Archive for the ‘declaration of independence’ Tag
Being stuck in this house and this bed is driving me crazier than usual. Now that the Cov-19 has come and gone I still have a twenty-pound cast on my leg. I’m still limited by some door sizes which are too small for this freaking wheelchair to get through. Let me apologize, I immediately start to whine and feel sorry for myself when things aren’t going my way. It’s just human nature I suppose. I decided I would find a few items of trivia to help breakup your day. These are a mish-mosh of items collected totally at random. I hope you enjoy them.
- An Egyptian papyrus, dated at approximately 1850 B.C., gives us the earliest record of a method to prevent pregnancies. It required putting into the vagina a concoction of honey, soda, crocodile excrement, and some sort of gummy substance.
- Between the mid-1860’s and 1883, the bison population in North America was reduced from an estimated 13 million to a few hundred.
- Not a single bank existed anywhere in the thirteen colonies before the American Revolution. Anyone needing money had to borrow from an individual.
- After twenty years as a faithful unpaid servant of the Duke of Windsor, Walter Monckton was rewarded with a cigarette case on which his name was engraved – and misspelled.
- In the seventeenth century, and principally during the period of the Thirty Years War, approximately sixty million people in Europe died from smallpox.
- A conventional sign of virginity in Tudor England was a high exposed bosom and a sleeve full to the wrists.
- If all of the water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere were condensed at the same time, there would be enough water to cover the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii) with twenty-five feet of water.
- The British erected in London’s Trafalgar Square a statue of U.S President George Washington, whose armies overthrew British rule in the colonies.
- When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, it was not a federal felony to kill a President of the United States.
- For fear he might conceal a joke in it was one reason why Benjamin Franklin was not entrusted by his peers with the assignment of writing the Declaration of Independence.
WERE THEY TRIVIAL ENOUGH FOR YOU?
Like this:
Like Loading...
No journal entry today because I need a bit of a break. I thought doing something a little different, interesting and off-beat might be just the ticket. I think I’m mentally already on vacation because I’ve started procrastinating many of my normal tasks and putting them off until I return from my Texas trip. I’ll begin preparing for that trip today.
My better-half is also preparing me for the trip by giving me her list of things I’m supposed to bring back for her. Since she was born in Texas and thinks she’s a real Texan, I’m being instructed to bring back a load of stuff. I just smile and nod my head so she’ll walk away happy but come on. Her list keeps getting longer and longer but I’ve managed to pare it down a little. She requires between 5-10 interesting Texas post cards. She’s something of a collector and loves sending random cards to her Mother who lives in Delaware.
She also wants me to somehow carry or ship home a few dozen tamales. She’s obsessed with Mexican food, especially the traditional style tamale. I think it was something special from her early childhood or so she says but I honestly don’t see that request being honored. Next on the list is a pair of cowboy boots or a western hat for the grandson. This one I might make happen if I can get away with spending a reasonable amount of money. The way he’s growing anything I buy will be too small within a month or two so I made no concrete promises on this request either.
Next on her list is her wish for two T-Shirts with some sort of Texas theme. I quote her as best I can, "nothing pornographic, dirty, or stupid". With that list of don’t’s the chances of pleasing her are now slim and none. As with all of her requests, I’ll figure something out once I get there. If I could find a small petrified chunk of horse droppings I’d buy that for her in a second because it would pretty closely reflect my feelings on this entire matter. Maybe I’ll just buy a really dirty T-Shirt for the grandson that he can wear when she comes to visit. Any eighteen month old can get away with wearing something like that and it would absolutely make her crazy as well. That’s called a Win-Win in any language.
Enough of that, now let me throw a short collection of useless things your way. These are things you never really never wanted to know or even cared about.
-
The line “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” in James Joyce’s Ulysses provided the name for the subatomic particles now known as “quarks”, named by physicist Murray Gell-Mann.
-
“Transurphobia” is the fear of haircuts.
-
Dylan Thomas once unkindly pointed out that, except for one misplaced letter, T.S. Eliot’s name spelled backwards is “toilets”.
-
The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper.
-
The single dot over the lower-case letter “i” is called a “tittle”.
And finally for all you nerds out there:
-
The letters of the word SHAZAM, which was shouted to conjure up comic-book hero Captain Marvel, stood for Solomon’s wisdom, Hercules’s strength, Atlas’s stamina, Zeus’s power, Achilles’s courage, and Mercury’s speed.
How’s that for a really useless tidbit?
Like this:
Like Loading...
everyuselessthing.com 