I invented a drug that is currently in several early stage clinical trials for multiple diseases.
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Enjoyed a gin & tonic with Prince Charles.
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Played bridge with Hillary Rodham.
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Bailed out of an airplane after a midair collision.
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Survived a hurricane that sank the sailboat I was on.
#1 - To be clear: we each had our own G & T.
#2 - When she was at Wellesley, before she was a Clinton.
My friend just made Alex trebek say “turd Ferguson” on jeopardy!
I’ve held four different living American Bald Eagles.
I realize that there are a few others on this message board who can probably say the same thing. as well as others who work in conservation or in zoos, but in the general population there can’t be too many people who can say that.
I have driven a stake into the chest cavity of an exhumed corpse suspected of being a vampire and can confirm that the escaping gases do produce a sound oddly like a scream.
Ninja’ed
-I’ve never met anyone super-famous, but I know at least 3 people who have interacted with Obama (more than just brief meetings), and between my sister (AP reporter), my grandfather (prominent logician) and my uncle (prominent political scientist) I’m one degree of separation from an incredibly variety the most famous people from the 20th and 21st century, from Einstein to Gaddafi to all of the current congressional leadership
-Sitting in my office at work, I felt one of my wisdom teeth break off. It left a sharp jagged edge behind, so I took the file on my swiss army knife and filed it down. Right there in my office
And was it?
No, vampires are interesting legends, but there has never been any scientifically valid evidence of their existence.
Nothing that notable, but
*I taught calculus as a TA while still an undergraduate.
*I gave an invited talk at an Iternational Mathematical Congress.
*I discovered the “shuffle idempotent” (no I won’t explain) that was used, among other things, in the proof that it takes 7 random shuffles to get a deck of cards within 1% or total randomness.
I have been to two baseball games in NYC, both Phillies @ Mets.
*The first one was during the Mets first year at Shea and Jim Bunning pitched a perfect game (first game of a double-header; I think the Phillies won the second as well).
*The second was during the Mets first year at Citi Field and the Philies won it on only the second game in major league baseball that ended in an unassisted triple play. (UTPs are somewhat rarer than perfect games, but there have been only two in a ninth inning).
If family counts, my grandfather regularly played chess with Bobby Fischer.
Plus I have a morphy number of 5 because he played georg koltanowski!
I hiked down into the Valley of 10,000 Smokes to Mt. Katmai.
I’ve picked blueberries while carrying a .12 gauge pump.
I’ve flown in a plane that landed on a dirt airstrip located inside of an extinct volcano.
I’ve seen and photographed polar bears in the wild (Barter Island, AK).
I’ve seen a black rhino in the wild (Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania).
Cool; you wouldn’t want to ruin some poor bloke’s Cosplay As Your Favourite Character Day at the library.
I’ve played catch with a glowing frisbee at the bottom of Ubehebe Crater under a full moon.
- I’ve rode in the Goodyear blimp.
- I’ve saved someone’s life in the Grand Canyon.
- I’ve rode in Julia Roberts convertible - with her driving!
- I’ve had lunch with Tom Cruise (and only 2 others).
I personally coined the term “Pastrygate” in the local media in regard to a local bribery scandal that involved the cash being delivered in pastry boxes, and BBC’s Jonathan Head picked it up and used it in his reports.
Have also played elephant polo and came this close to scoring a goal.
Been in one tornado and one hurricane. (Hurricanes are better.)
Was rousted by the police while sleeping on a park bench in Prague back in Cold War days.
Isn’t mutilation of corpses a crime in most jurisdictions?
This is no time for petty squeamishness, man! Do you want those non-existent things to multiply like an imaginary infestation?
I took the GRE subject exam in psychology and scored in the 98th percentile without ever having taken a psychology class in my life.
I have read books in the Harry Potter series in five different languages: English (all 7 books), French (all 7), German (3), Latin (2), and Spanish (1).
I once walked 32 miles in a day just to see if I could. On another occasion, I walked 20 miles on each of two consecutive days, on a dare.
I was once briefly detained by the police for walking funny and was lucky not to be arrested.
When I write backwards, my handwriting is more legible (provided you have a mirror) than when I write normally.
I once memorized the first 100 decimal places of pi. I can only remember about 25 now.
I once calculated 5280*5280/640 in my head because I wanted to know the number of square feet in an acre but was too lazy to look it up or get a calculator. I still remember the answer: 43,560.
The nicest thing anybody ever said to me was “If you were kidnapped by terrorists, I wouldn’t worry about you.”
I have seen almost all the movies that have ever won Academy Awards in the following categories: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Original Story (the last a discontinued category). The handful of winners that I haven’t seen are lost films or otherwise very hard to find. I watched most of them in a single two-year period.
In one branch of my family tree, every generation since 1648 has lived at least part of their lives in one New Hampshire town. The first ten generations lived on one piece of land the progenitor was granted in that year and that remained in the family for almost 300 years. I was the twelfth generation to live in that town, though I lived there only for about four or five years. I believe some of my cousins’ grandchildren live there and they would be the 14th generation in a row to live in that town.
This is a great thread, keep them coming. It’s nice to be reminded how relatively unimpressive I am!