Black Friday

Next friday is Black Friday. Many people think that the black part refers to the utter chaos that surrounds the crazy deals and people. This, however, is wrong.

When accounting books used to really be books and not all in Excel sheets, accountants used 2 colors of ink depending on whether the money total was positive or negative. (you can make Excel do this :-) ) Black was for positive numbers and red was for negative numbers.

Hrrmmm......now we have a common occurrence. Black.

Shop owners would sometimes rely on holiday sales to ensure that they ended the year in the positives. The day after Thanksgiving is a huge day for retail and would cause stores to be in the black.

I recently finished reading Stiff by Mary Roach. It goes into grand detail about what happens when you donate your body to science and what has happened in the past to those who did not willing donate their bodies but the body snatchers got them and they ended up on the cutting table anyway. (don't worry, it's illegal these days in the US).

Roach enjoys sharing her sometimes useful useless pieces of information, and so I'll share one with you. An autopsy cannot be done on anything besides a human (well, chimps learn how to hold a scalpel or some other species develops opposable thumbs). By definition, an autopsy is a "postmortem medical inspection of one's own species". So I hope to never see an autopsy of something besides of human......well....maybe that would be an interesting sight to see.

FYI, the postmortem medical inspection of a specimen of another species is called a necropsy.