IOW, just an ordinary evening of fun. Bwaahh haa haa!
Pete Townshend has been going to same wine store in London for 50 years and they never send him a bill even when he asks for one. They just add it to his tab but never ask him to pay the tab.
Long term planning - I bet they are going to present his estate with the tab. 
That will ruin his estate. He never was shy about his drinking habits 
.
ETA: and if his estate is made to pay for all the guitars he smashed, then they’re truly fucked.
All “unmarked” swans in the UK are owned (in theory) by the Queen. There are very, very, few that are privately owned, and must have a mark on their beaks showing this fact. An annual count is taken of the swans on the Thames, and some are banded for tracking purposes.
From Wikipedia:
In Scotland, the monarch’s property right inheres in those whales too large to be pulled to land by a “wain pulled by six oxen”; in practice, this is interpreted as requiring the whales to be over 25 feet (7.6 m) long.
I may be the only person who didn’t know this but…
I noticed in a listings mag that Dirty Dancing was on TV - starring Jennifer Grey. I’m not a big fan of DD but I loved Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and she was great in that. Two big films then … not so much.
Wondering what happened next, I looked up her wiki; I was unaware she had a famous father:
- Joel Grey.
j
Not sure this exactly fits here, but what the heck. My wife and I were watching a Star Trek: TNG rerun last night and there was a scene with a woman playing the piano. And I thought “that sounds familiar”, as the Closed Captioning told me that it was “Moonlight Sonata”. Which I’ve heard of, but not sure I’ve ever heard. Then it clicked… it’s the “ringtone” music that my car plays when someone is calling me.
What kind of car do I drive? A Hyundai Sonata! 
Wool-capped Monkee Mike Nesmith’s mother invented Liquid Paper®, eventually selling her company for over $47,000,000.
Oh, you knew that? How 'bout this:
In 1999, wool-capped Monkee Mike Nesmith won a lawsuit against PBS. He was apparently awarded about $47,000,000.
I see Ron Popeil (as in, Ronco) died. I had this Ronco compilation LP.
https://www.discogs.com/Various-Love-Rock/release/2786724
When shopping records like this, I used to calculate that if I liked a song I counted it as 1. Kinda liked it? .5, but if I really loved it, 1.5. I rank this album overall at 13.5. And sometimes I didn’t know a song by title so it was a wild card. This added up well and was worth the $5 I bought it for back in the day.
I never considered (but should have) that cramming more tracks onto the LP would compromise its sonic qualities.
You see, a regular 12" inch vinyl LP can hold up to about 23 minutes of music per side. This simply means the grooves were cut at normal depth and width.
For a K-Tel or Ronco record, the grooves were much finer. But the reduced depth/width of the grooves also meant reduced dynamic range… So it really didn’t sound as good as a conventional record and you had to turn up the volume a bit louder than you would on a regular album. Plus, they were also more susceptible to surface noise - sometimes brand new out of the sleeve. Stuck and skipping records were common without extreme care. But you had a record that could play for nearly a full half hour per side (usually 27-28 minutes), if you weren’t too picky.
TBH I couldn’t hear it, possibly because the source was a lousy single (AM mono) speaker in the family sedan. Per my brother’s suggestion, I would record the LP’s desired tracks onto cassette immediately, hoping to avoid later scratches etc. A classic from that album:
Candice Bergen’s father, Edgar John Bergen, was the famous ventriloquist of puppet of Charlie McCarthy. As a child, Candice says she was in constant competition with the puppet who had its own room which was larger than hers. She was cut out of her father’s will, but the puppet inherited $10,000.
The ventriloquist was quite attached to the puppet.
K-Tel also snipped verses, intros, and outros, to shorten the songs, and thus allow more songs to be packed.
I lost my childhood innocence when my K-Tel version of Carry on Wayward Son started fading out right when it got to the good part.
Damn, it must have gone on forever.
/s
God’ll get you for that!
I’ll… carry on.
Learned this from an episode of QI. The Molotov Cocktail wasn’t invented by Molotov. It was invented because of Molotov.
The name “Molotov cocktail” was coined by the Finns during the Winter War, called Molotovin koktaili in Finnish. The name was a pejorative reference to Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who was one of the architects of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed in late August 1939.
The name’s origin came from the propaganda Molotov produced during the Winter War, mainly his declaration on Soviet state radio that bombing missions over Finland were actually airborne humanitarian food deliveries for their starving neighbours. As a result, the Finns sarcastically dubbed the Soviet cluster bombs “Molotov bread baskets” in reference to Molotov’s propaganda broadcasts. When the hand-held bottle firebomb was developed to attack Soviet tanks, the Finns called it the “Molotov cocktail”, as “a drink to go with his food parcels”.
This is a nerdy one.
In 1960 it was decided there would be two defined temperatures:
absolute zero at exactly -273.15 °C
and
triple point of water at exactly 0.01 °C.
All other temperatures, including other fixed points (e.g. the freezing point of zinc) would be measured based on these two defined temperatures.
That changed a couple years ago. In 2019, it was decided the Boltzmann constant – which previously was a measured quantity – would be a defined quantity. It is now defined as 1.380649×10⁻²³ J⋅K⁻¹.
Now that the Boltzmann constant is a defined quantity, it means the temperature of the triple point of water is no longer defined. It is now a measured quantity. In the future, we may discover the triple point of water is actually closer to 0.0100003 °C, as an example.
Temperature metrologists are sorta bummed about this. The triple point of water has been their pride-and-joy for almost 60 decades, and now it has been demoted to just another temperature.
Actor Richard Edson, probably most familiar as the parking garage attendant in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, was the original drummer for the band Sonic Youth.
“Welcome to my world.” – Pluto