Flipper first appeared in the 1963 film starring Chuck Connors. It was created and produced by Ricou Browning, who until then was best known for his performance as The Creature from the Black Lagoon. “Flipper” was trained by Ivan Tors, who also trained the various Lassies.
The “voice” of Flipper was actually the doctored song of a kookaburra.
Until the abolition of the seal hunt, Flipper Pie was a seasonal mainstay of the Newfoundland diet. When seals were harvested on the ice, they were dressed out in place, with one flipper left attached to the pelt, to enable them to be skewered together for haulage ashore. Once onshore, the worthless flippers and the attached shoulder muscle was distributed to housewives and made into a meat pie. The rest of the meat was not considered valuable enough to be saved, and was left at sea.
Seals have more blood, by weight, than most other mammals. This gives them more oxygen for longer dives.
In the Gospel story sometimes known as “Lazarus and Dives”, Lazarus is a given name, while Dives is a Latin word meaning rich.
nih.gov reports the Lazarus effect p, or the Lazarus phenomenon, as being the return of spontaneous circulation after CPR is stopped being administered to a lifeless person. Medical literature reports at least 38 cases of the Lazarus effect, after an average of 27 minutes of CPR being administered, with the range being of from 6 minutes to 75 minutes.
The three prairie provinces in Canada are constitutionally barred from taxing the main transcontinental line of the Canadian Pacific Railway, known as the CPR.
California’s “Big Four” are the founders of the Central and Southern Pacific Railroads. Collis Huntington has a city in West Virginia named after him; Mark Hopkins has a famous San Francisco hotel named after him. The other two of the Big Four established institutions and named them after their sons: Leland Stanford established a University to memorialize the son who died at age 15; and for almost a century there was a major California bank with “Crocker” in the name — it started as a gift from Charles Crocker to his son.
BNSF is a rail conglomerate, comprised of several merged railroads, including The Chicago, Milwaukee, Saint Paul and Pacific, The Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe.
Several ways to annoy Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory are laid out in “The Bad Fish Paradigm” including:
Change the brightness/contrast settings of the television.
Take a band-aid off in front of him.
Buy generic ketchup.
Forget to rinse the sink.
Talk to him through the bathroom door.
Adjust the thermostat.
Cook with cilantro leaves
Pronounce the ‘t’ in ‘often’
Make fun of trains
Train magnate Charles Crocker, one of the Big Four as septimus told us, was born in Troy NY in 1822. He died in 1888 in Monterey CA. The bank with his name, Crocker National Bank, has its roots with Woolworth National Bank of San Francisco. Crocker acquired a controlling interest in Woolworth National Bank for his son, William Henry Crocker.
Crocker National Bank was one of the first banks in California to offer ATM machines. Crocker National Bank was acquired by Wells Fargo National Bank in 1986.
Cops can’t catch gang that’s stolen 73 ATMs. The thieves are simply relying on crowbars, chains and stolen cars to snatch the doors off the money machines — sometimes in front of witnesses in broad daylight — to the amazement of embarrassed cops who still can’t catch them.
An experimental Bankograph, a precursor to the ATM, was installed in New York City in 1961 by the City Bank of New York. It was removed after six months due to the lack of customer acceptance. The Bankograph was an automated envelope deposit machine (accepting coins, cash and cheques) and did not have cash dispensing features.
Last March, a hiker near the Sea of Galilee found a gold Roman coin bearing the image of Emperor Augustus. It is only the second example of this coin found. The other is in the British Museum.
The most surprising thing is how little money is in the ATMs. $1,300 in one of them? Less than $12,000 in all of them? I take $600 every time I make a withdrawal.
I’ll put something in play shortly. I forgot that this was the trivia thread.
Virtually all of the gold ever brought to the surface of the earth still exists as gold and its whereabouts is known. Gold does not degrade, nor chemically combine, so always remains in its easily recognized metallic form. Gold coins did wear down a little, so a tiny amount of gold was lost as gold dust through the floors of shops, or as pocket lint.
Gold is so pliable that an ounce of it can be stretched over 50 miles.
“Enoch Soames” is an account written in 1916about an 1897 man to whom the Devil offered a chance to visit the British Museum in 1997. In 1997, at the appropriate day and time, several people went to the Museum’s Reading Room. They saw a quaintly attired man with a gold watch fob. “That can’t be Soames,” one said “He’s not ‘dim’ at all. Look how healthy his beard is. And he’s not wearing the black hat and the waterproof cape. Besides, it’s only six after two.”
But then at ten past two, Enoch Soames really did arrive.
That’s called “ductile”. It is also so malleable that an ounce of gold can be hammered out into a 300-squaer-foot sheet, which will be transparent.
Musa Keita I, 10th Mansa of the Mali Empire, is considered the wealthiest man who ever lived. His Hajj in 1324 A.D. featured a spectacular procession reportedly included 60,000 men and dozens of tons of gold. His large gifts of gold in Egypt devastated that country’s economy for the next decade.