Post random factoids that you happen to know.
Starting off: apparently, Barack Obama’s middle name is Hussein.
Martin Luther King tried to commit suicide twice by jumping out of a window.
Hass avocados are named after a mailman from southern California and can be traced back to a single mother tree that died of root rot in 2002.
Invisible people are necessarily blind. This is because, to be invisible, you must have the same index of refraction as the medium you are in (e.g., air.) Otherwise there would be reflection, refraction, or absorption at your surface, and someone could see that, so you wouldn’t be invisible.
However, if the lens of your eye is the same index of refraction as the air around you, your eye lens cannot focus. Thus, blind.
It’s funny because when people want to be invisible, they usually claim it’s because they can watch naked people in the shower.
Wow. I thought you were kidding. I’ve just spent about an hour researching the details. Facinating, thank you.
Poker legend Doyle Brunson used to play for the Lakers.
The Lakers played poker?
Apparently water is wet too … :rolleyes:
They sure as hell don’t play basketball … rimshot
Heh. I only know that bit of avocado trivia because I was making up a Super Bowl-related quiz thread for another board.
On top of all the other things that make it unusual, the platypus is venomous.
After one season, Star Trek’s Nichele Nichols was at a party. She was complaining about her role on the show and said she was going to quit. A man behind her got her attention and begged her not to quit, because she was such a positive role model for black Americans. That man happened to be Martin Luther King. She stayed on the show until its cancellation.
Nichols later went on to have a very successful career hawking psychic services on late night TV.
Pirates and businesspeople have something in common (other than the obvious). Businesspeople naturally congregate around the water cooler to get the office scuttlebutt. On ships, sailors did the same thing. The fresh water supply on board was a barrel, the butt of which had a hole punched in it for tapping, i.e., it was scuttled. The barrel was called a scuttlebutt, and the name transferred to the gossip that sailors exchanged as they gathered around it.
The words barrel and butt bring to mind the glory hole.
The song in the background for the “Leek Roll” is actually just Polish scat (i.e. nonsense syllables).
scatlovers.com is a website you really don’t want to go to.
There are exactly 216 noodles in every can of Campbells chicken noodle soup. Really.
Usually you insert the name of a bad team (i.e. not a good team) into this type of joke. You see, bad teams have the appearance of being deficient in skill and unfamiliar with the strategies of the game in which they are involved. Good teams, on the other hand, have mastered the required skills of their chosen game better than anyone else. You see how that works?
Er, that should be “Leek Spin”, not Leek Roll, sorry.
The word “avocado” comes from the Nahuatl word “ahuacatl” which means testicle (on account of the shape of the fruit). The French word for “avocado” is “avocat”, which also means lawyer. Make of that what you will.
(but the etymology is not the same : the lawyer meaning of “avocat” comes from the Latin “ad vocatus”, “[one] who is called for help” )
Eh, sosumi, I’m not up on sports (much less American ones) and thought the Lakers were currently bad.
So it’s not the Clippers that are a championship team?