My Mum used to say we should eat mince pies on each of the 12 days of Christmas. One mince pie on the first day, two on the second, and so on, until we eat 12 on the 12th day of Christmas. Did anyone else have this custom?

A little late to this conversation, but please be advised that right now we have NOT turned our clocks back in the USA. I believe they will be turned back the night of November 3 (morning of November 4). So if you are in the Eastern Time Zone of the USA (including New York, Boston, and Detroit), rig...

I am pretty sure this is an urban myth. (The one about sucking the chocolate off of nuts). I doubt it happened to Pete's dad, either Pete's dad was telling a story (and making himself one of the characters), or else Pete misheard and thought it had happened to his Dad. This is usually how these urba...

Remember that Harry Grindell Matthews was a crackpot, and none of his "inventions" were successful. He probably got his inspiration from science fiction of the time. For example, the first appearance of a "death ray" was actually in a 1914 film serial called "The Exploits of...

I am applying for a job with the U.S. government, and so, yes, I have had to fill out a form which asked me questions like "are you a terrorist"?

Even if you can't write the SAME essay for each university application, see if you can write similar essays. That is, you can save time if you can spot ways that you can use pretty-much the same essay, maybe only rewriting one or two paragraphs. It's always a good idea to write about something no ot...

Yes, Tolkien wrote Father Christmas letters, but there was no room for Father Christmas in Middle-Earth. His ideas about a "secondary world" drove him to make Middle-Earth internally consistent. He didn't like the way that C.S.Lewis combined elements like Father Christmas with things like ...

He is in the film. I watched the film very closely, because I was curious what they would call him. He is called Father Christmas in the original book, but American children wouldn't recognize that name, we only say Santa Claus. So I wondered how they would handle it in the movie. From watching the ...

Quaker is an American company, almost always in the USA when we eat oatmeal we use Quaker Oats, they really dominate that part of the market. I didn't realize the brand had also reached the UK. Quaker was historically one of the first companies in the USA to really use advertising to sell their prod...

Okay . . . I have eaten oatmeal since I was a child. When I was a very young child in the USA I heard the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, in which the bears had some mysterious food called "porridge". I thought this was some sort of magical fairytale food. When my family later liv...

There is a rule that many people use in the USA, that certain moneys (different people define which moneys differently) get put under the "Free Parking" space. Then when someone lands on the free parking space, they get all that money. Monopoly is actually a pretty good game if you play by...

I do work at a Travel Agency in the USA, but we are really supposed to stick to working with folks from the USA or Canada. If a group of people who were residents (not necessarily citizens) of USA and/or Canada wanted to do an Enid Blyton tour, I could handle all of the logistics and organization. (...

What is the original source for the "naked tennis"? Every source I can access has copied this story from somewhere else. Where was the original statement of this? Is there more than one "eyewitness" or "near-eyewitness" account?

I'm trying to figure out how they found a computer voice that has what I think is an Eastern European accent.

A "Kirin" in Japanese is very similar to the creature we call a Unicorn in English.