daisy chain

michael andersen and andrew phillips

On January 31, 1990, the first McDonald’s opened in Soviet Moscow. Western journalists reported that thousands of locals lined up to spend the equivalent of several days’ wages on hamburgers and French fries.

Early last year, the cheapest Big Macs in the world could be found in Argentina and South Africa, where they sold for the equivalent of less than a dollar.

“Mac” hasn’t broken the country’s 1000 most popular baby names in at least the last 50 years, but in 2001, 6836 newborn American girls and 170 newborn American boys were named “Mackenzie.”

Canada’s Mackenzie River, the longest in North America, was named for Sir Alexander Mackenzie. Mackenzie, however, referred to it as the “River of Disappointment,” because it failed to lead him to a Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean.

In August, the journal Science reported that the continuing Arctic thaw could finally open a Northwest Passage through the Canadian archipelago in as few as ten years. Ships traveling between Europe and East Asia could cut up to 4,000 miles off their trips.

In 2001, 13,492 ships cut through Panama on their way between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The lowest toll ever paid for use of the Panama Canal was 36 cents, by adventurer Richard Halliburton when he swam the canal in 1928.

The myth of extraterrestrial life on Mars resulted in part from an English mistranslation of the work of Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who observed canali, or “channels,” on the red planet in 1877—but later in his life, Schiaparelli himself became convinced that the structures had been built artificially.

Looking for corporate partners to help publicize John Paul II’s 1999 visit to Mexico, the Vatican accepted donations from Frito-Lay in exchange for permission to produce commemorative bags of papas fritas bearing the papal coat of arms and containing a tiny photograph of el papa. A spokesperson for the snack company said the pun was “purely coincidental.”

McDonald’s is the largest buyer of potatoes, pork, and beef in the U.S. It is also the world’s largest distributor of toys.