Day: February 5, 2014

Let’s celebrate Facebook’s 10th birthday with a fun fact. Ready? Here it is: in America, more people now check Facebook than read the Bible on a daily basis.

Facebook says it has 757 million daily active users worldwide, the Associated Press reports. Of those, 19 percent are from the United States or Canada, so that’s 143 million daily users across North America. And according to the latest polling numbers, there are about 40 million U.S. adults reading the Bible each day. Even those of us with poor math skills know that 40 million is a much smaller number than 143 million.

Of course, there are probably plenty of people who read both Facebook AND the Bible each day, and those people are probably the ones sharing biblical quotes in your newsfeed all the time.

Some fake cashmere is actually rat fur. I repeat: the so-soft cashmere that is now touching your very skin may have once been worn by a rat. Again: You might be wearing a rat’s old coat.

Italian police seized over a million fake cashmere garments made at Chinese-run firms in Rome and distributed in Florence that were found to contain acrylic, viscose, and oh, some rat fur. An Italian court “cautioned” 14 Chinese-born people for fraud, which seems like a slap on the wrist considering that some of the rat-fur cashmere was used to make pashminas that touched people’s faces.

So you should burn that pashmina that your aunt bought you in Florence that she swears is “real Italian.”

[BBC]

News organizations’ style guides, along with fusty cousins like dictionaries and encyclopedias, don’t have a reputation for being super-casual or quick to adapt. The New York Times, for instance, made the decision to get with what the kids are doing and drop the hyphen from emailjust four months ago. But the situation is different over at BuzzFeed, a media site that this week compiled a long list of reasons grilled cheese sandwiches are better than boyfriends.

On Tuesday, the irreverent outlet published its internal style guide online. Many of the entries are funny in a bathetic way, mixing serious rules that BuzzFeed writers must follow with words one might find in the tweets of a mouthy tween (see: the instruction to always hyphenate d-bag). And because the outlet is so purposefully conversational and current, many of the entries also reflect zeitgeist-y language trends. Here are…

CVS announced Wednesday that the pharmacy will stop selling cigarettes and other tobacco products in its 7,600 stores by October, a decision that could cost the drug retailer as much as $2 billion in annual sales. The move was cheered by public health advocates and federal officials, including President Barack Obama, a former smoker, who called CVS’s decision a “powerful example.”

But CVS left out another matter entirely: electronic cigarettes. CVS doesn’t currently sell e-cigs—battery powered devices that emit a nicotine vapor instead of smoke—and it stopped notably short of saying whether it would do so in the future, leaving manufacturers in limbo.

CVS’s choice to stay in an e-cig holding pattern until the FDA comes out with new guidance, a process the agency has delayed for months, reflects the current confusion about how to classify electronic cigarettes, which are not medicines like nicotine patches or gum, but aren’t…

Adults have had years to build up indifference to rain. We shrug it off, grab an umbrella, turn up our collars and trudge through it. Kids, however, kids are different.

In a new viral video set to Jon Foreman’s “In My Arms,” a little girl named Kayden learns to love the rain, and boy does she love it. The youngster holds out her arms and spins around in a scene that looks like a kiddie version of a Nicholas Sparks novel. She resists an umbrella, raincoat, and shelter indoors where it’s warm and dry because all she wants to do is play in the rain.

The clip is so cute that it almost makes you want to forgo an umbrella. Almost.

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In addition to record ratings, Jay Leno now boasts a new record for…Bill Clinton jokes.

Out of the 43,892 jokes the comedian has made on the show between 1992 and Jan. 24, 2014, he has cracked 4,607 about the former president, according to a new study by The Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) at George Mason University. Essentially, Bubba was the subject of about one out of every 10 jokes that Leno made about public affairs and public figures, researchers wrote. Democrats were also targeted more than Republicans because they were in the White House more during Leno’s time as host, and the comedian’s humor tends to focus on presidents.

Below are the other top figures that the late-night star has targeted, per CMPA’s analysis, so we’ll see if he makes any more cracks at them before he steps down tomorrow:

Top Twenty Political Joke Targets

1. Bill…

Iran plans to launch an initiative to get all its citizens covered by health insurance, President Hassan Rouhani announced on Twitter Wednesday.

Rouhani’s account, which is not controlled by him directly but is widely viewed as credible and has broken news on his actions in the past, threw in the hashtag #RouhaniCare, clearly an homage to Obamacare—President Barack Obama’s health care reform law—and perhaps an olive branch as the two countries try to expand on a landmark deal on Iran’s nuclear program.

The Islamic Republic already has a fairly extensive network of basic public clinics and health care is guaranteed to Iranians under the constitution.