Neat little fark thread - I plucked these out and tried to verfity - (many in the thread are obvious ULs)
The ones below seem to pan out.
Psychogenic dwarfism
James Barrie grew up an only child after losing an older brother in a tragic accident. His parents became increasingly cold to him, with his father ignoring him upon entering a room (even tripping over him) and his mother asking his every morning if he was his brother. Years of this treatment so traumatized him that he developed a condition known as psychogenic dwarfism and never grew over the height of an average nine-year-old child. As an adult, he would write Peter Pan, a play about a boy who never grew up.
The sperm whale tapeworm, H. physesteris, can be > 30 m long, and each segment has 4-14 complete sets of genitalia. There can be up to 45,000 segments in a worm.
Leo Fender, inventor of (arguably) the two most successful electric guitars, did not himself play guitar.
Cellophane is not made of plastic. it is made from a plant fiber, cellulose, which has been shredded and aged. cellophane was invented in 1908 by a swiss chemist named jacques brandenberger who was trying to make a stain proof tablecloth and ended up with cellophane instead.
No it isn’t. Technically, it’s an infusion, not a juice. One doesn’t squeeze or pulverize coffee berries and filter out their juice, one soaks the cooked seed of the coffee plant in water to extract the essential oils and other flavoring agents. The fleshy berry part is discarded before the ground bean ever hits water.
Now SUGAR, sugar is technically dehydrated juice - if wheatgrass juice, carrot juice, celery juice and other non-fruit oriented liquid extracts are “juice”. So sugar water is reconstituted sugar cane or corn juice!
This site gives him an extra 2 inches, so I’ll agree with the height fact in general (he must have been careful regarding photographs, even so) but I’m still dubious over the “traumatised by his parents” thing.
Not only is cellophane not plastic, its cousin, rayon, isn’t polysester as is often believed (polyester is made from crude oil, cellophane and rayon are made from wood or other types of cellulose).
So, the next time someone casually lumps rayon in with polyester fabrics, defend the honor of this fine fabric with a swift kick in the ass (unless they’re actually wearing rayon, that is; then, a stern talking-to is more appropriate).
My favorite unbelievable but true fact is about the B-52, the primary U.S. long-range strategic bomber with nuclear capability. The B-52 was designed in the 1950’s and most of the ones in service today were built in the early 1960’s. The military has tried to come up with a better replacement a few times over the years and they couldn’t do it so they largely stopped trying.
The B-52 is not scheduled to be retired until at least 2040 when the design will be almost 90 years old and the planes in use now almost 80 years old. :eek: When the B-52 was sent on bombing runs to Iraq, it would often fly from Missouri to Iraq and back without stopping.
I’m a med student and my endocrine class this past quarter discussed physchogenic dwarfism with JM Barrie used as a famous example. So am going to hope that it’s true and that my professors are not passing on unsubstantiated medical “facts”.
J M Barrie was born in 1860, in Scotland and of a working class family. Now he may have been shorter than average but I very much doubt that there were many six-footers around at the time. I don’t find his height freakishly abnormal for that time or type of family.
Actually, it’s the B-2 (Stealth) that is based in Missouri (Whiteman AFB @ Knob Noster, MO) & sometimes flies nonstop out & back to the target.
While B-52s have also sometimes been used for very long-range missions, many are kept at more forward locations (e.g. Guam) & launch & recover from there.
Actually, the basic B-52 was designed in the late 1940s, with the first prototype flying in 1952. First production delivery was 1955.
I googled Barrie, and instead of the weird version of his own parents not recognizing him, I found every site that mentioned it at all said that he dressed up as his drowned brother (who has his mother’s favorite) to try to comfort her. He was into playacting at that young age, and liked to hear his mother’s stories He wrote a flowery biography of his mother later on, too.
I’m having difficulty believing the dwarfism story. It’s negative evidence, but there’s no mention anywhere of the rest of his family towering over him or anything, which I’d have expected if he hadn’t reached his expected height.
Here’s a picture of him playing croquet with H.G.Wells. He may have been short, but hardly untowardly so.
If you read the above link content, it’s hard not to think of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy that simply hasn’t been conclusively detected. The children thrive when taken away from the caregiver, for one thing. It’s a sort of catch-all diagnosis, e.g., child not growing, child extremely distrubed, no other cause found, or at least proven. (It could also be some sort of House-esque undetected accidental poisening or allergy or something, of course–anything but lupus, because it’s never lupus…).
Personally, I don’t see any proof it exists as a true mentally-induced condition. I’m not a medical doctor, just a suspicious person.
Your link does not say what you think it does. MSBP is a very real illness which causes caretakers to fabricate or induce an illness in their charges to gain sympathy. Are you saying that mothers who slowly poison their children with arsenic to get attention are not sick?
I have to dispute the thrust of this. Cellophane is made of plastic because cellophane IS a plastic. More accurately, it’s a polymer, one of the first artificial commercial ones. The fact that it’s not derived from petroleum id irrelevant – pl;enty of polymers derives from plant matter. Latex rubber is a natural polymer.
