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Halsey Taylor is one of the leading manufacturers of drinking fountains today. Company founder Halsey W. Taylor invented the non-squirting drinking fountain. In 1896, Taylor's father died from typhoid fever. This illness is principally spread through contaminated drinking water. Several years later, while working as a plant superintendent for the Packard Motor Car Company, Taylor realized numerous workers were becoming sick with dysentery. He believed contaminated drinking water was the chief reason for the spreading illness. Taylor determined to develop a drinking fountain that was sanitary and would not contribute to the spreading of various illnesses. By 1912, he had...

End Of Road For GOTMILF License Plate"Offensive" vanity tag yanked by Washington officials JULY 21--This is the story of GOTMILF. In May 2002, Michael Syravong filed a "personalized license plate application"with Washington's Department of Licensing. GOTMILF was Syravong's first choice among the three possible personalized tags he listed on the state form (he would have settled for SUPL8EZ or RCKSTAR). Asked for the meaning of GOTMILF, Syravong wrote, "Manual Inline Lift Fluctuator," which he would later claim was some kind of automotive gizmo. The 25-year-old software engineer's license plate choice was, amazingly, approved by bureaucrats who obviously never saw the...

FUTURE SOUNDTRACK FOR AMERICA Barsuk Records is set to release a fundraising CD compilation, titled future soundtrack for america, a joint project with MoveOn.org and Music For America, on August 10th. The compilation will include R.E.M.'s "The Final Straw (MoveOn mix)." McSweeney's Publishing is also releasing a book with similar fundraising goals that will include a copy of the CD; the future dictionary of america features contributions from an astounding group of almost 200 writers, from Paul Auster to Michael Chabon to Jonathan Franzen to Joyce Carol Oates to Kurt Vonnegut to Wendy Wasserstein. One hundred percent of the proceeds...