When Charles Darwin returned home from the Galapagos Islands, he brought many living specimens of newly discovered animals. Almost all of the animals survived the journey—except the giant turtles.
And–drum roll please–the reason the turtles did not survive was:
The ship’s crew had eaten them.
( cite: I saw it on an episode of QI. If Stephen Frye says it on QI, then it’s true. )
A thing I knew before the Phineas and Ferb episode: the things on the tips of shoelaces are called aglets. I have no cite, but I believe that aglets preceded shoelaces.
The official name of our smallest state isn’t “Rhode Island and Put Away Wet”, it’s “The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations”.
A New Zealander inventor built the MONIAC, a computer which used the flow of water to model the financial processes of the UK, in 1949.
Technically, birds are not only reptiles, they are dinosaurs.
There are ten times more bacterial cells in your body than human cells.
The tune used for The Star-Spangled Banner is from an old English drinking song. Apparently the drunks could handle singing it.
Also, there are mites living in your eyelashes (Thank you, Dead Milkmen).
Emily Dickinson’s poetry can be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”. Try it with “Because I could not stop for Death”. It’s amusing.
Really enjoyed the article on whales.
I would suggest an article on submarine communications cables. Did you know the first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid before the U.S. Civil War?
An article on the ENIAC would also be cool.
It contained over 17,000 vacuum tubes. It weighed 30 tons. It could perform 385 multiplications per second. The iPhone 4 can perform 2,000,000,000 instructions per second.
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” fits perfectly to “Hernando’s Hide-a-way”
/shamelessly stolen from NPR
The Devil’s Kettle in Wisconsin:
Basically it’s a river that splits in two. One half goes over a waterfall and the other goes into a hole in the ground. No one knows where the hole leads, or where the water that pours into it ends up.
There are three words that end in “-gry”. I just learned the third word: hangry
It’s when you start dieting and realize your former meals were way too large. I thought it was a misspelling or lame word my always-complaining-on-facebook sister-in-law made up. But it’s in the Urban Dictionary, meaning the word has sadly got some legs.
“And long may the Sons of Anachrion entwine
The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s vine.”
(that’s the “oh say does that star spangled” part.)
I give you: Trailer Bride, performing “Hope Is A Thing With Feathers.”
$ grep 'gry$' /usr/share/dict/words
aggry
ahungry
angry
anhungry
hungry
unangry
You can also sing “O, Little Town of Bethlehem” to “House of the Rising Sun.” Bob Rivers even made a recording of it with an Animals sound-alike band.
This is a dumb joke, and you just told it wrong, which means your result is meaningless. Here it goes: “Think of words that end in ‘-gry’. ‘Angry’ and ‘hungry’ are two of them. There are three words in the English language. What is the third one? The word is something everyone uses every day. If you listened, I’ve already told you.”
The answer:The answer is “language”. See? There are three words in the phrase “the English language”, the third one is “language”, and yes, my face is eminently punchable now that I’ve wasted your time with that moronic trick question posing as a riddle.Wikipedia has an article on this whole mess. So does Merriam-Webster and Oxford Dictionaries and you-know-who.
I’ve had days that went like that.
Kris Kristofferson is the only Rhodes Scholar who has written a No 1 hit.
tons of good suggestions, all.
i have to say my article on salt water vs fresh was one of the most enlightening i’ve done. drowning in fresh water sounds so much more terrible.
i have a running list so i’ll add on.
my post on the Anitkythera mechanism fell flat, which surprised me. people really seem to love the kind of kook “conspiracy” stuff the most, like the solway firth spaceman.
I have been sitting on Coral Castle as my 100th post, so excited for that.
Well, thank you very much. I just blew my whole evening reading the entire page.
If you can write articles in list form, I think you’d fit right in over at Cracked.com.
Unless you’ve been to coral castle, it is indeed odd that anyone would ever go twice. Guy digs up coral makes crappy museum, then hypes it up.