On my previous message board, a poster whose user name was “d” followed but something that was plausibly a last name, posted a comment that seemed so true that I used it for my sig for a while:
I guess I look enough like one particular celebrity - not gonna say which one - so I get the occasional comment “Has anyone told you that you look like __?” Anyhow, life is too short to waste time on such a discussion. I’ve managed to turn it around by saying, “yeah, but I prefer to think that they do look a lot like me. They got lucky for sure. (smile).”
Having read this in a post by @Beckdawrek:
(and BTW I never heard the term “civilian khakis” before - maybe it’s exclusively “chinos” in the UK) I found myself wondering, where does the word chinos come from? Here’s your answer:
Short and sweet.
j
Everything not military issue was civilian in my Daddy’s world.
Fair enough.
Here’s a weird aside arising from this. I just googled “civilian khakis” - in quotes, to make sure I was looking for the full phrase, and got 14 600 hits. Commonly used phrase, then? Well, on page 3 of the hits you find this:
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 21 already displayed.
14 600 cut down to 21? Is this a record? (And maybe it was pretty specific to your daddy!)
j
I think the lion costume worn by Bert Lahr in The Wizard of Oz takes the cake. It weighed between 60 and 90 pounds (cites don’t agree on a precise weight), and was made from real lion skin and fur. The set was very hot due to the lights that were used, and Bert sweated buckets inside that thing. The costume sold for $3M around ten years ago.
I sat on a park bench and a familiar-looking woman sat down at the other end. As I biked home, I saw a Comedy Club with a sign: “Sarah Sherman from SNL, tonight!”
(I should’ve invited her out for local delicacies, like bratwurst…)
Let me guess… that’s someone who started college in the early '70s, and every time they said “Hi, I’m Dave”, EVERY SINGLE PERSON had to say “Dave’s not home, man…”
And then guffaw at their own cleverness.
I’m pretty sure.
Yeah, it’s George Costanza for me. But when I was younger they called me “Radar.”
The platypus has no stomach.
The fig isn’t actually a fruit. It’s an “enflorescence”, which means that it’s a structure that’s full of flowers. It has a small opening in it that wasps crawl into, to pollinate the flowers.
(I learned this from a novel I just read, narrated in part by a fig tree).
60 lbs dry weight; 90 after all the sweat.
I heard this before. Also, juniper berries aren’t really berries, but basically miniature pine cones.
The deadliest avalanche in the UK… took place pretty much on the South Coast of England (give or take 11 km).
From the same wiki page:
A public house called the Snowdrop Inn (named in commemoration of the incident) was built in South Street on the site once occupied by Boulder Row, and still trades under the same name today. The white dress being worn by Fanny Boakes when she was rescued was preserved and is now in the Anne of Cleves House museum in Lewes.
We walked past the Snowdrop Inn today, and here we are. And that issue with the cliff overlooking the town is something you can’t miss.
Bonus weird fact: this is the Fouth time I’ve posted about Lewes in this thread - that place never disappoints. Oh, yeah, Anne of Cleves House - no, really:
j
Bill Dana, the comedian who adopted the José Jiménez persona, wrote perhaps the most famous episode of All in the Family, “Sammy’s Visit,” starring Sammy Davis Jr. and the kiss that startled America.
A new species of millipede has been discovered in LA. Cue hundreds of jokes about agents, lawyers, publicists…
Are micropedes actually smaller than millipedes, or just the legs?
There was also one north of Muncie on highway THREEEEE…
iykyk
I’m just getting caught up on this thread, and this comment (about the sign that shows the distances to Ham and Sandwich) is too good to go by without applause. Bravo!
I do have my own interesting random fact, which I learned while preventing my cat from murdering a small lizard: the New Mexico whiptail lizard is a female-only species. New individuals are created either by the hybridization of the little striped whiptail and the western whiptail or by parthenogenesis. Only females that have engaged in mating behavior with another female produce eggs, leading some to call them “the lesbian lizard.” They’re the state reptile of New Mexico!
Thanks to @Francis_Vaughan , today I learned dolphins can hear audio frequencies that are above 100 kHz. (For reference, most humans can’t hear frequencies much above 20 kHz.)