Useless Facts

In Japanese, there's a special register reserved for addressing the Imperial family.

Side note: one of my lecturers was told as a student that there was no point teaching it because the odds of meeting the Imperial family were so low. She wound of meeting three members in her work as an interpreter and had to use the most polite Japanese she could. They weren't mad

 

The Los Angeles County coroner has a retail website where you can buy t-shirts and stuff - 'skeletons in the closet':

http://lacoroner.com/

 

It takes fewer muscles to smile than it does to frown. It takes fewer muscles still to raise a middle finger.

 

In 1969 the Army Corp of Engineers shut off Niagra Falls for six months. They worried the rock face behind the falls was destabilizing due to erosion.

 

I think it was just American Falls, right? I can't imagine where they'd put all the water if they tried to shut down the whole thing.

 

The Army stopped the waterfalls so they'd have unrecognizable terrain to film the 'lunar landing', and we all fell for it.

Get it? We fell for the falls?

I'll show myself out.

 

Way to leave your partner with survivor guilt!

Or maybe just jealousy that they weren't enjoying it as much as you were?

And from the survivor's point of view, at what point does it become appropriate to push them off you to crash unceremoniously and disrespectfully to the floor?

 

Male = at the natural conclusion.
Female = when the smell starts to outweigh the benefits of rigor mortis.

 

The satisfaction of a job well done, I'd say

Stephen King wrote a story about that... Kind of a dirty version of A Rose for Emily.

 

Gerard's Game or something, right?

 

Gerald's Game was the one where she got tied up in the cabin, then her hubby dropped dead. This was a short story where a lonely lady picked up a construction worker or something, got him coked up, and, well, discovered the aforementioned rigor and its benefits when she climbed off after several hours. Kind of a precursor to a Sybian, I guess.

 

Ahhh. Shame I'm not a King fan because the premise sounds interesting!

 

People recognize Stephen King for his more mainstream writing; The Shining, Carrie, Christine, The Stand, It, etc.
But he used to send tons of stuff to Penthouse and Playboy magazines. Perverted is the only thing he does as well as horror.

 

Was thinking of cultivating a new habit of reading. The plan is to do one book at a time for now, starting with "Knights of the Seven Kingdoms" by George RR Martin. Question: how and what did you do to get yourself into the habit of reading?

 

In the 90s Malcolm Gladwell published a paper asserting that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery.

This has been proven false, but what is interesting is that this number has its own character in the Chinese numeral system.

 

And that number handicaps people's ability to count, since counting goes one, ten, hundred, thousand, one ten thousand, ten ten thousands, hundred ten thousands, sub-billion, ten sub-billions...

Trust me, when you put a number of more that five digits on the blackboard, they start counting on their fingers to figure out what it is.

 

Trust me, I had to explain it to the bf when he was paying Yakuza 0, when you're training with the Beast style there are crates with amounts of money written on them with it as short hand for the number of 0s.

If anything, I just saw the correlation interesting.

 

Malcolm Gladwell is a yellow pee stain on the underwear of modern culture. I've heard that 10,000 hour theory for years from people who actually believe it, and it makes me puke. Some people seem to believe you suck at something because you've only spent 9,999 hours practicing it, and it's demonstrably untrue. I guess all the mastery comes in that last hour. Hey - there's a great time-saving idea! Only practice for one hour, but make sure it's the ten thousandth!

 

In movable type printing, a cliche is a cast block of often used words. Rather than setting the phrase letter by letter, they would just use the cliche. A worn out cliche was one used so often it no longer printed clean and clear, like when it was new.

 

The first modern amphibious invasion, with naval fire support and machine guns, took place at Guantanamo Bay in June of 1898, during the Spanish-American War.

 

Yeah, Guantanamo was the first one to bring it all together. Another fun fact, once the Marines had landed, the Navy tried to refuse to resupply them with more ammo, saying it was needed as ballast in the ships. Seems someone missed a memo somewhere or other.

 

Youtube was originally started to be a video dating service.

 

1/ Sounds like a tale I heard about the Sicily landings in 1943. British MTB returning to Malta to refuel encounters a US PT boat, and challenges them to a friendly rivalry gunnery contest with a passing oil barrel. The Americans declined; they had no ammo, the ammo lockers were full of Coke bottles...(Were they planning to poison the Italians?)
2/"Bring it all together" sounds as if you're missing the air support.
If you can disqualify British naval operations for non machine guns...

 

I know this was posted a month ago, but I've just seen it and wanted to respond. I personally find it really irritating when people get this wrong. Cucumber? Fruit. Marrow? Fruit. Tomato? Definitely fruit. It's really not difficult. If it bears seeds and grows from a flower, it's a fruit. I feel so strongly about this that if I use a self-checkout and have to look the item up only to find that it has been wrongly classified, I will refuse to buy it.