Interesting Tab

INTERESTING - MARCH



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 5th 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. 

 

INTERESTING - DECEMBER

12/28/23
Some More Stuff

Why do we put candles on a birthday cake?

The Greeks borrowed celebrating birthdays from the Egyptian pharaohs and the cake idea from the Persians. Then early Christians did away with birthday parties for a while until the custom reemerged with candles in Germany in the twelfth century. Awakened with the arrival of a birthday cake topped with lighted candles, which were changed and kept lit until after the family meal, the honored child would make a wish that, it was said, would come true only if the candles were blown out in a single breath.


How did wakes become part of the funeral tradition?

The Irish are the most famous for their wakes, holding elaborate and festive celebrations with testimonials and toast to the recently deceased. The custom began long before advances of scientific undertaking and was a way of passing enough time to ensure that the subject wasn't about to be buried alive. The ritual was held to see if the subject would wake up, which sometimes happened, and so it was called a "wake."

 

Why are flags flown at half mast?

In the sixteenth century, ships would lower their flag halfway as a sign of submission during battle, and it was said they are flying at "half-mast." On reaching port, the flag remained half-lowered in honor of those who had sacrificed their lives. In the seventeenth century the ritual moved to land, where it was said that the flags were at "half-staff," as a sign of respect for any individual who had died serving his country beyond the call of duty.

 

12/27/23
Ready Set Invent

The abacus (an object used for counting or doing simple calculations, consisting of a frame with small balls in a row) was invented in Mesopotamia, probably by the Babylonians. Over the next 2000 years, it made its way to Europe and East Asia.

Neither the ancient Greeks nor the early Christians use the numeral zero. The concept of zero came from India, and reached Europe through the Arab world.

The first recipe for gunpowder comes from the Song Dynasty of China, around A.D. 1044. The Chinese were probably using it long before this, however, for fireworks.

The first treatise on perspective was written in 480 B.C. by the Greek artist Agatharkhos, a scene painter for the theater.



12/25/23
Strange and Interesting Stuff about Sports.

In Turkey, camel wrestling is a major sporting event, especially in the area around the Aegean Sea. The big humpback animals actually engage in a long shoving match, with an occasional bite thrown in to get the opponent to move off. The camels are never badly hurt, and the winner is the camel who simply doesn't give up.

 

In the early days of football, the game did not have a lot of standard rules. Originally, there was no rule governing how many players could actively participate on each side. Before a game, the two teams involved decided how many players would be on the field at one time; as many as 25 players on each side played in early football contests. It wasn't until 1876 that a rule was established limiting each seem to just 15 players on the field. Finally, in 1880 the rule was changed to allow teams the use of only 11 players at a time.

 

The pre-Columbian Aztecs in Mexico played a game similar to basketball that they called ollamalitzil. Players tried to put a solid rubber ball through a hole in a fixed stone placed high on the side of a stadium wall. Losing a game of ollamalitzil was costly… The captain of the losing squad was often beheaded and the winning team was entitled to the clothing of all of the spectators as a prize for being victorious.

 


12/21/23
Just Stuff Q&A

Q: How did the 2005 hurricane season set a precedent for the naming of tropical storms?

A: Each year, the National Hurricane Center generates a list of approved names for storms which are named alphabetically from A to Z. In 2005, there were so many hurricanes that the list was exhausted, that letters of the Greek alphabet had to be used to supplement the original list.

 

Q: In what year were female names first used for tropical storms and hurricanes?

A: 1953. In 1979, male names were added to the lists.

 

Q: According to the 2006 Mitsubishi Motors online poll, what are America's "wildest, weirdest, and wackiest" street names?

A: In a descending order: 10. Tatar Peeler Road in Lebanon, Tennessee. 9. The intersection of Count and Basie in Richmond Virginia. 8. Shades of Death Road in Warren County, New Jersey. 7. Unexpected Road in Buena, New Jersey. 6. Bucket of Blood Street in Holbrook, Arizona. 5. The intersection of Clinton and Fidelity in Houston Texas. 4. The intersection of Lonesome and Hardup in Albany, Georgia. 3. Farfrompoopen  Road in Tennessee (the only road up to Constipation Ridge.) 2. Divorce Court in Heather Highlands, Pennsylvania. 1. Psycho Path in Traverse City, Michigan.

 

Q: Psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers won the big prize in the $64,000 Question. In what subject did she compete?

A: Boxing

 


12/20/23
Interesting and Odd Animal Kingdom Facts

The armor-plated body of the crocodile is lithe and long. (Some have been known to reach a length of 30 feet.) It moves with lightning speed and can kill a man with a lash from its powerful tale.

     But it is its mouth that is really frightening. The jaws of a crocodile can snapshot on its prey with 1000 pounds of pressure. A crocodile’s teeth are set in its long, tapered head like a row of deadly weapons. Nor do crocodiles have to worry about this natural arsenal failing them, because they're seventy teeth endlessly replace themselves.

The huge teeth also intermesh, giving the reptilian mouth the look of a murderous zipper. The crocs charmless appearance is further emphasized by its choppers, which thrust upward through a marginal groove on the upper lip to jut, tusk-like, above its pointed snout.

     Though its teeth serve it well, the crocodile does have a dental problem. Unlike the alligator this big saurian does not have a tongue. That means the crocodile has trouble freeing its teeth of debris after devouring its frequent meals. The Nile crocodile solved this grooming problem eons ago, when he formed a strange partnership with the Egyptian plover. This bird keeps the big reptile’s teeth clean by feeding on the particles of food left lodged between them.

     Apparently, the bird’s host is content with its "flying toothpick," as the plover is the only living thing that the crocodile has never been known to attack.

 


12/18/23
Let's Talk Planets. Facts About Earth's Moon.

What is it made of?

Contrary to the popular stories, the moon is not made of cheese! (LOL)

 Instead, it is made up entirely of different types of rocks.

 Rocks. How complicated can that be? Well, there are many different types of rocks.

 For example, the dark, smooth areas of the moon contain mostly basaltic- type rocks – rocks that were formed from cooling lava.

 The lighter, heavily cratered highlands contain mostly anorthosites – rocks that cooled slower than the basalts and, therefore, were formed from different minerals.

 Then there are the breccias – rocks that are actually a combination of tiny rock pieces that were welded together, perhaps by the heat from a meteor impact.

 In addition to all the rocks, there is a type of lunar "soil" – although it's made of rocks as well. This soil, called regolith, extends down about 15 feet (4.6 mm) and is simply crushed rock – rock that has been pulverized by billions of years of meteor impacts.

 All these rocks are similar to Earth rocks, but they are not identical. Moon rocks contain higher concentrations of certain elements such as calcium, aluminum, titanium, uranium, and thorium.

 A thing they all lack, though, is water. Moon rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts show no evidence that water ever existed on the lunar surface.

 


12/14/23
Interesting and Odd Animal Kingdom Facts

There is an old wives’ tale well taken to heart by fishermen and their clams about not eating shellfish during a month without an R in its name. Modern biologists tell us it's a pretty good idea, too. Here's why:

During the warm months of the year there is a species of plankton that drifts and floats on the sea like so much flotsam and jetsam. These plankton, called Gonyaulax catenella, are strange little creatures about the size of a microbe that by the millions make up the menu of the various shellfish: oysters, scallops, clams, and mollusks. During warmer months the plankton secrete a poison known as saxitoxin and the shellfish eat both plankton and poison.

The saxitoxin consumed by and concentrated in the shellfish was at one time intended to replace the cyanide "L-Pill" issued to American agents in World War II. It never really found its way into the cloak and dagger arena, though it was used as the poison in the silver dollar carried by U-2 pilot Gary Powers in his flight over the USSR in 1960. Saxitoxin was put into the grooves of a tiny pin hidden in the silver dollar. The pin was to be used in the event of capture. As it turned out the Russians seized the silver dollar, found that the concealed pin, and out of curiosity tried out its power on one of their huge guard dogs…which died within seconds.



12/13/23
Just Stuff Sports-wise

Why is the Cleveland baseball team called the Indians?

Controversy generally surrounds the choice of Native American names for sports teams, but not in Cleveland. The city's baseball team is named in honor of one of their star players from the 1890s. He was Alex Sophalexis, a Penobscot Indian so respected that in 1914, one year after his death, Cleveland took the name "Indians" to commemorate Alex and what he had meant to their team.

 

Why is the L.A. baseball team called the Dodgers?

Before moving to Los Angeles, the Dodgers were based in Brooklyn, New York. The team had originated in the nineteenth century when, because of the dangers of horse-drawn trolleys and carriages, the pedestrians of Brooklyn called themselves "trolley dodgers." Because most of their working-class fans had to dodge traffic on the way to the games, the Brooklyn baseball team named themselves the "Dodgers" in their honor. When the team moved to LA in the 1950s, they took the name with them.

 

Why does the K signify a strikeout on a baseball score sheet?

In early baseball history, a man named Henry Chadwick designed the system we still use for keeping score. Because this system already had an overabundance of S’s scattered throughout his score sheet – safe, slide, shortstop, sacrifice, second base, etc. – he decided to use the last letter of struck, as in "he struck out," rather than the first. And that's why K signifies a strikeout in baseball

 


12/11/23
Just Stuff Thick Skin?

When hippos perspire, their sweat is red, which led to the belief that hippos sweat blood. Hippo sweat contains red and orange pigments, which make it look like blood, but these coloring agents act as a sunscreen to keep the hippo’s virtually hairless skin from burning in the strong African sun. In addition, the red pigment seems to act as an antibiotic that helps wounds heal, which is quite handy since hippos tend to fight amongst themselves frequently and most wild hippos carry lots of battle scars.

Hippopotamuses are considered among the most lethal mammals on earth. They're very strong and aggressive, and they don't fear humans. Since they typically weigh between three and five tons, there's not much reason for them to be afraid.

 Pigs, warthogs, elephants, and rhinoceroses can become sunburned. They roll in mud or sprinkle themselves with dust to protect their skin from the sun's UV rays.

 

12/7/23
Just Stuff Q&A

Q: What is Quidditch?
A: A ballgame played on flying broomsticks by the students of Hogwarts.

Q: Name the city that is most closely associated with the following public transportation terms.
    a) BART
    b) the Loop
    c) the Tube
    d) SEPTA
    e) The T
A: a) San Francisco b) Chicago c) London d) Philadelphia e) Boston

Q: What's do the following acronyms for New York City neighborhoods symbolize?
    a) Nolita
    b) Soho
    c) Tribeca
    d) Dumbo
    e) Bococa
A: a) North of Little Italy b) South of Houston St. c) Triangle Below Canal Street d) Down under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass e) Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens

Q: Which member of the animal kingdom has the largest brain proportion to its size?
A: The ant.


12/6/23
Let's Talk Planets Facts About Earth’s Moon.

The moon is covered with craters – craters ranging in size from less than a millimeter to several hundred miles in diameter.

All these craters were formed when debris of varying sizes slammed into the lunar surface. Each resulting explosion flung material away from the impact site in all directions, forming a nice round crater. Because the Moon doesn't have an atmosphere, everything that is aimed at the moon slams into it and forms a creater. And without any wind or weather to wash the craters away, these round marks will remain on the moon forever – unless another space rock happens to land on top of them.


12/4/23
Weather Facts About Lightning

At any time, two thousand thunderstorms are occurring around the world, producing lightning that strikes the earth up to one hundred times every second.

HOW LIGHTNING FORMS.

Lightning forms when rapidly rising air in a thunderstorm crashes into rapidly falling air to create separate positively and negatively charged areas within or surrounding the cloud. Air acts as an insulator, but when the electrical charge is strong enough, the result is a spark we see as lightning. Lightning equalizes the positively and negatively charged areas.

 

HOW LIGHTNING MOVES.

The flash of lightning that appears to hit the ground is actually a series of "strokes" of electrical current. These strokes, occurring about twenty-five times a second, travel along the pathway that meteorologists call and ionized channel.

The channel begins to form when the flow of negatively charged electrons drops from the base of a cloud almost to the ground. At the same time, a short tendril of positively charged electrons moves up from the ground along a tree, metal tower, or tall building.

When the negative flow meets the positive tendril, the channel is complete, and you see the bright strokes of lightning flashing through the channel.

 


INTERESTING - NOVEMBER

11/29/23
Let's Talk Planets: Facts about Earth’s Moon

WHY DOES IT CHANGE SHAPE?

The phases of the moon occur because the moon orbits Earth.

At any given time, half the moon is lit by sunlight and the other half is dark. Because the moon is constantly traveling around our planet, we see different amounts of the sunlit side.

For example, we see the whole sunlit side of the moon during a full moon.

During a new moon, the entire sunlit side of the moon is facing away from Earth, so we can't see anything. (This is the best time to look at faint stars and galaxies.)

All the rest of the time, how much of the sunlit side the varies.



11/27/23
A Dolphins Tale

The male heir to the throne of France is referred to as the dauphin. Dauphin is the French word for "dolphin."

 When a wild dolphin became trapped in a marina lock in the 1980s, she was rescued and cared for at a dolphin sanctuary in Adelaide, Australia, where she must've picked up a few tricks from the other dolphins. Nearly twenty years later, marine biologists spotted several wild dolphins near Adelaide performing a trick known as tail walking – rising out of the water to a vertical position and gliding backward for several feet powered by flicks of the tail. Tail walking is a swell trick for trained performing dolphins, but it serves no known purpose in the wild. The biologists concluded that the rescued dolphin learned the skill during her time in the sanctuary and taught it to her pod-mates when she was returned to the wild.

 Dolphins are "conscious breathers," meaning that they have to be awake or semi-awake to remember to breathe. If they fall asleep entirely, they'll stop breathing and drown. So, dolphins don't ever go completely asleep. Instead, they rest in short bursts during the day, sometimes shutting one eye and resting half of their brain while keeping the other eye open and the other half of the brain alert.

 

11/23/23
Interesting and Odd Animal Kingdom Facts

Stonefish are the most venomous fish known to man – and their delivery system is one-of-a-kind, too. They have thirteen or fourteen very sharp spines in their backs, fed from small sacs of venom on either side of the backbone. The sacs are located beneath the skin. The slightest pressure imaginable causes poison to flow up the spine grooves to the point of contact. If several of these spines manage to puncture the skin, they introduce a most deadly nerve poison into the victim. There is terrible pain, and cases have been reported where death followed in only two hours. More often it is four hours. If the victim is still alive after six hours, the chances for life are good – but not without problems. The excruciating pain may drive him to insanity and, if he survives the pain, his arms and legs may swell to enormous proportions for days or weeks. Finally, nausea may plague the victim for a year or more afterward.

When a whale "blows," it looks as if it is spouting water, but it is really blowing air.

     A whale fills its huge lungs with air before diving and can hold its breath for as long as an hour before resurfacing. When the whale comes up to the surface again, it blows out air and a great blast through one or two nostrils, called blowholes, on the top of its head. When this air, which has become warm and moist in the whale’s lungs, meets the colder air of the atmosphere, it condenses into a steamy vapor. The colder the air around the whale, the more visible the vapor when whale exhales. Much the same thing happens to humans on a cold day, when we see our breath as we exhale.

      Thus, the whale does not spout water. A true mammal, it can no more tolerate water in its breathing system than we can.

 


11/22/23
About the computer and such:

Of the millions of colors a computer can produce, only 216 of them look identical on both an Apple computer and a PC. Web developers use these "browser safe colors" to make sure that their pages look the same for owners of either machine.

The first computer game designed to be played on a television set was created in 1967. Its inventor, Ralph Baer, got the idea while working in television.

A game called "Computer Space" was the first arcade game, created in 1971 by programmer Nolan Bushnell. It was followed by another popular game, "Pong." A year later, Bushnell and Ted Dabney started the Atari computer company.

The company SUN Microsystems took its name from the Stanford University Network.

The computer "mouse" got its name from its inventor, Douglas Engelbart of Stanford University. He called it a mouse because the "tail came out of the end," and patented his invention in 1970.

According to Weird magazine, one of the computer industry's standard-setters, the plural of “mouse” is “mouses."

The Silicon Graphics computer – one of the most expensive machines ever produced – was used to create the special effects for the movies Forest Gump and the Matrix.

 


11/20/23
Just Stuff Q&A

Q: What is the most famous blooper in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest?

A: During the fake shooting scene at the Mount Rushmore cafeteria, a boy extra sitting in the background puts his fingers in his ears before the gun is fired.

 

Q: What is a "greengrocer’s apostrophe"?

A: It is an unnecessary apostrophe used to make a plural such as apple’s or pie’s. This comment ever of the English language got its name because of its prevalence on greengrocers’ signs.

 

Q: What is "the Patter"?

A: The dialect of English spoken by Scott's in and around Glasgow. The Patter is also known as Glasweigian.

 

Q: Match the following linguistic terms with their examples.

a) eponym                             1) fluke: fluke

b) toponym                           2) the crown: the king

c) metonym                          3) Balkanization: Balkans or Madison Avenue: advertising

d) pseudonym                      4) braille: Luis Braille

e) homonym                         5) Dr. Seuss: Theodore Gaisel

A: a) 4.  b) 3. c) 2.  d) 5.   e) 1.

                  


11/16/23
Strange Stuff About Space

Our galaxy is so wide that, at the speed of light, it would take you one hundred thousand years to cross it.

In space, astronauts can't cry because it's impossible for tears to flow without gravity. Weightlessness also inhibits the natural lubrication of the nasal passages, the quantity of saliva produced in the mouth, and the digestive juices in the stomach, and removes the isometric tension of muscles so that arms and legs grow weak. But the most serious problem involves the loss of bone mass. Without gravity, bones become porous and brittle, and are easy to break.

The volume of Earth's moon is the same as the volume of the Pacific Ocean.



11/15/23
Stuff About Inventions

In the early 20th century, the British mathematician Lord Kelvin predicted that radio had no future. He also predicted that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible.

Human speech was first transmitted over the ocean by radio in 1915. The broadcast began in New York City and was heard at the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

In 1899, the director of the United States Patent Office assured Pres. McKinley that "everything that can be invented has a ready been invented."

Greek philosopher Euktemon (50B.C.) might be considered the first meteorologist. Along with designing calendars, Euktemon identified and predicted weather patterns and announced his weekly forecasts to the marketplace.

Albert Einstein applied for and was granted a patent for an improved butane-ammonia refrigerator in 1927.


11/13/23
I Caught It From

Diseases that can be communicated from animals to humans are called zoonotic diseases. The most common of these is probably rabies, but there are others. People who work with horses may contract intestinal ailments, such as salmonellosis, and skin conditions, like ringworm and rain rot.

In addition to avian (bird) flu and swine flu – both of which originated in animals and can affect humans – there are canine flu and equine flu, related diseases that affect dogs and horses respectively.

Ancient Hittites used disease animals as weapons against their enemies the Arzawans during the Anatolian War in the fourteenth century BCE. Their species of choice were rabbits, sheep, and donkeys carrying the bacteria Francisellatularensis, which causes the infectious disease known as tularemia or "rabbit fever." Symptoms include skin ulcers, swollen lymph glands, fever, chills, respiratory failure and pneumonia.

 

11/9/23
Just Stuff

Q: Why do funeral possessions move so slowly?

A: The Romans introduced the lighting of candles and torches at funeral services to ward off evil spirits and guide the deceased to paradise. The word funeral itself is derived from the Latin word for torch. By the fifteenth century, people were placing huge candelabras on the coffin even as it was carried to the burial ground. The funeral procession moved at a very slow pace so that the candles wouldn't blowout.


Q: Why did the British drive on the left side of the road while Americans use the right?

A: The British custom of driving on the left was passed down from the Romans. The chariot driver stayed to the left in order to meet an approaching enemy with his right sword hand. Americans switched to driving on the right because in covered wagons the brakes were built on the left, forcing the driver to sit on that same side and, consequently, to drive on the right so they could have a clear view of the road.

 

Q: Why do we use X’s as kisses at the bottom of the letter?

A: During medieval times, most people could neither read nor write, and even those who could sign their names were required to follow it with an X, symbolizing the cross of St. Andrew, or the contract would be invalid. Those who couldn't write their name still had to end the contract with the X to make it legal. To prove their intention, all were required to kiss the cross, which through time is how the X became associated with a lover's kiss.


11/8/23
Botanical Oddities

The Scoville Heat Unit Scale was developed in 1912 to measure and compare the heat of chili peppers. Wilbur Scoville, a pharmacist, developed a method that used five tasters. They took exact weights of the peppers, crushed them, and dissolved the capsaicin (the compound that makes peppers hot) in alcohol. The alcohol solution was then diluted with sugar water until the capsaicin was no longer detectable to the palate. If it took 1000 units of sugar water to one unit of alcohol solution before the capsaicin became undetectable, the sample was said to measure 1000 Scoville Units. At least three panel members had to agree before a value was assigned. Although this method was the first to measure chili pepper heat, it was imprecise because it involved human tasters. Today, liquid chromatography and other sophisticated chemical procedures have replaced the Scoville method.

According to the school the method for measuring the heat of chili peppers, the mildest pepper is the bell pepper with an HU (Heat Index) rating of 0. The hottest is the habanero, with an HU of about 100,000.

The substance that gives hot peppers their "bite" is capsaicin, an alcohol-soluble alkaloid compound. Its heat has been shown to interrupt pain signals in nerves when applied to the skin.

Orchids have the smallest seeds. It takes more than 1.25 million seeds to weigh one gram.


11/6/23
Just Stuff Q& A

Q: The Cisco Kid was a creation of what well-known American author?
A: O. Henry was the creator of the Cisco Kid, who first appeared in the story, “The Caballero’s Way.” Cisco later became the hero of more than two dozen movies and a television series that ran for six years

Q: What is St. Elmo’s Fire?
A: A white or bluish-green lightning found on ship’s masts and aircraft wingtips.

Q: In what state was American author Tennessee Williams born?
A: Thomas Lanier William was born in Mississippi in 1911. He took the name of Tennessee after his father’s home state.

Q: What do Stephen Crane, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sir Arthur Sullivan, John Ruskin, and Oscar Wilde have in common?
A: Probably very little except that they all died in 1900.

Q: What do Thomas Wolfe, Aaron Copland and Ignazio Silone have in comm
A: They were all born in 1900.

11/2/23         

Ready Set Invent

The potter's wheel is among the earliest of inventions, appearing simultaneously in China, Samaria, and Egypt about four thousand B.C. Some archaeologists speculate that it was used long before the concept of the wheel was applied to vehicles.

The first evidence of the use of a mechanical drill is in a marble pedestal in the Domus Aurea or "Golden House" of the Roman Emperor Nero, made in about A.D. 74.

The pocket watch was invented in around 1500 by the German clockmaker Peter Henlein. Both “Henleins’s Morsel" and its inventor were ridiculed at the time.

The oldest mechanical clock is located in England's Salisbury Cathedral. Dating from the 13th century, the clock features a system of gears and ropes that would ring the tower bells every hour. Although the clock is no longer kept wound, it was demonstrated recently and found to work perfectly. 


11/1/23
About Mother Earth

Lithostatic pressure refers to pressure exerted equally in all directions, such as what a scuba diver experiences when underwater. It can also refer to the force exerted on a rock buried deep within the Earth by overlying rocks. Because the pressure is equal from all sides, compression makes the rock smaller without changing its shape.

Due to plate movement, the ocean floor is spreading at the rate of a little over an inch (3cm) a year.

Of all the oceans, the Pacific has the greatest average depth – 14,130 feet (4,307m).

Canada has the largest coastline of any country – 56,453 miles (90,852 km). This is due to the extensive collection of islands in the north.

With a maximum depth of 5,315 feet (1,594.5m), Lake Baikal in Russia is the deepest lake in the world.

INTERESTING - OCTOBER

SORRRY ABOUT MY OCTOBER POSTS. I WAS NOT PHYSICALLY ABLE TO DO THEM. 

INTERESTING - SEPTEMBER

9/28/23       

Strange Stuff About Ordinary Things

Celery has "negative calories," which means that it takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery contains as a food.

The molecule for the flavor of spearmint, when reversed, becomes the molecule for the flavor of rye.

Most lipstick, nail polish, artists paints, and ceramics contain a silvery substance called "pearl essence," obtained from the scales of herring and other fishes.

A chipped pearl will melt in vinegar. This is because under the pearly coating, or nacre, a pearl is mostly calcium carbonite, which dissolves in the acidic vinegar.

Every diamond has its own unique crystal "fingerprint."

 

9/27/23      

Let's talk planets. Facts about Earth

It is hard to think of Earth as a planet because to us it’s home. So for now, let's pretend we are aliens seeing this planet for the first time. Here's how the alien captain's log might read:

As our spaceship approaches the third planet in the solar system, we are struck by its color – a vivid blue and brown with swirls of white clouds.

Sensors tell us that the blue we are seeing is liquid water – a unique find in this otherwise dry solar system. Solid water ice covers both poles of the planet; the brown appears to be rocky continents.

The planet is geologically active, with many volcanoes and quakes that shake various parts of its surface. It also has an active weather system, with several storms breaking out in the thin nitrogen and oxygen atmosphere.

Sensors have detected a tremendous amount of activity on many different radio frequencies. This suggests the possibility of intelligent life, although much of what we are detecting sounds like noise!

Suggest caution as we approach as to not disturb any intelligent life-forms that may exist.

 I suppose that would explain why we've never seen any of these alien spaceships. lol


9/25/23            

More Stuff

In 1960 Bubble Wrap was introduced into our society. Marc Chavannes and Alfred Fielding created Bubble Wrap after experimenting unsuccessfully with an idea for plastic, textured wallpaper.

The last Monday in January is officially designated Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day in the United States.

Peach pits, apricot pits and apple seeds contain the poison cyanide.

Koalas feed almost exclusively on eucalyptus leaves, which provide very little energy and are highly toxic to almost all animals except koalas.

Koalas sleep as many as 22 hours a day.


9/21/23       

 Just Stuff  Q & A

Q:  Why do lemurs take turns mouthing large millipedes?

A: Apparently, these psychedelic lemurs have discovered that the millipedes’ powerful defensive chemicals can plunge them into hallucinations.

Q: What is the name of the doomed boat on Gilligan's Island (1964-1967)?

A: The  S.S. Minnow.

Q: What are the names of the two marble lions that stand in front of the New York Public Library?

A: in the 1930s, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia named them Patience and Fortitude.

Q: Provide the last names of these Desperate Housewives characters: (1) Susan. (2) Bree. (3) Lynette. (4) Gabrielle. (5) Edie. (6) Mary-Alice. (7) Mike. (8) Pharmacist George.

A: (1) Mayer.  (2) Van De Camp. (3) Scavo. (4) Solis. (5) Britt. (6) Young. (7) Defino. (8) Williams.


9/20/23      

Just Stuff

Q: Where did the rude Anglo-Saxon one fingered salute come from?

A: When the outnumbered English faced the French at the Battle of Agincourt, they were armed with a relatively new weapon, the Longbow. The French were so amused that they vowed to cut off the middle finger of each British archer. When the longbows won the day, the English jeered the retreating French by raising that middle finger in a gesture that still means, among other things, "in-your-face."

Q: Why do Christians place their hands together in prayer?

A: The original gesture of Christian prayer was spreading the arms and hands heavenward. There is no mention anywhere in the Bible of joining hands in prayer, and that custom didn't surface in the church until the ninth century. In Roman times, a man would place his hands together as an offer of submission that meant, "I surrender, here are my hands ready to be bound or shackled." Christianity accepted the gesture as a symbol of offering total obedience, or submission, to God.

Q: Why was grace originally a prayer said after a meal?

A: Today, we say grace before a meal in thanksgiving for an abundance of food, but in ancient times, food spoiled quickly, often causing illness or even death. Nomadic tribes experimenting with unfamiliar plants were very often poisoned. Before a meal, these people made a plea to the gods to deliver them from poisoning, but it wasn't until after the meal, if everyone was still standing, that they offered a prayer of thanksgiving, or "grace."

Q: Why at the end of a profound statement or prayer to Christians, Muslims, and Jews all say "amen"?

A: The word amen appears thirteen times in the Hebrew Bible and 119 times in the New Testament as well as in the earliest Muslim writings. The word originated in Egypt around 2500 BC as Amun, and meant the "Hidden One," the name of their highest deity. Hebrew scholars adopted the word as meaning "so it is" and passed it on to the Christians and Muslims.


9/18/23         

It's a complete Dutch city, and it has everything: canals, railroads, ships that move, stores, and factories. But it's actually a miniature, scaled to 1/25 of actual size. And it can be seen in the park at Madurodam,  just outside The Hague, in Holland. 

Flower arranging is considered a great art by the Japanese. And flowers play an important role in Japanese social occasions. But you will never see orchids, gentian, daphnes, or azaleas at a happy event. These flowers are prohibited by custom from use at happy occasions. (Personal note: To me that is interesting.)

9/14/23       

In 1609, an English ship, the Sea Venture, under the command of Sir George Somers, set out on a voyage to the New World.

Caught in a violent storm, the little vessel was wrecked on the coast of Bermuda. The crew managed to make shore safely. Then, from the wrecked timbers of their ship, they made two small boats and sailed across the water to Virginia, where they decided to settle.

But the hard, primitive life on the Virginia coast disappointed these early settlers, and they decided to return to Bermuda.

Shortly after their return, Sir George Somers died. His son buried his father's heart in Bermuda and then sailed back to England with the body.

This very romantic story of the storm, the shipwreck, and the death of Somers proved a sensation in London, and a popular playwright decided to write about the adventure.

The play became one of the most famous and enduring of all time, for the writer was William Shakespeare and the play was the Tempest.

9/13/23          

Let's talk planets. Facts about Earth

Water is the main reason we can live on this planet. Without it, life as we know it would literally dry up and blow away.

It's a good thing, then, that water covers more than two thirds of our planet.

No other planet or moon in the entire solar system can support liquid water on its surface. Most are too cold or don't have enough atmosphere. Venus and Mercury are too hot.

Earth, however, is just right. Our planet lies at the perfect distance from the sun. It doesn't get too hot or too cold.

As a result, water can splash around freely, supporting life. It even allows Earth’s inhabitants to enjoy a good swim.

9/11/23         

About the little piggies.

Walking across hot coals hurts less than running across hot coals. Quick, light steps to limit contact between the first and the hot surface; running thrusts the foot against the ground more forcefully.

Walking on your toes requires 83% more energy than walking normally

On average, 1.7 of every 1,000 babies are born with polydactyly – the presence of six or more toes on 1 foot, or six or more fingers on one hand.

 


9/7/23
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: Which star of The Munsters once ran for governor?

A: "Grandpa Munster" Al Lewis ran as a Green Party candidate in 1998 against New York Governor George Pataki. He didn't win, but he did garner 55,000 votes. The beloved actor/activist died in February 2006.

Q: In 1927, two "graduates" of Baltimore's St. Mary's Industrial School made history. Can you name these correctional school dropouts and their achievements?

A: During the 1927 baseball season, Babe Ruth whacked a record-setting sixty home runs. That same year, Al Jolson starred in The Jazz Singer, the first talking picture. Neither Ruth nor Jolson enjoyed their involuntary stay at the strict Catholic school for orphans; Ruth spent twelve years there, while Jolson was only there briefly.

Q: Who said, "Even Napoleon had his Watergate"?

A: Danny Ozark, the manager/history buff of baseball's Philadelphia Phillies.

Q: Where did Napoleon meet his Waterloo? And after his Waterloo, where did Napoleon go?

A: Napoleon Bonaparte fought and lost his last battle near the Belgian town of Waterloo. After being defeated by the British and the Prussians, the former French Emperor was exiled to St. Helena in 1815, where he died less than six years later.


9/6/23
Tying the Knot

Why is June the most popular month for weddings?

The ancient Greeks and Romans both suggested marriage during a full moon because of its positive influence on fertility. The Romans favored June, a month they named after Juno, the goddess of marriage, because if the bride conceived right away, she wouldn't be too pregnant to help with the harvest. She also would probably have recovered from giving birth in time to help in the fields with the next year's harvest.

Why does a groom carry his bride over the threshold?

The custom of carrying a bride over the threshold comes from the kidnapping practices of the Germanic Goths around 200 A.D. Generally, these men only married women from within their own communities, but when the supply ran short, they would raid neighboring villages and seize young girls to carry home as their wives. From this practice of abductions sprang the now symbolic act of carrying the bride over the threshold.

Why are wedding banns announced before marriage?

The custom of proclaiming wedding banns began in 800 A.D. when Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne became alarmed by the high rate of interbreeding throughout his empire. He ordered that all marriages be publicly announced at least seven days prior to the ceremony and that anyone knowing that a bride and groom were related must come forward. The practice proved so successful that it was widely endorsed by all faiths.


9/4/23
Some Animal Facts

A single poison-arrow frog, found in the Amazon rain forest, has enough nerve toxin to kill about 2,500 people.

Certain species of frogs can survive subzero temperatures, even if they're completely encased in a block of ice.

Owls have tubular shaped eyeballs, which makes it impossible for them to move their eyes in their sockets.

The hollow bones of an owl weigh less than its feathers. Hollow bones are found in many bird species – including the pigeon – and help the birds fly with less effort.

Mockingbirds imitate any sound – from a squeaking door to a meowing cat. In urban areas, they can even mimic car alarms and cell phone rings.

 


INTERESTING - AUGUST

8/31/23
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: What was the first computer bug?

A: The first computer was literally that: a moth that got stuck in the wiring at a computer at Harvard in August of 1945. The first recognized computer virus occurred much later: viral historian Robert Slade identified a relatively benign 1981 Apple II floppy disk incident that probably originated at Texas A&M.

 

Q: When was the carpet sweeper invented?

A: Anna and Melville Bissell owned a small crockery shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan, when Millville designed and patented a carpet sweeper in 1876. The first Bissell manufacturing plant was built in Grand Rapids in 1883.

 

Q: What significant discovery did the Norse make in 861 A.D.?

A: The Norse discovered Iceland in 861 A.D. The busy Norsemen also sacked Paris and Toulouse that same year.

 

Q: What did the writers Victor Hugo, Jack London, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson all do unsuccessfully?

A: Run for political office.

 

Q: Who wrote the first detective story?

A: The world's first detective story is generally believed to be "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," by American author Edgar Allen Poe. It appeared in Graham's Magazine in 1841.

 


8/30/23
The Human Body -- Scientifically Speaking

The cornea, or clear lens of the eye, is the only part of the human body that has no blood supply. It takes oxygen directly from the air.

The hard little lump of flesh in front of your ear canal is called a tragus.

 Every minutes, 300 million cells die in the human body.

The human brain is about 85% water.

The brain consumes about one fifth of all the calories you take in. It burns more energy than any other organ in the body. Therefore, the "brain power" used in mathematical or linguistic problem solving can be as effective for losing weight as aerobic exercise.


8/28/23
Facts about Earth's moon. Who's been there?

Between 1968 and 1972, the Apollo missions sent a total of twenty-seven astronauts to the moon. Of those, twelve actually walked on its surface.

Apollo 8

Launch Date             December 21, 1968

Arrival at Moon        December 24, 1968

Return to Earth        December 27, 1968

Apollo 8 took the first humans – Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders – to the moon. The spacecraft circled the moon ten times before returning to Earth.

 

Apollo 10

Launch Date             May 18, 1969

Arrival at Moon        May 21, 1969

Return to Earth        May 26, 1969

While Apollo 10 astronauts Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Eugene Cernan orbited the moon, they tested equipment and procedures for the upcoming moon landing.

 

Apollo 11

Launch Date             July 16, 1969

Arrival at Moon        July 20, 1969

Return to Earth        July 24, 1969

Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin landed in the Sea of Tranquility, becoming the first humans to walk on the moon. Michael Collins orbited overhead in the command module.

 

Apollo 12

Launch Date             November 14, 1969

Arrival at Moon        November 19, 1969

Return to Earth        November 24, 1969

Charles "Pete" Conrad and Alan Bean touched down in the Ocean of Storms, within walking distance of Surveyor 3, an unmanned spacecraft that had touched down on the moon 2.5 years earlier. Richard Gordon orbited overhead.

 

Apollo 13

Launch Date             April 11, 1970

Arrival at Moon        April 15, 1970

Return to Earth        April 17, 1970

Originally aiming for the Fra Mauro highlands, the landing was canceled when an explosion rocked the spacecraft halfway to the moon. The crew, James Lovell, Fred Hayes, and John Swigert, return safely to Earth.

 

Apollo 14

Launch Date             January 31, 1971

Arrival at Moon        February 5, 1971

Return to Earth        February 9, 1971

Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell touched down in the Fra Mauro highlands while Stuart Roosa orbited overhead.

 

Apollo 15

Launch Date             July 26, 1971

Arrival at Moon        July 30, 1971

Return to Earth        August 7, 1971

David Scott and Alfred Worden landed in the Hadley Rille region with the first lunar rover. James Erwin orbited overhead.

 

Apollo 16

Launch Date             April 16, 1972

Arrival at Moon        April 21, 1972

Return to Earth        April 27, 1972

John Young and Charles Duke landed in the heavily cratered lunar high lands of the Descartes region while Thomas Mattingly orbited overhead in the command module.

 

 

Apollo 17

Launch Date             December 7, 1972

Arrival at Moon        December 11, 1972

Return to Earth        December 19, 1972

Eugene Cernan and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt landed in the Taurus=Littrow region while Ronald Evans orbited overhead. Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon – at least for now.

 


8/24/23
More Stuff

Why are golf assistants called "caddies"?

In medieval France the firstborn sons of nobility were known as the "caput," or head, of the family, while younger, less valuable boys were called "capdets," or little heads, and were often sent to the military to train as officers. In English, "capdets" became "cadets," which the Scots abbreviated to "cads" or "caddies," meaning any useless street kid who could be hired for the day to carry around a bag of golf clubs.

 

Why is it so difficult for a woman to join prestigious British golf clubs?

Exclusive men's country clubs were called golf clubs long before the game was invented. "GOLF" is an acronym derived from the phrase "gentlemen only, ladies forbidden." Men had formed these clubs to enjoy themselves without the politics of dealing with women. When they began chasing a small ball around the grounds they gave the game the same name as their club: golf.

 

Why are billiards played on a pool table?

During the nineteenth century, off-track gamblers would often play billiards while waiting to hear the results of a horse race. Sometimes, if they agreed on the merits of a particular horse, the gamblers would pool their money in an effort to win a greater amount on one bet or to soften the blow of a loss. The "pooled" money, both bet and won was counted out on the playing surface of the billiard table, which the gamblers came to call their "pool table."

 

8/23/23
Just Stuff

We sometimes say that certain animals, such as rabbits, are "born blind." That's not entirely accurate. Rabbits are born with the ability to see, but their eyelids are temporarily sealed shut – a baby rabbit typically opens its eyes a week after birth.

 In the wild, a female cottontail rabbit may give birth to as many as six litters of four or more babies in one mating season. That's thirty plus babies for one female in one season, which might be all she gets: Typically, life expectancy for rabbit in the wild is about one year.

In the original 1962 film version of the Manchurian Candidate, Angela Lansbury played Laurence Harvey's mother. She was not quite three years older than he was.

 In the 1963 film version of Bye-Bye Birdie, Maureen Stapleton played Dick Van Dyke's mother. She was six months older than he was.

 

8/21/23
Just Stuff Q & A

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

a) "Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested."

b) "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road."

c) "This is the saddest story I have ever heard."

d) "124 was spiteful."

e) "Mother died today."

A: a) The Trial by Franz Kafka. b) James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man c)  The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford  d) Toni Morrison's Beloved e) The Stranger by Albert Camus

 

Q: Who was the main snitch for Starsky and Hutch during their 1970s TV series?

A: Huggy Bear.

 

Q: One Starsky and Hutch star had two major record hits. Can you identify the performer and the songs?

A: David Soul (a.k.a. Ken "Hutch" Hutchinson) broke into the charts with "Don't Give up On Us Baby" and Silver Lady."

 

Q: Before Magnum P.I., Tom Selleck solved cases on which television drama?

A: Tom Selleck played Lance White, the perfect detective and Jim Rockford's nemesis, on the Rockford Files (1974-1980).

 


8/17/23
Interesting/Odd Facts About the Human Body.

Saying someone is bighearted is considered a compliment. Obviously, the size of the heart doesn't really have anything to do with one's generosity or kindness. The fact is that the heart of the average adult woman weighs about 9 ounces, while that of the average adult male weighs about 10 1/2 ounces.

Your ears tell you if you're standing up, leaning over, or lying down. Special cells in the tubes of liquid in your inner ear send messages about your movement to your brain. They help you to know what you are doing.

Are you shrinking yet? If you've reached the age of forty, your body is beginning to shrink. The cartilage in the joints and in the spinal column start to contract, and that causes the body to become about 4/10 of an inch shorter every ten years.


8/16/23
Some Animal Facts

Cranes fly as high as 5000 feet (1,500 m) during migration. But in Asia, migrating cranes on their way to India must cross the Himalayan Mountains and reach heights of 20,000 feet (6,000m) – four miles up!

The fastest speed ever recorded for a flying bird was 220 miles (352 km) per hour. The bird was the spine-tailed swift. The swift is such a speedy flyer that it has lost the ability to walk!

Hummingbirds are nature's smallest birds. They're so tiny that one of their enemies is an insect – the praying mantis.

Hummingbirds, loons, kingfishers, grebes, and swifts are all birds that cannot walk.

The Hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards.



8/14/23
Let's Talk Planets - Can we see footprints on the Moon?

While twelve astronauts walked on the moon and left plenty of footprints, there is no way we can see those footprints from Earth.

Why not? Because the astronauts didn't have big enough feet!

Even with the largest telescopes on Earth, the smallest feature we can see on the lunar surface is about 0.6 mile (1 km) across.

We can't see any of the flags they left behind or any of the other equipment, either. It's too small, and the moon is too far away.

Even though you can't see anything, it's still interesting to think about all the stuff the astronauts left behind. It's still up there. Remember that the next time you look at the moon. 

On a personal note…I think it's sad that we litter every place we go.

 

8/10/23
DID YOU KNOW These things are First Aid for:

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, kills 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.


8/9/23
DID YOU KNOW these 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.


8/7/23
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: We've all heard stories about the ability of dogs to hear noises that humans can't. But how sharp it is the canine’s sense of smell?

A: Dogs can discern odors at levels of 100,000 times fainter than humans can detect. According to Nicholas Dodman, D.V.D., author of If Only They Could Speak, dogs have been able to "smell out" a six week old human fingerprint.

Q: Whose annoyance led to the discovery of potato chips?

A: In the summer of 1853, Chef George Crum was working at a plush resort in Saratoga Springs, New York when a customer sent back an order of French fries because the potatoes were cut to thick. Annoyed by the demand, Crum cut the potatoes as thin as humanly possible and sent them back. His returned insult quickly became the popular item on the menu.

Q: The Spanish music group Los del Rio had a surprise hit in 1996. What was the name of this pop song?

A: The "Macarena," which was not only a transatlantic recording hit, but also a huge international dance craze. Originally recorded in 1993, this sing-along darted to the top of the charts in Spain, Latin American countries, and, three years later, the United States, where it resided fourteen straight weeks as number one on the Billboard charts. Macarena is also the name of a section of the Spanish City of Seville.

 


8/3/23
DID YOU KNOW these 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.


8/2/23
Interesting and Odd Food Facts

"Fiddlehead" is not an expression of contempt in Eastern Canada, it's the name of a green vegetable that is eaten there. The vegetable is actually a frond of the bracken family and is served in the same way as asparagus.

Sea moss makes quite a tasty dish, according to some cooks in New Hampshire. The moss is picked along the ocean beaches. Mixed with milk, salt, and vanilla, it is cooked until thick and called blancmange.

Have you ever tasted mama liga? It is a national dish and Romania and everybody loves it.

Mama liga is a boiled cornmeal served as a bread substitute, or with stuffed cabbage or vine leave, or with poached eggs. Hot or cold, mama liga is quite delicious in melted butter or yogurt. And it can be garnished with salted herring and cottage cheese.

It's not quite a hamburger, but Chapli kebab is the Pakistani equivalent. It's a patty of ground lamb, with either green onion or diced pomegranate seed, and salt. In Pakistan you can get this fried meat cake from a street vendor everywhere you go.

 

INTERESTING - JULY

7/27/23
Computer, Yuk! Hmm

Those happy, sad, or angry face is that sometimes accompany messages sent in chat rooms or posted on message boards are called "emoticons." The word combines "emotion" with "icon."

In the book 2001: A Space Odyssey, the supercomputer HAL was built in 1997.

The acronym TWAIN, an interface that's used to scan images, stands for "Technology Without An Interesting Name."

More software has been written for PCs than any other system on the market.

The word modem, the device that allows your computer to communicate with other computers, is a combination of the words "modulator" and "demodulator."


7/26/23
Let's Talk Planets. Facts about Earth

Sizewise, Earth is the fifth largest planet in the solar system. Only three planets are smaller.

 

Earth is the only planet to have liquid water on its surface. With more than two thirds of our planet covered by water, and alien crash landing on Earth would probably get wet.

 

Earth is the only planet that supports life as we know it.

 

Earth is the densest of all planets.

 

Earth is the only planet in the solar system with active volcanoes. (There are three moons with active geysers, and two other planets have dormant or extinct volcanoes.)

 


7/24/23
More Stuff

Why is a handshake considered to be a gesture of friendship?

There seems to be many reasons. Here are a few more: The Egyptian hieroglyph for "to give" is an extended hand. That symbol was the inspiration for Michelangelo's famous fresco The Creation of Adam, which is found on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Babylonian kings confirmed their authority by annually grasping the hand of a statue of their chief god, Marduk. The handshake as we know it today evolved from a custom of Roman soldiers, who carried daggers in their right waistbands. They would extend and then grasp each other's weapon hand as a nonthreatening sign of goodwill.

 

Where did the two fingered peace sign come from?

The gesture of two fingers spread and raised in peace, popularized in the 1960s, is a physical interpretation of the peace symbol, an inverted or upside-down Y within a circle, which was designed in 1958 by members of the antinuclear Direct Action Committee. The inverted Y is a combination of the maritime semaphore signals for N and D, which stood for "nuclear disarmament

 


7/20/23
Laser Fast

How fast is fast? You've probably heard of a nano second, which is 1 billionth of a second. Well that's just the beginning. One second can be divided into: a trillion picoseconds, a quadrillion femtoseconds, a quintillion attoseconds.

The fastest laser light pulses ever recorded measured eighty attoseconds – that's eighty quintillionths of the second.

"Laser" is an acronym created by one of the pioneers of laser technology, Gordon Gould. It stands for "Light Amplification by Simulated Emission of Radiation." The predecessor of the laser was the maser (Microwave Amplification by Simulated Emission of Radiation) developed by a team led by Columbia University physicists Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow. The two camps filed patents for their laser technology processes within nine months of each other, sparking one of the fiercest patent wars in history. Ironically, neither side can take credit for building the first working laser – that goes to Theodore Maiman of Hughes Research Labs, who successfully tested the ruby laser in May 1960.

Development of laser technology was instigated by the United States military, which envisioned lasers as "death ray" weapons. That's one task for which lasers have never proved useful.

 

In addition to lasers, a number of life enhancers were introduced in 1960. Some of which were: Etch-a-Sketch drawing toy, downy fabric softener, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) technique, Bubble Wrap cushioning material.

 


7/19/23
Just Stuff Q&A

Q: Where did the expression "according to Hoyle" come from?

A :An English man named Edmund Hoyle wrote a rulebook for the card game whist, the ancestor of bridge, in 1742. Hoyle's rules were used to settle arguments during that one game until Robert Forster published Forster’s Hoyle in 1897, which included the rules for many other card games. Since then, "according to Hoyle" has meant according to the rules of any game, including those played in business and personal relationships.

 

Q:Why, when someone losing begins to win, do we say he's "turned the tables"?

A:The phrase "to turn the tables" is a chess term dating from 1634 that describes a set of recovery by a losing player. The switch imposition of each side's pieces makes it look as though they’d physically turned the table on the opponent to take over the winning side of the board.

 

Q:Why is a non-relevant statement during a debate or argument said to be "beside the point"?

A:The expression "beside the point" is from ancient archery and literally means your shot was wide of the target. Its figurative meaning, that your argument is irrelevant, entered the language about 1352, as did "You've missed the mark." Both suggest that regardless of your intentions, your invalid statement is outside the subject under discussion.

 

Q:Why is a marathon race exactly 26 miles and 385 yard long?

A:In 1908, the first modern Olympic marathon was designed to start at Windsor Castle and end in front of the Royal box in the London Stadium, a distance of exactly 26 miles, 385 yards, and that became the official distance. The race honored Pheidippedes, who in 490 B.C. had run 22 miles, 1470 yards to carry news to Athens that the Greeks had defeated the Persians on the plain of Marathon

 


7/17/23
Just Stuff Q&A

Q: What is the best way to survive in quicksand?

A: Contrary to conventional wisdom (and countless popular movies), surviving a fall into quicksand is relatively easy. According to a recent Dutch study, the best advice is to grin and bear The calmer you are, the more quickly the gunky material will stabilize and you can float your way to safety. Struggling will only increase the suction and hence the danger.

Q: What fragrance did scientists discover was strongly seductive to female cheetahs?

A: Calvin Kline's Obsession for Men.

 

Q: What is the name of the first gorilla to learn sign language?

A: Koko. According to scientists at Stanford University, this gorilla prodigy can communicate more than 1000 signs based on standard American Sign Language.



7/13/23
Interesting & Odd Animal Kingdom Facts

Looking like a carved chessmen and propelling himself forward in an upright position by means of a fan like dorsal fin is the six-inch-long seahorse.

     Not content with his singular appearance and swimming style, the male seahorse further compounds his strangeness by actually giving birth to his offspring, a procedure considered highly unorthodox for any father, in or out of the water.

     A few weeks before the seahorse gives birth, the sea mare has a rendezvous with Papa and carefully deposits her eggs in a kangaroo-like pouch in his abdomen. (The female is pouchless.) Within this protective pouch the eggs are fertilized and incubated.

When his tiny, squirming progeny are finally ready to be hatched, birth pangs seize the seahorse. With delivery near, he fastens himself securely by his strong, prehensile tail to some convenient underwater plant and waits for his quarter-inch babies – the image of Daddy, of course – to leap violently out of his distended brood pouch.

     From the time the little sea colts emerge, they can swim and move completely on their own. For a moment, the little ones swarm over the body of the father and then off they go, striking out bravely to meet the hazards of the dangerous, watery world into which they have been so strangely brought forth.


7/12/23
Some More Stuff

After mating, the male midwife toad collects the female’s eggs, wraps them around his hind legs, and carries them around with him for a month or more before depositing them in shallow water where they hatch into tadpoles.

Beelzebufoampinga, the "devil frog," could be the largest frog that ever existed. It measured 16 inches long and weighed about 10 pounds; its mouth was enormous, and it was a predator. Fortunately, it became extinct about 65 million years ago.

The smallest snake known to science is the Leptotyphlopscarlae, the Barbados thread snake, native to the Caribbean island of Barbados. A full-grown snake measures just 4 inches long.

The world's smallest seahorse is Satomi’s pygmy seahorse, which measures only about half an inch.


7/10/23
Odd Stuff in History

During World War II, a young man entered an enlistment center and eagerly asked to join the service. He said his name was Kincaid, he was twenty-one years old, and he wanted to become a flyer.

            He was accepted into the Air Force and after training in the United States he was assigned to a bomber squadron at the Benghazi airbase in North Africa.

            As a gunner on a B-24 bomber, Kincaid soon ran up a terrific record, was decorated, and was made a sergeant.

            Then one day his buddy was killed, and so deeply did his friend’s death affect the young airman that he asked for a transfer.

            The transfer was granted. The flyer returned to the United States and immediately went to see his commanding officer. His name, he told the astonished officer, was not Kincaid, it was Fletcher, and he was not twenty-one years old, as his military records stated, but sixteen. He had been only fifteen when he had enlisted the year before, and he had lied about both his name and age.

            Tom Fletcher was the youngest combat flyer in World War II. At the age of sixteen he was already a veteran. He had completed thirty-five combat missions, had flown 300 combat flying hours, had won the Distinguished Flying Cross, and had been given the Air Medal with one silver cluster and five bronze clusters.

 

The Pennsylvania Dutch – a community of religious people who live in a simple way in Eastern Pennsylvania – are not Dutch but German. The sect has been misnamed, perhaps because the German word Deutch, meaning "German," was confused with "Dutch" by people unfamiliar with the German language.

 

Did you know that the Nobel Peace Prize was named after Alfred B. Nobel? The irony of that is Mr. Nobel was the inventor of dynamite, which caused the death of millions of soldiers in wars all over the world.

 


7/6/23
Weather Facts About Lightning

Most lightning travels 10 miles (16 km) or less. But depending on other atmospheric conditions, some lightning can travel 20 miles (32 km) or more.

Within a lightning bolt, the air is heated to temperatures above 50,000°F (22,760°C) – that's many times hotter than the surface of the sun!

The ancient Greeks and Romans erected temples at sites where lightning struck. The idea was to worship the gods at these sites in order to appease their anger.

Lightning detection equipment works by sensing a brief but intense burst of radio energy that comes right before the actual lightning. This energy, called a sferic, is what causes the static on your radio immediately before the flash.

Depending on the conductivity of the soil or surface, lightning can spread out in a radius over 60 feet (18 m) from where it first struck.


7/5/23
Just Stuff Q& A

Q: What is a MacGuffin?
A: A MacGuffin is a plot device that motivates the characters and advances the plot, but is not ultimately important to the audience. In short, a MacGuffin is the papers, or the money, or the diamonds that set the story in motion. The term was coined by Angus McPhail, but owes its significance to Alfred Hitchcock who used the concept in many of his major films.

Q: Who killed Laura Palmer in the TV series Twin Peaks?
A: Her father Leland Palmer.

Q: Who did the creator of Twin Peaks originally want to be the killer?
A: Nobody. When writer/director David Lynch conceived the show, he did not plan to reveal the identity of the killer because he wanted to use the murder to explore the real story of the series: the steamy underside of small town America. In other words, the homicide investigation was meant to be a MacGuffin.

Q: Who was Carolyn Keene?
A: The pen name shared by numerous authors of books in the Nancy Drew mystery series. Mildred Wirt Benson, the first "Nancy Drew," wrote nearly 2 dozen of these best-selling teen mysteries, but still remained relatively unknown.

7/3/23
Let's talk planets. Facts about Mars

Average distance from the sun.
141,500,000 miles (227,900,000 km)

Equatorial Diameter
4219 miles (6794 km)

Temperatures
Hottest day: 70°F (20°C)
Coldest night: -220°F (-40°C)
Average: -60°F (-50°C)

Length of a Day
24 hours, 39 min.

Length of a Year
687 Earth-days

Atmospheric Composition
95% carbon dioxide
3% nitrogen
2% other gases

Number of Moons
2

Largest Moon
Phobos

 

INTERESTING - JUNE

6/29/23
Weird Stuff About Stars

Red Supergiants

A red supergiant is a really big red star in the final phases of its life. These are the largest stars in the universe.

Just how large are they? If one were in our solar system, it would swallow not only the sun, but Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars as well.

Red supergiants begin their lives as blue giant stars. When the blues giant runs out of fuel in its core, the core collapses and heats up dramatically.

In an effort to cool off, the surface of the star swells up like a balloon. (This process is just like what happens to a sun like-star, only the result is much larger.)

An old blue giant star will quickly swell past the red giant stage. It will continue to swell until it is almost as large as the orbit of Jupiter. This old star will swell and shrink several times before it is ripped apart in a tremendous supernova.

Supernovae

A supernova is the most powerful explosion in the universe. This incredible display of nature's fireworks marks the end of a star's life.

Astronomers believe there are two different ways a star can blow itself up. A Type Ia supernova involves a white dwarf star. A Type II supernova – the more common type – involves an old blue giant star.

A Type Ia supernova is rare because it requires not only a white dwarf, but an orbiting red giant star as well. In this deadly combination, when the red giant swells in size, its surface will get too close to the white dwarf. The strong gravity of the white dwarf quickly rips away large amounts of the red giant’s atmosphere. The stolen hydrogen rapidly piles up on the white dwarf's surface, increasing the stars temperature and pressure too fast for the white dwarf to handle.

This red star cannot expand the way other stars do when it gets hot. So the pressure and temperature goes up higher and higher until the start can't handle them anymore. It blows itself apart. Supernova!


6/28/23
Early Medicine

Leprosy was such a serious disease in the Middle Ages that those infected – while in relatively good health – were encouraged to plan and attend their own funerals before the disease disfigured and eventually killed them.

Medieval doctors thought leprosy extremely contagious, so lepers were not allowed to touch anything except by using a cane. Today we know that, although leprosy can be transmitted from person-to-person, it is very difficult to catch from touch alone.

Wealthy medieval lepers could live in luxurious leper colonies with their entire families. Many rich medieval men left their fortunes to such colonies, many of which were run by the church.

Medieval doctors believed that serious disease was spread by bad odors and that good odors could protect against infection. During plague times, people wore long beaks filled with fragrant spices to protect them from unwholesome air.

In medieval times, doctors believed that the body was divided into four "humors" – an idea that was borrowed from Hippocrates. Each of the humors had a body fluid associated with it. For example, fire with yellow bile; earth with black bile; water with phlegm; an air blood. The humors had to be balanced for health. If a person was moody or became ill, the humors had to be balanced by letting out blood or giving a laxative.

During medieval times, who provided your medical care depended on your social position. University trained doctors, treated only wealthy patients. Folk healers, usually women, took care of everyone else.

There was a great deal of hostility among the different "classes" of doctors during the Middle Ages. University trained physicians hated those who practiced more herbal and "magical" remedies. Some historians have even suggested that the persecution of witches started as an attempt by trained doctors to get rid of the untrained ones.


6/26/23
I Do (Traditions around the world)

Everybody wishes the bride and groom a happy honeymoon today. But the idea of the honeymoon actually goes back to a time when it was customary for the newlyweds to run away after the wedding. The bride's kinsman would go looking for the young woman to capture her and take her back. The husband hid with his bride until the relatives got tired of searching for her – and that's how the honeymoon got its start.

If you think mothers-in-law are unpopular today, imagine how the mother-in-law felt who lived among Lhopa tribe in Tibet years ago….It used to be the custom there to eat the bride's mother at the wedding feast!

There are many countries where parents arrange the marriages of their children. And this is usually done when they reach a certain age and are ready for it.

But there is also the custom of infant betrothal, in which marriages are arranged – and sometimes actually performed – when the girl and boy are mere infants.

In New Caledonia, for example, a girl is betrothed as soon as she is born. In the Fiji Islands, children are married by their parents when they are three or four years old. It's only a ceremony, but it's a binding ceremony. When the children grow up, they are man and wife.

And among certain Eskimo tribes, a young man, or his father, can ask for a girl as soon as the girl is born. If the father of the child accepts the offer of marriage, a promise is given. It is as binding as a marriage ceremony. At the proper age, the girl is delivered and the wedding takes place. It sometimes may be the first time she has seen her husband.


6/22/23
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: In the Star Trek Universe, what is the difference between a Vulcan and a Romulan?
A: A Vulcan is a humanoid from the planet of the same name. Vulcan society is based on total logic, reason and repression of emotion as developed by the philosopher Surak. Vulcan's who rejected Surak’s teachings of non-violence immigrated to the planets Romulus and Remus where they are known for their passion and cunning. Both groups have pointy ears.

Q: Can you name the five children who win a guided tour to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory in Roald Dahl’s classic children's book?
A: Augustus Gloop, Violet Baeuregarde, Veruca Salt, Mike Teavee and, of course Charlie Bucket.

Q: How do each of the children in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory meet their untimely exit from the factory tour?
A: After Augustus Gloop drinks from the chocolate river, he falls in and is sucked into one of the pipes leading to the Fudge Room. Violet Baeuregarde chews a three-course-dinner stick of gum, which transforms her into a giant blueberry girl. Then she is rolled off to the juicing room to be squeezed back to size. Veruca Salt suffers an even worse state: He is thrown down a garbage chute by squirrels trained to dispose of "bad nuts." Mike Teavee is miniaturized by a television camera designed to teleport chocolate samples and then sent to a gum stretching room to be restored to his normal height. Only Charlie makes it through the whole tour.

Q: Who appeared in more than thirty Alfred Hitchcock films?
A: Alfred Hitchcock. The director began his amusing cameos in The Lodger (1926), after an actor failed to appear on the set. He continued these unaccredited appearances until the end of his career. They became so famous that the portly Hitchcock was obliged to schedule his appearances near the beginning of the film, so as to not distract his audiences form the story.

Q: Who was the title character of the 1963-1966 television series My Favorite Martian?
A: Ray Walston played the Martian who, disguised as Uncle Martin, lives with Timothy O’Hara (Bill Bixby).

6/21/23
Weird Stuff About Stars

White Dwarfs

White dwarfs are fascinating, even if they are dead stars.

These bright, Earth-size stars emit tremendous amounts of heat and light and are so dense that a teaspoon of material from a white dwarf's surface would weigh a couple of tons!

These weird features are the result of an old sun-like star completely running out of fuel.

In the last stages of his life, a sun-like star (now a red giant) will puff off its outer layers and begin to collapse. Gravity will cause all the matter that is left within the star to collapse into a smaller and smaller ball.

Eventually, the collapse will stop when the strong gravity can't cram the remaining matter together any tighter. With all the matter from an old sun -like star now packed tightly within an Earth-size ball, a white dwarf is incredibly dense.

In addition to being very dense, a white dwarf is also very hot. The heat generated during its final collapse will take anywhere from thousands to millions of years to dissipate. As a result, a white dwarf will continue to shine for many years without nuclear reactions occurring in its core.

When a white dwarf finally cools off, all that will remain of the dead star will be a dark, dense hulk.

Novae

A nova (plural = novae) is a brief, powerful explosion that takes place on the surface of a white dwarf star.

As has already been noted, a white dwarf is a dead star. For a dead star to explode, some special conditions are required.

First of all, a white dwarf must be orbiting another star.

Second, the stars must be close enough together that the white dwarf’s gravity can steal hydrogen from the other star.

As hydrogen streams from the larger star to the white dwarf, it slowly collects on the white dwarf’s surface, which is already pretty hot. That temperature rises even higher as more and more hydrogen is added to the surface and compressed by the white dwarf's strong gravity.

After a time, the pressure and temperature of the stolen hydrogen will get high enough to trigger nuclear reactions. In a brilliant burst, all the stolen hydrogen will fuse in an intense, brief eruption of nuclear reactions. This is a nova.

When all the hydrogen is consumed, the nova will fade and the process will start all over again. As long as a white dwarf can steal hydrogen from a companion star, it will continue to produce a novae on its surface.


6/19/23
Weather Facts About Tornadoes

An F-0 tornado would have just enough force to blow lawn furniture around. An F-5 tornado can lift trains off the tracks. Meteorologists refer to F-5 tornadoes as "the finger of God."

Tornadoes have four distinct stages of formation: organizing, maturing, shrinking, and decaying.

Most of the destruction within the funnel of a tornado occurs as a result of 200 mile (320 km) per hour winds and flying debris.

Even though they may form at all hours of the day or night, tornadoes occur most frequently from 3 PM to 6 PM.

A wall cloud refers to the dark, dense cloud that eventually drops a tornado funnel. When the rotation effect of the system is very strong, the wall cloud stretches out around the funnel like a cuff. Meteorologists call this a collar cloud.

The unpredictability of the path tornadoes will take gives them the nickname "sidewinders," referring to the movement of some species of snake.

Tornadoes can disappear as soon as they form. This is because the air is very unstable during the various stages of tornado formation, and conditions can shift enough to dissipate a tornado's energy.

Weak F-1 tornadoes can form when a hurricane hits land.

Unlike a tornado, a dust devil forms from the ground up and does not involve a weather system.


6/15/23
Let's Talk Planets Facts About Venus

Venus is constantly covered by a thick layer of clouds. While these clouds may look like Earth clouds, they have very little in common with them.

Instead of Earth-like water vapor clouds, clouds on Venus are composed of sulfuric acid and other noxious chemicals. Also unlike Earth clouds, these clouds never produce any rain. Because the surface of Venus is so hot, the chemical mixture that would be rain evaporates before it hits the ground.

So acid doesn't rain down on the planet. But any spacecraft trying to land on Venus must first pass through these harsh, metal eating chemical clouds.

Mornings and evenings on Venus would be very confusing to humans.

    Venus has a retrograde rotation – meaning that it spins around on its axis in the opposite direction when compared with most other planets. (Uranus also has an unusual spin.)

Because of its opposite spin, sunrise and sunset on the planet are opposite as well. So on Venus, the sun rises in the West and sets in the East – although it would be hard to see because of the constant cloud cover!

You would feel more than a little crushed if you were to stand on the surface of Venus. That crushing feeling comes from an atmospheric pressure ninety times greater than Earth's.

On Earth we are used to an atmospheric pressure of about 14.7 pounds per square inch (101,353 Newtons per square meter). That means there is 14.7 pounds of air pushing on every square inch of your body. You don't notice the pressure because you are used to it. If you were to go to Venus, however, you would definitely notice a change.

Instead of 14.7 pounds, there will be 1,323 pounds per square inch (9,121,764 Newtons per square meter) pressing in on you from every direction.


6/14/23
Just Stuff

When you shake hands with someone, you are performing a symbolic act that goes back thousands of years.

Of course, the ancient symbolic meaning has long been forgotten and we all shake hands today without giving the act much thought. But here's what it meant to a primitive man:

When a man met someone with whom he didn't want to fight, and with whom he might want to establish a good relationship, he dropped his weapon to the ground. Then he held out his right hand – the weapon hand – as a symbol of friendliness. And shaking hands is still a symbol of friendliness today.

 

NO TIPPING is a sign we are sometimes glad to see in restaurants or hotels. On the island of Tahiti, tipping is considered patronizing in its most obnoxious sense – and accepting a tip a form of begging – which is why natives refuse to receive tips for their services.


6/12/23
Computer History (Sort of)

Before computers were in use, navigators, astronomers, accountants, and mathematicians all relied on books of tables – most of which were filled with mistakes.

The first version of Microsoft Word was released on November 20, 1985. It sold for ninety-nine dollars.

The "8-Second Rule" means the someone will wait no more than 8 seconds for a webpage to load before moving on to another webpage. This rule of thumb is used by webmasters to keep their pages uncomplicated.

The expression "whack a mole" means closing and annoying pop-up window while Internet surfing.

An angry e-mail, newsgroup, or chat room message that attacks another writer is called a "flame."


6/8/23
Just Stuff Q& A

Q: Who was last American president to sport facial hair?

A: William Taft, who left office in 1913, was the last president "as of this writing" to have had a mustache. Benjamin Harrison, whose term ran from 1889 to 1893, was the last executive chief to have a proper beard.

 

Q: Who was the world's tallest human? How tall was he?

A: At 8 feet 11inches, Alton, Illinois native Robert Wadlow towered above all others. This short-lived (1918 – 1940) gentle giant owed his height to an overactive pituitary gland that caused his abnormal growth and several health problems. Wadlow tried to live a normal life, but his rapid height spurt made it impossible: At the age of thirteen, he was already 7 feet 4 inches tall, gaining him the dubious distinction of being the world's biggest boy scout. In his last years, he toured as a goodwill ambassador for international shoes, who provided him with his size 37 foot wear.

 

Q: For what creature did authorities in the southern Malaysian state of Johor mount a major hunt?

A: In November 2005 three fishery workers claimed to have sighted a Bigfoot family that left footprints.

 

Q: Why do men wear neckties?

A: Roman soldiers wore a strip of cloth around their necks to keep them warm in winter and to absorb sweat in the summer. Other armies followed suit, and during the French Revolution the Royalists and the Rebels used ties to display the colors of their allegiance. They borrowed the design, and the name cravat, from the Croatian Army. Later, ties became a French fashion statement, offering a splash of color to an otherwise drab wardrobe.

 

Q: Why are men's buttons on the right and women's on the left?

A: Decorative buttons first appeared around 2000 BC, but they weren't commonly used as fasteners until the sixteenth century. Because most men are right-handed and generally dressed themselves they found it easier to fasten their buttons from right to left. However, wealthy women were dressed by servants, who found it easier to fasten their mistresses clothes if the buttons were on her left. It became convention and has never changed.

 

Q: Why do baby boys wear blue and girls wear pink?

A: The custom of dressing baby boys in blue clothes began around 1400. Blue was the color of the sky and therefore heaven, so it was believed that the color warded off evil spirits. Male children were considered a greater blessing than females, so it was assumed that demons had no interest in girls. It was another hundred years before girls were given red as a color, which was later softened to pink.

 

6/7/23
Let's Talk Planets: Facts about Earth

Average distance from the Sun
92,920,000 miles (149,600,000 km)

Equatorial Diameter
7921 miles (12,756 km)
Average Temperature
70°F (20°C)

Length of the Day
23 hours, 56 min.

Length of the Year
365.25 Earth-days

What You Breathe (Atmospheric Composition)
77% nitrogen… 21% oxygen …2% other gases

Number of Moons
One and it is called Luna

6/5/23
The Faster We Go

The British Automobile Association, or AA was founded in 1905 as an organization dedicated to helping its members avoid police speed traps. Today it advocates for road safety and provides members with services such as driving directions, roadside assistance, and vehicle insurance.

In the United States, someone runs a red light at an intersection once every twenty minutes.



INTERESTING - MAY 
5/31/23
Weird Stuff About Stars

Brown Dwarfs

Brown dwarfs are objects that just don't seem to fit in anywhere.

 

These large balls of gas are too small to be stars but too big to be planets.

Even though brown dwarfs are probably formed in the same type of diffuse nebula as all the other stars, these guys never managed to get enough mass together to trigger nuclear reactions in their core.

So, you should think of brown dwarfs as dud stars – stars that were too small to burn.

And because they range in size from 13 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter, they are really too large be considered planets.

So, they just float around space as giant gas balls.

 

Red Giants

A red giant is a former sun-like star that is passing through one of its last phases of life.

Its name comes from the star’s cool temperature (which causes it to glow red) and its enormous size.

A sun-like star reaches this phase when it has used up all the hydrogen in its core. The core then collapses and heats up more than ever.

To get rid of the excess heat, the star’s surface begins to swell up like a balloon. As it gets larger, there is more surface for the heat to escape from then the star begins to cool.

When our sun becomes a red giant, its surface will swell until it swallows both Mercury and Venus. So not only does a red giant mark the beginning of the end of a sun-like star, it also marks the death of any planet that happens to lie close to the star.

A red giant star will go on to form a planetary nebula and a white dwarf.


5/29/23
Botanical Oddities

The wildflower yarrow contains a chemical that speeds blood clotting. According to Greek mythology, the hero Achilles was said to have discovered this property.

Before the Mormon pioneers learned to cultivate the land around the Great Salt Lake, they survived by eating the tender bulb of the Mariposa Lily, just as the Native American Utes and Paiutes had been doing for centuries.

The herb parsley is particularly effective in neutralizing bad breath

The Chinese called it jen-shen, and the American Indians called it grantoqen. The name of the plant? Ginseng.

Willow bark provides the chemical from which aspirin was originally synthesized. The bark has been used as a pain remedy ever since the Greeks discovered its medicinal power nearly 2,500 years ago.


5/25/23
Let's Talk Planets: Facts about Venus- How Hot is Hot?

To a weather forecaster Venus would be pretty boring: Today, the high and low will be 900°F (480°C). Tonight and tomorrow, next month or next year – more of the same.

The cause of this extreme and unvarying temperature is the planet’s dense carbon dioxide atmosphere. It lets sunlight in, but won't let any heat out.

Sunlight is allowed to pass through the clouds and warm the planet. No problem. However, when the baked in heat rises from the ground and tries to escape back into space, it can't. That's a problem!

The carbon dioxide atmosphere acts like a wall, blocking the infrared radiation (what we call heat) and keeping almost all of it trapped on the planet. The next day, when the sun shines on the planet, more light is allowed through the clouds. It heats the surface again, creating even more infrared radiation that can’t escape.

This process continues every day and is called the runaway greenhouse effect. You may have experienced a similar type of greenhouse effect if you ever opened the door of a car that has been sitting in the sun a long time with its windows rolled up.

Windows allow sunlight to pass through and heat a car’s interior. However, the glass will not allow most of the resulting infrared radiation to pass back through it and escape the car. The heat stays trapped inside, causing the interior to get hotter and hotter.


5/24/23
Just Stuff Q & A
Q: In the 1956 American version of Godzilla, who plays the western journalist who plays opposite the embattled, yet resilient monster?
A: In the American version of Godzilla, Raymond Burr portrays reporter Steve Martin. Burr once claimed that he had played opposite actors more ferocious than Godzilla.

Q: What is the name of Bruce Wayne's original ward?
A: Dick Grayson was Bruce Wayne's first dependent. This duo is also known as Batman and Robin. Robin first appeared in Batman comics in 1940

Q: What is Lois Lane's job?
A: Lois Lane is a reporter for the daily planet, Metropolis’s most successful newspaper. Apparently, the aspiring sleuth Lane never seems to connect the quick disappearances of fellow reporter Clark Kent with the sudden arrivals of Superman.

Q: What does "G.I." stand for?
A: "G.I." stands for Government Issue.

Q: Some bottles of brandy carry the word "VSOP." What does this acronym mean?
A: Very Superior Old Pale.

5/22/23
Feeling Creepy Crawlers?

Karl-Axel Ekbom, a Swedish neurologist, published a detailed documentation of "delusional parasitosis" in 1938. His work was so significant that the disorder came to be known as Ekbom’s Syndrome.

Ekbom also coined the term "restless legs syndrome" to describe the sensation of itching or creeping under the skin that compels a person to move their legs. RLS is sometimes referred to as Wittmaack-Ekbom Syndrome, named in part for German physician Theodor Wittmaack, who studied the disease in the 1850s.

People with the psychological disorder Ekbom’s Syndrome believe they are infested with parasites crawling on and under the skin. The sensation is so real that they can both feel and see the imaginary bugs.

Ekbom’s Syndrome, or delusional parasitosis, is also known as formication. (Read that word carefully!)

Formica is the Latin word for "ant.”



5/18/23
Interesting and Odd Food Facts

When you buy a can of sardines, you're not getting one particular kind of fish. There is no such creature as a sardine.


Sardine is the name given to several different species of herring when they are caught while young and small and packed in flat cans for human consumption. One example is the European pilchard, a kind of herring who's partially grown offspring were the original sardines. There are also the New England sardine, another variety of young herring, and the California sardine, a young pilchard found in the Pacific Ocean. In England, the young of the Cornish pilchard are used. The Norwegian sardine is a fish called a sprat, or brisling.

      So, as you can see the sardine is any herring the canner chooses to call a sardine.

Everybody loves a fair, and the Great World's Fair held in Chicago in 1893 was a terrific hit. People flocked to see it from all over the world, as it had, among other new attractions, the first Ferris wheel. But it was a good concessionaire by the name of Anton Feuchtwanger who was to make a lasting impression of American life.

      Feuchtwanger had come to America from Bavaria with many old recipes, and now, at the fair, he was selling a specialty of his homeland.

      However, because this specialty had to be served piping hot, it was difficult to handle, so fairgoers passed it up for more conventional nourishment.

     Feuchtwanger tried everything to get people to eat his food. He even provided white cotton gloves to protect the hands of his customers, but most of them just walked off with the gloves.

    Finally, Feuchtwanger hit on a solution. He would prevent burned fingers by simply putting his specialty between the haves of a long roll.

     From then on, Feuchtwanger was a success. The food he served was the spicy sausage known throughout the world today as the American hotdog.


The peanut is not a nut. Most nuts grow on trees. The peanut plant is a legume, a member of the pea family; the peanuts it produces grow underground.

 


5/17/23
Some Animal Facts

One female wild golden hamster, found with a litter of twelve in Syria in 1930, is the ancestor of all pet hamsters found today.

The average high quality mink coat requires 35-65 pelts. Beaver coats require 15 pelts; Fox, 25; ermine, 150; and up to 120 pelts for the fanciest coat of all – the chinchilla.

Beaver teeth are so sharp and hard that Native Americans used them as knife blades and arrowheads.

Rats are considered one of the most truly omnivorous creatures. They'll eat anything – including dead and dying members of their own species.

     Native to Asia, rats spread throughout the world because they often found their way onto ships.

A rat can survive longer without water than a camel.


5/15/23
Let's Talk Planets: Facts about Venus

Venus is the sixth largest planet in the solar system, or the third smallest.

A day on Venus is actually longer than its year.

On Venus, the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.

Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system.

The normal atmospheric pressure on Venus is ninety times greater than Earth's. Let's put it this way…the pressure on Venus would squish you flat.

Astronomers use radar to "see" what lies beneath the thick clouds of Venus.

Eight spacecraft have landed on Venus. Together, they have sent back a total of 9.5 hours’ worth of data.

Although Venus has more than 1600 volcanoes and volcanic features, there has been no direct evidence of any recent eruptions.

Aphrodite Terra and Ishtar Terra are too highland regions on Venus, similar to Earth's continents.

On Venus, a 100 pound (45.3 kg) person would weigh 90.5 pounds (41 kg).

To find out how much you weigh on Venus, multiply your birth weight by 0.905.


5/11/23
Ever wonder about Ivory soap?

99 and 44/100 Percent Pure

William Proctor, a candle maker, and James Gamble, a soap maker, went into business together because their father-in-law, Alexander Norris suggested it. In 1837 they created the company known as Proctor and Gamble.

 

Proctor and Gamble's first major product was Ivory Soap, invented in 1879 by Gamble’s son, James N. Gamble. It was named by Proctor’s son, Harley T. Proctor, inspired by a passage from the Bible: Psalms 45:8, which refers to "ivory places."

 

Ivory Soap floats because there's air whipped into the mixture. This makes the soap lighter than water (and easy to find in the tub!).


5/10/23
Just Stuff Q & A

Q:Why do we say "hello" when we answer the telephone?

A:The first word used to answer the phone was the nautical greeting "ahoy," because the first regular phone system was in the maritime state of Connecticut. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor, answered with the Gaelic "hoy," but it was Thomas Edison's greeting of "hello," an exclamation of surprise dating back to the Middle Ages, that caught on, and so we answer today with "Hello?"


Q:Why do we say "good-bye" or so "long" when leaving someone?

A:The word good-bye is a derivative of the early English greeting of "God be with you," or it as it was said then, "God be with ye." Over the years its abbreviated written form and pronunciation became "goodbye." As for "so long," it came to Britain with soldiers who had spent time in Arabic speaking countries, where the perfect expression of goodwill is "salaam." The unfamiliar word to the Englishman sounded like, and then became, "so long."

 

Q:When did men start shaving every morning?

A:In many cultures shaving is forbidden. The reason we in the West lather up every morning can be traced directly back to Alexander the Great. Before he seized power, all European men grew beards. But because young Alexander wasn't able to muster much facial hair, he scraped off his peach fuzz every day with a dagger. Not wanting to offend the great warrior, those close to him did likewise, and soon shaving became the custom.

 

Q: What do the following abbreviations signify in internet-speak?

a) lol

b) imho

c) ttyl

d) afaik

e) bbl

A: a) "laughing out loud." b) "in my humble opinion." c) "talk to you later." d) "as far as I know." e) "be back later.)

 

Q: On August 10, 2003, Yuri Melanson wed Ekaterina Dmitriyeva. Why will their nuptials live in history?

A: When this couple exchanged vows, the cosmonaut groom was in space aboard the International Space Station, 240 miles above his betrothed, who was in Texas. The bride, a U.S. citizen, looked heavenly in a traditional wedding dress; her husband wore a bright blue spacesuit adorned with a bowtie. To complete their celestial effect, the bride stood next to a life-sized cardboard cutout of her groom and the best man astronaut Edward Lu played the wedding march on a portable keyboard in space.

 

Q: What are the troubles with Tribbles?

A: In the original Star Trek series, Tribbles are small round furry non-intelligent lifeforms. Born pregnant, these endearing little creatures reproduce asexually and exponentially if provided with an adequate food supply. After a lone Tribble is brought aboard the USS Enterprise, the species quickly mushroomed into millions, creating havoc and one of the funniest Star Trek episodes ever.

 


5/8/23
Some More Stuff

Where did the coffee habit come from?

Muslims were the first to develop coffee. As early as 1524 they were using it as a replacement for the wine they were forbidden to drink. According to legend, an astute Arab herder noticed that his goats became skittish after chewing on the berries of a certain bush, so he sampled a few himself and found them to be invigorating. The region of Abyssinia where this took place is named Kaffa, which gave us the name for the drink we call coffee.


Why do we define the rat race as "keeping up with the Joneses"?

"Keeping up with the Joneses" has come to mean trying to keep up with our neighbors, in terms of material possessions, at any cost. The expression comes from the title of a comic strip that ran in newspapers between 1913 and 1931 and chronicled the experiences of a newly married man in Cedarhearst, New York. Originally titled "Keeping Up with the Smiths," the cartoon was changed to "Keeping Up with the Joneses" because it sounded better.


5/4/23
More Stuff

The building and servicing material Formica was originally developed as insulation material for electrical devices. At the time, insulation was made mainly from the mineral mica. The new material was a substitute "for mica" – and that's how it got its name.

Daniel J. O'Connor and Herbert A. Faber were the Westinghouse engineers who developed Formica. When they filed their patent in 1913, the company paid them one dollar for the rights to their invention. They quit and set up their own business soon after.


5/3/23
Hmm – Just Stuff

When a politician campaigns for office, he tries to make people think he is "one of them." In the continental United States, it might mean eating certain foods or wearing certain hats. But in Hawaii, no politician dares run for office without knowing how to do the hula! It's part of the campaign.

The Swiss guards, the personal bodyguards of the Pope, are really Swiss. They are recruited in the Catholic cantons of Switzerland. The reason they wear those particular uniforms is that the treaty that established the guard was signed in the sixteenth century – and that's the uniform they wore in those days.

About a hundred years ago in India, Sikhs used a Frisbee-like a weapon. They twirled a razor-sharp metal quoit on one finger and hurled it at the enemy.

Many years ago, a village priest in the little town of Zipaquira, Columbia, dreamed of someday having a beautiful church for his little flock, all of whom were poor workers in the local salt mine. The mine there is the largest active salt mine in the world, and it supports the entire town.

     The priests dream came true. But the church grew into a cathedral – and it is made entirely of salt!

     The cathedral, called Our Lady of the Rosary, is constructed entirely within a towering mountain of salt, 800 feet beneath the summit. Everything within the cathedral is carved and shaped from the hard, glistening white salt: the towering pillars, the great vaulted dome, the Stations of the Cross, the side chapels, the statuary, the magnificent central altar. And all the work of construction, of carving and shaping, was done by the devout miners.

     The cathedral took six years to build, and can seat 5,000 worshipers. The great nave is 400 feet long, 73 feet high, and is supported by columns of solid salt 33 feet square. The workmen who built it used pneumatic drills in constructing it.

     Our Lady of the Rosary is reached by way of deep tunnels, each a mile-long, and wide enough for the passage of a single car; one tunnel leads in, the other winds out. Just outside the gates to this strange house of worship is a vast underground parking lot that has enough space to accommodate more than 200 cars.


5/1/23
Early Medicine Egyptian Style

A collection of thirty-seven surgical instruments is engraved on a wall in the Egyptian Temple of Kom-Ombo (2nd century B.C.). Some show amazing similarities to modern surgical instruments and include scalpels, scissors, needles, forceps, lancets, books, and pinchers.

The Egyptians used opium as a crude form of anesthesia when operating on patients. They also created a milder painkiller by mixing water with vinegar and adding ground Memphite stone. The resulting "laughing gas" was inhaled.

Egyptian archaeologists have discovered thirty-nine mummies with cancer. Most of these were cancers of the breast and uterus.

Trepanning, or making holes in the skull to relieve brain pressure, was practiced in ancient Egypt. Skulls at the medicine museum in Cairo show circular holes in the frontal bones. New bone growth at the edges suggest that the patients lived through the operations, at least for a few months.

Egyptian doctors treated joint pain by applying ointments containing fat, oil bone marrow, gum, and honey. They sometimes added flour, natron, onion, cumin, flax, frankincense, or pine.

In ancient Egypt, cough was treated by swallowing a mixture of honey, cream, milk, carob, and crushed dates.


INTERESTING - APRIL

4/27/23
Just Stuff Q & A

Q:How did teenagers become a separate culture?

A:The word teenager first appeared in 1941, but the emancipation of that age group began forty years earlier when new laws freed children from hard labor and kept them in school. Until then, there was only childhood and adulthood. At the age of thirteen, a girl became a woman and could marry or enter the workforce and a boy became a man. Today, teenagers are treated as children with suppressed adult urges.

 

Q:Why is a formal suit for men called a "tuxedo"?

A:In the nineteenth century, the appreciated formal dress for men was a suit with long swallowtails. But one evening in 1886, Young Griswold Lorillard, the heir to a tobacco fortune, shocked his country club by arriving in a dinner jacket without tails. This fashion statement caught on, and the suit took on the name of the place Lorillard introduced it: Tuxedo Park, New York.

 

Q: According to recent media reports, Japanese women are suffering from Retired Husband Syndrome. What is this new malady and what havoc is the causing?

A: As the Japanese population ages, a burgeoning number of husbands are retiring to their homes. Pitched together after decades of separation, the retirees and their spouses often encounter problems, perhaps aggravated by traditional Japanese gender roles. In any case, symptoms of Retired Husband Syndrome include irritability, ulcers, rashes, and, in many cases, a rush to divorce lawyers. (Ha ha – It seems to me that this happens to women everywhere, not just Japan. Lol)

 

Q: Which movie was not based on a Stephen King book?

a) Insomnia

b) The Green Mile

c) The Shawshank Redemption

d) Misery

e) Dolores Claiborne

A: a) Insomnia. King did write a novel called Insomnia, but it has never been turned into a movie. The film insomnia was based on a Norwegian film of the same name.

 

Q: Match the operas with their composers:

1) Tosca                                              a)Gaetano Donizetti

2) Aida                                               b) Giacomo Pucccini

3) The Barber of Seville                  c) Giuseppe Verdi

4) Lucia di Lammermoor               d) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

5) Don Giovanni                              e) Gioacchino Rossini

A: 1) b.    2) c.    3) e.    4) a.    5) d.

 

4/26/23
Just Stuff – Sleepy Time

Changes in hormone levels make it harder for a woman to sing when she's pregnant. Rising hormones affect the vocal cords so more lung pressure is needed to hit certain notes.

Possibly the world's most famous lullaby, the song that begins "Lullaby, and good night" was written by Johannes Brahms, who never married and had no children.

NS-RED stands for Nocturnal Sleep Related Eating Disorder, also known as "sleep eating." Not only do sufferers leave their beds and wander around in their sleep, they make their way to the fridge and chow down – then remember nothing the morning after!

NS-RED affects twice as many women as men.


4/24/23
Strange and Interesting Stuff about Sports

When football was first being played in American colleges, there were so many injuries and accidents that Harvard University decided to forbid it. So on July 2, 1860, a football funeral was held. "Football Fightum," an effigy, was put into a coffin and buried in a grave by the sophomore class. But on the tombstone was written: "It will rise again" – and is certainly did.

The ballgame that came before other ballgames (such as tennis, baseball, and football) was handball. In Italy it was called pallone, in France jeu de paume, and in England fives. Why fives? Because the ball was struck by the hand – a "bunch of fives."

Married men wrestle against bachelors in Brazil, as part of a ceremonial dance. The unmarried men, dressed in feathery leggings and sleeves, line up to challenge their married brothers to wrestle.

Bowling is a popular sport in America, but don't bet on it. Betting on the game of bowling almost finished it as a sport. In the 1840s, Connecticut lawmakers banned it because too much gambling went on when people bowled. To stop the gambling, nine pin bowling was made illegal. To get around the law, bowlers added a tenth pin so they could bowl without breaking the law. Bowling has been using ten pins ever since.

One of the contests in the herdsman’s festival in Switzerland is the throwing of a 185-pound, egg shaped granite boulder. The dates on the rock commemorate the first Unspunnen Festival and its 100th anniversary.

 

4/20/23
Strange Stuff About Ordinary Things

If a cup of ketchup left the bottle and traveled indefinitely in a vacuum, it would move at the rate of 25 miles (40 km) per year.

Ketchup was sold in the 1830s as a medicine to "fortify the blood."

A nondairy creamer is flammable because it contains so much palm oil.

A powerful glass cleaner, used in the semiconductor industry, is made from a mixture of sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide. The mixture is so corrosive when applied to organic materials that it has been nicknamed the "piranha solution."

Murphy's Oil Soap is the chemical most commonly used to clean elephants.

Correction fluid was invented in 1951 by Bette Nesmith Graham. She is the mother of former Monkey Mike Nesmith.

The unique burn of a sparkler is caused by the tiny explosions of minute iron particles ejected from the rod. Iron, separated into fine enough particles, is very combustible


4/19/23
Just Stuff Q&A

Q:How did the drink Gatorade get its name?

A:In 1963, Doctor Robert Cade was studying the effects of heat exhaustion on football players at the University of Florida. After analyzing the body liquids lost during sweating, Cade quickly came up with a formula for a drink to replace them. Within two years, Gatorade was a $50 million business. The doctor named his new health drink after the football team he used in his study, the Florida Gators.

 

Q:Why do we call a bad actor a "ham" and silly comedy "slapstick"?

A:In the late nineteen century, second-rate actors couldn't afford cold cream to remove their stage makeup, so they used ham fat and were called hamfatters until early in the twentieth century when these bad actors were simply called "hams." Physical comedy became known as "slapstick" because of its regular use of crude sound effects: Two sticks were slapped together offstage to accentuate a comics onstage pratfall (pratt being an old English term for buttocks).

 

Q:Why are vain the people said to be "looking for the limelight"?

A:In the early days of theater, the players were lit by gas lamps hidden across the front of the stage. Early in the twentieth century, it was discovered that if a stick of lime was added to the gas, the light became more intense, so they began to use the "limelight" to eliminate the spot onstage were the most important part of the play took place. Later called the "spotlight," the "limelight" was where all actors fought to be.

 

Q: Who released the Pentagon Papers?

            a) Harian Ellison

            b) Daniel Ellsberg

            c) Daniel Berrigan

            d) Ted Berrigan

            e) Mark Felt

A: b) Daniel Ellsberg

 

Q: Which of the following men did not go to prison because of crimes committed during the Watergate scandal?

            a) Elliott Lee Richardson

            b) E. Howard Hunt

            c) E. R. Haldeman

            d) G. Gordon Liddy

            e) John Ehrlichman

A: a) Elliott Lee Richardson. Richardson became Attorney General after the resignation of John Mitchell. When President Nixon ordered him to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, Richardson refused and resigned.

 

Q: Who did fire the special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the Watergate scandal?

A: Robert Bork. After his two superiors resigned in protest during the "Saturday Night Massacre," Solicitor General Bork became acting Attorney General. In his first official act, he fired Richard Nixon's nemesis.


4/17/23
Ready Set Invent

The ancient Greek natural philosopher Anaxagoras (500-428B.C.) thought that the sun and stars were made of red-hot stone, ignited by friction as they circled the earth. His theories might have been influenced by a meteorite that fell near his home in 460 7B.C.

A type of aerosol spray can was first introduced in France around 1790. The can contained a pressurized carbonated beverage.

In the year 1324, the English philosopher William of Ockham wrote that the simplest explanation is usually the most accurate – or "What can be accounted for by fewer assumptions is explained in vain by more." This approach came to be known as "Ockham's Razor," and proved valuable in scientific research.

In 1455, Gutenburg printed the first bible with movable type. Soon after this, he published books on herbs, medicines, and "simples" (herbs combined into teas and powders) – all of which became best sellers.

In 1824, the English scientist Michael Faraday invented the rubber balloon to use in his experiments with hydrogen gas.

4/13/23
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: Why did Italians frequently shout "Viva Verdi!" in the nineteenth century?

A: For two reasons. During the 1840s, when Milan was occupied by Austria, numerous clandestine groups supported Victor Emmanuel's campaign to unify the Italian states. To circumvent strict Austrian censorship, their effort was given the code name "Viva VERDI!", an acronym for Vittorio Emanuele Re D’Italia. Shouting "Viva VERDI!" enabled nationalists to boisterously declare their allegiances while outsiders assumed quite understandably that they were fans of the masterful opera composer.

 

Q: Name the four operas that constitute Richard Wagner's Ring of Nibelung Cycle.

A: Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), Die Walkure (The Valkyrie), Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung  (The Twilight of the Gods).

 

Q: Identify the classical composer and score most closely associated with the following films:

a) Apocalypse Now

b) Clockwork Orange

c) 2001: A Space Odyssey

d) Fatal Attraction

e) Ten

A: a) Richard Wagner, “Ride of the Valkyries.” b) Ludwig Van Beethoven, Symphony No. 9 c) Richard Strauss, Also Sprach Zarathustra. d) Giacomo Puccini, Madama Butterfly. e) Maurice Ravel, Bolero.

 

Q: On TV’s I Dream of Jeannie (1965 – 1970), what was actress Barbara Eden never permitted to do?

A: The censors wouldn’t let her show her sexy navel.

 

Q: On what island did King Kong live?

A: Before he was carted off to inhospitable New York City, Kong lived in tropical semi-seclusion on Skull Island.

 

4/12/23
Let's Talk Planets. Mercury

Mercury: Long Days, Short Years

Because Mercury is so close to the sun, it takes the small planet only eighty-eight days to complete one orbit. For comparison, it takes 365 days (one year) for Earth to travel around the sun.

Imagine a birthday every eighty-eight days.

Now for the weird part – while the years are really short on Mercury, the days are really long.

While it takes Earth only twenty-four hours to spin around once on its axis, it takes Mercury about fifty-nine Earth days to spin around once.

Now that would take some getting used to.


4/10/23
Hmm Just Stuff

Pilgrims who visit St. Patrick's Purgatory, a tiny island on a lake in Donegal, Ireland, have to observe certain strict rules. These include fasting on dry bread and black tea, and going barefoot all day.

The Torah, which consists of the Five Books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, is found in every Jewish synagogue. But every single Torah is prepared in a very special way. A Torah must be written by hand, with a feather pen, and on a special kind of parchment.

What father had the most children? Well, in the Western world the palm must go to Niccolo III, who ruled the independent Italian city of Ferrara from 1393 to 1441. During his long reign, through a succession of wives and mistresses that shocked even his free and easy age, he fathered almost 300 children.


Just Buggy
Besides burrowing into mattresses, pillows, carpeting, and upholstered furniture, bed bugs can live in wood furniture, behind electrical outlets, under wallpaper, and inside picture frames, clocks, electronics, and smoke detectors.
    When they feed, bed bugs can consume six times their weight in human blood.

James Harrington, a political philosopher and friend of England's King Charles I, was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1660. During his incarcerattion he came to believe that his perspiration turned into flies and bees.


4/6/23
Whether Facts About Tornadoes

The Fujita Scale, named for Ted Fujita at the University of Chicago, is used to measure the intensity of tornadoes. Fujita’s scale ranges from F-0 (minor damage) to F-5 (severe destruction).

Tornadoes can form in clusters with several funnels touching down at once. These start out from a storm system called a supercell.

Sometimes a "low pressure explosion" can take place when a tornado suddenly creates a vacuum around a sealed structure. The higher pressure within the structure causes it to explode.

Although 70 percent of all deaths come from F-5 tornados, only two percent of tornadoes qualify as F-5. About 69 percent of all tornadoes are F-1 or weaker, and 29 percent are F-2 to F-4.


4/5/23
Let's Talk Planets Facts About Venus

Average distance from the sun = 67,205,000 miles  (108,200,000 km)

Equatorial diameter = 7, 517 miles (12,104 km)

Average temperature =  900°F (470°C)

Length of day = 244 Earth-days

Length of year = 224.7 Earth-days

What you would breathe (atmospheric composition) = 97% carbon dioxide, 3% nitrogen.

Number of moons - none

4/3/23
About Our Planet

Although Mount Everest, at a height of 29,028 feet (8,848 m) is called the tallest land-based mountain, the inactive Hawaiian volcano Mauna Kea is actually taller. Only 13,796 feet (4,205 m) of Mauna Kea rises above sea level, yet the mountain is a staggering 33,465 feet (10,200 m) tall if measured from the ocean floor. This means that Mauna Kea would be 4,437 feet (1,352 m) taller than Mount Everest if they were placed next to each other.

Mauna Kea typically stays snowcapped from December to May. Its name in Hawaiian means "White Mountain."

Geologists define dust as particles small enough to be carried by air currents.

Dust is the most widely dispersed terrestrial matter. Dust from the Southwestern United States regularly blows into the New England states.

Dust is important in the formation of rain and snow. Moisture condenses around dust particles so that precipitation can occur.

The dust that collects on clothing can provide detectives with important information about the movement of a crime suspect.

Dust can be combustible. Mixed with the right quantity of air, grain dust can spontaneously explode.


INTERESTING - MARCH   

3/30/23
Some Ocean Facts

All clams start out as males, but some change into females later in their lives.

A goldfish turns white or light yellow if you keep it in the dark or place it in a body of running water, such as a stream. The more familiar orange pigment developed to protect a fish that's not moving from the sun's ultraviolet radiation.

The Pacific Giant Octopus is the largest octopus in the world. In its two-year lifespan, it grows from the size of a pea to a 30-foot (9m) wide, 150-pound (68kg) monster.

An octopus’s mouth is a bony beak located directly under its fleshy head.

The giant squid is the largest creature without a backbone. It can weigh up to 3 tons and grow to nearly 60 feet (18m) long.

Porpoises can be taught to recognize reflections of themselves. Some will even preen and pose before a mirror!

A male saltwater catfish keeps the eggs of his young in his mouth until they are ready to hatch. During this three-week incubation period, he will not eat.

Freshwater catfish have over 30,000 taste buds. Humans have a 9000.

A female mackerel can lay about 500,000 eggs at one time.

It takes a lobster about seven years to grow to weigh one pound.


3/29/23
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: Canada has a newly named province. What is it?
A: Nunavut comprises the eastern part of the old Northwest Territories.

Q: Who were the two stars of I Spy?
A: Robert Culp and Bill Cosby played American agents fighting menacing foreigners in this popular series. I Spy ran from 1965 to 1968.

Q: What was extraordinary about the title character in the 1967 – 1975 television series Ironside?
A: Robert Ironside, a San Francisco detective, is wheelchair-bound. In this breakthrough series, detective Ironside (played by Raymond Burr) heads a special unit and traveled in a specially-equipped van.

Q: Who was the host of the television documentary series In Search of… from 1976 to 1982?
A: From 1976 to 1982, Leonard Nimoy hosted this weekly show, which investigated the unusual and the paranormal.

Q: In what year did The Beverly Hillbillies first rumble into Hollywood, California?
A: The Beverly Hillbillies, which starred Buddy Ebsen as the nouveau riche oil tycoon Jed Clampett, was first broadcast in 1962.

3/27/23
Odd Laws and Lawsuits

“Cole Porter has been swiping my tunes for just about long enough," Lenny decided – and he sued the famous songwriter for copyright infringement. It wasn't Lenny's first lawsuit, not by a long shot. Over the years, he sued five other composers for the same offense.

            Cole Porter hadn't dreamed up "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" all by himself, Lenny claimed. The tune came from Lenny's "A Mother’s Prayer." "Begin the Beguine" came from there, too. "Night and Day" was stolen from Lenny's "I Love You Madly," and "Don't Fence Me In" was right out of "A Modern Messiah."

            Lenny wanted "at least $1 million out of the millions Cole Porter is earning out of all the plagiarism." The judge asked Lenny where Porter might have heard his music in order to copy from it, Lenny pointed out that "A Mothers Prayer" had sold more than a million copies. As for the other pieces, most of them had been played at least once over the radio.

            Besides, Lenny claimed, Cole Porter "had stooges right along to follow me, watch me, and live in the same apartment with me." His room had been ransacked several times, he said.

            "How do you know Cole Porter had anything to do with it?" the judge asked. "I don't know that he had anything to do with it; I only know that he could have," Lenny explained.

            The district judge found Lenny's whole story fantastic and dismissed it. The appeals court, though, did find similarities between Lenny’s music and Cole Porter's. Yes, the judge admitted, that part about the stooges was pretty weird, but "sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. " It would be up to a jury to decide.

            Sadly for Lenny, the jury didn't swallow his story. He appealed again – he even petitioned the US Supreme Court – finally he had to compose himself and go home.

A man and a woman were dining at a restaurant in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The woman ordered an oyster dish. The oyster contains a pearl that was valued at $750. Both the woman and the restaurant owner claimed they owned the pearl, and the case went to court. The judge, in his attempt to make an impartial ruling, awarded the pearl to the gentleman who paid for the woman's dinner.

In Mahdia, Tnisia, a 67-year old philanthropist died, leaving his worldly goods to his wife, 9 children, 13 grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, friends, business associates, mailman, and secretary. He didn't, however, include his gardener or his barber. They've contested the will. The case is pending, and so far no one's collected a cent.

Drugstores in Providence, Rhode Island, may sell toothbrushes on Sunday – but not toothpaste.

A Minnesota tax form asked for all sorts of information. It requested that you fill in your date of birth and your date of death.


3/23/23
About Mother Earth

At 29,028 feet (8,708 m), Nepal's Mount Everest is the highest land-based mountain (a mountain that sits on dry land and not seafloor) in the world. Formed about 60 million years ago, Everest is named after Sir George Everest, the British surveyor who accurately calculated its height in 1800.

In Nepal, Mount Everest is called Sagarmatha, which means "goddess of the sky."

At 28,259 feet (8,478 m), the mountain K2 at the China – Pakistan border is the second-highest peak after Mount Everest.

The third highest mountain is Mount McKinley in Alaska – 20,320 feet (6,096 m) high.

Steam explosions can occur when a cold rain falls on the active volcano Kilauea on Hawaii's biggest island.


3/22/23
How Stars Get Together –
Star Groups: Local Groups

The Milky Way has about 40 galactic neighbors. Astronomers call this cluster of nearby galaxies the Local Group. It contains galaxies of all shapes and sizes – three of which can be seen with the naked eye (no telescope required).

The Andromeda galaxy is a large spiral galaxy that is 2.2 million light-years away. On a dark, clear night, it can be seen as a small, faint, oval-shaped smudge in the northern hemisphere constellation of Andromeda.

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are irregular galaxies. They are both smaller than the Andromeda galaxy, but since they are closer to the Milky Way, they appear larger and brighter in our skies.

The Large Magellanic Cloud, located in the southern hemisphere constellation of Dorado, is about 170,000 light-years away.

The Small Magellanic Cloud, located in the southern hemisphere constellation of Tucana, is about 200,000 light-years away.

Other galaxies within the Local Group are harder to see. They are smaller or more distant, or their light is blocked by large dust clouds within the Milky Way.

Star Groups: More Galaxy Clusters

Beyond the Local Group, there are even larger clusters of galaxies.

The Virgo cluster is about 50 million light-years away from us and contains almost 2000 galaxies. The Coma cluster is 300 million light-years away and contains as many as 10,000 galaxies. There are even super clusters of galaxies – clusters of galaxy clusters.

Yes – our universe is a really big place!


3/20/23
Odd Stuff In History

In the medieval city of Dinkelsbuhl in West Germany, a children’s festival is held each July. It's not a festival to entertain children – but to thank them. It commemorates the role of children in saving the city from destruction during the Thirty Years War, which was fought from 1618 to 1648.

The Chinese used a shadow clock to tell the time more than 4500 years ago.

In 1903, a New England doctor named Nelson Jackson, who was on a vacation in San Francisco, made a bet that he could drive clear across the continent in the newfangled invention called the automobile.
    A few days later, the daring doctor bought himself a 2-cylinder, 20-horsepower, chain driven car and – with a companion – headed east on his pioneer journey.
    The trip covered 6,000 miles and 11 states. The top speed attained it was 20 miles per hour, and the roads were so bad that sometimes Jackson covered no more than 6 miles in a single day.
    Frequently, he was stopped dead by breakdowns. Even minor repairs because tires had to come all the way from Akron, and spare parts from Cleveland.
    Once, a farmer's wife purposely misdirected him so that her sister, who lived 50 miles away, would see a horseless carriage.
    But the intrepid Jackson pushed on as fast as he could go and he finally made the East Coast. It took him 63 exhausting days and cost them $8000 to win a $50 bet. . . but he was the first man in history to across the United States by car.

The Romans had no figure 40. They used letters of the alphabet for the numbers 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500, and 1000. This meant that they could not add columns of numbers.

3/16/23
Botanical Oddities

In ancient Egypt, the apricot was represented by a series of glyphs meaning "egg of the sun."

The philosopher Pliny the Elder believed that the souls of the dead resided in beans.

Noting his interest in botany, the explorers Lewis and Clarke wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson describing the goldenseal flower. They described it as "a sovereign remedy for sore eyes."

It takes 60 to 75 years for a saguaro cactus "found only in the southwestern United States" to grow branches. Since many saguaros have been destroyed by development and they grow so slowly, these cactuses have become one of America's most precious and highly protected natural resources.

The city of Gilroy, California, still makes the quaint claim that it's the "Garlic Capital of the World." However, Fresno County – the largest agriculture producing county in the United States – actually produces more garlic.


3/15/23
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: One of these people doesn't belong in the list: Bix Beiderbecke, Gerald Ford, William Frawley, Herbert Hoover, Ann Landers, Glenn Miller, Donna Reed, Henry A. Wallace, John Wayne, Grant Wood. Name the anomaly.
A: With the exception of Gerald Ford, all of these Americans were born in Iowa. Ex-president Ford was born in Nebraska.

Q: In what country is Timbuktu located?
A: Mali.

Q: What does Iceland sit atop?
A: The mid-Atlantic ridge, which separates two great geologic plates, the North American and the Eurasian plates.

Q: Istanbul, Turkey is located in two continents, Europe and Asia. What country has other cities in two continents?
A: Kazakhastan. The cities of Uralsk and Atyrau straddle the Ural River, the hypothetical boundary between Europe and Asia.

Q: Pizza Hut is well known for their fast, efficient delivery service. What was their most historic Moscow delivery?
A: In 1991, after putting down an attempted coup, Russian President Boris Yelstin and his supporters were still hold up in the Parliament Building, tired and apparently very hungry. With food supplies dwindling, the portly president and his triumphant comrades decided that they had a huge hankering for pizza. They dialed up Pizza Hut, ordered 260 pizzas (including some with extra toppings), 20 cases of Pepsi and enough hot coffee to keep them awake for the next counter-revolution. After the gunfire stopped, Yeltsin called Pizza Hut headquarters to thank them for their counter-revolutionary support.


3/13/23
Odd Laws and Lawsuits

In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the state house of representatives passed a law stating that the sum of $.25 can be charged to cut the hair of bald men.

In Nogales, Arizona, they "let it all hang out": It is illegal to wear suspenders.

A law in Boston, Massachusetts, has rendered it illegal to bathe without a written prescription from a doctor.

In Lake Charles, Louisiana, there is a law making it illegal for a rain puddle to remain on your front lawn for more than 12 hours.

Two attorneys in Hartford, Connecticut, wrote their own wedding vows. The vows of Bernard Prothroe and Annamarie Kendall covered 47 single-spaced, 8 ½ x 14-inch, type written pages. It took the officer more than five hours to read them. By the time the ceremony was over, 90% of the guests had left – including the parents of the bride and groom.


3/9/23
Early Medicine

One remedy that apothecaries (whom we now call pharmacists) borrowed from a recipe by the Greek doctor Galen, was called theriac or treacle. It included over 50 ingredients, including the bark of trees and skins of snakes, took 40 days to prepare, and had to "cure" for 12 years! Medieval doctors claimed that treacle cured everything – and most people believed them.

Astrology was important to doctors during the middle ages. Astrologers were often called on to forecast the spread of the Black Death.

Several famous female herbalists lived in the 10th and 11th centuries. The most prominent was Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179), a German nun who composed music that is still performed today.

To treat smallpox, a medieval doctor would arrange red drapery around the patient's bed. This practice may have had a magical reason, or perhaps was an attempt to protect the patient from disturbing light.

In medieval times, thousands of people died from what are treatable diseases today – influenza, measles, pneumonia, scarlet fever, and tuberculosis.


3/8/23
How Stars Get Together –

Star Groups: The Milky Way

Our sun is located in a spiral galaxy recalled the Milky Way.

Shaped like a huge, flattened pinwheel, the main disk of our galaxy is about 160,000 light-years in diameter and 2000 light-years thick. The spiral arms are located within this disk.

At the center of the flattened disk is the galactic core, a bright sphere of stars 7,000 to 10,000 light-years in diameter. Within the very center of the core, astronomers believe there is a giant black hole – one that contains the mass of 2.6 million suns.

Our sun is located along one spiral arm within the galaxy’s main disk, about 26,000 light years from the core.

From Earth, the Milky Way can best be seen in the evening skies from August through October. During these months, observers see a narrow, hazy streak of light stretching across the sky from the north to the south. This streak is made up of the light of billions of stars located within the more distant spiral arms of the Milky Way.

Stars located within the same spiral arm as our sun can be seen every night, stars such as the North Star and the ones that make up the constellations.


3/6/23
Interesting Customs

In hot climates, perspiration is good for the body, and a dry skin is an indication of fever. So in Cairo, many people greet each other with the salutation "How do you sweat?"

Everybody knows about Big Ben, the Bell in the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament in London. But why is it called Big Ben? It was originally called St. Stephen's Bell. The Commissioner of Works, Sir Benjamin Hall, had much to do with putting up the new Houses of Parliament in 1851. He was an enormous man, and folks called him Big Ben. When the question came up in Parliament what to name the great bell that was to be hung in the tower, a member called out, "Why not call it Big Ben?" – and the name stuck.

The most unusual commuters in the world are Turks who make a 10 minute ferry trip every day. They go across the Bosporus from Uskudar to Istanbul. In those 10 minutes they actually commute from one continent, Asia, to another, Europe.

With the globalization of film, television, and all kinds of communication, customs, clothing styles, and even food are becoming more and more alike all over the world.

            One of the things that people in Europe and America have taught the rest of the world is to kiss! The Chinese didn't have the custom of kissing. Neither did the Japanese. In Samoa, the kiss is really a sniff. The Polynesians – and the Eskimo – rub noses together.

            So the kiss, as a form of affection, actually developed rather late in human history. But it seems to be here to stay.

In certain countries, different dialects are spoken in different sections. But in India, while Hindi and English are the chief official languages, hundreds of other languages are spoken. In fact, a great many Indians cannot understand Indians from another part of their own country at all!


3/2/23
About Space
Astronomers can determine if stars are moving away from us, and how fast, by noting the color of the light they produce in a spectrometer. A "red shift" indicates motion away, since the light waves are stretched into longer wavelengths of red and orange. A "blue shift" reveals motion towards us, as light waves are compressed into shorter wavelengths of blue and violet.

A ring of ice and rock orbits the sun beyond planet Neptune. Called the Kuiper Belt, astronomers believe that it's the remains of the debris that clumped together to form the solar system 5 billion years ago. The new planet, Quaoar, was discovered in the Kuiper Belt.

Most meteorites come from the asteroid belt, others come from the moon, Mars, and from comets.

The astronomer Harvey H. Nininger is considered the "Father of Meteoritics.” He was the first to do an extensive study of Arizona's Meteor Crater in 1939. His discovery of silica bombs and shocked quartz at the site proved that the crater was formed by impact and not by volcanic activity. Nininger was also the first to use the then novel metal detector to find meteorites.

Meteorites are one of the most valuable sources of information about the formation of the early solar system.


3/1/23
Just Stuff Q & A
Q: How old is Tony the Tiger?
A: Tony's exact age is uncertain, but when he was first introduced as a Kellogg's spokes- tiger in 1952, he already had an imposing growl, Tony the Tiger got the job after besting Katy the Kangaroo in a close nationwide vote the previous year. Katy, Elmo the Elephant, Newt the Gnu and the other losers disappeared without a trace.

Q: Which mint is "two mints in one"?
A: Certs, which is both a breath mint and a candy mint.

Q: If you "ask any mermaid you happen to see, ’what's the best tuna?’"
A: Chicken of the Sea. But, is that the first question you would ask a mermaid?

Q: Speaking of mermaids: Who played the nautical flapper in the 1984 movie splash?
A: As a part-time mermaid, Daryl Hannah won the hearts of Tom Hanks and millions of moviegoers.

Q: Fill in the blanks for these sixties advertisements:
    1) "… is the one beer to have when you're having more than one."
    2) "Hey, Mabel, …"
    3) "When you're out of … you’re out of beer."
A: 1) Schaefer. 2) (Carling) Black Label. 3) Schlitz

INTERESTING - FEBUARY   

2/27/23
Strange stuff about ordinary things.

Rice paper isn't made from rice but from the small "rice paper tree" (Tetrapanax papyriferum) that grows in China and Japan.

Apples are more efficient than caffeine in waking you up in the morning. The apples contain a form of fructose that’s particularly effective for alertness

Banana oil doesn’t come from banana’s but from petroleum.

Pumice is a stone so porous that it floats in water.

Magnetic iron (magnetite) is produced from iron by the metabolism of tiny bacteria that live in iron ore. Living without light or air, these bacteria eat the ore, which then undergoes a molecular transformation and is excreted as magnetite.


2/23/23
Star Groups: Galaxies

A galaxy is the largest collection of astronomical objects in the universe.

In addition to containing anywhere from a few millions to hundreds of billions of stars, galaxies contain planets, comets, moons, and everything else that I've mentioned in the past.

Galaxies also come in different shapes:

Spiral galaxies look like twirling pinwheels with small, bright, round scores.

Elliptical galaxies can be egg-shaped or almost completely round like a ball.

Irregular galaxies have no common shape. Instead, they look more like odd-shaped clouds.

Peculiar galaxies have large amounts of intense radiation pouring out of them, and astronomers aren't sure why.


2/22/23
Odd Laws And Lawsuits

In Oklahoma there it was a legendary legislator named "Alfalfa Bill" Murray. He was a rather tall chap and was continually irked when he went into hotels and found the bed linens too short to cover his long, lanky body. So in 1908 he had a law passed requiring all hotels to have 9 foot sheets.

You can file suit against the devil himself and have your day in court, Adolph found, but you won't necessarily get any satisfaction. Adolph filed a civil rights action against "Satan and his staff." The defendant, he claimed, had "on numerous occasions caused him misery" and had "placed deliberate obstacles in his path and caused his downfall."
    That might well be, said the judge, but there wasn't anything he could do about it. First, he noted, "we question whether Adolph may obtain personal jurisdiction over the defendant in this judicial district." Nobody knew for sure whether Satan had his legal residence there.
    The case might be considered in a class action, the judge went on, but that was going to be tough given the vast size of the "class" – and the question of whether Adolph’s claims were representative of everyone else's. Finally, the judge noted, Adolph hadn't given any instructions as to exactly how the US Marshall was supposed to serve process on Satan and his servants.
    In this case, at least, the Devil came out "not guilty."

As the salutatorian of her high school class, Shelly took her grade point average seriously – very seriously. One day she missed algebra class. Since she had no excuse, the teacher lowered her grade – and that meant a slip in her overall grade point average from 95.478 to 95.413.
    Now .065 might not sound like much; but to Shelly’s dad, Ralph, you start letting the little things go and pretty soon the big ones will follow. Ralph saw only one solution: to sue the school board for $1 million.
    That docked grade point was a violation of his daughters Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment rights, Ralph told the court. The judge consented to the reinstatement of the grade points, but he refused to award any money. Ralph appealed the decision, hoping at least to get his attorney's fees paid – but the appeals court judge was so exasperated he took the grade points away again. "Patently insubstantial" was how the judge saw the case.

2/20/23
Ready Set Invent

The first submarine was designed in 1578 by an English mathematician. The first submarine was built in 1620 by Cornelius van Drebbel a Dutch inventor.

In 1776, the American colonist David Bushnell built the first submarine used for military purposes. Used in the American Revolution, this one-man "Turtle" was powered by hand-cranked wooden propellers.

Air-filled tires were used on bicycles before they were used on cars.

The first machine to show animated movies was called the "wheel of life" and patented by William Lincoln in 1867. The machine, lit by an arc lamp, showed a series of drawings, which appeared to move when rotated and then viewed through a slit.

A 4,700 year-old coffin from an Egyptian pyramid at Saqqara was found to be made of six layers of wood veneer, sandwiched and glued together like plywood. The woods were cyprus, juniper, and cedar of Lebanon.

Around 1750, the first glue formula was patented in Britain. It used fish oil.


2/15/23
Just Stuff Q & A
Q: What product advertised that "a little dab will do you"?
A: Brylcreem.

Q: "Where's the Beef?" was the ad slogan for what hamburger chain?
A: Wendy’s.

Q: Fill in the product name blanks: "Hot dogs, … hotdogs. What kind of kids love … hot dogs? Fat kids, skinny kids, kids to climb on rocks."
A: Armour. And what to tough kids, sissy kids, even kids with chickenpox put on their Armor hot dogs? "Mustard, ketchup, lots of relish too, pickles, onions, even peanut butter too."

Q: Of which cola is it said, "It's the real thing"?
A: Coca-cola.

Q: What coffee is "Good to the last drop"?
A: Maximal House coffee. The advertising slogan reportedly comes from a 1907 comment by President Theodore Roosevelt. After he was served with a cup of the beverage, Roosevelt reportedly opined that the coffee was "good to the last drop."

2/13/23
Interesting & Odd Facts About Nature

If you measure a day as lasting from sunrise to sunset, there is a time of year in Spitzbergen, Norway, when a "day" day lasts three and a half months! The town is so close to the North Pole that the sun shines continuously all summer.

If you stand on a scale at the equator, you will weigh less then at the North Pole. This is because the equator is further from the Earth's center, and the pull of gravity is less there.

Everyone can see mist rising from boiling water but, strictly speaking, that is not steam. Steam is not only invisible, it is not even wet! It ceases to be steam and becomes a visible mist when water droplets are formed by a drop in temperature.

The Danish island of Mano, which is off the mainland, Jutland, is reached by its inhabitants in an unusual way: They drive to it on the bottom of the sea.

    During ebb tide, the sea is between the island and the mainland becomes a road. There is a track marked by dead trees, and automobiles and carts can go back and forth on this road. But that's only during six hours a day. When the high tide returns, the road is covered by five feet of water.


2/9/23
About the computer and such.

In the mid-1940s, engineer John von Neumann made important improvements in computer design. His "stored memory" design allowed a computer to handle more complicated programs, and his idea for a central processing unit (C P U) allow electronic functions to be concentrated in a single source. In 1951, the UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer) became the first computer to use these features. One of the UNIVAC's impressive early achievements was predicting that Dwight D. Eisenhower would win the 1952 presidential election.

The language used to create web pages is called HTML, which stands for "hypertext markup language." HTML allows webmasters to insert special tags into their pages that tell the browser how to display text and graphics.

Computers that store and deliver information to other computers across the Internet are called servers. They "serve" by receiving a request from your PC, called a client, and delivering the data.

A fumbling beginner on the Internet is sometimes referred to as a "newbie."

The standard protocol for sending e-mail is SMTP, for "simple mail transfer protocol." This protocol packages your message into a kind of envelope and sends it to a series of servers. Each server leaves information on the message so that the receiver may see the message route.


2/8/23
How Stars Get Together

Star Groups: Open Clusters

Open clusters are small groups that contain anywhere from 50 to 1000 stars.

Stars within these clusters were all formed from the same diffuse nebula. Since these young stars are all about the same age, an open cluster is sometimes compared to a kindergarten class.

The Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, is one of the brightest examples of an open cluster in our skies.

Although several stars will stay together as multiple star systems, this cluster as a whole will gradually drift apart.

Star Groups: Galactic Clusters

Galactic cluster is just another name for "open cluster" – a group of 50 to 1000 young stars.

These clusters form within the plane of our galaxy. The term galactic helps astronomers to distinguish these clusters from the larger globe Euler clusters that formed on the outer fringes of the galaxy.

Star Groups: Globular Clusters

Globular clusters are huge, tightly packed spheres containing anywhere from 50,000 to 1 million stars.

These brilliant clusters formed early during the creation of our galaxy, so they are made up of fairly old stars.

And these old stars aren't going anywhere. They are trapped within the cluster by the strong combined gravity of all the other stars.

Globular clusters can be found above and below the plane of our galaxy in a region known as the galactic halo. As result, they are much farther away from us then open clusters and appear fainter in our skies.

Even at such great distances, the globular cluster is a beautiful sight to look at through a telescope.


2/6/23
Odd Stuff In History

Sometimes we feel that good bathrooms are a sign of the advance of modern civilization. At Knossos, on the island of Crete, there are ruins of a palace that was built about 4,000 years ago. It contains complete bathrooms with modern drainage systems.

Gold certainly has a way of changing history. A gold rush will cause all kinds of people to settle in faraway places. And gold changed the whole history of Australia.

            The British used to send convicts from their overflowing prisons to the American colonies. After the War of Independence, they had to find another place – and picked Australia.

            Between 1788 and 1868, the British transported 155,000 convicts to Australia, which made it quite a penal colony. But in 1851 gold was discovered there, and that changed everything. The gold rush brought all kinds of "good people" from all over the world to Australia – and the new continent started a whole new life.

The first escalator in Britain was put in Harrods department store in 1898. An attendant waited at the top and handed a glass of brandy to any customer who was upset by the ride.

The only people in all of Europe who speak a Semitic language are the natives of the island of Malta. It is believed by some experts that Maltese is partly derived from the ancient dead language of the Phoenicians. But it is definitely a Semitic language, like Arabic and Hebrew.


2/2/23
About Mother Earth

Unlike other terrestrial planets in our solar system, Earth has only about 120 impact craters on its surface. Water and wind erosion, as well as erupting volcanoes and earthquakes, have erased most of them.

Geologists have identified a 112-mile (180 km) diameter crater in Mexico that they believed was formed by a particularly violent meteoritic explosion. The meteorite, estimated to be 6 miles (9.6 km) in diameter, may have contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs. The crater, named Chixalub (pronounced "sheesh-ah-loob”) is estimated to be about 65 million years old.

The largest known impact crater on Earth is the Vredefort Ring in South Africa. It has a diameter of 186 miles (299 km) and was formed about 2 billion years ago.

The Marianas Trench, and elongated valley on the floor of the Pacific Ocean, is the deepest depression on Earth. A United States Navy bathyscape reached the bottom in 1960 and measured its depth at 35,798 feet (10,739 m).

Deep in the Marianas Trench, the temperature of the water is always just above freezing, and the pressure is more than 1000 times what is on the surface, but many bottom-dwelling fish and invertebrates call it home.


2/1/23
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: Who invented roller skates?

A: It is generally believed that a Belgian mechanic and maker of musical instruments named Joseph Merlin built the first roller skates in 1770. Merlin wore his invention to a party in a fashionable section of London, where he ended up crashing into an expensive mirror. After this, he wisely put his skates away. The first patent for roller skates was issued to a Monsieur Petitbled in France in 1819. But, despite his claims to the contrary, they were not great at making turns.

Q: When was roller-skating introduced to America?

A: In 1863, Massachusetts businessman James Plimpton decided to place skate wheels on springs, with two parallel sets of wheels, one pair under the ball of the foot and the other pair under the heel. Plimpton skates were the first that could gracefully turn and maneuver a curve. After this improvement, roller-skating caught on all over the world.

Q: Where is the National Museum of Roller Skating?

A: Founded in 1980 and opened in 1982, the National Museum of Roller Skating is on the northwest corner of Forty-eighth and South Streets in Lincoln, Nebraska. The museum possesses the largest collection of historical roller skates in the world. The museum is closed on holidays and weekends.

Q: In the on unenlightened days before cigarette advertising was banned, ads for cigarettes were everywhere. Can you match the ad slogans with the cigarette brands?

1- "I'd rather fight than switch."                            A. Lucky Strike

2- "I'd walk a mile for a …"                                     B. Winston

3- " … Tastes good like a cigarette should."         C. Camel

4- "… /M.F.T. … Means fine tobacco."                  D. Tareyton

A: 1=D.    2=C.    3= B.    4= L.S./M.F.T

Q: Can you identify the toothpaste brand, and finish this line? "You'll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with …"

A: Pepsodent.



INTERESTING - JANUARY  
1/30/23
Stuff About Space

In a sword duel with one of his students over a math problem, in the 16th century astronomer Tycho Brahe lost his nose and wore a silver replacement nose for the rest of his life.

Scientists have come to understand in recent years that an enormous amount of material has been exchanged between Earth and extraterrestrial sources such as moons, asteroids, comets, and plants. Some scientists theorize that living microbes could survive the trip through space and perhaps even thrive on our planet. Since the origin of the earth is still a mystery, new theories suggest that our planet might have been "seeded" with alien life forms, which over the course of several million years evolved into humans. These theories suggest that we could all be the descendents of space travelers.

The only inanimate symbol in the zodiac is Libra, the scales.

An object that streaks the sky with light and burns up in the atmosphere is called a meteor.

And extraterrestrial object that hits the ground and survives is called a meteorite.

An object that drifts in space before hitting our atmosphere (if it ever does) is called a meteoroid.

Astronomers classify meteorites into three major types: iron, stone, and stony iron. These types have many subcategories.


1/26/23
Star Groups

When you go outside at night and look up, you see hundreds of individual stars. At least, that is what it looks like. In reality, it is hard to find a star that is truly all by itself.

Take our own star, for example. Even though the sun is in a single-star system, it – along with several thousand other stars – lies within one spiral arm of our Milky Way Galaxy.

The Milky Way contains several billion stars.

Our galaxy is just 1 of 40 different galaxies that make up a collection known as the Local Group of galaxies.

In other words, there are stars everywhere!


1/25/23
Interesting And Odd Facts About Nature

Carat for carat, the ruby is more valuable than the diamond.

Mirages are popularly associated with conditions of extreme heat. The ever-receding puddle on the sizzling highway surface, the unreachable oasis in the desert, these are what come to mind when one thinks of a mirage. Mirages are actually as common under conditions of cold as they are under conditions of heat. Mirages associated with the Arctic are, in fact, larger and more enduring than those associated with the deserts.

Arctic mirages differ from their desert counterparts in that they reflect something that actually exists, although not in the place it is located. Whereas the traveler in the desert may see a lake that doesn't exist anywhere, the traveler in the Arctic may see a land that exists – but not in the place he sees it.

Whether an image has a real or imaginary origin, all mirages can be photographed. The lens of the camera reacts to any mirage as does the human eye.

You see a rainbow when the sun, shining on drops of water, is broken up into seven main colors. On the ground, you only see half a rainbow. In a plane, you see the whole circle of a rainbow.

It gets mighty cold in Oymyakon, a town in eastern Siberia. A temperature of -90.4°F has been recorded there.

What grows in the interior of Greenland? Nothing. What was there? Nothing. It is just one immense mass of ice, often several thousand feet thick. There is no other place like it on earth.

Diamond is the hardest known natural substance in the world. It can scratch every other material. The only thing that will scratch a diamond is something called Borazon. It is made up of boron and nitrogen.


1/23/23
Early Medicine

It was reported by his contemporaries that Galen kept at least 20 scribes on hand to jot down his every thought.

Galen's errors persisted for nearly 1500 years until the Vesalius, the 16th-century Italian anatomist, began to correct them.

The Middle Ages produced no great doctors to take the place of such important figures as Imhotep and Hippocrates in the ancient world.

The first early medieval medical university was founded in the 10th century in Salerno, Italy, where Greek manuscripts written by such physicians as Hippocrates were studied. At the time, this was the only school of healing that allowed female students. It was headed by a woman named Trotula, or "Dam Trot," as she was then known.

In the 10th century, a book of herb recipes appeared called The Leach Book of Bald. This book, written by a monk, contained herbal information from traditions of the Druids in Wales and combined them with Greek and Roman herbal knowledge.

Most medieval medicines were "simples," made of herbal ingredients that were eaten raw or made into teas.


1/19/23
Just Stuff Q & A

Q: Why was the baseball park in Chicago called Wrigley Field?
A: In 1926, Cubs Park was renamed Wrigley Field after Chicago Cubs owner William Wrigley Junior.

Q: When was Wrigley Juicy Fruit gum first introduced to the public?
A: In 1892, William Wrigley Jr. was a baking powder salesman who came up with an innovative idea: As a promotional device, he began giving away two free packs of chewing gum with each can of baking powder. When he saw that the chewing gum was more popular than the baking powder, he realized that he was in the wrong business. His first two Wrigley chewing gum brands were Lotta and Vassar, and Jucy Fruit and Wrigley’s Spearmint were introduced the following year.

Q: Who said "you can buy a Model T in any color you want, as long as it's black"?
A: Henry Ford.

Q: When was Campbell Condensed Soup first sold to the public?
A: In 1869, fruit merchant Joseph Campbell and ice box manufacturer Abraham Anderson formed the business called the Campbell Preserve Company, which sold canned foods and other products. Decades later, Campbell's chemist, Dr. John T. Dorrance invented condensed soups. He was able to reduce the water in the can, making it much cheaper and easier to ship canned foods. Campbell's Condensed Tomato soup was first sold in 1897, just a year before the classic red and white can appeared.

Q: When were the Campbell Soup kids introduced in Campbell Soup’s advertising?
A: In 1904, these ever hungry youngsters made their first appearance on ads on trolleys and in magazines. In the 1930s, after radio had come along, the same cherubs started humming "M’m, M’m, Good!”

1/18/23

A Little Of This – A Little Of That

Guilty or not guilty is the choice of a verdict for criminal offenses in all countries – except Scotland. In trials for criminal offenses there, three verdicts are permitted: guilty, not guilty – and not proven. Not proven amounts to acquittal.

One of the most clever tasks of design and engineering was accomplished by Filippo Brunelleschi, an Italian architect who lived in the 15th century.

           When he constructed the dome on the Cathedral of Florence, this Renaissance architect left the small opening in the top through which a shaft of light streams in every June 21. The opening, in its relation to the sun, was so precisely arranged that the sunbeam shines squarely on a brass plate set in the floor of the sanctuary. For more than five centuries, this ray of light has never failed to cover the plate completely.

            Brunelleschi knew that once there was the slightest divergence of light from the plate it would mean that the cathedral had shifted its center of gravity and the structure would have to be bolstered to prevent its collapse. The cathedral, however, was so perfectly designed that it has stood firmly on marshy ground for nearly 600 years.

It doesn't take a great invention to make money for the inventor. Many people thought of simple little things have made fortunes from them. Here are a few examples: the man who thought of putting the rubber eraser on lead pencils made $100,000 a year; a man named Harvey Kennedy made $2.5 million a year for inventing the shoelace; the woman who invented a certain kind of curling iron got a yearly royalty of $40,000; and Doctor Plimpton, the inventor of the roller skate, made $1,000,000 from his patent.

 1/18/23

A Little Of This – A Little Of That

Guilty or not guilty is the choice of a verdict for criminal offenses in all countries – except Scotland. In trials for criminal offenses there, three verdicts are permitted: guilty, not guilty – and not proven. Not proven amounts to acquittal.

One of the most clever tasks of design and engineering was accomplished by Filippo Brunelleschi, an Italian architect who lived in the 15th century.

         When he constructed the dome on the Cathedral of Florence, this Renaissance architect left the small opening in the top through which a shaft of light streams in every June 21. The opening, in its relation to the sun, was so precisely arranged that the sunbeam shines squarely on a brass plate set in the floor of the sanctuary. For more than five centuries, this ray of light has never failed to cover the plate completely.

            Brunelleschi knew that once there was the slightest divergence of light from the plate it would mean that the cathedral had shifted its center of gravity and the structure would have to be bolstered to prevent its collapse. The cathedral, however, was so perfectly designed that it has stood firmly on marshy ground for nearly 600 years.

It doesn't take a great invention to make money for the inventor. Many people thought of simple little things have made fortunes from them. Here are a few examples: the man who thought of putting the rubber eraser on lead pencils made $100,000 a year; a man named Harvey Kennedy made $2.5 million a year for inventing the shoelace; the woman who invented a certain kind of curling iron got a yearly royalty of $40,000; and Doctor Plimpton, the inventor of the roller skate, made $1,000,000 from his patent.


1/16/23
Strange Stuff About Ordinary Things

Because of the danger of ultraviolet light from acetylene torches and burners, glass blowers wear special glasses that contain the elements neodymium and praseodymium. These elements have proved to be effective absorbers of UV rays.

The emerald gem is actually a form of beryl (crystal aluminum) that contains the metal chromium. The ruby is another form of crystal aluminum called a corundum.

The green coating that covers copper objects is a salt called copper carbonate. The salt forms as the copper reacts to moisture in the air.

Adding the metal zirconium to steel creates flint – a metal that sparks when struck or rubbed.

Combining titanium with steel makes it less brittle; adding tantalum makes it harder.

1/12/23

Stars – Going out with a bang – Old Blue Giant Stars

Old blue giant stars go out with a bang! In fact, when they blow up, is one of the most powerful explosions in the universe.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. First they have to use up all their fuel. 

As old blue giant stars burn through their tremendous supply of hydrogen, helium, carbon, and heavier elements, they go through a series of contortions that make old sun-like stars look as if they were just warming up.

Why are old blue giant stars so different from old sun-like stars?

Because blue giant stars are so massive, the pressures and temperatures in their cores are much higher than those found within sun-like stars. These extreme conditions allow nuclear reactions take place at a much faster rate.

When all the hydrogen within the blue giant’s core is converted to helium, the nuclear reactions stop. Its core collapses and heats up, while its surface expands – just like the old sun-like star.

However, since a blue giant star was much larger than our sun to begin with, when it swelled in size, it passes the red giant stage and becomes a red supergiant.

            Note: If a red supergiant star were to replace our sun, the four inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars will all be swallowed up by this monster star.

The star doesn't stay this big for long. Soon afterward, helium begins fusing in the core, and the star shrinks back to its normal size.

Then after it uses up all the helium, the old blue giant swells again into a red supergiant.

The series of contractions and expansions continue at a faster and faster pace as heavier and heavier elements fuse together within the old stars core. From this point, carbon and helium fuse into oxygen – then – oxygen and helium fuse into neon – then – neon and helium fuse into magnesium – carbon and oxygen fuse into silicon – oxygen atoms fuse into sulfur – silicon atoms fuse and iron, and from here things change really fast.

Up until this point, every nuclear reaction that has taken place has released more energy than was required to make it.

This extra energy pushes out against the strong gravity pushing in, keeping the star relatively stable.

This balance is destroyed when silicon fuses into iron because it takes more energy to make iron than is released when the reaction is complete.

With the sudden drop in energy output, the strong gravity pushing in on the star immediately takes advantage of the situation and causes the star to collapse. The collapse happens fast, taking less than a second. Material within the star collides with itself, and the star is ripped apart in a tremendous explosion.

BANG!

This supernova, the most powerful explosion in the universe – a spectacular end to a brilliant but short-lived star.

You would think that when a star is completely ripped apart by a supernova, that would be it.

For some, it is. A cloud of gas and dust known as a supernova remnant will be all that remains of low-mass blue giants.

            Note: A supernova remnant is different from a diffuse nebula (a type of stellar cloud.) A supernova remnant contains many different elements that were all formed within the old star. A diffuse nebula contains mostly hydrogen and a little helium.

For more massive blue giant stars, the end isn't at as straight forward.

The larger the star, the more mass is left over after the supernova.

Sometimes there is enough debris left over that its combined gravity will cause it to collapse into a small ball. Astronomers call this small dead start a neutron star. 

Sometimes, if there is a great deal of debris left over from a supernova, it will gather together and collapse beyond the point of a neutron star.

From here, the gravity is so strong that nothing will be able to stop it. It will continue to collapse until everything that was the old blue giant star is now crammed into a singularity – a point with incredible mass that doesn't take up any space. More commonly known as – a black hole.

In summary, all blue giant stars will end their lives with a supernova – the largest explosion in the universe. Then depending on how much debris remains, you will find either a dust cloud, a neutron star, or a black hole.


1/11/23
Odd Laws and Lawsuits

Susanville, California: She sued him for divorce because he sold the kitchen stove in order to get the money to purchase liquor to feed his habit. He owned up to the fact that he did sell the stove, but he begged the court for leniency because she didn't miss the stove for two weeks.

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a motorist cannot park an auto for more than two hours unless it is hitched to a horse.

Parviz Mahin, a janitor at a bus depot in Ankara, Turkey, found a bag of precious stones worth $7.3 million. A Good Samaritan, he returned the stones to the jeweler. The jeweler didn't offer any reward. Tr. Mahin asked the jeweler for a small diamond ring for his wife. The jeweler refused, and Mr. Mahin took the ring. The jeweler pressed charges and Mr. Mahin had to spend six years in jail.

In Kankakee, Illinois, a woman brought charges against the man because he called her a chicken. The judge asked the woman how much she weighed, calculated what she would cost per pound if she were chicken, and fixed that sum as the fine.

Marshfield, Wisconsin: When the couple married, he promised to pay her $1 for each kiss as long as they remained married. She sued him for divorce and asked the court for an award of $3,000 in back payments.

In Virginia it's illegal to take a bath in a tub if the tub is located in any room attached to the house.

1/9/23             

Botanical Oddities

Juniper berries smelled so strongly of evergreen trees that they have been chewed as a breath freshener, steeped for tea, ground into poultice, and made into jam.

 In early 17th century Europe, tea was so expensive that it was kept in locked metal boxes called canisters.

 The poinsettia plant was brought to the United States in 1828 by Doctor Joel Poinsett, the first US Ambassador to Mexico. The plant, called "flower of the blessed night" in Mexico, was renamed in Poinsette’s honor.

 The North American plant called the bloodroot was used by the Algonquin Indians as a source of red dye for their faces and bodies. They called it puccoon.

The herbs bloodroot, boneset, currant, and magnolia all have fever-reducing properties. Botanists refer to these herbs as antipyretics.

 The California redwood, coast redwood, and giant sequoia are the tallest and largest living organisms in the world. However, the oldest living thing in existence is not a California redwood, but a 4,600-year-old bristlecone pine from the White Mountains of California.

 1/5/23           

 Just Stuff  Q & A

Q: In which John LeCarre novel does the character George Smiley not appear?

           a) Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy

            b) A Perfect Spy

            c) The Little Drummer Girl

            d) The Spy Who Came In From The Cold

            e) The Looking Glass War

A: A Perfect Spy


Q: In John LeCarre novels, the British Intelligence Agency is called:

            a) The Agency

            b) MI5

            c) Cambridge Central

            d) The Circus

            e) Control

A: The Circus.

 

Q: Complete the following expressions from Seinfeld:

            a) "A Festivus. . .”

            b) " Serenity. . . ”

            c) “Sponge. . .”

            d) “These pretzels. . .”

            e) “Yada, . . .”

A:  a) “A Festivus for the rest of us.” b) “Serenity now.” c) “Sponge-worthy.” d) “These pretzels are making me thirsty.” e) “Yada, yada, yada.”

 

Q: What is the pseudonym that George Costanza chooses when impersonating someone on Seinfeld?

A: Art Vanderlay. The ever-versatile Art is both an importer/exporter and an architect.


Q: How did the poem "Mary Had a Little Lamb" become so famous?

A: "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was written in 1830 by Sarah Hale, the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book.  She was inspired after watching young Mary Tyler's pet lamb follow the girl to school, which, of course, was against the rules. The poem became immortal more than fifty years later when Thomas Edison used it as the first words ever spoken and then recorded on his new invention, the phonograph.


Q: Who was Little Jack Horner in the nursery rhyme?

A: At a time when Henry VIII was confiscating church property, one monk appeased the king with the gift of a special Christmas pie. Inside the crust were deeds to twelve Manor houses secretly offered in exchange for his monastery. The steward who carried the pie to London was Jack Horner, who along the way extracted a plum deed for himself. It was for Mells Manor, where Horner's descendents still live to this day.

 1/4/23          

Odd Stuff In History

The great modern auction houses have had some strange items, under their hammer, but nothing as strange as that which went on the block in Rome in 193 CE. The bids taken at that auction were for possession of the Roman empire, an area then covering several million square miles.

The oldest surviving writing paper dates back to about 110 CE, and was made in China.

Without an Englishman named Congreve, the United States would not have had its national anthem.

            The rockets that inspired Francis Scott Key as he watched the bombardment of Fort McHenry on that historic night during the War of 1812 were the invention of Sir William Congreve, royal fire master to the king. They were also the first rockets ever seen in America.

            Made of narrow wooden tubes filled with gunpowder and tipped with iron warheads, the rockets were guided by simple, polelike rudders and launched from rows of tilted frames in a series of giant assaults. With a range of 2 miles, they were designed to explode on impact, scattering deadly shrapnel over a wide area.

            Streaking across the sky, tales hissing and blazing, these new missiles were a terrifying sight. But they did not win the war for England. Instead, Congreve’s rockets were remembered today only because they're brilliant "red glare" gave America its great "Star-Spangled Banner."

 1/2/23               

About the computer and such:

The most famous and powerful computer to come out of World War II was the Electronic Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), funded by the U.S. government and designed by the University of Pennsylvania. ENIAC 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, and 5 million soldered joints. The computer was so massive it consumed 160 kw of power – enough energy to dim the lights in an entire section of Pennsylvania.

 The design of the computer keyboard evolved from the typewriter keyboard, which was invented in 1868.

 In computer terminology, "protocol" means a set of rules for exchanging data that both sides, in this case two computers, agree to follow.

 Although transistors were responsible for smaller, more efficient computers, they were also hot and could damage a computer's wiring system. To get around this problem, engineers began looking at the electrical conducting properties of silicon, made from quartz. In 1958, Jack Kilby, an engineer with Texas Instruments, developed a 3-component integrated circuit or "chip." This made much smaller computers possible. The chip was ahead of its time, and unfortunately, Kilby didn't renew his patent by the time chips became a standard feature in every computer.

In July of 1993, a fire destroyed Japan's Sumitomo Chemical Company. Since Sumitomo supplied over 60% of the world’s cresol (used to make memory chips), the price of memory chips skyrocketed.

 



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