The “Savage Mountain” K2 gets its name from its Karakorem Scale designation. Mountain heights are compared using the Karakoram Scale, with Mount Everest being the tallest (K1), K2 being the second highest, and Khanchenjunga (K3) being the third. Interestingly enough, after K2, you have to go all the way down to K61 (24,370 ft) to find a another mountain that is known only by its K-Scale name. Many locals incorrectly refer to K61 as “K12” because the height of the mountain was seriously misjudged for decades by geographers and only corrected in 1935 when the estimated height was lowered by almost 2200 feet.
There 2200 feet in an imperial nautical mile.
The Sun gets closer to the Earth by 2,200 miles every year. By the end of this millennium it will have burned Mercury to ashes.
The last Mercury, a Grand Marquis, was produced on January 4, 2011 and was painted Smokestone Metallic. Following the final wishes of Edsel Ford, his ashes were mixed into the final coat of this final Mercury.
:: Does it ever happen to you that a better word pops into your head AFTER the five-minute edit window has closed? I wish I’d named the last Mercury the Grand Finale <sigh> ::
The Marquis de Sade was described by his neighbors as " nice, though quiet, sort of guy." Their nickname for him was “le finale grande.”
Voltaire on his deathbed uttered that he now is about to enter “le grand peut-être.” (“The great perhaps.”)
Voltaire was the illegitimate son of Cardinal Richelieu.
Cardinal Richelieu liked to sing along to Desi Arnaz’ hit song “Babalu” while pretending to play the bongo drum on an empty oatmeal carton.
Cardinal Richelieu actually had a morbid fear of cardinals (the birds), a result of an attack by a flock of them when he was a small child growing up in Nantes. He far preferred robins, parakeets, bluejays, owls, hawks, kites, doves and especially pigeons, of which he owned an estimated 73 over the course of his life, naming each “Georges.”
There are exactly 73 fluid ounces in a gallon.
The gallon was originally based on buckets large enough to hold the daily urine output of two prisoners at the Tower of London.
A bushel was originally based on baskets large enough to hold the daily output of dung from the donkey used to pull the urine cart at Buckingham Palace.
Abercrombie Henderson hold the record for the highest number of points scored by an individual in a donkey basketball game. Riding a burro named Felix, Henderson scored 74 points for his Reynolds High School team against North Brockton.
Presidents Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant and Bill Clinton were all graduates of Reynolds High School. Millard Fillmore also attended, but was expelled for cheating in his biology class.
President Andrew Johnson would get furiously angry when people accidentally called him “Andrew Jackson”. To this day the Andrew Johnson Memorial Library will summarily expel anyone who calls him Andrew Jackson.
President Lyndon B. Johnson regularly picked up his beagle Bessame by her tail and blew on her “rosebud”. He thought it was hilarious that this made Bessame’s ears fly up. A journalist from the Washington Post uncovered evidence that Johnson had secretly trained Bessame to lift her ears on cue.
Sherry Ann Johnson, a librarian from Idaho, won the first and only duplicate solitaire world championship in a 1996 tournament held in Madrid. The event, sponsored by the now defunct Global Duplicate Solitaire League, had over 2400 participants. Johnson won in a sudden death playoff despite having a poorer time than her opponent Harvey Chan because Chan inadvertently played his ten of diamonds on his heart pile, thereby incurring several penalty points that ultimately cost him the title.
Some 80% of Americans do not play bridge and don’t know the first thing about its rules. Only in very rare circumstance does this enter into their consciousness.
While most Americans have never played contract bridge, of those people, 3 out of 5 will intuitively know the rules when sat blindfolded at a table with three experienced players who they’ve never met before. Scientists are baffled by this strange, random phenomenon.