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| Posted by Cute One on 13-Aug-2005 | Fun Factoids[Some of these ideas are news to me, so I've decided to share... however I do not vouch for their accuracy]
DID YA KNOW?
Why do dimes, quarters and half dollars have notched edges, while pennies and nickels do not? The US Mint began putting notches on the edges of coins containing gold and silver to discourage holders from shaving off small quantities of the precious metals. Dimes, quarters and half dollars are notched because they used to contain silver. Pennies and nickels aren't notched because the metals they contain are not valuable enough to shave.
Why do Xs at the end of a letter signify kisses? In the Middle Ages, when many people were unable to read or write. Documents were often signed using an X. Kissing the X represented an oath to fulfill obligations specified in the document. The X and the kiss eventually became synonymous.
Why is shifting responsibility to someone else called "passing the buck"? In card games, it was once customary to pass an item, called a buck, from player to player to indicate whose turn it was to deal. If a player did not wish to assume the responsibility, he would pass the buck" to the next player.
Why do people clink their glasses before drinking a toast? It used to be common for someone to try to kill an enemy by offering him a poisoned drink. To prove to a guest that a drink was safe, it became customary for a guest to pour a small amount of his drink into the glass of the host. Both men would drink it simultaneously. When a guest trusted his host, he would then touch -- or clink -- the host's glass with his own.
Why are people in the public eye said to be "in the limelight"? Invented in 1825, limelight was used in lighthouses and stage lighting by burning a cylinder of lime in an oxyhydrogen flame that produced a brilliant light. In the theater, performers on stage in the ''limelight" were seen by the audience to be the center of attention.
Why do ships and aircraft in trouble use "mayday" as their call for help? This comes from the French word m'aidez - meaning "help me" - and is pronounced "mayday." (Note: not exactly.... it's pronounced "med-ay", but close enough)
Why are zero scores in tennis called "love"? In France, where tennis first became popular, a big, round zero on the scoreboard looked like an egg and was called l'oeuf, which is French for "egg". When tennis was introduced in the US, Americans pronounced it "love,"
Why are many coin banks shaped like pigs? Long ago, dishes and cookware in Europe were made of a dense, orange clay called pygg. When people saved coins in jars made of this clay, the jars became know as "pygg banks". When an English potter misunderstood the word, he made a bank that resembled a pig. And it caught on!
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| Posted by Cliff J. Not Available on 13-Aug-2005 | A Scant 100 years ago...It May Be Hard to Believe That A Scant 100 Years Ago...
The average life expectancy in the United States was forty-seven.
Only 14 percent of the homes in the United States had a bathtub.
Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone. A three minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars.
There were only 8,000 cars in the US and only 144 miles of paved roads.
The maximum speed limit in most cities was ten mph.
Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more heavily populated than California. With a mere 1.4 million residents, California was only the twenty-first most populous state in the Union.
The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower.
The average wage in the U.S. was twenty-two cents an hour. The average U.S. worker made between $200 and $400 per year.
A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year, a dentist $2500 per year, a veterinarian between $1500 and $4000 per year, and a mechanical engineer about $5000 per year.
More than 95 percent of all births in the United States took place at home.
Ninety percent of all U.S. physicians had no college education. Instead, they attended medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press and by the government as "substandard."
Sugar cost four cents a pound. Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen. Coffee cost fifteen cents a pound.
Most women only washed their hair once a month and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
Canada passed a law prohibiting poor people from entering the country for any reason, either as travelers or immigrants.
The five leading causes of death in the U.S. were: 1. Pneumonia and influenza 2. Tuberculosis 3. Diarrhea 4. Heart disease 5. Stroke
The American flag had 45 stars. Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Hawaii and Alaska hadn't been admitted to the Union yet.
Drive-by-shootings -- in which teenage boys galloped down the street on horses and started randomly shooting at houses, carriages, or anything else that caught their fancy -- were an ongoing problem in Denver and other cities in the West.
The population of Las Vegas, Nevada was thirty. The remote desert community was inhabited by only a handful of ranchers and their families.
Plutonium, insulin, and antibiotics hadn't been discovered yet. Scotch tape, crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea hadn't been invented.
There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day.
One in ten U.S. adults couldn't read or write. Only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school.
Some medical authorities warned that professional seamstresses were apt to become sexually aroused by the steady rhythm, hour after hour, of the sewing machine's foot pedals. They recommended slipping bromide -- which was thought to diminish sexual desire -- into the woman's drinking water.
Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at corner drugstores. According to one pharmacist, "Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and the bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health.
Coca-Cola contained cocaine instead of caffeine.
Punch card data processing had recently been developed, and early predecessors of the modern computer were used for the first time by the government to help compile the 1900 census.
Eighteen percent of households in the United States had at least one full-time servant or domestic.
There were about 230 reported murders in the U.S. annually.
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| Posted by Alex Martin on 13-Aug-2005 | Weird Notes- At one time in Holland it took four years to train to be a hatmaker but only three years to train to be a surgeon.
- Despite the many rat invested slums in New York City, only 311 people are bitten by rats in an average year. But 1,519 residents are bitten annually by other New Yorkers.
- No one knows why, but 90 percent of women who walk into a department store immediately turn to the right.
- The term skyscraper was first used way back in 1888 to describe an 11 story building.
- Adults average only one nightmare a year, but typically have seven sexual fantasies a day.
- There are twice as many kangaroos in Australia as there are people. The kangaroo population is estimated at about 40 million.
- During his entire lifetime, Herman Melville's timeless classic of the sea, 'Moby Dick', only sold 50 copies. (DeepJoke sez "Gee, I wonder why?")
- Drivers tend to drive faster when other cars are around. It doesn't matter whether they are in front, behind or beside them.
- A small tribe named the Todas in southern India don't greet each other with a handshake, they thumb their noses.
- The host team in an NFL football game must have 26 footballs inflated and ready to play.
- The world's greatest lover was King Mongut of Siam. He had 9,000 wives. Before dying of syphilis he was quoted in saying he only loved the first 700.
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| Posted by Hysteria82 on 13-Aug-2005 | News: Weird ways to dieMike Stewart, 31, of Dallas was filming a movie in 1983 on the dangers of low-level bridges when the truck he was standing on passed under a low-level bridge -- killing him.
George Schwartz, owner of a factory in Providence, R.I., narrowly escaped death when a 1983 blast flattened his factory except for one wall. After treatment for minor injuries, he returned to the scene to search for files. The remaining wall then collapsed on him, killing him.
In 1983, a Mrs. Carson of Lake Kushaqua, N.Y., was laid out in her coffin, presumed dead of heart disease. As mourners watched, she suddenly sat up. Her daughter dropped dead of fright.
While motorcycling through the Hungarian countryside, Cristo Falatti came up to a railway line just as the crossing gates were coming down. While he sat idling, he was joined by a farmer with a goat, which the farmer tethered to the crossing gate. A few moments later a horse and cart drew up behind Falatti, followed in short order by a man in a sports car. When the train roared through the crossing, the horse startled and bit Falatti on the arm. Not a man to be trifled with, Falatti responded by punching the horse in the head. In consequence the horse's owner jumped down from his cart and began scuffling with the motorcyclist. The horse, which was not up to this sort of excitement, backed away briskly, smashing the cart into the sports- car. At this, the sports-car driver leaped out of his car and joined the fray. The farmer came forward to try to pacify the three flailing men. As he did so, the crossing gates rose and his goat was strangled. At last report, the insurance companies were still trying to sort out the claims.
Hitting on the novel idea that he could end his wife's incessant nagging by giving her a good scare, Hungarian Jake Fen built an elaborate harness to make it look as if he had hanged himself. When his wife came home and saw him she fainted. Hearing a disturbance a neighbor came over and, finding what she thought were two corpses, seized the opportunity to loot the place. As she was leaving the room, her arms laden, the outraged and suspended Mr. Fen kicked her stoutly in the backside. This so surprised the lady that she dropped dead of a heart attack. Happily, Mr. Fen was acquitted of manslaughter and he and his wife were reconciled.
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| Posted by Jody R. wood on 13-Aug-2005 | News: Impersonating your wifeJoshua Marete Mutuma, 32, was arrested in Modesto, Calif., on suspicion of impersonating his wife, who had a restraining order against him. Mutuma arrived at the courthouse dressed as a woman with a long black wig and five o'clock shadow, talking in falsetto as he attempted to have the restraining order dismissed.
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Ordered to submit a urine sample for a drug test before his sentencing on a theft conviction, John Issa of Painesville, Ohio, got a bright idea. He substituted his wife's sample for his. Issa's plan backfired, however, when the test results came back showing that he was pregnant.
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| Posted by ryanstilesgirl on 13-Aug-2005 | Bad promotional ideaAt this point, two things seem clear: It will be a very long time before David Phillips will have to pay for another airline ticket. And it will be even longer before the poor and homeless people in the Sacramento area will want to see another cup of chocolate pudding.
Phillips, a civil engineer at UC-Davis, has become a cult hero in the obsessive subculture of people who collect frequent-flier miles by parlaying $3,150 worth of pudding into 1.2 million frequent flyer miles. Oh, yeah - he's also going to claim an $815 tax write-off.
Last May, Phillips was pushing his shopping cart down the frozen-food aisle of his local supermarket when a promotion on a Healthy Choice frozen entree caught his eye: He could earn 500 miles for every 10 Universal Product Codes bar-codes) from Healthy Choice products he sent to the company by Dec.31. Even better: Any bar codes mailed by the end of the month would rack up double the mileage, or 1,000 miles for every 10 labels.
"I started doing the math, and I realized that this was a great deal," he said. "I wanted to take my family to Europe this summer, and this could be the way." Frozen entrees were about $2 apiece, but a few aisles away Phillips found cans of Healthy Choice soups at 90 cents each. He filled his cart with them, and then headed to his local Grocery Outlet, a warehouse-style discount store. And there he hit the mother lode.
"They had individual servings of chocolate pudding for 25 cents a piece," he said. "And each serving had its own bar code on it. I did some more math and decided to escalate my plans."
Phillips cleaned the store out - bought every last cup of pudding in the warehouse. He then asked the manager for the addresses of all the other Grocery Outlet in the Central Valley and, with his mother-in-law riding shotgun in his van, spent a weekend scouring the shelves of every store from Davis to Fresno. "There were 10 stores in all," he said. "Luckily, most of them were right off the freeway."
He filled his garage to the rafters with chocolate pudding and stacked additional cases in his living room. But Phillips wasn't finished yet - he had the manager of his local Grocery Outlet order him 60 more cases.
"A few days later I went out behind the store," he said, "and there were two whole pallets of chocolate pudding with my name on them."
All in all, he'd purchased 12,150 individual servings of pudding. Around this time, Phillips began to reveal his scheme to fellow readers of the Webflyer Web site http://www.flyertalk.comwww.flyertalk.com, where he posted an account under the name "Pudding Guy." Phillips' tale was met with skepticism, if not outright disbelief, until he uploaded photos of his haul. They're still there, at: http://www.flyertalk.com/pudding.htmwww.flyertalk.com/pudding.htm http://www.flyertalk.com/photosfr.htm
But then Pudding Guy discovered he had a problem on his hands: The deadline for earning double miles was quickly approaching, and there was simply no way Phillips and his wife could tear off all those bar codes in time.
"I had to come up with something to do with all that pudding, fast" he said.
Phillips trucked the pudding to two local food banks and the Salvation Army, which agreed to tear off the bar codes in exchange for the food donation.
"We'd never seen anything like it," said Larry Hostetler, community relations director for the Sacramento Salvation Army. "We've gotten some big donations, but always from companies and institutions, not individual people."
Phillips got his bar codes in the mail in time to beat the deadline, and then held his breath. The promotion specifically said I could get the miles for any Healthy Choice product," he said. "But still, it seemed like there was a good chance they'd get me on some technicality."
But then packages - large packages - started arriving in the mail from Healthy Choice. In all, they contained 2,506 certificates, each good for 500 miles. That's 1,253,000 miles.
Under the terms of the promotion, Phillips could have the mileage posted in any airline account. He split 216,000 between his United, Delta and Northwest accounts and posted the rest - 1,037,000 miles - to his American Airlines account.
By surpassing the million-mile mark, Pudding Guy now has AAdvantage Gold status for life, entitling him to a special reservations number, priority boarding, upgrades and bonus miles. While we talked on the phone, Pudding Guy did a little math - as you might have noticed by now, he's very, very good at math - and figured out that scheme netted him enough miles for 31 round-trip coach tickets to Europe, or 42 tickets to Hawaii, or 21 tickets to Australia, or 50 tickets anywhere in the U.S.
"Wow - 31 trips to Europe for a little over $3,000," I said. "That's less than $100 a ticket."
"Oh, it's better than that," Phillips said. "Since I gave the pudding to charity I can take a tax write-off of $815. So that brings the cost of a ticket to Europe down to $75." As it turns out, Pudding Guy didn't donate all his stash to the food banks.
He kept about 100 servings for himself, and he's just about finished them.
"Actually," he said, "I really like the stuff."
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