Posted on 12/17/2004 8:59:30 AM PST by TheBigB
Awright guys 'n gals 'n kats 'n kittens...time for another FRIDAY SILLINESS THREAD! Feel free to post jokes, silly stories, cartoons, beeber stunings, or even to IGNORE THIS THREAD!
To start things off...a picture of an adorable kitten!
The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as a substitute for blood plasma.
No piece of paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.
Donkeys kill more people annually than plane crashes.
You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching television.
Oak trees do not produce acorns until they are 50 years of age or older.
The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley's gum.
The king of hearts is the only king without a mustache.
American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating 1 olive from each salad served in first-class.
Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.
Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning.
Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin.
The first owner of the Marlboro Company died of lung cancer. So did the first "Marlboro Man."
Walt Disney was afraid of mice.
Pearls melt in vinegar.
The three most valuable brand names on earth: Marlboro, Coca Cola, and Budweiser, in that order.
It is possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.
A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.
Dentists have recommended that a toothbrush be kept at least 6' away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush.
Richard Millhouse Nixon was the first U.S. president whose name contains all the letters from the word "criminal." The second? William Jefferson Clinton.
And the best for last.....
Turtles can breathe through their butts.
Now you know everything there is to know
Most of my bosses must have been turtles, if talking is similar to breathing.
Claim: A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.
Status: False.
Origins: Anyone who has been on the Internet more than a week has probably received at least one of those annoying lists of "facts": dozens and dozens of items of no real significance that somebody thought would be cool for you to know. It is indeed fortunate that the lists are usually composed of items of no real significance, because many of the entries are of dubious veracity. The purpose of these lists apparently is not to educate the masses (however trivially), but to induce readers into the information age equivalent of a scavenger hunt, sending them scurrying all over the Internet in an attempt to verify the truthfulness of the entries. Ours is one of the virtual doors that gets knocked on quite frequently by these scavengers, and while we're glad to help, our job is never done because anyone can make up lists like these — just invent four or five of the most far-fetched statements you can imagine, and follow them with the phrase "and no one knows why." To wit:
Ostrich eggs have no yolks, and no one knows why.
Julius Caesar was left-handed, and no one knows why.
Banging your head against a solid wall really hurts, and no one knows why. The winner (so far) of the Most Ludicrous Entry contest is the claim that a duck's quack doesn't echo. Unfortunately, it's also the item we're most frequently asked about. The premise is just silly: a duck's quack (and presumably, of all the sounds known to man, only a duck's quack) has some special sonic property that causes it not to echo. We're not talking about a situation where a landform creates an acoustic shadow (a phenomenon under which even loud sounds can be inaudible to nearby listeners), but the claim that a duck's quack doesn't echo under any conditions. First of all, how are we to define "a duck's quack"? Different breeds of duck make different sounds, and there are a lot of breeds of duck in the world. And anyone who has spent time around ducks knows that even within the same breed of duck, a male's quack can sound nothing like a female's. (Female mallards, for example, make loud honking sounds, but male mallards produce a much softer, rasping sound.) Do all these varied sounds, without exception, fail to produce an echo?
I could dismiss this one merely from personal experience. Although I grew up in suburbia, much of my youth was spent raising various kinds of domesticated animals, particularly ducks and geese. When those ducks got to quacking, I could most assuredly hear the cacophony of sound as it echoed off the stone walls that surrounded our yard and entered my bedroom window. So could the neighbors a few hundred feet down the street, who frequently called us to complain about the noise. The surprise was not that our ducks' quacks didn't echo, but that they echoed so remarkably well.
Fortunately, we now have more than my personal experience to offer since an acoustic research experiment was carried out at the University of Salford in Greater Manchester in 2003 to set this legend to rest:
Acoustic expert Trevor Cox tested the popular myth — often the subject of television quiz shows and Internet chat rooms — by first recording Daisy's quack in a special chamber with jagged surfaces that produces no sound reflections.
She was then moved to a reverberation chamber with cathedral-like acoustics before the data was used to create simulations of Daisy performing at the Royal Albert Hall and quacking as she flew past a cliff face.
The tests revealed that a duck's quack definitely echoes, just like any other sound, but perhaps not as noticeably.
"A duck quacks rather quietly, so the sound coming back is at a low level and might not be heard," Cox told the UK Press Association.
"Also, a quack is a fading sound. It has a gradual decay, so it's hard to tell the difference between the actual quack and the echo. That's especially true if you haven't previously heard what it sounds like with no reflections."
He said ducks were normally found in open-water areas and didn't usually congregate around echoey cliffs, which may have fueled the theory that their quacks don't produce an echo.
"You get a bit of reverberation — it's distinctly echoey," Cox said
Well, bless her little heart.
You may enjoy the cat toss in this post!
I wish she really was a volunteer. :-)
Julianne Barbie is hot.
I think I just broke Google Image Search looking for a retort.
Rachel Ward used to be very hot. However, we need some pics of Eva Longoria on this thread.
"Challanges"....it's the French spelling. Yeah, that's it.
thag
Talent, shmalent. =P
A small Kitty is no distraction to the smuggling of watermelons in ones tank top. I'm sure she'll be caught.
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