Back in 1976, the Zero Population Growth society launched an effort to get Valentine's Day rebranded as "Love Carefully Day," as a way to bring awareness to the problem of teen pregnancy.
"Happy Love Carefully Day" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "Happy Valentine's Day," but their effort must have been somewhat successful, because Google reveals that even this year a few places, such as Allan Hancock College, will hold Love Carefully Day events.
Lincoln Journal Star - Feb 13, 1976
Tampa Tribune - Feb 13, 1976
Posted By: Alex - Wed Feb 14, 2018 -
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Category: Holidays
After Meco Monardo created a hit disco version of the Star Wars soundtrack in 1977, the next album he planned was Meco's Time Machine. He explained, "We'll visit eight different time periods of Earth's history and observe events. Those events will be translated into music. We'll start before the dawn of man, in prehistoric times, and we'll end in New York in 1980."
But it doesn't seem like that album ever came out. Instead, Meco spent his entire career producing disco versions of movie soundtracks, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek, and An American Werewolf in London.
Plenty more of his stuff on YouTube, if you're interested.
In 1980, Danya Padilla of Montclair, New Jersey came out with the "SWEAT-T." It was a grey t-shirt with artificial sweat marks under the arms and down the front and back, designed for people who hated exercise but wanted to look like jocks anyway.
I haven't been able to find any pictures of an actual SWEAT-T, but the picture below is what I imagine it must have looked like.
Back in 2010, in order to prove his theory that "in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most — not the nutritional value of the food," Kansas State University professor of human nutrition Mark Haub lived almost entirely on Twinkies for 10 weeks. He ate one every three hours.
Though he added some variety into his diet with side helpings of Doritos, sugary cereals, and Oreos. As well as a multivitamin pill, protein shake, and some vegetables daily.
But by limiting himself to 1800 calories a day he lost 27 pounds, and other measures of health, such as cholesterol levels, all improved.
Years before the Internet company Yahoo! came into existence, the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was urging use of the word as a more hygienic form of greeting: "When you come across a friend, raise your hands to the sky and scream 'Yaa Hoo' instead of employing the universal handshake."
The Molina Dispatch - Apr 1, 1988
Apparently Rajneesh believed that "Yaa-Hoo" was quite a powerful word, since he also had his followers use it in a ritualized laughter therapy:
The first part will be Yaa-Hoo!—for three hours, people simply laugh for no reason at all. And whenever their laughter starts dying they again say, "Yaa-Hoo!" and it will come back. Digging for three hours you will be surprised how many layers of dust have gathered upon your being. It will cut them like a sword, in one blow. For seven days continuously, three hours every day... you cannot conceive how much transformation can come to your being.
And then the second part is "Yaa-boo." The first part removes everything that hinders your laughter—all the inhibitions of past humanity, all the repressions. It cuts them away. It brings a new space within you, but still you have to go a few steps more to reach the temple of your being, because you have suppressed so much sadness, so much despair, so much anxiety, so many tears—they are all there, covering you can destroying your beauty, your grace, your joy.
Alex Boese
Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction books such as Elephants on Acid.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.
Chuck Shepherd
Chuck is the purveyor of News of the Weird, the syndicated column which for decades has set the gold-standard for reporting on oddities and the bizarre.
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