Archive for the ‘Humor’ Category
I don’t know about you but I’m a bit of a foodie. As like everyone else I have certain foods that I absolutely love but very few that I dislike. I like trying new things and I’ve eaten some things I regret. I spent two years in Korea and inadvertently ate dog soup and spring rolls made with cat. Those for sure I don’t recommend because the resulting projectile vomiting ruined my meal. With that disgusting thought in mind, I felt a post on food trivia was called for. Eat up . . .
- Chocolate was once considered a temptation of the devil. In Central American mountain villages during the 18th century, no one under the age of 60 was permitted to drink it, and churchgoers who defied this rule were threatened with excommunication.
- Vinegar was the strongest acid known to the ancients.
- Most healthy adults can go without eating anything for a month or longer. But they must drink at least 2 quarts of water a day.
- A herd of mountain sheep in Alberta, the Canadian province, has been in danger of being killed off. The herd neglects the normal grass diet in favor of the candy and other junk food offered by tourists. The animals are losing weight, and the females may not be producing enough high-quality milk.
- When tea was first introduced in the American colonies, many housewives, in their ignorance, served the tea leaves with sugar or syrup after throwing away the water in which they’d been boiled.
- The annual harvest of an entire coffee tree is required for a single pound of ground coffee. Every tree bears up to 6 pounds of beans, which are reduced to a pound after the beans are roasted and ground.
- The Manhattan cocktail – whiskey and sweet vermouth – was invented by Jenny Jerome, the beautiful New Yorker who was the toast of the town until she went to England as the wife of Lord Randolph Churchill, in 1874, and shortly thereafter gave birth to Winston.
- A highway 55 feet wide and 6 feet thick that’s built entirely of grain and stretches around the world at the equator – that’s how much the world’s annual consumption of grain comes to: 1.2 billion metric tons.
- Kernels of popcorn were found in the graves of pre-Colombian Indians.
- While Europeans in the 16th century did not live by bread alone, it can be said they almost lived by grain alone. Beer and ale, both derived from grain, were consumed in vast quantities. Dutch soldiers on campaign in 1582 received 2 gallons a day. Queen Elizabeth’s men got only one.
FOODIES RULE ! !
I discovered over the years that the older you get the more reminiscing you do and I’m still not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’ve always been a believer of worrying about the future not the past and that hasn’t changed a whole lot. I’ll be turning 78 years old in August of this year and I’m amazed. I never thought I’d live this long because of my rough and tumble attitude towards living. As I was reminiscing about my long and somewhat interesting life I wondered, what some of the other people that I read about deal with their aging after the age of 70. I always jokingly told anyone who’d listen that after 70 I would retire, sit on my porch with a drink, and smoke as much weed as I could get my hands on until I passed on. Little did I know that I’d be buying my cannabis at a convenience store in gummy form. One of life’s many miracles. I thought a little reflection on my current lifestyle should be matched against some of our more famous or infamous celebrities.
Age 70
Socrates is condemned to die for corrupting the minds of Athenian youth.
Me: I made dozens of bottles of wine, and then spent a few months drinking them.
Age 71
Nelson Mandela was released from a South African prison, after 20 years of incarceration.
Me: Completed a few graphic paintings of scantily clad buxom young women. Then I drank some more wine and sat and looked at them. And yes, I still do.
Age 72
The Marquis de Sade takes a new, 15-year-old lover.
Me: I looked for a 15-year-old lover but forgot why.
Page 73
Walt Stack completes the Ironman Triathlon in 26 hours, 20 minutes.
Me: I did 1000 steps in one day, and my faithful Fit Bit was so amazed it exploded.
Age 74
Albert Einstein announces his unified field theory (but it didn’t hold up).
Me: Drank more wine, contemplated some of my erotic paintings, and worked hard trying to remember the names of the models.
Age 75
Fanny Garrison Villard founds the Women’s Peace Society.
Me: I founded and celebrated the Maine chapter of the Jack Daniels Fan Club. I also considered making a Hag to their distillery in Tennessee.
Age 76
Charles Foster Kane, of Citizen Kane, whispers his immortal, confounding clue, “Rosebud”.
Me: I decided after rereading Citizen Kane that I needed a lot more Jack Daniels. It’s the only way to defend myself against the boredom of Orson Welles and his writings. Little did he know I once had a fat little gerbil named Orson who never really bored me at all.
Age 77
Grandma Moses takes up painting in a serious manner.
Me: After 16 years of my so-called retirement, I bought a lot more weed and a case of a really good Chardonnay in preparation for the start of our three grandson’s 2024 Little League debuts.
LIFE CAN BE GOOD – IF YOU LET IT
Do you own a cowboy hat or other articles of western clothing. The American Old West has fans around the globe as reflected in thousands of Japanese cowboys who live for the fantasy. I was a big fan at an early age when I received my first two-gun cap pistol rig. When the novelty of that wore off, I was pretty much finished with my desire to be a cowboy, so I moved on to wanting to be a professional baseball player and later still a first-class skirt chaser. I’m not wearing a cowboy hat, boots, or assless chaps but I still can offer a few limericks from the Old West.
While waiting for the Sioux to disband,
Colonel Custer took matters in hand.
Despite his dejection
He achieved an erection.
That was almost Custer’s Last Stand.
As a gunslinger Wild Bill Hickok
Had mastered every known trick-shot.
But his skills while in bed
Leave less to said,
For nothing could make his small dick hot.
Said a girl who came west to a farm,
“City life has far greater charm.
Take the pleasures of orgasm,
Each urban girl has’em,
But in Kansas they’re viewed with alarm.
An old whore who worked Santa Fe
Was known as a luscious hot lay.
But the bugs in her twitchet
Forced her always to itch it,
And that frightened her clients away.
Yee Ha, Y’all!
After my raucous celebration of Earth Day, I thought a little humor would improve my morning. It’s only right that if I’m having a good morning, I should pass along some of that goodness to you. Here’s a short joke to start things off.
Q. What are the three words men hate to hear during sex? “Are you done?”
Q. What are the three words women hate to hear during sex? “Honey, I’m home.”
I thoroughly enjoyed this joke which made me laugh out loud when I read it. Who doesn’t love sheep?
🐏🐏🐏
A new farmer buys several sheep hoping to breed them. After several weeks he notices that none of the sheep are getting pregnant and calls a local vet for some help. The vet tells him that he should try artificial insemination. The farmer doesn’t have the slightest idea what that means but, not wanting to display his ignorance, only asks the vet how he will know when the sheep are pregnant. The vet tells him that they will stop standing around and will lay down and wallow in the grass when they are pregnant. The farmer hangs up and gives it some thought. He comes to the conclusion that artificial insemination means he has to impregnate the sheep. So, he loads the sheep into the back of his truck, drives them out into the woods, screws them all, brings them back and goes to bed.
In the morning, he wakes up and looks out at the sheep. Seeing as they are all still standing around, he deduces that the first try didn’t take and again loads them into the truck. He drives them out to the woods, screws each sheep twice for good measure, brings them back home and goes to bed.
The next morning, he wakes to find the sheep still standing around. Out of frustration he again proceeds to load them up and drive them out to the woods. He spends all day sheep screwing, and upon returning home falls totally exhausted into bed.
Morning arrives and he can’t even raise himself from the bed to look at the sheep. He asks his wife to look out and tell him if any of the sheep are lying in the grass.
“No”, she says, “they’re all in the truck and one of them is beeping the horn.”
KEEP SMILING PERVERTS
I’ve made it clear over the years that I’m a huge fan of Isaac Asimov. I’ve tried to read as many of his writings as I could find, and his limericks are outstandingly bawdy. He also has another talent which I really appreciate and that was his ability to collect odd facts. It never ceases to amaze me how diverse his level of knowledge became over the years, and it still fascinates me. It was one of my motivations for starting this blog because there are just so many interesting odd and weird facts available and most of them never see the light of day. This blog is my way of bringing as many of those facts as possible to light so you all can enjoy them. Today’s topic of discussion will be the world of entertainment. Where else could you find the appropriate amount of weirdness that Asimov so religiously documented. Here we go.
- Not until 1959 was a play by a black woman produced on Broadway. 29-year-old Lorraine Hansberry’s starred in, A Raisin in the Sun, which concerned the problems (comic and serious) of a black family in modern day America. It was highly successful and eventually made into a motion picture.
- The great French actress Sarah Bernhardt was obsessed with death. As a teenager, she made frequent visits to the Paris morgue to look at corpses of derelicts dragged up from the Seine, and she begged her mother to buy her a pretty rosewood coffin with white satin lining. The coffin became part of the Bernhardt legend. Occasionally, she slept in it, and eventually she was buried in it when she died at the age of 79.
- A U.S. television network’s dramatic representation of the trial of Nazi judges was sponsored by the natural gas industry. The word “gas” was excised from the script, but a few “gases” slipped by the censors; those had to be blipped before the program was aired.
- During the pre-Broadway tour of the 1936 musical Red, Hot and Blue, Cole Porter had to do a lot of rewriting. Rather than hire a professional stenographer to take his dictations and transcribe the changes, he used the services of one of the stars of the show, Ethel Merman. Before she went into show business, Ms. Merman had been a secretary. Porter described her as “among the best stenographers I’ve ever had.”
- A tambourinelike instrument used in old time minstrel shows was made from the jawbone of a horse or ass, from which the instrument got its name, “Bones.” When the bone was thoroughly dried, the teeth were so loose they rattled and produced sounds as loud as a castanet. Every minstrel troupe had a “Mr. Bones.”
- Rin Tin Tin, for years the most famous dog in the world, was born to a war-dog mother in a German trench in France during World War I. Deserted when the Germans retreated, the German-shepherd puppy was found by an American officer who just happened to be a police dog-trainer from California. He trained Rin Tin Tin when they returned home. The dog was so intelligent he came to the notice of Warner Brothers Studios, which signed him up for what turned out to be a long career as one of the biggest box office draws of the silent screen era.
I just love these hidden stories and facts and envy Azimov’s ability to research and publish all of them. I’m happy to share them with you and I hope you enjoyed them.
THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES, ISAAC!
To all of the baseball lovers out there, here’s a little trivia that goes back seventy-two years. It’s nice to know that the tradition of the game remains as frustrating and fascinating as ever.
In baseball there is no clock. A pro basketball game lasts 48 minutes while hockey and football games last 60 minutes. But as the old saying goes, a baseball game (or the inning) isn’t over until the final out. A game on May 21, 1952, between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers proved the old saying true.
The first half-inning had lasted one hour. Twenty-one batters had gotten hits and seven walks, and two batters had been hit by a pitched ball. Fifteen runs had scored, and three men were left on base. The following day the New York Times printed some of the records the Brooklyn team had broken in that that first-half inning:
Most runs scored in one inning (15)
Most runs scored in the first inning (15)
Most runs scored with two outs (12)
Most batters to bat in one inning (21)
Most batters to reach base safely in a row (19)
This last record may be the most amazing of all. Only the first batter and the last had not gotten on base safely. The 19 batters in between had all made it – even the man who was put out on the basepaths for the second out. The Times confessed it couldn’t be sure that 19 batters in a row was a record, but if any major league team ever did better, no one remembers the occasion.
⚾⚾⚾
PLAY BALL & GOOD LUCK TO THE PIRATES
When I started this blog many years ago it took me a while to come up with a proper name. Once the decision was made to call it “every useless thing” I was hooked into providing as many weird and unusual facts as I could find. I’ve created a rather large library of totally useless information and it’s my pride and joy. If I’ve calculated properly, I have enough facts and trivia to continue this blog for 10 more years and never repeat the same item twice. I get to find them and post them, and unfortunately you get to read them. Here we go . . .
- Reese Witherspoon has two pet donkeys.
- Keanu Reeves was born in Lebanon.
- The iconic mask used in the 1978 horror film Halloween was a plastic Captain Kirk mask from Star Trek, spray-painted white and with its eyeholes enlarged.
- The S. S. Minnow of Gilligan’s Island fame was named after former chairman of the FCC, Newton Minnow, who considered television to be a “vast wasteland.
- The maiden name of Betty rubble from the Flintstones show was Betty Jean McBricker.
- To complete the pair, the maiden name of Wilma Flintstone was Wilma Slaghoopel.
- In the United States, the last year that somebody officially died of “old age” was 1951 That’s the last year “old age” was listed on death certificates. It’s now referred to as death by “natural causes.”
- Robert Williams is the first known person to be killed by a robot. He worked at a Ford automobile factory and was struck in the head by a robot in 1979.
- Amalie Auguste Melitta Benz was the un-famous inventor of the coffee filter.
- The first mechanically sliced loaf of bread was sold under the famous Wonder Bread brand in 1930.
AND THE BEAT GOES ON
I’m feeling the need for some limericks today. I recently came across a book that I picked up at an on-line thrift bookstore and it was a former Boise Public Library book with a date of 2015. It’s a book of limericks written by children for children and some of them are priceless. With that in mind here are four that I particularly liked. I hope you will too.
A teacher of English, Ms. White,
Whose students got everything right,
Would put on her shades
As she wrote down her grades
Because all of her kids were so bright.
😉😉😉
“Ahoy!” Said a pirate named Marrrrty,
Who was fun loving, healthy, and hearrrrty.
“I believe it’s my duty
To go shake my booty,
Cause nothing is more fun than a parrrrty!”
🤪🤪🤪
Said little first grader Pam Plunkett,
“The past tense of ‘shrink it’ is ‘shrunk it.”
Told, “Yes, that is true!
“Just who taught that to you?”
She said, “Not really sure, I just thunk it.”
🤗🤗🤗
A French chef we all call Miss Margo
Cooks lunch at our school here in Fargo.
But we wouldn’t eat
Any yucky frog meat,
So she makes something’ she calls “S cargo.”
*****
SPECIAL THANKS TO BRIAN CLEARY
I’ve had a relationship for more than fifty years with the criminal justice system in this country. Starting as a cop, then a private investigator, a corporate Loss Prevention specialist, and eventually working for the State of Maine in the Judicial Branch. I’m fascinated with all aspects of the profession which includes collecting odd bits of trivia which I’ll share with you today.
- The world’s first police detective was Eugene Françoise Vidocq. The Frenchman founded the plainclothes civil police unit, the Brigade de la se Surete, in 1812.
- C. Auguste Dupin was the world’s first fictional police detective. Edgar Allen Poe used Eugene François Vidocq as a model for his character C. Auguste Dupin in the 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which is considered to be the world’s first detective story.
- The act of hanging, drawing, and quartering was not abolished in England until 1870.
- Sheraton Hope and Ormond Sacker were the original names of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous crime-fighting duo, Sherlock Homes and Dr. John Watson. They first appeared in a novel called “A Tangled Skein.” Doyle ultimately changed the novel’s title to “A Study in Scarlet” when it was officially published in 1887.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has sold more books than J.K. Rowling and J.R.R. Tolkien combined.
- One in four convicts ultimately exonerated by DNA evidence confessed or pled guilty to crimes they did not commit.
- Until 1998 it was a valid defense against rape or sexual battery in Mississippi to claim that the female victim was not chaste in character.
- From the 11th to the 18th centuries criminals were executed in southeast Asia by being crushed by an elephant.
- A real-life member of Scotland Yard, Inspector Charles Frederick Field, was friends with author Charles Dickens and introduced Dickens to many of London’s criminal haunts. Dickens later featured the inspector in his 1851 short story “On Duty with Inspector Field.”
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE
A young playboy took a blind date to an amusement park. They first went for a ride on the Ferris wheel. When the ride was over, she seemed somewhat bored. “What would you like to do next?” he asked. “I want to be weighed,” she said. So, the young man took her over to the weight guesser. “112 lbs,” said the man at the scale, and he was obviously right. Next, they took a ride on the roller coaster. After that, he bought her some popcorn and cotton candy, then asked what else she would like to do. “I want to be weighed,” she said again. I really latched onto an odd one tonight, thought the young man, and using the excuse that he had developed a headache, he took the girl home. The girl’s mother was surprised to see her home so early, and asked, “What’s wrong, dear, didn’t you have a nice time tonight?” “It was “Wousy,” said the girl.
Q. Why is air a lot like sex?
A. Because it’s no big deal unless you’re not getting any.
When Ralph first noticed his penis was growing longer and staying erect longer, he was delighted, as was his wife. After several weeks his penis had grown to twenty inches. Ralph became quite concerned as he was having problems dressing and even walking. So, he and his wife went to see a prominent urologist. After an initial examination the doctor explained to the couple that, though rare, Ralph’s condition could be fixed with corrective surgery. “How long will Ralph be on crutches?” the wife asked anxiously. “Crutches? Why would he need crutches?” responded the doctor. “Well,” said Ralph’s wife coldly, “you are going to lengthen his legs, aren’t you?”
Q. What’s the difference between a lesbian and a Fritz cracker?
A. One’s a snack cracker, and the others a crack snacker!
I JUST WANT TO BE HAPPY . . .
AND MAYBE A LITTLE NAKED AS WELL
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