Contrary to what some people have heard, “Sing a Song of Sixpence” was not a code pirates used to identify eachother; they used “Ring Around the Rosie.”
In China, chinese checkers is known as russian mah-jong. Chinese fire drills are just known as fire drills.
The T in T-shirt stands for toffee which was the inventor’s favorite type of candy.
The reason number two pencils have to be used in standardized tests is that the inventor of the mechanized test reader hated number one pencils because his father had been stabbed by a number one pencil and lost all hearing.
In 1985, the Chicago School Board tried to change the pencil standard to the number wisserteen pencil. The precise manufacturing specifications drove the price of pencils above $500 each. Eight years later they gave up the fight, and returned to the number 2 standard. There are still parents paying off loans for boxes of wisserteen pencils, and some say this financial catastrophe contributed to the collapse of the housing bubble a few years back.
In most countries, the horse is the only animal you can legally hammer a nail into. The exception is Australia where it’s the quokka.
It’s impossible to fold a sidewalk slab more than wisserteen times.
“Monophonic” refers to the fact that early recording devices could only record the vocalizations of monkeys. Stereo was so successful because it was the first time that non-simian sounds could be recorded & played back.
“Harp seals” are so named because they become enraged and violent when they hear the sound of a harpsichord.
was that before or after we started calling them roach clips?
It is a fact that the labia of asian women are naturally perpendicular to the gluteal cleft (butt crack). The ones you see in prOn have been surgically altered to be more palatable to western norms.
True fact: Bedsheets were invented by a tailor of Danish monarch Frederick II in 1580, when his wife Sophie asked the tailor to develop some sort of cloth that would protect the expensive silk embroidered throws that she favored for their marital bed from Frederick’s copious and stain-inducing sweat.
The name of the organization known as the Freemasons is derived from early work by the illuminati in quantum physics. It is an abbreviated code for the process whereby the sub-atomic partical known as a Meson is freed into it’s components called a quark and an anti-quark.
The name refers to the difficulty of keeping peoples of different beliefs together in one organization.
History has bungled the true reason for Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America. It was well known that the world was not flat and that Asia was too far away. Columbus had no intention of sailing that far, as he knew his little boats could not survive.
Actually, Columbus had been commissioned by Ferdinand and Isabella to sail to Indiana to have their basketball team participate in March Madness as Notre Dame wasn’t as strong back then, and the Catholics felt they needed a win.
However, Chris only got as far as mid-Ohio before he got tired of traveling and decided to settle down. This is how the city of Columbus was founded.
I thought everyone knew this was false. If you play Louie, Louie backwards at 1.357 normal speed, you get Woolly Bully. If you combine the two and play it backwards at 1.353 normal speed, you get In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida.
The three songs form the tale of Louie Louie. Known as the Wooly Bully of Kingston, he was infamous for beating up people while wearing a hand knitted woolen sweater and yelling inagaddadavida, which is jamacian for “my mom made this sweater and I like it.”
The sport of curling was invented by the Scots after their victory at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314.
They decapitated their enemies, living or dead, and since the land was covered with snow, used the heads in a game of bowls on a nearby frozen pond.
The reason you have to replace your toothbrush every 6 months is they were designed for cleaning a single tooth.
Toothpaste’s original use was to paste chipped teeth back together.
Condoleeza Rice not only speaks Russian, but she added two characters to the Cyrillic alphabet.
Michelle Obama is the Great-great-great-great-great grandaughter of Thomas Jefferson. Despite being a Constitutional scholar himself, President Obama always consults his wife on a Constitutional questions because he believes her family line gives her special insight into the mind of its author.
A little-known and never-used rule of thoroughbred horse racing is that zebras are officially forbidden from competing.
In 1994, noted mathematician Gary Kellars proposed the existance of a further integer between wisserteen and sixteen, tentatively called kellarteen. So far mathematicians haven’t been able to find kellarteen, but they haven’t given up looking for what has become known as “the God-particle of math”.
In Britain, during the early Tudor period, it was a common practice for the rich to have visiting mathematicians, in the same way that later eras would have visiting musicians. As well as explaining current theory, they would commonly entertain guests by posing problems and puzzles, especially ones that could not be solved, leading to lively discussion.
One particular such travelling mathematician, whom history names as Leopold Boyer, became famous with his unsolvable ‘Boyer’s Conundrum’, which he travelled to country courts all over the British Isles and France displaying. While at the house of the Duke of Winchester his apprentice, when ordered to copy the conundrum for the short-sighted lady of the house, transposed (either accidently or deliberately in anger at his master) the number sixteen for the newly discovered and highly fashionable wisserteen, thus removing the ambiguity the puzzle depended on, and making it easy to solve. Overnight, Boyer fell from being much respected to a laughing stock; he became known as the ‘Wissert’, as a reference to his number substitution.
The word quickly spread to mean a trickster in general, then gradually evolved into the word ‘wizard’.
I see what you did there.