Odd facts learned this week

A new pointless thread for all to enjoy/tolerate/ignore.
I’ll start: Thundercats had a psychological consultant named in the credits.

Salix is Latin for willow (as in the tree)

Bernard Manning was a guard at Spandau Prison, guarding amongst others, Rudolf Hess.

My MP lives in a right sh!tty house. It must be, he seems to be claiming just over a grand every quarter for ‘maintenance’. Poor bast@rd.

The ladies changing room at my gym has nicer showers than the gents changing room.

This is the best new fact I have come across in ages:

The twister ice cream lolly (my fave as a child) was invented by a kid appearing on Jim’l fix-it.

Shrapnel was actually invented by a brit called Henry Shrapnel.

I’m not one of teh famed “most people”.

As in, “well most of our customers work that out for themselves”.

(If it’s in teh box it’s only in teh box if you get the thing from teh www site not from phoning even thought they suggest you use the www site to compare items.)

One of my bails partially exploded last night

Old Speckled Hen increases the distance from the pub to your front door.
Took me ages to get there.

i thought chvck said one of his balls partially exploded.

I winced – you will too.

I’m not one of teh famed “most people”.

As in, “well most of our customers work that out for themselves”.

(If it’s in teh box it’s only in teh box if you get the thing from teh www site not from phoning even thought they suggest you use the www site to compare items.)

I learned that its possible for someone to hit the “h” and “e” keys in the wrong order five times in three sentences.

I learned that famed 80’s/90s popsters The The are relaunching themselves for the internet generation as ‘Teh Teh’.

he? eh’s madh a mhss of that!

I just found out that the company I now work for makes fast trains.

thepurist – Member
I learned that famed 80’s/90s popsters The The are relaunching themselves for the internet generation as ‘Teh Teh’.

😆

Did you know that once baby swifts leave the nest they don’t land again for two years – do everything on the wing; eat, sleep, make sweet lurve.

Peterborough is a bigger s**t hole than I remember it being.

simon………ius that really true?

I hope so – I’ve been dining out on it for ages (I go to some interesting dinner parties)

A blackbird’s favourite food is sultanas.

The one in our back garden will come within about 2′ to get them and has even popped inside the kitchen to ask for more.

Its costing us a fortune.

“The one in our back garden will come within about 2′ to get them and has even popped inside the kitchen to ask for more.”

Surely you can make enough money to fund sultanas from taking your talking blackbird on Britains got talent etc.

Apparently there’s a species of fossil crustacean that had spermatazoa about 10 times longer than their bodies. According to “top spunkoarchaeologists”, apparently. Learned it on the Register, and I suspect I’ll be quoting it for some time to come*

*no pun intended

Carrying on from Lunge’s comment about the latin name for willow… Salasylic acid (I think that’s the right spelling), the active ingredient in asparin, can be found in the layer of willow immediately below the bark of it’s branches.

You can get some relief from pain by gently sripping the bark off and chewing the smaller stems.

If youre going to get a screw in your car tyre it will be in the one that you had repaired before, structurally you can only get the tyre repaired once so must purchase replacement tyres for perfectly good ones…

A blackbird’s favourite food is sultanas.

acoording to danny the champion of the world, pheasants too. i wonder if all birds like them?

Florence Nightingale invented the pie chart

A greyhound can accelerate from 0 to 45 mph in one second.

A Rubik’s Cube has more combinations than light travels inches in a year.

All polar bears are left handed

finbar – that can’t be right, sorry. Got a source? 🙂

EDIT: The greyhound thing I mean

Mary Shelley, author of ‘Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus’ was the first passenger on the first railway built in continental Europe (it was in Belgium in 1935).

Jilly Cooper is not infact the writer of books that bear ‘her’ name. She was employed by the publisher to be the front-woman for them because the person writing them under the pseudonym of his choice was in actually the former tory MP Douglas Hurd.

onions are cheaper than apples

A few facts from my sigs file:

The universal gravity constant G is 6.67E-11 to three significant figures. Taking this and the distance of the sun from the earth into account you are about 100g heavier at night than at midday.

–
There is a genus of snails called “Abra” and when a new species was discovered, some wag named it “Cadabra”, so its full scientific name is Abra Cadabra.

–
The 71m packets of biscuits sold annually by United Biscuits, owner of McVitie’s, generate 127.8 tonnes of crumbs.

The longest pier on the UK is in Derby

When Kaliber is brewed it has an alcohol content of i’m not sure what.
It is then put through a malting process to remove the alcohol.

Florence Nightingale was actually mad keen on graphs, or at the very least worked on new ways of charting numbers and suchlike. Not just pie charts!

When the height of Everest was first calculated in 1856, the guy that did it calculated the height to be 29000ft exactly, he subsequently added 2ft as he thought that no one would believe the calculation if it came out to be exactly 29000ft, hence Everest being stated at 29002ft.

The mountain was also named after Sir George Everest.

I learnt this on a setting out course I finished today

Elephants have no pleural space.