Why is the guy who leads the football team called a "quarterback?"

Because on the first day of training camp he put a dollar bill in the $.75 Coke machine, didn't get change, and compulsively complained about it ever afterward, earning this derisive nickname?

Of course not. The name comes from the way football teams lined up when the game was just catching on over a hundred years ago. In the backfield, the furthest behind the offensive line, was a lone fullback. In front of him, closer to the line, were the two running backs, known as the halfbacks. The guy in the backfield to whom the center snapped the ball was closer yet to the offensive line. I guess this is like a Scholastic Aptitude Test question, but given what you've been told so far, what would YOU call him?

Whaddaya you mean, you'll pass?
 

Why is New York called "The Big Apple?"

New York's nickname "The Big Apple" was coined by jazzmusicians, who used to say "There are many apples on the tree, but to play in New York City is to play The Big Time . . . The Big Apple!"

Later, the New York City Convention and Visitors Bureau popularized the nickname because the Bureau thought it gave the city a "bright and shining image."
 

Early politicians required feedback from the public to determine what was considered important to the people.

Since there were no telephones, TV's or radios, the politicians sent their assistants to local taverns, pubs and bars who were told to "go sip some ale" and listen to people's conversations and political concerns.

Many assistants were dispatched atdifferent times . "You go sip here" and "you go sip there." The two words "go sip" were eventually combined when referring to the local opinion and thus, we have the term "gossip".

 

Who invented the modern lottery?"

There are lots of references to lottery-like activities in the Bible, and the Romans used them to sell property. In the United States today, lotteries finance education. I got an education from my state's lottery. Many losing tickets have taught me that I have a better chance of winning at the track.

The people of Renaissance Florence are credited with developing the modern public lottery, run by the state to finance its operations without raising taxes, and paying off the winners in cash. With the formation of a united Italy in the mid-19th century, that new nation-state also became the first country to run a national lottery.

My local diner holds a lottery with the prize of a free turkey dinner. In truth, you take a chance whenever you eat there.
 

Honey keeps almost forever on the shelf. It's probably the most long lasting of any food and has been found in a still edible state after sitting for centuries in Egyptian tombs dating back to the Pharaohs.

Remember that the next time you're tempted to tell YOUR honey that he or she is spoiled rotten.
 

The origins of the hand salute can be traced back further to the Romans when a person appearing before the Senate would raise his right hand to show that he was unarmed.

Then in the middle ages knights would raise their sheilds to show friendly intentions.
Both of these are the origins of the modern day hand
salute.

 

The "Zip" in U. S. postal zip codes stands for Zone Improvement Plan. It came into use in 1963. It helps the Post Office deliver more mail in a day than FedEx does in a year. The Post Office also maintains a fleet of more than 200,000 vehicles.

Unfortunately, they lack steering wheels, which is why mail is often delivered to the wrong place.
 

What's the difference between pathos and bathos?

It's a trick question, right? I'm really trying to see if you know the name of the third of the Three Musketeers. O. K., you didn't fall for it. Clearly the first word is about how to get somewhere and the second, how to be clean when you arrive.

All right lexicographers, if you insist. Pathos was an ancient Greek word. It's the arousal of pity or sadness, typically in tragic drama.

Bathos also comes from the Greek and literally means "deep." But it's not deep as in "deep thinker," but rather deep as in the sub-basement of emotions. It's the emotion a soap opera might evoke. Aiming for pathos, it's only pathetic, trite, insincere and overly sentimental.
 

Have any married couples been launched into space?

On the 1950s TV show, "The Honeymooners," bus driver Ralph Kramden often promised his wife, "Alice, you're gonna go to the moon!" Neal Armstrong beat her to it.

In 1992, a real married couple did go into space -- together. Astronauts Jan Davis and Mark Lee were preparing for an 8-day mission aboard the Space Shuttle
Endeavor. During their training they secretly married and by the time they revealed it the flight was drawing near. They were permitted to go but NASA scheduled them
on opposite 12-hour shifts. Since astronauts are above it all, so to speak, it's hard to say who worked days and who, nights.

By the way, if you and your sweetie are thinking you, too, would like to really get away from it all, fuhgedaboutit. NASA now nixes space spouses.
 

Why do we have earlobes?

Do yours hang low?

they wobble to and fro?

Can you tie them in a knot; can you tie them in a bow? Can you wiggle them, jiggle them and make people giggle with 'em? Or do you just hang earrings from them, as one dangles a hanger from the rod in a closet?

Earlobes are pieces of fatty tissue, hanging like pendants from the outer ear. It's hard to imagine any function for them other than as an aid to accessorizing your head.

But scientists keep trying to come up with what might have been the original purpose for this now vestigial structure.

Maybe when we walked on all fours our earlobes were larger and kept dust and dirt from our ear canals.

One anthropologist even theorizes that they were used for sexual attraction. "Hey, baby, how about a little 'lobe?'" That's so earotic.
 

Invented in India, the game of chess was called al-schah-mat or, "The King is Dead," by the Arabs.

The Arabic name eventually evolved into our term, "checkmate."

Then there's the other theory.

"Checkmate" is what Australians who play chess for money and lose say when asked how they're going to pay.
 

Why do we say that someone speaking gibberish is talking "mumbo jumbo?"

Logic will not take us very far here. After all, if you had the large, economy-size mumbo, what would you have?

The only other thing the words themselves suggest is that somebody's been mumbling, big time.Usually this sort of expression depends entirely on the sound of the words to convey its meaning and there is no historical etymology.

Not so here, where the expression derives from a word in the African language Mandingo, spoken in the Sudan. The word is "mamagyombo," meaning the guy whose magic powers can banish evil spirits.

Westerners usually consider such a practice, well, mumbo jumbo - gibberish.

So, mumbo jumbo is a witchdoctor. I checked my HMO handbook under "alternative medicine" to see if I could consult one, but the only mumbo jumbo I found was the language describing why they wouldn't pay for this, that and almost every other thing.
 

Many years ago in England, pub frequenters had a whistle baked into the rim or handle of their ceramic cups.

When they needed a refill, they used the whistle to get some service.

"Wet your whistle" is the phrase inspired by this practice.
 

Pure gold has no practical value whatsoever. It's too soft to do anything with it and has to be diluted, or alloyed, like iron, to make it workable -- typically with copper.

Martin M Goldwyn, in his book How a Fly Walks Upside Down, recounts a suggestion from a student that pancake flour and popcorn would make the perfect alloy.

The popcorn would flip the pancakes over as it cooked.
 

Why do we have wisdom teeth?

Because the American Dental Association lobbied for them, I concluded after reviewing the bill from my latest brush with dentistry.

There are so many dentists with the skills of a coal miner and the heart of an accountant, and so few wisdom teeth.

Before microwaves and frozen dinners, people had to really chomp their uncooked food with what are also called "third molars." But today wisdom teeth are vestigial.

You don't need them for a guacamole burger. And they get infected and have to come out. Which is where your dentist and credit card come in.They're called wisdom teeth because they're the last teeth you get.

You're older and smarter than you were when you got your first teeth. So why not call gray hair, wisdom hair; middle age paunch, wisdom fat; and the forgetfulness that begins in your 40s, wisdom whiteout?

Chew on that for a while.

 

Why do whales frequently beach themselves?

Not because they're slackers. They usually end up on some desolate beach. If they were just looking for downtime, they would show up more often in places like
Cancun, Miami or Hilton Head.

Whales navigate with their own version of sonar. They bounce sound off objects, including the ocean bottom, and calculate their distance from these objects by the time it takes for the sound to return. With this system, they usually get along quite swimmingly.

Shallow water with a sandy bottom near beaches presents a problem. The whale's sound waves can get tossed back and forth like ping-pong balls between the bottom and the nearby surface of the water, delaying their return.

This makes the whale a little nuts. He mistakenly thinks he's in deep water when he's really getting into hot water, and soon he's like a fish out of water.
 

Why do llamas spit?

This refers to those big, oh so cute and furry animals from South America.

The answer is, briefly, llamas spit to communicate.

Believe me, if they could send an email instead I am sure they would. But they can't, and spitting is a direct way of sending a message - in your face, so to speak.

If the message is relatively benign, they use plain spit. One llama could be telling another, "not tonight, honey, I have a headache." But if they're angry or afraid, they expectorate smelly green slime.

Even then, there's a warning: they pull their ears back just before they let fly.
 

TAX DAY Special ***

Interesting Things That Have Been Taxed

Bachelors (England in 1695 A.D., and Missouri in 1820 A.D.)

Beards (Russia, 1702 A.D.) Cooking Oil (Ancient Egypt, approximately 2000 B.C.)

Souls (Russia, approximately 1682 A.D.)

Urine (Rome, 1 A.D.)

Besides taxing beards and souls, Peter the Great of Russia also taxed: hats, boots, beehives, basements, chimneys, food, clothing, birth, marriage, and burial.

The Size of the IRS ~ The IRS has 114,000 employees. That's equal to the population of Peoria, Illinois. It is twice as big as the CIA and five times the size of the FBI. ~ IRS employment has increased 20 percent over the past 10 years. The rest of the government shrank by 10 percent over that same period. ~ The IRS spends $8 billion per year; its budget has doubled over the past 10 years -- but who's conunting?
 

Moving objects are affected by the Earth's rotation. This is called the "Coriolis effect."

In the Northern Hemisphere, such objects are deflected to the right. That would explain the conservative trend in recent Republican campaigns.

Light has "weight" and exerts a pressure of two pounds per square mile on our planet's surface, as anyone who has ever tried to bench-press a light beam can testify.
 

Men and women each have about five million hairs on their body. About 125,000 of these hairs grow on the head at the rate of .4 inch per month. The summer sunshine increases this rate slightly. \

A full moon may accelerate that growth substantially more, but only among those who have been bitten by a werewolf.
 

True Facts to read and forget.

A cockroach will live nine days without its head, before it starves to death.

American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first-class.

Americans on average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

China has more English speakers than the United States.

Donald Duck comics were banned in Finland because he doesn't wear pants.

If Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-33. She would stand seven feet, two inches tall and have a neck twice the length of a normal human's neck.

More people are killed by donkeys annually than are killed in plane crashes.

Stewardesses is the longest word typed with only the left hand.

The sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter in the English language.
 

Why is it called a "hamburger" if it doesn't contain ham?

At first glance, it seems that the word "hamburger" is a combination of the words "ham" and "burger." Therefore, one naturally assumes that a hamburger is a burger that contains ham.

But the word "hamburger" actually traces its roots back to Hamburg Germany, where people used to eat a similar food called the "Hamburg steak." Eventually, the Hamburg steak made its way to the United States, where people shortened its name to "hamburger."

Now you know.
 

Is there any difference between seraphim and cherubim?

There's always a pecking order, even among angels. I'm not just talking about wingspread, although physical characteristics come into play.

First, there are enough kinds of angels to field a baseball team. The nine types, or choirs, in descending order, are seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, virtues powers, principalities, archangels and (plain vanilla) angels. Seraphim rule the roost and have three pairs of wings, while cherubim never have more than two. It's not exactly like Hertz and Avis. Even if the cherubim try harder, they're not going any higher.

Of course, this hierarchy of haloes omits a very important fallen angel. You know what they say: the devil is in the details.

 

How do seedless grapes reproduce?

You know, this is a family mailing list, so I can't exactly draw you a picture, if you get my drift. But if you'll usher any minors in the house out of the room inwhich you keep your computer, I'll do my best to inform, with discretion. And I promise there will be no childish jokes about how before there were seedless grapes, it was the pits.

Actually, I was overreacting because seedless grapes reproduce without sex. (Borrring!) Did someone ever give you a cutting from a plant so that you could start your own? The process involved is regeneration, in which you can grow the whole plant by transplanting only a part of it. The original seedless grapes were mutations that were perpetuated via cuttings. It's still done that way.

But now that the kids are gone, have you heard the one about...
 

People in the Dominican Republic, where Christopher Columbus landed, think his name is jinxed and won't mention it. There have been earthquakes, plane crashes and other accidents associated with occasions honoring the explorer.

The word they use for this jinx is "fucu" (pronounced foo-coo). Be careful not to mispronounce it or you may be cursed, too.

 

According to Prof. Anders Henriksson, college students say and write the darnedest things.

For example, that Noah's wife was Joan of Ark, Plato taught Harris Tottle, and the Germans used the military technique called Blintzkrieg.

My favorite is that the communists built the Berlin Mall. I guess they hoped to make the West shop till it dropped.
 

How does the B-2 bomber avoid detection?

The B-2 bomber has a wing span of 172 feet (52 meters), yet its radar "signature" (apparent size on a radar screen) is as big as that of a bird. Not only that, but
it makes very little sound and is difficult to see, from the ground or from the air.

The bomber's construction uses graphite composites, which trap radar waves inside the plane, and its outer surfaces contain no flat parts and no right angles, which would reflect radar.

The jet's hot exhaust is mixed with cool air before being released, foiling heat-seeking missiles. Its engines are also hidden deep inside the plane, where their noise is muffled by the structure of the aircraft.

Even the plane's shape is designed to fool the eye, making it difficult to tell whether it's coming or going. The result is an aircraft that is able to fly deep into enemy territory without detection.
 

Is the appendix our body's only vestigial structure?

If some of the people I've had to deal with lately are any indicator, the brain might qualify. Seriously, though, there are several apparently useless parts in the human body. Your nictating membrane is one.

But the most interesting vestigial part is the only bone in your body that does not appear to have been assigned a task. The coccyx begins as four small bones that fuse into one as you mature. But it has no more use as a solo act than it did as a quartet. The coccyx is what we commonly call our "tail bone." It may indeed be the remnant of the tail we once had, but in our time, it just sits there.

Now, out of the corner of my eye I've seen you squirming. Ok: the nictating membrane is that small useless fold in the corner of YOUR eye.
 

There's a story about an MIT student who spent an entire summer going to the Harvard football field every day wearing a black and white striped shirt, walking up and down the field for ten or fifteen minutes throwing birdseed all over the field, blowing a whistle and then walking off the field.

At the end of the summer, it came time for the first Harvard home football team, the referee walked onto the field and blew the whistle, and the game had to be delayed for a half hour to wait for the birds to get off of the field.

The guy wrote his thesis on this, and graduated.
 

Exactly what do we mean by "the exception that proves the rule?"

We've all heard and probably repeated this expression many times. But can you explain it? When I say it slowly, paying attention to what I'm saying, it sounds
like nonsense. An exception undercuts, it doesn't prove a rule.

So why have we been duped into repeating this gibberish? Because it made sense at one time when the word "proves" meant something other than what it usually means today. It used to mean, "test," from the Latin, probare, "prove." The same root gives us the word "probe," also a test. And an exception does test a rule. If the exception is valid, the rule ain't.

So why do we go on repeating an expression which at its heart is truly archaic? Because we heard it from others when we were young and we imitate them, like monkeys. Here, have a piece of my banana.
 

It takes millions of nerve cells to transmit pain from the spot that hurts to your brain. Given its complex path, it's amazing just how quickly the message travels. At its peak, pain can do 350 feet per second - often in a hospital zone!

Brain surgery is the oldest known operation. The Aztecs and Incas practiced it to cure insanity. It "worked," if the criterion for success for each procedure was one less insane person.

 

Mardi Gras is the period lasting anywhere from a day to two weeks before Ash Wednesday, a last fling before Lent.

If you know that the name comes from the French for "Fat Tuesday," you get only 25 out of a possible 100 points because you don't know the half of it.

The ancient Romans had an anything-goes spring feast called Lupercalia. Take my word for it, anything, but anything, went.

The early Church had to compete, and so allowed for a toned down version of Lupercalia called "carnivalere" - "goodbye to the flesh," in Latin - just before the meatless Lent.

It's the source of our word, carnival. The last day of carnival - Shrove Tuesday - came to be called "Fat Tuesday" because of the medieval Parisian custom of leading an ox, crowned with a fillet stuck on its horns, through the streets.

Now there's a steak-on-a-stick that really gilds the lily.
 

Published in March 15 Blue Springs, Missouri, Examiner:

ST. LOUIS--The winning numbers drawn Tuesday night in the daily Missouri Lottery Pick 3 game were 9-9-9.

A winning $1 ticket with the numbers in the correct order paid $500; a winning $1 ticket with the numbers in any order paid $160.
 

What's hotter than a jalapeno?

A habanero pepper is about twenty times hotter. The measurement of pepper potency is the Scoville Unit.

A bell pepper rings no bells at 100 Scoville Units, max.

The jalapeno can hit 3,000 units, and set off an alarm.

A typical habanero is a 275,000-unit scorcher.

Minors may not eat it unless accompanied by an adult and restaurants may serve it only if a fire extinguisher is nearby.
 

Who invented the "Monopoly" game, and when?

No, not Bill Gates! His game is played on a desktop with two clicks and a curse, not a roll of the dice.

Nor was it Donald Trump, although imagine passing "GO in a stretch limo, landing on Boardwalk and having the wherewithal to put a real hotel on it.

Naturally, this real estate game in which even the meek can become moguls was invented during the Depression. Charles Darrow created it in Germantown, Pennsylvania and sold it to Parker Brothers in the mid-1930s.

Darrow used Atlantic City place names because he had a few good times there.

With more than 200 million sets sold since then, Monopoly has become part of American culture. Nieman Marcus even brought out a chocolate version in 1978.

Play that one long enough and you can't go to jail because you won't fit through the door.
 

"LASER." It's an acronym you use often, but do you know what it stands for? Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

This has created quite a crisis for school boards in some of the backwoods sections of America.

Once you have textbooks delving into "stimulated emissions," there's no telling where they'll go next.

 

Rated G

Why are people's eye's often red in snapshots?

Well, if you photograph them just before the bar closes, you shouldn't be surprised. Under other circumstances, if they're your relatives and yours are anything like some of mine, don't even question this phenomenon. Use it to identify which are not of this
Earth.

If you want the scientific explanation, it's all in the retina, the light-sensitive membrane in your eye. It's not exactly a mirror so most of the time light does not reflect off of it. But the light from a camera's flash is so intense that it does come back at the camera's
lens. The red color is from the blood vessels in the membrane.

Cats, like some other animals, have an extra reflective layer on their retina so even shining a flashlight at them in the dark produces a reflection. What's more, they're in league with the devil.


 

Why do we call extortion "blackmail?"

Do you tip your mailman at Christmas? You don't have to. But would you want your neighbor to "mistakenly" receive your Frederick's of Hollywood catalog? Accidents happen. How about those "toys" you ordered from that torrid website?

Actually, blackmail has nothing to do with the Post Office, which screws up as a matter of principle. It comes from "mal," Old English for tribute or rent.

Warlords in ancient Scotland used to force farmers to pay mal as protection. Pay it and you plant your crops in peace; don't pay it and we plant you and you rest in peace. Blackmail took on its modern meaning of general extortion for money in the 19th century.

Why black? The color was often used to suggest evil, but it may also have been to distinguish the payment, made in crops or livestock, from what was called "white" money -- coins and currency.
 

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.

Small fry, then, is redundant, since children tend to be small in the first place. But since you always have to tell them at least twice to do anything...
 

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.

And you thought maybe the sun was embarrassed?

 

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."

Later 86 came to mean "Whatever he asks for, tell him we're out of. He's broke, so don't serve him anything."Eventually, when someone was 86ed, he was simply asked to leave or thrown out.
 

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."

The most likely explanation for the experience involves two facts. First, your brain is always comparing your present to your past. Second, there is a gap between the time we see, hear, feel or smell something and the time our brain registers it. During that pause between sense and awareness, your brain can mistakenly confuse your
present experience with a past memory. As baseball immortal Yogi Berra once said, "it's deja vu all over again."
 

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.

These were assigned by an international convention in 1912. French stations were to begin with "F," Canadian stations with "C.," and so on. The U.S. was issued A, N, W, and K. "A" was for Army and "N" for Navy, each of which had their own stations. But why "W" and "K" for other stations? If there's a logic to that, we can't find it. Eventually, all stations east of the Mississippi were assigned W, and west of it, K. So if you're in the U.S. and you get lost, you can at least tell which side of the river you're on by turning on the radio.

 

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

----Anonymous
 

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

--Anonymous
 

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.

I won't bother to apply. I can't even remember what sign I was born under. But it sure wasn't "$."

 

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.

So what did Bill Gates actually say? "Monopoly? What monopoly?"

 

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.

We don't know if it was the characteristics of the road or the music the horses listened to on their Walkmans - the canter is a 3-beat gait -- that caused this pace. Be that as it may, it became known as the Canterbury gallop, which was finally shortened to canter.

 

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.

Neither spoke English, used a cell phone or lived long enough to symbolize the Republican Party.
 

Who invented the microwave oven?

Someone who didn't have the patience to wait three minutes while water boiled on the stovetop? Someone who loved gray hamburgers? Actually, none of the above.

In 1946 Dr. Percy Spencer, an engineer with the Raytheon Corporation, was working with a magnetron tube, the emitter of microwave energy invented six years earlier in Britain by Sir John Randall and Dr. A. H. Boot. Spencer got too close to the tube and a chocolate bar in his pocket melted. This chocolate-loving -- and therefore, right-thinking -- engineer drew the proper conclusion: microwaves could cook food.

Raytheon used his discovery to produce a "Radar Range" for restaurants, which by 1952 became available as a home microwave oven. Consumers were finally able to melt chocolate in their own pockets.
 

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.

Sorry, nobody's home.

 

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.

Speaking of expressions, who footed the bill for all this junketing?
 

IKEA, the name of the worldwide home furnishings emporium, is an acronym. The founder was Ingvar Kamprad, accounting for the first two letters. And his family farm in Sweden was called Elmtaryd, hard by the village of Agunnaryd, providing the last two.

After trekking through one to find sufficient storage containers to cram 15 rooms of stuff into an 8-room house, I Know Every Aisle.

 

Was there really a Johnny Appleseed?

There's sometimes a thin line between mythology and pathology. How would YOU characterize a guy today who walked barefoot from town to town, wearing a tin pot on his head, dressed in strange clothes, preaching and planting trees? You would probably call the cops and have this nut put away.

Well, John Chapman (1774-1845), aka "Johnny Appleseed," was neither pathological nor mythological. He probably didn't go barefoot, as he is sometimes depicted, and while he may have smoked pot or whatever was the equivalent in those days, he didn't wear one. He did preach and plant orchards in the Midwest, although not simply by scattering seeds from a sack. In fact, by the time he died he was pretty well off, owning lots of land and many orchards.

Hey, the guy was just into apples. Live with it!
 

Why does the phrase to go 'the whole nine yards' mean to carry some act to full completion, with a sense that it is accomplished without stopping and at full speed?

It may seem like the phrase has something to do with team sports. Do the nine yards represent distance won or lost on a football field? Although the expression is popular among sports fans, the origin lies elsewhere.

One theory says the expression came from the cement delivery industry, where a rotating mixer truck carries nine cubic yards of cement. To discharge the whole nine yards would be to fully complete the task.

Another theory describes the space between the inner and outer walls of a prison, which was nine yards wide. To go the whole nine yards was to escape entirely.

The most popular theory refers to World War II war planes, which carried machine gun ammunition belts 27 feet (nine yards) long. To discharge the whole nine yards was to fully empty the belt.

 

What exactly is "kangaroo court"?

A kangaroo court is a mock or illegal court that is set up in violation of established legal procedure, or it is one that is characterized by dishonesty or incompetence.

You might expect that this term originated in Australia, the land of kangaroos, but it seems to be of American origin. It first appeared in the early 1850s in the far western US. It may have originated during the California Gold Rush, possibly in connection with Australian prospectors, many of whom arrived during that time.

It is not known how this meaning evolved. One theory is that a "kangaroo court" was a court in which legal procedures were largely a sham, and the action "jumped" quickly from accusation to sentencing without due process. Another idea is that "kangaroo" was a reference to Australian "claim jumpers," prospectors who illegally mined someone else's claim.
 

Why do we say that something that's silly is, well, "silly?"

Oh, how the mighty have fallen! At one time, if you were silly it meant that you were blessed. Now, I have to tell you that I am one of those free spirits who still thinks it is blessed to be silly, but I would never claim that it was also silly to be blessed.

Silly began as the Old English word, "saelig," which described a happy state of affairs. In fact, if you were unhappy, you were unsaelig. As English evolved, the word became seely - sounds like it passed through Latin America, doesn't it? - and eventually, silly. But that wasn't the only thing that changed. Gradually it came to mean innocent. Then "silly" really fell on hard times and described someone who was pitiful. After that, it was strictly etymological misfortune as it spiraled down into ignorant, weak and foolish.

Maybe we should buy this word a drink.

 

Why do we say "goody two-shoes"?

A goody two-shoes is a smugly self-righteous person who makes a big show about being good and virtuous while secretly hiding less benevolent motivations.

Originally, a goody two-shoes was simply someone who went around parading his or her goodness, which may have been annoying but not necessarily hypocritical. It was not until the 1930s that the phrase
took on a negative tone.

The origin is thought to be a moralistic nursery story by Oliver Goldsmith, originally published in 1765 or 1766 in a book of children's stories. In "The History of Little Goody Two Shoes," Goody was a poor girl who owned only one shoe. When she somehow obtained apair of shoes, she rushed around with delight, proudly
exclaiming "Two shoes. Two shoes." to everyone she met.

 

~ Knock on Wood ~

In Britain, the phrase is "touch wood," but the meaning is the same. It's said (while performing the act, of course) as a way of warding off evil influences.

There are several interesting theories about the origin of this ancient ritual. The most commonly accepted explanation goes back to pre-Christian times, when Pagans believed in the protective powers of the spirits of certain trees, notably oak, ash, or holly. Bytouching the tree, one was said to awaken the benevolent spirit within.

Another theory that may ultimately come from the same source involves the extremely ancient children's game of tag, where one who is touching a tree is safe from capture.

It is likely that another explanation, in which the wood is the cross of Jesus, is a Christian reinterpretation of a much older source.Another unlikely theory explains that during the Spanish Inquisition, Jews would use certain codes to knock on the wooden doors of synagogues for safe entry.

 

When the atom bomb was being built in New Mexico during World War II, the government hired only illiterates as janitors so they wouldn't be able to pick up secrets from the trash.

This policy was so successful that it was expanded to many other jobs throughout the vast government bureaucracy after the war and continues to this day.

 

Does the planet Vulcan in Star Trek have any basis in reality?

Spock, shmock. Just because Peter Pan believed in Never- Never Land, do you think you would earn frequent flier miles by booking a flight to it? Everyone knows that
the planet Vulcan was a product of Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry's imagination.

Well, not entirely. Vulcan was not only the Roman god of fire, but also a planet that astronomers once conjured up to explain Mercury's peculiar orbit.

Mercury's path didn't fully compute. So in the mid-19th century, astronomers bet there was a yet unobserved planet between Mercury and the Sun, the gravitational
pull of which was responsible for Mercury's perturbing path.

Leave it to Albert Einstein to spoil the fun. The brainy one explained Mercury's orbit with his general theory of relativity. Exit Vulcan. Although . . . although, did you ever notice that underneath his long white hair, Einstein's ears look, well, rather pointy?
 

Why is someone who's indecisive "waffling?"

Picture a waffle. Lots of little squares that are ideal for holding syrup, right? So, what do you conclude about the relationship between this breakfast food's
shape and being indecisive?

Nothing, I hope, because there isn't any relationship. The relationship is between waffle and the Old English word, "wafian," which meant "to wave." From that word
in the 16th century came another, "whiffle," which described the wind when it changed direction. (Perhaps someone had a lisp and said what sounded like "the wind is whiffling.") Now jump to the 1950s and 60s and whiffle ball, a game in which you hit a wind-blown plastic ball with holes in it. That ball, like indecisive people, could go in any direction.

So, why don't we say that indecisive people whiffle, instead of waffle? Maybe someone talked with his or her mouth full. I'm not sure, can't decide.

Pass the syrup, please.
 

Why do we refer to someone who's lazy as lackadaisical?

Maybe we're just looking for trouble. People get punched in the snoot for such name-calling.

But if we insist on doing it, we should know that the word originates
in a medieval expression, "alack-a-day," meaning "shame on this day." It had the implication of ruing the day because of the ill fortune
it brought you. Over the years, though, it was watered down and used for trifling misfortunes and finally, for getting sentimental over things that didn't rate such feeling. Someone who habitually whined and went on about such piffle became a "lackadaisy" and was
characterized as lackadaisical. Finally, it applied to languid people who had the energy to do only that and nothing substantive in life.

You know that "someone" we characterized as lackadaisical? He really is a lazy bum. Go tell him. I'll be right behind you.

 

The year 1666 was much feared throughout Western Europe because of its triple sixes, “666,” which represent the "Number of the Beast."

While the world did not end, London was nearly destroyed by the Great Fire.
 

Corrected: Why do we respond to something dumb or obvious with "duh/doh?"

The interjection doh, indicating that you have done or said something stupid (as opposed to the duh indicating that someone else has said something obvious), gets its recent popular incarnation from Homer Simpson (voiced by actor Dan Castellanata) on the animated TV series The Simpsons.

Castellaneta and The Simpson's creator Matt Groening have stated that they came up with the expression in imitation of actor James Finlayson. Finlayson was a sidekick of Laurel and Hardy and used the expression "do-o-o-o-h" as early as 1931 in Laurel and Hardy films and shorts. Finlayson used the interjection as a euphemism for damn. Others used the interjection in the intervening years. Castellanata was not the first since Finlayson, although he did clip Finlayson's pronunciation and formed the contemporary, short pronunciation.

Duh also has a cartoon connection. It is first recorded in a 1943 Merrie Melodies cartoon. There it was used as an expression of inarticulacy and confusion. The
insulting use to comment on another's moronic statement dates to the early 1960s.
 

Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.

There are more chickens than people in the world.

All of the clocks in the movie "Pulp Fiction" are stuck on 4:20.

No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.

"Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".

Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.

There are only four words in the Englishlanguage which end in "dous":tremendous,horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.

In most advertisements, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10.

Al Capone's business card said he was aused furniture dealer.

The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra's " It's a Wonderful Life."

A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours.

A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.

A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.

It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

The giant squid has the largest eyes in the world.

In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.

The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.

Mr. Rogers is an ordained minister.

The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.

Stewardesses" is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand
 

Why do we graduate from college with a "bachelor's" degree?

Judging from what we read in the paper these days, many people are graduating from college with, first, a pretty big bar tab. It'amazing that they can walk steadily enough across the stage at graduation to be handed anything but a summons.

As for the bachelor's degree, when I was a kid I thought it was related to coming of age. Would you call an unmarried 11-year-old a "bachelor?" But there's a more formal explanation. It was only in the 14th century that the word was applied to college graduates and unmarried persons. It originated a century earlier as a description of a young knight or aspiring knight – thus a soldier low in the military hierarchy. So, a college graduate as "bachelor" would be earning his or her spurs academically, but only at the lowest rank in
academia.

Source used: DICTIONARY OF WORD ORIGINS by Jordan Almond

 

The origin of the "best man" tradition ~

"Best man" is of Scottish origin and goes back many centuries to the times when a prospective groom simply kidnaped the woman of his choice and carried her away with him.

Such a venture required courage and audacity as well as a good deal of manpower.

So the groom selected the bravest of his friends to accompany him. They were known as "groomsmen" - a term still used in some parts of the country to describe ushers at a wedding. the closest and most valiant of the bridegroom's associates became known as the "best man".

Similarly the bridesmaids were originally the closest friends of the bride, the ones who helped or pretended to help the bride defend herself against her abductors.

Thus the customs of a savage and primitive society are echoed in names used today for the participants in that most formal and civilized of ceremonies, the church wedding.
 

Why do we call Monday Monday and Friday Friday? For the answer, we must look back thousands of years and investigate a number of languages.

Our modern week owes much to the Babylonians, who were dividing years into seven-day weeks as long ago as the 15th century B.C. They also came up with the idea of naming days of the week after the seven heavenly bodies they knew best -- the sun and moon and the five inner planets.

When the Romans adopted the seven-day week, they gave the days Latin names associated with those same heavenly bodies: solis dies (sun's day), lunae dies(moon's day), Martis dies (Mars), Mercurii dies (Mercury), Jovis dies (Jupiter or Jove), Veneris dies (Venus), and Saturni dies (Saturn).

In Latin, the names of the planets (except the sun and moon) were also names of gods, and each day was dedicated to the god it was named for. You can still hear the influence of those Latin weekday names in the Romance languages (consider the French lundi, mardi, and mercredi, for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday), although the French did rebaptize the more religiously significant weekend names samedi (a word related to Sabbath) and dimanche (from a Latin phrase meaning "Lord's day").

Like many civilizations, the early Germanic peoples were influenced by the Roman empire. They adopted the Roman seven-day week, but not without adding their own twist. Instead of picking up the Latin day-names wholesale, they translated them into their Germanic equivalents. Thus, solis dies (literally, sun's day) was translated to a compound that eventually yielded the Old English sunnandaeg (sunne, meaning "sun," and daeg, meaning "day"). The Latin lunae dies yielded the Old English monandaeg (from mona, Old English for moon).

The Germanic people also substituted the names of their own gods for Roman ones, matching the deities' similar characteristics. For instance, Mars was the Roman god of war. In Germanic mythology, the god Tyr (spelled Tiw in Old English) held that position. Thus, Mars' day became tiewesdaeg when it was translated into Old English.

The Roman god Mercury was associated with the Germanic god Odin (Woden in Old English), and Mercurii dies became wodnesdaeg. The Germanic thunder god, Thor, replaced the Roman god Jupiter or Jove to form the Old English thursdaeg, and the Germanic Frigg (wife of Odin) replaced the Roman Venus to give us Frigedaeg. But the Germanic people had no god to equate with Saturn, so they left him in place when they translated his day-name into the Old English as saeterndaeg, our
modern Saturday.

Source used: M-W.com
 

Nobody named Mercedes had anything to do with the production of
the Mercedes-Benz.

Instead, the name is that of the daughter of Emil Jellinek, the Austrian who habitually named his cars for her.

(In 1900, three of his racing cars were called Mercedes.) Later,
when he induced the Daimler automotive works to design a car for
him, he called it Mercedes.

When the Daimler and Benz firms merged in 1926, they retained the name.

 

Are pigs really "dirty" animals?

The pig's reputation for being dirty is ill-deserved. Even in fairly close confinement a pig will select a place in which to defecate and repeatedly use that spot and that spot only. Most domestic animals are indiscriminate in this respect.

In America the pig early received the reputation of "liking" filth, because in New England it was usually kept in the worst place on the farm - dark sty under the barn. In their natural state, pigs are forest-roaming creatures.

When day is hot, pigs will wallow in the mud - but not because they like dirt. The reason is that pigs have no perspiration apparatus, and this is their way of lowering the temperature of the skin.

Pigs are sometimes maligned for eating garbage. In captivity,of course, they eat what they are fed. It is well to recall that of all domestic animals their preferred diet is closest to that of human beings.

Finally, it is often said that pigs can not swim, because if they try, they will cut their own throats with their forehooves. This, also is nonsense. They can swim perfectly well.

The real meaning of "beat around the bush" is not so much to evade an issue entirely but to approach it cautiously and indirectly.

"Stop beating around the bush! Get to the point," goes back to many centuries and comes from the language of huntsman.

It was once a custom to hire beaters to beat bushes and arouse game birds for the hunter to shoot at. So the beater Stirred up the action, but the hunter got to the point.

 

A female orgasm is a powerful painkiller (because of the release of endorphines), so headaches are in fact a bad excuse not to have sex.

 

The first automobile was neither invented not produced in the
United States by Duryaes, by Henry Ford, or by anybody else.

Not even the second automobile, as a matter of fact, was invented or
produced in America.

Both honors go to Germany: The Benz Patent Motor Wagon was patented by Karl Benz in Mannheim in 1885; and the Daimler was patented the same year in Stuttgart, sixty miles away, by Gottlieb Daimler, working independently of Benz.

By 1893, still a year before the Duryeas were to introduce America's
first automobile, the Benz even had a named model, the Velo, ready for general public, or such of it as could afford to buy one. It was water cooled, with a transmission, differential, carburetor, and top speed of twenty-five miles an hour.

 

There isn't any such thing as bananas tree; bananas do not grow ontrees, but rather develop on very large herbs; the banana "tree" does not, in fact, have roots but a rhizome. And what appears to be its trunk, or stalk, is actually made up of very large leaves in tubular configuration. Nor is the banana native to the Western
Hemisphere; its origin, according to most horticulturists, lies in Southeast Asia.

Contrary to popular opinion, bananas are not picked green merely for the convenience of the vendor. Oddly enough, bananas have better flavor and texture if they are allowed to ripen after picking.

 

BIG BEN

It is NOT the clock, and NOT the tower, but the bell that strikes the hour. That's "Big Ben". It weighs thirteen tons and is named for Sir Benjamin Hall, who was the commissioner of works, when it was installed.

 

Many cooks turn up the heat to make something "boil faster". Waterboils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit (at sea level) and so long as it is in an open receptacle, its temperature cannot be raised any higher. Therefore furiously boiling water does not cook an egg, let's say, any faster than mildly boiling water.

Proof of this is the fact that a three-minute egg (at sea level) is a three-minute egg no matter how hard it boils.As neophytes in the mountains are forever learning, however, a "3-minute egg" takes a good deal longer at high altitudes, because water boils at a lower temperature there.

Of course a hot flame will cause more steam to form and pass off than a moderate flame, even though the temperature of the liquid remains the same. This has a bearing in the making of maple syrup, jelly, etc., where the purpose is evaporation.
 

Do dogs sweat through their tongues? Dog's do not "sweat with their tongues," as is often said. There are some sweat glands in dogs, but the only ones of any significance are on the soles of their feet.

There are no sweat glands anywhere near the dog's muzzle.

Dogs cool themselves primarily by rapid breathing, which is why they pant after running. But when a canine sticks his tongue out, he does so because it is moist, and evaporation helps to cool it, not because he is sweating.
 

It is quite possible for a catholic priest to be married, even
though a Catholic priest may not marry. Many Eastern Rite Catholic priests are, as a matter of fact, married, although their marriage must have taken place before ordination.

Under certain circumstances, however, even a Western Catholic priest may be married; as, for example in the case of a married Anglican priest who is converted to Catholicism and becomes a Catholic priest.

 

What does Air Force One have that other planes don't?

Yeah, the President. He wouldn’t tolerate the abysmal service or eat the peanuts they serve on your flight. Nor would there be any reason for that flight attendant with the painted-on-smile to tell him,
“have a nice day.” He knows he won’t.

Although any Air Force plane carrying him is designated Air Force One, there are two Boeing 747’s especially fitted for the
President’s use. When he goes bye-bye, he has a bedroom, an office, a private bathroom and a small gym. There’s office space for his staff, a conference/dining room, a medical treatment area and a communications section with about 20 TV monitors, secure phone lines and wiring shielded from the disrupting electrical pulse of a nuclear blast. The plane can be refueled in-flight, allowing him to stay up indefinitely.

Ah, I see the hands going up.

No, he doesn’t earn frequent flyer miles.

 

Why does a circle have 360 degrees?

We can thank the Egyptians for this. While a circle could have been divided up into any convenient number of degrees, the Egyptians chose 360, one degree for each of the solar days in the Egyptian year (they added five days a year to correct their calendar).

In fact, our degree sign (°) is actually an ancient symbol of the sun. The degree was used to measure the distance through the Zodiac that the sun traveled each day, just as an astrological sign described the astronomical space the sun passed through in a month.
 

How many glasses of water a day should I be drinking?

Assuming you’re a person and not a fish, you know you need to make the effort to drink water.

But how much is enough? Six glasses a day? Eight?

More if you work out?

How much of your life do you want to spend peeing?

The publicly spirited bottled water companies seize upon every study that has pointed to the need for eight glasses, eight ounces each a day.

Selflessly, they remind us to fill’er up. But many nutritionists are challenging these figures as all wet. They say they are based on studies of atypical groups – hospital patients, soldiers active at high altitudes and the like.

So how much is enough? Assuming you eat a reasonably healthy diet and don’t have any special medical need for fluids, you may need no more than the amount that quenches your thirst.

And tell the bottled water companies to dry up.

 

100% of all smokers die.

So do 100% of all non-smokers.

 

Coffee and Inebriation.Often forced upon the intoxicated on the premise that it aids in sobering up, coffee is of help only in that it takes some time to drink it. And time is the only remedy for too much alcohol in the bloodstream.

What is sometimes called, particularly by those who must deal with drunken drivers, "the great coffee myth" is actually a dangerous bit of folklore; many a driver with half-dozen cups of coffee forced upon him has gone out to die on the highway.

The human body burns alcohol at the rate of about one-half ounce an hour. And there is no way to speed up this rate.
 

Why is the ocean salty?

The ocean is eventual depository for most of Earth's water. Over the eons of land and ocean formation, dissolved minerals from Earth's crust were washed into the ocean. As time went on, water was continuously evaporating from the ocean, leaving behind mineral salts until they reached their present-day concentrations.

Salt water is roughly 3.5 percent dissolved mineral salts, much ofwhich is sodium chloride, ordinary table salt. Fresh water contains dissolved mineral salts too, but at concentrations too low for us to taste.

Salt lakes are often found in a region where the rate of evaporation is high and dissolved salts are left behind. These are closed lake systems, because there is no drainage. One famous lake, which is saltier that the ocean, is the Great Salt Lake in the state of Utah. The Dead Sea has a 25 percent salt content, so high that, due to buoyancy it is almost impossible to drown.

 

Are condemned men freed as a result of mechanical failure?

It is widely believed that if an electric chair or gas chamber should fail to operate, or the rope break during a hanging, the prisoner must go free because he cannot twice be put in jeopardy for the same offense. But this is a confusion between the "trial" and the
"sentence".

A man cannot, under the Constitution, be *tried* twice for the same offense. But once he has been convicted and sentenced, then the sentence must be carried out, malfunctioning equipment or no, if the law is to be followed.

 

Hens, Roosters, and Eggs:

A surprising number of people believe that, without a rooster, a hen will not lay - lay eggs, that is. But hens *will* lay eggs without a rooster - infertile, true, but eminently edible.

 

- "double negative":

Parents and teachers sometimes tell their charges, "If you say 'I
haven't got none,' then you are really saying 'I *do* have some.'
You should be more logical." Double negatives once held, in fact
an honorable place in our language; as witness Chaucer's immortal
lines describing the Knight in the Prologue to the 'Canterbury
Tales': "He never yet no vilenynye ne sayde/In al his lyf unto no
maner wight." Or, in modern English, paraphrased freely but quite
accurately: "He never said nothing bad in all his life to nobody."

The argument that a double negative "cancels itself out" is
borrowed apparently from elementary algebra, the rules of which
have nothing to do with grammar.

 

Destroying United States coins.

Nothing in the law forbids anyone from destroying coins, in spite of a belief to the contrary. Defacing or mutilating a coin and then passing it as a currency in another matter.

 

- Is it necessary to give dogs and cats annual shots?

Oh! You meant vaccination injections, like for distemper and rabies? Ok. On those, we’re not so sure anymore. Vets may still remind you to bring in your furry friends once a year as a matter of course. But some research now points to the possibility that these shots offer immunity for many years, not just one. More disturbing are the possibility of dangerous, even fatal side effects of annual shots. Under investigation now as possible consequences in some animals of too many vaccinations are tumors, autoimmune diseases and hyperthyroidism.

So what to do? Ask your vet about these findings. I’d consult my
cat, but it’s that time of the year and he’s too tipsy.

 

Are there any snakes that can fly?

Some of the CEO's whose creative accounting has watered the value of their stock spend a good deal of time in corporate jets. That alone would justify an affirmative answer.But if we confine ourselves to reptiles proper, the answer is a surprising, although qualified, "yes" – and aren't you happy that you haven’t encountered them!

In truth, even if you were in the forests of the Malay Peninsula and were near one of its Paradise tree snakes, you might never know it. They glide like flying squirrels between the treetops. The snake gets up there by using protrusions on its scales to grip the irregular tree surfaces. Once there it launches itself by gripping a branch with its tale and then quickly straightening out. It uses its ribs to flatten its body on the side facing the ground to provide lift.

Sufferin' serpents, there goes one!
 

Dynamite:

There is a common belief that if you put a dynamite in the fire, it will explode. Actually dynamite requires detonation by spark or percussion.

Warming up dynamite will make it more responsive to the detonator, but will not explode it.

Years ago in lumber camps of Maine dynamite was heated up in a frying pan on cold mornings. (The practice is not recommended.)

Incidentally,dynamite was invented by Alfred B. Nobel,who established the famous peace prize.

 

- Is education a major factor in assuring higher income?

For many years it has been an article of American faith that the
better one's education, the better the chance of increasing one's
income. Various charts and tables purport to illustrate the "value" of a high school or college education in purely monetary terms.

However, the implication that the best way, thus, to equalize economic opportunity is to improve the education of the poor turns out to have little basis, at least according to a three-year study by a Harvard research team, which concluded that cognitive skills are only weakly related to earning power.Indeed, even such factors as heredity, home background,intelligence quotient, and quality of schools attended turned outto account for only about one fourth of the variation in American incomes.

The other three fourths, apparently, is determined by such imponderables as luck, personality, and whatever it is that enables some to make a lot of money regardless of background or the presumed advantages of a better education. The study would make it appear, thus, that attempts to ensure equal economic opportunity solely through improvement in schools, no matterhow laudable these improvements may be from other points of view, are not likely to succeed.

 

"Oct 5th is the United States' most popular birth date. According a study conducted by Anybirthday.com, there is a not-so-suprising significance to Oct 5th, as conception would have fallen right on New Years Eve.

"In Greek mythology, Nike is the goddess of victory."

 

What kind of a guy was the pirate, Captain Kidd?

Yo, ho, ho, yourself. I’m serious! You can’t just judge a man by the flag he flies. Maybe that skull and cross bones simply meant that he liked to read mysteries.

In fact, according to “The Pirate Hunter,” by Richard Zacks, Captain William Kidd was initially no more than a typical sea captain
businessman. Pirates were a persistent problem at the end of the 17th century, and a group of merchants, with royal approval, hired Kidd to hunt the blackguards and confiscate their booty. Naturally, all of these investors would share in the spoils. That made Kidd a privateer - a respectable enough calling.

But the Royal Navy and other merchants resented Kidd’s success. When he gave too much booty to his crew, they had their excuse, branding Kidd a pirate himself. Only then did Kidd begin to live up to his future reputation. No Kidding.

If you were in an elevator and the cables snapped, could you save yourself by jumping upward at the last second?

Wouldn't hurt to try, I guess, and Lord knows I'm not going to tell you how to spend the last 10 seconds of your life. But the chances of it working are pretty slim. Let's suppose your elevator is falling downwards at 40 miles per hour, or nearly 60 feet per second. Now suppose you jump up at the last moment. How fast do you think you're going to go? Forty miles per hour? Fat chance.

Let's be generous and say you could jump up at 10 miles per hour. Forty miles an hour down minus 10 miles per hour up leaves you going 30 miles per hour down. In short, no matter what you do, you're going to come out of this looking like a pizza. But don't get too alarmed. There isn't just one elevator cable holding you up, there are several - often five or six. Any one cable could support the weight of the entire elevator. If by some evil miracle all the cables did snap, the elevator is also equipped with brakes that would grab the sides of the shaft. If the brakes failed, too, some elevators have giant springs at the bottom. So maybe you'd just bounce.

If that doesn't work - well, they'll be scraping you off the floor with a putty knife. But look on the bright side: at least you won't have to make a lot of stops on the way down.

~ source used: "Know It All!" by Ed Zotti

 

- Why do we christen boats with bottles of champagne?

According to maritime historians, the custom dates back more than a thousand years to the Vikings, who are thought to have practiced a gruesome ship-launching ritual called "roller reddening".

To propitiate the sea gods, boatwrights would strap a sacrificial maiden onto rollers used to maneuver ships into the water; the splattering blood ensured a safe voyage.

Then someone decided that the gods might enjoy red wine just as much, and maidens everywhere breathed a sigh of relief.

It wasn't until the late seventeenth century, when a Benedictine monk named Dom Pierre Perignon produced the liberation.

The tradition got a big boost in 1912 with the sinking of the Titanic, whose owners apparently tempted fate by neglecting to smash her with the ceremonial magnum — or, for that matter, blood or wine.

Bottoms up.

~ source used: "Why Moths Hate Thomas Edison" by Hampton Sides
 

Why do people yell "Geronimo" wlien they jump off something? (Especially symbolic when jumping out of an Apaclie aircraft.)

Geronimo was a Chiricahua Apache war chief. There is a legend that Geronimo was being pursued by the U.S. Cavalry at Medicine Bluffs, Oklahoma. His path was cut off by a steep cliff bordering a river. The only chance he had of escaping was to jump off the cliff on horseback into the river below.

As he made the daring leap, he cried out his name in defiance of the troopers. Geronimo survived and escaped.

During World War II the name "Geronimo" was adopted as a battle cry of U.S. paratroopers as they jumped out of their planes.

The first paratrooper unit to use the cry was the 82d Airborne at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Geronimo was captured in 1885 but escaped with a small band of warriors. Over 5,000 soldiers and 500 Indian auxiliaries attempted to capture Geronimo's band. After traveling 1,645 miles for over five months, the soldiers finally found Geronimo's band, which had eluded them for so long. The band had only 35 warriors along with 8 children and 101 women.

Geronimo had been outnumbered by over 150 to 1, yet managed to hold the army at bay for almost half a year.Geronimo later escaped but was captured once again. Although President Grover Cleveland believed all the lurid newspaper stories about Geronimo's terrible acts of evil and wanted him hanged, more sensible men prevailed and Geronimo was sent to Fort Marion, Florida.

The Apaches had lived in high, dry country and could not tolerate the hot and humid climate of Florida. When Geronimo arrived in Florida, he found his comrades dying—over one hundred had died from consumption alone.

Finally, Geronimo's old enemies, the Kiowas and Comanches, offered him a part of their reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

Geronimo went to Fort Sill in 1894 and remained there as prisoner of war until his death in 1909. Although he was buried in the Apache cemetery, legend says that shortly afterward his remains were secretly stolen and buried somewhere in the Southwest. No one has ever found Geronimo's bones.

~source used: "Do Fish Drink Water?" by Bill McLain
 

What are the evolutionary reasons for, and possible benefits of, male-pattern baldness?
Male-pattern baldness involves a combination of genetics and testosterone.

To oversimplify slightly, if you're cursed with a certain gene, which perversely enough is passed down through your mother, then your balls will make your hair fall out.

The same set of chemical signals, conversely, puts hair on your chest and props up the multibillion-dollar razor-blade industry.

Why does nature bother with all of these elaborate hair realloca-tions?

The best guess is that balding evolved as a way for males to show
females that they were mature and hormon-ally sound.

"There tend to be a lot of things that signal age," says biological
anthropologist Jim Moore of the University of California, San Diego.
"They show that you've got good genes, because you've survived. And the testosterone connection shows you're ready to reproduce."

All the same, you might have noticed that the signal seems have gotten mixed up somewhere along the way; apparently tone-deaf to thousands of years of evolution, most women fail to respond to male baldness in the way they're "supposed" to.

That's not biology, that's just life. For a long time it was thought
that male-pattern baldness was unique to humans, but it's
not: the stump-tailed macaque, a monkey native to India, South
China, and the Malay Peninsula, seems to go bald for similar
genetic reasons, though no one has yet spotted middle-aged male
macaques swirling that proverbial last strand around and around.

~source used: "Why Moths Hate Thomas Edison" by Hampton Sides

 

What would happen if the Earth were to fall into a black hole?

A black hole is a wad of stuff with such incredibly strong gravity that even light cannot escape. Black holes usually result when giant stars run out of gas and collapse into tiny clumps of superheavy stuff. I say "usually" like it happens all the time, but the truth is nobody has ever actually seen a black hole—since no light can get out of them, they're invisible. But scientists are pretty sure they exist. The gravity of black holes is so strong that everything in the neighborhood, including planets, gets sucked in.

However, (1) since only very big stars can get to be black holes, and (2) since our wimpy sun is too small to qualify, death by black hole won't be our planet's fate. We'll just get torched when the sun goes into "red giant" stage, which happens to all old stars eventually. Luckily, this won't happen for another few billion years.

But suppose you were out walking the dog and a black hole
magically appeared. What would it be like?

It'd be no day at the beach, that's for sure. You'd have two
problems: intense radiation and tidal forces. The pull of gravity
at one end of you would be so much stronger than at your other
end that your body would be ripped apart.But suppose you were lucky and somehow survived. Then what?

Well, there's no way to know for sure, but some folks think you might
get spat out at a different place in space and time by way of
something called a "worm-hole." This is too complicated to explain now. But there's an outside chance that someday it may be possible to travel through time.

~ source used: "Know It All!" by Ed Zotti

 

Galileo
There are many fallacies connected with this famous Italian astronomer and physicist:

1. Galileo did not invent the telescope; it was invented in 1608 in Holland. He did, however, make his own telescope in 1609 and pioneered its use as an astronomical instrument.

2. Although *tried* by the Inquisition he was never tortured.

3. He never uttered under his breath "E pur si mouve" ("Nevertheless it does move"). The story that after his "recantation" or
"abjuration" - and there does seem to be some question as to whether Galileo admitted he was wrong or simply agreed to keep quiet -Galileo rose from his knees and added this remark under his breath did not surface until 1761, some 130 years after the trial.

4. He never spent so much as a day in prison; his punishment was a kind of "house arrest," in the phrase of Montagu and Darling. He was never actually put into a prison cell.

5. He did not come to any theories about the pendulum as a result of observing a swinging lamp in the cathedral of Pisa, nor did he drop anything from the Leaning Tower to show that objects of different weights would fall to earth at the same velocity. Neither of these "facts" was mentioned by Galileo or his contemporaries; they were attributed to him years later.

6. Otherwise, what most people think they know about Galileo is quite correct, except that his name was Galileo only in the same sense that Lincoln's name was Abraham. His father was Vincenzio
Galilei, who named his son Galileo Galilei.

~source used: "The Dictionary of Misinformation" by Tom Burnam

 

Did Napoleon lose the battle of Waterloo because of hemorrhoids?
(That's not where the English caused him pain.)

Although Napoleon was very sick when the battle of Waterloo began and there were signs his military ability had deteriorated, there is no record of his having had hemorrhoids. He did, however suffer from poor health for many years, including frequent bladder stone attacks.

A 1970 movie may have led to this myth. In the film, Napoleon is watching the battle when he becomes ill and has to retreat to his tent. His commanders then launch an attack on the British but send in foot soldiers without cavalry protection.

The foot soldiers are routed and the French forces never recover.
But there is no actual record of this happening. Napoleon's defeat was the result of a number of conditions, not the least of which was the fact that he was outnumbered. At Waterloo the French had about 70,000 men. Although the British had only 60,000 men, the Prussian army, which came to their aid, also had 70,000 men. This combined force was almost double that of Napoleon's army.

The commanders of the English and Prussian armies that defeated
Napoleon met at a village called La Belle Alliance. The Prussian
commander wanted to name the battle after the village. But
Wellington, the British commander, refused because he always
named his battles after the place he had stayed the night before
the battle. Thus, the battle became known as "the battle of
Waterloo."

Although Napoleon is usually portrayed as a power-hungry conqueror, his other achievements are often ignored. In the states that he created, he instituted constitutions, abolished slavery, introduced uniform laws for all people, created efficient governments, and fostered both science and the arts. Whatever Napoleon was, he was definitely not a small man.

Although most people think Napoleon was short, he was actually five feet six inches tall, an average height for a Frenchman in those days. He was often seen in the presence of taller men, which may have led to the myth that he was short.

Although Napoleon is usually portrayed as a power-hungry conqueror, his other achievements are often ignored. In the states that he created, he instituted constitutions, abolished slavery, introduced uniform laws for all people, created efficient governments, and fostered both science and the arts.Whatever Napoleon was, he was definitely not a "small man".

~source used: "Do Fish Drink Water?" by Bill McLain

 

If somebody opened the emergency exit on an airplane, while it was in the air, would everybody on the plane be sucked out and killed?

I used to wonder about this, too. My feeling was, a seat next to the emergency exit was not something you wanted to sell to a guy with a twitch, if you know what I mean. But no need to worry. He couldn't get that door open even if he wanted to. The reason is that airplane doors don't open out, they open in. On the ground, which is where you're supposed to be when you use the emergency exit, that doesn't matter, because the air pressure is the same inside and out.But up in the sky it's a different story. The air gets thinner the higher you go. At 30,000 feet - the typical cruising altitude (height) for a jet plane - the outside air pressure is only about 3 pounds per square inch. To keep everybody from dying for lack of oxygen, the crew pressurizes the cabin (fills it with air) to about 11 pounds per square inch. So we've got 3 pounds pushing in, and 11 pounds pushing out. That gives us a net outward pressure of 8 pounds per square inch. If the emergency exit has a total surface of 650 square inches, opening the door would be like lifting a 2.5-ton weight. There's no way even Arnold Schwarzenegger could do it.

The same applies to the regular doors that you enter the plane through. True, they open out, but first they have to be yanked in a bit. So you wouldn't be able to get them open in flight either. Just as well. There are enough things to worry about on an airplane flight as it is.

~source used: "Know It All" by Ed Zotti

 

- The origin of "Scuttlebutt":

If you want inside information, forget public relations releases and listen attentively to the scuttlebutt.

Much of it is meaningless or erroneous, but by mining this vein of talk you may come up with an occasional gem. Scuttlebutt is half rumor and half gossip, of course. That is because it was first heard when British sailors gathered around a large butt, or cask, of water. For no known reason, such a container was nearly always placed close to a vessel's scuttle, or hatch with a movable cover.Crew members who went for a drink of water liked to exchange the latest rumors with their mates, so talk under a scuttle that sheltered a butt became
"scuttlebutt".

~source used: "Why You Say It" by Webb Garrison

 

Today's Useless fact - Why do dogs wag their tails? And what happens when they make eye contact?

Tail motion and eye contact are parts of a complicated inborn system of communication among doge. The signals let doge figure out who is top dog in a group or when meeting a stranger. They can also communicate emotional states. Tail wagging may simply indicate excitement. Position is important, too. The tail held high is a signal of dominance, which may be challenged or not, and a tucked tail shows a dog is kowtowing or accepts lower
status.

The social signals can best be observed in wolves. One of the things they do when they challenge each other is to monitor the autonomic signs, such as heart rate and blood pressure, that signal emotion.

Some of these signs are read indirectly, through changes in pupillary light. If the pupil becomes wider, it generally means fear or at least ambivalence. If wolves pupils narrow, on the other hand, based on other bodily postures and signs, it generally means they are angry, and you had better take them seriously.

Signals by domestic dogs are more ambiguous because owing to human intervention in their breeding, they are divorced from the original meanings and can signify anything from "come and play" to "watch out."

~source used: "The New York Times Book of Science Questions and Answers" by C. Claiborne Ray

Today's Useless Fact - What does the USPS do with mail it can't deliver or return because of lack of a return address?

If a piece of mail is improperly addressed and does not contain a
return address, it is sent to a dead letter office. Dead letter
offices are located in New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, San
Francisco, and St. Paul. There a USPS employee will open the
envelope. If no clues to the address of the sender or receiver
are found inside, and the enclosures are deemed to have "no
significant value," the letter is destroyed immediately.

Frank Brennan, of the USPS media relations division, explains that if the enclosures are deemed to be of some value, the parties involved will have a temporary reprieve:"This allows time for inquiries and claims to be filed. After 90 days, all items that have not been claimed are auctioned off to the public. Cash or items of monetary value that are found in the mail are placed into a general fund. If it is not claimed after one year, it is rolled over into a USPS account to be used as the USPS deems necessary."

And, of course, we can all count on the USPS making the best possible use of any windfalls that come their way.

~source used: "Do Penguins Have Knees?" by David Feldman

Does lightning ever strik twice in the same place?

This old saw is so often exposed as fallacious that probably not many educated people take much stock in it. But many are unaware that not only does lightning often strike twice in the same place; it is *more likely than not* to do so.

Lightning, like all electric currents or discharges, follows the path of least resistance. Air is a very poor conductor. Thus, almost anything else helping to bridge the gap between ground and cloud - a high tree, or a building, especially one with a metal skeleton; an elevation in the landscape itself - ill offer a more convenient path and thus "attract" the lightning.

To speak of a lightning "stroke" is not, incidentally, accurate. Lightning is really a succession of strokes, and often the most powerful move not from cloud to ground but the other way: the so-called return stroke.

~source used: "The Dictionary of Misinformation"by Tom Burnam

 

- Do dolphins ever sleep?

Yes and No. Dolphins must be conscious to breathe. If they went
into a full deep sleep, they would suffocate. In addition, they
must be constantly alert to avoid danger. Yet virtually every
animal needs to sleep. The dolphins have solved this problem in a
unique way.

The dolphin brain has two hemispheres, just like ours. However, a dolphin's hemispheres each operate independently of the other. For eight hours, both hemispheres are awake; for the next eight hours,
only the left hemisphere sleeps; and for the next eight hours, only the right hemisphere sleeps. This way the entire brain gets eight full hours of sleep, although only half is sleeping at any given time. During the time half the brain is sleeping, the dolphin remains physically active but tends to move as little as necessary. When the dolphin is sleeping, circumstances and individual preferences determine how it continues to breathe. It may swim slowly and surface only now and then to take a breath. If in shallow water, the dolphin may rest on the bottom and occasionally rise to the surface. Or, it might simply rest at the surface and keep its blowhole exposed.

When a dolphin is underwater, it holds its breath. Just before reaching the surface, it opens the blowhole and begins to exhale.Once at the surface, it quickly takes in air and then closes the blowhole.

A dolphin typically surfaces to breathe about every two minutes.When we breathe, we exchange only about 17 percent of the air in ourlungs. The efficient dolphin exchanges about 80 percent of its lungs' air with each breath.

It is believed that dolphins can live as long as 50 years.A group of dolphins is called a "pod." Being social, they tend to congregate and spend their entire lives with fellow podmates. A pod can contain anywhere from 10 to 30,000 dolphins.

~source used: "Do Fish Drink Water?" by Bill McLain

 

"Red sky by night, sailor's delight. Red sky by morning, sailor take warning." Is it true?

A Variations of this ancient saying turn up in Shakespeare and even in the Gospel of Matthew. Some meteorologists have estimated that the "night" part of the proverb can be as much as 70 percent accurate in forecasting rain—not bad, as folk wisdom goes, but not good enough to drive the Weather Channel off the air. There's no consensus on why it works as well as it does, but here's the basic concept:

Sunlight comes to us through more miles of the atmosphere at dawn and dusk than at other times of day. When the sky is clear, the atmosphere catters the light at the blue end of the spectrum, leaving mostly red. But if the light passes through larger particles, such as water droplets, you tend to get paler light. A ruddy sky at sunset, then, can indicate that there is little moisture in the upper atmosphere west of you, where tomorrow's weather generally comes from—and thus sunny skies are in the forecast. It might also be a
situation, say some meteorologists, in which the setting sun is simply reflecting off the underside of clouds on the eastern horizon, which suggests that rainy weather has already moved beyond you.

The second part of the proverb is the subject of endless speculation among professional meteorologists. More importantly, it isn't the least bit reliable. So when morning comes, sailor, don't even bother looking for red in the sky: you'd do just as well to flip a coin.

~source used: "Why Moths Hate Thomas Edison"by Hampton Sides

 

How come you can see through glass?

To understand this, you need to know another Weird Fact: Gloss is not "a solid". It's just a very thick liquid, like extra-hard Jell-O. Don't believe me? Go find a window, Now wait one billion years.

See what I mean? The glass has flowed out of the window frame and gotten all over the carpet.

Actually, a lot of times you don't even have to wait one billion years. You may notice that very old windows often are thicker on the bottom than the top. That's because the glass has oozed downhill over the years.

Basically, you can see through glass for the same reason you can see through any liquid, such as water. The molecules are so loosely spaced they don't block the light. What's more, there's very little in glass to *reflect* light, as in metals; to *bend* it, as in crystals; or to absorb it. So the light just zips right through.

P.S. To clarify, light does bend slightly when it passes from air to glass, and from glass back to air. That's what makes eyeglasses possible.

~source used: "Know It All" by Ed Zotti

 

How did they keep beer cold in the saloons of the old west?

Beer in the Old West wasn't cold in the modern sense of the word —
but it was refreshingly cool. Evaporation kept it that way. Beer
in those days was packaged in wooden barrels, and the liquid
would seep through the porous wood to the outside of the barrel,
where it would evaporate. And basic physics explains the cooling
effect of evaporation.

Also, it should be noted that beer then was not artificially
carbonated. The slight natural carbonation required only that it
be cool to be refreshing and tasty. Modern beer, with its
artificial carbonation, needs to be very cold to hide the sharp
taste of the excess carbon dioxide.

~source used: "Do Penguins Have Knees?" by David Feldman

 

Is it true that horses sleep standing up?

You've probably seen those westerns where the bad guys sneak up on the good guys' camp at night and steal the horses. The horses are always just standing there, ready at a moment's notice to be stolen or stampeded or whatever it is the bad guys have in mind.

"What's the deal?" you ask. "Don't horses ever lie down?"

Actually, they do—sometimes. When they're sick, for instance. Or when a mare is giving birth (or "foaling," as they say).But not usually. Horses can go for days and sometimes even weeks without ever leaving their feet. They have the ability to lock their knees into a standing position and sleep at the same time.

If you tried the same thing, you'd fall over and brain yourself.
Not horses.Some experts say horses are more comfortable and use less energy when standing. Part of the problem with lying down is that the
great weight of the horse's body can make it difficult to breathe.
Horses aren't the only critters who sleep standing up.

So do flamingoes. What's more, they do it on one leg, with the other
leg tucked beneath them, while standing in shallow water. Why?

Mainly to impress the tourists is my guess, but being in the water also makes it pretty hard to sneak up on a sleeping flamingo.

~source used: "Know It All" by Ed Zotti

How did Nike come up with its name and logo?

IN 1972, the Blue Ribbon Shoe Company turned to the art department of nearby Portland State University for a student who could design a distinctive logo.

Carolyn Davidson was chosen, and she set about the first real job of her career.

Company founder Phil Knight asked for something both functional and stylish. He wanted what Addidas had: a distinctive logo that was also part of the support of the shoe. He wanted the logo to "reflect movement and speed"

Davidson produced a series of designs, including a broad stripe with a hole in the middle that was only briefly considered.

She suggested Knight put support in the shoe itself and leave the logo to reflect movement only.

Knight wasn't pleased, but settled on the fat check-mark design
anyway, deciding it would grow on him. Davidson billed the company $35; the logo turned out to be worth millions.

The Nike name comes from the Greek goddess of victory and was given to the shoe a few days after the logo was approved. The name was chosen from a list of possibilities largely because it was short enough to fit on the back of the shoe and still be readable.

~source used: "Just Curious Jeeves"by Jack Mingo and Erin Barrett

 

What was the largest bank robbery in U.S. history?

It was February 10, 1997, and the Lakewood, Washington, branch of the Seafirst bank had just closed. A well-dressed man in a trench coat and FBI cap used some excuse to get the teller to open the door.

Once inside he put on sunglasses, pulled out a gun, and let in an accomplice, also wearing sunglasses and a trench coat.They were extremely polite as they ushered the three women tellers into the vault and bound their hands with plastic handcuffs. The men then began filling bags with money and taking the bags out to their car. Most of the bills they took were hundreds, fifties, and twenties. The loot probably weighed around 100 pounds because they made off with $4.5 million dollars. A few hours later the tellers managed to free themselves and call 911, but by then the men had vanished.

The two, William Kirkpatrick of Hovland, Minnesota, andRay Bowman of Kansas City, Missouri, might have gotten away with it if they had been as smart at handling money as they were at robbing banks.

Although his share was over $2 million, Bowman forgot to pay the $30 rent on his storage locker. When the manager opened up the storage space, he found guns, silencers, police radio scanners, and materials for creating disguises. He quickly called the police.

Just one month after the robbery, Kirkpatrick was stopped for speeding by a Nebraska state trooper. When the trooper searched the trunk of Kirkpatrick's car, he found guns and $1.8 million in cash.

If Bowman had paid his storage bill and Kirkpatrick had driven just a little bit slower, they might have been successful in getting away with the largest bank robbery in U.S. history.

In over 75 percent of bank robberies, no gun is shown, just a note. Even customers in the same line often don't realize the person in front of them has just robbed the bank.

Nearly 50 percent of all bank robberies take place on Friday.

~source used: "What Makes Flamingos Pink?" by Bill McLain

 

Is it true turkeys are so stupid they'll look up at the sky when it rains and drown?

Turkeys are dumb, but they're not *that* dumb. Farmers think they are, though. In fact, I've had farmers swear the drowning-turkey
story is true. But when I say, "Listen, you mean to tell me you
actually stood out there in the rain and watched those poor birds
die ?"

They admit they didn't. They came out afterward, found a few dead gobblers, and jumped to conclusions.

The trouble with turkeys is that when they're very young (up to eight or nine weeks) they have down instead of feathers. The down doesn't hold their body heat in very well, and it's easy for them to become badly chilled if the weather turns cool. If they get caught in a sudden rainstorm, they can get so cold they die. It's sad. Instead of making fun of the turkeys, we should be buying them raincoats and galoshes.

~source used: "Know It All" by Ed Zotti

 

Why do riders always mount their horses from the left?

The custom began centuries ago when men carried swords.Since most men are right-handed, the sword was usually carried on the left hip to make it more accessible to the right hand. With a long sword dangling from a rider's leftside, it was clearly easier for him to mount his horse by putting his left foot into the stirrup and then throwing his
right leg across the horse's back. This, of course, required that
the horse be mounted from the left.

Even after ridersno longer carried swords, mounting from the left remained the custom.

~source used "Ever Wonder Why?" by Douglas B. Smith

 

What does It mean when there is a ring around the moon?

It means rain or snow is coming soon. The old folk rhyme is accurate, because high clouds typically streak out ahead of a fall or winter storm. This veil of wispy cirrus clouds, about 20,000 feet up, is mostly ice crystals that act like prisms in the sky. They refract or bend the light coming from the moon or sun, forming a halo.

~source used:

"The New York Times Book of Science Questions and Answers" by C. Claiborne Ray"

 

Mona Lisa.

The Mona Lisa (or La Giocondd) is certainly the most-talked-about work of art in the world. And with good reason: It is full of mystery and personality; it was Leonardo da Vinci's own favorite;it is a very great painting indeed.

As if this were not enough, it has been weighed down with misinformation and spurious explanations of its greatness.One story has it that the subject is the third wife of Francesco del Giocondo, that she was young and he was old. He was also harsh, and impotent. He pawned her jewels and made her wear mourning so that their absence would not be noticed.

When Leonardo came along, he fell under her spell, for he was young, too. She became his mistress. Still she was sad, and in order to make her smile for her picture, he hired musicians and jesters.

Then he painted her portrait, and in it he expressed through her sphinxiike expression the mystery and beauty of their-romance.Most, if not all, of this tale is nonsense. At that time Leonardo was not young; he was over fifty and looked about eighty.

Furthermore, painters at this time did not paint portraits from live subjects. They made a sketch, or cartoon, from which they developed the painting in their shop. Leonardo probably made his master sketch in Florence about 1504, took it to Milan, transferred it to a panel and developed the painting (1506-1510),adding the costume, the veil, and the background landscape.

The absurd story about hiring people to crack jokes while the lady was being painted from life seems to have been made up out of whole cloth by Giorgio Vasari, the famous art historian, who in 1550 produced this episode, along with numerous details about the hair, the flesh, the nostrils, etc., although Vasari had never even seen the picture himself.

Finally, it is not at all certain that the Mona Lisa represents the third wife of Francesco del Giocondo. The reliable Cassiano dal Pozzo, writing over a hundred years after the painting was made, refers to "a life-size portrait, half length of a certain Giocondo," but we cannot be sure that this is really Francesco's third wife. The evidence is scanty. Of course the lady's expression comes in for perennial comment.

Tourist guides like to say that if you stare at her long enough, she will smile back at you, and that it requires great genius to paint this kind of a furtive smile. Leonardo had achieved this ability; therefore it is a great painting. Again, this is nonsense. This kind of ghostly smile was not at all uncommon among painters in that period: Andrea del Verocchio for instance.

The painting is one of genius, but that is not where the genius lies.Tourist guides also like to say that the eyes will follow you around the room, as if this too were an accomplishment reserved only for the greatest painters. The eyes-that-foliow-you trick is a simple one, used by innumerable artists in everything from posters to billboards.If La Gioconda could hear what people say about her she would doubtless not smile; she would laugh out loud.

~source used: "The Dictionary of Misinformation" by Tom Burnam
 

Why Were Duels Always Fought at Dawn?

Or Is This Depiction in Fiction and Movies Not True?

Not true, we're afraid. Historians assured us that duels were fought at any time of the day. But dawn was definitely the preferred time; a duel fought in twilight could turn into more of a crapshoot than a gunshoot.Doesn't make much sense to us.

We might be convinced to get up at dawn to go fishing. But if we knew we had an approximately fifty-fifty chance of dying on a particular day, we'd at least want a decent night's sleep the night before and time for a doughnut or two before we fought.

Historian C. F. "Charley" Eckhardt speculates on this strange predilection of duelists to fight to the death at inconvenient hours: Just at sunrise, if the list [the technical term for a dueling ground] was oriented north-south, neither man got the sun-to-the back advantage. Also, either the local law was still abed or, if there was a regular police force in the area, the day watch and night watch were changing shifts. Fighting at dawn minimized the likelihood of interference by the law, the same reason why many burglaries occur between 3 and 4 P.M. and 11 P.M. to~ midnight. Most police departments change shifts at 3 P.M., 11 P.M., and 7 A.M.

source used: "Do Penguins Have Knees?" by David Feldman
 

Is it true that one of the major threats to the world environment is ... cow burps?

Aw, you've been reading ahead. Believe it or not, some scientists think cow burps are a major menace to life on earth. Cow burps contain a gas with no smell or color called methane. Methane is
basically the same stuff that's used in gas stoves. In other words, it can burn. Cows burp up between 200 and 400 quarts of this stuff per day, or 50 million tons per year No kidding.

Scientists are concerned about what happens when the methane gas
that the cows burp floats up into the atmosphere. Methane, you see, adds to the greenhouse effect. Probably you have heard of the greenhouse effect. Some scientists fear that chemicals in the
atmosphere are trapping heat that would normally escape into outer space, much as the glass walls of a greenhouse trap heat inside. As a result, the earth is becoming warmer. If it becomes too warm, crops may fail and the polar ice caps may melt, causing flooding. It'll be so hot in the summer you won't be able to go outside.

Methane isn't the only thing causing the greenhouse effect. The carbon dioxide produced by cars and factories (and by us, for that matter) plays an even bigger part. But methane is right up there.

Why do cows burp up so much methane? Mainly because of their eating habits. Cows aren't out there eat-ing mashed potatoes and gravy. They eat hay and grass. Hay and grass aren't easy to digest. In fact, the only way cows manage it is that (1) they chew their food a very long time, and (2) they have tiny creatures called bacteria in their innards that help break down hay and grass into something a cow's body can use. But the bacteria do a pretty sloppy job. What they don't take care of the cows burp up as methane.

Your next question probably is: Why are we suddenly blaming cows?
There have always been cows* True. As a matter of fact, cows aren't the only source of methane in the atmosphere. You can also blame rice paddies, swamps, oil drilling, the burning of the Amazon rain forest, even (don't laugh) termites. (One researcher thinks termites make even more methane than cows— 150 million tons a year.)But let's face it, there's not much you can do about termites. Cows make a much bigger (and therefore easier) target. Besides, there are more cows now than there used to be—1.2 billion, by one count. That's a lot of burps.So what do we do, give the cows Pepto-Bismol? Might not be such a bad idea. One scientist thinks if we fed the cows special drugs,
they'd make less methane. But it's not very clear how you'd do this for 1.2 billion cows.

That leaves only one solution. Panic. Call me if you come up with any better ideas.

~source used: "Know It All" by Ed Zotti

 

- Moth-Eaten Clothes:

Moths, contrary to the popular notion, do not eat clothes. Some, as a matter of fact, don't eat anything at all during their adult lives, which are (not surprisingly) brief. It's the larvae that do the damage; by the time moths are flying out of the closet, it's too late.

~source used: "The Dictionary of Misinformation"by Tom Burnam

 

When and where were the first eyeglasses made?

Although Nero used emerald-colored lenses to view the gladiator games in A.D. 60, it's questionable whether he could actually see better. The first "reading glass" was developed around A.D. 1000 but was more of a magnifying glass than an eyeglass. Most historians believe the first eyeglasses were invented in 1284 or 1285. No one knows if the inventor was a monk, a scientist, or a craftsman, but all agree that the inventor was Italian.

In the 1300s eyeglasses were a luxury used by the rich as a symbol of their wealth and power. However, when Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1456, the history of eyeglasses changed forever. Because of the widespread availability of books, the use of reading glasses gradually filtered down to the common people and became an important part of everyday life.

However, eyeglasses still had a long way to go. Finding a pair that helped the wearer see better was a time-consuming process of trying on one pair after another until sight improved.

In the seventeenth century the Spanish invented the first graded lenses, which solved the problem of the trial-and-error fitting of
eyeglasses.Until the eighteenth century, eyeglasses either balanced
precariously on the nose or were held by the rim with one hand.

Finally, an optician in Paris added short arms that extended to
the temples, and an optician in England carried the idea further
by extending the arms to the ears. This became the world standard
for eyeglass frames.

~source used: "Do Fish Drink Water?" by Bill McLain

 

Useless Fact - Triskaidekaphobia:

Triskaidekaphobia is the morbid fear of the number 13. This superstition leads many people to avoid anything which involves number.

The fear of the number 13 has its roots in Christian and papan cultures. In Christian countries the number 13 was considered unlucky because there were 13 persons at the Last Supper of Jesus Christ. Fridays are unlucky because the
Crucifixion was on a Friday. Hence, when a Friday falls on the thirteenth, it is regarded as especially unlucky.

In Norse mythology the number 13 can be traced back to being unlucky when Loki, the most evil of Norse gods, went univited to a party of twelve at Valhalla. What resulted was the death of Balder, the god of joy, light and reconciliation.

During the Middle Ages, the superstition against Friday the Thirteenth grew.

As you know, many high-rise hotels omit the number 13 floor.

Probably one of the most famous modern stories involving the number 13 is the Apollo 13 Mission. It was launched on April 11, 1970, from Pad 39 (three times 13) at 13:13 local time and was struck by an explosion on April 13.

Some famous Triskaidekaphobias include Napoleon, Mark Twain, Herbert Hoover, Richard Wagner and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The opposite of Triskaidekaphobia is Triskaidekamania, the excessive enthusiasm for the number 13.

(For those out there who want to do a little research on their own, look up the 18th century launching of the ship-- HMS Friday)

~this article was kindly provided by "Lorraine"
 

Where did the idea for underwear come from?

Underwear is one of the earliest known types of clothing; its use was recorded as far back as 3000 B.C.

It started as a narrow band around the waist from which both decorative and magical pendants were hung.

The Egyptians wore woven material wrapped around the body several times and then tied in front. Loincloths were worn in Crete around 2000 B.C. They were usually decorated, often with intricate patterns.

Even today, loincloths are worn in many tropical and semitropical regions of the world. Between 2105 B.C. and 1240 B.C., men in Babylonia and Mesopotamia wore loincloths as undergarments and women wore short skirts as undergarments.

Around A.D. 200 the Romans wore undergarments. Both men and women wore a loincloth similar to our modern briefs. The women also wore a breast band called a "mammillare."

In 1850 Amelia Jenks Bloomer advocated a costume for women made up of a short jacket, a skirt extending below the knee, and loose "Turkish" trousers, which were later referred to as "bloomers."

This fashion never caught on, but the term "bloomers" stuck and eventually became the name for loose, baggy underwear worn by women.

The term "underwear" did not come into use until 1879.

~source used: "Do Fish Drink Water?"by Bill McLaine
 

Most people, if asked what the world's oldest city is, would
probably answer "Rome."

Rome, the Eternal City, was traditionally founded in 753 B.C., making it more than 2,700 years old.

Damascus, Syria, on the other hand, was in existence before the
time of Abraham (Gen. 14:15, 15:2). It is undoubtedly the oldest
continuously inhabited city in existence and probably was
flourishing a couple of thousand years before Rome was founded.

~source used: "The Dictionary of Misinformation" by Tom Burnam

 

- GODZILLA:

Japanese producer Tomoyuki Tanaka came up with the idea for Godzilla while flying over the Bikini Islands which were the site of American H-Bomb testing.

The Japanese name for Godzilla is Gojira, a combination of two words 'gorira' (gorilla--a tribute to King Kong) and 'kujira' (whale).

Godzilla is the Americanized version of this name.(Other spelling Gozilla)

Originally, Godzilla was conceived as a giant mutated octopus. But this idea was changed to an amphibious bipedal phenotype. Such a creature would be much more menacing to human society on land.

The home of Godzilla was the remote island of Lagos near the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. The giant dinosaur was exposed to an atomic bomb. His offensive abilities were his atomic ray, brute strength and regeneration powers.

The original Godzilla stood 164 feet tall (50 meters) and weighed 22,000 tons.

The Godzilla screenplay was co-authored by Takeo Maurata and Ishiro Honda. Eiji Tsuburaya was the creator of Godzilla.

The first Godzilla film was released in 1954.

Two years later American actor Raymond Burr, playing American journalist, Steve Martin, filmed scenes here in the United States, which were spliced into the U.S. version. In the United States the film was released as "Godzilla-King of the Monsters".

Since its original release there have been over 20 Godzilla films. And if there is one thing everyone will recognize and remember about this giant dinosaur it is his ROAR!

~this article was submitted by "Lorraine"
 

Useless Fact - Halloween:

Halloween has ancient origins in the United Kingdom. It seems to be a version of the ancient Celtic holiday called "Samhain" (sow' an) celebrating the end of harvest and the beginning of the new year. The Druids, a Celtic religious group, brought in Saman, the Lord of the Dead. They believed that the dead were allowed to wander on earth in search of living bodies to take over and turn into evil witches. People made themselves and their homes as undesirable as possible to keep the spirits away by wearing costumes, masks, being loud and obnoxious, and keeping their homes cold and dark.

With the onset of Christianity in the U.K., the celebration shifted into "Halloween." The Scottish referred to October 31st, the night before All Saints Day, a Catholic holiday honoring those who had died in the faith, as "Hallowe'en." In Old English, "hallow," means to sanctify. The Irish came up with trick-or-treating when peasants went door-to-door demanding food to celebrate. Homeowner's gave them "soul cakes" to prevent bad curses and encourage prayers that would help them get into heaven. The Scottish had a special cake called "Dumb Bannock." They baked this cake on Halloween to predict who would be married in the coming year. The English added bobbing for apples: whoever bit into an apple first, would be married first the next year.

Halloween in America The Irish brought the holiday to the United States in the 1840's. American's adopted the Jack-o-Lantern, a tradition started in Ireland as a result of folklore. Special decorations went up using colors that reflect the ancient origins: orange signifying harvest and black signifying death. Skeletons were added from the Day of the Dead festival celebrated in Mexico. Candy was chosen over soul cakes, costumes became funny as well as scary, and the first card made its appearance in 1920. In 1950, a group of
Sunday school children decided to trick-or-treat for money for needy children rather than candy. They raised and donated $17.00 and started the tradition of trick-or-treating for UNICEF. Halloween is here to stay, so let the haunting begin.

~source used: MyBackYard.com

 

Where did pay toilets go?

You date yourself.

Although most people alive today don't remember coin-slotted lavatories, they were once quite common.

The original thought was that making people pay for the "service"
would encourage them to keep the toilet clean. But the opposite
happened. People were so angry at having to pay to carry out basic biological functions that vandalism increased, costing more to fix than could ever be collected in dimes.

Furthermore, women's groups declared pay toilets discriminatory because women had to pay to urinate, whereas men had the luxury of free urinals.

Many courts backed this argument, and by the late 1960s, most coin slots had been removed.

Today pay toilets are very rare indeed.

~source used: "Just Curious Jeeves"by Jack Mingo & Erin Barrett

 

Alaskans eat more ice cream per capita then any other state.
 

Why does scratching an itch make it feel better?

The old saying goes that if your palm itches you will come into some money. Finding money may be nice but it won't do a thing for your itch.

A good scratch will. An itch can be caused by almost anything—insects, dust particles, allergies, emotions, infections, etc. All itches result for the same reason: local stimuli are irritating the fibrous nerve endings on the upper layer of the skin. The brain interprets these stimuli as itches.

Scratching can either remove the stimuli or cause pain in the area of the itch, which neutralizes the itching sensation in the spinal cord. While we are on the subject of itches, why is it that shirt manufacturers insist on sewing their itchy labels on the inside of the collar, where they are guaranteed to rub against the back of our necks and make us itch all day long?

~source used: "Thoughts for the Throne" by Don Voorhees

 

- Ruffian, the racehorse who refused to be
beaten.

Ruffian (born April 17th 1972 ) was a filly that won her very first race by 13 lengths and broke the track record. In her first two years of racing she won every race she entered. Late in her second year of racing she fractured a bone and was retired to rest for a while. Even so, she was crowned two-year-old filly of the year. As a three-year-old, she raced longer distances and won every time. She won all three legs of the Filly Triple Crown and seemed destined for greatness. But there was one more test.

It was decided to hold a match race on July 6th at Belmont Park between Ruffian and the winner of that year's Kentucky Derby, Foolish Pleasure. Over 31,000 people watched the match. The match was considered the battle of the sexes. Could the giant black filly beat a colt?

Foolish Pleasure took an early lead but Ruffian came on strong and pulled in front by half a length. As they reached the mile marker, the two great horses were running neck and neck.Then it happened. There was a sickening crack. Ruffian had broken her leg.

Her jockey struggled to pull her up but she was fighting him. She
wanted to continue the race in spite of her shattered leg.A team of four veterinarians and an orthopedic surgeon worked for 12 hours trying to save her leg, during which time she stopped breathing twice and had to be revived. When the anesthetic wore off, she started thrashing her legs around like she was running, her mind was still in the race, and although they tried to restrain her, she flailed about and broke her other leg.

The veterinarians knew she could not survive further surgery so they put the gallant horse to sleep to end her suffering.

Ruffian was buried at Belmont Park, near the flagpole. As a fitting tribute, they buried her with her nose facing the finish line.

Flags flew at half mast that sad day.

~source used: "What Makes Flamingos Pink?"by Bill McLain

 

MARY CELESTE--A Maritime Mystery

The Mary Celeste was a 100 foot brigantine which weighed 282 tons and was registered in New York. On November 7, 1872 she sailed from New York bound for Genoa with a cargo of 1701 barrels of American alcohol (Value-$35,000). The ship was valued at $14,000.

On board the Mary Celeste were Master Benjamin Spooner Briggs (Captain), his wife Sarah, two year old daughter Sophia Matilda and a crew of seven.

Another ship the 'Dei Gratia' sailed on November 15, 1872 from New York with a cargo of 1735 barrels of petroleum. The 'Dei Gratia' was following a parallel course of the Mary Celeste.

On December 5, 1872 , the 'Dei Gratia' came upon the Mary Celeste. The crew noticed that the ship was yawing (coming into the wind and then falling off--or out of control). Eventually, several crew members of the 'Dei Gratia' boarded the Mary Celeste. They found the vessel to be in seaworthy condition, but apparently abandoned (and in a hurry).

The Crew of the 'Dei Gratia' was divided and helped sail the Mary Celeste safely to Gibraltar. She arrived Friday, December 13, 1872 at approximately 9:00 AM. There has been much speculation over the years as to what happened to the Captain, his family, and the crew of the Mary Celeste. To this day, it remains one of the greatest of Maritime Mysteries.

The Mary Celeste was not the only ship to be found abandoned. In April,1849,the Dutch schooner 'Hermania' was found dismasted but otherwise sound. It too was abandoned. And,in February, 1855, a ship named 'Marathon was also found abandoned but in perfect order.

~this article was written and submitted by 'Lorraine'

 

Oysters and the "r" months.

The old belief that oysters are safe to eat only during the months that incorporate the letter r in their names is pure fiction. True, oysters tend to to be watery during the summer, but that poses no danger to health.

In spite of folklore to the contrary, by the way, oysters are no special help to virility or potency. They are a pretty poor source of energy in any sense; a half dozen raw ones of the kind commonly grown along the Atlantic coast add up to only some sixty calories.

~source used: "The Dictionary of Misinformation" by Tom Burnam

 

- Plague:

Plague -- just mention the word and people cringe. But what exactly is this disease?

There have been three major epidemics of plague throughout history -- in the 6th, 14th, and 17th centuries (the approximate death toll from these three epidemics -- 137 million victims).

The most common name for this illness -- The Black Death or Bubonic Plague.

The Bubonic Plague is an infectious disease caused by a bacterium named 'Yersinia pestis'. It derives its name from the swollen lymph nodes or buboes that was but one of its many symptoms. Another term used to describe this illness was "The Black Death". This referred to the spots on the skin that are red at first and then turn black.

In the 1330's an outbreak of this deadly disease occurred in China. It was brought to Europe by merchant ships that were carrying dying people and infected rats. People usually become infected when bitten by a rodent flea that was carrying the plague bacterium.

The death rate was ninety percent for those exposed to the bacterium. Depending on the general health of the infected person, death usually occurred in less than one week. The Italian writer Boccaccio said its victims often "ate lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestor in paradise."

At its worst, the Bubonic Plague killed two million victims a year.

After five years approximately 25 million people were dead -- one-third of Europe's population. A terrible killer was loose in Europe. Medieval medicine had nothing to combat it.

In winter, the disease seemed to disappear because the fleas who helped to carry it from person to person are dormant then.Survivors lived in constant fear that the plague would return.

Medieval Europe never recovered from the effects of the plague. So many people had died that there were serious labor shortages all over Europe. The Pneumonic form of the plague could be spread from person to person by coughing, sneezing, or simply talking.

Today, modern antibiotics are effective against plague, that is if the infected person is treated promptly. Outbreaks in people still occur. In the United States, the last urban plague epidemic occurred in Los Angeles in 1924-25.Since then, only scattered cases occur and most of these are in rural areas numbering ten to fifteen persons each year. The World Health Organization reports that globally 1,000 to 3,000 cases of plague occur every year.

In the United States most cases of plague occur in two regions:

1) northern New Mexico, northern Arizona, and southern Colorada

2) California, southern Oregon, and far western Nevada
And, plague also exists in South America, Asia, and Africa.

~this article was written and submitted by 'Lorraine'

 

What's the origin of the hand signals used in baseball today?

In the early 1900s, the New York giants baseball team had a pitcher named Luther H. Taylor. He was a deaf mute who was, in an era of insensitivity, nicknamed "Dummy."Taylor lost a lot of games due to his inability to communicate with his teammates.

John McGraw, the manager of the Giants, was under enormous pressure from the team's owner,the fans and the sportswriters to trade Taylor. Instead, McGraw required the entire Giant team to learn American Sign Language. Once that was accomplished, McGraw used hand signals tolead his team.

That's the origin of the hand signals that are used in baseball today.

~source used: Dear Abby Column, submitted by Stephen Redmond, MD
forwarded by 'Texas Bob'

 

Useless fact - Why do flies swarm around a fixed spot in the air?

It depends. If there's nothing obvious around to attract the flies' interest, then usually the big draw is the other flies.

They're mating, you see. Swarming flies (often they're called gnats) don't live very long and they have to make hay while the sun shines, so to speak. We won't go into the details. Let's just say that years from now you'll probably spend some time in bars that operate along similar lines

~source used: "Know It All" by Ed Zotti

- Why do geese fly in a V?

Lots of guesses, no definite answers. Here are some of the top
theories.

1. The geese fly in a V to save energy. Some people think each goose flies close to the one in front of it because the goose in front blocks the wind. With less wind resistance to overcome, the goose behind doesn't have to work as hard. (Race car drivers do something similar: they try to drive close to the car in front so they'll use less gas.)Trouble is, for this idea to work, each goose would have to fly at a certain angle to the one in front and maintain a certain distance in between. And they'd all have to flap their wings at the same time. But they don't. The birds wander all over the place and flap their wings any which way.

2. It helps the geese stay together. The idea here is that by keeping the bird in front of them in view, the geese won't get lost. Geese have easy-to-spot tail markings that make this easier. Doubters, however, claim that the geese's honking is what keeps them together. What's more, geese stay in formation after dark, when they can't see the goose in front of them.

3. The geese fly in a V so other geese can recognize them at a distance. Why it's more important that one bunch of geese be able to recognize another bunch of geese I don't know, but that's the theory. So there you have it—another muddle. Maybe some hotshot young scientist of the future can get this straightened out.

~source used: "Know It All" by Ed Zotti

 

Pores of the skin breathing.

Despite pseudo-scientific advertisements for various cosmetics and soaps, the pores do not "breathe," nor is there any need to go to special efforts, under ordinary circumstances, to "keep the pores open."

Among related fallacies is that painting or gilding the whole body closes up the pores and thus causes a quick death by suffocation. No truth in it. Keeping one's body gilded for any length of time would not, obviously, be desirable. But any ill effects would certainly not show themselves at once—assuming, that is, the absence of a toxic substance in the gilt.

~source used: "The Dictionary of Misinformation" by Tom Burnam

 

useless fact - Why is the handle on the left side of the toilet when most people are right-handed?

The early pull-chain flushers were placed on the left side of the tank so that people sitting could reach up and flush with their right hand. When handles replaced the chains, the flush mechanism, although lowered, remained on the left side of the toilet. These days, 66% of people flush when standing, using the left hand or crossing over with the right. Even some of the sitter-downers admit to crossing over and using their left hand to flush because it wrenches the shoulder to try to flush with the right hand while sitting. The toilet is thus one of the few devices in our modern world set up for lefties.

~source used: "Just Curious Jeeves" by Jack Mingo & Erin Barrett

 

Rated G Useless Facts

Why do the elephant and donkey represent the Republican and Democratic parties? Neither creature is particularly regal or distinguished. How did they come to be the symbols of our national parties?

One person is primarily responsible. A man named Thomas Nast was the most influential political cartoonist in U.S. history. He was the nineteenth-century version of Gary Trudeau, and worked for Harpers Weekly magazine as a political cartoonist. Another political cartoonist first used the donkey to represent the Democratic party in 1837, when a cartoon appeared depicting President Andrew Jackson riding the beast.

However, Nast is credited with popularizing this political symbol. In 1870, he drew a donkey labeled "theCopperhead Press," to mock the Democratic newspapers who sympathized with the South. Nast first used the elephant to represent the Republican party in a satirical cartoon. In 1874 the New York Herald reported that President Ulysses S. Grant intended to run for an unprecedented third term in 1876, and accused him of "Caesarism," referring to the famous Roman emperors. Several weeks later, the paper erroneously reported that animals from the New York City Zoo had escaped and were roaming around Central Park. On November 7, just before midterm elections, a Nast cartoon ran in Harper's Weekly depicting a donkey disguised as a lion and marked "Caesarism." The lion was scaring all the other animals that were loose in the park, including a huge elephant labeled "the Republican Vote."

Nast's depiction of the two parties using these animals was not complimentary but it stuck, and they now proudly represent their respective parties.

Incidentally, Nast is also famous for drawing the first modern-looking Santa Claus. Before Nast, Santa didn't even have a beard.

~source used: "Thoughts for the Throne"by Don Voorhees
 

Do cats have belly buttons?

Sure. They just don't look like human belly buttons. Cat belly buttons are a long scar, often covered with hair, located just under the cat's rib cage. Almost all mammals have belly buttons because they all had, at one point, umbilical cords. Umbilical cords provide food and so on while the baby is still inside its mother's womb. The exceptions are the duckbill platypus, the echidna (also known as the spiny anteater), and Adam and Eve. The platypus and the echidna, which live in Australia, are born in eggs, so they don't have umbilical cords. As for Adam and Eve — well, think about it.

~source used "Know It All" by Ed Zotti~

 

Rated G

Useless fact - Can bees really detect fear in humans?

Rated G

Useless fact - What Happens to the 1,000 or More Prints After Films Have Finished Their Theatrical Runs?

Rated G -Useless fact -

Why is a wedding ring worn on the third finger of the left hand?

Rated G

Useless Fact - Why do you aim with one eye closed?

Rated G

useless fact -How did they figure out that fluoride prevents tooth decay?

Rated G

Useless fact - "Thumbs up"?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why Does Your Voice Sound Higher and Funny When You Ingest Helium?

Rated G

Useless fact - Are the streets on the Monopoly game real streets from somewhere?

Rated G

Useless fact - Most ticks are deaf, blind,and slow as Christmas.So how do they find you?

Rated G

Useless Fact - Why are nonsweet wines called "dry"?

RatedG

Useless fact - Are the vitamins in a potato really in the peel?

Rated G

Useless fact - Who was the Teddy bear named after?

Rated G

Rated G

Useless fact - Why do dogs sometimes turn around several times before they lie down for a nap?

Rated G

Useless fact - Salt in prepared foods?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why do cowboys wear such unique boots?

Rated G

Useless fact - What is the Richter scale?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why are stop signs red?

Rated G

Useless fact - How many insect parts are allowed to be in peanut butter before it's legally considered unsanitary?

Rated G

Why doesn't the cobra strike the snake charmer?

Rated G

Today's useless fact - Why do fireflies light up?

Rated G

Useless fact - Is it true you can only stand eggs on end one day out of the year?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why are gasoline prices listed to three decimal places, such as $1.479 per gallon?

Rated G

Useless fact - Can you die from a black widow spider bite?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why do cars in some countries drive on the left side of the road,and in others on the right?

Rated G

Useless fact - why are ships referred to as "she"?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why do you have to pee so much when you drink beer?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why are most manholes round?

Rated G

Useless fact - Radiators, Automobile, and Distilled
Water.

Rated G

Useless fact - Why do builders put a small tree on the top of a building as soon as its top frame is completed?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why are moths drawn to light and what do they get out of it?

Rated G

Useless fact - What makes peppers so hot?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why Do Birds Bother Flying Back North After Migrating to the South?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why are stoplights red, yellow, and green?
Why not some other colors?

Rated G

Useless fact - How hard Is it to tread grapes with your feet?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why are tennis balls fuzzy?

Rated G

Useless Fact ***

Why does "let the cat out of the bag" mean "to let a secret be known"?

Rated G

Useless fact - What are the different types of caviar and
why is caviar so expensive?

Rated G

Useless fact - Can a head live after being severed by a guillotine, and for how long?

Rated G

Useless fact - Where do frogs spend their winters?

Rated G

Useless fact - Are foods labeled "natural" really all natural?

Rated G

Useful fact - How did the shuttle Columbia get its name?

Rated G

Useless Fact - How did each of the seven continents get its name?

Did you know that all the continents except Europe begin with the
letter "A"?

Rated G

Useless fact - What were Marie Antoinette's last words?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why do office buildings and department stores have revolving doors?

Rated G

Useless fact - Time spent waiting for professors:

Rated G

Useless fact - How do Japanese celebrate St. Valentine's day?

Rated G

Useless fact: Why do clothes shrink?

Rated G

Useless fact - Is it true that at one time the entire world consisted of a single continent?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why is root beer called "beer" when it isn't beer at all?

Rated G

Useless fact - The origin of Valentine's Day:

Rated G

Useless fact - Why is breaking a mirror said to lead to
seven years of bad luck?

Rated G

Useless fact - north pole discovery:

Rated G

Useless fact - Are baby snakes more poisonous than adults?

Rated G

useless fact - Coffee:

Rated G

Useless fact - What is the origin of the legend that storks bring babies?

Rated G

Useless fact - So what's the difference between a frog
and a toad?

Rated G

Useful fact - Early Clocks:

Rated G

Useless fact - Does champagne get you drunk faster than non-bubbly wine?

Rated G

Useless fact - Horse Racing:

G

Useless fact - How do time-release medications work?

Rated G

Useless fact - How do bill changers tell that the money isn't counterfeit?

Rated G

Useless fact - Does ketchup always contain tomato sauce?

Rated G

Useless fact - What Use Is the Appendix to Us? What Use Are Our Tonsils to Us?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why is that square enclosure used by
boxers called a "ring"?

Rated G

Useless Fact - Why did the dead in Europe use to be buried with their heads to the west?

Rated G

Useless fact - "Live" TV and radio call-in talk shows?

Rated G

Useless fact - Do Penguins Have Knees?

Rated G

Useless fact - Do the planets really make a faint "music" that you can hear?

Rated G

Useless fact - Is it true that the Mormon Church used to
consummate marriages at the temple during the marriage ceremony?

Rated G

Useless fact - Are you supposed to open the windows of your house during a tornado?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why is the sky usually cloudless in the morning?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why does the Dutch homeland have two names, Holland and the Netherlands?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why did the Egyptians worship cats?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why do beavers build dams?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why do we call physically attached twins "Siamese twins"?

Rated G

Useless fact - "The Wizard of Oz":

Rated G

Useless fact: Why are lizards always doing push-ups?

Rated G

Useless fact - What makes stars twinkle?

Rated G

Useless fact - How do nutritionists determine how many
calories a food has?

Rated G

Useless Fact - Why are you never supposed to touch a halogen light bulb with your fingers?

Rated G

Useless fact - Is Pluto really a planet?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why do car doors open rear to front?

Rated G

Useless fact - Is dry cleaning really dry?

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Useless fact-Why does popcorn pop?

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Useless fact - When in American history was it a crime to
criticize the president?

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Useless fact - Smallest Baseball Player:

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Useless fact - Can you name the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World?

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Useless fact - Why is family's heraldic symbol called a "coat of arms"?

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Useless fact - April Fool's Day:

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Useless fact - Is it true that we use only 10 percentof our brain at any given time?
(Some people use a lot less than that.)

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Useless fact - Who invented the 'Slinky' toy?

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Useless fact - How many pages were in the longest book ever written?

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Useless fact - Why is rice thrown at weddings?

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Useless fact - Why are dull students called dunces?

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Useless fact - Where did the Jolly Roger flag come from?

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Useless fact - Why did pirates make prisoners walk the plank when they could've just tossed them overboard?

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Useless fact - Full Moon

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Useless fact - Why does a man's coat come with those useless buttons on the sleeves?

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Useless fact - Do frogs really rain from the skies?

Rated G

Useless fact: QWERTY keyboard

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Useless fact - Was Captain Kidd as bad a pirate as his legend says?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why is the devil portrayed as having horns and hooved feet?

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Useless fact - If hot air rises, why is it always cooler
in the mountains?

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Useless fact - Is the Great Wall of China the only man-made object visible from moon?

Rated G

Useless fact - Why are there ridges on the sides of most
school buses?

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Useless fact - Why is a practice based upon general experience called a "rule of thumb"?

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Useless fact - What gangster wrote a fan letter to Henry Ford about his cars?

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Useless fact - Sleep:

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Useless Fact - Is scuba diving really bad for your bones?

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Useless fact - Al Capone:

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Useless fact - Should fish be worried about the high pressures deep in the ocean,or about being electrocuted when lightning strikes?

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Usefull fact - Bathing:

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Useless fact - Why do the "Dutch" wear wooden shoes?

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Useless fact - Why is it okay to kiss someone under mistletoe?

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Useless fact - How many gods did the ancient Egyptians have?

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Useless fact - Are there any one-eyed animals?

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Useless fact - What is baker's yeast?

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Useless fact - Why is something genuine called "the real McCoy"?

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Useless fact - Why are marathons 26 miles,385 yards long?

Rated G Globe Magazine 5-6-03
From the Diary of Useless Information

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Useless fact - How big can a hailstone get?

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Useless fact - Why do all the armed forces start marching with the left foot?

Rated G

Useless fact - Who was Jack the Ripper?

Rated G

Useless fact - What is that smell when it rains?

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Useless fact - Why does bride always stand on the groom's left?