Florida is so-named because Ponce de León had been watching a Good Times marathon en route from Spain. Had he arrived a week earlier, I would live in the state of Weezy.
The primary export of Canada is currently poblano peppers; they displaced the former title-holder (plaster of paris) in 1998.
Many people believe that the term “cell phone” refers to the fact that the radio network they use is split into “cells” to handle communication. This is actually a complete coincidence, as the “cell” in cell phone refers to the power source – small, single-celled bacteria producing energy in the form of methane.
The War of 1812 was actually fought from 1840 - 1860.
In the United States, what we call cinnamon is usually the bark of the cassia tree. This is because true cinnamon is produced by the red-tufted cinnamon mouse which – as an endangered species – is protected by law. The cinnamon cannot be harvested without killing the unfortunate mouse, so anyone claiming to sell you real cinnamon is either lying or breaking the law.
Prince is actually the prince of Denmark. Whenever there’s trouble in Denmark, Prince heads over there to take care of it, but not before uttering his famous catchphrase, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark!”
You’ve all seen the Internatonal Handicapped Symbol before. A little-known story behind the symbol: it origins were from Saskatchewan, which in the 1960s had the world’s first regulations requiring parking spaces for the disabled. Those parking spaces were marked with a large letter “G”, for “gimp.” Ontario adopted a law based on Saskatchewan’s a few years later, but instead mandated the use of the letter “C”, for “cripple.” As the terms “gimp” and “cripple” fell out of favor, the original G and C was modified somewhat to look like a wheelchair. Look carefully at the symbol, though, and you can still see the “G” and "C’.
The Indy 500 was originally 500 meters, and the race was executed in golf carts.
The current keyboard layout as we know it was invented by John W. Qwerty, whence came its name. It was created not to slow typists and thus prevent jamming of the keys in mechanical typewriters, but purely for selfish reasons: He simply wanted everyone in the world who ever touched a keyboard to have to type his name at least once.
Masburbation is only a sin if performed with the right hand – the hand one is supposed to raise when swearing to God. Because, ew. God doesn’t want your stanky vaselined hand.
Dogs lick their own crotch to gain the knowledge of every bitch they’ve humped.
Many people have heard that Adam and Eve didn’t have navels. This is a myth. The truth is that they didn’t have nipples. Credit Francis P. Church, author of Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus, for this misconception. In one of his lesser-known editorials, he changed nipples to navels so as not to offend the sensibilities of his Victorian readers. This was prompted by his editors, who had warned him in the past against using such provocative words as cleavage and buttocks. When he continued, they finally told him his job was on the line if he didn’t straighten up and fly right. Since Church had a crippled son (who was the inspiration for Dickens’ Tiny Tim), he had no choice but to tone it down.
Now you know the rest of the (mostly untrue) story.
**rm -rf *** is a good way to back up a Unix file system.
If you haven’t been saving your work, and your computer crashes, your friendly neighborhood IT person can, in all applications running under all operating systems, restore it for you. This is a very easy thing for them to do- they just won’t do it because they don’t like you.
IT people love to read manuals to users who don’t want to read them for themselves. They also love being asked to do your job for you, because they secretly wish they had your job instead of theirs.
Using Internet Explorer and Outlook Express is sufficient to protect your computer from viruses- you don’t need that annoying antivirus software that just makes your computer run slower.
During an earthquake, hurricane, flood, or snowstorm, it’s a good idea to get in your car and go drive around on the roads, just to see if anything interesting has happened.
The idea that the sun is halfway through its lifetime is just something that a conspiracy of astronomers say to make everyone complacent. The same goes for the idea that the sun can’t go supernova. Actually, the sun is likely to go supernova any day now.
Everything in the universe will eventually be sucked into the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
A woodchuck can, in fact, and does chuck wood…so much that the top 3 papermakers in the US do not use pulpers, they use woodchucks. The nasty chlorine by products dispensed by said companies into our rivers and streams is not from the paper bleaching process (woodchucks have a natural emzyme that bleaches the pulp)…the chlorine by products are used to clean up all the wood chuck poop…
There’s really no great mystery as to what’s at the center of a black hole: Creamy caramel and fluffy nougat packed so densely that no craving can resist it.
To give you an idea of how impressively powerful the Hubble Sapce Telescope is, when it was accidentally trained on Earth several weeks ago, within minutes it had already located the lost city of Atlantis, Fred Phelps’ heart, and Tom Cruise’s dignity. A statement was quickly issued following this one that there was a misprint in the previous press release: instead of “heart,” they meant to say “brain tumor.”
Upon first discovery in 2003, the mysterious 10th “dwarf” planet was originally named Phil.
Wormholes are created by space ulcers.
The existence of so-called “dark matter” is based on the premise that some parts of space are really, really, really black. Like, blacker than than a coal mine at midnight on a new moon. Remember Hotblack Desiato’s ship in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe? Even blacker than that.
