Archive for the ‘Just Saying’ Category
I am feeling extremely miscellaneous today. Here are 15 miscellaneous truths that you didn’t know you wanted to know. Enjoy!
- Mount Baker in Washington state is the world record holder for the most snowfall in one season. In the winter of 1998-99, the ski resort recorded 1140 inches of snow.
- The first chalkboard for classroom use was recorded in 1714.
- The first read recorded e-mail was sent in 1972.
- Rod Stewart once dug graves for a living.
- Beginning with Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000, footballs used in the big game have been marked with synthetic DNA to prevent sports-memorabilia fraud. Souvenirs from the 2000 Summer Olympics were also marked with human DNA in the ink.
- The last letter added to the English alphabet was “J”.
- A typical American family goes through approximately 6000 pounds of food in any given year.
- Prior to James Madison, US presidents wore knee britches instead of long pants.
- A Twinkie contains 60% air.
- The original name of the game volleyball was “mintonette”. It was created in 1895 when a YMCA gym teacher borrowed from basketball, tennis, and handball to create a new game.
- Thomas Morgan and Elizabeth Caerleon were married for 81 years. When she died on January 19, 1891, their aggregate age was 209 years, 262 days.
- Englishman were once legally barred from witnessing childbirth.
- The stripes on a tigers face are used for identification, since no two tigers sport the same stripe pattern.
- The first fairy tale adapted into cartoon by Walt Disney was Little Red Riding Hood, released in 1922.
- Francis Scott Key wrote the lyrics of the Star-Spangled Banner to the tune of an 18th-century British drinking song.
THE TRUTH WILL STILL SET YOU FREE
THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU WANTED TO KNOW
SEX
- It is illegal In Arizona for a secretary to be alone with his or her boss.
- In Oklahoma you must be married in order to have sex legally.
- It is illegal to kiss for more than 5 minutes In Iowa.
- In Indiana it is illegal to be in a state of sexual arousal in public.
- Talking dirty during sex is illegal in Oregon.
- In Arizona it is illegal to have more than two dildos in a household.
TRANSPORTATION
- The Lincoln Highway from New York to California was the first coast-to-coast highway in the United States. It opened for travel in 1913.
- The last model T Ford was produced on May 26, 1927.
- The first electric traffic light was installed in Cleveland Ohio in 1914.
- The first parking meter in the United States was installed in 1935.
- The first speed limit law in the United States was established in Connecticut in 1901. The limit for cars in cities was 10 miles per hour.
- The first mountain bikes were made in the United States in 1979 by Charles Kelly and Gary Fisher.
FOOD & DRINK
- Starbucks Coffee Company was named after Starbuck, a character in Moby Dick.
- The hot dog was invented by Charles Feltman in 1874.
- Hershey’s Kisses got their name because the machine that makes them looks like it’s kissing the conveyor belt.
- There are over 5900 Dairy Queens throughout the world.
- There are over 3000 varieties of tea.
- Cotton Candy made its debut in 1904 at the World’s Fair in St. Louis.
I TOLD YOU, YOU’D WANT TO KNOW
I collect many books of odd and interesting information but a few weeks ago I found something in a box that surprised me. Stuck between two other stacks of papers was a small paperback book of only 63 pages. It is titled Womens Wit and Wisdom and was published in 2000. One chapter caught my eye concerning quotations from various women from various years with their thoughts on Life. Here are a few.
- “Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard there’s nothing you can do.” Golda Meir 1973
- “The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.” Lucille Ball 1989
- “I was thirty-seven when I went to work writing my column. I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security, and too tired for an affair.” Erma Bombeck 1979
- “Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.” Coco Chanel 1956
- “It is better to be looked over than overlooked.” Mae West 1967
- “Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.” Lillian Hellman 1939
- “At the end of your life you will never regret not having passed one more test, winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret the time not spent with a husband, a child, a friend or parent.” Barbara Bush 1990
- “Adolescence is just one big walking pimple.” Carol Burnett 1986
- “Suddenly you find at the age of fifty, that a whole new life has opened before you, as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.” Agatha Christie 1977″
- “My friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges and enabled me to walk serene and happy in a shadow cast by my deprivation.” Helen Keller 1903
I’M GLAD I FOUND THIS BOOK
In recent months the term “Fake News” has become popular. I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but “Fake News” has been around for a very long time. The younger generations think that they’ve discovered some outrageous political trick that never existed before they discovered it. As an example, many years ago my son (aged 13) came rushing to me all excited. He told me to sit down and listen to this great song. He told me it was being used on a TV commercial and it was the best song he ever heard. I sat down and he played it for me, and I just started grinning. The song he discovered was at that time already a golden oldie, it was the Righteous Brothers singing Unchained Melody. He was sure it was some group from his generation. “Fake News” is a new term, but it has always meant the same thing: lying, misrepresenting, and double speak. George Orwell has been proven right once again. Here are a few samples of so called “Fake News” from the past.
2003: President George W. Bush for his creative use of language in public statements regarding the reasons the United States needed to pursue war against Iraq.
2002: New York State Board of Regents for its politically correct and silent editing of state tests.
2000: The tobacco industry for its media blitz portraying tobacco companies as the benefactors of children, abused women and disaster victims. That is abusive language in pursuit of their right to sell a deadly drug.
1991: Department of Defense for obfuscation and jargon in euphemisms during the first Gulf War.
1990: President George Bush on wetlands, the Panama invasion, Tiananmen Square and the “No New Taxes” pledge.
1989: The Exxon Corporation for the “Exxon Valdez” oil spill obfuscation.
1985: The CIA for the Psychological Warfare Manual prepared for the Nicaraguan war.
1979: The nuclear power industry for its euphemisms and jargon during the 3-Mile Island accident.
1977: The Pentagon and the Energy Department for language cover-up of the neutron bomb development.
1975: Colonel David Opfer, USAF press officer in Cambodia for saying to reporters, after a raid, “You always write its bombing, bombing, bombing. It’s not bombing! It’s air support!
HERES MY FAKE NEWS ANNOUNCEMENT – “FAKE NEWS IS TRUE”
LOL
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910)
I first became a fan of Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain as a youngster. I was quite the reader at a very young age and was instantly captivated by the story of Tom Sawyer and his adventures along and on the Mississippi river. That’s when I discovered one of my first “Happy Places”, my ability to get totally consumed by a book. That ability has served me well for more than seventy years and it still makes me happy. He lived an adventurous life and is famous for his biting sense of humor. Here’s why.
- “Always do right. This greatly gratifies some people and astonish the rest.”
- “When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.”
- “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”
- “It takes your enemy and your friend working together to hurt you to the heart: one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.”
- “Man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to.”
- “Familiarity breeds contempt . . . and children.”
- “Confession may be good for my soul, but it sure plays hell with my reputation.”
- “Good breeding exists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.”
- “It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.”
- “I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up.”
And finally, one of my all-time favorite quotes from Mr. Clemens which could apply to so many things.
“Noise prevents nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.”
PICK UP A GOOD BOOK AND LOSE YOURSELF
Since yesterday’s posting was all about people and how and when they lost their virginities, I thought today I would do a short but interesting look at the history of “kissing”. It was always among my favorite things and the older I got the higher up my list of favorite things it went.
- I guess we should start with the Garden of Eden and Adam. Scripture says that God breathed the “spirit of life” into him and it might explain why many religious ceremonies include kissing.
- A Canadian anthropologist demonstrated that 97% of women shut their eyes during a kiss but only 37% of men did.
- As with many things it seems the Romans got involved with kissing early on. A husband returning from work would kiss his wife on the lips to see if she’d been drinking during the day. The Romans had three different types of kisses: abasium, the kiss on the lips; osculum, a friendly kiss on the cheek, anduavium, the full mouth and tongue. Emperor Tiberius once banned the practice of kissing after an epidemic of lip sores.
- Kissing at one point was frowned upon because it had been used as a sign of betrayal by Judas Iscariot. He identified Jesus to his enemies in the garden of Gethsemane by kissing him.
- Kissing under the mistletoe is an English tradition and started with the kissing bough, which had mistletoe at its center. When the Christmas tree replaced the kissing bough, the mistletoe was salvaged.
- How and where you kiss used to be a sign of where you stood in the social pecking order. Equals kissed each other on the cheek. The lower you ranked to another person, the lower you had to kiss him. Thus, a slave would kiss his masters’ feet, and a prisoner not even allowed to do that. They were forced to kiss the ground near the foot.
- Alice Johnson, a 23-year-old American waitress, won a car in Santa Fe, New Mexico, after kissing it for 32 hours and 20 minutes in a 1994 competition. She loosened four teeth in the process.
- An American insurance company discovered that men were less likely to have a car accident on their way to work if they were kissed before they set off.
- In Sicily, members of the Mafia have stopped kissing each other because the way they kiss was a dead giveaway to the police, and mobsters were getting arrested.
- The first film kiss was in, appropriately enough, the 1896 movie The Kiss. The participants were John C. Rice and Mae Erwin.
- My last entry will give all of you a reason to kiss a little more often. Kissing can prevent illnesses. When you absorb other people’s saliva, you also receive their enzymes, which gives you their immunities like a kind of antibiotic. Unfortunately kissing can also pass on diseases too.
“YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS; A KISS IS JUST A KISS.”
Dooley Wilson in Casablanca
What’s a day without a load of trivial and useless information. If you want to know everything about celebrity’s losing their virginities this is the place to be today. In no particular order.
Jimi Hendrix – age 12
Johnny Depp – age 13
Clint Eastwood – age 14
David Duchovny – age 14
Bruce Willis – age 14
Michael Caine age 15
Charlie Sheen age 15
Madonna age 15
Victoria Beckham – age 17
Brad Pitt age 18
Leonardo DiCaprio – age 18
Brooke Shields – age 18
Mira Sorvino – age 20
Mariah Carey – age 23
Lisa Kudrow – age 31
I LOST MINE AT AGE 14 WITH SANDRA
It’s Sunday which is supposed to be a day of rest. Short and sweet today with a few limericks written by kids and for kids.
😎😎😎
Consider the poor hippopotamus,
His life is unduly monotonous.
He lives half-asleep
At the edge of the deep,
And his face is as big as his bottom is.
🙄🙄🙄
There was an old man of Peru
Who dreamt he was eating a shoe.
He awoke in the night
With a terrible fright,
And found it was perfectly true.
🙃🙃🙃
A visitor from Outer Space
On arriving presented his case.
“Earthlings? Inferior!
My race? Superior!”
Tripped up and fell flat on his face.
🤪🤪🤪
An elephant never forgets,
Neither messages, shopping nor debts.
He can hold in his trunk
A whole cartload of junk,
And the little ones make super pets.
Languages are interesting. Many books have been written about the use of words, but it seems they appeal to only a small portion of the population. I love learning new words and their odd uses, it’s fun! Let’s get started on some fun for you on this fine Monday morning.
- Check out these three sentences:
A mad boxer shot a quick, gloved jab to the jaw of his dizzy opponent.
Five or six big jet planes zoomed quickly by the tower.
Now is the time for all quick brown dogs to jump over the lazy lynx.
They each use every letter in the alphabet.
- The 1939 novel, Gadsby, doesn’t contain a single word with the letter “e”. That quite some accomplishment in a fifty-thousand-word book.
- The longest palindrome in the Oxford English Dictionary is “tattarrattat”. Coined by James Joyce in his book, Ulysses, as a knock at the door.
- The word “honorificabilitudinitatibus” at 27 letters is the longest word to appear in a work by Shakespeare from Love’s Labor Lost.
- The longest palindrome in any language is “saippuakivikakuppias”. It’s 19 letters long and means “soap seller” in Finnish.
- Poets love to rhyme words but in some cases it’s very difficult or just plain impossible. No words rhyme with orange., silver, elbow, galaxy, and rhythm. The words wasp, purple, and month are also very hard to rhyme.
- Here are a few more very cool palindromes:
A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal. Panama
Madam, in Eden I’m Adam
Was it a bar or a bat I saw.
THERE’S YOUR ENGLISH LESSON FOR THE WEEK
Today will be a first for this blog. I’ve covered many and varied topics over the years but today is something special. Today I’ll be discussing cows and cow poop. I’ve heard certain insane environmentalists insist that all of the cows on the planet are affecting the earth due to excessive farting. I think it’s a load of crap (no pun intended) but I suppose I could be wrong. Here’s some additional crap for you to digest (again, no pun intended) to help you make an informed decision.
- There are an estimated 1,294,604,000 head of cattle on Earth. Some are cows and some are bulls but for this discussion let’s call them all cows.
- There are approximately 4.93 people for every cow.
- There is no rule that says all these cows couldn’t potentially be eaten. There also is no rule that says all this meat couldn’t be turned into juicy and delicious burgers. Point of fact, each 850-pound carcass would provide 310 pounds of edible meat.
- Using the above information there are approximately 1,605,308,900,000 (1.61 trillion) quarter pounders masquerading as cows. At 15 cents each, buns for those quarter pounders would cost approximately $240.,000,000.
- These burgers could provide all the 4.472 billion adults on Earth with the maximum calorie allowance for 36 days. To summarize, all the cattle currently on earth could feed adult humanity for five weeks.
- The worlds 1,294,604,000 each cow poops up to 16 times per day and beef cattle produce up to 65 pounds of poop daily.
- Hold your nose for this one. 11,747,273 tons of poop are produced worldwide every day.
- Hold your nose again. Over the course of a year 15,367,758,619 tons of cow poop is produced.
- 2.41 tons of manure per person are produced worldwide annually. This much poop could cover an area two and a half times the size of Rhode Island to the height of a man. P and U !!!!
- Disposing of all this poop is a serious problem. As many as two-thirds of households in the developing world depend on poop as a significant fuel source. Tragically, as many as 4 million women and children are estimated to die every year from respiratory disease triggered by the smoke from wood and poop fires.
Therre it is. Everything you always wanted to know about cows and cow poop but were afraid to ask. My suggestion is for all of us to eat as many burgers as humanly possible and to build a three-story mansion made totally from cow poop. We have to try and be as ecologically respectful as we can if we want to save the world. LOL
COW POOP RULES!
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