “already begun to impair the family as the basis of civilization and its advance.” Pillsbury envisioned the schools creating a lectureship that could help keep women in the home.

3. Donor Wants Flowers in Perpetuity

For years, Indiana University offered a scholarship with a strange condition: the recipient was supposed to drive from Bloomington to Indianapolis once a year to put flowers on the donor’s grave. The school gradually decided it was a bit much to ask a student to take a roadtrip to a stranger’s headstone, though, so for 20 years it didn’t enforce the requirement. Eventually the donor’s attorney found out that the flowers weren’t being placed, but instead of being indignant he worked with the school to remove the clause from the bequest.

4. Auburn Goes to the Dogs

When Miss Eleanor Elizabeth Ritchey, granddaughter of the founder of the Quaker State Oil Refining Company, died in 1968, she left Auburn University a generous gift of $2.5 million. She also gave the school something a bit more unusual: the responsibility for 150 dogs. Ritchey, who owned a ranch in Florida and loved to adopt homeless dogs, made the large cash donation contingent on the school finding good homes for all 150 of her dogs. The cash was then earmarked for veterinary research.

5. Mystery Donor Opens a Giant Wallet

In 2009, colleges experienced an unprecedented rash of anonymous generosity. Colleges of all sizes around the country received letters from lawyers informing them of seven-figure anonymous donations. The only catch was that the donor wished to stay anonymous, and in some cases the giver required that the colleges sign a contract agreeing not to investigate the benefactor’s identity. The donations, which ranged from $1 million all the way up to $10 million all went to schools that had female heads. Beyond that, though, the donor’s identity and motives remained a mystery, even though he or she donated over $70 million.

6. Bryn Mawr Goes on the Clock

Did Bryn Mawr need any new clocks in 1957? It didn’t matter. They were getting one. Philadelphia physician Florence Chapman Child left the school $50,000 in her will if they would also agree to take her 150-year-old grandfather clock. The doctor stipulated that the school’s administrators had to “install it in an appropriate place, keep it in proper condition and repair, make no changes in the fundamental appearance, and are not to have it electrified.”

7. Small Potatoes Lead to Big Cash

In 1950, the government had a surplus of potatoes and started looking for ways to get rid of the excess tubers. The Department of Agriculture decided to give the potatoes to Hiwassee College, a small Methodist school in eastern Tennessee. College president D.R. Youell told the government that he didn’t want its charity, though. A short time later, the school received a $10,000 donation with a note praising the institution for taking a stand against “the dangerous trends toward socialism in our Government.”

8. Three Colleges’ Ship Comes In

In 2006, famed shipbuilder and philanthropist Luther Blount was feeling generous, and he decided to stick with what he knew when making his donation. He gave Rhode Island College, the Wentworth Institute of Technology, and Roger Williams University a ship to share. The 175-foot cruise ship, The Niagara Prince, was part of one of Blount’s cruise lines. The idea was that the three schools—all of which had given Blount an honorary doctorate—would sell the boat and divvy up the proceeds.

9. Colleges Find a Fountainhead of Cash

In 2008, Marshall University received a $1 million gift to establish the BB&T Center for the Advancement of American Capitalism. The catch was that the school had to agree to teach Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as part of its curriculum. BB&T executives said the requirement was designed to spark debate on the ethical underpinnings of capitalism.

This wasn’t the first time BB&T had made this sort of gift, either. In 2005, it gave the University of North Carolina Charlotte another million big ones to make Atlas Shrugged required reading for its students.

10. College Profits From a Racist Will

When Dr. Jesse C. Coggins died in 1962, he left his estate to the Keswick nursing home so it could construct a new building. Coggins made a last-minute change to the will, though, that stipulated that the building would only house white patients. In 1999, a court ruled that the racist stipulation effectively voided the gift and gave the entire estate—which had grown to $28.8 million—to the will’s backup beneficiary, the University of Maryland Medical Center.

11. Donor Affects Fashion from Beyond the Grave

Radcliffe once received a piece of jewelry as a bequest. A nice gift, to be sure, but the late donor was a bit bossy. She wasn’t just donating the piece of jewelry; she stipulated in the gift that the president of Radcliffe must wear the accessory.

12. Small College Enters the Scientific Instrument Business

By the time Erick O. Schonstedt died in 1993, he had built his 40-year-old business, the Schonstedt Instrument Company, into a $6-million-a-year enterprise. There was a problem, though. If he wanted to leave the business to a relative or an employee, the estate taxes would have been nearly $3 million. None of his prospective heirs had that sort of loot on hand. Schonstedt, a Univeristy of Minnesota alum, got creative. He gave the company to Augustana College, a school that, like Schonstedt, had Swedish Lutheran affiliations.

Rather than simply turning around and flipping the business for cash, though, Augustana decided to run it. The school instituted new sales models, found cost savings, and changed the company’s product mix, and after two years was exceeding profit targets by 25%.

In 2008, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at North Carolina State received a similar gift; a donor left the school controlling interest in a company he had started to raise sturgeon for caviar in North Carolina.

13. A Different Kind of Monument

Back in 2008, Katie Kelly covered an interesting donation here on mental_floss:

“Endowing a school, building, or even a classroom with one’s name is a pretty typical fundraising practice among universities today. Demanding a bathroom to commemorate yourself isn’t quite as commonplace. Brad Feld, a local venture capitalist, donated $25,000 to the University of Colorado on the condition that a plaque would be placed on the door of a second-floor men’s restroom in one of the campus’ technology centers. He originally made the conditional offer to his alma mater, MIT, but was rejected. Feld, in an interview with Boulder’s Daily Camera, stated: ‘I just wanted a plaque outside of the men’s room to inspire people as they walk in to do their business.’ Quite fittingly, the quote reads, ‘The best ideas often come at inconvenient times—don’t ever close your mind to them.’

14. School Doesn’t Say “Danke Schoen” to Wayne Newton

In 1993, Wayne Newton made his first appearance in Branson, MO. He offered to give his cut of the first night’s show to the nearby Presbyterian school College of the Ozarks. It was a pretty generous gift; Newton’s take would have ended up being $15,000 to $25,000.

Unfortunately, the school’s president, Jerry Davis, went to see Newton’s set. He was horrified by Newton’s double entendres and jokes about the elderly having sex. The next day Davis announced that the school wouldn’t accept a cent of Newton’s money.

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Check ‘em bust a move (without busting a hip, thankfully) to Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean: Link [embedded YouTube]

Deputies said Schaumburger fled down a street with a dead end at Lake Tarpon. With nowhere to go, authorities said he hijacked a docked pedal boat and tried to escape across the lake.

A Sheriff’s Office helicopter was called in. According to the arrest report, the helicopter crew reported that “there was a lone male pedaling the boat dressed only in boxer shorts, and the boat appeared to be taking on water.”

Deputies enlisted the help of resident Robert Putnam, whose pontoon boat was docked at the lake, to intercept Schaumburger.

Link via Lowering the Bar | Photo: flickr user Joe Shlabotnik, used under Creative Commons license

Forget the Neatorama redesign – that was nothing compared to this beauty.

Yes, you’ve found it at last … Behold, the world’s most beautiful website. No, it’s not a joke – it’s the website of an actual store called Yvette’s in Panama City, Florida.

Link (For the full effect, you should turn up your computer’s speaker.)

Now wasn’t that awesome? Why, you’re welcome.

(YouTube Link)

Seriously though, the DRC is top tier when it comes to places like this. Here’s a snip from Hannah’s five star review on Yelp:

After an afternoon at this terrific research center, I learned more about dolphins than I ever thought I’d know. We came here as a group, with the BF and his parents. For $20 a person, you get admission, which allows you to walk through the center and watch the public shows. The place is very low key – it’s obvious that all their money goes towards taking care of the dolphins,and not on frills.

Link (Photo: DRC)

]]> http://www.worldsstrangest.com/neatorama/dolphin-football/feed/ 0 http://www.worldsstrangest.com/mental-floss/how-did-cameron-get-an-indoor-stadium-the-names-behind-12-college-arenas/ http://www.worldsstrangest.com/mental-floss/how-did-cameron-get-an-indoor-stadium-the-names-behind-12-college-arenas/#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:19:33 +0000 Stranger to the World http://www.worldsstrangest.com/mental-floss/how-did-cameron-get-an-indoor-stadium-the-names-behind-12-college-arenas/ Now that college basketball season is in full swing, hoops fans are hearing a lot about teams’ home arenas during broadcasts. While it’s easy to figure out the origins of many of these namesake arenas—basketball fans surely know where Rupp Arena and the Dean Smith Center got their names—some aren’t as clear. Who was Cameron, and how did he get an indoor stadium? Let’s take a look at the names behind college hoops’ best-known venues.

1. Cameron Indoor Stadium

The Duke Blue Devils’ major home-court advantage gets its name from Eddie Cameron, who was a monumental figure in Duke athletics. Not only did Cameron coach the school’s basketball team from 1929 to 1949, he also coached the football team from 1942 to 1945, when he won the Sugar Bowl. In 1972, the university renamed Duke Indoor Stadium after Cameron.

2. Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum

Duke’s cross-state rival Wake Forest plays in an arena named after a Medal-of-Honor-winning Army medic. In late 1965, Joel was on a patrol in Vietnam when his battalion fell victim to a Viet Cong ambush. The attack killed or wounded nearly every soldier in Joel’s vicinity, and despite orders to stay on the ground, he began attending to the wounded. Even when Joel was shot twice, he kept treating other injured soldiers after bandaging his wounds and making himself a makeshift crutch. He died in 1984, and Winston-Salem’s Board of Aldermen named the city’s new arena after Joel in 1986.

3. Allen Fieldhouse

The Kansas Jayhawks’ digs take their name from one of the school’s most legendary coaches. Dr. Forrest C. “Phog” Allen led the team for 39 years, where he picked up three national titles while coaching future greats like Adolph Rupp and Dean Smith. Allen also helped turn basketball into an Olympic sport and coached the American team to gold in the 1952 Games.

4. The Carrier Dome

Syracuse’s giant football and basketball stadium gets its name from heating and cooling leader the Carrier Corporation, which plunked down a $2.75 million naming gift to help with construction during the late 1970s.

5. Gampel Pavilion

The Connecticut Huskies’ formidable men’s and women’s squads play in an arena named after Harry A. Gampel, a 1943 UConn grad, steel magnate, land developer, and philanthropist. He donated $1 million to help finance the arena.

6. The Stephen C. O’Connell Center

The Florida Gators’ home takes its name from the former Florida Supreme Court justice who became the university’s sixth president in 1967, a position he held until 1973.

7. The Frank Erwin Center

The University of Texas Longhorns’ drum-shaped home used to be called the Special Events Center, but in 1980 the school changed the arena’s name to honor Frank Erwin, a former university regent who helped build new facilities on campus.

8. Pauley Pavilion

The UCLA Bruins’ home is named after Edwin W. Pauley, a 20th-century oil baron and University of California Regent. In addition to his oil businesses, Pauley dabbled in politics. President Truman made him the American representative to the Allied Reparations Committee after World War II and unsuccessfully nominated Pauley for the post of Undersecretary of the Navy.

9. Crisler Arena

The home of the Michigan Wolverines takes its name from Fritz Crisler, who coached the Wolverines’ football team from 1938 to 1947. His coaching career culminated with an undefeated 1947 season in which Michigan thrashed USC 49-0 in the Rose Bowl, and Crisler then became the school’s athletic director.

Crisler’s given name wasn’t Fritz; he was born Herbert Orin Crisler. Fritz was a nickname given to him by legendary football coach Amos Alonzo Stagg when Crisler was a player at the University of Chicago. The joke was that Crisler’s last name sounded like that of Austrian violin virtuoso Fritz Kreisler. Football may have been just a tad more intellectual in those days.

10. Williams Arena

The University of Minnesota’s hoops home is also named after a football coach. Henry L. Williams got his coaching start at Army in 1891, but he became famous for his 1900-1921 stint at Minnesota. He has a number of football innovations to his credit, including being possibly the first coach to advocate the legalization of the forward pass and innovating the four-man defensive backfield.

11. Jon M. Huntsman Arena

When you’re both the 47th-richest man alive and extremely generous, you’re going to get quite a few buildings named after you. Huntsman, the billionaire philanthropist founder of Huntsman Chemical, has his name on the University of Utah’s 15,000-seat home arena, but it doesn’t stop there. The main building of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the business school at Utah State University are both named after Huntsman as well. He might have his name on the law library at Brigham Young and the library at Southern Utah University, too, but Huntsman requested those buildings be named after other people.

12. John Paul Jones Arena

The University of Virginia’s home arena isn’t named after the American naval hero of the same name, and it’s not named after Led Zeppelin’s bassist, either. Instead, the arena takes its name from the father of billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones II. The Virginia grad donated $35 million to finance the arena’s construction and named it after his father.

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If you have a serious phobia of frogs, rats, bees or snakes, you probably shouldn’t read WebEcoist’s article on the most invasive species in the world. On the other hand, if you don’t have any phobias, it’s fascinating to know just how devastating a pair of bunnies ended up being to Australia and how Florida and other areas of the South are being taken over by released and escaped Burmese pythons.

Link

Thomas said that over the decades, she has never had a power outage that would destroy the cold hunk she says is precious to her.

“It’s just like a little pet,” she said.

Thomas made the snowball during a rare Florida snowfall 33 years ago. Link -via Fark

Most criminals rob banks, steal cars, or maybe just take your wallet. But some crooks have gone for less conventional targets over the years. Like Kurt Cobain’s ashes, or 6,000 cheesecakes.

1. Bridge Today, Gone Tomorrow

If someone offered to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, you’d know it was a scam. But if someone in Khabarovsk, Russia, were to offer you a 200-ton steel bridge, they might actually deliver. In January 2008, employees on their way to a remote heating plant were forced to find an alternate route after the 38-foot steel bridge they crossed the day before had vanished. While the workers slept, scrap metal thieves dismantled the span and supports and loaded it all onto trucks for a quick getaway. The plant’s owners estimated it would cost around $40,000 to build a new bridge. This time, though, they were going to use concrete.

2. Lifting Lingerie

During the 1992 L.A. riots, while some looters were busy stealing TVs and VCRs, others broke into Frederick’s of Hollywood and made off with around $200,000 in women’s undergarments. The company also suffered the loss of a few one-of-a-kind items from the store’s lingerie museum—a bustier with gold tassels that Madonna wore in the music video for “Open Your Heart,” a pair of Ava Gardner’s bloomers, and a push-up bra worn by Katey Sagal as Married…With Children’s Peg Bundy. A few days later, a man known only as Jim B. came forward to return Peg’s push-up and Ava’s undies. Sadly, Madonna’s bustier was never recovered, despite a $1,000 reward from the company. But she agreed to give Frederick’s a replacement in exchange for a $10,000 donation to an organization that supplied free mammograms to the poor.

3. Somebody Call for a Bambulance?

Escaped psychiatric patient Leon Hollimon stole an ambulance in Lexington, North Carolina, and led police on a cat-and-mouse chase for hours, traveling through four different counties in two states. One of the cops likened the chase to an episode of Dukes of Hazzard. Eventually, the culprit ran off the road and was apprehended wearing a stethoscope, carrying latex gloves, and sporting a mohawk. It was an odd enough crime, but it got really weird when authorities found, splayed in the back, a dead deer with an IV stuck into its body. There was also evidence that Hollimon had tried using a defibrillator on the animal. Hollimon was taken to a nearby mental health facility for evaluation.

4. Kurt Cobain, Meet Cheech and Chong

After Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, most of his ashes were spread over a Buddhist temple in New York and in the Wishkash River in Washington state. His wife, Courtney Love, kept what was left inside a pink, bear-shaped handbag, hidden in a closet at her Hollywood home. In June 2008, Love said that a former friend broke in and stole the bag. The ashes’ whereabouts were unknown until a few months later, when German performance artist Natascha Stellmach claimed she acquired them, mixed them with marijuana, and planned to smoke the whole thing as part of an art installation entitled “Set Me Free.” She said the act was symbolic and was going to release Cobain’s spirit “into the ether from the media circus.” Of course, no one is able to substantiate if Cobain’s remains were in the joint or if it was just a publicity stunt. Either way, the ashes were never recovered.

5. Hulk Wrestles Ex-Wife for Toilet Seat

Shortly after their divorce, Hulk Hogan (AKA Terry Bollea) sued his ex-wife, Linda, for stripping their Florida home of chandeliers, a tanning bed, bathtubs, fixtures, and many other items Hogan said were necessary for the house to sell. One of those much-needed items specifically mentioned in the suit was a “wooden antique toilet seat from the guest house.” In response to Hulk’s accusations, Linda said, “He knows I’m using the wooden toilet seat as a frame for his picture ever since I found out he is a serial cheater and a liar. Once he comes clean and starts to be honest, he can have it back.” Obviously this is one Hollywood relationship that really went down the crapper.

6. Head Deadhead’s Head Missing

The Hulkster isn’t the only one with missing toilet woes. After Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia died, Henry Kolty bought the rock star’s home and auctioned off items from the house to raise money for charity. In March 2006, Kolty sold Garcia’s toilet for $2,550 to casino Goldenpalace.com. But before it could be delivered, the throne was stolen from Kolty’s driveway. The casino offered $250 for the return of the commode, but it was never found.

7. Now I Just Need a Few Tons of Strawberries…

On December 26, 2009, truck driver Gary LaSalle left his big rig and refrigerated trailer parked near Orlando International Airport with a group of similar delivery trucks. He took the keys with him, but left the cooling unit running on the trailer to protect his valuable cargo, which he would be delivering to North Carolina in the morning. When he returned the next day, his $50,000 truck, the $120,000 trailer and its contents—6,000 cheesecakes, valued at $40,000—were gone. The police investigation is ongoing, but its doubtful the cheesecakes will ever be found.

8. Pilfered Pumps and Heisted Heels

While it’s a known fact that women love shoes, apparently so did Chuck Jones, the former publicist of Marla Maples, the former wife of Donald Trump. In July 1992, Maples noticed that some of her things were missing. So she and Donald set up a hidden camera in her apartment and caught Jones in her apartment without permission. When police raided his home, they found some of Maples’ underwear and 40 pairs of her shoes, including high heels, black Converse high-tops, bedroom slippers, and cowboy boots made of alligator skin. He was initially convicted in 1994, but that was overturned in 1996 due to a technicality. During his retrial in 1999, he represented himself and, during his testimony, admitted to having a shoe fetish. He went so far to say he’d had a sexual relationship with Maples’ footwear. After a media circus trial, Jones was found guilty of burglary and sentenced to 1 to 4 years in prison. He was released in 2001 and tried unsuccessfully to sue Maples for various reasons until 2002, when the courts told him to stop.

Ever heard of a crime and asked yourself, “Why would you steal that?” Ever had anything peculiar stolen from your own house? Tell us about it in the comments below!

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Sand- and salt trucks have evolved a long way from the era when two men with shovels used to stand on the back of a dump truck. Modern grit is a mixture of sand and rock salt, but the latter has deleterious effects not only on metal vehicle frames, but also on vegetation and freshwater lakes and streams. A variety of techniques have therefore been devised to keep roads on a “low-salt diet.”

“Pre-wetting” the salt — spraying it with brine as it’s dropped — helps it stick to the road better, meaning crews can cut back from 500 pounds per mile to 200…

Vehicle-mounted electronic thermometers let supervisors know how far above or below freezing the pavement is. Some truck cabs have up-to-the-minute weather radar so crews know how long it’ll be before the freezing rain or snow hits…

To prevent the grit from being thrown off the road surface by vehicle tires, additional substances may be intermixed to increase adherence. The earliest additive was molasses, but it was difficult to use in cold weather and tended to attract cows and wildlife to the roads.

That means using brine, magnesium chloride and a sugar beet byproduct, which are mixed via a dozen yellow-handled valves marked with letters of the alphabet.

Fine-tuning the grit application to the weather conditions not only saves taxpayers money (one truckload of salt costs ~$800), but also reduces chloride levels in nearby lakes.

Link. Photo credit Richard Tsong Taatarii, Star Tribune