December 31, 2008
Animals can’t …
Here’s a list of a few things certain animals just can’t do:
- Turkeys can’t blink.
- Mules can’t step sideways.
- Canarys can’t sing while flying.
- Cats can’t hear music.
December 28, 2008
Phobias of the Phamous (Famous)
Even the rich and famous have troubles with unreasonable fears, or ‘phobias’. Here are a few of the best.
- John Bonham of Led Zepplin was a notorious germophobe, who would make his ‘groupies‘ scrub up for 15 to 20 minutes before he would touch them.
- Benjamin Disraeli could not stand to be in the same room as shellfish. In 1872, he wrote to his brother that ‘the crab is a monstrous creature, more akin to a spider than anything a man of sanity should put in his mouth’.
- 1800s footballer William Cropper, best known for dying due to match-related injuries, was terribly afraid of Yorkshire Terriers.
December 26, 2008
Christmas fun
Until Chinese professor and professional barber Clement Moore wrote ‘The Night Before Christmas’, lore had that there were actually 12 reindeer on Father Christmas’ sleigh. They were:
- Donner and Blitzen (Thunder and Lightning)
- Sonne and Mond (Sun and Moon)
- Leben and Tod (Life and Death)
- Hoffnung and Verzweiflung (Hope and Despair)
- Liebe and Hass (Love and Hatred)
- Darmentleerung and Harn (Defaecation and Urine)
On Urine, on Despair, on Hatred and Shite! Nope. Looks like Clement made the right choice.
Ta, David.
December 20, 2008
Pug love
Pug dogs are cute, lovable and very sweet little pups, but the hyper-inbred breed are host to a variety of ailments including:
- Retinal ticks
- Flaming bowel syndrome
- Wurster ear
- Malodorous sclerosis, and finally
- Herpes
December 18, 2008
Weird vocab
Sorry about the delays lately. Things should be evening out in the near future. In the meantime, here’s two fun words for you:
- Glate (jargon): To shave excess sugar off hard candy during the moulding process.
- Flütterdore (archaic): A bee, wasp or hornet.
Hope that makes your day a little sweeter!
Ta, David.
December 14, 2008
Rarest watch
The rarest watch in the world is the Tormijooksuga. It is reputed to have been constructed only five times.
Made by Estonian watchmaker Urmo Aava, the Tormijooksuga has been rumoured to have been owned by Leonid Brezhnev, Henry Kissinger and three private collectors.
Adding to the history of grand complication watches, the Tormijooksuga not only had a tourbillon to compensate for the earth’s gravity, but rare earth magnets and twin gyroscopes to deal with the coriolis effect, which deals with the rotation of moving spheres. In other words, it’s why the loo flushes the other way in Australia.
No example of the watch is currently known to exist.
December 10, 2008
Hair of the Dog
According to a Jerusalem Institute of Applied Biology study, exposure to the hair of the Weimaraner breed of dog has been linked to pancreatic cancer in case studies of pregnant women.
December 8, 2008
He out-Prousted Proust
Christopher Ogden Nicholson (1899-1931) was not the most prolific author in the world, nor was he regarded as anywhere near the best. But Nicholson did have one enduring credit — some consider him the most long-winded.
At the time of his death from tubercular pneumonia at age 31, Nicholson was reportedly midway (3,781 hand-written pages) into a semi-autobiographical novel he had entitled ‘Memory Dissuaded’.
The book — which he had threateningly entitled ‘Volume 1’ — contained such detailed passages a 271-page description of feeding a single chunk of bread to a Mallard duck on a lake by the house of the narrator’s parents.
The book remains, needless to say, unpublished.
December 6, 2008
On being a little ‘down’
For millenia, the male fear of not “rising” to the occassion has plagued many. Here are some folk remedies used through history.
- Sumerians: In a technique no doubt created by the lads, one technique described in an early Sumerian text was to spend a week living with — and sleeping with –the wife’s sister in a tent at least 40 cubits from the village.
- Incas: Rubbing the affected (or unaffected, if you will) area with gravel trod on by a pregnant mule was one technique early European missionaries reported.
- British: One witchfinders guide from the 1600s said one way witches used to cure male problems was to take a small gudgeon fish and insert it in the rectum of an afflicted male whilst he bites into a mandrake root. No word on whether the fish was alive before or after the process.
- Calveranians: An early king in this enemy of classical Greece was said to have sacrificed a child every time he had ‘inadequacies’, although this might have been propaganda on the part of orator Demosthenes.
December 2, 2008
Human body facts
Sorry for the brief break, but here are a few in a row to make up for it. The topic? Us.
- 60 percent of the potassium in the human body is stored in the hair.
- While it’s not true that people’s nails and hair grow after death, the eyes often open as the body dries, pulling back the lids. This is where the phrase ‘Evil Eye’ comes from.
- Freckles are caused by photosensitive bacterial clusters living under the skin. Anti-bacterial facial scrubs can help tone them down, but not cure them.
- Blondes might have more fun, but people with ginger hair live an average 6.2 years longer.
Ta, David.
Fun Facts for You! 