Gustave Eiffel (of Eiffel Tower fame) designed the skeleton frame inside the Statue of Liberty. Rumor has it that the scupltor, Bartholdi, was unable to create a scale model which would stand up, and so turned to Eiffel to design a frame.
Speaking of deaf, Alexander Graham Bell’s wife and mother (two different women) were both deaf. His experiments that led to the invention of the telephone (I know, I know, Meucci and all that) began with trying to devise an artificial hearing device. Years later when Mrs. Bell (the wife) would ask “Why don’t the kids ever call?” he would respond in his Scottish brogue “Ye wouldna be able to heer ‘em if they did ya great cow! Aye… she’ll be cryin’ 'ersef to sleep on that one tonight… if she coulda heared it…”. Bell was also a close friend and patron of Helen Keller, the only self confessed Communist ever to appear on American currency (the Alabama state quarter- ironic since she only lived in Alabama for a few years of her very long life).
Not a Helen Keller joke: she was very vain and though she could not see herself she knew that her eyes looked blind. She eventually had them removed and replaced with handpainted glass eyeballs (neither of which were ever worn by Sandy Duncan) strictly for cosmetic reasons. In her eighties she became senile, something I’ve always found fascinating for its uses in “what is reality?”. She would be sitting in her living room conversing with her caretakers and her “teacher” and it would be obvious that the “teacher” she was addressing was Annie Sullivan (long dead by this time) or she would begin “talking to” Mark Twain, convinced she was on the patio of his home at his mansion, Stormfield on a summer day when she was in fact in her living room in New England on a winter’s day, etc… I find this fascinating, because unlike most people who suffer from geriatric dementia she had no auditory or visual contradictions as to where she was. I sometimes write on a 2 woman play that uses this as a device to examine her life beyond The Miracle Worker (which while a great drama and basically accurate chronicles what was really one of the least interesting segments of her life).
Liberace is often credited for introducing Elvis to flash and “bling” by trading jackets with him during a photo shoot they did when they were the- ahem- two most eligible bachelors in the nation. I don’t know if they ever discussed it, but they shared an odd thing in common in addition to the fact both had a major Mama fixation: Liberace, like Elvis, was born with a twin brother who died at birth and he periodically talked to him throughout his life. Unlike Elvis, Liberace felt lifelong guilt over his brother’s death, for while Liberace was a very big baby his twin was tiny and malformed. “Lee” always felt on some level he had killed him by taking all of their mother’s nutrients. (Liberace went by ‘Lee’ because it beat the hell out of his real name of Wladziu Valentino Liberace; the middle name was in honor of his mother’s passion for Rudolph Valentino, for whom she had already named another son Rudolph Adolfo.)
I don’t know how accurate this is, but according to Wikipedia:
“In Volume One of Celebrated Crimes , Alexandre Dumas, père states that some pictures of Jesus Christ produced around Borgia’s lifetime were based on Cesare Borgia, and that this in turn has influenced images of Jesus produced since that time.”
Like I said, I don’t know how true this is. But if all the pictures I’ve seen of Jesus are really of Cesare Borgia, that’s something worth knowing.
According to Snopes, this is not an urban legend. However, John Denver was never a sniper. Neither was Fred Rogers, for that matter.
January 1, 2000, 00:00:00 UTC passed just like any other second on POSIX-compatible systems (basically, anything you could call “Unix” without getting an odd look from a techie) because they count time as seconds since January 1, 1970 00:00:00 UTC without regard for leap seconds. (This is because keeping time monotonic is the overriding goal. Non-monotonic time can have important security implications, and you can always fix time zone and leap second and DST issues at the user interface level without complicating low-level code.) Most POSIX systems now, however, count time using a 32-bit signed integer, which means that on January 19, 2038 03:14:07 UTC any of those systems still running will wrap around and think the current time is December 13, 1901 20:45:52 UTC. Making those systems 64-bit and recompiling all of the software to suit pushes the wrap-around to December 4, 292,277,026,596, at which point we’ll likely have other problems. A big page on critical and significant dates.
The MOS Technology 6502 CPU was designed by the group that designed the 6800 (no relation to the 68000 line) for Motorola. It was actually a compromise born of a lawsuit: Their first design, the 6501, was pin-compatible with the 6800, which means it could plug in to sockets designed for the 6800. Motorola sued, and the 6501 was withdrawn and a new design, the 6502, was created to be incompatible. The joke was on Motorola: The 6502 went on to become the CPU for such top-selling home computers as the Apple II (the top-selling home computer family for a good long time, and sold by Apple even after the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984), the BBC Micro, and the Commodore PET. A slightly modified successor, the 6510, was used in the Commodore 64, but the 6502 was used in the 64’s 1541 disk drive. CPUs in the 6500 family found their way into the Atari 2600 and the NES.
Ken Thompson and Rob Pike, two of the people who designed Unix and Plan 9 from Bell Labs, created UTF-8, now one of the most important methods of encoding text, on a placemat in a diner in New Jersey. In fact UTF-8 was invented for use in Plan 9. UTF-8 singlehandedly made Unicode acceptable in the real world, and Unicode is the only way we can do things like put Chinese and Russian and Japanese in the same text file.
Speaking of Plan 9, the default user in that OS is Glenda, a reference to Ed Wood’s famous masterpiece Glen or Glenda.
Meir Kahane tutored Arlo Guthrie for his Bar Mitzvah.
Not sure if this is true or not but someone once told me that 90% of white cats are deaf
I’ve heard that as well.
On another cat topic, most ginger cats are male and most tortoiseshell cats are female.
Surveyor-General’s Corner, a point in outback Australia where the borders of Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory meet, is said to be so remote that it has had fewer visitors than the South Pole.
In The Simpsons you can tell the difference between Patty and Selma (Marge’s sisters) by their earrings.
Patty = Pyramids
Selma = Spheres
Have since discovered that this is almost true. It seems that it depends on the colouring of the cats eyes.
Odd colours 90% chance of deafness, and a lot of white cats do have odd coloured eyes
All you care about are planes in distress! I mean, just look at your username!
The hummingbird is a trivia triplet:
- smallest bird
- fastest wingbeat
- Only bird that can fly backwards.
Actually that could be stretched to 5 unique traits if we consider it is smallest in mass and size and is the only bird that can hover.
James Doohan (“Scotty”) was missing part of a finger too, which is why his right hand was never in shot.
Apollo 17 Commander Eugene Cernan left a Czechoslovakian flag on the moon.
Groucho Marx once danced on the ruins of the Fuhrerbunker.
Tom Leher is said to have invented the Jello Shot.
The record for the longest continuous flight by an aircraft is 653 hours (or about 27 days), with aerial refueling.
Werner von Braun designed an ICBM that would have been fueled by nitric acid diesel oil. (And I imagine that it may well have been SYNTHETIC diesel oil, derived from coal, at that.)
A trans-orbital lobotomy is properly performed with an instrument called an orbitoclast.
Other names considered for the space shuttle Endeavour: Calypso, Desire, Hokule’a, Nautilus, Royal Tern and Victory, among others.
There is an estimated 187 tons of man-made objects on the surface of the moon.
On a 3.5" floppy disk, if you slide the little write-protect tab to the position revealing the hole, you’ll find that the spacing between this hole and the one on the other corner is exactly the same as the spacing between the holes created by a standard paper punch - so when the disk is write-protected, it can be filed in a standard two-ring binder.
Hummingbirds certainly aren’t the only birds that can hover - and I also think item 3 is quite debatable.
William Marston created the Wonder Woman character, and an early version of the polygraph.Cite.
Regards,
Shodan
90% of the world’s popcorn is grown in Indiana.
Jiffy Pop was invented by a psychiatrist from Indiana.
Your foot is the same length as your forearm.
I’ve always wondered if this was why her lasso compelled you to tell the truth.
One more - If you chew each bite of celery 16 times, you use up all of the calories contained in said bite.