In 1941, Forrest Mars Sr. of the Mars company, struck a deal with Bruce Murrie, who was son of the famed Hershey president William Murrie. The deal was to create a chocolate encased in a hard shell. The reason for this collaboration was due to Mars needing supplies of Hershy chocolate as Forrest Mars Sr. anticipated that there would be a chocolate shortage during the pending war.

 As such, the deal gave Murrie a 20% stake in the newly developed M&M; this stake was later bought out by Mars when chocolate rationing ended at the end of the war, in 1948.

The name therefore stood for “Mars & Murrie” the cofounders of this ever popular chocolate.

A few M&M facts:

 • The original M&M colours were Red, Yellow, Brown, Green & Violet.

• During WWII production of M&Ms skyrocketed due to the fact they were supplied to the military for inclusion in ration packs.

 • The “M” printed on M&M’s was originally painted black. This was changed to white in 1954.

He wrote one novel, The Picture of Dorian Grey, and a number of plays which include the very well known, The Importance of Being Earnest. 

Wilde was considered a master of social comedy, being the expert craftsman of witty sayings and paradoxes.  There are far too many to list all at once so I have compiled a list of what I beleive to be the 10 best.

1. To love oneself is the begining of a lifelong ramance.

2. Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much.

3. Murder is always a mistake.  One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

4. To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, expect take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

5. Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

6. Nothing succeeds like excess.

7. What is a cynic?  A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

8. The Idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

9. I can resist anything except temptation.

10. Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes

Richard Jones, 27, rode Nemesis at Alton Towers in the nude after traveling across America and Europe to tackle 298 different roller coasters and clock up a total of 10,000 rides.

Richard, a supermarket worker from Churchdown, near Cheltenham, admitted the naked rides ”were very cold”.

”Ever since I was four I have been hooked on roller coasters. It’s an escape from time because it takes you somewhere you don’t normally go,” he said. ”Hurtling along at 80mph also gets the adrenaline going.

Doing it naked is a lot more difficult because it does get very cold.” ”But it was still a good experience and I will definitely be doing it again in the future.

I have broken world records and raised money for charity through my roller coaster riding.”

When asked Richard Jones said that he fell in love with roller coasters aged just four when his parents took him on the Zipper Dipper in Blackpool.

 Since then he has ridden a total of 298 different roller coasters with his favourite the 400ft (122m) Top Thrill Dragster in Ohio, America.

In May 2004 he broke the Guinness world record for the largest naked roller coaster ride while riding the Nemesis Inferno at Thorpe Park with 112 other fans.

This surely begs the questions as to whether he had any taste buds. Let me know if anyone has ever tried this as I certainly don’t fancy trying it.

An aggregator for anything weird and wonderful.  Includes offbeat and unusual news stories from around the world, bought together in one website. Read about; cross-dressing sensitivity training for policemen, criminal masterminds who steal chicken wings and naked air traffic controllers, to name just a few.

2. Despair.com

An antithesis to the motivational posters you often see in offices, Despair.com takes inspirational photography and captions it with negative and cynical slogans.  The posters are guaranteed to raise a laugh in the office. You can even buy them online if your office walls are looking a little bare.

3. PopCap Online Games

PopCap offers some incredibly addictive free games.  One great feature of these games is being able to pause so that you can carry on mundane daily tasks (such as your job).  Yes, it’s terrible how work always manages to get in the way of enjoying ourselves. Many favourites such as Bejeweled 2, Zuma, Pixelus, Atomica and Insaniquarium will keep you entertained until its time  to go home.  Loads of fun, just don’t get caught at work.

4. Facebook

Facebook is a great while to idly waste hour upon hour.  Weather it is getting sucked into Farmville and Mafia Wars or just uploading the photos from your latest lads night out, it is amazing addictive.  Sadly most employers are now wise to the fact that their productivity plummets from the use of Facebook and for many it is banned.  For everyone else, enjoy, just don’t get too sucked into the world of Facebook.

5. 2Leep

2Leep is a hub for the millions of blogs and photo collections out there.  Thankfully there is some great stuff on here.  You will never be short of a strange story to tell at the pub, such as  Bob Dullam’s homemade batmobile and the worst celebrity twins of all time. There is always a lot of new content so make sure you come back often.

6. Ebay

Ebay is officially the worlds largest online market place and there really isn’t anything you can’t buy on here.  Apart from possibly Russian nuclear weapons but I wouldn’t but it past a disgruntled member of the Russian army giving it a try.  Whether you are wanting to get rid of unwanted presents or set on making a business out of buying and selling on Ebay you will find it very addictive.  Not recommended for those with an addictive shopping personality

7. Fail Blog

“Schadenfreude” is German for “deriving pleasure from the misfortune of others”. FailBlog has embraced this with aplomb to create the hilarious site.   This photo and video blog captures some of the most tragic human mistakes ever caught on camera. You’ll find horrifying examples of car parking errors, sports mishaps, advertising faux pas  and absurd human inventions.

8. Cute Overload

Even if you’re not a pet owner like myself, I guarantee you will like this website.  It  is a photo blog of user-submitted pet photos and videos. The objective is to showcase the adorable and endearing qualities of our four-legged friends plus a few other random animal shots.  Definitely a site to make you go “awwwwwwwwwww”.

9. WonderHowTo.com

How to make visual explosions with tongue depressors.  How to turn your car into an armored tank.  How to steal a Guinness record for free throwing. WonderHowTo.com is an amazing mix of engineering, ingenuity, and curiousity.  It will have you hooked for hours.  Just be careful if you ever want to try any of them at home.

10. YouTube

YouTube has recently celebrated its 5th Birthday, although given its popularity you would think it had been around longer.  Although there is often a lot of absolute rubbish on the site there are also some absolute gems.  It can take some digging but its worth it.

Mrs Gonzalez and her family had spent a number of hours crafting a nude sculpture in front of their home in Rahway, New Jersey.

The sculpture even attracted the attention of passing motorists stopped to take photos of their version of the celebrated Greek statue Venus de Milo, and several neighbours were complimentary.

However, Rahway police sent an officer to their home after they received an anonymous complaint of “a naked snow woman”, and asked the family to cover her up.

Although the Police officer was apologetic and appreciative of the snowlady and her assets, he insisted that the family dress the snowlady to present any further embarrassment of their neighbours.

“He said, ‘It’s very good,’” Mrs Gonzalez recalled.

Mrs Gonzalez said: “She was curvaceous, bodacious and booty-licious.”

“I thought she looked more objectified and sexualised after you put the bikini on.”

Mrs Gonzalez’s daughter Maria Conneran, 21,  said they had been made to cover up art.

She said: “Our snow lady looked like marble. It looked like a statue.

“Are you going to go to the Met and cover up all the statues?”

With the onslaught of the Russian Revolution, the existence of a royal family was intolerabl­e to the Bolsheviks. In 1918, they massacred the royal Romanov family — Czar Nicholas II, his wife, son and four daughters — to ensure that no legitimate heir could later resurface and rally the public for support.

Soon, rumors floated around that certain members of the royal family had escaped and survived. As one might expect, claimants came out of the woodwork. “Anna Anderson” was the most famous. In 1920, Anderson was admitted to a hospital after attempting suicide and confessed that she was Princess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the royal family. She stood out from other claimants because she held a certain resemblance to and surprising knowledge of the Russian family and life at court.

Although a few relatives and acquaintances who’d known Anastasia believed Anderson, most didn’t. By 1927, an alleged former roommate of Anderson claimed that her name was Franziska Schanzkowska, not Anna and certainly not Anastasia [source: Aron]. This didn’t stop Anderson from indulging in celebrity and attempting to cash in on a royal inheritance. She ultimately lost her case in the legal proceedings that dragged on for decades, but she stuck to her story until her death in 1984. Years later, upon the discovery of what proved to be the remains of the royal family, DNA tests confirmed her to be a fake. In 2009, experts were able to finally confirm that all remains have been found and that no family member escaped execution in 1918 [source: CNN].

4. Han van Meegeren’s Vermeer Forgeries

This lie re­sulted from a classic case of wanting to please the critics. Han van Meegeren was an artist who felt under-appreciated and thought he could trick art experts into admitting his genius.

In the early 20th century, scholars were squabbling about whether the great Vermeer had painted a series of works depicting biblical scenes. Van Meegeren pounced on this opportunity and set to work carefully forging one such disputed work, “The Disciples at Emmaus.” With tireless attention to detail, he faked the cracks and aged hardness of a centuries-old painting. He intentionally played on the confirmation bias of critics who wanted to believe that Vermeer painted these scenes. It worked: Experts hailed the painting as authentic, and van Meegeren made out like a bandit producing and selling more fake Vermeers. Greed apparently overcame his desire for praise, as he decided not to out himself.

However, van Meegeren, who was working in the 1930s and ’40s, made one major mistake. He sold a painting to a prominent member of the Nazi party in Germany. After the war, Allies considered him a conspirator for selling a “national treasure” to the enemy [source: Wilson]. In a curious change of events, van Meegeren had to paint for his freedom. In order to help prove that the painting was no national treasure, he forged another in the presence of authorities.

He escaped with a light sentence of one year in prison, but van Meegeren died of a heart attack two months after his trial.

3. Titus Oates and the Plot to Kill Charles II

By the time he fabricated his notorious plot, Titus Oates already had a history of deception and ­general knavery. He’d been expelled from some of England’s finest schools as well as the navy. Oates was even convicted of perjury but escaped imprisonment. His biggest lie however, was still ahead of him.

Raised Protestant by an Anabaptist preacher, Oates entered Cambridge as a young man to study for Anglican orders. After misconduct got him dismissed from his Anglican post, he started associating with Catholic circles and feigned conversion [source: Butler]. With the encouragement of fellow anti-Catholic Israel Tonge, Oates infiltrated enemy territory by entering a Catholic seminary. In fact, he entered two seminaries — both of which expelled him. But it hardly mattered. By this time, he had gathered enough inside information and names to wreak enormous havoc.

In 1678, Oates concocted and pretended to uncover a plot in which the Jesuits were planning to murder King Charles II. The idea was that they wanted to replace Charles with his Catholic brother, James. What ensued was a three-year panic that fueled anti-Catholic sentiment and resulted in the executions of about 35 people [source: Encyclopaedia Britannica].

After Charles died in 1685, James became king and had Oates tried for perjury. Oates was convicted, pilloried and imprisoned. He only spent a few years in jail, however, as the Glorious Revolution swept through England in 1688. Without James in power, Oates got off with a pardon and a pension.

2. Piltdown Man

After ­Charles Darwin published his revolutionary “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, scientists scrambled to find fossil evidence of extinct human ancestors. They sought these so-called missing links to fill in the gaps on the timeline of human .

When archaeologist Charles Dawson unearthed what he thought was a missing link in 1910, what he really found was one of the biggest hoaxes in history.

The discovery was the Piltdown man, pieces of a skull and jaw with molars located in the Piltdown quarry in Sussex, England. Dawson brought his discovery to prominent paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward, who touted its authenticity to his dying day.

Although the discovery gained world renown, the lie behind Piltdown man slowly and steadily unraveled. In the ensuing decades, other major discoveries suggested Piltdown man didn’t fit in the story of human evolution. By the 1950s, tests revealed that the skull was only 600 years old and the jaw came from an orangutan. Some knowledgeable person apparently manipulated these pieces, including filing down and staining the teeth.

The scientific world had been duped. So who was behind the fraud? Many suspects have surfaced, including Dawson himself. Today, most signs point to Martin A. C. Hinton, a museum volunteer at the time of the discovery. A trunk was found bearing his initials contained bones that were stained in exactly the same way to the Piltdown fossils. It is suggested that he was out to embarrass his boss, Arthur Smith Woodward, who refused to give him a weekly salary.

1. Watergate

In the summer before President Richard Nixon’s successful re-election to a second term, five men were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, housed in the Watergate Hotel. As details emerged over the next year, it became clear that officials close to Nixon gave the orders to the burglars, perhaps to plant wiretaps on the phones. The question soon became about whether Nixon knew of, covered up or even ordered the break-in.

In response to mounting suspicions, Nixon denied allegations that he knew anything and proclaimed, “I am not a crook.” This lie came back to haunt him. When it was revealed that private White House conversations about the matter were recorded, the investigative committee subpoenaed the tapes. Nixon’s refusal on the basis of “executive privilege” brought the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that he had to relinquish the tapes.

The tapes were exactly the smoking gun needed to implicate Nixon in the cover-up of the scandal. They revealed that he obviously knew more about the matter than he claimed. Upon the initiation of impeachment proceedings, Nixon gave up and resigned from office. The scandal left a lasting scar on the American political scene and helped usher Washington outsider Jimmy Carter into the presidency a few years later

A hobbit measured either volume or weight – how much a hobbit weighed depended on what it was made of, so a hobbit of wheat would weigh more than half as much again as a hobbit of oats. 

If your confused, dont worry, so am I

However, the rats’ lawyer, Bartholomew Chassenee, successfully argued that not all the rats could have recieved the legal summons, and furthermore couldn’t appear in court because they might be eaten by cats. The case was dropped.

In fact the street is as long as some people are tall. Such as Vanja Ivesa (tallest football player living, playing for Eskisehirspor in Turkey) or Zdeno Chara (tallest player in the National Hockey League) are tall. 

The story of Ebenezer Place centres around the MacKay’s Hotel. In the early 1880s, Alexander Sinclair had returned to Scotland from America after making a considerable fortune.

He used much of this fortune to build the MacKay’s Hotel at the junction of Union and River Streets in Wick. Ebernezer Street was constructed in 1883, when the 1 Ebenezer Place building was built.

This building was a hotel at that time, and the owner was asked by the town council to print a name on the shortest side of Mackay’s Hotel. He did so, and the world’s shortest ’street’ was born, although not officially approved as a street for four years because it took that long to get the required Ebenezer Place door in place.

Today, Ebenezer Place contains only a single address because there is no room for another and No 1. Bistro remains part of MacKay’s Hotel. A descendant of Mr. Sinclair was still living in Wick in 2009.

Lajamanu in the Northern Territory, with a population 669, has seen hundreds of small white fish fall from rain clouds with many still alive.

Weather experts in Australia believe the fish, were sucked up in a thunderstorm before being dumped over the tiny town.

Mark Kersemakers, the senior forecaster at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, said: “It could have scooped the fish up to 40,000 to 50,000 feet in the air.

“Once they get up into the system they are pretty much frozen. After some period they are released.”
It is the third time in less than 30 years that Lajamanu has been deluged by falling fish after the phenomenon stuck  in 1974 and 2004.

Joe Ashley, 55, from Jabir, said: “Usually fish are in the water now they are falling out of the sky what if anything bigger falls out of the sky next?
“It could be crocodiles that would be real scary.”

Postcrossing got its name as it is based on BookCrossing, another lovely idea. You leave books you have read in public places for people to find and read. I did this a while ago and was pleasantly surprised to find it had a worldwide following.

The replica model of the Quantas aircraft, a double-deck, four-engine airliner which is currently the world’s largest passenger plane, uses mainly white, grey and red bricks. It took McNaught, a native Australian, eight months to build. It is made up of over 35,000 pieces, measures over 7ft in length and is 6ft wide.

The model moves too with automated touch-screen controls operating functions that include front landing gear, two rear landing gear doors and airbrakes on the wing. Surrounding the aircraft there are baggage carts, fuel tankers and airport employees wearing the obligatory bright attire.

The construction shows only of half the plane’s exterior, which enabled McNaught to recreate scenes from life onboard an airliner.

There is a full crew and passengers can be seen stretching their legs in the aisles, reclining in their seats or nipping to the toilet. And like all good flights, there are one or two celebrities on board – presumably in first class.

McNaught, a father-of-two from Melbourne said of his project: “No one has ever built an Airbus like this. When I first unveiled it people were climbing over each other to have a look.

“I used to work for an airline so had a bit of knowledge about planes, but it is harder to get information these days because of the world terrorism threat.

“Most of the designs came off the internet and I had to adapt the scale of the Airbus because your average Lego man is quite fat for his height.”

The model, which was built his garage, is set to appear in Chicago for the Brickworld Lego event later this year.