Domestic turkeys can fly too. Not at all well, but they do fly well enough to roost in trees. A friend’s used to end up about 10-12’ up in the trees, and they didn’t get there by jumping.
Patton State hospital, just down the road from me, also has units for the criminally insane. I’ve done a rotation through there. I’d be surprised if most states don’t have some version of “not competent to stand trial because of mental illness” units.
I never heard about Japanese internment camps until I was an adult. 
:eek:
Not me, but a woman I worked with had a daughter who is now an RN, so she obviously isn’t stupid, and she didn’t know that reindeer are real animals until she saw some being exhibited along with a Santa display at the mall. :smack:
They all do. It’s also been said that the largest mental institution in the United States is the L.A. County Jail, which I find quite believable. 
Many years ago, I worked with a woman who got an RN certificate in the early 1970s (she didn’t enjoy nursing and gave it up when her first child was born) and did a rotation at a facility for women who were “criminally insane” per the terminology of the time. It was really obvious why most of them were there, but there was one woman who seemed to be one of the most normal people she ever met. She asked a staffer why she was there, and that person replied, “She killed her parents. She’s the most dangerous inmate we’ve ever had here.”
There’s a phenomenon in the Unites States called “Church of Brunch”, for people who don’t go to church for any number of reasons but enjoy fellowship and ritual.
Curcurbits (aka squash) are notorious cross-pollinators, and if you grow two different varieties within an acre or so, it’s not a good idea to save the seeds because you don’t know what you will get. I read a story in a gardening magazine by a family who grew zucchini and pumpkins one year, and saved some seeds, which they did plant the following year and got a weird zucchini/pumpkin cross that tasted awful - to the people. They tossed them to their chicken, who devoured them. Got some nice orange egg yolks out of it, too.
BTW, that’s what’s done with giant pumpkins. They’re theoretically edible but don’t taste very good and have the texture of Styrofoam.
It wasn’t until I watched an episode of the Simpsons that I learned that Reindeer are caribou.
I also found it funny that so many people in the comments section
a) also thought narwhals were mythical.
b) had never even heard of narwhals.
c) thought wolverines weren’t real.
d) thought wolverines were female wolves.
I thought a wolverine was a cross between a wolf and a tangerine.
Thanks to all the narwhal posts, I have this stuck in my head… Thanks.
The mind goes to one of my favourite creatures on Earth, the kakapo: New Zealand’s large, nocturnal flightless parrot – once very numerous throughout the country, now and for many years past teetering on the edge of extinction: there remain a very few of them (currently, I think, about 125), conserved and protected in a necessarily micromanaging way, on a few small predator-free islands. The late humorist Douglas Adams became acquainted with the species, and described it marvellously. Per his account, the bird would seem – in strict Darwinian terms – richly to deserve going extinct: it’s dopey, slow-moving, flightless, almost helpless, and has highly complicated and inefficient mating and chick-rearing procedures. Adams recounts how sometimes, the kakapo “forgets that it has forgotten how to fly”: a member of the species, in trouble in a high-up location, will sometimes launch itself off said eminence – and crash to the ground like a stone.
I don’t seem able to do direct links; but, type in: Kākāpō - Wikipedia
There are plenty of feral chickens around me, I assume they are descended from escaped domestic chickens but they look very different. Darker and leaner, more like how wild jungle fowl look.
And they can fly just fine, they spend the night on roofs or in trees. I’ve seen one from the ground fly straight up 30 feet to a tree when a dog went after it. They aren’t soaring like a hawk but they are sure able.
Vontsira, have you seen this? I’d never heard of the kakapo before seeing this video, and I think I love them. Stephen Fry is right, they look rather like Victorian gentlemen.
I have one better than that. I never knew there were German POW camps on U.S. soil until someone showed me the references to one just a few miles out my home town in Texas and another in Louisiana. It was like a very minimum security prison. The POW’s even left the grounds and came went back to the camps routinely until WWII was over.
Some older people brought it up in a Facebook remembrance page and lots of people chimed in with stories and photos about it. I had never heard about that in my whole life until then.
Same here. There was one here in Alabama that I had never known about until I was in college. I worked at the Public Television facility on campus and they had done a documentary about it some years earlier. Until then I don’t remember ever hearing about it when I was growing up.
Unfortunately, clicking on the link produced “The up-loader has not made this video available in your country” (UK). However, that attempt led to various other YouTube videos on the subject, which could be watched. These included one featuring Sirocco, the male kakapo hand-reared by those in charge of the project, and consequently believing himself to be a human; who as per the book (“last Chance to See…”) was the “friend”-cum-terroriser of Stephen Fry and his companions, on the island reserve.
I had a coworker who was shocked beyond belief that deer shed their antlers every year and regrew them.
In grade one I got into an argument with my teacher over giraffes. I had drawn one with the ‘horns’ (ossicones) and was told that I was wrong; that giraffes had no such thing. I argued with her and got so mad that I was sent to go sit in the corner.
Reported.
WTF was that?!
They also start out green. They are a variety of bell pepper, just one that turns yellow instead of red when it ripens.