Here's your (not so) totally useless fact(s) of the day:

[JoeMo]

On 12/14/2019 at 5:46 PM, phkrause said:

Another five awards have been won by Alex Trebek for Outstanding Game Show Host.

As most of you know, Alex has Stage 4 pancreatic cancer; and the diagnosis is poor.  The current season may be his last; ending a legacy of over 35 years.  He will be sorely missed when he passes. He is a fine Christian man.

[phkrause]

Like many women in the 1950s, Bette Nesmith Graham made a living as a
secretary. The problem was that she wasn’t a good typist, and kept making
mistakes. So she began experimenting with ways to cover up errors. She mixed
ingredients such as white tempera water-based paint in her kitchen blender and
painted over her mistakes with a thin paintbrush. She began marketing her
typewriter correction fluid as "Mistake Out". The name was later changed to
Liquid Paper. In 1979, she sold Liquid Paper to the Gillette Corporation for
$47.50. Her son, Michael Nesmith, would also find fame as a member of the
rock band The Monkees.

James

[phkrause]

The Sahara Desert stretches farther than the distance from California to New York.

James

[phkrause]

As a society, we take more pictures in two minutes today than were taken in the
entire 19th century.

James

[phkrause]

The Nobel Prize has been awarded to women 54 times between 1901 and 2019.
The first woman to win a Nobel Prize was Marie Curie, who won the Nobel Prize
in Physics in 1903 with her husband, Pierre Curie, and Henri Becquerel. Curie is
also the only woman to have won multiple Nobel Prizes; in 1911, she received a
second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, in recognition of her work in
radioactivity. Curie's daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, won the Nobel Prize in
Chemistry in 1935, making the two the only mother-daughter pair to have won
Nobel Prizes.

James

[phkrause]

No one knows who named Earth.

 

(ps:I believe that's not entirely true!)

[phkrause]

The fear of Friday the 13th is called paraskevidekatriaphobia from the Greek
words Paraskeví, meaning "Friday", and dekatreís, meaning "thirteen".
Shockingly, nearly 20 million Americans are affected by paraskevidekatriaphobia.
It’s also referred to as friggatriskaidekaphobia while being afraid of number 13 is
called triskaidekaphobia. It's estimated that nearly $900 million is lost in business
on this day because many people will not fly or do business as they normally
would.

James

[phkrause]

A pangram is a sentence using every letter of the alphabet at least once.
Pangrams have been used to display typefaces, test equipment, and develop
skills in handwriting, calligraphy, and keyboarding. The best-known English
pangram is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".

James

[phkrause]

When it comes to wine, an aroma similar to cat pee is a
considered a good thing.

James

[phkrause]

Samsung dominates 15% of South Korea's entire economy.
The company owns hospitals, universities, apartment buildings,
and even funeral homes throughout the country.

James

[phkrause]

Jolt Cola is a carbonated soft drink created in 1985 as a highly caffeinated
beverage. From the outset, Jolt's marketing strategy centered on the caffeine
content, billing the drink as a means to promote wakefulness. It was targeted
towards students and young professionals, stressing its use as a stimulant in
a similar manner as energy drinks. The initial slogan was "All the sugar and
twice the caffeine"; this slogan survived for 24 years. The slogan was then
changed to "Maximum caffeine, more power." The new Jolt Cola has 3.5
times more caffeine than a 16 fl oz Coca-Cola Classic!

James

[phkrause]

A cruciverbalists is someone that constructs or enjoys solving crosswords
puzzles. Arthur Wynne was a Liverpool journalist that invented the first crossword
puzzle. It was published in The New York World in 1913. His puzzle was first
called a “Word-Cross” and was designed as a diamond shape. A few weeks after
the first "Word-Cross" appeared, the name of the puzzle was changed to
"Cross-Word" as a result of a typesetting error. Although Wynne’s invention was
initially greeted with skepticism, by the 1920s it had established itself as a
popular pastime, entertaining and frustrating generations of cruciverbalists.

James

[phkrause]

Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve is an annual New Year's Eve television
special. Its creator and namesake was the entertainer Dick Clark, who conceived
New Year's Rockin' Eve as a younger-skewing competitor to Guy Lombardo's
popular New Year's Eve big band broadcasts on CBS. The first two editions, in
1973 and 1974, were hosted by Three Dog Night and George Carlin,
respectively, and featured Dick Clark assuming the role of Times Square
reporter, and were broadcast by NBC. In 1974–75, the program moved to its
current home of ABC, and Clark assumed the role of host.

James

[phkrause]

Whether it's vanilla extract in your chocolate chip cookies or vanilla beans for ice
cream, vanilla is used in many different recipes. But did you know that Vanilla
comes from an orchid? The most widely used orchid to produce vanilla is the
Vanilla planifolia. After the Vanilla orchid flower is pollinated, the orchid’s seed
pod develops into what we know as a vanilla bean. Once they are harvested,
they are sold either as vanilla beans or used to create vanilla extract. Today,
Mexico and Madagascar is where most vanilla is grown and harvested
commercially.

James

[phkrause]

On his 50th anniversary in 1978, Mickey Mouse became the first animated
character to be honored on the Walk of Fame. Bugs Bunny received his star
several years later, in 1985. Some other noteworthy fictional characters with
stars include: Kermit the Frog, Donald Duck, Tinker Bell, Snow White, Winnie
the Pooh, Shrek, and The Simpsons. In 2004, Godzilla became the first monster
to receive a star in 2004. In 1960 the canine characters of Strongheart and
Lassie received their stars, followed in 1963 by Rin Tin Tin. Darth Vader is still
waiting for his star.

James

[phkrause]

Neil Armstrong and the Apollo XI crew have moons on the Hollywood Walk of
Fame instead of stars.

James

[phkrause]

Till Death Us Do Part was a British television sitcom that aired on BBC from 1965
to 1975. The show centered on Alf Garnett, a white working-class man who holds
racist, prejudiced and anti-socialist views. In this controversial sitcom, Alf is
married to the “silly old Moo” Else, and has a daughter named Rita. Rita's
husband Mike Rawlins is a socialist who frequently locks horns with Garnett.
Sound familiar? Norman Lear bought the rights to the show and created his own
version which he called All In The Family, with the Alf Garnett’s character being
renamed to Archie Bunker.

James

[phkrause]

Paul David Hewson is most commonly known by his stage name Bono. He is an
Irish singer, musician, and humanitarian best known for being the main vocalist
of the rock band U2. The name Bono was originally a nickname, short for "Bono
Vox" given by his friend Gavin Friday. “Bono Vox" is an alteration of Bonavox, a
Latin phrase which translates to "good voice". Hewson has been known as
"Bono" since the late 1970s. Although he uses Bono as his stage name, family
and friends also refer to him as Bono, including fellow band members.

James

[phkrause]

Here's your (not so) totally useless fact(s) of the day:

Although a number of people have received the honor twice, U.S. President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the only person to have been named TIME
Magazine's Person of the Year three times: 1932, 1934, and 1941. Every
president since FDR (except Gerald Ford) has won as least once, and every
president who has been re-elected has won at least twice. Repeat winners of the
award include Joseph Stalin, George Marshall, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill,
Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail
Gorbachev, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.

James

[phkrause]

"Fool's gold" is a common nickname for pyrite. Pyrite may be shiny and brass
colored, but any miner will tell you, it is not as good as gold. Pyrite received that
nickname because it is worth virtually nothing, but has an appearance that "fools"
people into believing that it is gold. The nickname "fool's gold" has long been
used by gold buyers and prospectors, who were amused by excited people who
thought they had found gold. Pyrite contains sulfur and iron. During World War II
it was mined to produce sulfuric acid, an industrial chemical. Today, it is used in
car batteries, appliances, jewelry, and machinery.

James

[phkrause]

The glabella is a medical term given to the space on the human head that is
located above the nose and between the eyebrows. This area of the head sits
just over the frontal bone of the skull and works to connect the two structures
known as superciliary ridges. The word glabella comes from the Latin word
glabellus, which means smooth and hairless, and glaber, meaning bald, due to
the lack of hair that is usually found in this area. If you have a unibrow, your
glabella might be hidden!

James

[phkrause]

Today over 700 streets in the United States are named after Martin Luther King
Jr., with one such street in almost every major city.

James

[phkrause]

The first handheld cellular phone call was made on April 3, 1973,
by Motorola engineer Martin Cooper from Sixth Avenue in New
York while walking between 53rd and 54th streets. Cooper hoisted
the 2 1/2-pound prototype to his ear and called a rival, Joel Engel
of Bell Laboratories at AT&T, to declare that his Motorola team
had devised a functional portable phone. “There was silence at the
other end of the line,” Cooper recalled to Bloomberg in 2015. The
clunky phone, almost as big as a shoe box, allowed a user to talk
for 35 minutes and required 10 hours to recharge, according to
Wired magazine.

James

[phkrause]

Stock car racing has its origins in bootlegging during Prohibition, when drivers
ran bootleg whiskey. Bootleggers needed to distribute their illicit products, and
used fast vehicles to better evade the police. When the runners weren’t
smuggling alcohol, many spent their free time racing other runners for bragging
rights. Once Prohibition had ended, runners found themselves with souped-up
cars yet of work. On December 14, 1947, one of these runners, Big Bill France,
held a meeting with other drivers to put in place some standardized rules for the
races—thus NASCAR, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, was
born. The first official race was held two months later.

James

[phkrause]

If Earth's entire history were compressed into a single year, modern humans
would first appear on December 31 at about 11:00pm.


James