This phrase, often used affectionately, presents quite an image when you think about it. Of course, it could be worse. You're not suggesting we envision them boiled in oil, just dipped in some fat and quick-heated over a high flame.

Food is often used to suggest something diminutive. For example, we might say that something is "peanuts" or "small potatoes." And "fry," in another context, describes small fish that are eaten fried. But in this context, it's got nothing to do with fish. In fact, it's not connected to food of any kind. This fry comes from the Old Norse word "frjo," which means kids. It's that simple.

Why are sunsets red?

Because the day needs a traffic light, so it won't run into the night.

I better tell you the truth or MY sun will set. The molecules of air in our atmosphere always deflect the sun's light. That white light is actually a combination of violet, blue, green, yellow, orange and red light. These colored rays shine at different wavelengths and are deflected more or less depending on how much of the atmosphere they have to shine through. By sunset, the sun's low position in the sky means the rays have to pass through the maximum amount of our atmosphere to reach us and all of the colors have been completely
deflected and scattered except red. It wins by default.

Humans have been eating pickles for 4,000 years.

The Bible, in a few sour passages, refers to them twice.

Aristotle said some great things about them, but entirely in Greek.

Columbus brought them to America.

Napoleon thought they were good for you. Had he been asked to take his hand out of his coat, you would almost certainly see that he was concealing a half-eaten dill.

Why is something that's thrown out said to be "86ed"?

It seems that in the 1920s, diners and soda fountainemployees used to use code numbers to communicate with each other. 82 meant "I need a glass of water," 19 was a call for a banana split, 99 meant "the manager is on the prowl," and 86 meant "we're out of that item."

Why do we sometimes get that deja vu feeling?

Even if you think that somehow, somewhere you've read this before, read on. Surely you've experienced the feeling that you just heard, said or saw something you lived through before. French for "already seen", deja vu is enough to evoke the theme music from the "Twilight Zone."

Is there any significance to radio station call letters?

If I were to start a trivia station I would try to get appropriate call letters, such as WHAT. Companies that are known for a particular product or service often secure relevant letters. The company that owned the MGM movie studio, for example, used to own station WMGM. Yet no matter who owns a station, they can't choose the
first of its call letters. In the U.S, for instance, it's always W or K.

Sometimes being in the majority only means that all the fools are on the same side.

A Television may insult your intelligence but nothing rubs it in like a computer.

There is now an accredited school of Astrology, The Astrological Institute, in Scottsdale, Arizona. The Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges of Technology, a federally recognized group, sanctioned it. The only criteria for accreditation are available jobs in the field and teachers qualified to teach their
subjects.

Did Bill Gates once say that computers would never need more than 640K of ram?

According to many people, he said, "640K should be enough for anyone." In fact, he didn't say that or anything like it. He wouldn't have said that anymore than he would have said, "$640,000 should be enough for anyone."

The limitation of 640K of ram on early personal computers had to do with the central processing chip they used and the way it addressed the machine's memory. Actually, there was a total of one megabyte or
1,024K of memory in these machines, but not all of it could be allocated to ram. Gate's company, Microsoft, supplied the operating system, DOS, for the most famous of these machines, the IBM PC. That's how he became linked to that maximum of memory.

Why is a slow gallop called a "canter?"

Well, since a canter is somewhere between a trot and a gallop, I suppose they could have just combined those two words to make "trollop." But this is about the horse's speed, not its morals.

For the origins of canter, we have to look back to medieval England and the shrine to Thomas Beckett at Canterbury.

Pilgrims traveling there came down the old Kent road on horseback and their steeds were observed to ride in a somewhat odd gait.

Was there any difference between a mammoth and a mastodon?

What can you say about hairy elephants? Appearances notwithstanding, they were shunted onto one of evolution's sidings, rather than its trunk line. They didn't survive to have peanuts thrown at them at the zoo.

To most people, all hairy elephants look alike. They can't tell a mammoth from a mastodon. But they were two different animals and the distinction could be
important should you ever trip over a large chunk of ice containing one of these extinct mammals. Mastodons go back almost 40 million years and died out a million
years ago. They stood ten feet high and had straight tusks. The mammoth, which emerged a mere million years ago, had curved tusks, an extra outer layer of hair,
could reach a height of 15 feet and survived until 10,000 years ago.

Who invented the microwave oven?

What's the function of characters such as "?," "=" and "~" in URL's?

Even computer cognoscenti don't always know about that stuff after the first "/." Is it the machine's way of cursing you out, as in &%$!!*%+?&?"

No, but it is letting you know where it's at. The familiar part of the address, as in www.cmonupandseemesometime.com/, is the location of the page on the Web. It's like the street address of a
house. But what if it's an apartment house or office building? You also have to know where in the house or building you're going. The "~" is one of those direction marks, in this case indicating that the page is on a personal folder on the server.

But maybe you need to ring the bell and use the intercom. The "?" and "=" refer to scripts that handle the information you are asked to input to further narrow your search. Go ahead: input.

The expression, "hands across the water," symbolizes nations reaching out to each other. For France and the U. S., though, it's more like "arm-in-arm." The French
sent the Statue of Liberty's right arm across the Atlantic for showing at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Then the arm traveled back to France to be attached to the rest of the statue. Then it crossed for the last time as part of the whole statue.