Is it just me or is the media using the term “genius” way too often. It seems that if your successful at anything you’re a genius until the novelty wears off and then your back to being a regular schmuck like everyone else. Real geniuses are a rarity, and they bring their own baggage along with them. They are usually a genius in a specific area but in other areas not so much. I went to college with a guy who could pick up a #2 pencil and in mere minutes, completely copy works by Michaelangelo. It was effortless and left many of us absolutely amazed. What most people didn’t know was that he was something of a recluse. He hated groups of people and was barely able to attend classes. Many times, he would complete wonderful projects at his apartment and then contact his fellow students to deliver them to the teacher. He was unable to speak before groups of more than 2 or 3 without panicking. Was he a genius? Yes! Was he happy? I don’t honestly know.
I decided to checkout a few well know geniuses to get a better feel about how they handled their gift. Here are a few facts.
The eccentric English chemist and physicist Henry Cavendish (1731-1810) had no appropriate instruments for that purpose, so he measured the strength of an electrical current in a direct way. He shocked himself with the electrical current and estimated the pain. He still managed to live to be nearly 80 years old.
The first person to work out the manner in which a telescope handled light according to strict scientific principles was the German astronomer Johann Kepler. His eyesight was so bad, however, that it was useless for him to try to use a telescope himself.
Thomas Edison, who bordered on being totally deaf, do not think of the phonograph in terms of music and entertainment. He was interested in the business and educational potential of the invention.
Henry Ford in 1921 proposed that milk be made synthetically. His disregard for dairy cows as being inefficient and unsanitary stemmed from unpleasant experiences on his father’s farm. Milking had been an exasperating and disagreeable labor.
Charles Dickens believed that a good night’s sleep was possible only if the bed was aligned from north to south. In this manner, he thought, the magnetic currents of the earth would flow straight through the resting body.
Geniuses require powers of concentration. But even that can be carried too far. In 1807, the mathematician Johann Karl Frederich Gaus was caught up in a problem while his wife lay sick upstairs. When the doctor told him his wife was dying, Gaus waved him away and never looking up from his problem, muttered, “Tell her to wait a moment till I’m through.”
Louis Pasteur, whose work on wine, vinegar, and beer led to pasteurization, had an excessive fear of dirt and infection. He refused to shake hands, and he carefully whipped his plate and glass before dining.
Sigmund Freud never learned to read a railway timetable. It was necessary that he be accompanied on any journey.
I’ve been a baseball lover my whole life. I have a hard time watching baseball games these days because it’s always been more fun to play than to watch. Thank God for highlights provided on the Internet which makes watching much more pleasant. I was born in the Pittsburgh area and was required to be a rabid Pirates fan by my father and grandfathers. Unfortunately, the team has been a serious disappointment for the last twenty or so years. I still follow the team but not too closely anymore. Maybe that would change if the management of the team ever decides to pry open their fat wallets and spend a little extra money for next level players.
I’m also big into trivia and as I’m surfing the net or reading books, I constantly look for baseball trivia. Fortunately, or unfortunately some of the greatest stories were from the early years of the game before rule changes that made it impossible for players to show much emotion. The current whinny umpires are a tad too sensitive for my liking and really need their moms to show up and hug them. Those nasty baseball players are just soooooooo mean and they apparently hurt the poor umpires’ feelings. Just step-up guys and grow a pair!!! If it’s too upsetting for you – get the hell out of the business. They are one of the reasons that will eventually cause the league to turn over all umpiring duties to computers.
Here are a few trivia facts for you for a taste of baseball at its best.
One of the most popular baseball players of the 1880’s was a catcher-outfielder named Michael Joseph “King” Kelly, who played for Cincinnati, Chicago, New York and Boston. Kelly was a good hitter and a great baserunner. When he tried to steal a base his fans would shout, “Slide, Kelly, Slide!” This phrase was soon printed in the newspapers and made Kelly famous. Kelly was also an alert ballplayer who was always looking for a way to get an advantage over the other team. One day, when he was sitting on the bench, an opposing batter hit a high foul ball that none of Kelly’s teammates would be able to catch. Kelly leaped off the bench and went after the ball. At the same time, he was shouting to the umpire, “Kelly now catching!” Kelly caught the ball, but the umpire refused to allow the catch. “It’s not against the rules,” Kelly declared. “It says in the book that substitutions can be made any time.” The umpire still wouldn’t call the batter out. But Kelly was right. That winter, a new rule was written into the book. Because of Kelly’s alert play, the new rule said that a player could not enter the game while the ball is in play.
On August 13, 1910, the Pittsburgh Pirates played the Brooklyn Dodgers. After nine innings the game was tied, but darkness stopped play. The nine-inning statistics showed that each team had scored 8 runs on 13 hits and committed 2 errors. Both clubs had sent 38 men to the plate, with both sets of fielders credited with 27 put-outs and 12 assists. There were 5 strikeouts recorded against each team, and each side had given up three walks. It was the evenest game ever played.
One day in a Southern League game a batter for Knoxville smashed a long, high fly to center field. Arnie Moser, the centerfielder for Nashville, ran all the way to the scoreboard. The ball was over Moser’s head, and he leaped for it but missed. The ball hit the scoreboard and came down. Moser also hit the scoreboard but did not come down. His belt had caught on a wooden peg, and he was hanging helplessly on the fence, unable to chase the ball and get it back to the infield. Moser’s teammate left-fielder Oris Hockett came racing over to back-up the play. “I’m stuck! Get me down!” yelled Moser. Hockett looked up at his friend, looked for the ball, and looked at the runner rounding second base. He had to make a choice quickly. “Get me down!” yelled Mosier again. “Wait a minute”! hollered Hockett. He picked up the ball and threw it back to the infield to keep the runner from scoring. Only then did he go back to the fence and help get Arnie Moser off the scoreboard peg.
Today I’d like to talk about virgins and virginity. Whether we like it or not there aren’t as many virgins available as there once were. Back in the day virginity was prized by almost everyone but I think those days have passed us by forever. I’m reminded of a joke I heard a few years ago that the only virgins left were “ugly third graders”. It was funny at the time but the more I thought about it the more unfunny it became. I’ve been around a very long time and my experience with virgins is damn near nonexistent. With the advent of “soaking” (thanks to those devote Mormons), I’m not entirely sure if the term virginity even applies anymore. Since I admittedly have no clue about virginity, I thought I’d revert to my library for some soulful inspiration. My first choice when diving into my library is always limericks. Here are four limericks concerning virginity or the lack thereof. Enjoy!
After the last few years, I’ve become something of an expert on the human body and all of its frailties. It’s not something I ever wanted to know but when you’re put in a position where you have no choice, you learn. I thought I’d pass along a short list of interesting items about the human body that might help you learn some things you didn’t know. Let’s see . . .
The longest hiccupping attack lasted 65 years; the longest sneezing fit lasted 978 days; and the longest yawning ordeal lasted for five weeks.
The average human body has 14 to 18 square feet of skin.
The average human head contains approximately 100,000 hairs.
Assuming that the heart beats at least once a second, by the time a person is 70, his or her heart will have beat at least 2.8 billion times.
Approximately 200,000,000 to 300,000,000 sperm cells are contained in a single human ejaculation.
Every human being will drink approximately 16,000 gallons of water in their lifetime.
It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown.
A human being will lose 1/2 to 3/4 of the bodies heat by not covering the head in cold weather.
The hyoid bone resides by itself in the throat, and it supports the tongue and its muscles. It is the only bone in the body that does not connect with another bone.
Whether the person is male or female, the number of hairs lost in a given day is approximately 25-225 hairs.
And for my final entry I’ll explain how religion manages to involve itself in virtually everything. We’ve all heard during our lives about the “Adam’s Apple”. It refers to a religious legend that claims a piece of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden was stuck in Adam’s throat. My only question is why Eve didn’t never had one.
Here’s a collection of facts concerning some of the history of the battle for women’s rights. Some good ones, some bad ones, but all are certainly interesting.
Epicurus (341-241 BC), to whom good and pleasure were synonymous, was the first important philosopher to accept women as students.
In 17th and 18th century America, women were employed in all of the same occupations that men worked, and men and women earned equal pay. A female blacksmith charged the same as a man to shoe a horse. Women sextons and printers were paid at the same rate as men. Women were also silversmiths, gunsmiths, shipwrights, and undertakers.
The first woman governor in U.S. history was Mrs. Nelly Taylor Ross. She was elected governor of Wyoming in 1925.
$10,000 was offered by Marion Hovey, of Boston, to the Harvard Medical School, to be used to educate women on equal terms with men. A committee approved the proposal, but the Hovey offer was rejected by the board of overseers. The year was 1878.
Though she was a Nobel Prize winner (and soon would become the first person to win two), Marie Curie (1867-1934) was denied membership in the august French Academy simply because she was a woman.
A woman agreed in 1952 to play in organized baseball, with the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Senators of the Interstate League. However, minor league commissioner George Trautman, with the support of major league baseball commissioner Ford Frick, unilaterally voided Mrs. Eleanor Angles contract.
During the American Revolution, many brides did not wear white wedding gowns; instead, they wore red as a symbol of the rebellion.
She was 87 years old when she became the first woman U.S. Senator, and she served for only one day, November 21, 1922. Rebecca Lattimer Felton, a Democrat and the widow of a Georgia representative who had opposed reactionary machine politics, had long worked for women’s suffrage, which became national law in 1920. She was appointed for a day to the Senate in a token gesture by the governor of Georgia, who had opposed the suffrage movement. “The word ‘sex’ has been obliterated from the Constitution,” Mrs. Felton said on excepting her appointment. There are now no limitations upon the ambitions of women.
There are 15 nations that had given women the right to vote before the U.S. did in 1920. The earliest were New Zealand, in 1893, Australia, in 1902, and Finland, in 1906.
Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, in 1776: “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
I’m feeling a little weird today as you’ll see when you read the following post. I always like to have a reasonable amount of weirdness in my life but today I have more than my share. Therefore, I’ll pass the following items on to you to help me shed some of my current level of weirdness. Oh yeah, “You’re welcome.”
An agoraphobic man who had vowed never to leave his house again after he was assaulted at age 18 decided, after 30 years of self-induced imprisonment, to take a walk outside. But the strain of being outside was too much for him and he suffered a heart attack while strolling along.
A man was speeding down the highway at 110 mph when he struck the rear of a car, immediately killing the two people inside. The victims? The man’s mother and her elderly neighbor, who she was taking on a leisurely drive to see the town’s Christmas lights.
Author Morgan Robertson wrote his story of a gigantic luxury ship, the Titan, in 1898. In his fictional tale, the ship, advertised as unsinkable, hits an iceberg and tragic tragically goes down, killing many passengers and crew. In 1912, the real-life ship the Titanic met a shockingly similar fate.
A man attempting to rob a convenience store in Cherry Hill, North Carolina, thwarted his own plans when he dropped his gun. The gun hit the ground, went off, and the bullet lodged in the robber’s foot.
“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
Edgar Allen Poe
A wealthy Connecticut woman named Helen Dow Peck believed messages she received from Ouija boards. One day in 1919, the board spelled out that she should leave her entire estate to a man named John Gale Forbes. She did but the only problem was she didn’t know anybody by that name. In fact, after she died in 1956, her lawyer did a search throughout the world and discovered that, despite what all the all-knowing spirits had said, there was nobody with that name.
Four men dressed like Elvis Presley jumped out of a plane to promote a Boston nightclub opening in 1996. Three of them lived, but one unlucky Elvis died when he caught a gust of wind and was blown out to sea.
“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many
things that escape those who dream only at night.”
Why is it that everybody seems to love celebrities. It’s something that’s puzzled me for many years and I still don’t understand the fascination. During my lifetime I’ve met a number of celebrities and after short conversations very few of them were interesting. Underneath all the glitz and glamour and the famous roles that they’ve played, it’s still just a regular old human being playing dress up like they did when they were kids. They have the same problems and issues as all the rest of us except for the fact that a few problems they have are exacerbated by their fame and celebrity. Their worst problem is primarily the use and abuse of drugs as reflected by the endless list of OD fatalities. I dug into my archives again today and picked up a few trivia items concerning celebrities from the early Hollywood years. For those of you that love celebrities and can’t live without TMZ and the effing Kardashian clan, you have my sympathies. You should stop reading now and go have a cup of coffee or a stiff drink. That’s what’s I’m going to do.
An old-time actress, Ethel Barrymore, was the first actress to have a theater named after her.
A great actor James Cagney made his first stage appearance as a chorus girl in a show called Every Sailor.
In the famous Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho, the blood in the famous shower scene was actually chocolate syrup.
Child actress Shirley Temple appeared in her first film, The Red-Haired Alibi, at the age of three.
Yule Brenner was famous for his shiny bald head but most people who watched his movies had no idea his real hair was actually a dark brown.
Jimmy Durante of the famous gravelly voice and large nose insured his nose at Lloyd’s of London.
In the 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the out-of-control computer HAL, is taught to sing the song, A Bicycle Built for Two.
Dolly Parton and her two wonderfully round and soft friends once had the name, Booby Trap as a CB handle.
Famous leading man Sean Connery represented Scotland in the 1952 Mr. Universe contest.
Elizabeth Taylor’s film career started at the age of 10 in a low-brow comedy called There’s One Born Every Minute, which also featured former Our Gang star, Carl (Alfalfa) Switzer.
As you can see most of the celebrity gossip from the good old days isn’t nearly as juicy as what we’re dealing with today. I just wish I had the power to bundle up all of the Kardashians (including big Daddy/Mommy Jenner), all of their associates and children and lovers and ex-lovers and husbands and ex-husbands, and dump them all back into the 1920’s. If only wishing made it so.
A few weeks ago, I posted a number of limericks written in the World War II era. Your response was much better than I anticipated so I thought I’d dig up a few more from that same era to make you laugh and smile all these years later.
I thought I’d step back from my comfort zone a little for today’s post. I’m not a big believer in the occult and all things mysterious but you may find them interesting. Some folks live for this kind of craziness which apparently helps them deal with their fears and phobias. Here are a few superstitions on varied subjects which should convince you without a doubt that most human beings are nuts. Believe them or not.
If you see a white horse, put the little finger of your right hand against your chin just under your lips. Then, spit vigorously over your finger. You will soon find a bundle of money and your worries will be over. I guess the real trick today is to try and find a white horse.
If a man has a mole on his nose, it means he is going to be rich. Moles generally mean good luck unlike warts, which signify bad luck. A mole on a man’s nose was a sign of good luck and material wealth. A mole on a woman’s nose, or anywhere else on her face, meant she was beautiful but not necessarily wealthy. My advice, look for a wartless women with a mole on her cheek and also one her nose, “Problem Solved”.
The yolk of an egg, yellow like the sun, had the power to cast out the evil eye. Egg worshiping cults existed in many cultures throughout history. Ancient Egyptians believed the one supreme life was in an egg. This belief was expressed in the hieroglyphs for their sun god, Ra. I guess, this explains my absolute love of eggs. No one has ever successfully given me the scary Evil Eye.”
I guess all of these quirky superstitions come to us from generations of foolish beliefs of foolish people. It just further convinces me that people really are nuts and that we unfortunately come by it honestly. Here is one final one item that I particularly liked:
If you inadvertently walk through a spider’s web, you will soon receive a letter with good news. If you try to do it intentionally, you’ll be cursed, screwed, with all manner of bad things sure to happen. Most of my letters must have been lost in the mail. I’m still looking for all that money.
Do you consider yourself a “Foodie”? I love a great variety of foods and have gone out of my way over the years to try almost everything once. There are a few things I absolutely love and on the backside of that a whole lot of things I absolutely hate. That doesn’t make me a foodie it makes me a nitpicker. I pick the nits I like, and I ignore the ones that I dislike. With that thought in mind I thought maybe a class on food trivia might be called for and give you a little information you probably haven’t heard before. I’ll just throw 15 facts at you, and you can deal with them as you please.
Coca-Cola was first bottled in 1894 in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
A 12-ounce cup of brewed coffee contains 200 mg of caffeine.
The average ear of corn has 800 kernels.
A medium-sized potato provides 45% of the recommended daily value of vitamin C for an adult.
Nescafé was the first instant coffee. It was introduced in Europe in 1938.
The Chinese restaurant item, chop suey, was invented in the United States.
Fulton, Kentucky was once known as the “The Banana Capital of the World” because 70% of all imported bananas to the United States used to be shipped there.
The United States military has created an “indestructible sandwich” that can stay fresh for up to three years.
Black olives contain 10-30% more oil than green olives.
The Aztecs considered avocados an aphrodisiac.
The red and white colors of the Campbells Soup label came from the colors of the Cornell University football team, which Campbell’s executive Herberton Williams watched play in 1898.
White and brown eggs contain the same nutrients in the same quantities.
The Marquis de Sade loved chocolate so much that he had it sent to him in prison.
Post Cereals developed the first cereal, Grape-Nuts, in 1897.
The national drink of Iceland is a potato schnapps called “Black Death.”
everyuselessthing.com 