Posted on 07/26/2003 10:38:39 PM PDT by Hildy
1. A rat can last longer without water than a camel.
2. Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks or it will digest itself.
3. The dot over the letter "i" is called a tittle.
4. A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down continuously from the bottom of the glass to the top.
5. A female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find a mate.
6. A duck's quack doesn't echo. No one knows why.
7. A 2 X 4 is really 1-1/2" by 3-1/2".
8. During the chariot scene in "Ben Hur," a small red car can be seen in the distance (and Heston's wearing a watch).
9. On average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily! (That explains a few mysteries....)
10. Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn't wear pants.
11. Because metal was scarce, the Oscars given out during World War II were made of wood.
12. The number of possible ways of playing the first four moves per side in a game of chess is 318,979,564,000.
13. There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with orange, purple and silver.
14. The name Wendy was made up for the book Peter Pan. There was never a recorded Wendy before.
15. The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin in World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.
16. If one places a tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion, it will instantly go mad and sting itself to death. (Who was the sadist who discovered this??)
17. Bruce Lee was so fast that they actually had to s-l-o-w film down so you could see his moves. That's the opposite of the norm.
18. The first CD pressed in the US was Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA."
19. The original name for butterfly was flutterby.
20. The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law which stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.
21. The first product Motorola started to develop was a record player for automobiles. At that time, the most known player on the market was Victrola, so the called themselves Motorola.
22. Roses may be red, but violets are indeed violet.
23. By raising your legs slowly and lying on your back, you cannot sink into quicksand.
24. Celery has negative calories. It takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it to begin with.
25. Charlie Chaplin once won third prize in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.
26. Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.
27. Sherlock Holmes NEVER said, "Elementary, my dear Watson."
28. An old law in Bellingham, Washington, made it illegal for a woman to take more than three steps backwards while dancing!
29. The glue on Israeli postage is certified kosher.
30. The Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from public libraries.
31. Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space because passing wind in a spacesuit damages them.
32. Bats always turn left when exiting a cave!
A popular saying once the Morotola police radios were in wide use:
You can outrun the motor, but you can't outrun the Motorola.
Do you doubt Dr. Goebbels?
It occurred to me that the duck's quack is reasonably long in duration, if the echo time is short enough it may be hard to distinquish the echo from the source, and the source will "eclipse" part of the echo. I remember sledding with my daughter when she was two at a local country club. The air was still and it was very quiet. If you let out a short yelp (the kind a two-year old generates when she discovers sledding) you could hear a very distinct echo from off the club house about 100 yards away. Since the speed of sound is about 660 ft/sec, the secret was to keep it short.
The most prominent echos I remember are when we watch fireworks from the grandstands at the local high school. The fireworks, high in the air, create a very distinct short report. The school is in the form of an "L" and makes a very nice corner reflector, redirecting the sound towards the stands. The woods behind the school scatter back a fraction of second later so that every report sounds like one loud report, one muffled report a second or so later follow by a low difuse rumble.
Anyway, that's my theory.
According to Arthur Koestler in The Sleepwalkers Galileo never uttered, "And yet ... it moves" or anything like that.
Here at the Duck Research Institute (DRI), we're investigating a related question: "If a duck quacks in the woods, but no one's around to hear it, does it make a sound?". We'll keep you informed!
(As an aside, DRI is funded by PETA - "People Eating Tasty Animals". Please support both organizations.)
OTOH, in Czarist Russia it was leagal for a man to beat his wife to death. If he re-married, he could also beat his second wife to death. However, if he married after that and beat his third wife to death - By Gum that was enough! He could not marry a forth wife.
And up until the late 60s or so they were 1 3/4 X 3 3/4.
Makes remodelling a pain in the elbow.
Not hardly true. Early in the war, neither side bombed each other cities. The Luftwaffe originally planned to destroy the RAF bases in southern Britian and gradually work north until they could maintain air supremacy over the channel, and deny it to the Royal Navy, allowing the Germans to bring their army over in barges - there was effectively no British Army since most of their heavy weapons were left behind at Dunkirk.
The Luftwaffe plans were succeeding well, but Hitler was not interested in occupying Britain and only wanted to achieve an armistice with the UK. He thought that bombing London and other population centers would cause the population to demand that Churchill sue for peace and ordered to Luftwaffe to change targets. In the event it had the opposite effect on the population. And because the Me-109 only carried enough fuel to fly to London and remain for five minutes - no linger time - it gave the RAF a tremendous tactical advantage. Luftwaffe bomber losses ran around 12% per raid over London.
Many common English words have morphed in the distant past by transposition of the syllabic consonants.
I wish I could think of some offhand but I can't.
I do recall many times wondering to myself why it happened.
I doubt that very much.
Glass, however did at one time hold that dinstinction.
As did, I believe, aluminum.
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