Sunday shopping has come to Stornoway (Outer Hebrides/Western Isles, Scotland). One of the last holdouts anywhere, Sunday shopping starts today under protest. When I visited there about 20 years ago - the only place you could get a meal (and the only place open) on a Sunday was in one hotel. Even the ferries to the Scottish “mainland” didn’t run (they do now - but only one return trip a day). Tesco row shows Sundays are still sacred on Hebridean islands
Not only does Singapore have 4 official languages, which is already unusual for a city, but each of these languages belong to completely unrelated families :
- English (Indo-European)
- Malay (Austronesian)
- Chinese (Sino-Tibetan)
- Tamil (Dravidian)
It might well be a unique case.
And after riding the Singapore metro a few times, you will have memorized what “Doors closing” is in the other three languages.
If the operator took more than a few seconds to reply, many people would start “rattling” the receiver. This sent a series of highly irritating clicks to the operator which, on a private switchboard at any rate, could be counter-productive.
Not so much. The operator would not be listening to your line or extension at all until they had made a connection to it. The flashing light mentioned by Spectre was not accompanied by any sound on the operator’s headset.
(Source: My MIL who was an operator for BellSouth and set up/trained switchboards for private companies for many years. She says that SOME switchboard assemblies could be set up to make a sound when the light came on, but this was primarily at hotels where the front desk person would need to go back to handle the switchboard when required. This did not, however, produce clicks in the operator headset.)
TIL that animator Don Bluth is related to Mitt Romney of the GOP.
“It is very rare and uncommon, but the fear of bananas or bananaphobia does exist.” - Fear of Bananas Phobia – Bananaphobia
Yeah, my dad was in elementary school in West L.A. at the time of that earthquake, and he told us kids that nearly all the school buildings in Long Beach and many in Los Angeles had collapsed during that earthquake. That occured at 3:30 pm. If it had happened even a little bit earlier hundreds of kids could have been killed.
I don’t think that @bob_2 was referring to sounds on the headset. I think he was referring to clicking from relays opening and closing.
The '71 Sylmar quake was a fun one. Out in the 909 I watched every pool on the block wave themselves empty from my second story bedroom. This one happened at 6am.
I was in West LA and in First Grade. It knocked me out of bed. We turned on the tv and saw the news of the wreckage. The thing that struck me was the Emergency Broadcast System. After years of “this is a test. this is only a test”, it wasn’t a test! Our house had a crack in the stucco but no major damage. We went to school as normal.
Carl Dreyer’s astonishing film was immediately cut into various versions due to both church and government censorship, and then a fire destroyed the original master negative… In 1981, a janitor discovered a complete version, forgotten in a mental institution in Asker, Norway. Then the University of Norway didn’t open the canisters for another three years. So for nearly 60 years, no one saw the film as intended.
I saw the film in the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, when it had been set to a modern score the Symphony and chorus was performing, by Richard Einhorn, called Voices of Light. That score (there have been several), written in medieval Latin and French, is phenomenal all by itself.
All around memorable.
Bananas are one of my two phobias. The other is fear of watching amateur theatricals.
Yes, but not audible to the operator. You could jiggle the switch on your phone set all you wanted, but no “clicks” were audible to the operator until she had selected your line and was ready to talk to you. Depressing the receiver switch basically disconnects a typical T&R circuit from the central office. (Greatly simplified, but there are some excellent YT videos that show you how manual switchboards work.)
King for a day. Translated from Spanish Wikipedia.
John de Lepe went down in history for winning a double-handed card game in which [King Henry VII of England] had bet the rents his kingdom produced in one day and the appointment (symbolic) as “king of England” on that same day, because of this, he was known as "the little king of England," gaining fame throughout the English kingdom.
Smithsonian magazine ran a bit about it, so at least someone respectable vouches for its history. I can’t find a date, though.
I saw it in a film class at UCLA in 1973. There was no soundtrack, so the professor subbed in the Missa Luba. Surprisingly, it worked out really well. Also, he said that Dreyer tool Maria Falconetti into a nearby forest and tied her to a tree and left her there overnight the day before they shot the bonfire sequence.
Here’s one I just learned last night:
Michael Jackson was born August 29, 1958, and died June 25, 2009. His infamous pyrotechnic accident occurred on January 27, 1984.
Exactly the halfway point of his life. He was born 9282 days before the pyrotechnic accident, and died 9282 days after it happened.
According to the Port of London Thames Byelaws, Clause 36.2, a bale of straw has to be placed under London’s river bridges “when the headroom of an arch or span of a bridge is reduced from its usual limits”. Nobody knows the history of this law but it must date back hundreds of years.
A few weeks ago, a road bridge over the River Lea (a tributary to the Thames) was covered in scaffolding for maintenance repairs and upgrades. So currently there are two bales of hay hanging under the East India Dock Road bridge.
It happened last year as well when workers were dangling under the Millennium Bridge in central London…
I nominate this for the title: The Most Random Fact In The Universe.
I agree. Although it looks like we’ll get a lot more of these with AI finding them.