THE HARRIER HUSTLE

In 1996, Pepsico ran a promotion where empty Pepsi containers could be redeemed for prizes. Each container was worth a certain number of points, and when you accumulated enough points, you could get a shirt, sunglasses, a hat, a Harrier jet, or the like.

Harrier jet? Well, one of the Pepsi commercials featured a teenager using Pepsi points to acquire various personal items in preparation for school while identifying how many points were required for each item. At the end of the commercial, the teen lands a Harrier jet near the bike rack of his school and smugly says "Sure beats the bus." The commercial then flashes on the screen the message "Harrier Fighter: 7,000,000 Pepsi Points."

John Leonard, a business school student, saw the commercial. He discovered that Pepsi points could be purchased directly for cash at the price of ten cents per point. He got together with five investors and, on March 28, 1996, tendered 15 Pepsi points along with a check for $700,008.50 for the remaining 6,999,985 points and demanded his Harrier (the surplusage of $10 represented costs for "shipping and handling.") Pepsi refused to give Leonard his plane (which normally sold for about $33.8 million apiece when they were purchased for the US Marine Corps).

Leonard sued Pepsi for misleading advertising, fraud, breach of contract, and deceptive and unfair trade practices. He lost. The judge bought Pepsi's argument that no objectively reasonable person could have thought that the commercial constituted a genuine offer on the part of Pepsi.

It was probably just as well for Leonard. The Department of Defense would not have allowed a civilian to purchase a Harrier anyway without first gutting it and stripping it of various armaments and military features--including the famous Harrier engine which permits it to take off and land vertically.

Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

THE AVIAN CHROMATIC DECEPTION

Peacocks are actually brown in color. Their famous delightful Technicolor effects which led them to be adopted for years as a trademark for NBC color television broadcasts actually are generated by thousands of microscopic indentations in the feathers which are covered with thin layers called lamellae. When viewed as a whole, these produce interference patterns in the reflected light and the creation of the gorgeous iridescent hues of the feathers. This phenomenon is shared by certain other birds such as hummingbirds and most blue-hued birds as well as with some butterflies and moths and a few other things in nature.

If you ground up feathers from one of these birds and broke up the lamellae patterns, you would end up with a drab earth-colored paste.

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THE ADMIRAL'S BUG

Photo by James S. Davis [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper of the US Navy is usually credited with coining the term "bug" and "debugging" with reference to a malfunction in a computer and the subsequent repair of that malfunction.  In 1947, when she was working on a primitive computer at Harvard University called the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator, her associates found an actual moth which had been shorting out a circuit (the moth is pictured below and is now enshrined at the Smithsonian Institute), and she allegedly came up with these terms as a result.  However, most entymologists (and entomologists, for that matter) believe that the origin of "bug" as a synonym for glitch originated at a much earlier time.

By Courtesy of the Naval Surface Warfare Center,
Dahlgren, VA., 1988. [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

THE HEBREW-VULCAN CAUSALITY

The split-fingered Vulcan salute from Star Trek was derived from the Blessing Hands ritual of Orthodox Judaism, where it is used to anoint synagogue participants on holy days.  It was introduced into the TV show by Leonard Nimoy, who learned it from his grandfather.

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