Budapest is actually two cities: Buda on one side of the river, and Pest on the other.
I was about to complain that you shouldn’t be making up joke facts in a thread like this but then I looked it up. It really is true! :eek: I am sure I can use that fact to win money sometime because it sounds like complete bullshit but isn’t.
Good God, that’s horrible!
:eek:
And once Turks conquered it (both), Hungarians moved their capital to Bratislava, which is now capital of Slovakia. Thank you.
Hmm. There are two Isabel Allendes, and they are cousins. The worldwide best-selling author is not the daughter of elected-then-assassinated Chilean president Salvador Allende, but his niece. Salvador also had a daughter, Isabel, who became the first ever female president of the Chilean Senate.
I learned that there is one actor in common between “The Silence of the Lambs” and “The Burbs”. The Bichon that shits on everyone’s lawn is the same dog as Buffalo Bill’s pet.
And Óbuda, as well. It’s not considered separate cities today. They all merged in 1873.
To clarify: Budapest is the merging of three cities in 1873: Buda, Óbuda, and Pest. Budapest is one city now, but the west side of the river is referred to as Buda and the east side as Pest, so the separate names are used to describe geographically the two sides of the city. (Buda is the hilly side, a bit leafier and quieter, and generally considered more upscale, and Pest is the more urban side, where the bulk of the city’s goings-on are.) Óbuda is what is now known as the 3rd district.
And you should also have learned that “Voila!” is not spelled the same as “viola,” a string instrument.
Today’s fun fact, the meaning of the city names:
“Buda” means surprise
“Óbuda” means ruthless efficiency
“Pest” means an almost fanatical devotion to the pope
Hey, made-up trivia is over in the Thread Games forum! 
(“Buda” probably comes from the Slavic “voda,” meaning “water.” “Ó” means “ancient” in Hungarian. And “Pest” seems to come from a Slavic word meaning “oven.” Interestingly, the old German name for Buda was “Ofen,” meaning “oven.”)
This the basis for the Montague Egg story, “A Shot in Goal”, where the misspelling is the critical clue that solves the mystery.
Today I learned that talus and scree don’t mean the same thing to hikers. Among hikers and hiking guides, scree refers to a slope covered with small loose stones while talus refers to a slope covered with large boulders, not typically very loose. I always thought the two terms were synonymous, and I still believe they are to geologists.
Yes, that’s true. I think climbers and hikers call stuff that’s small and loose “scree” (you can “ski” down it if it’s small & steep enough), and stuff that’s large enough to be in a semi-stable configuration with gaps between lumps of rock that your leg could become trapped in “talus”. The difference is emphasized because of the difference in techniques by which you’d move across the terrain.
Coloradans climbers have told me that they use slightly different terminology - scree is gravel to pebbles, talus is maybe baseball-sized to a little larger, and the stuff that everyone else calls talus is called “boulder fields”. But that’s probably just because they are such hipsters.
And I agree that so far as I know geologists don’t emphasize any qualitative distinction, because there’s no qualitative difference in the weathering mechanisms that produce them. I’m less certain about this, though.
The bus I take home after working on Sunday changed its schedule from every hour to every 75 minutes.
I wish I knew that before wasting 70 minutes of my life waiting for it Sunday.
I have just discovered that Christopher Pine, who plays Capt. Kirk in the Star Trek reboot movies, is the son of Robert Pine, who played Sgt. Getraer on CHiPs.
It’s fairly well-known that the sickle cell trait offers a degree of protection from malaria.
Less well-known, and more recently discovered, is that a gene that is linked to reduced fatality from trypanosomasis (African sleeping sickness) is also linked to an increased risk for kidney failure, and some scientists think this may explain, at least in part, why black people of equatorial descent have a much higher rate of kidney disease.
Here in New Zealand the Fire Service have the authority to do whatever it takes to protect public safety.
If that means shunting a car off a hydrant or smashing the windows to run a hose through the car, they have the legal right to do so.
Last year, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut announced that they are, over the next couple of years, phasing out artificial flavorings in their foods.
That includes black pepper FLAVOR. Um, really? Never knew there was such a thing. :dubious:
There was ANOTHER Winston Churchill, an American, who was born just a few years before the famous one. To make matters worse, they both wrote books.