This may not be best for IMHO, but it’s the best one I could come up with … weirdness is an opinion sometimes, I guess.
Anyway, the Washington Post runs a weekly humor contest called the Style Invitational. I thought this week’s would be quite appropriate for the folks here and wanted to present it to you.
The contest is slightly different this time around, though, if you’re familiar with it. Usually it’s a creative exercise, but this time they’re looking for FACTS. Specifically, come up with true facts that are completely unimportant, but in a weird sort of way. The examples are 1. The average garbage disposal motor has a service life of 15 hours. 2. A glass of hippopotamus milk contains, on average, 80 calories. 3. The number of ethnic Bashkirs in Bashkiria is exceeded by the number of Tatars. In neighboring Tataria, the reverse is true.
The chemical element Gallium, as used in GaAs LEDs (Gallium Arsenide Light Emitting Diodes) is a solid, semi-metallic (actually it is a III-V compound) material at room temperature. Yet, hold a small lump of gallium in your hand long enough and it will melt into a liquid. That is how close one of gallium’s eutectic transition points is to our own ambient temperature. Alloy gallium with minute traces of arsenic and suddenly, +1,000°C furnace temperatures are needed to melt it.
Everybody knows the western Roman Empire was destroyed by the Germans in 476.
What is not commonly known is that the Roman Empire was actually restored from 535 to 572. (Well, OK, it was the Byzantines who took over Italy, but they were still the Roman Empire.)
King Friday? Sorry, but that etymology is false. Sincere comes from the root *sem- meaning ‘one’ as in same, simple, simultaneous, and single; plus the root *ker- ‘to grow’. So the original idea is ‘of one growth’; i.e. natural, not fake.
I’m calling bullshit on that one. If you used a disposal for just one minute a day this would imply that the motor would only last two and a half years.
No it is not, O Revtim. The “Holy Roman Empire” referred to the successor kingdoms of Charlemagne’s realm in Germany. From about the 10th century down to the 19th. Voltaire said it was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.”
I once read that to aid repairmen in finding leaks in natural gas pipes in desert areas, a certain scent is added to the gas that vultures find “sexually appealing.” The repairmen then just look for the large congregation of vultures to pinpoint the leak.
:eek: