Post Your Trivia: Interesting, Fun, or Useless Facts

Will do George

My my Dad died a couple of years ago he left me a super photo in a frame of his Mum (1905-2004) when she was eighteen. Also a pic of his Dad (1904-88) when he was a lad in 1913 outside my paternal great-grandparents' London pub. When I get access to a scanner I'll put 'em up. The pub pic is fantastic!

Kevin!

I am going to get a scanner!

Please do so also, and we can have an old people thread!

What amazes me about the old people is that they had exactly the same human emotions as we, and yet were so dignified. They saw trouble, they lived through it, and remained kind, and calm. They must have had fantastic grand parents and great grand parents ... !

A lesson for today's self indulgent youth, but one that will not be learned, I suspect.

Very best wishes from George

I like the idea of an old people/ancestors thread...

"The great unwashed" was first coined by Edmund Burke.

Graham.

I think they used to wash. Maybe the soap was mot scented, but they washed alright ..

ATB from George

I am still trying to work out why Jamie's over fat swallow would be expected to hold a coconut - or am I missing something?

You're missing having watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Thank you Redmires - I see, it's all a matter or weight ratios.  I will have to call in at the castle (Doune) on my way to Perth tomorrow to try and refresh my memory.

'Not a lot of people know that.'

Michael Caine's supposed catchphrase was not originally said by him but originated from Peter Sellers who impersonated Michael on his telephone answer machine using those words and Peter recounted the story on television.

Not a lot of people know that!

Uranus has rings.

George Frederick: Your great grandfather beat out my grandfather by one year.  My grandfather was born in 1876, one month before Custer was killed by the Sioux at Little Big Horn.  If you ever see the U.S. TV miniseries "Lonesome Dove", they might have cast my grandfather in the Robert Duval role of Gus, had he been alive.  He died in 1955 and I knew him well.  Grant was the U.S. president when he was born and he told me he hated that!

His sister, and my great Aunt died in 2008 at the age of 99.  She was one of the last five surviving children of U.S. Civil War veterans.

But the oldest person I ever met was an old woman who had done ironing for my grandmother, who had actually been born into slavery and was a tiny child when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.  I knew her only as "Aunt Lucy".  She told my grandmother she had been six years old when the Civl War ended (that was in 1865--if true, that would mean she had been born in 1859).  I was a small child in either 1953 or '54 when I saw her several times, so she would have been in her nineties at that time.  She called me "Honey." 

Not that he was particularly old, but an interesting fact relating to slavery: I once was buying feed in the small town nearest the family ranch, and met an old black man who was shelling pecans.  We got to talking and he ended up asking me who "my people" were.  I told him my grandfather's name "Lee--named after Robert E. Lee--.  He told me that my great grandfather had owned his grandfather and that he had worked for our family as a young man.  I kept in touch with him for a few years and then found out he had died.  Those were the closest brushes with real history I ever had.

Forgot to add that my wife told me when we got married that her great Uncle Max Knoll, whom she had known when she was a child, was the co-inventor of the scanning electron microscope who had ended up at Princeton when Einstein was at the Institute for Advanced Studies.  I thought to myself "Yeah, yeah."  Then later, we were visiting the huge museum relating to science and industry in Munich.  There was damned near a whole room devoted to him.

Best regards,

Russ

GraemeH: In my case, you are correct, and they hurt like Hell whenever I eat spicy Mexican food.

Russ

On a more serious note this is my Great(x4) grandmother who lived to 102.  This is from 1937 - she was an accomplished smoker.  Note the pipe she holds her cigarette in.  I still have it and can smell the tabacco today.  G

Approaching 60, Cary Grant tried LSD and declared " I have been born again" ....Every day now is wonderful . Shortly afterwards he became a father for the first time.

Humphrey Bogart, in "Casablanca", never actually said "Play it again, Sam"

Sherlock Holmes, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's books, never actually says "Elementary, my dear Watson"

Captain Kirk never actually says "Beam me up Scotty"

Spock never actually says "It's life, Jim, but not as we know it"

The longest train delay in the UK due to snow was 4 days (from tonight's One Show)

Cheers

Don

Pig orgasms can last up to 30 minutes.

The total volume of semen ejaculated is typically around 4 deciliters.

Shouldn't that be posted in the streaming section ?

Atoms are tiny. There are more atoms in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in all the world's oceans. 99.9% of an atom is empty space - if the nucleus of an atom were the size of a football the nearest orbiting electron would be 0.8km away. Consequently, if one could squeeze all of the empty space out from within an atom a human being could be compressed to a size smaller than a grain of salt - and the entire human race of six billion to around the size of an apple.

Even so, the 17.45 from Liverpool Street would still be strap-hanging packed.

Eagles LPs have messages in the run out area.

From the three I own:

Their Greatest Hits; Side 1, "Happy New Year Glen”,  S2, “---with Love from Bill"

Hotel California; S1, "Is it 6 o'clock yet?",  S2 "V.O.L. is five piece live"

The Long Run; S1, "Never let your monster lay down.",  S2, "From the Polack who sailed North."

Mick Fleetwood is the tallest man in rock at 6'6" (2.0 m).

That sounds just like a White House Press Release 

A load of none specific  .

Stu