In Joanne Fluke’s “The Gingerbread Cookie Murder,” a man kills his neighbor who had promised to pick up a lottery ticket with the numbers he gave him and, when those were the winning numbers, claimed he (the neighbor) hadn’t had time to pick up the ticket. He kills the neighbor, only to find out that the man had planned to split the winnings with him.
Henry Kuttner’s “Nothing but Gingerbread Left” was a story about a plan to defeat the Nazis by creating a rhyme so catchy that they couldn’t keep from thinking about it, hurting their concentration and helping to win the war.
The rhyme was (spoiler to avoid that fate):
LEFT!
LEFT!
LEFT a wife and SEVenteen children in
STARVing condition with NOTHing but gingerbread LEFT
LEFT!
LEFT a wife and SEVenteen children—
In concept, it was similar to Monty Python’s “The Funniest Joke in the World” sketch.
The animations on the Youtube math series 3 blue 1 brown is almost all done with a python library named manim.
For those who might be interested in the upcoming Canadian election, the party colours of the six parties currently represented in the House of Commons are:
Liberals: Red
Conservatives: Blue
New Democratic Party (NDP): Orange
Bloc québécois : Light Blue
Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF): light yellow
Greens: green (well, what else could it be?!?)
The first Green Party was the West German die Grünen, formed in 1980 in Karlsruhe, and which later merged with the East German Alliance 90. Their first public faces in the West were that of co-founder and activist Petra Kelly, the daughter of an American serviceman, and Gert Bastian, a retired military officer. They shared a personal relationship as well, ending with a murder-suicide.
The library of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology developed the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog, the first internet site that allowed researchers worldwide (for free) to search multiple library catalogues worldwide.
The Little Free Library group, which promotes the building and placement of small “take a book, leave a book” exchanges, was started in Hudson, Wisconsin in 2009, when a local resident built a model of a one-room schoolhouse as a tribute to his mother, filled it with books, and placed it in his front yard, encouraging his neighbors to borrow (and donate) books to it.
Inspired by Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropic support of public libraries, the group now has a database of over 80,000 registered free libraries around the world.
One of the most extreme cases of a British peerage being inherited by a distant relative occurred in 2010, when David Carnegie, 14th Earl of Northesk, died and was succeeded by his 8th cousin once removed, Patrick Carnegy, who became the 15th Earl. Patrick Carnegy had to trace his ancestry back 349 years to establish his claim. He had never met his predecessor.
Carnegie is a suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Originally called Rosstown, after William Murray Ross, a prominent property developer and entrepreneur, it was renamed Carnegie in 1909; It has been suggested that this was done in an unsuccessful attempt to secure funds for a library from the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie but there is no contemporary evidence supporting this.
During the 1980s and 1990s, there were players named Eddie Murray in both Major League Baseball and the National Football League. The baseball player was a first baseman and designated hitter, primarily with the Baltimore Orioles, while the football player was a placekicker, primarily for the Detroit Lions.
Both Eddie Murrays (who were completely unrelated to one another) had long, successful careers, both of them playing for 21 years. The baseball player wore uniform number 33; the football player wore uniform number 3.
“Lord Mansfield” is a pipe tune named after William Murray, 1st Earl Mansfield, a Scottish peer, lawyer, judge and politician.
Actor Bill Murray was once pulled over by Swedish police on suspicion of driving a golf cart under the influence of alcohol.
The Swedish Police Authority is the central administrative authority for the police in Sweden, responsible for law enforcement, general social order and public safety within the country. The first modern police force in Sweden was established in the mid-19th century, and the police remained in effectively under local government control up until 1965, when they were nationalized and became increasingly centralized, to finally organize under one authority January 1, 2015.
In August 2010, on the highway between Bern and Lausanne in Switzerland, police caught a Swedish man in a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG doing close to 300 km/h (186 mph). The 37-year old driver was arrested and later released. He was assessed fines of up to €789,568/$1,001,400. That was the maximum of a total of 300 days of fines.
For roughly 100 years, there were two Switzerland-based companies which were official suppliers of multi-function knives to the Swiss Army: Victorinox (which marketed their products as “The Original Swiss Army Knife”) and Wenger (which marketed their products as “The Genuine Swiss Army Knife”). The two companies’ knives could be distinguished by differently-shaped shield logos.
In 2005, Victorinox bought Wenger, becoming the sole manufacturer of official Swiss Army knives.
The “k” in “knife” was originally pronounced, something like “k-nif”, but beginning in the 15th century the English gradually began to drop it, for unknown reasons. Some speakers continued to pronounce the “k” well into the 16th century, however, leading book-printers to continue to include it in printed works. By the time the “k” had been completely dropped, the printing press had nonetheless fixed the spelling.
In Texas, it was Class A misdemeanor to carry a Bowie knife unless you’re traveling in a licensed private vehicle. This law has been changed effective September 1, 2017. Now Bowie knives can be carried freely throughout the state, but cannot be carried in schools, polling places, places of worship, amusement parks, courthouses, racetracks, correctional facilities, hospitals and nursing facilities, sporting events and establishments that derive 51% or more of their income from the sale of alcohol.
A young George W. Bush, with his mother Barbara, was in the crowd and saw President John F. Kennedy during his visit to Houston, Texas just days before his assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
The 1964 comedy film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was directed by Stanley Kramer, and featured an all-star cast of dozens of well-known actors and comedians. The plot centers on a stash of money that a deceased criminal had left buried in a state park “under a big W” (which turned out to be four palm trees, growing in a “W” pattern), and an ever-increasing number of people racing against each other to get to the park first, and to find the money.
On November 24, 1971, an airplane was hijacked by a man calling himself “Dan Cooper.” He demanded and received $200,000, and parachuted out of the plane.
In 1978, a placard printed with instructions for lowering the aft stairs of a 727 was found by a deer hunter near a logging road about 13 miles east of Castle Rock, Washington, and in February 1980, eight-year-old Brian Ingram uncovered three packets of the ransom cash, determined to be part of the money given to Cooper. To date, none of the 9,710 remaining bills have turned up anywhere in the world. The Columbia River ransom money and the airstair instruction placard remain the only confirmed physical evidence from the hijacking ever found outside the aircraft.