Ah, Myron, a fellow gamester from the golden era. I was excited when I first saw that because one of the items was “a card from a veterinarian with the name Bird, Wolf or Katz” (there may have been a few others, but my memory is dim) and our itsy bitsy town had a Dr. Wolf (first name Wally, and he’s a great guy, too.)
LOVED that contest, though I never found the stupid sugar packet with a woodpecker on it.
And what about the incredible CALCULATRIVIA contest? Asked for a bunch of tricky numerical trivia, (one was a catalog number for a certain stamp, IIRC) including double-stage numerical trivia (The number of years the War of the Roses lasted minus the number of U.S. presidents born in Ohio, for example) and then plugged all of the numbers into this huge friggin equation, so that one tiny little number wrong would throw your answer off by miles. Guess they were really ahead of the curve on chaos theory with that one. Ah, the good ol’ days! I see the magazine on the stands ocassionally, but doubt it can match its glory days before it went out of business and was then revived.
-Chantecleer in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale of the Canterbury Tales is a “golden speckled hamburg” type rooster.
-While I’m on the subject of the Canterbury Tales, part of Chaucer’s government job was to oversee where the human waste of the town was dumped and buried.
-A “dower” and a “dowry” are thought of as synonyms, but are actually very different. A “dower” is a portion of the husband’s estate that goes to the widow if he dies. When the widow dies, that portion of the estate goes not to her family, but either to the heir produced between the original couple or back to the husband’s family. A “dowry” is given from the family of the wife to the groom’s family in marriage. It becomes a part of the estate of the couple, and would not be returned in the event of the wife’s death. This difference is because the wife, in the middle ages, is considered to become a part of the groom’s family upon marriage.
-President Taft once got stuck in the White House bathtub because he was too fat for it. Hah.
What a great thread. I’m learning so much useless knowledge!
The first interacial kiss aired on tv was on Star Trek. When capt. Kirk kissed lt. Uhura (I know I butchered the spelling on her name but you know who I’m talking about?)
Among Chinese Muslims, the given name Muhammad is rendered as “Ma” — so I bet you could find plenty of dudes named Wong Ma, especially in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.
[ul][li]A Clerihew is a poem, named for Edmund Clerihew Bentley. What makes a Clerihew? It’s four lines, humorous, a fictionally biographical sketch of a person, and the person’s name normally ends the first or second line. An example:[/li]
[li]Michael Bolton’s real last name is “Boloton”.[/li][li]Poison ivy is not ivy, poison oak is not oak – they are both members of the cashew family.[/li][li]On March 30, 1993, Charlie Brown hit his first home run[/ul][/li]I’m sure there’s more, but I’m sick with the flu – I can’t think that hard!
The Mocha Valencia (a lesser-appreciated Starbucks beverage) is unique in its composition from any other drink the coffee giant serves. See, there’s an equal proportion of mocha syrup and valencia (orange) syrup, (3 pumps of each for tall, 4 for grande, 5 for venti) which makes for a VERY sweet drink, considering the proportion of syrup volume to volume of espresso and milk. The hitch is that the drink comes with an extra shot of espresso to counterbalance the intense sweetness of what tastes like drinking a chocolate covered orange. It’s really a very good beverage. I suggest you try it sometime. {/advertisement}
You want obscure knowledge? I work at Starbucks, and I’m full of it.
If you live in the Northern hemisphere you can tell what time of year it is by looking at the position of the Big Dipper constellation. It revolves once around the North Star counter-clockwise, in a year’s time. At the very bottom, (6 o’clock), it is the middle of October. So around the middle of April it is at 12 o’clock and so on.
Yeah, well, that’s really cool … but you forgot that the big Dipper also moves around the sky due to the earth’s rotation, so that on a single given night you could see it go about halfway around, describing a semicircle.
I think what you meant was that if you look at the Big Dipper at the same time (midnight?) you will see its position shift throughout the year. Please check your source again.
I know an obscure trivia fact about the Big Dipper: in England they call it “Charles’s Wain.” Charles supposedly referring to Charlemagne. But the American Heritage Dictionary’s etymology thinks that it was altered from an Old English form carles wægen, ‘churl’s wain’. A churl in Anglo-Saxon times was a freeman of the lowest class.
