by david allan van nostrand | Jan 27, 2026 | Americana, Inventions, The Wayback Machine
The potato chip (puhleez don’t say iconic) is a symbol of portable snacks, specifically the category the food industry calls salty snacks. American companies turn four million tons of potatoes into chips every year. That’s $10 billion of what most Americans consider...
by david allan van nostrand | Jan 19, 2026 | Human Behavior, Inventions, The Wayback Machine
Look on the top of most better bar counters and you’ll find cherries, oranges, lemons, limes, sliced, wedged, twisted, and impaled upon little plastic swords with sharp points and tiny little hilts. Next to them you’ll see swirled stacks of bevnaps (the portmanteau...
by david allan van nostrand | Jan 12, 2026 | Human Behavior, Inventions, The Wayback Machine
For many, the word woodwind is just what it sounds like: wood wind. It conjures up visions of clarinets and oboes, those slender and hollow wooden tubes with holes drilled along their length. Musicians supply the power by blowing into those tubes, changing the sounds...
by david allan van nostrand | Jan 5, 2026 | Human Behavior, Marketing, The world around us, Young moderns
Billy’s father was Catholic and his mother was Jewish. When he was 23, he married a 40-year old woman who fixed his bad teeth, changed his hairstyle, taught him how to act, and talked him into changing his name. Joan Crawford co-starred with him in eight films. She...
