Tell us an interesting random fact you stumbled across (Part 2)

Kiwis (aka Chinese Gooseberries) are not even related to gooseberries. They grow on very large vines with big fuzzy leaves, and are from China. The fruit may vaguely resemble giant gooseberries if you squint.

Gooseberries are spiny shrubs related to currants. Not the currants you get in the store, because currants, like gooseberries, are hosts to White Pine Blister Rust, which is a killer of merchantable pine. Because of this, some states ban growing black currants in particular (there are also red currants, usually permitted). Because of all this, the currants in stores are not currants at all, but are tiny raisins from a tiny variety of grape called Corinthian.

I’ve got one for you. The word currant itself was originally coined for those very same Corinthian raisins. Corinth > currant, get it? The name was only secondarily applied to Ribes spp., which are ironically now called the “true currants.”

Didn’t Ricardo Montalbán once talk about those rich Corinthian raisins?

Whenever I hear “Corinthian”, I hear it as the third thing after “Doric” and “Ionic”. I do not believe that the Corinthian capital typically included currant leaves.

I did not know that.
Hence, I guess, “Ribena”

That explains that! I’d heard somewhere that currants were a variety of grape, but my mom, an expert on all sorts of berries, assured me that that was not the case, and that the currants she used for jams were nothing at all like grapes.

On the Tyler’s grandson one, one a bit closer to home: The school I teach at was founded in 1890, which makes it a very old school indeed, by American standards. This year, one of our counselors retired, after 46 years of service in various forms to the school. The principal pointed out that this meant that she’d been working for the school for over a third of its existence.

When she started, there were still nuns teaching at the school, and they’re famous both for their longevity and for working long past when most folks would retire, so it probably wouldn’t take too many links to get back to the school’s founding.

Thank you!

Wikipedia’s “Did you know” section today mentions that Chicago’s tornado sirens have been described as creepier than actual tornados. After listening to it, I have to agree.

In all the years I lived in Chicago I can’t remember ever hearing that, But I may have just wiped it from my memory.

TIL (though wasn’t surprised) in 1918 a movement of war-fevered hyper-patriotism flared up in Wisconsin. Reactionary against the reluctance among its German-American, Socialist, and pacifist elements, it included incidents of violence against Wisconsin citizens deemed not in line with the national mood.

Sounds like something from a “Siren Head” video.

I was thinking the wails the US Army used to scare the NVA.

In a 1953 episode of This is Your Life, Hanna Bloch Kohner became the first Holocaust survivor to be interviewed on U.S. national TV. She was “presented as grateful for her new home in the United States—a country that had, in fact, denied her refuge before the war…note that the word ‘Holocaust’ is never heard” during the episode.

This article puts the appearance in context of both Hollywood’s and the U.S. government’s pre-and-post-war approach to the Holocaust. The episode itself is on YT. I found it uncomfortable viewing primarily owing to the intrusive - and sickeningly inappropriate - plugs for the show’s sponsors (and because I got to know Hanna and her husband Walter not long before their deaths).

If gravity acts like a force, then wouldn’t any objects in free-fall continue to experience the same force they feel at rest. If you were in free-fall and you tried to push something away from the direction of the fall, wouldn’t it “weigh” as much as if you were trying to pick it up off the ground?

That’s not what we observe, however.

A Philadelphia radio DJ coined the term “blue-eyed soul” in 1964, initially to describe the Righteous Brothers.

Dude, WTF!? Who thought that was a good thing to play at a time of impending doom?

Because a big city has a lot of sirens and alarms during the course of a normal day, something like a tornado warning has to be distinctive (AKA “weird”)

Yeah, I guess that makes sense but it does sound weird and gloomy.

Holocaust was not used at that time. It didn’t develop as a term until the late 60s

In other words, “They have that black sound, but it’s OK for all you racists out there, because they’re white”.