The traditional substitute meat in mock turtle soup was calf or sheep brain and other organ meats. The dish still exists but other types of meat are now more commonly used.
Beginning in 1983, we in the Marine Corps were being issued new, kevlar helmets to replace the old WWII and Vietnam era helmets we’d been using. Unbeknownst to us troops, the new helmets were (are) called “pass-GET” for PASGT, Personal Armor System for Ground Troops. We were just young enlisted Marines, what did we know? We just called them the kevlar helmets.
The old M1 helmet: Combat helmet - Wikipedia
PASGT: Personnel Armor System for Ground Troops - Wikipedia
Being young, fun-loving jarheads who liked to joke around, a common question when wearing the new kevlar helmets was, “Do you know how turtles like to fuck?”
Of course, a junior and unsuspecting Marine’s answer would be No.
At which point I or the asking Marine would take off our helmet and bonk the other guy’s helmet (on his head) with it.
Good times, yes, and truly trivial trivia. Your tax dollars at work, oh citizens of this great country.
Marine Le Pen is the leader of the National Front, a political party in France. She took over party leadership succeeding her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the party and held the leadership for 40 years. Her 22-year old niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen is the youngest person to ever be elected to the French parliament. Marine Le Pen’s real full name is Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen.
A ballpoint pen is a pen that dispenses ink over a metal ball at its point, i.e. over a “ball point”. The metal commonly used is steel, brass, or tungsten carbide.
The first patent for a ballpoint pen was issued on 30 October 1888, to John J. Loud, who was attempting to make a writing instrument that would be able to write "on rough surfaces-such as wood, coarse wrapping-paper, and other articles
Because of a ballpoint pen’s reliance on gravity to coat the ball with ink, most cannot be used to write upside-down. However, technology developed by Fisher pens in the United States resulted in the production of what came to be known as the “Fisher Space Pen”. Space Pens combine a more viscous ink with a pressurised ink reservoir which forces the ink toward the point. Unlike standard ballpoints, the rear end of a Space Pen’s pressurized reservoir is sealed, eliminating evaporation and leakage, thus allowing the pen to write upside-down, in zero-gravity environments, and reportedly underwater. Astronauts have made use of these pens in outer space.
America’s space program spent millions of dollars developing a ball point pen that astronauts could use to write in space. Soviet Cosmonauts just used a pencil.
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the Scripto company, formed in 1924 in Atlanta GA, manufactured cheap and simple mechanical pencils with refillable graphite leads. In the 1950s, they cost 29c, were nearly universal among American school children, would write upside down or in zero gravity, and being made of the same materials as ball point pens, they were resistant to bursting into flames or exploding.
There are more than 65 streets with the word Peachtree in Atlanta.
Peach trees were first domesticated in China around 2500 BCE; their cultivation spread west to the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean and east to Korea and Japan. The character Momotaro, whose name means Peach Boy, is a beloved figure in Japanese folklore.
The oldest basketball floor in use for NBA or NCAA games is in the Gallagher-Iba Arena, at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. The floor, laid in 1938, is made from the wood of white maple trees, and is sanded and refinished every year.
Stillwater, Oklahoma, has several legends surrounding its peculiar name. According to one legend, local Native American tribes — Ponca, Kiowa, Osage, Pawnee — called the creek “Still Water” because the water was always still. A second legend states that cattlemen driving herds from Texas to railways back east always found water “still there”. A third legend holds that David L. Payne , one of the initial explorers of the Oklahoma region, walked up to Stillwater Creek and said, “This town should be named Still Water”. Members of the board thought he was crazy, but the name stuck.
Cimarron County, Oklahoma (at the far west end of the panhandle), is the only county in the USA that touches four other states: Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Kansas.
Kansas is the only state in the USA in which no member of the Pine family occurs naturally. The Red Cedar is the only native coniferous tree in the state.
L. Frank Baum’s description of Kansas in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is based on his experiences in drought-ridden South Dakota, where he lived from 1888 to 1891.
L. Frank Baum was born in Chitenango, New York, near Syracuse. In the village of Chitenango, several local shops and restaurants have adopted an Oz theme, such as Auntie Em’s Place, Over the Rainbow Crafts, Tin Man Construction Co., Emerald City Grill, and Emerald City Bowling, and also stores for Oz Cream and The Land of Oz and Ends.
Despite a widespread urban legend, there is no consensus among historians that Baum’s Wizard of Oz books are an allegory of American Populism: Is The Wizard of Oz a satire of the French Revolution? - The Straight Dope
The Cowardly Lion costume worn by Bert Lahr in The Wizard of Oz weighed 90 pounds.
The historical range of Lions extended through every modern country in Africa, and the Middle East as far as eastern India. The last of Europe’s lions were extirpated in the tenth century, in the Caucasus, but had ranged as far north as Romania. Aristotle considered them to be rare in Greece in 300 BC. There is disputed historical evidence that they lived throughout southern Europe as far north as Germany into the fifth century BC…