The Fun Facts, Outrageous Trivia Thread!

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mouse from merced

Trad climber

merced, california

Apr 29, 2012 - 02:43pm PT

I thought Frank Key wrote the Star-spangled Banner...
Yet long do I rave, in the home of the free and the home of the homeless.
What, do I know?

Marlow, it doesn't take a detective to know that a man with nine fingers takes down his pants to count to ten or his boots to count twenty, then lines up the Three Stooges, strips them, and then is able to count to eighty.

"You some kinda genus, Mouse?"
"That's right, Moe. Mus musculus. How'd ya know."
"I was counting on you to tell me."

Who's the fastest to correct Mouse's arithmetic? Nyuk nyuk nyuk (approved spelling of "nyuk").

Marlow

Sport climber

OSLO

Apr 29, 2012 - 03:18pm PT

"A modern stade is a tenth of a nautical mile, about 600 feet, but lengths in the ancient world and on into the seventeenth century - were rarely uniform. A stadion could vary considerably, even within a single society: some say it represented the distance a man in ancient times could cover running flat out without taking breath, and that this governed the length of the sports stadiums. Others say it originated as a standard length of a ploughed furrow, 600 pedes (from pes - foot); but the length of a pes varied, and in consequence so did that of a stade."

Marlow

Sport climber

OSLO

Apr 29, 2012 - 03:46pm PT

"For as long as we have records, eclipses have awakened fear and end-of-the-world imaginings, independent of mythology or culture. Eclipses as well as other heavenly occurences that were believed to be almost impossible to predict, such as auroras, comets and meteor showers, are described in a Greek word meaning that the stars are aligned against you: dis-astra - the stars are against. Eclipse itself comes from the Greek and means abandonment or forsaking. The Chinese word translates as "being eaten away" (rishi, literally "Sun-eat"; in Spanish the word means to make dim or indistinct, and in Russian to black out. For the Cakchiquel tribe of North America it glosses as "the Sun carries sickness" - a belief shared by many cultures. In Asian folklore, children born at the moment of the deepest darkness will emerge mute or deaf. Even today, many Thais hoard black joss sticks and jelly and sacrifice black chickens to Rahu, the Sun-devouring demon, much as their ancestors did, and give eclipse-tainted goods as alms to beggars in the belief that their sins will be redeemed by their donations"

Marlow

Sport climber

OSLO

Apr 29, 2012 - 04:07pm PT

"A particularily terrifying and bloodthirsty religious sect founded in 1090 was violently opposed to the Abbasid caliphate. Amin Maalouf, in his history of the Assassins, writes: "The serenity with which the members of the sect accepted their own death led their contemporaries to believe that they were drugged with hashish, which is why they were called hashashun, or hashishin, a word that was distorted into "Assassin" and soon incorporated into many languages as a common noun"

mouse from merced

Trad climber

merced, california

Apr 29, 2012 - 07:00pm PT

Where in the hell is Bootjack?

edit: To lazy to seek the answer? To lazy to tell me?

Bootjack is near Mariposa on Hwy 49, east of town. If you run up the hill from the town of Bootjack, it goes to Jerseydale, home of the now-defunct Double Eagle Golf Course, a 9-hole affair long-reverted to the meadow.

What is a "double eagle?"
In golf, it is 3-under par on any individual hole, either a 2 scored on a par-5 or a 1 scored on a par-4.
OR
It is a gold coin in the $20-dollar denomination, first minted in 1849; it is so-called because it is double the value of the $10 gold "eagle."

Bootjack and Sevilla, Spain, lie on the same degree of latitude.

edit: Seeing mistakes above, crew. Two, too many to count.

Marlow

Sport climber

OSLO

Apr 30, 2012 - 12:03pm PT

The Knife Man - John Hunter

"When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his gothic horror story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he based the house of the genial doctor-turned-fiend on the home of John Hunter. The choice was understandable, for Hunter was both widely acclaimed and greatly feared.

From humble origins, John Hunter rose to become the most famous anatomist and surgeon of the eighteenth century. In an age when operations were crude, extremely painful, and often fatal, he rejected medieval traditions to forge a revolution in surgery founded on pioneering scientific experiments. Using the knowledge he gained from countless human dissections, Hunter worked to improve medical care for both the poorest and the best-known figures of the era—including Sir Joshua Reynolds and the young Lord Byron.

An insatiable student of all life-forms, Hunter was also an expert naturalist. He kept exotic creatures in his country menagerie and dissected the first animals brought back by Captain Cook from Australia. Ultimately his research led him to expound highly controversial views on the age of the earth, as well as equally heretical beliefs on the origins of life more than sixty years before Darwin published his famous theory.

Although a central figure of the Enlightenment, Hunter’s tireless quest for human corpses immersed him deep in the sinister world of body snatching. He paid exorbitant sums for stolen cadavers and even plotted successfully to steal the body of Charles Byrne, famous in his day as the “Irish giant.”

In The Knife Man, Wendy Moore unveils John Hunter’s murky and macabre world—a world characterized by public hangings, secret expeditions to dank churchyards, and gruesome human dissections in pungent attic rooms. This is a fascinating portrait of a remarkable pioneer and his determined struggle to haul surgery out of the realms of meaningless superstitious ritual and into the dawn of modern medicine."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/books/review/11roach.html?_r=1

Charles Byrne's skeleton

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8971853/Skeleton-of-Charles-Byrne-the-Irish-Giant-should-be-buried-at-sea.html

Reilly

Mountain climber

The Other Monrovia- CA

Apr 30, 2012 - 12:31pm PT

During WWII Black Widow spider silk was used for the cross hairs of US submarines.

ydpl8s

Trad climber

Santa Monica, California

Apr 30, 2012 - 12:36pm PT

Lima Peru and Washington D.C. are at the same longitude.

mouse from merced

Trad climber

merced, california

Apr 30, 2012 - 12:55pm PT

Lima, Ohio, and San Jose, Costa Rica are at the same degree of "longitrude."

survival

Big Wall climber

Terrapin Station

Topic Author's Reply - Apr 30, 2012 - 01:03pm PT

The International Space Station solar array surface will be large enough to cover the U.S. Senate Chamber more than three times over.

Gary

climber

"My god - it's full of stars!"

Apr 30, 2012 - 01:21pm PT

The only player to lead the NCAA, ABA and NBA in scoring for an individual season?

Rick Barry

Can you name the four brothers who played major league baseball?

The Alou brothers: Matty, Felipe, Jesus and Boog Powell.

Reilly

Mountain climber

The Other Monrovia- CA

Apr 30, 2012 - 01:22pm PT

Now if they could only deploy an array to cover up the House Chamber too!

mouse from merced

Trad climber

merced, california

Apr 30, 2012 - 01:41pm PT

Which has more stars, Gary: one can of chicken and stars soup or Old Glory?

TwistedCrank

climber

Dingleberry Gulch, Ideeho

Apr 30, 2012 - 02:00pm PT

The Alou brothers: Matty, Felipe, Jesus and Boog Powell.

That's the funnest fact and most outrageous trivia ever posted.

Gary

climber

"My god - it's full of stars!"

Apr 30, 2012 - 02:31pm PT

Which has more stars, Gary: one can of chicken and stars soup or Old Glory?

The California Air National Guard.

DanaB

climber

Apr 30, 2012 - 02:50pm PT

1. What does radar stand for?
2. Five smallest states in area?
3. Four states that are officially called commonwealths?
4. Last French colony in North America?
5. Only vice president to take the oath of office outside the US?
6. The two vice presidents that were charged with treason?
7. The vice president that also served in the government of the Cofederacy?
8. The vice president of the Confederacy?
9. Vice president that served in the Maine Coast Guard during a war?
10. Unusual accomplishment by the baseball Hall of Famer George Brett?
11. State with the shortest ocean coast line?
12. Who was Edith Cavell?
13. What do the words silhouette and leotard have in common - aside from being french in origin?
14. What is the name of the units that are used to measure how hot a pepper is?
15. How is the President Pro Tem of the Senate chosen?
16. What is the origin of the name Jumar?
17. First female cabinet member?
18. Who were the Know Nothings?
19. Origin (possibly) of the word okay?
20. Which city was the scene of the great molasses flood?
21. Where did the names Sten and Bren for the Sten and Bren guns come from?
22. First woman to run for the presidency (there is some dispute about this).
23. Who was the editor of the famous abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator?
24. What was the Hartford Convention and its significance to the war of 1812?
25. What was the significance of Plessy vs. Ferguson?

mouse from merced

Trad climber

merced, california

Apr 30, 2012 - 04:46pm PT

Is there a man or woman who doubts the US Senate chamber alone produces enough gas in one day to:

A) Surpass the amount of gas produced by the Taco in a decade?
B) Answer a simple trivia question.
C) __.

Be my guest...fill in the blank.

And for possibly the longest, certainly the most boring, Wiki article ever:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station

I wondered where all the money was going.

Radar never stood for Col. Potter when he entered except when he was accompanied by a General, but he knew what the acronym meant. I'm more familiar with the ever-popular RURP.

KY and Mass. are two commonwealths....

Is the answer to #23 perchance Mr. Garrison? I'm stretching my brian cells.

If the great molasses flood didn't happen to San Louis Obispo, it should've.

Mighty, good, questions! ;)

mouse from merced

Trad climber

merced, california

Apr 30, 2012 - 05:12pm PT

En garde, Monsieur Gary.

The ever-popular "BASEBALL STAR" is in a constellation which is visible only from the planetoid Boogus16.

Boog was a mountain guide's nickname in the BC area. He was Hans Gmoser's go-to guide.