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Today I Learned... More Useless Trivia!
Does anyone else feel like their head is full of useless trivia? Share your weird and random facts here!
Newborn babies will cry, like all the time, but they won't actually produce tears. Our tear ducts don't start working until we're about two months old. Speaking of tears, you can' t cry properly in space either due to zero gravity. The water will just sort of leak out of your eye and start floating around. BOOM!
-It took Jane Austen 17 years to finish Pride and Prejudice, which goes to show that all great things take time.
-Moby Dick only gained recognition as one of the greates novels after the Hermen Melville died (I find this so sad, several authors never got to see their books' full potential). same with Oscar Wilde's ' A picture of Dorian Gray',
-J.K Rowling cried when she killed off dumbledore :') as did I when I read it
Offal ain't that bad, @ElleBelle! Mmm, chicken heart and pâté are hella tasty Looking at your fact historically, it makes a lot of sense though. It's been said that offal - in some cases - is healthier for you than eating sausages!
The giraffe used to be known as 'Camelopard' in the English language as an archaic name. It derives from Ancient Greek for camel and leopard due to its appearance, and the Latin species name camelopardalis.
I've watched a couple of docos and read some old price sheets, and it doesn't actually buy much. Prices were inflated because meat was hard to come by, it was more economical for farmers to use the land/resources for crops and dairy herds. It would generally buy you about 2 pork chops, or about a kilo of the cheap cuts and offal. That and your ham was all the meat you would get for the week. If you had a big family, you might be lucky enough to use everyones ration and have a meat meal every night, but if it was just you or a couple, then most of your meals were going to be vegetarian (or really gross. ew, liver)
During WW2 in Britain, every person had their food rationed down to:
225g of bacon or ham
454g of sugar
113g of tea
1 shillings worth of meat
227g of cheese
227g of butter
340g of margarine
85g of lard
1 egg
unlimited bread and vegetables, although lots of stuff was really hard to come by (like onions, bananas, all citrus fruit)
Imagine trying to live off that for a week!
Oddly enough I'm planning to try it @stonepixie, I might start with a week and see if I can extend it to a month. The staples are bread and potatoes, and I don't eat meat so it would be a very carb-y month. I just ordered a cookbook of WW2 recipes to help me.
Here's another interesting fact about the rationing, despite the strict rationing the health of most Brits actually increased following the war. As opposed to WW1 when many people died of starvation due to limited and poorly controlled food supplies.
ALSO the Giraffititan (!!!!) is believed to be one of the largest land animals to have ever roamed the earth. Here is a size estimate with a human for scale:
@N1ghtW1ng real candles? On a real tree?? Do they not worry about a potential fire hazard???
Here is a non-Christmas fact: we humans are, on average, 10cm taller now than our ancestors living 150 years ago. We're also pretty close to the human genetic height limit on average
In the Benelux countries, Santa has a helper called Zwart Piet, or Black Pete, who is a black muslim. It's controversial and pretty racist, because people who play Pete usually dress up in blackface.
Also, in Italy they have La Befana - the Christmas witch!
A newborn baby's eyes are greyish-blue, and only change colour after a few months
Western screech owls pick up tiny snakes, and bring them back to their nests, alive, they kill and eat all other snakes
Example: X chromosome looks like an x, Y chromosome comes after x 😛
This is the thread for me!
Gotta hate it when you really do need to remember something uber important - but all you actually remember are useless facts
Alrighty, here we go:
- Harrison Ford actually wanted Han Solo to be killed off, instead of continuing his role 35 years later
- J.K Rowling originally wanted to kill off Ron in the H.P series, just coz.
- There is a word that rhymes with 'orange' - it's 'sporange', which is a sac in flowering plants where spores are made
Do you mean that a woman can be Queen if she marries a King, even if she is not the direct descendent to the throne, but a man cannot be King if he marries a Queen if he is not the direct descendent to the throne, aka Prince Phillip @N1ghtW1ng?
The Vandals were a Germanic tribe notorious for smashing up buildings for no particular reason when they invaded Rome, hence the term vandalism.