Interesting Tab

INTERESTING - NOVEMBER

11/18/24
About Games and Puzzles

The game of chess was invented in China about 2,200 years ago, before moving on to Persia (now Iran). Pieces were carved in the form of elephants, horses, foot soldiers, and chariots.

The game of checkers or droughts goes back about 5,000 years. A version of it very similar to the modern ones was found in the ruins of the ancient city of Ur in present-day Iraq.

The crossword puzzle was created by journalist Arthur Wynne. On Sunday, December 21, 1913, a diamond shaped puzzle appeared in the newspaper The New York World.

The jigsaw puzzle was invented in 1767 by the English teacher John Spilsbury. To teach geography to his students, he glued maps to hardwood boards and then sawed up the boards into the shapes of the individual countries.

The most popular puzzle in history, the Rubik's Cube, was invented in 1974 by Hungarian mathematician Erno Rubik. There is only one correct way to assemble the cube and 43 quintillion (43 followed by 18 zeros) wrong ways!

 

11/14/24
Black Holes: How do we see them?

Since black holes swallow light and will not let any escape, astronomers can't "see" black holes directly. So, they are forced to be creative when searching for them in the sky. 

Looking for X rays:

One thing astronomers have learned is that not all material being sucked into a black hole can be swallowed it once. In some ways, it's like letting water out of the bathtub. The tub doesn't empty immediately; it takes a while for the water to spiral down the drain.

As matter spirals toward a black hole, it heats up, creating what astronomers call an accretion disk. Since this disk forms outside of the horizon it's super-intense heat can be detected by Earth-based telescopes as X rays. Astronomers have detected several X ray sources they believe to be black holes.

Looking for flying stars:

Some black holes have already sucked in all the matter within their grasp, meaning they don't have an accretion disk. These black holes are harder to detect. In this case, astronomers look for a black hole's effect on other stars.

Astronomers have identified several stars that appear to be part of a double star system, although they can detect only one star. The star they see is moving extremely fast, as if it's flying around an invisible supermassive star. The only thing that could be massive enough to cause the star to move that fast – and be invisible – is a black hole.

 

11/13/24
Stuff About Inventions

Nonshrinking cotton fabric was created in 1930 by the inventor Sanford Cluett of the Sanforizer Company. Cluett created an ammonia-based bath process that cause cotton fibers to swell, preventing shrinkage when washed.

In 1994, the first genetically engineered vegetable, the "Flavor-Savr Tomato," was approved for commercial marketing. The tomato was designed for slow ripening and increased shelf life.

The Chinese invented the umbrella over 4,000 years ago by waxing their paper parasols, used for sun protection, to keep dry in the rain.

The ancient Romans were the first to understand and practice of crop rotation – the alternate planting of legumes and grains. The legumes replaced the nitrogen in the soil and insured a more plentiful grain harvest.

The Ancient Romans invented the hourglass around A.D. 100, supposedly to time the orations of speakers in the Roman Senate.

11/11/24
Inventions Just For Fun

The first remote-control for a television was invented in 1950 by the Zenith Corporation of America. Called the "Lazy Bone," it was attached to the television by a thick wire. Five years later, Zenith created the first wireless remote, the "Flash-matic." 

The first ferris wheel was built for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Its inventor was George W. Ferris, a bridge builder.

The trampoline was invented in 1936 by George Nissen, an American circus acrobat and Olympic medalist. He called it a "flashfold."

The roller coaster was invented in Ohio by a toboggan designer, George Miller. In 1926, Miller patented his "Flying Turns" ride, which featured cars sliding down inclined ramps. It would be several years later before Miller added tracks to his design.

 

11/7/24
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: Why did the founders choose the name Phoenix, Arizona?

A: The phoenix is a bird in Greek mythology that rises from the ashes. Since there were traces of an ancient Indian or prehistoric settlement at the site, the new settlement was seen as rising again, just like the Phoenix.

 

Q: How did Portland, Oregon get its name?

A: In 1845, there was a coin-flip to decide whether to name the new settlement after Portland, Maine or Boston, Massachusetts.

 

Q: How did Boston, Massachusetts and Portland, Maine get their names?

A: Both Boston and Portland were named after places in England. Massachusetts is a corruption of an Indian word, and Maine is named for a province in France.

 

Q: What architect said, "Doctors can bury their mistakes. Architects can only advise their clients to plant vines"?

A: Master builder Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 – 1959).

 

Q: In a letter to his sister, how did Harry S. Truman describe the presidency?

A: "All the president is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway."

 

11/6/24
Black Holes:

A black hole is made up of two parts: an event horizon and a singularity.

 

The event horizon can be considered the surface of the black hole. Anything that crosses the event horizon would have to travel faster than the speed of light to escape.

 

Once inside the event horizon, everything will end up within the singularity – the incredibly massive point that takes up no space.

 

So as long as an object doesn’t cross the event horizon, it is able to wander through space.

 

Once it crosses the event horizon, however it will end up within the singularity, where it will remain forever.

 

What about their sizes?

The size of a black hole depends on how much mass is inside it.

 

But wait a minute. How can black holes come in different sizes when everything within a black hole ends up in a singularity, which takes up no space and, therefore, has no size?

 

While the size of a singularity can't increase, the size of its event horizon can.

 

As more mass is swallowed by a black hole, the gravity of its singularity increases even if its size doesn't. (Remember, the laws of science break down here, so don't worry if it sounds a little strange.)

 

As its gravity increases, so does the distance at which its effects can be felt. This expanding gravity means that the event horizon also expands.

 

Event horizons can be as small as a few miles across or as large as a few million miles across.   

 

11/4/24
Stuff About Candy, Dessert or Junk Food

The doughnut was invented by the American Capt. Hanson Crockett Gregory in 1847. He wanted to improve his mother's fried cakes, which were always undercooked and doughy in the middle. His solution? Remove the middle so that the dough could fry evenly.

Gelatin as a dessert was first introduced in 1845 by millionaire industrialist and inventor Peter Cooper. But the product wasn't popular with consumers and Cooper sold his patent. By 1906, the sales of the fruit-flavored "Jell-O" reached $1 million.

The candy "Life Savers" was invented in 1912 by chocolate manufacturer Clarence Crane of Cleveland, Ohio. He promoted them as a "summer candy" that wouldn't melt in the heat like chocolate. The original mints looked like life preservers, hence the name.

The lollipop was invented in 1916 by Samuel Born, a Russian immigrant who invented a machine that inserted a stick into a molten sugar disk. Born also invented those chocolate sprinkles you love to put on ice cream.

In 1905, 11-year-old Frank Epperson left his fruit drink with a stirrer outside overnight. The result was a frozen popsicle, originally called the "Epcicle."

The potato chip was invented in 1853 by George Crum, a cook at the Moon Lake Lodge in Saratoga Springs, New York. A fussy customer returned fried potatoes that were too thick, and Crum, a temperamental cook, sliced the potatoes so thin that they couldn't be eaten with a fork. The customer loved them, and a new treat was born.

 

INTERESTING - OCTOBER

10/31/24
FYI

Maine is not the easternmost state in the United States.

Alaska is not only the westernmost state but also the easternmost state. Some of Alaska's Aleutian Islands (the Rat Islands and the Near Islands) lie west of the 180th meridian, the dividing line between the Eastern Hemisphere and the Western Hemisphere, placing them securely in the Eastern Hemisphere.

 

Chess did not originate in Russia.

Chess began in sixth-century India as a game called chaturanga (“army” in Sanskrit) using miniature chariots, calvary, infantry, and elephants as playing pieces. The game spread to Persia, which was conquered by the Arabs in the seventh century. Arab invaders brought the game to Spain in the tenth century, where it spread throughout Europe. The Europeans gradually changed the playing pieces to bishops, nights, pawns, and rooks. The Arabs had renamed the game al-schah-mat (“the king is dead" in Arabic), which in English became the word checkmate. In Russia, chess is called schahkmat. The English word chess comes from the Persian word shah, meaning "king."

People think chess originated in Russia because Russians held the official world chess championship title from 1948 until 1972, when American Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky. The Russians regained the title in 1975 and held it through 2004.

 

10/30/24
Stuff About Inventions

Thomas Edison filed 1,093 patents in his lifetime, including 34 patents for the telephone, 141 for batteries, 150 for the telegraph, and 389 for electric light and power.

In 1770, the English chemist Joseph Priestley coined the name "rubber" for the natural latex of the South African Hevia brasiliensis tree. Priestley noted that latex was excellent for rubbing out the marks of a black pencil on paper.

In 1944, Chinese botanists discovered a living specimen of the dawn redwood tree. Before this discovery, the tree was known only through 20-million-year-old fossil samples and thought to be extinct

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) patented a design for a self-pasting scrapbook in 1873.

A device for tying ships to keep them stable while freight was unloaded was patented by President Abraham Lincoln in 1849.

 

10/28/24
Who said that?

The days of thinking of time as a river – evenly flowing, always advancing – are over. Time perception, like vision, is a construction of the brain and is shockingly easy to manipulate experimentally.

David Eagleman

 

A person has all sorts of lags built into him. . . . One, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and you're able to react. . . . We are always acting on what just finished happening. It happened at least one-thirtieth of a second ago. We think we are in the present, but we aren't. The present we know it's only a movie of what happened in the past.

Tom Wolfe, paraphrasing Ken Kesey

 

The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.

Ezra Pound

 

Every act of perception is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an active imagination.

Gerard M. Edelman

 

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

Barbara Kingsolver

 

We tend to think of memories as moments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they’re also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you've experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.

Diane Ackerman

 

10/24/24
About The Computer

Global Positioning System (GPS) technology was invented by the United States Department of Defense at a cost of $12 billion in taxpayer money. The system uses satellites and a computer to coordinate the information from those satellites to calculate navigational positions.

One of the most popular computer games ever invented, "Tetris," was created in Russia in the early 1980s but never patented.

The first "touch screen" computer was developed at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Sam Hurst, who taught there, patented his "Elograph" in 1971.

In 1943, Thomas Watson, the chairman of IBM, predicted a world market for "maybe only five computers."

The refresh rate of a computer screen can exhaust the eye muscles and make it difficult to focus. This is because the eyes are forced to refocus hundreds of times per minute as the screen redraws itself.

"Firmware" is a kind of fixed software that resides in appliances like microwave ovens, televisions, coffee timers, and DVD viewers. It contains basic instructions that remain in memory after the appliances turned off.

Digital camera technology developed from the same technology that recorded video images. In 1951, the first videotape recorder (VTR) captured live images from television cameras by converting the images into electrical impulses and saving the information onto magnetic tape.

 

10/23/19
About The Computer

In 1970, the engineer James Fergason invented the first liquid crystal display, or LCD. Liquid crystals are display panels – used in devices such as wristwatches – that reflect light when voltage is applied.

The Xerox company introduced the first laser printer, the 9700 model, in 1978. It was the first commercially available laser printer in the world and could output 120 pages per minute.

The initials DOS stand for Disc Operating System. The DOS was introduced by IBM and originally fit into two 700K floppy disks.

The programming language FORTRAN, which stands for FORmula TRANslation, was invented by John Backus at IBM. FORTRAN is considered to be the first high-level, or reader-friendly computer language.

10/21/24
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: Who was the first philosopher to use a typewriter?

A: Frederick Nietzsche, who purchased his first typewriter in 1881. The great nihilist’s attempts to master these primitive writing machines were unsuccessful and frustrating. In fact, one commentator has suggested a connection between Nietzsche’s frustration with typing and his insanity a few years later.

 

Q: Who was the first person to describe the circulation of blood?

A: English physician William Harvey discovered the circulation of blood in the human body. His treatise On the Motion of the Heart & Blood in Animals was first published in 1628. For his medical achievement, Harvey received appointments as a physician to the court of King James I and as personal physician to King Charles I.

 

Q: Where is Lucy, the Elephant Building?

A: The architectural pachyderm stands majestically and Margate, New Jersey, just outside Atlantic City. In 1881, real estate speculator James V. Lafferty designed the 6- story high elephant-shaped building as a promotional device. Named "Lucy", the 90-ton elephant was not only an engineering feat, but a great crowd attraction as well. Lafferty followed his Margate success with two other elephant like structures, one a 12-story building in Coney Island and the other in Cape May, New Jersey. (Unfortunately, both of these creatures have slipped away to the Happy Hunting Ground.) After Lafferty sold his property in the area, Lucy was used as a hotel, a beach house, a tourist attraction, and a tavern. Finally abandoned, she was slated for demolition, but a "Save Lucy" committee formed in 1969 served its purpose, and now the petitely-trunked Lucy has been declared a national landmark. Lucy is open to visitors.

 

Q: Where is the annual Twins Days convention held?

A: Twinsburg, Ohio, of course. Every year, over 2,500 sets of twins gather at the convention. Twinsburg, for those curious duos, is a town not far from Akron.

 

Q: Why do clouds darken just before it is about to rain?

A: The clouds darken when they absorb more light. When the light is scattered by the small ice and water particles, clouds appear white. As the size of these particles increase, the light is increasingly absorbed.

 

10/17/24
Looking at the Universe

(Binocular Observing)

There is much to see with a pair of binoculars. It just takes a little getting used to, and the right expectations.

While binoculars do magnify as much as telescopes, they do offer a wide field of view, allowing you to see a larger portion of the sky through the eyepiece.

Some good astronomical targets for binoculars include the moon, the Andromeda Galaxy, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, The Pleiades open cluster, and the Orion Nebula, just to name a few.

Binoculars come in a variety of sizes: 7 x 35, 8 x 40, 10 x 50, and so on.

The first of these numbers tells you how much magnification the binoculars produce. The second number is the diameter (in millimeters) of each of the two main lenses. For example, a pair of 7 x 35 binoculars will magnify an object 7 times and have lenses that are 35 millimeters in diameter.

While any pair of binoculars is fine for astronomical observing, some are better than others. Binoculars with larger lenses will gather more light and, therefore, delighted do see fainter objects.

 

10/16/24
Stuff About Inventions

The first Crayola crayon was black and made of charcoal mixed with oil.

The first color Crayola crayon was produced in 1903 by the inventors Edwin Binney and Harold Smith.

The name "Crayola" was suggested by the inventor’s wife. Alice Binney combined the French word for chalk, craie, with ola for oily.

Over 100 billion Crayola crayons have been produced since their invention, there were originally eight colors in the box. In 1998 the biggest box containing 120.

10/14/24
Just Stuff Sports-wise

Would ancient Greek athletes have had any chance against our well-trained modern Olympians?

At least two ancient Greek athletes would have done well in the modern games; their Olympic records stood until the twentieth century. Twenty-six hundred years ago, an athlete named Protiselaus threw a cumbersome primitive discus 152 feet from a standing position. No one exceeded that distance until Clarence Hauser, an American, threw the discus 155 feet in 1928. In 656 BC, a Greek Olympian named Chionis lept 23 feet, 1.5 inches, a long jump record that stood until 1900, when an American named Alvis Kraenzlein surpassed it by 4.5 inches.

 

What does it mean to "rest on your laurels"?

The practice of using laurels to symbolize victory came from the ancient Greeks. After winning on the battlefield, great warriors were crowned with a wreath of laurels, or bay leaves, to signify their supreme status during a victory parade. Because the first Olympics consisted largely of war games, the champions were honored in the same manner: with a laurel, a crown of leaves. To "rest on your laurels" means to quit while you're ahead.

 

Why is a trophy a symbol of victory?

After a victory on a battlefield, the ancient Greeks would build a monument dedicated to a chosen God, which they called a "trophy." These trophies were made of limbs stripped from the dead enemy soldiers and then hung on a tree or pillar, a ritual that is kept alive by modern "trophy hunters," who celebrate their victory over an unarmed animal hanging its head on the wall.

 

Why is a blue ribbon a symbol of champions?

Blue was the favorite color of England's King Edward III, who in 1348 created the highest Royal Order of the Knights of the Garter. Its membership was and is limited to the king and princes of England as well as a very few knights of distinguished service the insignia of the Royal Order is a blue garter, and because of this, blue ribbons have come to be a reward for any supreme achievement.

 

10/10/24
About Inventions

The candy cane was created in 1670, when the choirmaster at the Colgate Cathedral in Germany bent sugar sticks to represent a shepherd’s staff. He gave the white canes to children to keep them quiet during the long Christmas services. It wasn't until 1900 that the striped candy canes began to be sold in America.

Bubblegum was created in 1906 by American inventor Frank Fleer. He called it "Blibber-Blubber Gum." The recipe was perfected in 1928 by Walter Diemer, who colored the gum pink and called it "Double Bubble."

The inventor of cotton candy was Thomas Patton. He received a patent for a cotton candy machine in 1900, and the first cotton candy was sold at the Ringling Brothers Circus the same year.

 

10/9/24
About The Computer

Current Internet IP addresses are 32-bits long. The next generation of addresses, IPv6, will be 128-bits long.

The first DVD players appeared in Japan in November of 1996. To produce a DVD player, a company has to license more than 70 patents owned by different companies.

A person who subscribes to and reads a Usenet newsgroup but never contributes to it is called a "lurker."

The first "Speak and Spell" software, simulating the human voice, was introduced in 1978.

"Zipping" means converting CD files into a compressed file format for storing or transferring.

 

10/7/24
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: Who said, “Good pitching will always stop good hitting, and vice versa”?

A: Casey Stengel, manager and madcap savant, uttered these words before an appreciative press corps.

 

Q: When did the Pillsbury Doughboy make his debut?

A: The Pillsbury Doughboy made his first appearance in advertisements in 1965. His formal name is “Poppin’ Fresh.”

 

Q: Alexander Selkirk was the inspiration for which classic English novel?

A: Real life castaway Alexander Selkirk (1676-1721) was the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The adventurous Scot spent more than four years on an uninhabited Pacific Island. Oddly enough, Selkirk hadn’t been stranded. He chose to be marooned: After a heated argument with his captain, he insisted on being set ashore.

 

Q: How did Dorothy Parker review Katherine Hepburn’s performance in the 1933 play The Lake?

A: Dorothy Parker wrote, “Miss Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.”

 

Q: Zachary Taylor almost didn’t receive word that he had earned his party’s 1848 presidential nomination. Why did the future president remain in the dark about his Whig party candidacy?

A: The ever budget-conscious Whigs had mailed the notification of his candidacy to Taylor without adequate postage. As a matter of principle, “Old Rough and Ready” Taylor always refused such parcels.

 

10/3/24
Looking at the Universe

(With the naked eye)

Naked eye observing is simply observing the sky with only your eyes. This requires little preparation. You just go outside and look up!

Some good naked eye targets include the waxing and waning moon, the wandering planets, eclipses, and constellations. Meteor showers are also great for naked eye viewing.

The best way to prepare for naked eye observing is to give your eyes some time to adapt to the dark before you begin. By avoiding bright lights, your pupils will dilate (expand) and allow more light through to your brain. The more light that is allowed through, the fainter the object you can see.

In addition, chemical changes in the eye itself allow you to see fainter and fainter objects. After 30 min. in the dark, your eyes are 10,000 times more sensitive than they are in a bright room. Since astronomy is filled with faint objects, dark-adapted eyes are a must.

 

10/2/24
Stuff About Inventions

Today, timekeeping has moved away from the mechanical and based on the motion of atomic particles. For example, the interval of one second is now defined by the way the atoms behave in the element cesium. The motion of a cesium atom regularly changes from a quiet to an excited state, and physicists called this a "transition." A second equals 9,192,631, 770 transitions of the cesium atom and is extremely precise.

Before 1840, paper manufacturers used rags instead of wood pulp.

The idea of an ambulance probably started in the 11th century with the Knights of St.  John. This was a group of people who would assist the soldiers injured on the battlefields during the Crusades.

In 1872, a professor of psychology at Toulouse University called Louis Pasteur's theory of germs a "ridiculous fiction."

 

INTERESTING - SEPTEMBER

9/30/24
Way, Way Out There

Is Pluto really a planet?

Astronomers are currently debating whether Pluto is actually a planet at all. In recent years, about 30 enormous asteroids have been discovered just beyond Pluto's orbit, in the disk-shaped cloud called the Kuiper Belt. Since many of these asteroids are nearly as large as Pluto, and nearly as spherical, the classification of Pluto as a planet has been questioned. The pro-planet astronomers point to the fact that, unlike in asteroid, Pluto has distinct terrestrial planetary features and is massive enough to have its own field of gravity.

Pluto is about the size of the United States.

Relative to its size, Pluto has the largest moon in the solar system. Named Charon, it's nearly half as large as Pluto.

Owing to its extremely irregular elliptical orbit around the sun, Pluto was closer to the sun than Neptune was between 1979 in 1999.

On June 4, 2002, astronomers Michael Brown and Chadwick Trujillo discovered a new planet one and a half billion kilometers beyond Pluto. This planet, given the temporary name of Quaoar, is the biggest find in the solar system since Pluto was discovered in 1930. Quaoar is about one-tenth the diameter of Earth and in circles the sun every 288 years.

Before digital computers, scientists had to calculate orbits of astronomical bodies by hand, often finding themselves using figures up to nine digits long.

 

9/26/24
Weird Stuff About Stars
Black Holes: There is no escape.

If you were unlucky enough to be sucked into a black hole, you would never be able to escape. Its strong gravity would keep you trapped forever.

On Earth, gravity is a good thing. It is strong enough to keep us from floating off into space but weak enough to allow us to escape if we really want to.

For example, if you throw a baseball on Earth, gravity will pull it back down to the surface of our planet. The faster you throw the ball, the farther it will travel before gravity pulls it down. If you could throw the baseball really fast – as fast as 25,039 miles per hour (40,320 kilometers per hour) – it would be traveling fast enough to escape Earth's gravity entirely and fly into space.

This is what scientists call Earth escape velocity – how fast something must be traveling to escape the planet’s gravity. Astronauts had to use a really powerful rocket to reach that velocity so they could travel to the moon.

More massive objects have stronger gravity's and higher escape velocities. Objects trying to get away from Jupiter, for example, have to be able to travel 133,018 miles per hour (214,200 kilometers per hour) to escape that planet's gravity.

Black holes are the most massive objects in the universe. To escape from a black hole, an object must be able to travel faster than 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second.)

In other words, something would have to travel faster than the speed of light to escape a black hole. Since nothing can travel that fast, anything sucked inside a black hole will be trapped forever.

 

9/25/24
Interesting Stuff About Inventing:

The Greek poet and philosopher Xenophanes (580-460 B.C.) was the first to write a treatise on fossils. From his studies of fossilized fish, he concluded that all land was once beneath the sea and would eventually return there.

In 1973, the first airbag was introduced by Chevrolet as an optional feature.

George Westinghouse, the founder of Westinghouse Electric, invented air brakes in 1868.

The Greek physician Hippocrates wrote numerous works on medicinal plants. When he was condemned to death by the Greek Senate, he took his own life by drinking hemlock – the juice of which he had identified as poisonous in one of his own volumes.

Aluminum foil was first commercially produced in 1910 by a Swiss company. Before that, metal foil was made from pounded tin.

Actor Zeppo Marx of the Marx Brothers applied for and received a patent for a "cardiac pulse rate monitor" in 1969.

 

9/23/24
More Stuff About Caves

A stalactite is an icicle-shaped formation that hangs down from the ceiling of the cave. The Antiparos Cave on the Greek Island of the same name has some of the most spectacular stalactites – many over 20 feet (6 m) long.

A stalagmite is a cone-shaped formation that grows upward from the floor of the cave. They're usually wider, lower, and fatter than stalactites.

Draperies, one of the most beautiful formations in caves, are the result of ground water running in a sheet down an inclined ceiling. The resulting translucent sheet of striped color often resembles a strip of bacon.

The most unusual feature of the Waitomo Cave system in North Island, New Zealand, is the thousands of glow worms that attach themselves to the cave ceiling. Visitors can walk through the dark chambers and see a spectacular "starry sky."

Groundwater in caves, flowing in a film over dirt and rock, can form a bumpy calcite layer that looks like a waterfall. Geologists call this flowstone formation.

The world's largest natural underground space is part of the Mulu cave system in Indonesia. Called the Sarawak Chamber, it’s 2,300 feet (690 meter) long, 1,480 feet (444 meters) wide, and 230 feet (69 meters) high – large enough to contain 40 Boeing 747 jets or 7,500 buses.

Wyandotte Cave in southern Indiana contains the largest underground mountain – 135 feet (40.5 meters) high.

 

9/19/24
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: Which state has been the birthplace of the most vice presidents?

A: New York has the distinction of being the birth place of eight vice presidents: George Clinton, Daniel D. Tompkins, Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Schuyler Colfax, William A. Wheeler, Theodore Roosevelt, and James S. Sherman.

 

Q: Where does Chicago get its name?

A: Chicago is a corruption of the word Chigagou, the Algonquin word for "onion-place." There were wild onions growing in the area; the name was first applied to the river, then to the city.

 

Q: Where does New York get its name?

A: In 1664, when the English took over from the Dutch, they changed the name of the city from Nieuw Amsterdam to New York. The name that had commemorated a Dutch city now honored the Duke of York, to whose charge King Charles II had entrusted the colony.

 

Q: How did Dallas get its name?

A: The generally-accepted story is that Dallas was named for George Mifflin Dallas, who was the vice president of the United States from 1845 to 1849, when James K. Polk was president.

 

Q: How did the city of Buffalo get its name?

A: Buffalo, New York takes its name from Buffalo Creek, which was named for a Native American named Buffalo Leap who lived there.

 

9/18/24
Weird Stuff About Stars

Black Holes:

Galactic Black Hole

During the formation of large galaxy, stars in its central core will form so close together that some of the stars will actually collide.

The combined gravity of those colliding stars will attract other stars in the core, causing them to collide as well.

Eventually, too many stars will come together. Their combined gravity will overcome the nuclear reactions in their cores, and the enormous mass will collapse in on itself, forming a huge, supermassive black hole.

9/16/24
Odd Things About Neptune

One of Neptune's 11 moons is larger than the planet Pluto. The moon, Triton, also has a nitrogen atmosphere and rotates in the opposite direction from Neptune's other moons.

True to his name, suggesting the sea, the planet Neptune has a deep blue atmosphere that resembles Earth's oceans from outer space.

Like Jupiter, Neptune has a great dark spot that is probably a huge storm in its upper atmosphere.

Neptune has three rings encircling it. The rings are made from ice particles and rock.

Neptune was discovered in 1846 by first observing the strange behavior Uranus. Astronomers noticed that Uranus’s orbit "wobbled," which suggested the gravitational pull of some other large planetary mass close by.

 

9/12/24
Weird Stuff About Stars

Black Holes:  Dead Star Black Hole

When a supermassive blue giant star dies, it explodes with a tremendous supernova. Afterward, gravity from the remaining debris begins to pull everything back together, collapsing the leftover mass into a smaller and smaller ball.

This debris is no longer a star, so there are no nuclear reactions to stop the collapse. It will continue until everything that was the blue giant star is crammed into a tiny ball the size of a pinhead – and still it collapses!

This action continues until the debris becomes what astronomers call a singularity, or a black hole: an incredibly massive object that takes up no volume (or space) at all.

 

9/11/24
About Caves

Caves often have as many as three ecosystems: the warm, dry climate surrounding the entrance; the warm, moist microclimate at the entrance; and the cool, moist, dark environment of the cave itself.

The term speleothem refers to the various types of mineral deposit formations found in caves, such as stalactites, stalagmites, columns, flowstone formations and draperies

Speleothem are formed when mineral-rich groundwater flows through cracks in cave walls or ceilings. As the water evaporates, the minerals accumulate into fantastic shapes.

Mammoth Cave in central Kentucky is the longest cave system in the world. The system, 10 miles (16 km) in diameter, consists of 345 miles (555 km) of irregular pathways, underground lakes, and rivers.

 

9/9/24
About Mother Earth

Here is a list of the biggest islands on our planet (well eight of them anyway.)

Greenland, with 2,139,999 square miles (2,175,596 square kilometers), is the largest island;

New Guinea (316,615 square mises or 820,032 square kilometers) is the second-largest;

Borneo (286,914 square miles or 743,106 square kilometers) is the third;

Madagascar (226,657 square miles or 587,041 square kilometers) is the fourth;

Baffin (183,810 square miles or 476,067 square kilometers) is the fifth;

Sumatra (182,859 square miles or 473,604 square kilometers) is the sixth;

Honshu (88,925 square miles or 230,315 square kilometers) is the seventh;

Great Britain ( 88,758 square miles or 229,883 square kilometers) is the eighth.

 

9/5/24
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: How many pipes are there in the pipe organ at the Chapel Royale In Hampton Court Palace?

A: There are 2,202 pipes in the organ at England's Hampton Court Palace.

Q: Why was the apparent winner, American Fred Lorz, disqualified in the Marathon event at the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis?

A: Although Fred Lorz finished the marathon first, he was disqualified after it was discovered that he had been driven in a car for most of the grueling 26 mile race. Teammate Thomas Hicks was eventually awarded the gold medal, although his opponents charged him with doping because he had been imbibing brandy. Many race watchers thought that Felix Cartzaval of Cuba could have won the race, had he not tarried along the route to ask spectators for money. He ended the marathon in fourth place, possibly because he had also stopped to eat an apple. In fairness to the athletes, it should be stated that there were no accusations of illegal steroid use.

 

Q: Which was the first of the original 13 colonies to ratify the Constitution?

A: Delaware.

 

Q: Which was the last of the original 13 states to ratify the document?

A: Rhode Island.

 

Q: What is "2919 Dali”?

A: No, it's not a surrealist street address; it's a small main belt asteroid named after the wildly eccentric Spanish artist Salvador Dali. Asteroid 2919 Dali was discovered by astronaut Schelte J. Bus in 1981.

9/4/24
Weird Stuff About Stars

Black Holes:

There are so many weird things about black holes, it's hard to know where to start! So, let's begin with a basic definition and go from there.

A black hole is an incredibly massive object that does not take up any space.

You might wonder how something can exist but not take up any room. You wouldn't be alone. Even scientists don't really know.

The laws of physics predict the steps leading up to the formation of a black hole. Once the black hole forms, however, the laws of physics break down. It is just not possible to use the science we know today to explain how something can have mass but no volume.

Maybe in the future astronomers can figure out how black holes work. Until then, they will continue to collect data and observe the effects of the weirdest of the weird stuff.

So, how does a black hole form?

There are two main ways a black hole can form: through the death of a supermassive star and through the birth of a large galaxy.

 

9/2/24
Odd Stuff About Uranus

Uranus has 15 "regular" moons that travel in predictable orbits around the planet. The remaining six moons are considered "irregular," because they take odd courses and are thought to be the remnants of a collision between Uranus and a large asteroid.

All the moons of the solar system take their names from Greek and Roman mythology, except for Uranus, who’s moons are named after Shakespearean characters.

The planet with the most moons is Uranus. At last count, astronomers had named 21. The last one was discovered in 2001.

Uranus is unique in the solar system because it tips to the side. This means that the planet's north and south poles are found near its equator.

Because of the unusual equatorial position of Uranus's poles, the seasons are extreme. When the sun rises over Uranus's north pole, it stays up for 42 Earth years. When the sun sets, the pole is in complete darkness for the same amount of time.

 

INTERESTING - AUGUST

8/29/24
Weird Stuff About Stars

Pulsars

A pulsar (short for "pulsating star") is a rotating neutron star.

When astronomers first discovered these tiny, super dense, rapidly spinning dead stars, they had no idea what they had found.

What they first detected was a radio signal made up of a series of rapid blips.

These blips were so evenly spaced that astronomers didn't think anything in nature could produce such a study signal. They figured it had to be human made and dubbed the signal LGM – short for "little green men."

Instead of little green men, they had detected a pulsar.

To better understand these fast-rotating neutron stars, let's use an Earthly example. Imagine you are outside at night with a friend. If your friend holds a flashlight in front of him and faces your direction, you will see a steady beam of light.

If your friend spins around in a circle, instead of a study beam, you will see a flash of light every time he turns toward you. The faster he spins the quicker you see the flashes of light.

A pulsar is like your rotating friend. Instead of a flashlight, a pulsar is a steady stream of intense radiation pouring out of each pole. If the pole of a pulsar were aimed directly toward Earth, we would see a steady stream of radiation. But we don't.

Instead, we see flashes of radiation every time a spinning pole is aimed in our direction. We detect this radiation as blips of radio signals.

Pulsars rotate extremely fast, anywhere from once a second to 30 times every second

 

8/28/24
About Icebergs

Although no two icebergs are the same, geologists classify them into shapes in order to recognize and log them. Some of the basic shapes are tabular, blocky, wedge, dome, pinnacle, and drydock. Many of these shapes are formed when the iceberg begins to melt.

The record for the tallest iceberg goes to the Melville Bay Iceberg, sighted off the coast of Greenland in 1958. The iceberg extended out of the water 550 feet (165 m), making it almost as tall as the Washington Monument.

A floating iceberg will last between one and three years after breaking off from its glacier.

The largest iceberg ever sighted came from Greenland and was named the Great Tabular. This enormous flat shelf of ice was roughly the size of the state of Rhode Island.

By studying the crystal structure of an iceberg, geologists can determine which glacier it came from.

 

8/26/24
Weird Stuff About Stars – Quasars

Quasar is short for "quasi-stellar radio source."

Quasars may look like faint, distant stars, but they are much more. More what? That is the question astronomers are trying to answer.

The faint, distant objects are emitting tremendous amounts of energy. All types of radiation, from X rays to radio waves, are pouring out of them at unbelievable rates.

And they are also moving extremely fast through space, faster than anything else in the universe.

Astronomers believe quasars are galaxies – some of the first created. The energy released may come from accretion disks surrounding black holes at the quasars’ centers.

Because quasars are so far away, their mysteries are proving hard to unravel, but astronomers keep trying.

 

8/22/24
Strange Things About Saturn

Photographic evidence from the Voyager spacecraft suggests that Saturn's rings are composed mostly of ice crystals.

Saturn has lowest density of any planet or satellite in the solar system. In practical terms, you might describe Saturn as the least "solid" of all the planets. For example, if Earth were made of iron and Jupiter of wood, Saturn would be a feather pillow.

Saturn radiates more heat than it absorbs. Astronomers call these planets "gassy giants."

The space between the two largest ring systems of Saturn is called the Cassini Division  after Giovanni Cassini, the astronomer who discovered them in the 17th century. Cassini also discovered four moons of Saturn: Iapetus (1671). Rhea (1672), Dione (1684), and Tethys (1684).

 

8/21/24
Strange Things About Mars

According to one astronomical theory, 1 billion years ago, and asteroid struck Mars, vaporizing much of its carbon dioxide frost and water ice.

Water may still flow on Mars – underground. A study of Pathfinder photos suggests that erosion patterns at the sides of craters show recent water activity.

Data gathered by Pathfinder mission to Mars suggests that the planet was once flooded over thousands of miles of its surface.

The red color of Mars is created by iron oxides, or common rust.

On August 27, 2003, Mars and Earth were a mere 34,649,589 miles (55,785,838 km) apart – their closest proximity in recorded history.

A Martian day lasts 24 hours, 34 minutes and 23 seconds. An Earth day lasts 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds.

 

8/19/24
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: Where were tomatoes first grown?

A: Tomatoes are native to the Andean region of South America and were cultivated by the Incas. Tomatoes are edible fruits of a vine like plant that belongs to the deadly nightshade family; for many years Europeans considered them poisonous.

 

Q: What do Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Peter Jennings, Joni Mitchell, and Alex Trebek have in common?

A: They were all born in Canada.

 

Q: Who was George Washington Harris?

A: George Washington Harris was an American vernacular humorist. He is best known for humorous writing about backwoods life in Tennessee, which were published in the New York periodical, Spirit of the Times. He had a strong influence on Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and other Southern regional authors.

 

Q: What do Mike Myers, Rick Moranis, Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, and Dave Thomas have in common?

A: They were all performers on the SCTV television show in the 1980s – and they too were all born in Canada.

 

Q: What is pashmina?

A: Pashmina is supposedly the under for of Himalayan goats, but much of what is offered as pashmina is a blend of Cashmere wool and silk. In any case, pashmina is known for being soft and smooth, and pashmina scarves and shawls are very popular items. Pashm is the Persian word for wool.

 

8/15/24
About Mother Earth

One of the most enormous lava flows in the world is in central Oregon in the United States. About 1,300 years ago, a volcano spewed more than 170 million cubic yards (130 million cubic meters) of molten rock. This is enough to pave 70,000 miles (13,000 km) of road – a road that could circle the Earth three times.

From 50 to 70 volcanoes erupt each year, and about 160 erupt each decade.

Historically, Indonesia has experienced more volcanic eruptions than any other country. During the past 10,000 years, geologists estimate that 76 active volcanoes have erupted about 1,171 times.

Most volcanic eruptions last a single day. However, the volcanoes Etna and Stromboli in Italy, Erte Ale in Ethiopia, Manam in New Guinea, and Sakurajima in Japan have been erupting continuously during the past three decades.

The world's tallest volcano is Ojos del Salado, which straddles the countries of Chile and Argentina. The cone rises 22,595 feet (6,779 m). The next nine tallest volcanoes are in the same region.

At any given moment during the day or night, at least 20 volcanoes are erupting throughout the world.

The dust from the 1980 explosion of Mount Saint Helens was so extensive that it covered half the state of Washington.

 

8/14/24
About Mother Earth

Geologists distinguish continents from islands not only by their larger size, but by their density. Continents are made up of low-density rock, so they float high on Earth's mantle. High-density islands emerge from volcanic activity deep within Earth's mantle. According to this definition, Greenland is an island; Australia is a continent.

The Mid-Ocean Ridge is Earth's longest mountain range. It circles from the Arctic Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, passes into the Indian Ocean, and finally joins the Pacific Ocean. It is four times longer than the Andes, Rockies, and Himalayas combined.

Egypt's Nile River is the longest on Earth, measuring 4,160 miles (6,695 km) on its northward journey to the Mediterranean Sea.

Most icebergs (also called ice islands by geologists) originate in the tidewater glaciers along the west coast of Greenland. There are 20 named glaciers in this area, and as many as 15,000 icebergs will break off from them each year.

All icebergs started as snow that fell more than 15,000 years ago.

 

8/12/24
Strange Things About Jupiter and Saturn

Jupiter makes one complete rotation around its access every 9 hours and 55 min. Earth rotates around its axis once every 23 hours and 56 min.

The surface gravity of Jupiter is 2.6 times greater than that of Earth. A person weighing 170 pounds (77 kg) would tip the scales at 442 pounds (20 kg) on Jupiter.

Jupiter radiates about six times more heat than it absorbs, which bolsters the theory that the giant planet is actually a star that failed to fully ignite.

Saturn has five major ring systems, each of which is divided into thousands of individual ringlets. The ringlets are only about 6.2 inches (15.7 cm) thick.

When Voyager 1 past Saturn, the spacecraft returned photographs that revealed many surprises about its rings. One of them was the discovery that some of the rings are more like "spokes" quote because they stick out from the planet. Another photograph revealed that some of the smaller rings were twisted into braids that never untangle.

 

8/8/24
Strange Things About Space

In August of 1996, Nassau and a Stafford University research team announced that they had discovered the fossilized remains of ancient bacterial life inside a Martian meteorite. The meteorite, named Alan Hills 84001 (ALH84001), was found in Antarctica in 1984. Its Martian origin was confirmed by matching trapped gases inside the meteorite with Martian atmospheric data brought back by the Viking spacecraft. The fossil like structures ranged in size from about 0.4 micron worm-like shapes down to 0.04 micron avoids. There were no tubular and ball-like structures, all smaller than the smallest bacterial cell known to exist on Earth. Current scientific evidence suggests that nothing can be truly alive and be packed into a body smaller than 0.2 microns – or 200 nanometers – in diameter. If this is true, then many of the structures scientists found in ALH84001 are too small to have been living cells, but a debate about this continues.

    

8/7/24
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: When will Haley's Comet next appear?

A: Haley's comet will be visible on its next pass near the Sun 2061. The comment was named for Edmund Haley (1656 – 1742), who correctly predicted the return of the comet in 1758 that was seen in 1682.

 

Q: Who introduced tobacco to the Europeans?

A: Christopher Columbus first saw the Arawak people of the Caribbean smoking tobacco on his journeys to the New World, so he decided to carry the evil weed back to Spain. Over the next 50 years, tobacco growing and use spread throughout Europe, but at first, it was primarily used as a medicine.

 

Q: Who was the designer of the hansom cab, which was popular in London in the late nineteenth century?

A: The two wheeled, one-horse carriages were designed by English architect Joseph Aloysius Hansom (1803 – 1882).

 

Q: When did Europeans first use forks?

A: The Romans used two-tined utensils that were forerunners of the fork, but most Europeans ate with knives and their hands until the 16th century.

 

Q: Is the tomato a vegetable or fruit?

A: Although most people think of the tomato as a vegetable, it is actually a fruit, because it is the seed-bearing ovary of a plant.

 

8/5/24
Weird Stuff About Stars

Neutron Stars

Neutron stars are the smallest stars around.

Only a few miles across, these tiny dead stars are about the size of a small city, which is a far cry from how they started their lives.

Believe it or not, every neutron star was once a massive blue giant star (one of the largest stars around).

After a supernova destroys an old blue giant star, gravity from the leftover debris is sometimes strong enough to pull the remaining matter back together. The debris collapses quickly. The strong gravity crams everything that once was in the old blue giant star into a ball just a few miles across, making the neutron star extremely dense.

Just how dense is it? A teaspoon of material from a neutron star would weigh several million tons.

 

8/1/24
Strange Things About Space

The pressure on the surface of Venus is equal to 94 Earth atmospheres.

The evening star is actually a planet, usually Mercury or Venus, seen in the west just after sunset.

Often referred to as Earth’s sister planet, Venus comes very close to Earth in size and total mass.

Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system. Its dense atmosphere creates a greenhouse effect o the surface of the planet where temperatures reach 860 degrees Fahrenheit (460 degrees Celsius) – hot enough to melt lead.

Venera 14 explorer landed on Venus in 1982 and transmitted photographs that showed a blackened, coal-like surface. After only 54 minutes, the spacecraft was destroyed by the heat.

Martian “canals” were first reported in 1877 by the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli. But the effect was actually an illusion. Schiaparelli’s crude telescope made for fuzzy images that caused him to ‘see’ things that didn’t exist, like canals.

 

INTERESTING - JULY

7/31/24
Strange Things About Space

A solar flare is basically a gigantic magnetic arch – like a horseshoe magnet – that attracts itself inward, back to the surface of the sun.

A solar flare, ejected from the Sun's surface, can reach speeds of 190 miles (306 km) per second.

The famous Haley's Comet returns every seventy-six years. It last appeared in 1986. It appears again in 2062.

Comets originate from a mysterious region beyond the planets called the Oort Cloud, a giant halo that surrounds our solar system and is about two light years away from the furthest planet.

Although a comet’s tail can reach 93,000,000 miles (150,000,000 km) in length, the total amount of gas and vapor it emits would fit into the trunk of a car.

 

7/29/24
Let's Talk Planets Facts about Jupiter

Jupiter is huge – much larger than our own small planet. So, you would think that it would take much longer to spin around on its axis. This is an incorrect assumption.

Earth takes twenty-four hours to spin around once. Jupiter – eleven times bigger than our planet – takes less than ten hours to spin around once.

At the equator, the fast-moving gases spin around once every nine hours and 50 min.

Near Jupiter's north pole and south pole, the planet takes five minutes longer to spin around once. So, a day at the equator is actually five minutes shorter than a day at the north or south pole.

7/25/24
Stuff about ~ Military/War

Q: Why do paratroopers shout "Geronimo" when they jump from a plane?

A: During the second world war, Native American paratroopers begin the custom of shouting the name of the great Indian chief Geronimo when jumping from plane because, according to legend, when cornered at a cliff's edge by the U.S. Cavalrymen, Geronimo, in defiance, screamed his own name as he leaped to certain death, only to escape both injury and the blue coats.

 

Q: Why when someone ignored the rules do we say she "turned a blind eye"?

A: In 1801, while second-in-command of the British fleet near Copenhagen, Horatio Nelson was told that his commander had sent up flags ordering a retreat. Nelson lifted his spyglass to his previously blinded eye and said he couldn't see the order, and then he ordered and led a successful attack. Nelson's insubordination became legend and gave us the expression "turn a blind eye."

 

Q: Why do we say, "I heard it through the grapevine"?  

A: During the American Civil War, a Colonel Bee set up a crude telegraph line between Placerville and Virginia City by stringing wires from trees. The wires hung in loops like wild grape vines, and so the system was called the "Grapevine Telegraph," or simply "the grapevine." By the time war news came through the wires it was often outdated, misleading, or false, and the expression "I heard it through the grapevine" soon came to describe any information obtained through gossip or rumor that was likely unreliable.

 

Q: When did croissants, or crescent rolls, originate?

A: In 1683, during a time when all the nations of Europe were at war with each other, the Turkish army laid siege to the city of Vienna. The following year Poland joined Vienna against the Turks, who were ultimately forced to lift the siege in 1689. As a celebration of victory, a Viennese baker introduced crescent shaped rolls, or "croissants," copying the shape of the crescent Islamic symbol on the Turkish flag.

 

7/24/24
Some More Stuff

It would seem that the chemists who isolate new chemical elements just don't think ahead. By the time krypton was discovered in 1898 by Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsay and English chemist Morris M. Travers, "K" was already spoken for by potassium on the periodic table. So, the chemical symbol for krypton is Kr.

The name krypton comes from the Greek word kryptos which means "hidden."

Around the time that the world was marking the fortieth anniversary of the discovery of krypton, the world's greatest hero was about to make his comic book debut. The first appearance of Superman was in Action Comics #1, which was released in June 1938.

Superman, so the story goes, came to earth from the planet Krypton. It's not clear why Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster chose to name the Man of Steel’s home planet after an odorless, colorless gas.

 

7/22/24
Interesting and Odd Facts About Nature

Hurricanes were first given names by Clement Wragge, an Australian weatherman. Known as Wet Wragge, he used the names of people he had quarrels with for the worst storms.

The most snow to fall in one storm in the United States fell at Mount Shasta Ski Bowl in California, in February 1959. The storm lasted for seven days, and 189 inches of snow was recorded – enough to bury a small house.

The popular image of a raindrop is that it is either shaped somewhat like a pear with a rounded bottom tapering to a point on the top, or that it is perfectly round. Neither is correct.

     High-speed photography of raindrops nearing the earth show them to be shaped like mushroom caps. The bottoms of the raindrops are flat and the tops are rounded. The shape is a result of air resistance. As a raindrop falls, the air resistance exerts a force on the raindrop, flattening it. The flattening on the bottom causes the top two bulge outward.

The Kokee area of the island of Kauai in Hawaii is likely to be a bit damp when you visit. It has an average rainfall of 471.68 inches, and there aren’t many – if any – wetter places on earth.

 

7/18/24
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: For what deed is the chicle-chewing former Mexican president best-known?

A: General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna defeated a small brigade of valiant Texans at the Alamo in March, 1836. The Alamo defenders, who included Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, held on for thirteen days. When Sam Houston's Texas army routed Santa Anna and his troops a month later at San Jacinto, they shouted, "remember the Alamo!", emblazoning that phrase in history.

 

Q: Why does Blibber-Blubber deserve a niche in history?

A: Frank Fleer never widely marketed this 1906 gum invention, because most consumers thought his product was irritatingly sticky. But, Blibber-Blubber Gum does have one surefire claim to fame: It was the first authentic bubblegum.

 

Q: Why is bubblegum pink?

A: Probably because it always was pink. When Walter Diemer, a Frank H. Fleer Co. accountant, decided to improvise with gum recipes in 1928, he was obliged to work with the ingredients on hand. The only food coloring on hand was pink and it became part of Diemer’s recipe for the first successful bubblegum in history – and just about every bubblegum since that time.

 

Q: What sales landmark did Double Bubble gum reach in 1981?

A: That was the first year that more than one million pieces were sold of this sweet toothed friend.

 

7/17/24
The Human Body Scientifically Speaking

The left side of the brain controls logic and speech; the right side controls creative thinking and imagery.

A single brain cell can communicate with as many as 25,000 other cells at one time.

A modern human’s brain is smaller than a Neanderthal’s was.

Walking up to a beeping alarm clock traumatizes the nervous system and can lead to heart attacks in susceptible people. Soft music on a clock radio is the safer alternative.

The air released from a sneeze can exceed a speed of 100 mph (160 km/h).

 

7/15/24
Let's Talk Planets Facts about Jupiter Trivia

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system.

If you put Jupiter on one side of a teeter totter, you could put two of every other planet on the opposite side – and you still wouldn't lift Jupiter.

Jupiter has the shortest day in the entire solar system.

Parts of Jupiter spin at different rates.

Jupiter is covered by a complex set of cloud bands.

As a gas giant planet, Jupiter has no "land."

Jupiter is surrounded by one ring.

On Jupiter, a 100-pound (45.3 kg) person would weigh 253 pounds (114.7 kg).

To find out how much you weigh on Jupiter, multiply your Earth weight by 2.53.

 

7/11/24
Stuff about ~ Military/War

Why when someone dies do we say "he bought the farm"?

During the Second World War, airmen introduced the term "he bought the farm" after a pilot was shot down. The expression caught on with all the armed services and meant that if you gave up your life for your country, your impoverished family would receive insurance money for your death, which would help pay off the mortgage on the family farm. Death for your country meant you were "buying the farm" for your parents.

 

Why is a glaring error called a "snafu"?

During the Second World War, massive military operations were so huge they were usually fouled up by their sheer weight and size. The frustrated servicemen called them SNAFU’s, an acronym for "Situation Normal: All Fouled Up." Some say that "fouled up" was a polite adaptation for family use, but regardless, the expression snafu lived on, and now, as it did then, means a glaring error.

 

Why is a restricted limit called a "deadline"?

A deadline is an absolute limit, usually a time limit, and was popularized by the newspaper business, in which getting stories written and printed on time is of ultimate importance. But the expression comes from American Civil War prisoners, who were kept within crude makeshift boundaries, often a line scratched in the dirt or an easily breached rail fence. They were told, "If you cross this line, you are dead," and soon the guards and prisoners simply called it what it was: a deadline.

 

7/10/24
Just Stuff

Scrabble players know that there are seventeen three-letter words that end with u on the Official Word List (OWL2) approved by the national Scrabble Association for tournament play in the United States. Among them is "ulu" – a type of knife used by Eskimo women to clean and skin fish, and the only three letter word on the list that contains two u’s.

As of 2006 when the revised Official Word List was issued, there are 101 two-letter words accepted in Scrabble tournament play in the United States. They range from "aa" – a type of lava – to "za" – a nickname for pizza.

The chemical symbol for the element potassium is K. It comes from the Latin word kalium, which comes from qali, the Arabic word meaning "ashes."

     It might seem logical that the chemical symbol for potassium would be P, but by the time potassium was discovered in 1807, there already was at P in the periodic table. P stands for phosphorus, which was discovered in 1669.

 

7/8/24
Interesting and Odd Animal Kingdom Facts

The South African town of Oudshoorn is known as the ostrich center of the world. It is also where ostrich farming started in the mid-nineteenth century, when the demand for the bird’s handsome plumes made for a profitable worldwide business.

     Today, the ostriches at Oudshoorn are raised mostly for their skins, which are used for fine leather goods, and for their small body feathers, which are used to make feather dusters. The ostriches are sheared of these – like sheep – every nine months. Most of these feathers go to France, where tidy housewives still prefer to keep the mahogany bright by means of feather flicking.

 

It is commonly assumed that one bird leads a flock of birds in flight. The leader is thought to be the oldest, most experienced, or strongest of the birds. This is not the case.

Observe any flock of birds and you will note that the flock periodically breaks formation and reassembles a short distance later. Each time the flock does so, a different bird assumes the position at the lead of the flock and becomes the new leader.

 

Chameleons undergo rapid changes of color, but this has nothing to do with the color of their surroundings.

     Cells in the chameleon’s skin contain pigments that are involved in these color changes. When the chameleon becomes angry or frightened, nerve impulses sent to the color cells cause the colors to darken. Heat and cold, sunlight and darkness also affect the color of the chameleon.

     Thus, temperature, light, and the chameleon’s emotions are responsible for its color changes.

 

Scorpions were the first animals in the world to live on land. They have been around for 440 million years.

 

7/4/24
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: In 1953, Topps gum began to package comics in the wrappers around their Bazooka bubblegum. What is the name of the character who first appeared in these comics?

A: Bazooka Joe, with his tough talk and eye patch, first swaggered onto the bubblegum scene in 1953. Topps Gum, the manufacturer of Bazooka, introduced these cartoons to help capture the youth market.

 

Q: Who invented PEZ?

A: Baker Edward Haaz III invented PEZ in a Vienna kitchen in 1927. Believing that his peppermint perfection might aid smokers attempting to quit, he decided to market the candy, giving it a name derived from Pfefferminz, the German word for peppermint. PEZ was merchandised originally in pocket tens. The famous PEZ dispenser wasn't introduced until 1948.

 

Q: Who scooped the first ice cream cone?

A: There are numerous, sometimes conflicting theories about the invention of the ice cream cone, most of them involving concessionaires at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. The story told most frequently is that Ernest Hamwi, a Syrian-born pastry vendor, hit upon the idea of rolling up zalabia, a wafer-like pastry, and putting a scoop of ice cream on top. However, according to his 1954 New York Times obituary, Italian immigrant Italo Marchiony might disserve the distinction, having sold ice cream cones from a pushcart in New York City as early as 1896. Marchiony even documented his claim: He was granted a patent on his mold on December 13, 1903, several months before the St. Louis fair opened.

 

7/3/24
Some Animal Facts

There are more than 900,000 known species of insect in the world, and several new species are discovered each year.

Insect pests eat one third of the world's food crop each year.

Mosquitoes cause more human deaths in the world than any other insect or animal. The diseases they carry include malaria, encephalitis, yellow fever, and West Nile virus.

Mosquitoes avoid citronella because it irritates their feet.

Mosquitoes prefer children to adults, and blondes to brunettes. Skin thickness is probably a factor in this choice.

7/1/24
Let's Talk Planets Facts about Jupiter

Average distance from the sun:

483,300,000 miles  (778,300,000 km)

 

Equatorial Diameter

88,793 miles     (142,984 km)

 

Average temperature

-166°F    (-110°C)

Length of a day

9 hours, 50 min.

 

Length of a year

11.86 Earth-years

 

Atmospheric composition

86% hydrogen    13% healing them      1%other gases

 

Number of moons

63

 

Largest Moon

Ganymede

 

INTERESTING - JUNE

6/27/24
Just Stuff Politically Speaking

"What is the origin of the phrase, "I'll be hanged if I do and hanged if I don't."?

When America was fighting for independence, the British poet Thelwall was arrested after enraging King George with his liberal, seditious support of the colonies. In prison he wrote to his lawyer, "I shall be hanged if I don't plead my own case," to which his lawyer replied, "You'll be hanged if you do!" His lawyer got him off, and the phrase became a slogan that contributed to the demise of the royal cause in America.

 

Why do we refer to an important issue as the "burning question" of the day?

During a time when the church and the state were equal in government, anyone failing to follow the state religion was burned at stake. Those who demanded the separation of church and state were considered heretics, and thousands who were caught discussing the issue were burned at the stake. Because of this, whenever there was a secret debate on religious freedom, the subject was referred to as the "burning question."

 

Why when someone is betrayed do we say he was "sold down the river"?

After 1808 it was illegal for deep southerners to import slaves, and so they were put down the Mississippi River from the North to the slave markets of Natchez and New Orleans. This gave the northerners a way of selling off their difficult or troublesome slaves to the harsher plantation owners on the southern Mississippi, and it meant that those selected or betrayed would be torn from their homes and families to be "sold down the river."

 

Why, when there's no turning back, do we say "the die is cast"?

When you say "the die is cast," you are quoting Julius Caesar. In 49 B.C., the Roman general stood and thought long before crossing the Rubicon River into Italy with his army, a move that would break Roman law and start a civil war. When he made his decision to move forward, he said, "Aleajactaest” (the die is cast), meaning, as when throwing the dice, that the outcome is in the hands of fate, and there is no turning back from the consequences. Another phrase with a similar meaning came out of this same event: "Crossing the Rubicon" means taking a step or action that sets you on an irrevocable path.

 

6/26/24
More Stuff

Winston Churchill is credited with the first use of the phrase "Iron Curtain" to describe the emerging division in Europe between countries that were strongly influenced by the Soviet Union and those that were not. He used it in a speech he gave at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946.

Churchill owned a cat named Mr. Cat. (Kinda short, no?)

He also owned an orange cat named Jock, given to him by his private secretary Sir John "Jock" Cloville. Churchill's former home at Chartwell – now a historic site – always has an orange cat named Jock living there.

English author Thomas Hardy owned a cat named Kiddleywinkempooops. (Kinda long, yes?)

Cat urine, like dog and human urine, contains phosphorus, which causes it to glow greenish yellow when it's exposed to ultraviolet light.

The average person produces more than 10,000 gallons of urine and flushes the toilet 140,000 times in a lifetime.

6/24/24
Interesting and Odd Animal Kingdom Facts

Flamingos get their orange-pink color from their food. They eat shrimps and tiny water plants that contain carotene. Without this food, their feathers with slowly turn a dull gray.

The ostrich can run at speeds of up to 40 miles an hour. On the ostrich farms in Cape Province, South Africa, they hold ostrich races for the benefit of visiting tourists.

The kago is a rather odd bird found on the island of New Caledonia. It runs, but it can't fly. It feeds on worms. And it barks like a dog.

Crows make about 300 different sounds to call to one another and to ward off enemies.

Crows live in many parts of the world and, like people, have different languages in different countries.

6/20/24
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: Who introduced chocolate to Europe?

A: Christopher Columbus. When the great explorer returned to Spain in 1502 from his fourth expedition to the New World, he carried with him cocoa beans that he had obtained from the Aztecs. In Mesoamerica, Columbus had sampled a sour tasting cocoa drink, but he didn't recognize the true potential of these dark brown beans. It wasn't until 1519, when Aztec Emperor Montezuma served Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez a royal cocoa drink called " chocolatl" that European heads – and taste buds – began to take notice.

 

Q: Where did peanuts originate?

A: In South America. The peanut is thought to have first grown in Argentina or Brazil.

 

Q: Who invented chewing gum?

A: According to archaeological findings, prehistoric people chewed chunks of tree resin. It is known also that the ancient Greeks masticated the resin of mastic trees; the Mayans chomped on the chicle sap of the Central American sapodilla tree; and North American Indians crunched on the sap of spruce trees. Commercial chewing gum developed much later. In the 1840s, Charles B. Curtis launched a spruce gum enterprise in Maine. In 1869, exiled Mexican president Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna sold some chicle to New Jersey inventor Thomas Adams. Noticing Santa Anna’s perchance for chicle-chewing, Adams boiled a small batch to create a chewing gum. In 1871, he introduced the first commercially packaged chewing gum, and, a few years later, he introduced Black Jack, a licorice flavored brand of chewing gum.

 

6/19/24
Some Animal Facts

It's a myth that throwing instant rice at weddings creates a danger for birds. Birds have no problem digesting expanding seeds since these occur regularly in bird diets.

The praying mantis is the only insect that can turn its head from side to side.

There are more insects in one square mile of rural land then there are people on the entire earth.

Aphids are born pregnant without ever having mated. Only ten days after being born, aphid babies can give birth themselves.

6/17/24
Let's Talk Planets Facts about Mars

The Moons:

Mars has two moons: Phobos and Deimos. These small, potato-shaped moons are very different from our own big, slow-moving Moon.

Phobos, the closer and larger of the two moons, is only 17 x 14 x 12 miles (18 x 23 x 20 km) in size. It zips around Mars three times every day.

Deimos, the more distant and smaller moon, is only 10 x 8 x 6 miles (16 x 12 x 10 km) in size. It takes this moon about a day and a half to travel around Mars.

Astronomers believe these two odd moons began their lives as asteroids. They were captured by the gravity of Mars when they passed too close to the planet.

6/13/24
Just Stuff Politically Speaking

Why is someone displaying absolute loyalty said to be "true blue"?

With the slogan "a true, covenanter wears true blue," the Scottish Presbyterians adopted blue as their color in the seventeenth century during their defense of their faith against Charles I. The instruction came from Numbers 15:38 in the Scriptures, which tells the children of Israel to fringe the borders of their garments in ribbons of blue. Blue is a powerful symbol in Judaism and the national color of Israel.

 

Why do we say a graduating lawyer has "passed the bar"?

To control rowdiness, a wooden bar was built across early courtrooms to separate the judge, lawyers, and other principal players from the riffraff seated in the public area. That bar, first used in the sixteenth century, also underlies the English word barrister, the lawyer who argues the case in court. When someone has "passed the bar" or has been "called to the bar," it means he or she is now allowed into the closed off area.

 

Why, when someone has been fooled, do we say he's had "the wool pulled over his eyes"?

In British courts, both judges and attorneys wear wool wigs, a custom that originated in the eighteenth century. The judge's wig is larger than the lawyer’s, so he's often called the "bigwig." When a crafty lawyer wins at trial against all odds, it's as though the lawyer has blinded the judge with his own wig. It’s said he just had "the wool pulled over his eyes."

 

Why do we say that someone caught in a dishonest or criminal act "got nailed"?

In the early days of criminal justice, punishment was often barbaric. Public hangings and floggings were commonplace, and for lesser crimes, the infliction of public humiliation and pain on the criminal was considered necessary to deter others from committing similar crimes. One such deterrent was to nail the convicted person's ears to the hangman's scaffold, where he or she would spend the day as a public spectacle. They had been "nailed."

 

Why were executions held at sunrise?

In prehistoric times, executions of condemned prisoners were carried out as sacrificial ceremonies to the rising sun. In the Middle Ages, because the executions were public, they continued to be held early in the day so as not to attract huge crowds. It wasn't until well into the twentieth century that more enlightened societies brought capital punishment indoors, not because executions were shocking, but because they were too popular.

 

6/12/24
Just Stuff

Theaters in France and Italy permitted women to work as stage actresses and performers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and those theatrical troupes performed in England as well. So, English audiences did see women onstage – just not English women, who were banned by law from acting on the public stage.

 

The first woman to play a Shakespearean role on the public stage in England was Margaret Hughes, who played his Desdemona in a 1660 performance of Othello.

 

A hand-painted curtain that conceals the stage or that serves as a backdrop during a performance is not unusual – unless that curtain is painted by Pablo Picasso.

Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes, managed to have some of the most renowned and unconventional artists of the early twentieth century design for his productions: among them: Henri Matisse, Juan Gris, and Joan Miro, as well as Picasso. They designed stage curtains, backdrops, and even costumes.

Matisse worked with Diaghilev only once – they didn't get along – but Picasso designed for at least six Ballets Russes productions. The first was the 1917 circus-themed ballet Parade, during which he met and married Olga Khokhlova one of the ballerinas in the company

 

Perhaps the most famous ballerina to emerge from Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was Anna Pavlova. In the 1920s, Pavlova epitomized the ideal ballerina – light and ethereal, just like a swan – and just like the dessert named in her honor.

The Pavlova is made up of a meringue shell filled with tart, soft fruit, especially passion fruit, and sometimes topped with whipped cream. It's a simple dish with a complicated pedigree.

Anna Pavlova toured Australia and New Zealand in 1926. Her visit was such a great event that chefs in both countries claim to have created the frothy, white dish inspired by her performance of the dying swan from the ballet Swan Lake. To keep both sides happy, it is often conceded the dessert was developed in New Zealand, but was ultimately named in Australia. Still, that answer hasn't really settled the debate, which continues between the friendly rival nations to this day.

 

6/10/24
Odd Laws and Lawsuits

In Belvidere, California and ordinance states: "No dog shall be in a public place without its master on a leash."

In Texas, it's against the law to milk somebody else's cow.

In Galveston, Texas, it is against the law for camels to wander the streets unattended.

In Brooklyn, New York, it is illegal for a donkey to sleep in a bathtub.

Everybody knew that Nelly's pet geese had their nasty side. But Mike, Nelly's grandson, wasn't worried the day he dropped by for a visit. He was more concerned about Nellie herself, who was ailing.

     When Mike stepped inside the fenced yard, however, the two geese and their three goslings did not approve. They rushed at Mike, their necks outstretched. When he turned to run, he tripped and fell, cracking two fingers and a wrist.

     When Mike got the doctor bills from his goose attack, it seemed only reasonable to send them to his grandmother's insurance company. The insurance company didn't agree. They maintained that Mike knew the geese were aggressive, and he assumed the risk when he walked in the gate.

     Mike had only one option left: to sue his grandmother for $30,000. No hard feelings, he told Nelly, it's the insurance I'm after. In the end, he withdrew his suit, and grandma passed her geese along to a friend.

6/6/24
Just Stuff Q& A

Q: When did Shakey's open their first pizza parlor?

A: "Shakey" Johnson and his friend Ed Plummer bought an old grocery store in Sacramento and remodeled it to become the first Shakey's Pizza Parlor. The new pizza parlor, complete with Shakey playing the piano and Ed serving the beer, opened on April 30, 1954. It was an immediate success.

Q: Are hamburgers served in Hamburg?

A: Yes. Hamburg, Germany boasts of Burger House and several fast food restaurants that serve ground beef on a bun. Most Germans, however, consider hamburgers an import from the United States, not a part of their national cuisine. Although the origin of the hamburger remains a much-debated subject, most food historians agree that cooked ground beef on bread or a bun was first served somewhere in the United States. Hamburg, New York; New Haven, Connecticut; Seymour, Wisconsin; and Athens, Texas all claim the honor. Nonetheless, almost everybody agrees that the name derives from the popular German Hamburg Steak.

Q: In 1592, Pope Clement VIII overcame priestly objections when he issued an edict allowing Christians to consume a particular beverage. What was the drink?

A: Coffee. The stimulating beverage had already provoked religious protests: It had been banned in Mecca in 1511 and in Cairo in 1532, but both decrees were rescinded. Apparently, coffee holds and addictive appeal.

 

6/5/24
Some Animal Facts

The flightless kiwi bird of New Zealand lives in a hole in the ground, is almost blind, and lays only one egg each year. Despite this, the kiwi have survived for more than 70 million years.

A chemical in chocolate, theobromide, is poisonous to many species of bird, including the parrot. The skins and pits of avocados are also dangerous.

Most parrots have a vocabulary of about twenty words.

Baby robins eat an average of 14 feet (4.2 m) of earthworms every day.

 

6/3/24
Let's Talk Planets Facts about Mars

The Rover:

If you've ever driven a remote-controlled car you know how tricky it can be trying to keep it from running into walls and flipping over. Now, imagine trying to drive a remote-controlled car that’s on Mars – several million miles away. NASA has done just that – three times, as a matter of fact.

Pathfinder (carrying the Sojourner rover) landed on Mars on July 4, 1997. Sojourner traveled a total of 100 yards (91 m), although it never strayed more than 40 feet (12 m) from Pathfinder at any given time. The mission ended on September 27, 1997, when contact with the pair was lost.

The Mars Exploration Rover Spirit arrived on Mars on January 3, 2004, while its twin, Opportunity, landed on the opposite side of Mars on January 24, 2004.

Much larger than the Sojourner, these two hardy explorers were each designed to carry out a three month mission. The engineers and scientists were delighted when both rovers survived much longer. Together, they explored more than 10 miles (16 km) of Martian territory in three years.

INTERESTING - MAY

5/30/24
Some More Stuff

Van Gogh's Portrait of Doctor Gachet was bought at auction by Ryoel Saito, the head of a Japanese paper manufacturing company. Two days later, he paid more than $78 million for a painting by Renoir. Then he hid them both away in a warehouse – and declared that he loved the paintings so much he wanted them cremated along with him upon his death.

     He later said that he'd been kidding about the last part, but some people aren’t so sure.

     Siato soon ran into serious money troubles, followed by a conviction for trying to bribe a government official. He died in 1996.

     And the paintings? Well, the Renoir was sold to help pay off his debts. The van Gogh has vanished. Museum curators hope that the painting will surface again – and pray it didn't go up in smoke!

Instead of painting in long brushstrokes, French painter Georges Seurat painted with tiny dots of color, applying them one by one over an entire canvas. His most famous work is A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. It measures nearly 7 feet high and more than 10 feet across. From a few feet away, it's easy to distinguish the Sunday afternoon scene of people relaxing by the waterside, but up close the painting looks merely like random dots of paint – about 3.5 million dots of paint by some estimates.

It took Seurat about two years to complete A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.

 

5/29/24
Just Stuff Q&A 

Q: "Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda” was once the name of what now-famous soft drink?

A: 7 Up. When Charles Leiper Grigg introduced his soft drink in October 1929, he gave it that tongue torturing, but accurate name. It didn't require much teasing to make him realize that this forgettable brand name was the problem. He changed the name to 7 Up, but nobody knows what, if anything, the new designation meant. There were numerous unverifiable theories: The soft drink has seven ingredients; it was packaged in 7 ounce bottles; or even that Grigg had once seen a cattle brand that resembled 7 Up.

 

Q:  How did Mountain Dew receive its name?

A: In the early forties, Ally and Barney Hartman developed a lithiated lemon-lime drink as a mixer for hard liquor. As a joke on Tennessee Mountain Moonshine, these two brothers from Knoxville called their soda Mountain Dew. In 1948, they registered the trademark and began marketing their mixer. By the late fifties, the beverage still had only regional popularity. Then Bill Jones, a former fruit flavor salesman, tinkered with the formula, adding some orange juice and other ingredients. Sales on this new flavor took off almost immediately. 

 

 

Q: Where did RC cola originate?

A:  Pharmacist Claud A. Hatcher bottled his first Royal Crown beverages in the basement of his family’s wholesale grocery business in Columbus, Georgia. His subsequent attempt to trademark his “Charo-Cola” drink set off decades of unsuccessful litigation by cola competitors. In 1934, “Charo-Cola” was reformulated in a new soft drink called “Royal Crown Cola.” Eager consumers quickly shortened it to “RC.”

 

5/27/24
Hmm - Just Stuff

The Pygmies happen to be the smallest humans on earth, averaging 4'11", but the effect of their favorite arrow poison is anything but diminutive. Derived from the formidable red ants, it is so poisonous that a single poison arrow will fell a full-grown elephant.

There were no sparrows or starlings in North America until about 100 years ago, when a New Yorker imported the birds. He wanted the United States to have all the birds named in Shakespeare's plays.

If you see a clock with Roman numerals, is the 4 expressed as IV? It should be, but usually it's done by four strokes, IIII. There is an odd reason for this. When Louie XIV would look at his watch, he always confused the IV and the VI. So, he sent it back to the watchmaker to make a change. And, of course, everybody copied the King's example. We still do.

 

5/23/24
Vegetation Oddities

A notch in a tree will remain the same distance from the ground even though the tree grows taller.

At 167 calories per 3.5 ounces (100 g), avocados have the highest number of calories of any fruit.

The "miner lettuce" flower got its name because it was a dietary staple of the forty-niners during California's gold rush days.

Grass, corn, and wheat are all pollinated by the wind. These plants produce a great quantity of pollen, do not need to attract the pollinator, and so conserve energy by not producing flowers.

The herb coltsfoot, also called "British Tobacco," is so salty it can be used as a substitute for mineral salt.

5/22/24
More Stuff

Modern military camouflage was developed in France during World War I, initially to disguise vehicles – even battleships. The people who designed and executed the painting were fine artists in civilian life, and the seemingly random patterns of color blocks that comprise camouflage patterns were strongly influenced by the cubist paintings of artists such as Picasso.

American artist Grant Wood worked as a camouflage artist – a "camoufleur" – during World War I. Wood's most famous painting is the decidedly un-cubist, starkly realistic American Gothic.

The Central American nation of Costa Rica has not had a standing army or navy since 1948.

Oscar Arias Sanchez, president of Cost Rica from 1986 to 1990 and again from 2006 to 2010, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for his work to draft the Esqipulas peace accords that helped prevent or end wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama.

 

5/20/24

Just Stuff Q & A            

Q: When did Coca-Cola start selling their products in aluminum cans?

A:  1967

 

Q: What famous restaurant chain developed from filling station vittles?

A: Kentucky Fried Chicken.  About 1930, Colonial Harland D. Sanders began serving food to hungry travelers in Corbin, Kentucky. Demand enabled him to open a real restaurant and, by 1939, he had perfected his “secret blend of eleven herbs and spices.”

 

Q: Was Colonel Sanders really a military colonel?

A: No. Harland Sanders did serve in the U.S. Army, but he never rose above private. His famous title is an honorary one: In 1935, home state Governor Ruby Laffoon made America’s chicken wizard a Kentucky Colonel in recognition of his indisputable contribution to the state’s cuisine.  

 

Q: Where was the first McDonald’s?

A: Both San Bernardino, California, and Des Plaines, Illinois, have some claim to the title. In 1953, Mac and Dick McDonald opened a hamburger restaurant with that name in San Bernardino. Impressed by the eatery, fifty-two-year-old Ray Kroc convinced the brothers to grant him the first franchises to their concept. Within seven years, the former milk-shake-machine salesman was able to buy then out. The rest is burgers and fries history.

 

5/16/24
Let's Talk Planets facts about Mars

For more than 100 years, science-fiction stories have talked about humans traveling to the Red Planet.

Over the past few years, engineers and scientists have sent a fleet of robotic spacecraft to Mars, including orbiters, landers, and rovers.

Why all the interest in the Red Planet? Of all the planets in the solar system, Mars is the most like Earth.

It may not seem too similar to Earth – with its super-thin, carbon dioxide atmosphere and an average temperature of -63°F (- 53°C) – but Mars is still the easiest planet for humans to adapt to.

There is no way we could survive on Venus, with its acid clouds, scorching temperatures, and crushing pressures. Without an atmosphere, Mercury is both too hot and too cold. It also gets pounded by deadly amounts of solar radiation.

Jupiter and the other gas giant planets don't even have a surface we could land on.

 

5/15/24
Just Stuff Politically Speaking

Why is the Irish gift of gab called "blarney"?

Kissing the Blarney Stone at Blarney Castle near Cork, Ireland, is supposed to transfer the gift of gab to the kisser, but the idea that the word blarney meant a smooth talker came from the mouth of Elizabeth I of England in 1602. She had insisted that Dermot McCarthy surrender Blarney Castle as proof of his loyalty, but he kept coming up with excuses – so many excuses, in fact, that the Queen once exclaimed in exasperation, "Odds Bodkins, more Blarney talk!"

 

Why is some extreme behavior called "beyond the pale"?

The expression dates back to the English Crown's first effort to control the Irish by outlawing their language and customs. But the unruly Irish were just that, and by the fifteenth century the English still controlled only a small area around Dublin, protected by the fortification called "The Pale," meaning sharp sticks (i.e., impaled). To the British, to go "beyond the Pale" meant that you are entering the uncivilized realm of the wild Irish.

 

Where did the expression "paying through the nose" come from?

In Northern Ireland during the nineteenth century, the British introduced a harsh poll tax of one ounce of gold per year on all Irish households. The tax was nicknamed the "Nose Tax" because if a person didn't or couldn't pay, he had his nose slit. This cruel but effective procedure gave rise to the expression "paying through the nose," meaning if unreasonable due payments aren't made, there will be dire consequences.

 

Why do we say "justice is blind"?

The Egyptian pharaohs, concerned that courtroom theatrics might influence the administration of justice, established the practice of holding trials in darkened chambers with absolutely no light. That way, the judge wouldn't be moved by anything but the facts. It's this principle that inspired Lady Justice, the well-known statue of a woman in a blindfold holding the scales of justice that is often found outside contemporary courtrooms.

 

5/13/24
Animal Kingdom Oddities

The Cass County Quack-Off is held each year in Nebraska, where you can race ducks on the ice. If you don't have one, you can rent a canard for the day. If that event doesn't suit you, you might try the Muzzle-Loaders Rendezvous for the Middle of Nowhere Parade.

 

Male quetzal birds have beautiful, long tail feathers that were once worn by ancient Mayan chiefs as a symbol of authority. Now the bird is Guatemala's national symbol, and the country's money is named after it.

 

Old as the Dodo and just as strange, but still enjoying life, is Australia's amazing mallee foul, a bird who can actually tell the temperature.

     The mallee, anxious for motherhood but scorning the tedious business of just sitting, buries her eggs in mounds of earth up to 3 feet high. As a substitute for her own body heat, the mallee mother-to-be keeps the eggs warm by covering them with decaying organic matter before building the mounds over them. The heat given off by this organic material turns the earthy nest into a fine incubator, and the clever foul is free to pursue other interests while her brood hatches. Mindful of her maternal duties, however, the mallee returns frequently to test the temperature of the mound and make sure it is always at the same comfortable level.

     The mallee tests the temperature by means of its long, sensitive tongue, with which it probes the interior of the mound after driving its bill in right up to its eyes. If the bird finds that the mound is growing too hot or too cold, she corrects the temperature variants by one of two methods: either by opening or closing the mound or by raising or lowering its height.

     This strange bird can detect temperature so well that even a change of less than 2° will cause her to take frantic corrective action.

 

5/9/24
Our Earth

Any stationary iron object will eventually become magnetized so that it has a distinct north and south "pole." To test this out, hold a compass to a can of soup that has been sitting in your cupboard for a while.

Current research shows that 900 million years ago, when the Earth's rotational rate was greater than it is now, there were 481 eighteen-hour days in the year.

The moon's gravitation slows down the Earth's rotation by about two milliseconds per century.

Silicon dioxide, or quartz, is one of the most abundant materials on Earth. It's found in all colors except green.

The semi-precious stones amethyst (purple) and citrine (yellow) are just highly compressed forms of quartz.

5/8/24
Let's Talk Planets Facts about Mars

Many pictures of Mars show what looked like dried riverbed and ancient lakes on the planet's surface. NASA’s two Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) have found rocks and minerals that scientists believe could have formed only after a long soak in a salty sea.

 

The problem with all this evidence is that liquid water can't exist on Mars – at least not the way the planet is right now. It is much too cold and its atmosphere is much too thin. If water did flow on the surface of Mars at one time, conditions on the planet must have been very different.

 

So how did Mars go from warm and wet to cold and dry? Scientists believe that this drastic change in climate began a long time ago, when the planet’s giant volcanoes quit belching large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) and dust into the air.

 

Rain continued to wash the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere – as it had in the past. This dissolved CO2 became trapped in the rocks – as it had in the past. Now, however, without the volcanoes to throw the rocks (and carbon dioxide) back into the atmosphere the overall amount of CO2 in the air began to decrease. As a result, the atmosphere thinned, the planet began to cool, and surface water and rain began to freeze on the ground instead of returning to the atmosphere as water vapor.

 

The thinning air allowed more ultraviolet light through – just like a giant ozone hole. The ultraviolet light reacted with the atmosphere and a process that allowed even more air to escape into space. The end result was the super-thin atmosphere we see today that can't trap enough heat from the Sun to keep the planet warm.

 

Data from orbiting spacecraft suggest that large amounts of the missing water now lie frozen beneath the Martian surface.

 

If water did flow on Mars at one time, perhaps life developed there is well, since life needs water to exist. The possibility of ancient Martian life is one reason scientists search for that missing water.

 

5/6/24
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: How many burgers did McDonald’s sell during Ray Kroc’s lifetime?

A: By the time owner Ray Kroc died in January 1984, McDonald’s had served customers almost fifty billion burgers. 

 

Q: Who is the “Wendy” in Wendy’s?

A: Wendy was the nickname of Melinda Lou Thomas, the daughter of Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas. When Thomas opened his first “old fashioned hamburgers restaurant” in Columbus, Ohio, in 1969, he named the place after his eight-year-old child. That downtown Columbus Wendy’s is still serving cheeseburger combos and biggies.

 

Q: When the Whopper was first introduced, how much did it cost?

A:  In 1957, you could purchase an original whopper sandwich for thirty-seven cents. Prices were low then: In the mid-fifties, thirty-six cents would buy you both a broiled Burger King’ hamburger and a milkshake.

 

Q: Where was the first Burger King restaurant located and when did it open?

A: At NW Thirty-sixth Street in Miami in 1954. By 1998, the chain had opened its ten thousandth restaurant. 

 

5/2/24
Some More Stuff

Although he was nominated five times, the world's most famous pacifist Mohandas K Gandhi, never won the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the center of the current flag of India is a twenty-four spoke wheel that symbolizes forward progress. Originally, the wheel was a spinning wheel in honor of Gandhi's campaign to encourage people to make their own handspun, hand-woven khadi fabric for their clothing. He viewed khadi as a symbol of self-sufficiency and unity for the Indian people.

The flag code of India states that all official flags must be made from hand-spun, hand-woven fabric.

5/1/24
Interesting/Odd Facts About the Human Body

A fetus grows fastest in the three months before it is born. If it continued to grow at that rate, it would be 18 feet, 4 inches tall by the time it was ten years old.

 

Did you know that when you sneeze, air and tiny particles of mucus are blown out of your nose at a speed of 100 miles per hour?

 

Did you know that your lungs contain a mesh of very small blood vessels called capillaries? If you lay them out end-to-end, they would stretch for 1500 miles.

 

Because the aorta, the largest artery leading out of the heart, is on the left side of the body, it is easier to hear or to feel the beat of the heart on the left side, just to the left of the breastbone. This is not exactly the position of the heart, however. A small part of the heart is on the left side of the breastbone and a small portion is on the right side. The bulk of the heart is right in the middle of the chest, slightly tilted.

 

INTERESTING - APRIL

4/29/24
Just Stuff Politically Speaking

Why are some politicians called "lame ducks"?

A "lame duck" is a powerless American politician. After an election in a parliamentary system, such as that found in Britain or Canada, the House convenes and the winners immediately form the new government. In the American system, however, the newly elected Congress doesn't take control for months, leaving those who have lost still in charge. During this time, because they can't pass anything meaningful, the powerless politicians are as useless as lame ducks.

 

Where did the phrase "spin doctor" come from?

The term spin doctor first appeared in the New York Times during Ronald Reagan's campaign for reelection in 1984. "Spin" was the twist given a baseball by a pitcher throwing a curveball to deceive the batter, while a "doctor" is someone who fixes the problem. Therefore, a "spin doctor" is someone who, faced with a political problem, solved it by putting a twist on the information to bend the story to his or her own advantage.

 

What does it mean when someone suffers a "sea change"?

Sea change is a term often used in politics that refers to a surprising and significant change from the previous position. Because early sailors were familiar with the sudden and unpredictable temperament of the sea – one minute calm, life-threatening and dangerous the next – they introduced the expression "sea change" into everyday English language, meaning any sudden transformation.

 

4/25/24
Odd Stuff In Entertainment

Back in the 1700’s a new dance hit Vienna. It paired off dancers in wildly revolving couples and was the opposite of the slow minuet.

     Overnight, the lively dance became a citywide craze. Huge ballrooms sprang up by the dozens; their doors were never closed and mobs of eager dancers surged in at all hours. Rotating orchestras played around the clock. Intoxicated by the dance, people neglected their work, abandoned their children, left their sick untended.

     And what was the dance that had turned the Austrian capital into a city of madness? It wasn’t a Disco-style dance. It wasn’t St. Vitus’s dance. Did you guess? It was the waltz.

 

There is nothing “special” about a small atoll called Tetiaroa, which is just north of Tahiti. Except perhaps, that it was owned by movie star Marlon Brando, who wanted to use it for sportfishing. And that’s a long way to go for the sport, considering that Tetiaroa is roughly 3,720 miles from Los Angeles, 2,416 miles from Honolulu, and 3,500 miles from Sydney – the only cities from which you can fly there.

 

The color red is said to be irritating to a bull. The animal is thought to become especially enraged when a red object – a piece of cloth, for example – is moved about.

    Actually, bulls cannot see colors. While not all animals have as yet been tested for color blindness, it is believed that humans, apes, and monkeys are the only mammals able to see color.

     If the bull does not become enraged at the sight of red cloth, why is it used in bull-fighting? The bullfighter, whether he is aware of it or not, is waving around the red cape more to excite the audience than to excite the bull. Human beings are very responsive to the color red. It is a bright color; it is the color of blood; it is a color associated with danger.

     As for the bull, what excites him is not the color of the cloth, but its motion. Waving a green towel or polka-dot PJ’s would excite him just about as much. 

 

4/24/24
Just Stuff

Red is the color seen most often on national flags. About 75% of the world flags have red on them; about 70% have white.

At least twenty nations have flags of red, white, and blue (and only red, white, and blue). Among them: Australia, Cambodia, Chile, Cuba, France, Iceland, Laos, The Netherlands, North Korea, Norway, Panama, Russia, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.

The study of flags is called "vexillology." This word comes from the Latin for "curtain."

4/22/24
Some Facts About the Ostrich

The brain of a mature ostrich is about the size of a golf ball, slightly smaller than its eye.

An ostrich sticks its head in the sand to search for water.

In ancient Rome, ostriches were bred for strength, and sometimes were even used pull chariots.

Ostrich eggs are nature's largest eggs and can reach the length of 9 inches (23 cm), though they are usually from 6 to 8 inches (15 to 20 cm) long. Because of their size and the thickness of their shells, they take up to 40 min. to hard boil.

4/18/24
Just Stuff Q & A

Q:  What was the name of Robert E Lee's horse?

A: Traveller. General Lee bought his Kentucky Saddler, Traveller, in 1861. Traveller was sixteen hands tall and gray in color with black points. He is now buried near the remains of General Lee in Lexington, Virginia.

 

Q: Who invented Coca-Cola?

A: Atlanta-resident Dr. John Pimberton first concocted the caramel-colored liquid in 1885. The following year, he offered his invention to the public as a brain tonic, but sales were disappointing. Shortly before his death, Pimberton sold his business. New owners Asa G. Candler hit upon the bright idea of carbonating Coca-Cola and adding more sugar. Thus transformed, the soda quickly became popular nationwide as a refreshing drink.

 

Q: How did Pepsi-Cola get its name?

A: When Caleb Bradham first served his soft drink creation at his North Carolina pharmacy in 1898, it was known simply as "Brad's Drink." Within a few years, though, Bradham renamed it to give it a competitive edge. He called it Pepsi-Cola. "Pepsi" for pepsin, an ingredient to aid digestion, and "Cola," because it tasted like its very popular competitor, Coca-Cola.

 

Q: Which major brand of soft drink is the oldest?

A: Both Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper were invented as drugstore drinks in 1885, but Dr. Pepper probably earns the nod: It was patented and marketed first.

 

4/17/24
Let's Talk Planets facts about Mars

Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the entire solar system, towers 15 miles (25 km) above the surrounding Martian landscape.

This extinct volcano is three times higher than Mount Everest, the tallest mountain on earth.

If you were going to climb Olympus Mons, you would first have to figure out a way to scale the enormous cliff that completely surrounds its base. This cliff ranges from 4 to 6 miles (6 to 10 km) high, depending on where you start to climb.

Once you make it up that steep cliff, you would find a very gentle slope to the volcano's summit about 200 miles (322 km) away. However, that gentle slope would be covered by millions of years’ worth of rough volcanic rock.

 

4/15/24
Just Stuff Politically Speaking

Why do we say that healing a relationship is "mending fences"?

In 1880, the strong-willed senator John Sherman was testing the water for a presidential nomination. He slipped out of Washington but was followed to his Ohio farm by a reporter who found the senator talking with a high-ranking party official while standing near a fence. When the reporter asked what they were doing, the response, "We're mending fences," gave him his headline, and it became a new phrase for healing relationships.

Within a democracy, what are the fourth and fifth estates?

Within British history, the first three states with influence over legislation were the Church, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons. The term fourth estate has meant different forces of influence over Parliament at different times, including the army. It was first used to describe the press during a debate in the House of Commons in 1828 and has retained that meaning ever since. The fifth estate was added to include radio and television.

 

Why when someone tells a secret do we say he's "spilled the beans"?

A system of voting, the ancient Greeks placed beans in a jar. They called these small beans or balls "ballota," which gives us the word ballot. A white bean was a "yes" and the brown bean was a "no." The beans were then counted in secret so the candidates wouldn't know who voted for or against them. If the container was knocked over, and the beans were spilled, the secret was out of the jar.

 

4/11/24
Some More Stuff

Theater curtains that concealed the stage from the audience before the start of the performance, between acts, or at the end of a performance are a relatively new invention in theater terms. They didn't come along until after 1660. The ancient Greeks, who virtually invented theater, didn't have them. Neither did Shakespeare – his plays were usually performed in open-air venues where the stage was slightly sheltered but the audience was exposed to the sun and the rain.

 Although he didn't have theater curtains, Shakespeare did have the Curtain Theater built in 1577 in the area known as Curtain Close, the Curtain Theater is considered to be the second purpose-built theater in the London area. (The first was imaginatively named The Theater.) It's likely that Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Henry V had their debuts at the Curtain Theater in the 1590’s.

 During Shakespeare's lifetime, boys or a young man played all of the female roles in his plays – even romantic roles like Juliet. Most theatrical companies had only two or three boys in the troop, which is why some scholars believe Shakespeare's plays have a lot more male roles than female roles in them.

 

4/10/24
ODD-BITS IN HISTORY

Wine tasters had a dangerous job in the fifteenth century – they tested for the presence of poison, not for the quality of the beverage.

 

One of the names that leaps from the pages of Egyptian history is that of Hatshepsut, who ruled from 1501 to 1479 BCE.

     There’s a difference between Hatshepsut and her predecessors, however: Hatshepsut was a woman.

     Sacred tradition in ancient Egypt required that every ruler must be a son of the great god Amon. Thus, at least in theory, Hatshepsut could not rule Egypt. And, even for someone as capable and strong-willed as this daughter of Thutmose I, first king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, this was a tradition that could not be ignored.

     Hatshepsut was raised to partnership on the throne of Egypt by her father, Thutmose I, as he neared the end of his 30-year reign. But because tradition decreed that she could not succeed him, when he died, Hatshepsut’ half-brother, who was also her husband, became King Thutmose II.

     In turn, before Thutmose II died, he named Thutmose III an obscure son of Thutmose I whose mother had been a concubine, to succeed him. That move was too much for Hatshepsut to swallow, and she promptly seized the throne for herself.

     To justify her move, she invented a biography that, to her satisfaction at least, solved the problem of her sex.

     In the biography, Hatshepsut wrote that Amon had descended from his heaven and impregnated her mother, Ahmasi. As he departed, he announced that the fruit of the union would be female but that all of his strength and valor would flow through her to the Egyptian people.

     Then, as if in further justification, when she appeared in public, Hatshepsut dressed in male clothing and sported a false beard. In later years, she had herself represented on the many monuments she raised as a bearded, breastless warrior.

      Pointless as the masquerade may have been, it satisfied both Hatshepsut and her subjects and kept Thutmose III from the throne for almost 22 years.

     Hatshepsut left her mark on Egypt. Before her death, she built for herself a secret and ornate tomb on the western side of the Nile, across from the then-capitol of Thebes. In succeeding generations, more than 60 of the rulers that followed her would build royal sepulchers in Hatshepsut’s city of the dead. Eventually, the collection became known as the Valley of the King’s Tombs.  

 

4/8/24
Let's Talk Planets facts about Mars

If you think the Grand Canyon in Arizona is big, you should see Valles Marineris (Mariner Valley) on Mars.

This canyon is more than 3,000 miles (4,700 km) long and 5 miles (8 km) deep at its deepest point, and it spans almost 400 miles (644 km) at its widest point.

If this canyon were on earth, it would stretch from New York City to Los Angeles! By comparison, Earth's Grand Canyon stretches only 250 miles (430 km) across northwestern Arizona. It is about 1 mile (1.6 km) wide and 1 mile deep.

It is not entirely clear how Valles Marineris formed. It may be a rift that formed when two plates of land pulled part. Part of it may have been formed by flowing water, like the Grand Canyon in Arizona. No matter how it formed, it is huge.

 

4/4/24
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: Coca-Cola is the world's largest manufacturer and distributor of nonalcoholic drinks. On an average day, how many Coca-Cola's are consumed worldwide?

A: One billion!   (OMG)

Q: Was Dr Pepper named after a real person?

A: Yes. The soft drink was named after Dr. Charles Pepper, a Virginia drug store owner. But oddly, Dr Pepper has nothing to do with the development of the soda. Wade Morrison, in whose Waco, Texas drugstore the drink was invented, honored his first employer by naming the beverage after his former boss.

 

Q: Dr Pepper bottles carry the numbers "10", "2" and "4." What do they mean?

A: In the late twenties, a Dr Pepper executive encountered research that indicated that the average person experiences energy slumps at about 10:30 AM, 2:30 PM, and 4:30 PM. His company then developed an advertising campaign to encourage people to avoid those daily letdowns by drinking Doctor Pepper at 10, 2, and 4.

 

Q: The Gods Must be Crazy is a 1981 film that takes a humorous look at cultural clashes. In this movie, Botswanan bushmen encounters Western technology and culture for the first time when he finds something in the jungle. What object does he discover?

A: A Coca-Cola bottle.

 

4/3/24
Strange Stuff about Ordinary Things

Diamonds are crystals formed almost entirely of carbon, such as the charred material left over when you burn a piece of wood.

If you heat a diamond to 1400°F (760°C), it will simply vanish and leave nothing – not even ash – behind.

Amber, a semi-precious material formed by the fossilization of pine resin, was thought in ancient times to be solidified sunshine.

In nineteenth century America, gallstones from animals were often used to treat infected wounds. A stone was soaked in warm water to soften it so that it could then be applied to the wound. The chemicals in the tissue of the gallstone were believed to neutralize the infection.

4/1/24
Just Stuff Politically Speaking

Why did Abraham Lincoln's son withdraw from politics?

In 1865, Robert Lincoln rushed to his father's deathbed. Sixteen years later, as Garfield's secretary of war, he was with that president when he was shot by an assassin. In 1901, Robert arrived in Buffalo for the American Exposition just in time to see President McKinley murdered. After that Robert Lincoln vowed never again to be in the presence of an American president.

Why do monarchs refer to themselves using the "royal we"?

When Roman consuls spoke of public issues, they did so on behalf of all those with whom they shared power and so they used the plural pronoun we, instead of the singular I. The first king to use the "royal we" was Richard I, implying that he was speaking for his subjects as well as himself. It's improper for nonroyals to use the plural self-reference, so when Margaret Thatcher did it in 1989, we were not amused.

 

How did Edward VII make it fashionable to leave the bottom button of a man's vest undone?

King Edward VII had a large appetite and an even larger tummy. He began leaving the bottom button of his vest undone because after a meal he simply didn't do it up. Those who didn't want to make the king uncomfortable did the same, and so it became the fashion of the day. Edwards bulging belly may in part have been a consequence of his favorite dish, which was, of course, chicken à la king.

 

INTERESTING - MARCH

3/28/24
More Stuff

Pearl oysters, the salt water mollusks that produce pearls, are not closely related to the oysters we eat. So, if someone tells you he found a pearl inside an oyster he was eating, it's probably not true. But...     

        Oysters aren’t the only creatures that produce pearls. Other mollusks, such as mussels and clams, produce them too – and people have been known to discover pearls inside clams during the meal. Clam pearls are generally not as lustrous or as valuable as natural pearls found in oysters, although they can be quite beautiful.

The largest pearl ever found was discovered in the Philippines, and it almost certainly came from a giant clam – the only creature big enough to have produced it. Known as the Pearl of Lao-Tzu or the Pearl of Allah, it measures 9 inches long and weighs nearly 14 pounds. It has been valued at between forty and sixty million dollars.

At a high enough temperature, a diamond will burn.

Paying too much for something activates the part of the brain that also is responsible for the perception of pain and guilt.

3/27/24
Odd as it may seem…

In Atlanta, it is against the law to secure a giraffe to a telephone pole or streetlamp.

In Belvidere, California, an ordinance states: "No dog shall be in a public place without its master on the leash."

In Texas, it's against the law to milk somebody else's cow.

When Violet passed away, she left her $100,000 home to her beloved Skippy, a Pomeranian, to live in for the rest of his life. But this didn't set well with Violet’s brothers and sisters. They went to court for permission to sell the house and divide the proceeds. "Sorry," said the judge, "you'll have to abide by the bequest and wait until Skippy's death."

            Three years later, the silver haired Skippy was still going strong at thirteen years of age – about ninety in human terms – and violets heirs went to battle again. How can we be sure some other dog isn't being substituted? They wanted to know, and they demanded that Skippy have his leg tattooed.

            That sounded pretty dramatic to Skippy's caretaker, a retired policeman who lived in the basement apartment in the dog’s house. Skippy could be identified just as well through x-rays and photographs, he argued.

            Once again, the judge found in favor of Skippy. The settlement did allow a detailed inspection of the dog’s body to reassure the heirs.

Platteville, Wisconsin: He filed for divorce after her plane trip. It seems she took out travel insurance and named their dog as beneficiary

 

3/25/24
Let's Talk Planets Facts About Mars

Because Mars has about one third the gravity of Earth there would be less gravity tugging on you – or anything else for that matter.

So if you can jump 3 feet (0.9 m) high on earth, you'd be able to jump almost 8 feet (2.4 meters) high on Mars.

If you can throw ball 25 feet (7.6 m) on earth you could throw the same ball more than 65 feet (19.8 m) on Mars.

If you want to jump high or throw far… It seems visiting Mars is a must!

3/21/24
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: Underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar of American Splendor often appeared on what popular TV show? What caused his final exit?

A: Cantankerous Pekar made eight appearances on Late Night with David Letterman until his on-air criticism of NBC and its parent company General Electric caused his expulsion

 

Q: John Berendt’s best-selling book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil depicts the eccentric characters surrounding a controversial murder trial in which great city?

A: Savannah, Georgia.

 

Q: What was Pac-Man's original name?

A: Puck Man. The name was changed to avoid vandalism by American teens intent on making a single letter substitution. Because this alteration is not an issue in non-English speaking countries, both Puck Man and Pac-Man machines can be found throughout Europe.

 

Q: What is "bullet time"? Who made it famous?

A: A special effect used in movies that enables audiences to see imperceptibly fast events in slow-motion while the camera circles the scene at normal speed. This technique was popularized by the Wachowski Brothers in the 1999 movie The Matrix.

 

3/20/24
Just Stuff Politically Speaking

Why are political positions referred to as "left" and "right"?

Over two hundred years ago, King Louis XVI of France was forced to convene a form of Parliament for the first time in more than a century. At the assembly, the more radical delegates took up seats on the left of the King, while their conservative counterparts sat on his right. Ever since, liberal views had been referred to as from the left, and conservative ideas as from the right.

Were those seeking political favor from elected officials said to be "lobbying"?

The term lobbying originates from the earliest days of the British Parliament, where an extensive corridor runs between the Chamber of the Lords and the House of Commons. Because the general public were allowed into this corridor, or lobby, it was where constituents waited to meet with their representatives in order to influence their votes on current legislation. This practice was called "lobbying" because it took place in the lobby.

 

Why do we say a political candidate on speaking tour is "on the stump"?

When early European settlers were moving west and clearing the land, every farm had an abundance of tree stumps in their fields. A "barnstorming" politician who looked for a place of prominence to be seen and heard by the gathered electorate would invariably find a large tree stump to stand on from which he would make his pitch. This gave us the expression "on the stump," which is still used to describe a politician seeking election.

 

3/18/24

Some More Stuff

How did March 17 become St. Patrick's Day?

When the time came to honor the patron saint of Ireland's birthday, church officials gathered solemnly to choose a day, then realized that most of St. Patrick's life was a mystery. They finally narrowed his birthdate down to either March 8 or 9th, but because they couldn't agree which was correct, they decided to add the two together and declared March 17 to be St. Patrick's Day.

How did the Shamrock become a symbol of St. Patrick?

In the fifth century, Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, transformed that country from its pagan roots to Christianity. During an outdoor sermon, Patrick was struggling to explain the holy Trinity when he spotted the Shamrock. He used its three leaves to illustrate how the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost grew from a single stem, symbolizing one God sustaining the Trinity, and ever since, the Shamrock reminds the faithful of that lesson.

 

3/14/24
Some More Stuff

In the early morning of March 18, 1990, two men dressed in police uniforms broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, stealing thirteen works of art, including paintings and drawings by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Degas, and Manet. It was the largest art theft in history. More than twenty years later the works have not been recovered and are valued today at around $500 million. In the museum, the frames of the stolen artwork remain in their places on the gallery walls as placeholders, empty and waiting for the return of the treasures.

According to the Art Loss Register, Pablo Picasso is the artist whose work is stolen most frequently. Hundreds of Picasso's have been stolen from museums, galleries, businesses, and private homes, including a theft in 2007 from the home of Picasso’s granddaughter.

In 1990 Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of Doctor Gachet set an all-time record for the highest auction price paid for painting when it sold for $82.5 million at Christie's in New York. The van Gogh painting held that record for fourteen years, until Pablo Picasso's Boy with a Pipe sold at an auction for $104.1 million in 2004.

Although scholars continue to hunt for documentation to the contrary, van Gogh appears to have sold only one painting during his lifetime. That was a piece called Red Vineyard, which sold in 1890 during an exhibition in Brussels.

 

3/13/24
Computers… Hmm

If all the data on a CD were stretched out in a single line, it would be 3.5 miles (5.6 km) long.

The first graphical computer game, "Tic-Tac-Toe," was created in 1952 by A. S. Douglas at the University of Cambridge. The game displayed crude symbols on a cathode tube attached to the computer's processor.

The first animated videogame was created in 1958 by William Higinbotham at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. It was called "Tennis for Two."

The first game designed exclusively for a computer monitor was called "Space War." It was created in 1962 by the programmer Steve Russell.

3/11/24
Interesting and Odd Animal Kingdom Facts

The beautiful fan of feathers you see is not the peacock's tail at all. Those long, lovely display feathers, or train, grow on the lower part of the back, just above the true tail, which consists of twenty short, stiff, plain colored feathers. When the peacock wishes to show off, the true tail lifts, fans out, and rises and supports the display feathers.

After raising their young, most birds go through a period of molting, shedding their feathers and growing new ones. They lose only a few feathers at a time from each wing, and new feathers quickly grow in to replace those lost.

            It is not well-known, however, that most waterfowl lose their ability to fly during molting. Swans, geese, ducks, and rails, among others, shed all their flight feathers at once. These birds may be totally incapable of flight for several weeks.

A person with low intelligence is often said to be birdbrained, from the belief that birds have tiny brains. Actually, a bird's brain is large and heavy in proportion to its body weight. Moreover, some birds – crows, for example – are quite intelligent.

The stork doesn't bring babies, as even young people know. But does it have magic powers? Some people in northern Germany think so. They believe that fire never comes to the place where the stork has its brood. So, storks are allowed to rest on rooftops of homes everywhere.

3/7/24
Just Stuff Q& A

Q: Identify the movie from the following line:

            a) "No wire hangers!”

            b) "I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there, Lou."

            c) "So, I got that going for me which is nice."

            d) "There is no spoon."

            e) "Can I borrow your underpants for ten minutes?"

A: a) Mommy Dearest. b) Fargo   c) Caddyshack    d) The Matrix e) Sixteen Candles

 

Q: Catnip drives pet felines wild. Does it also affect big cats like lions and tigers, too?

A: Yes, some "Big cats" are extremely sensitive to catnip, which is also sometimes called catmint. The herb contains a chemical, nepatalacetone, which triggers strong and often unusual feline responses.

 

Q:  What is the name of the dog on the Cracker Jack box?

A: Bingo. Although Cracker Jack was first introduced in 1896, and was included in the song lyrics of "Take Me out to the Ballgame" in 1908, and started putting "A Prize in Every Box" in 1912, it was in 1918 that Sailor Jack and his dog, Bingo, first appeared on the Cracker Jack's box. Bingo and his human pal, Sailor Jack, have changed their appearances over the years, primarily to keep up with changing fashion.

 

3/6/24
Let's Talk Planets: Facts About Mars

Mars is the second smallest planet in the solar system, just a little more than half the size of Earth.

Mars was named for the Roman god of war because of its blood red appearance in the sky.

Mars gets its redish color from the iron in its crust interacting with a very small amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. To put it simply, Mars is red because it's rusting.

For a planet only half the size of Earth, Mars has some really huge features on its surface – including the largest volcano and the largest canyon in the solar system.

Both Phobos and Deimos, the two moons of Mars, are believed to be captured asteroids.

On Mars, a 100 pound (45.3 kg) person would weigh 37.9 pounds (17.1 kg).

To find out how much you weigh on Mars, multiply your Earth weight by 0.379.

 

3/4/24
Early Medicine Egyptian Style

In ancient Egypt, a migraine headache was considered a special ailment that called for special treatment. The patient ate siluris (an electric catfish) that was fried slowly in peppered oil.

The word "cataracts" comes from the Latin cataracta, meaning a downward trickle of water. The Egyptians and Romans believed that cataracts were caused by liquid flowing from the brain into the eyes.

In ancient Egypt, cataracts where treated by applying a mixture of tortoise brain and honey. The Egyptians thought the tortoise brains, along with the sluggish honey, possessed magical properties that would stop the flow of fluids.

The first known surgery for cataracts was performed in the Egyptian city of Alexandria in about A.D. 100.

INTERESTING - FEBUARY

2/28/24
Computer Stuff

The clock speed of the original IBM personal computer was 4.77 MHz. Today's computers are more than 500 times faster.

A standard compact disc (CD) is 4.8 inches (12 cm) in diameter.

You can store 74 minutes of music on a CD, equivalent to 783,216,000 bytes of information.

On a CD, information is "written" from the inside center hole to the outside edge.

Unlike data tape, a CD has only one track, which spirals from the CD’s center hole to its edge. Since the data is stored on a spiral, a greater concentration of it exists at the center of the CD then towards its edge.

 

2/26/24
More Stuff

How did we start the ritual of kissing a wound to make it better?

Everyone with children has kissed the small bruise or cut to make it better. This comes from one of our earliest medical procedures for the treatment of snakebite. Noticing that the victim could be saved if the venom was sucked out through the point of entry, early doctors soon began treating all infectious abrasions by putting their lips to the wound and sucking out the poison. Medicine moved on, but the belief that a kiss can make it all better still lingers.

 

How did flipping a coin become a decision-maker?

The Lydians minted the first coin in ten B.C. but it wasn't until nine hundred years later that the coin toss became a decision-maker. Julius Caesar's head appeared on one side of every Roman coin of his time, and such was the reverence for the Emperor that in his absence often serious litigation was decided by the flip of the coin. If Caesar's head landed upright, it meant that through the guidance of the gods, he agreed in absentia with the decision in question.

 

How did we start celebrating Mother’s Day?

In 1907 Miss Anna Jarvis of West Virginia asked guests to wear a white carnation to the church service on the anniversary of her mother's death. But Mother's Day became increasingly commercial, and Miss Jarvis spent the rest of her life trying to restore its simplicity. The strain of her efforts to stop Mother's Day and what it had become led her to an insane asylum, where she died alone in 1948.

 

2/22/24
Stuff about The Mosquito

A mosquito's "nose" is located on its antennae, which are covered with what biologists call odorant receptors. The specialized receptors that are sensitive to human sweat are the ones that prompt a mosquito to bite. They're found only on female mosquitoes.

It seems likely that King Tut died from malaria, a disease transmitted through the bite of a mosquito.

Female Anopheles mosquitoes, the ones that transmit malaria, are responsible for about one million human deaths a year.

 

2/21/24
Just Stuff Q&A

Q: Identify the literary work from the following first line:

a)     "Call me Ishmael."

b)     "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

c)      "A screaming comes across the sky."

d)     "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead."

e)     "It was a pleasure to burn."

A: a) Moby Dick by Herman Melville.  b) A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. c) Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. d) Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce.  e) Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

Q: Identify the poet of the following first lines:

A)    "I saw the best minds of a generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…"

B)    "April is the cruelest month…"

C)    "I sing the body electric…"

D)   "Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me."

E)    "Lana Turner has collapsed!"

A: A) Allen Ginsberg, "Howl."  B) T. S. Elliott, "The Wasteland."  C) Walt Whitman, "I Sing the Body Electric."  D) Emily Dickinson, "Because I could not stop for Death…"  E) Frank O'Hara, "Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)"

Q: What school does Harry Potter attend?

A: The Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Sorcery.

 

2/19/24
Interesting/Odd Facts About The Human Body.

An adult’s brain weighs three pounds, which is equal to the weight of three soccer balls.

Nerve impulses carry messages from your body to your brain at speeds of up to 180 miles per hour – the top speed of a fast car.

When you dive into water, your heartbeat slows down. This is one of your body’s survival tricks it slows down the effect of the lack of oxygen in your body and helps you hold your breath longer.

Your skin helps keep you cool by sweating salty water. On an average day, we sweat about half a pint, but on a very hot day you can lose as many as six pints of sweat.

 

2/15/24
Did you know…

When you go to buy bread in the grocery store, have you ever wondered which is the freshest, so you 'squeeze' for freshness or softness? Did you know that bread is delivered fresh to the stores five days a week? Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Each day has a different color twist tie.
They are:

Monday = Blue,
Tuesday = Green,
Thursday = Red
Friday = White
Saturday = Yellow.

So if today was Thursday, you would want red twist tie; not white which is Fridays (almost a week old)! The colors go alphabetically by color Blue- Green - Red - White - Yellow, Monday through Saturday. Very easy to remember. I thought this was interesting. I looked in the grocery store and the bread wrappers DO have different twist ties, and even the ones with the plastic clips have different colors. You learn something new every day! Enjoy fresh bread when you buy bread with the right color on the day you are shopping.

Pass this information on to friends so they can be informed

 

2/14/24
Some Stuff

Miscellaneous Odds and Ends
   When the doll clothes are hard to put on, sprinkle with corn starch and watch them slide on

   Body paint - Crisco mixed with food coloring. Heat the Crisco in the microwave, pour in to an empty film container and mix with the food color of your choice!
   Preserving a newspaper clipping - large bottle of club soda and cup of milk of magnesia, soak for 20 min. and let dry, will last for many years!
   A Slinky will hold toast and CD's!
   To keep goggles and glasses from fogging, coat with Colgate toothpaste
   To keep FRESH FLOWERS longer Add a little Clorox , or 2 Bayer aspirin , or just use 7-up instead of water.

2/12/24
Interesting uses for Kool Aid / Jello / Pam / Elmer’s Glue

   Stinky feet - Jello
   Kool aid to clean dishwasher pipes. Just put in the detergent section and run a cycle, it will also clean a toilet. (Wow, and we drink this stuff)
   Kool Aid can be used as a dye in paint also Kool Aid in Dannon plain yogurt as a finger paint, your kids will love it and it won't hurt them if they eat it!
   Tie Dye T-shirt - mix a solution of Kool Aid in a container, tie a rubber band around a section of the T-shirt and soak
   Sticking bicycle chain - Pam no-stick cooking spray
   Pam will also remove paint, and grease from your hands! Keep a can in your garage for your hubby

   Elmer's Glue - paint on your face, allow it to dry, peel off and see the dead skin and blackheads if any.

2/8/24
Did you know these things are good for…

Budweiser beer conditions the hair
Pam cooking spray will dry finger nail polish
Cool whip will condition your hair in 15 minutes
Mayonnaise will KILL LICE, it will also condition your hair
Heavy dandruff - pour on the vinegar!
For Shiny Hair - use brewed Lipton Tea

2/7/24
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: What are the names of Santa's reindeer

A: According to the "Night Before Christmas," – The answer, Prancer, Dixon, Comment, Qubid, Donner, and Blitzen by the reindeer who pull Santa's sleigh for the appointed yuletide rounds.

 

Q: Where do reindeer live?

A: Other than some very special reindeer who reside with Santa at the North Pole, these creatures live in the arctic and subarctic regions of Europe, Asia, and North America. The Sami in Scandinavia and the Nenets in Russia have domesticated them for centuries. There are wild reindeer in North America called caribou.

 

Q: Where was the game of badminton invented?

A: Badminton evolved from a Chinese game of the 5^th century B. C. That involved kicking the shuttle. A later version of the sport, played with racquets, appeared in ancient Greece and India, and a game called shuttlecock appeared in Europe during the 1600s. British army officers brought an adopted game back to Britain from India in the mid-19th century. In 1873, the Duke of Beaufort introduced the game to royalty at his country estate, Badminton House, giving this sport its name.

 

Q: What does Cinco de Mayo celebrate?

A: May 5 celebrates the victory of General Zaragosa over a French army in 1862. Contrary to popular belief, it is not Mexican Independence Day. That holiday is celebrated on September 16.

 

Q: Why is Amerigo Vespucci’s name forever linked with the Western Hemisphere?

A: Amerigo Vespucci’s name was given to America. This Italian geographer explored the northern coast of South America for Spain in 1499 and 1500. It was German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller who named the western continents after Vespucci in 1507. Later, he had second thoughts about the name, but it was too late to take back.

2/5/24
HELPFUL HINTS

Cleaning Aids:

   Wine stains, pour on the Morton salt and watch it absorb into the salt.
   To remove wax - Take a paper towel and iron it over the wax stain, it will absorb into the towel.
    Remove labels off glassware etc. rub with Peanut butter!
    Baked on food - fill container with water, get a Bounce paper softener and the static from the Bounce towel will cause the baked on food to adhere to it. Soak overnight. Also; you can use 2 Efferdent tablets, soak overnight!
   Crayon on the wall - Colgate toothpaste and brush it!
   Dirty grout - Listerine
   Stains on clothes - Colgate toothpaste
   Grass stains - Karo Syrup
   Grease Stains - Coca Cola, it will also remove grease stains from the driveway overnight. We know it will take corrosion from car batteries!
   Fleas in your carpet? 20 Mule Team Borax- sprinkle and let stand for 24 hours. Maybe this will work if you get them back again.
   Peanut butter will remove ink from the face of dolls
   Peanut butter - will get scratches out of CD's! Wipe off with a coffee filter paper

2/1/24
Did you know these things to use for first aid of…..

Sunburn - empty a large jar of Nestea into your bath water
Minor burn - Colgate or Crest toothpaste
Burn your tongue? Put sugar on it!
Arthritis? WD-40 Spray and rub in, kill insect stings too
Bee stings - meat tenderizer
Chigger bite - Preparation H
Paper cut - crazy glue or chap stick (glue is used instead of sutures at most hospitals)
Athletes feet - cornstarch
Gatorade is good for Migraine Headaches (PowerAde won't work)
Puffy eyes - Preparation H
Fungus on toenails or fingernails - Vicks vapor rub

INTERESTING - JANUARY

1/31/24
Just Stuff Sports-wise

Why do we call someone who is left-handed a “southpaw”?

When the first baseball diamonds were laid out there were no night games. To keep the afternoon or setting sun out of the batters’ eyes, home plate was positioned so that the hitter was facing east, which meant the pitcher was facing west. Most pitchers threw with their right arm, but the rare and dreaded left-hander’s pitching arm was on the more unfamiliar south side, and he was referred to, with respect, as a “southpaw.”

 

Why is an erratic person called a “screwball”?

In baseball, when a pitcher throws a curveball, it breaks to a right-hander’s left and a left-handers right. Early in the twentieth century, the great Christy Mathewson came up with a pitch that broke in the opposite direction and completely baffled opposing batters, who called it a “screwball.” It became a word used to describe anything eccentric or totally surprising - including some humans.

 

Why in sports does the home team wear white while the visitors wear darker colors?

Early television was in black and white and definition wasn’t nearly as precise as it is today. When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was testing for live hockey broadcasts in 1952, they found that if both teams wore their traditional colors, it was impossible to tell them apart. They solved the problem by having the home team wear white, while the visitors stayed in their darker uniforms.

 

Why is a football field called a “gridiron”?

The word football first described a game involving two teams and an inflated animal bladder in 1486. The game evolved several times before North Americans introduced new rules, such as three chances to advance the ball five yards, that led to white lines being painted on the field. From the stands, these lines gave the field the appearance of broiled meat from the metal grating of a griddle or “gridiron,” and so that’s what they called it. 

 

1/29/24
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: According to conspirators in the DaVinci Code by Dan Brown, what is the Holy Grail?

A: The Holy Grail is not a chalice but a woman, Mary Magdalene.

 

Q: What are the most popular items employees pilfer from office supply rooms for matters unrelated to the job?

A: According to a report in USA Today, a recent office supply survey found that 60% of the respondents admitting to taking pens and pencils, 40% took Post-It Notes, 32% took envelopes, 28% took note pads, and 28% took writing paper.

 

Q: What were Jayhawkers?

A: Radical abolitionist fighters during the American Civil War.

 

Q: Who said, "First I lost my voice, then I lost my figure and then I lost Onassis"?

A: Maria Callas (1923 to 1977).

 

Q: What is the Bilbao Effect?

A: Named after the new Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Gehry in Bilbao, Spain, the term refers to the revitalization of the city or region by a high-profile building by a world-class architect.

 

1/25/24
Some More Stuff - Minting Madness

In 2009 the United States Mint produced 3.548 billion circulating coins; 2.354 billion of those were pennies.

 Pennies contain more zinc than copper. Nickels contains more copper than nickel.

 The United States five-dollar bill has the shortest lifespan in circulation of any United States paper currency: about sixteen months. Ten-dollar bills stay in circulation for about eighteen months, and one-dollar bills for twenty-one months.

 Hippopotamuses are depicted on the fifty-franc banknote from the African nation of Burundi and the two-emalangeni banknotes from Switzerland.

 Banknotes from Mozambique, Nepal, South Africa, and Tanzania all feature pictures of rhinoceroses.

 The general manager of the mint in Chile was fired in February 2010 when it was discovered that thousands of fifty-peso coins had been issued with the name of the country spelled incorrectly: C-H-I-I-E instead of C-H-I-L-E.

    Interestingly, the coins had been put into circulation in 2008; it took two years for the error to be reported.

 

1/24/24
Just Stuff sports-wise

Why isn't it over, "till the fat lady sings"?

 In the 1970s, Washington sports columnist Dan Cook wrote, "The opera isn't over till the fat lady sings." Later, basketball coach Dick Motta, referring to the Bulls' slim playoff chances, misquoted Cook when he said, It isn't over till the fat lady sings," and it's stuck. The inspiration might have been the old American proverb, "Church ain't out till the fat lady sings," but regardless, it's now excepted in sports as meaning: where there's life, there's hope.

 

Where did we get the expression "second string"?

 In sports jargon, the "second string" is the second-best group of players on a given team. The term has also found its way into business, where it is used in much this same way. In fact, it comes from medieval archers, who always carried an extra string in case the one on their bow broke. Therefore, the second string had to be as good as the first, as did the third and fourth strings.

 

Why do we say a person isn't "up to scratch"?

During the early days of bare-knuckle boxing, a line was scratched across the center of the ring, dividing it into two halves. This is where the fighters met to start the contest, or where they "toed the line" to begin each round. If, as the fight progressed, one of the boxers was unable to toe the line without help from his seconds, it was said that he failed to come "up to scratch."

 

1/22/24
More Stuff

The most popular reality-television show in the Arab world is Million's Poet, a competition in which participants read their own poems in front of three judges, a live studio audience, and tens of millions of television viewers who watch the contest--broadcast live from Abu Dhabi-- and vote for their favorite poets online and by text message. The winner receives a cash prize of 5 million dirhams, about $1.4 million.

The longest poem in the world is still being written, and it's growing by about four thousand verses a day.  

     A computer program created by Romanian web developer Andrei Gheorghe takes random tweets from Twitter social networking service and pairs them into rhyming couplets that are then added to the collective work he calls "The Longest Poem in the World."

 

The Mahabharata, at some seventy-five thousand verses and nearly two million words, is one of the longest epic poems ever written and arguably the most significant Hindu text in history. Numerous translations and interpretations have been published, but one started in the summer of 2009 is among the more unusual: An Indian academic is writing his own interpretation of the Mahabharata on Twitter. Because of the service’s message length restrictions, it is being published 140 characters at a time.

 

1/18/24
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: What is the Lisbon Traviata?

A: In 1958, Maria Callas made her stage debut at Lisbon's Teatro Nacional de Sao Carlos where she gave a magnificent performance in the role of Violetta. The Portuguese National Radio (RDP) broadcast the opera live but the tapes were thought to be lost. Over the years, several imperfect bootleg editions of the Lisbon Traviata appeared, but it wasn't until 1997 that the original recording of the legendary performance were rediscovered in a radio storage room. A CD from the master tapes was eventually released.

 

Q: What was the Sensation Art Exhibit?

A: A controversial art exhibit in drawn from the collection of renowned art buyer Charles Saatchi. First shown at the Royal Academy of Art in 1997, the show featured works by many young British artists of the 1990's, provoking public fury because of the perceived inflammatory or offensive nature of many of the works of art. The show sparked both outrage and blockbuster ticket sales.

 

Q: Who was the designer of the original 1936 Volkswagen?

A: Ferdinand Porsche, who became well known for his line of elegant sports cars.

 

Q: Who was the first winner of the hit TV reality series Survivor?

A: Richard Hatch.

 

1/17/24
Strange Things About Space

Mercury has the fastest orbit of any planet in the solar system, completing one revolution around the sun in 88 days.

Because of Mercury’s rate of rotation and its unusual orbit, the sun appears to rise briefly, set, and then rise again before it travels westward across the sky. Then, at sunset, the sun appears to set, rise again briefly, and then set again.

Mercury has the greatest temperature range of any planet in our solar system. The side facing the sun reaches 800 degrees Fahrenheit (427 degrees Celsius) – hot enough to melt tin. The night side temperature drops to -361 degrees Fahrenheit (-218 degrees Celsius).

Astronomers estimate that 80% of Mercury’s core is iron-nickel, compared with Earth’s 32%.

Mercury has a very thin atmosphere composed of helium atoms captured from the solar wind.

1/15/24
Interesting Facts About Nature

"The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain" – as everybody has heard from My Fair Lady. But did you ever wonder if that's really true? It isn't, in the north and east of Spain (far from the plain), along the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic, the rainfall is so heavy that it often comes to 66 inches a year!

Lightning can and does repeatedly strike the same object – be it a lone tree in a field or a lightning rod on the roof of a building. The spire atop the Empire State Building is struck as often as 50 times a year. Are the people in the building at the time hurt in anyway by the lightning? No, they are not even aware that the building is being struck.

The tallest clouds are the great towering thunderclouds called cumulonimbus. They can be twice the height of Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, and hold 500,000 tons of water.

1/11/24
Ready Set Invent

Optical fiber, those light carrying threads that are used in communication (and to decorate Christmas trees) was invented in 1966 by the British inventors Charles Kao and George Hockham.

Paper was invented in China about 100 B.C. But the physician Ts'ai Lun greatly improved it in A.D. 105 by adding tree bark and soft woods. This ancient paper was of very high quality and came to be known as "Marquis Ts'ai Paper."

The Chinese were the first to design gunfire-powered cannons. They used them to defend themselves against the Mongol threat from the north.

We owe our 60-based time system (60 minutes to the hour; 60 seconds to the minute) to the Babylonians.

 

1/10/24
Let's Talk Planets. Fact's About Earth's Moon.

There are several dark, smooth areas on the lunar surface called maria (pronounced MAR-ee-uh – the first syllable rhymes with car).

Not long after the planets and moons had formed, there was a great deal of leftover debris floating around in space.

Large pieces of this debris slammed into the moon, forming giant craters. Some of these impacts were so powerful, they cracked the lunar crust. Molten lava from the interior of the moon seeped through the cracks just like water seeping into a basement.

The lava eventually filled the craters and hardened, leaving the smooth surface. However, these smooth surfaces are deceptive. It turns out that maria have been collecting small craters for billions of years – as Apollo 11 astronauts found out.

Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility) was chosen as a landing site for the first manned mission to the moon partly because of its crater-free appearance. Yet when Apollo 11 astronauts arrived, they found their crater-free landing site covered with small craters and boulders that had been invisible to telescopes on Earth and cameras in lunar orbit.

Despite the relatively rough terrain, they were able to find a flat spot to safely touch down— the rest is history. 

1/8/24
Just Stuff Sports-Wise

Why is a boxing ring square?
In the days of bare-knuckle boxing, before modern rules, a circle was drawn in the dirt and prize fighters where ringed by the fans. When one of the men was knocked out of that circle, he was simply pushed back into the ring by the crowd. In 1867, the Marquess of Queensberry introduced a number of rules to boxing, including three-minute rounds and a roped off square, which fans continued to call the "boxing ring".


Why do we call the genuine article the "real McCoy"?
In the 1890s, a great boxer known as Kid McCoy couldn't get the champion to fight him, and so to seem beatable, he began to throw the odd bout, and fans never knew if they'd seen the "real McCoy." The plan worked, and he became the welterweight champion of the world. Once, while in a bar, McCoy was challenged by a drunken patron who didn't believe that he was the great boxer, and McCoy flattened him. When the man came around, he declared that the man who had knocked him out was indeed the "real McCoy."


Why is a fistfight called "duking it out"?
"Duking it out" and "put up your dukes" are both expressions from the early 1800s when bare-knuckle boxing was considered a lower-class activity. When Frederick Augustus, the then duke of York, took up the sport, English high society was shocked. The "Duke" gained so much admiration from the other boxers, however, that they began referring to their fists as their "dukes of York" and eventually as their "dukes."


How did tennis get the terms seeded and love?
Tennis was popularized by the French nobility, and because a zero looked like an egg that's what they called it. Egg in French is l'oeuf, which became "love" in English. The seeding or placing of the best players within favorable tournament positions required other players to graciously cede – yield or give up – the spots. In time, the word mutated to the spelling of its homonym, seed, and so players were said to be "seeded."

1/4/24
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: In what country did the TV show Big Brother originate?
A: The Netherlands.

Q: Who was called "The Velvet Fog"?
A: Mel Torme. A disk jockey gave this smooth-voiced singer the sobriquet in 1946. Torme hated the nickname (perhaps because critics dubbed him "The Velvet Frog"), but could never shake it.

Q: Was the Baby Ruth candy bar named after Babe Ruth?
A: That's a sticky question. The Curtiss Candy Company has always maintained that their tasty peanuts and chocolate candy bar was named after "Baby Ruth" Cleveland, the daughter of President Grover Cleveland. However, that contention seems a bit problematic" Baby Ruth first appeared in candy stores in 1921, a full seventeen years after the death of "Baby Ruth," but just as "the Sultan of Swat" was hitting his homerun stride.

Q: Was P.T. Barnum, considered to be one of America's greatest showmen, ever a mayor off an American city"
A: Yes. P.T. Barnum was elected the Mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1875. He also served two terms as a representative in the Connecticut General Assembly.


1/3/24 was 1/3/24

Some more stuff

The 11th-century Tibetan Epic of King Gesar is considered to be the longest epic poem in existence. It contains more than a million versus, most of which were not written on paper, but were passed down through generations of storytellers.

Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer composed his most famous work, the four volume "Burundi Quartet," during the 10 years he was a political prisoner on Buru Island. Because he was forbidden to have pens or paper during most of his time in prison, he committed his stories to memory by telling them to his fellow prisoners every evening.

Poet John Milton went blind, probably from glaucoma, in 1652. He wrote his masterpiece, the twelve-volume poem Paradise Lost, published in 1668, by dictating it to his daughters and assistants.


1/1/24

Hmm, Just Stuff

St. Pantaleone was once the patron saint of Venice, Italy. He was later depicted in a play as a silly old man who wore long trousers. From the play, trousers were called pantaloons, later shortened to pants. 

The Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey, in London, England, contains the remains of many great writers and poets. This includes the ashes of Thomas Hardy. But his heart is not there. It is buried in a grave at Stinsford, in Dorset. 

A temple to Kuan Yin, the goddess of mercy, was built in Hong Kong for a very unusual reason. About fifty years ago, workers were digging a well when suddenly a geyser erupted. It had crimson water because of deposits of mercury and sulfur there. But the diggers thought they had wounded a sacred dragon and it was the dragon's blood that they saw -- so they built a temple on that site. 

At approximately 146,000 square miles, the total area of Japan is slightly smaller than the state of Montana. It is a chain of islands that has a north-to-south span of about 1,300 miles. This is such a long distance that the vegetation is completely different at each end of the country.