That was a fun read. This was the best part:
stumbled upon the Internet equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. Here was a hoax that had been in circulation since 1997, laden with factual improbabilities and logical contradictions, widely reviled and frequently debunked yet thriving on a Net strewn with spam and other causes of universal cynicism - a prank lacking in both brains and brawn that nevertheless, cockroach-like, had outlasted the Melissa virus and Saddam Hussein.
Don’t know, that was a quote from the wiki.
Isn’t this the song, about 2:40 in?
Vladimir John Ondrasik III is the full name.
In 1995, Ondrasik signed with EMI Records. He adopted Five for Fighting as a “band name” that same year[17][18] at the request of EMI executives, who found Ondrasik’s name difficult to pronounce.[19] “Five for Fighting” is an ice hockey term that means a five-minute major penalty for participating in a fight. Ondrasik is a lifelong fan of the National Hockey League’s Los Angeles Kings.
That’s it.
Ewen McGregor’s brother is a former Royal Air Force pilot. His call sign was “Obi Two”
The International Gay Rugby Association & Board is commonly referred to by its acronym.
Today I learned that a regiment of French Hussars (cavalry!) once captured a Dutch war fleet in 1795. (Sort of.)
My favorite quote from the article is:
A capture of ships by horsemen is an extremely rare feat in military history.
TL;DR: the harbor froze over.
Today I learned that Omaha was bombed by the Japanese during WWII. Link.
I’d heard of the balloon bombs but I didn’t realize one got that far, I thought of them as a West Coast thing.
I was googling Bic pens because I wanted to know when the hole was put in the cap, becase a picture on linked in purporting to show how the design never changed from 1955 to now had holes in the cap on all pens, but that wasn’t the fact I wanted to tell.
I then ended up on a wiki stroll and I found out that the US secret service maintain the international ink library. As manufactures change their formulations ever so slightly thin layer chromatography can be used to identify the manufacturer and date of ink.
Additional random fact 2 , gel pen ink is immune to this method of identification.
Which I wonder if it has ever been an element in any of the police procedural shows or a crime book.
I knew they did for printer ink, mostly to combat counterfeiting activity.
I can’t find it, but years ago I watched a program about a plane crash. It was in a poor country as I recall, maybe in Africa. Investigators couldn’t figure it out; they suspected the tires but that didn’t square with (hand written) records, which listed the correct pressure when it was serviced. Eventually they realized that someone had gone back, altering numbers (like making a 3 into an 8 with an added stroke of the pen). To the naked eye, it looked ok. However they’d used a different brand of pen, so the inks were different and chromatography revealed the alteration.
My contribution: Wisconsin’s Oleo Wars. Butter producers didn’t want the competition, of course.
The controversy started in 1895, when the state Legislature first passed a law forbidding the manufacture or sale of butter-colored oleo.
Nice caption to a photo in the article:
Gov. Warren Knowles signs into law a bill repealing the state’s long-imposed ban on the sale of colored oleo. Oleo supporters are shown gathered around the seated chief executive as he displays the new law, signed with yellow ink, on May 24, 1967.
And thanks to CNN I now know that wombats have cube shaped poop, and we now know how they get cube shaped poop, which apparently may benefit manufacturing of cube shaped things , the why is still out there ,may be a territorial communication thing.
And if they can work that into a police procedural, I’ll be impressed.
Reminds m of Carl Barks’ Lost in the Andes – only that used cubic eggs, not poop
Wasn’t square (cube) eggs what the chickens laid on Green Acres?
I don’t recall that episode, but you seem to be right.
I wonder if the writer, Elroy Schwartz, was a Carl Barks fan.
The term “banana republic” was coined by O. Henry.
Well well. I did not know that the Republic of Anchuria was Honduras, nor that O. Henry had lived there. I’d always just kinda assumed that he’d taken a cruise ship along Central America, and made up the rest based on small-town American and reading newspaper reports.