In the summer of 1994, the internet was a quiet place. There were no secure shopping carts, no digital wallets, and no Amazon. Most people viewed the web as a giant digital bulletin board. But a small group of twenty-somethings working at Pizza Hut headquarters in Wichita, Kansas, wanted to try something crazy. They built a crude, gray website called "PizzaNet." To test it, they set up a computer in a local pizza shop. If a customer lived in Wichita, had a rare internet connection, and knew the specific web address, they could type in their name, address, and select a medium pepperoni, mushroom, and extra cheese pizza. The website didn't even have a way to accept credit cards. The order just popped up on a screen in the kitchen, the cooks baked it, and the delivery driver collected cash at the door. In late August 1994, a customer actually placed an order. The screen beeped, the pizza was made, and history was quietly altered. It is widely considered the very first commercial purchase ever made on the public web. Within a year of that single pizza delivery, Amazon and eBay were founded. Today, global e-commerce is a multi-trillion-dollar industry that delivers everything from groceries to cars directly to your doorstep. But the entire digital economy we rely on today kicked off because someone was sitting at home in Kansas, staring at a computer screen, and really wanting a slice of pizza. 🍕💻

One of the most satisfying moments in WITNESS (1985) is watching a local punk mistake John Book for an ordinary Amish man. Harrison Ford lets the misunderstanding breathe just long enough before correcting it the hard way.

Unbiased poll results for Dolly Parton

Here is a story about a group of students who fundraised and worked for an entire year to bring Neil de Grasse Tyson to speak at an event: "We were a small college club with around 10 members and on a whim one of our members emailed tyson's agent to see if we could book him. We found out it would cost 40k (it raised to 50k in December of that year where I think it still might be) for his speaking fee plus expenses to have him come to our college for 1 day where he'd host a small lecture, a press meeting, dinner with up to 6 people, and the main lecture and a book signing time permitting. We decided to go for it, and spent a year where our club exclusively worked on bringing him in. When he arrived, myself and others introduced ourselves and our fields of study. He went after first of us in humanities or soft sciences pretty much relentlessly from the get go. We're all used to the philosophy major working at McDonald's joke, but he wasn't trying to be funny, and spent the ride from the airport making repeated comments about the uselessness of our majors. Additionally he spent about 5 minutes trying to show that logic was stupid but he was citing logical rules and Occam's razor. The small lecture was him bragging about how famous he was, and how easy it is to pull yourself out of poverty or etc. The dinner was for leaders of other clubs so helped us raise money. He took the piss out of how one student held her fork, and was impossibly smug when giving advice to physics students. The main event was a terribly boring lecture consisting of fart jokes and fan service; teasing the upcoming TV series he was in and not much else. He spent a quarter of the time reading Sagan's blue dot, which is nice but shouldn't have cost us because it wasn't his material. He left at about 2am, and we were all exhausted because we had spent the day busy setting up and tearing down. The whole affair cost nearly 85k. The additional money being for locations, personnel, air fare, Tyson's hotel, catering, etc. We all decided he was an ass hole. I'd never want to spend 16 hours with a celebrity again." From another member of the same group: "Neil deGrasse Tyson, who came to our university, gave a crappy speech rife with lame fart jokes, was rude and disrespectful with the people who organized the event (there were a couple campus clubs working on it for about a year). He equated one of the group's member's philosophy major as a degree in mental masturbation. We were so pumped to hear a talk about the universe, astrophysics, black holes and dark matter, and instead he gave a speech on debunking lame pop media science misconceptions such as the "supermoon" because the organizing club is known as a skeptic/secular humanist society. He then basically said he did us a favor and that we "owed him one" for that. He delivered a private lecture to our group and members of the campus physics club in which he realized he had said something witty, whipped out hsi iphone, and spent the next fifteen minutes trying to come up with the perfect wording for it to post it to his twitter. In the middle of a lecture we spent a year's work and $55k total to organize."

I guess it didn't work out!

You should always be Southern roadtripping whenever possible. I've developed one of the best maps for this ever to be constructed.

The previous headline on this article did not meet The Globe’s editorial standard. It has been replaced.

The last car in the Union Pacific Big Boy train was not a caboose, obviously. It was a Pullman car. Specifically, it was the Marco Polo, built in Chicago in 1927. It was used by Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he was governor of New York and president of the United States. Normally, it is on display at the Southeastern Railway Museum in suburban Atlanta, Georgia.

Amerikanerne burde nektes å delta i internasjonale fotballstevner frem til de lærer seg at det heter fotball