Tell us an interesting random fact you stumbled across (Part 1)

I didn’t happen to look back to Exapno’s original, and thought you had emphasized “broken,” which is why I thought you were saying it wasn’t broken.

But if you had posted a quote instead of a bald link, that would have made your point clearer.

More damage left behind by the Ghostbusters. The Mayor was right to lock them up.

TIL that John Ratzenberger, who played Cliff Clavin on Cheers, was a member of the stage-building crew at Woodstock.

The phrase “Revenge is a dish best served cold” was coined in Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn. Earlier versions of the phrase exist, but the specific wording we’re all familiar with comes from Star Trek.

The Klingon Wiki says that the phrase appeared before TWOK in the 1967 movie Death Rides a Horse and in the 1969 novel The Godfather. I don’t know if that’s true.

It was first translated into actual Klingon in 1996 by Marc Okrand, the creator of the Klingon language. He rendered it as bortaS bIr jablu’DI’ reH QaQqu’ nay’, literally “When one serves cold revenge, the dish is very good.”

In college, I once participated in an MS 150 bike tour from Houston to Austin. At one point in the ride, there was a very long, perfectly straight downhill section of two-lane highway in the hill country of Texas, with what appeared to be an equally long uphill climb on the other side. I therefore endeavored to pick up as much speed as possible by pedaling as hard as I could in top gear a good portion of the way downhill. At some point I realized I was going much, much faster than I had counted on and was going downhill at a terrifyingly high speed, but at that point I was concentrating too hard on maintaining control and not hitting a bump to look down at my speedometer. I then made it more than halfway up the other hill before I slowed down.

My digital speedometer did record my maximum speed though. I hit 63 mph! :scream: I shudder to this day what the consequences would have been if I’d fallen. :grimacing:

After peddling up to the top of Emigration Canyon outside Salt Lake City (to prove to myself that I could do it), I turned around and let gravity take over. I don’t know how fast I was going, because I had no speedometer, but it was scary fast. I slowed down and took the rest of the trip in stages.

It seems to me the problem some people had with your posts is that you said that she was wearing a shackle and chains. There is a broken chain on the base, but there is no indication that Lady Liberty was herself shackled by them or “wearing” them.

I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole (thanks to something up thread) and ended up reading about Iris Love. A member of the Gugenheim clan and came across not one but two interesting facts:

-1. She was the partner of gossip columnist Liz Smith for 15 yeas. (I didn’t even know that Liz Smith was on that team.)
-2. She was a trained archealogist who lead diggings in several places for temples of Aphrodite. I’m sure her last name had nothing to do with that. :wink:

She died in 2020 from the Covid.

I believe that a fair number of people are not on a “team” but have some degree of flexibility and may experience changes in preference over the course of a lifetime. If Kinsey is to be believed, the strict “team” members may well be in the minority and the overwhelming prevalence of a particular type is largely a cultural affect.
       This does make the most avid advocates of “I was born this way” sowewhat uncomfortable, but the reality is that the person one forms their strongest intimate attachment to is the part that is not a matter of choice, and that is what we should be ok with.

I went down a youtube rabbit hole (hah).

I started with watching terrier packs kill rats on farms in England, which brought up recommended videos of an animal damage management guy using a ferret and greyhounds to exterminate a colony of rabbits which were honeycombing a bank underneath a parking lot. It was astounding just how fast the greyhounds were.

This brought up some videos whose accompanying text was foreign to me (Farsi? not sure). Apparently there’s a sport in the middle east where men bring their greyhounds, salukis, Afghans, etc., to a vast flat desert and release a very fast antelope with a five second lead and the whole pack of sight hounds then gives chase. The dog owners then run to their trucks, jeeps and Land Rovers and keep up with the pack of racing dogs. In the video I watched, the race went on for a few minutes and the antelope got clean away.

But man, those dogs are freaking fast. The truck carrying the camera kept up with the lead dogs and the greyhounds just run full tilt with their spines flexing up and down until you think they couldn’t bear it. But at the end of the race all the dogs were panting and happy and caressed and they looked like they wanted to start all over again.

So there’s a whole sport of desert greyhound racing with a live lure somewhere in the middle east (maybe it was Arabia?) that I had never heard of before.

The rat hunting videos I’ve watched feature a guy who rescued an American mink from a fur farm and raised it to work with his dogs to exterminate rats. The mink can get at any rats in their holes and the dogs chase down any rats that run.

There is a decaying dilapidated building not far from us on Route 1 i Saugus MA. The building has been condemned but not torn down. It seems to have been that way forever.

Someone just but up a very neat, very new sign on it reading

Prada Saugus

(20+) Facebook

My wife and I are going to the Saugus Iron Works today!

I hope you enjoy it!

They just finished rebuilding the furnace proper, and he museum and buildings ought to be open now.

And think that when it was running, the dammed up Saugus River pretty much covered Route one north of Walnut Street.

An homage to Prada Marfa?

Everybody loves Saugus, but no one wants to watch it being made.

Not everybody.

Jonathan Harr, in his book a Civil Action (the one about chemical contamination of drinking water in Woburn, MA that got turned into a movie starring John Travolta back in 1998) called Saugus “A grubby blue-collar town”

Hollywood seems to like Saugus, through. They filmed scenes here for Ted and Grown-ups II. The Holdovers shot scenes in The Continental restaurant here. IMDB gives a list of other films that shot scenes locally (although it’s possible that some are in Saugus, CA):

See also here

and here

Ritalin is older than I am. It was first synthesised in 1944 by Leandro Panizzon, and named for his wife Rita. Approved for medical use in the US in 1955 and launched in 1957. I had no idea it was that old. Source: Methylphenidate - Wikipedia

Even more surprising (to me):

The first clear description of ADHD is credited to George Still in 1902 during a series of lectures he gave to the Royal College of Physicians of London.

Source: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder - Wikipedia

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I just found out that the lonely composer seen in Hitchcock’s film Rear Window was Ross Bagdasarian - a.k.a. David Seville, the guy who brought us the Chipmunks and the “Witch Doctor” song.

And also that he and author William Saroyan were cousins.