Stat's daily tidbits of weird but not worthless factoids, one topic per day!

[Statistikhengst]

Day 1: January 12, 2015

Topic 1: Statue Rats, Flying Carp, Winged Weasels, aka Pidgeons.

-Pidgeons are the only birds that don't have to lift their heads to swallow water.

-Racing pidgeons have been clocked at 110 mph.

-Homing pidgeons were used in both world wars to carry messages between troops and headquarters. They had a 98% success rate in missions flown.

-In the 17th century, pidgeon droppings were used to tan hides and to make gunpowder.





tomorrow: bizarre wills and testaments!

 

[Pogo]

Subscribed!

 

[martybegan]

MartyBegan's added made up crap about Stat's factoids:

Pigeon's are like the heads of a hydra, kill one and 2 rise to take its place.

Pigeon's must reproduce only in this way, because no one has ever seen a baby pigeon, the fuckers just seem to appear from thin air.

In a battle between Pigeons and Aquaman, Aquaman would be worthless because he can only talk to fish (credit given to Frank J for this joke).

Pigeon spikes are their preferred nesting place.

We should splice pigeon DNA into all endangered species, because we have been trying to off these things for decades with zero end result.

 

[Statistikhengst]

MartyBegan's added made up crap about Stat's factoids:

Pigeon's are like the heads of a hydra, kill one and 2 rise to take its place.

Pigeon's must reproduce only in this way, because no one has ever seen a baby pigeon, the fuckers just seem to appear from thin air.

In a battle between Pigeons and Aquaman, Aquaman would be worthless because he can only talk to fish (credit given to Frank J for this joke).

Pigeon spikes are their preferred nesting place.

We should splice pigeon DNA into all endangered species, because we have been trying to off these things for decades with zero end result.

To quote the Boomer Bible: Hmmmmm. ... interesting. Only we are talking about REAL factoids. ...


Gesendet von meinem GT-I9515 mit Tapatalk

 

[martybegan]

MartyBegan's added made up crap about Stat's factoids:

Pigeon's are like the heads of a hydra, kill one and 2 rise to take its place.

Pigeon's must reproduce only in this way, because no one has ever seen a baby pigeon, the fuckers just seem to appear from thin air.

In a battle between Pigeons and Aquaman, Aquaman would be worthless because he can only talk to fish (credit given to Frank J for this joke).

Pigeon spikes are their preferred nesting place.

We should splice pigeon DNA into all endangered species, because we have been trying to off these things for decades with zero end result.

To quote the Boomer Bible: Hmmmmm. ... interesting. Only we are talking about REAL factoids. ...


Gesendet von meinem GT-I9515 mit Tapatalk

Your factoids are real. I did explicitly state my crap will be made up.

 

[Statistikhengst]

MartyBegan's added made up crap about Stat's factoids:

Pigeon's are like the heads of a hydra, kill one and 2 rise to take its place.

Pigeon's must reproduce only in this way, because no one has ever seen a baby pigeon, the fuckers just seem to appear from thin air.

In a battle between Pigeons and Aquaman, Aquaman would be worthless because he can only talk to fish (credit given to Frank J for this joke).

Pigeon spikes are their preferred nesting place.

We should splice pigeon DNA into all endangered species, because we have been trying to off these things for decades with zero end result.

To quote the Boomer Bible: Hmmmmm. ... interesting. Only we are talking about REAL factoids. ...


Gesendet von meinem GT-I9515 mit Tapatalk

Your factoids are real. I did explicitly state my crap will be made up.

Really??? I'm shocked to the core! Quick, Pogo my smelling salts! !!

Gesendet von meinem GT-I9515 mit Tapatalk

 

[Statistikhengst]

Gesendet von meinem GT-I9515 mit Tapatalk

 

[martybegan]

MartyBegan's added made up crap about Stat's factoids:

Pigeon's are like the heads of a hydra, kill one and 2 rise to take its place.

Pigeon's must reproduce only in this way, because no one has ever seen a baby pigeon, the fuckers just seem to appear from thin air.

In a battle between Pigeons and Aquaman, Aquaman would be worthless because he can only talk to fish (credit given to Frank J for this joke).

Pigeon spikes are their preferred nesting place.

We should splice pigeon DNA into all endangered species, because we have been trying to off these things for decades with zero end result.

To quote the Boomer Bible: Hmmmmm. ... interesting. Only we are talking about REAL factoids. ...


Gesendet von meinem GT-I9515 mit Tapatalk

Your factoids are real. I did explicitly state my crap will be made up.

Really??? I'm shocked to the core! Quick, Pogo my smelling salts! !!

Gesendet von meinem GT-I9515 mit Tapatalk

The difference is that unlike most Progs on this board, I know which posts of mine are made up, and which are factual.

 

[Statistikhengst]

MartyBegan's added made up crap about Stat's factoids:

Pigeon's are like the heads of a hydra, kill one and 2 rise to take its place.

Pigeon's must reproduce only in this way, because no one has ever seen a baby pigeon, the fuckers just seem to appear from thin air.

In a battle between Pigeons and Aquaman, Aquaman would be worthless because he can only talk to fish (credit given to Frank J for this joke).

Pigeon spikes are their preferred nesting place.

We should splice pigeon DNA into all endangered species, because we have been trying to off these things for decades with zero end result.

To quote the Boomer Bible: Hmmmmm. ... interesting. Only we are talking about REAL factoids. ...


Gesendet von meinem GT-I9515 mit Tapatalk

Your factoids are real. I did explicitly state my crap will be made up.

Really??? I'm shocked to the core! Quick, Pogo my smelling salts! !!

Gesendet von meinem GT-I9515 mit Tapatalk

The difference is that unlike most Progs on this board, I know which posts of mine are made up, and which are factual.

Awww, come on, we're just having fun here. Remember, this here is the Lounge! So, lounge with us.

 

[Statistikhengst]

January 13, 2015: Freaky Wills

Harry Houdini (1874-1926)

9 Strange Last Wills and Testaments - HowStuffWorks

His library of books on magic and the occult was offered to the American Society for Psychical Research on the condition that J. Malcolm Bird, research officer and editor of the ASPR Journal, resign. Bird refused, and the collection went instead to the Library of Congress.

The rabbits he pulled out of his hat went to the children of friends. Houdini left his wife a secret code -- ten words chosen at random -- that he would use to contact her from the afterlife. His wife held annual séances on Halloween for ten years after his death, but Houdini never appeared.

10 Strange Will And Testaments Charles Vance Miller (1853-1926)

This Toronto-based attorney with a love of practical jokes kept on laughing straight to the grave after his death in 1926. His last will and testament bequeathed a large sum up for grabs to any Toronto woman who could produce the most offspring in the decade following his death. The result became known as the "Great Stork Derby." Four winners emerged in a tie for nine children; each received about $125,000.

Mark Gruenwald

The Executive Editor of Captain American and Iron Man, as well as being involved in other Marvel Comics, Gruenwald stated that he wished for his ashes to be mixed with the ink used to print the comic books. They were.

Strange Wills The Good the Bad and the Ugly Walt s Thoughts

Solomon Sanborn, a hatmaker, died in 1871. He left his body to science with one stipulation. His skin was to be used to make two drums that would be given to a friend. At dawn every June 17th after that, the friend was to go to Bunker Hill and pound out “Yankee Doodle” to commemorate the anniversary of that famous revolutionary war battle. The rest of his body was “to be composted for a fertilizer to contribute to the growth of an American elm, to be planted in some rural thoroughfare.”

Meet:

Jeremy Bentham was a British philosopher and social reformer. When he died in 1832, he gave his entire estate to the London Hospital on the condition that his remains were to be preserved and allowed to preside over its board meetings. Surprisingly, the hospital agreed to the demands of his will. Dr. Southwood Smith dissected the body (to teach anatomy) and then reassembled the bones into a skeleton which was outfitted with Bentham’s clothes and put on a glass-fronted wooden cabinet seated in a chair. According to the University College London, at the centenary and sesquicentenary of the college, the good Mr. Bentham was brought out to the College Committee meeting. “He sat at one end of the table, the Provost at the other, and the minutes record ‘Jeremiah Bentham, present but not voting.'” According to the university, it is a myth that Bentham casts the deciding vote in case of a tie.

And:

Garvey P. White (1908): "Before anything else is done 50 cents is to be paid to my son-in-law to enable him to buy for himself a good stout rope with which to hang himself, and thus rid mankind of one of the most infamous scoundrels that ever roamed this broad land or dwelt outside a penitentiary"

Source: The Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader ( )


Up tomorrow:

Slang from 1940!

 

[Statistikhengst]

January 14, 2015: Slang from the 1940s!

Some of these words have now become standard in our lexicon, others have fallen to the wayside. This list is in no way complete, but has some interesting slang terms we no longer use today. Feel free to add any you know.

Beefburger: another name for hamburger.
Steakburger: a misleading name for hamburger, was not made out of steak, just very pricey.

TTFN: short for Ta-Ta-for-now, the 1940's equivalent to CyaByeBye!

Sweater Girl: a movie starlet who deliberately wears tight sweaters to show off her breasts.
Peek-a-boo: a woman's hairstyle in which the hair falls over one eye, but not the other.
Shortie: a word to describe clothing (mostly women's clothing) that was a little too short. The term was replaced with "mini" sometime in the 50s.

Military slang that became everyday slang:

Robomb: the slang for robot bomb, came into the lexicon because the German V-rocket series, before the term "guided missile" was applied by the US military.
Tail-End-Charlie: The person who mans the gun in the tail end of a WWII bomber.
Jerry (also spelled Gerry): slang word for "German"
Step-out: to parachute from an airplane.
Nurembergs: Hemorrhoids. (A reference to the NAZIs, who used Nürnberg for their big ugly rallies)
Active Duty: sexually promiscuous boy
Share Crop: sexually promiscuous girl
Hi sugar, are you rationed?: are you going steady with someone?
Vacky: An ecacuee, referring to WWII evacuees. The word was popular among Brits AND Americans.Motorized freckles: insects, like mosquitos
Armored Heiffer: canned milk
snap your cap: to get angry (later becomes "blow your top")
buzz (buzzed): to be tipsy, to get tipsy


General slang, a little bit of everything:

Slimline: sleek styling of consumer products.

Ducky shincracker: a good dancer
Dead hoofer: a poor dancer
khaki whacky: boy crazy
doll dizzy: girl crazy

Take a powder: buzz off

Toecover: used to describe a cheap, worthless item given as a gift.

Lettuce: money. "Hey Pal, you gotta lotta lettuce on you?"

Unputadownable: just what it sounds like - a book or magazine article that is so good, you can't put it down!

Ameche: to telephone (I believe this comes from the Italian "Amici", which means "friends")

Whizzo: wonderful.

Squillions: an unspecified, extremely high number. We would call it a "google" today!

Bust your chops: get a major scolding. (My ma sure busted my chops today)

Yuck: foolish person

Chrome dome: bald-headed man

North Dakota rice: hot cereal
Mud: coffee

Applesauce: expletive (and then she told me to go applesauce)
Lulu: something beyond the pale, excellent, outstanding (the word could be used positively or negatively)

Whistle Dixie: to be wrong or mistaken

Buy the farm: to croak, die

G-man: FBI investigator



Some 40's slang that has stayed in the repertoire until today:

Pass the buck - to shirk responsibility
Grandstand - to show off
Brainchild - someone's creative idea
cook with gas - to do something right
in cahoots with - conspiring with
above my pay grade - can't tell, it's a secret
cracks me up - makes me laugh
chicken - coward
call girl: appointment only prostitute
bum rap: false accusation
walkie-talkie: two way portable communication device
threads: clothing
blow a fuse: bad temper
in my book: in my opinion
nuts!: crazy, insane
smooch: romantic kiss
my two cents worth: to give an opinion


Sources: various, including a small notebook from my Grandmother, with a newspaper article from 1949 commenting on the new "common phrases" of the decade. Also from, of course, Uncle John's slightly irregular Bathroom reader!


Tomorrow: random insect factoids!

 

[Statistikhengst]

January 15, 2015: Random Insect facts

The word "bug" started out as the Ango-Saxon word "bugge" or "bough", meaning a terror, a devil or a ghost.

The word "dragonfly" probably orginated with the Greek word "drakos", meaning "eye"

The hairs on the butt of a cockroach as so sensitive that they can detect the air currents made by the on-rushing tongue of a toad. Eeeew.

The praying mantis is the official state insect of Connecticut.

Mating soapberry bugs remain locked in an embrace for up to eleven days, a period of time which exceeds the life-span of many other insects..

-Uncle John's slightly irregular Bathroom Reader! And let the soapberry bug jokes commence!


And:

insect trivia uncommon facts about bugs - Trivial Trivia Collections

And adult bedbug can survive up to one year without feeding.

Ants don't sleep.

Only female mosquitos bite. They need the protein from blood to produce their eggs.
The mosquito is responsible for the most human deaths worldwide.
You're more likely to be a target for mosquitoes if you consume bananas.

The buzz that you hear when a bee approaches is the sound of its four wings moving at 11,400 strokes per minute. Bees fly an average of 15 miles per hour.The leap of an average flea is equivalent to a 100 pound man leaping 1,000 and enduring a g-force of 20,000 pounds with an acceleration greater than that of a space shuttle.

A world within a world: there are more insects in one square mile of rural land than there are human beings on the entire earth.

 

[Statistikhengst]

And just for fun, meet the 4-eyed Himalayan Jumping Spider:

Let the alien invasion jokes commence!

 

[Lipush]

Oh great, JUMPING spider

 

[Statistikhengst]

January 16, 2015 - Four completely unrelated factoids that somehow feel right together:

Between 800 and 1500 A.D., English law decreed that every male in the Kingdom must practice archery daily.

More than 90% of the actions performed by the human nervous system are reflex reactions.

The cornea is the only human bodily part with no blood supply. It gets oxygen directly from the air.

It takes Pluto 248.53 YEARS to travel around the sun. It takes Mercury 88 days. Ratio: 1031.54 to 1. Mercury goes around the sun more than 1000 times faster than Pluto, which is no longer classified as a planet, but fun to watch, anyway. In other words, the last time that Pluto was in the same arc-position from the sun as it is today was in the middle of the year 1766.

 

[Statistikhengst]

January 17, 2015: some of the most untranslateable words in the world.

Klloshar (Albanian) - the closest meaning is "loser", but it can be used in many ways.

Pochemuchka (Russian) - the closest meaning is "a person who asks a lot of questions". Pochemu = "why" in Russian. So a Pochemuchka is a "why-man" or a "why-woman". In English, I suspect we would mean "busybody".

Selathirupavar (Tamil) - best translation: certain form of truancy. Not showing up when it would have been critical to have been there, goddammit!

Saudada (Portugese) - best translation: certain form of "longing". Say it in the wrong context, get yet block knocked off.

Gezellig (Dutch) - best translation: cozy. But in German, "gesellig" means someone who likes the company of others, who likes to socialize.

Altahmam (Arabic) - best translation: particular kind of "deep sadness".

Naa (Japanese), a word used in the Kansai dialect. It's a modifier that's used to "emphasize statements or agree with someone".
Doch (German). It's a modifier that's used to "emphasize statements or agree with someone".
In fact, a lot of languages have such a flavouring word. English is one of the languages that doesn't.

Radioukacz (Polish) - best translation: "a person who worked as a telegraphist for the resistance movement on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain.

Schlimazel (Yiddish - ashkenazic) - best translation: "a person who is chronically unlucky". The words has slowly been changed in US-English to means situations that are unlucky instead of people who are unlucky.

Itsuarpok (Inuit) - best translation: the feeling of anticipation that leads you to keep looking outside to see if anyone is coming.
Remember, most of Northern Alaska sees little sunlight for most of the year....

Waldeinsamkeit (German) - best translation: the feeling of being alone in the woods. But the word can either have a very peaceful or a very agitated connotation, depending on how you use it in your writing. I have experienced a form of Waldeinsamkeit a couple of times and cannot even begin to describe it in English words.

Culaccino (Italian), no, not Cappuccino - best translation: the round mark left on a table by a cold glass. Amazing that condensation can sound like beautiful poetry. Only, look up the meaning of "culo" in Italian....

Sombremesa (Spanish) - best translation: the time after a meal when you have food-induced conversations with people. Since the main meal in Spain often STARTS at 10 or 11 PM, this can be a very, very late conversation!

Jayus (Indonesian) - best translation: someone tells a joke that is so unbelievably bad that you cannot help but to laugh because it is just so fucking bad. It's kind of the Indonesian version of Schadenfreude...

Pana Po'o (Hawaiian) - best translation: when you lose your keys and are scratching your head, trying to remember where in the hell you left tham, that is a state of Pana Po'o!

Goya (Urdu) - best translation: the suspension of disbelief that can occur, for instance, when telling an especially good story.

Toska (Russian) - best translation: so many forms of pain or anguish that no English word could cover them all. From endogenous spiritual anguish to a dull aching within the soul, to a melancholy towards a specific person, all the way to the desire to kill oneself.

Interestingly enough, there is something similar in Czech: Litost - rough translation: what you just read in the Russian "Toska", with the added characteristic that this agony is caused by seeing one's own torment.

Tartle (Scottish) - best translation: the forced and usually embarrassing hesitation caused by having forgotten someone's name.

Prolly one of my favs:

Tingo (Pascuense - the language of Easter Island) - best translation: the process of "borrowing" things you desire from a friend's house until you have borrowed everything. lol...

One of the longest words in the the world: Mamihlapinatapai (Yagan) - best translation: a wordless yet meaningful look between two people who really wish to have intimate contact with each other, but hesitate.

And maybe the weirdest, least translatable word in the world:

Ilunga (a Bantu dialect) - best translation: a person who will forgive any abuse the first time, tolerate it the second time and then beat the shit out of you for it the third time.

Ilunga!!!

Tomorrow: religious factoids!

 

[Statistikhengst]

January 18, 2015: Interesting Church factoids

The Melchisidechians were a church sect from Phrygia at the onset of Christianity that did not believe in the trinity; they were also the first sect to give up circumcision and they had a strange practice of receiving OR giving gifts. Their rule was: place the gift on the ground first, then let the recipient pick it up.

The second largest church denomination in the USA is the Baptist denomination.

St. Augustine (354-406 ED) believed that when we die, G-d reuses our fingernail and toenail clippings as other body parts to build new bodies.

From 1644-1680, in the Church of England, the celebration of Christmas was forbidden. It was considered a pagan ritual at that time.

John Calvin, who started the very strict Calvinist movement, was a learned French lawyer before he came to religion.

The inventor Benjamin Franklin determined that 30,000 people could hear Evangelist George Whitefield's voice.

St. Francis of Assisi was given armed guards at his deathbed because at that time, cutting off bits of the saint before he died to sell as a relic was not unheard of. Eeeww....

The Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis Kirche (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Memorial Church) in Berlin, at least the original part, still lays in ruins from WWII in Berlin, because it was part of the treaty of surrender in 1945 that the church not be rebuilt. Since the church is so close to what was the main train station (Zoological Gardens) in West Berlin, the allies wanted Germans to see for all eternity what destruction that war can bring. In keeping with the treaty, the old church was not rebuilt, but a new church was built next to it. Here the old and the new together, to this day:

When Coventry Cathedral in Englad was accidentally bombed in 1940, the Cathedral burnt so hot that metal splitters (most of them large silver nails) flew hundreds of feet in every direction and were too hot to touch for many days on end. A number of those nails bored through more than one tree before finally landing somewhere. What was left of the Cathedral itself was too hot to enter for 3 weeks after the firebomings. German fighter pilots, whose plane was low on fuel, decided to drop it's remaining bombs in order to save fuel to get back home, and those bombs landed over Coventry. Just hours before Coventry was utterly destroyed, Prime Minister Winston Churchill had drafted and was reading through an article of surrender to the Germans. After the bombing, he ripped-up those articles of surrender. Immediately following the bombing, Father Provost had inscribed onto the ruins: "Father forgive".

After the war, the metal fragments that had been gathered up and made into silver crosses, one of which hangs in Coventry; another hangs in Hiroshima permanently, another hangs mostly in Dresden but sometimes goes on tour around the world. This event of forgiveness was so intense that it spurred composer Benjamin Britten to write a cycle for Tenor, Horn and Piano called 1940: Still Falls the Rain, based on poetry of Edith Sitwell. In the truest sense of the word, a Church was the absolute turning point of WWII, and most don't even know about it.

And Coventry today:

In terms of attendance and roster, the largest Chuch in the USA is Lakewood Church in Houston, TX, with over 45,000 members!

The largest physical Church building in the world is St. Peters Basilica in Rome. The second largest is The Basilica of the National Shrine of our Lady of Aparecida in Aparecida, Brasil.

The oldest Synagogue building in the world is hard to pin down exactly (because archeologists are still digging), but most likely the Synagogue in Erfurt, Germany, from 1100 AD, is the oldest. The Santa Maria la Blanca Synagogue in Toledo, Spain, was built in 1190. However, neither building has been used as a Synagogue for centuries.

The only holy communion taken on the Moon was in July 1969, when Buzz Aldrin, a presbyterian, administered the sacrament himself before exiting the lunar lander and becoming the 2nd man ever to touch the surface of our moon.

 

[Statistikhengst]

January 19, 2015:

Rain contains Vitamin B-12.

 

[Pogo]

Saudada (Portugese) - best translation: certain form of "longing". Say it in the wrong context, get yet block knocked off.

Actually it's Saudade (sow-DOD-dee in Europe, sow-DOD-djee in Brasil). It does mean a melancholy wistful heart-rending longing feeling but I've never heard of it as a fightin' word.

Saudade is perhaps closest to the African-American concept of "the Blues" -- in the sense of mood, not the musical genre. Although the concept deeply colours the spirit of the music of Portugal and its children...

-- as here, expressed by Cape Verdean Cesaria Evora -- "Sodade" is the same word in Cape Verdean Criollo (Creole).... note the plaintive minor chords. That's what saudade sounds like.

​

 

[Statistikhengst]

Saudada (Portugese) - best translation: certain form of "longing". Say it in the wrong context, get yet block knocked off.

Actually it's Saudade (sow-DOD-dee in Europe, sow-DOD-djee in Brasil). It does mean a melancholy wistful heart-rending longing feeling but I've never heard of it as a fightin' word.

Saudade is perhaps closest to the African-American concept of "the Blues" -- in the sense of mood, not the musical genre. Although the concept deeply colours the spirit of the music of Portugal and its children...

-- as here, expressed by Cape Verdean Cesaria Evora -- "Sodade" is the same word in Cape Verdean Criollo (Creole).... note the plaintive minor chords. That's what saudade sounds like.

​

Bey zhe yay, sawree, Aye spehld iht rawng.