Carl Pettit
Carl Pettit is a columnist, editor and writer working for an array of colorful publications. He specializes in cultural and social issues, as well as East Asia, politics and satire.
Getting a solid apprenticeship or a college education is almost always a good idea for anyone traveling down the career path. The problem arises when you have to decide between several different options. While anyone with a strong skill set (blue- or white-collar) should be fairly employable, it’s just a basic fact that some vocations are more in demand these days than others. It often depends on where, and especially when, you live.
When it comes time to celebrate the passing of another year, people around the world often gather together and make a lot of noise in order to demonstrate their good cheer.
Most people are familiar with the massive, and very impressive, Christmas tree that graces New York City’s Rockefeller Center every year. This tree has come to symbolize the holiday season for millions of people, and is something of national icon, appearing as a backdrop in countless movies and television specials.
This week, families will come together from all across the nation for Thanksgiving. They will stuff themselves full of turkey, side dishes and desserts. Some will laugh and joke with relatives, while others renew old feuds and bicker with their cousins and siblings. No matter how your particular Thanksgiving winds up, you can thank the American Pilgrims for starting this long-standing custom.
If you’re a TV and cinema buff, as well as a barfly, you just might be able to combine your passions together. The characters inhabiting our film and television fantasy worlds need places to hang out, just like we do.
The search for Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamster union boss who was purportedly murdered by the Mafia in 1975, still flares up from time to time — even though Hoffa was declared legally dead, absent his body, in 1982. It seems that good ol’ Jimmy just doesn’t want to go away: he still might turn up in (or rather, beneath) a Michigan driveway.
The United Nations deals with some pretty serious business, especially in a world climate as dangerous as this one, but even so, this august body of world representatives can get pranked now and again. It just so happens that two very audacious Canadian radio talk show hosts managed to pull a fast one on U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Our comedic brethren up north called into the U.N. this week and pretended they had Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister of Canada, on the line.
How low can you go? Tim Storms might be tired of that question, but he’d probably be willing to bet you a large sum of money (if he’s a betting man) that he can sing a heck of a lot lower than you, or anyone you know, can. Tim’s deep register is so low, in fact, that Guinness World Records named his voice as the lowest human voice on the planet.
You know it’s a bad day when a judge decides you need to spend some time behind bars because you didn’t delete your Facebook account. Is having a Facebook page now a crime? It seems that if you irk the wrong judge in the state of Kentucky, it just might be.
Yes, paradise does exist on earth. It might not be paradise for everyone, but for a single guy on the prowl, these cities are hard to beat. These are the locations where women vastly outnumber men.
Sometimes the food you eat is trying to kill you. Not in the traditional sense, with saturated fat, refined sugars and cholesterol. There are a few foods out there that can literally end your life if improperly prepared, or at the very least make you terribly sick. While you probably won’t encounter most of the items on this list during the normal course of your life, a few of them are surprisingly common.