Improv Everywhere

Improv is a group of people who put on spontaneuous events. Well, the events are well planned but to the unsuspecting participant it certainly seems spontaneous. If you ever watched the old TV show Fame, or Grease, or even HS Musical then you've seen the spontaneous musical moments when people just start singing and dancing. Improv Everywhere does a great one at the mall food court.



A food court worker spills lemonade and needs a few napkins to clean up the mess and bursts into song. Other performers "called Agents" start singing as well.

Fun stuff!

There is a T-shirt for everyone....

Looking for a way to stand out from the crowd....why not go to Google and search for "funny t-shirts". There is something for every type of humor. I would recommend you do this at school, though.

Moniker Maladies: Research Shows our Names Cause Problems

Next time Frank or Frannie tells you that it wasn’t their fault they failed the test you might want to listen up. This one is straight out of the files of “I can’t believe someone really studied this”. When skimming a recent issue of Newsweek I saw a brief story about a study about to be published in which it was found that people are more prone to do, prefer, or accept certain things that start with the same letter as their first initial. Huh? Research shows that people names Abby or Ben actually have a higher GPA (more As and Bs) then students whose name begins with C, D, or even F. Baseball players who name begins with a K (hello Ken Griffey, Jr.) strikeout more often than players who names begin with other letters. If that is the case, perhaps Homer Bailey shouldn’t be pitching, maybe he needs to bat cleanup….with a name like Homer.

Believe it or not this phenomenon is backed up by data from multiple research studies and even has its own name “name letter effect” or NLE. Research has shown that Mark is more likely to attend Miami, marry Molly, and move to Milford than is Connie who is more likely to attend Cincinnati, marry Chuck, and move to Cleveland. You can read the study right on the web and see all the data they have to back it up. Fascinating stuff! When you see the differences between the control group and the group inflicted with “unconscious self-liking” you think to yourself, well, they differences are so small. Surely it is just chance. However, in science, there is a saying that if something levitates (raising the number) you don’t focus on how high it levitated but why it moved at all….so the fact remains that there is a measureable distance between the two groups. So be careful what you name your children.

We really need to test this theory at school:

Does Jeff, John, Jen, Joni, Jason and Jon like jello more than other non-J teachers?

Do Betsy and Barb like brownies more than the other non-B teachers?

Do Pat, Pam, and Patty all prefer pralines more than the non-P teachers?

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=946249#PaperDownload