30 September: Chewing Gum Day

Chewing Gum Day Celebrates the birthday of William Wrigley, Jr. Here are 10 things you might not know about chewing gum:

1. People have been chewing gum for at least 6,000 years. Gum that old, with teeth marks, was found in Finland. It was made from Birch bark tar. The ancient Greeks chewed gum made from the resin of the mastic tree. Both these substances have antiseptic properties, so it’s thought early people chewed it to keep their mouths healthy. The Greeks called their gum "mastiche" which comes from the Greek word meaning "gnashing of teeth".
2. Modern gum was developed in the USA after settlers observed Native Americans chewing tree resin. Around 1850 a gum made from paraffin wax was developed and soon exceeded the spruce gum in popularity. Chewers would periodically dip the gum in a bowl of powdered sugar to keep it sweet.
3. William Semple filed an early patent on chewing gum, patent number 98,304, on December 28, 1869. The popularity of chewing gum soared during prohibition, when people needed to hide the fact they’d been drinking on the sly. “It takes your breath away!” declared one advertising slogan.
4. Chewing gum has a virtually indefinite shelf life because of its low moisture content and non-reactive nature. It may, over time, lose its flavour or become brittle, but it will never be unsafe to use. Hence in many countries, it isn’t legally required to have an expiry date.
5. Chewing gum burns around 11 calories per hour.
6. Benefits of chewing gum include improving alertness, concentration and memory and reducing tension. Chewing gum can help with some common problems – it can help reduce crying when cutting Onions and helps prevent ear popping when flying. The latter is because chewing gum makes people salivate which in turn means swallowing more, which helps balance the pressure. Doctors have found that chewing gum aids recovery after intestinal surgery. It gets the gastric juices flowing without the patient having to eat anything.
7. The first ever item to be bought using a Bar code was a pack of chewing gum, in 1974.
8. A major problem with chewing gum is that humans, messy pups that they are, don’t take their litter home but just dump it wherever they are when they’ve finished chewing. Chewing gum litter is the second most common type of litter, after cigarettes. In 2000 a study on Oxford Street, one of London's busiest shopping streets, showed a quarter of a million blobs of chewing gum were stuck to its pavement. It costs Westminster council over £100,000 a year to remove chewing gum from its streets. In Rome, 15,000 pieces of chewed gum are discarded every day and the removal of each piece costs the city one euro. Singapore’s solution to the problem has been to ban the stuff completely. Possessing chewing gum there can get you a heavy fine of more than $6,000 unless you have a prescription for it.
9. A London artist called Ben Wilson paints chewing gum that has been discarded on pavements. He says "I like to make something special out of something that people find disgusting". British designer Anna Bullus has made a business out of recycling chewing gum into plastic products like shoe soles, rubber boots, mugs, Pencils, Frisbees, door stops, and containers for collecting used gum.
10. Over 3 million packs of chewing gum are made every day in Britain. Most of it comes from a factory in Plymouth, Devon. In the US, the total amount of chewing gum sold in a year would make a single stick 3.5 million miles long. That’s long enough to reach the Moon and back seven times or to circle the earth’s equator 150 times.

See also: Bubble gum

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

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