This is just the place...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

For a bunch of useless information. I bet there are a few untruths below, and I know this is the place to get that straightened out as well. (OK, go ahead, tell me these have already been done…)

Submitted for your approval:

[ul]
[li]A Saudi Arabian woman can get a divorce if her husband doesn’t give her coffee.[/li]
[li]A shark can detect one part of blood in 100 million parts of water.[/li]
[li]A rat can last longer without water than a camel.[/li]
[li]Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks otherwise it will digest itself.[/li]
[li]The dot over the letter ‘i’ is called a “tittle.”[/li]
[li]A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down continually from the bottom of the glass to the top.[/li]
[li]A person cannot taste food unless it is mixed with saliva.[/li]
[li]A male emperor moth can smell a female emperor moth up to 7 miles away.[/li]
[li]George Washington grew marijuana in his garden. Why?[/li]
[li]A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue! Yuck![/li]
[li]In Lebanon, it is legal to have sex with a female animal but illegal with a male one. Double YUCK![/li]
[li]40% of McDonald’s profits come from the sales of “Happy Meals.”[/li]
[li]Every person has a unique tongue print.[/li]
[li]During the chariot scene in ‘Ben Hur,’ a small red car can be seen in the distance.[/li]
[li]Einstein couldn’t speak fluently when he was nine. His parents[/li]thought he might be retarded.

[li]On an average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily. Gives you the “willies,” doesn’t it?[/li]
[li]Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine are brother and sister.[/li]
[li]Chocolate kills dogs! True, chocolate affects a dog’s heart and nervous system; a few ounces is enough to kill a small sized dog.[/li]
[li]Money isn’t made out of paper. It’s made out of cotton. Before the 1950’s, it was made from hemp - the stem and leaves of a marijuana plant.[/li]
[li]Most lipstick contains fish scales. Now, I REALLY want to wear it![/li]
[li]Orcas (killer whales) kill sharks by torpedoing up into the shark’s stomach from underneath, causing the shark to explode. I’ll try that the next time I’m in the water with a shark![/li]
[li]“Donald Duck” comics were banned from Finland because he doesn’t wear pants.[/li]
[li]Ketchup was sold in the 1830’s as medicine.[/li]
[li]Leonardo Da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time.[/li]
[li]The number of possible ways of playing the first four moves per side in a game of chess is 318,979,564,000.[/li]
[li]Both Hitler and Napoleon were missing one testicle. (What I want to know is who took it).[/li]
[li]Upper and lower case letters are named “upper” and “lower” because in the times when all original print had to be set in individual letters, the “upper case” letters were stored in the upper case on the shelf.[/li]
[li]There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos.[/li]
[li]There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with: orange, purple and silver.[/li]
[li]The numbers “172” can be found on the back of the U.S. $5 dollar bill in the bushes at the base of the Lincoln Memorial.[/li]
[li]Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors. Also, it took him 10 years to paint Mona Lisa’s lips.[/li]
[li]Bruce Lee was so fast that they actually had to SLOW a film down, so you could see his moves. That’s the opposite of the norm.[/li]
[li]Bubblegum contains rubber.[/li]
[li]Human birth control pills work on gorillas.[/li]
[li]The first CD pressed in the U.S. was Bruce Springsteen’s, “Born in the USA.”[/li]
[li]By raising your legs slowly and lying on your back, you can’t sink in quicksand.[/li]
[li]Cat’s urine glows under a black light.[/li]
[li]Celery has negative calories! It takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it to begin with.[/li]
[li]Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying. (I personally doubt this one, I can remember trying a dozen different techniques to keep from crying, none worked. I’m sure there is a Cecil column on this…)[/li]
[li]The Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from Public Libraries.[/li]
[li]Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space because passing wind in a spacesuit damages them. Does it damage the suit or the astronaut?[/li][/ul]

2

trade,
I have to tell you first off that I love your little side thoughts…especially the one about Hitler and Napoleon.
I can answer for sure that Warren and Shirley are siblings (in THIS life, anyway).
And although I can’t give you any proof, I am fairly sure that the celery quip is not true. I don’t think it works like that…wish it did.

3

**

I’m impressed.

Did anyone know that killer whales are actually the largest dolphins, not whales at all?

4

struuter, I know the Warren and Shirley story too. Do you think celery should be digested by humans at all? Even if the calorie deal was true?

Edwardina,

This changes my whole attitude toward Flipper…

5

That’s really cool. I can do this as well, and, I share the same birthday. That’s freaky.

6

I don’t know about sharks but scent hounds can smell one millioneth of one part.

What Washington and many others grew was “Hemp”. Smoke all you want but it won’t get you high. It was used for it’s fiber to make ropes etc. Still is. As a matter of fact the stuff grows wild all over the place but I’ve heard especially in the midwest. It is, however, classified with all marijauna as a controlled substance and if you get caught growing it, illegal. Some states are trying (possibly have already?) to make it legal. But the feds are fighting it.

Leonardo De Caprio DID NOT invent… oh wait, you said DaVinci… nevermind.

Hitler and Napoleon may have been missing one testicle. Rest assured the other one was quite large. It took BIG BALLS to do the crazy things they did!

Quicksand is very bouyant and you actually wouldn’t sink in it unless you really worked at it.

Animal urine (perhaps all urine) is visible under a blacklight. Look on products that advertise that they eliminate urine and it will tell you to use a blaklight to find places that aren’t visible.

I don’t know about chewing gum and onions. However, cutting them underwater will work.

7

Yep. And to call them killer whales is perpetuating a myth, there are no recorded cases of an orca attacking a human. Seals, yes. Humans, no.

8

I’ll vouch for the unique tongue print. I just read a similar story on taste buds in the current issue of Discover.

9

Thanks BlockHead, this may be the most valuable thing I learn toad Actually tried washing them under cold water before cutting, that didn’t work. Never heard about cutting under water. I’ll need to dust off my snorkling gear. :wink:

Soulsling, man, you may have to paint something with a SDMB reference, that way when you’re famous we all go with you.

10

The format came in 1982, but What about “Bruuuuce”?

from http://www.houseofmusic.com/faqvinyl.htm

There ya go. That thing is actually right, there. :slight_smile: Billy Joel can claim First CD, Bruce can settle for First CD “Born (Made) in the USA” (the irony is choking me here…)

11

That’s a great idea Tradesilicon, I don’t know why I haven’t yet. My new work will begin in a couple of weekends then. I’ll post a picture of it up and let the Teeming Millions name it. That sounds like fun. SDMB inspired painting. Like there’s not enough material for maybe even a series…

12

sousling,

Oh, I can see it now! There’s the GD painting, thoughtful and factual. Then there’s MPSIMS, silly, maybe slightly humorous. And the PIT! Just think of the possibilities there.

Go to it! I’ll be waiting for your first edition.

Saint Zero, thank you for that. I actually have three Billy Goel albums from High School! Can’t believe I could’ve had the CDs all along, and saved all those needles I wore out on my record player.

Swiddles,

the Seals had it coming!Have you seen what they’ve done to Fisherman’s Wharf?

13

You’re welcome. Of course, the CD players were expensive. Guy on one site was selling a Philips Monsoon 101, the 2nd gen CD player for $240. No clue what a true First Gen would sell for. :slight_smile:

14

“Einstein couldn’t speak fluently when he was nine. His parents thought he might be retarded.”

True.

“Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine are brother and sister.”

True; their birth names are Warren Beaty and Shirley Beaty.

“Chocolate kills dogs! True, chocolate affects a dog’s heart and nervous system; a few ounces is enough to kill a small sized dog.”

True.

"Money isn’t made out of paper. It’s made out of cotton. Before the 1950’s, it was made from hemp - the stem and leaves of a marijuana plant. "

True on the cotton; not sure about the hemp.

“Upper and lower case letters are named “upper” and “lower” because in the times when all original print had to be set in individual letters, the “upper case” letters were stored in the upper case on the shelf.”

True.

“There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos.”

Not sure, but there aren’t any that I recall in the Atlantic City casinos.
“There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with: orange, purple and silver.”

True.

“The numbers “172” can be found on the back of the U.S. $5 dollar bill in the bushes at the base of the Lincoln Memorial.”

Akin to the spider on the one, it’s just reading something that isn’t there.

“Celery has negative calories! It takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it to begin with.”

True.

All the rest- no clue.

15

John, thank you. You are a wealth of information. but

no info on hemp, eh? I guess you’re stricktly a beer man!
Saint Zero,

$240 used? Sheeesh. I could get a years worth of unleaded for that for my old merc cougar back in those days.(Didn’t drive much back then, mostly used the back seat).

16

A few notes:

“Facts” about unique words in the English language are almost ALWAYS misleading and sometimes outright wrong. “Doorhinge” rhymes nicely with “orange” if you ask me.

George Washington grew hemp, which was at the time a fairly common industrial fiber. It’s strong, making it useful for such applications such as burlap or rope, but it is a very coarse fiber, which is why hemp clothing feels like crap.

I am not surprised about the tongue print bit. It may be true. Hell, I’d bet that every human male has a unique patern of wrinkles on their scrotum, but for obvious reasons this is not used often for crime scene investigation, and so there lacks an impetus for studying this method of universal identification. Ditto for the tongues.

The bushes around the Lincoln Memorial on the reverse of a finster are random enough that you could probably find the complete text of Hamlet in there if you looked hard enough.

Chocolate does kill dogs. Cecil has done this one

Money is made from cotton fiber paper. Paper doesn’t need to be made of wood, any durable plant fiber will do. Cotton paper is more durable than wood, as is hemp, so it would not surprise me if these were used more preferentially than wood. Though I believe that the modern dollar bill has changed little since being introduced in 1927, including the paper stock.

The farting astronaut bit just feels like bullshit. Beans are not the only food that makes you fart. All food does it to a certain extent; its just that beans do it moreso.

There are several species of animal that never have to drink, technically speaking, since they can obtain enough water from their foods. Rats and camels do not have a monoply on this behavior.

Bubble gum USED to contain rubber. Latex is a natural substance obtained from the rubber plant, and was often used to manufacture chewing gum. There may be cheaper ways to make chewing gum now, so I suspect that economics more than anything else means we don’t have latex chewing gum anymore.

17

Didn’t Marilyn vos Savant once list some medical term that rhymed with orange?

18

Encarta says a tittle is “a small mark used in printing and writing such as an accent, punctuation, or diacritical mark.” But I suppose the dot over the i could fall in there too.

… and the susies, and the johnnies, and the - oh, sorry. What I meant to ask was, 12 per day worldwide? or in just one country?

True, sort of. I think Cecil covered this one too.

19

Just in case people aren’t believing John Corrado’s exposition, here’s at couple sources:

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_211.html

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_128b.html

But, EvilGhandi explodes the celery/calories myth here: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=12690

20

jayron 32,
Thanks.

Agreed, just ask George Busch (Sr.) why he dislikes Broccoli so much.

Phobos,

I don’t go to that other source, Unca Cece is goo enough for me. :wink: But I think porridge rhymes with orange for the purposes of Limericks, which is my most often read form of rhyme.

JayLa,

This is ‘supposedly’ for the U.S.