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 There is a large mountain range in NZ called the Ureweras. The name means 'Burnt Penis' which commemorates a Maori Chieftain sleeping too close to the fire one night. The SR-71 was one of the first aircraft to be designed with stealth features, but it had one of the largest IR (Heat-seeker) signatures of any aircraft.
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Nov 5, 2015 21:00
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Wiki front page had some interesting tidbits today: In 2004 a Sperm whale being carried to Autopsy in Tainan spontaneously exploded due to gas buildup, showering sightseers with bits of whale. Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies is "An exact Description of the most celebrated Ladies of pleasure who frequent COVENT GARDEN and other Parts of the Metropolis". IOW, a directory of London's 18th century prostitutes, complete with waxing lyrical about their anatomy and notable skills.
Jaguars! has a new favorite as of 02:41 on Nov 13, 2015 |
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Nov 13, 2015 02:39
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Some vaguely early rock and surf music related factoids: When the Ventures recorded Walk, don't run in 1960, their drummer, one Skip Moore, chose to be paid a lump $25 (About $200 today) instead of royalties, and left the band. (I Imagine him being all smug and buying a nice radio or something with the proceeds of a weekend's work on a doomed single) The song was a million seller and the band later sold over 100 million records. Another early drummer eventually became a general in the USAF. Miserlou by Dick Dale (I guarantee you've heard it before, maybe in Pulp fiction) is an adaption of an Egyptian folk song that he created when challenged to come up with a song that could be played on only one string of his guitar. Wipeout was written as an afterthought (See also Paranoid by Black Sabbath). It is a 'flipped disc' - The B-side filler of a single that supplanted the intended A-side. Jan Berry had a hit in 1964 with Dead man's curve, about a street race between a Corvette Stingray and a Jaguar XKE. Two years later, he nearly killed himself in his own Corvette Stingray by crashing into a truck, a couple of miles from the curve he sang about. I was made for loving you by KISS was written at least in part to prove how easy it was to create a hit song using the disco formula. (OK, so not so early rock.)
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Jan 12, 2016 03:30
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Kanine posted:Haha this pretty much happens in "Inside llewyn Davis." I wonder if it's a direct reference. Maybe, wouldn't be the first musician to get ripped off like that. Their previous single sank completely and there's only two known copies of it left. The band also has toured japan every year since 1965. (And I checked, they were still touring there last year.) Link Wray's 1958 tune Rumble, was banned in NY due to fears that it would incite gang violence, despite being an instrumental. To be fair, it is a very menacing, ominous song. He must be one of the first people to poke holes in his speakers to distort the guitar tone, a trick popular in the punk rock age.
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Jan 12, 2016 22:23
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There is a time capsule from 1878 beneath Cleopatra's needle in London. It contains copies of Bradshaw's railway guide, Whittaker's Almanac and 12 photographs of the most beautiful women in Britain. The obelisk is a genuine ancient artifact from Cairo, and was already over 1000 years old when Cleopatra was alive.
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Jan 25, 2016 09:51
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 Every bomb needs safeguards to prevent detonation while in the plane or after an aborted bombing raid. In WWII, Japan had the lowest rate of dud bombs because they had the fewest of these safeguards. No statistics are available on how many armourers or planes returning from unsuccessful raids were lost. This might be limited to Australasian interest, but the infamous jingle in the spray 'n' wipe commercials is actually a 1977 pop song by Ian Dury called 'Billericay Dicky'. The real lyrics start:I had a love affair with Nina In the back of my Cortina A seasoned up hyena could not have been more obscener and go on to brag about all the times Dickie has got his leg over.
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Mar 1, 2016 21:22
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Some lesser-known Churchill quotes: "I remember, when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities. But the exhibit I most desired to see was 'The Boneless Wonder'. My parents judged that the spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes, and I have waited 50 years to see the boneless wonder sitting on the Treasury bench."[On Ramsay MacDonald] "My wife and I tried two or three times in the last few years to have breakfast together but it was so disagreeable that we had to stop." "At every crisis the Kaiser crumpled. In defeat he fled, in revolution he abdicated: in exile he remarried." "If you wanted nothing done at all, [Prime minister Arthur] Balfour was the man for the job." [Ramsay MacDonald is] "A sheep in sheep's clothing" "The biggest argument against democracy is a five-minute discussion with the average voter." [Prime minister Stanley Baldwin]"Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened" "I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but it would have been much better if he had never lived."
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Jun 11, 2016 23:42
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Since we're sort of on the subject, some British bomber weirdness. The Avro Lancaster. A good bomber. But of course it was, it was their second try! Before the Lancaster, there was the disastrous Avro Manchester, which was basically the same aircraft with only two engines, markedly inferior to the ones eventually used on the Lancaster.  Avro Manchester. Fun fact, Avro was bought out in 1963, but the Avro football club is still around. Short Brothers Stirling:  Len Deighton was inspired to write his novel Bomber after an RAF friend told him about the cheers that went through the squadron briefing room when the crews learned that the Stirlings were going to accompany them on a raid, flying lower and slower and thus attracting all the attention of the anti-aircraft gunners and the German night fighters. The cause of this handicap was the specs it was built to - it was limited to a 99ft wingspan to fit through the doors of pre-war RAF hangars. (Though Wikipedia debates the subject) Anyway, Shorts shortened the wings of one of their flying boats and converted it to a landplane and it unexpectedly won the tender when the favourite candidate's factory was destroyed by Geman air raids. It also used two small bomb bays where the Lancaster used one, preventing the use of the larger bombs the Lanc eventually carried. Handley Page Halifax:  A boringly competent bomber that did a mediocre-to-fair job until the Lancaster came along. Armstrong Whitworth Whitley:  The Whitley was designed with the wing tilted up at 8.5° to improve take-off performance. Of course, once you level off, you level off the wings, not the body. The one above is not diving, that's how they flew. Handley Page Hampden:  It's just a weird aircraft. Look at it! It couldn't carry enough bombs and it had no toilet. Retired halfway through the war. (Only half of them were left) Vickers Wellington:  A good bomber used in the early part of the war. It used the old style of doped canvas skin, but it had a clever frame system, essentially being built out of a diamond shaped mesh. My favourite VC winner, Sergeant James Ward, used this to good effect one night, using a fire axe to punch hand and footholds in the wing one night in order to beat out a fire in the engine with a canvas cover. 
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Jul 23, 2016 23:12
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Imagine surviving two years of war in a crappy Hampden, struggling to keep above the night fighters and the AA, and getting a shiny new Manchester delivered. Five months later you're back in the Hampden because the Manchesters keep throwing conrods  syscall girl posted:The guy partly responsible for those engines was well That reminds me of some Rolls-Royce Trivia - Early Rolls-Royce jet engines were named after english rivers to promote the idea of the smooth flow of air through the turbines.
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Jul 23, 2016 23:42
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Tokoroa, population 13600, is the fifth largest town of the Waikato district, New Zealand. The main employment source there is a large wood pulp mill. It has a plant that converts treatment byproducts to much of New Zealand's supply of swimming pool chlorine. The plant is of German manufacture and dates from 1915. It was taken as war reparations in 1918 and that's where it ended up. This has been a world war fun fact.
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Oct 29, 2016 11:56
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If you go back a little further, you have the reign of terror where suddenly the all the aristocratic ladies were wearing plain gowns and calling each other citizen to avoid looking too ostentatious. Napoleon's coronation portrait shows him crowning Josephine because during the coronation he crowned himself (Much to the disgust of pope Pius VII, who was supposed to do it) and it wasn't thought seemly to depict that.
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Nov 1, 2016 23:12
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Apples, Butter, Charlie, Duff, Edward, Freddy, George, Harry, Ink, Johnnie, King, London, Monkey, Nuts, Orange, Pudding, Queenie, Robert, Sugar, Tommie, Uncle, Vinegar, Willie, Xerxes, Yellow, Zebra See if you can guess it Royal Navy phonetic alphabet, WWI Jaguars! has a new favorite as of 08:48 on Aug 24, 2017 |
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Aug 24, 2017 08:41
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The oldest known named pet is Abuwtiyuw, the royal guard dog of an unknown pharoah.quote:The dog which was the guard of His Majesty, Abuwtiyuw is his name. His Majesty ordered that he be buried (ceremonially), that he be given a coffin from the royal treasury, fine linen in great quantity, (and) incense. His Majesty (also) gave perfumed ointment, and (ordered) that a tomb be built for him by the gangs of masons. His Majesty did this for him in order that he (the dog) might be Honoured (before the great god, Anubis).
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May 27, 2019 03:28
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Virginia (born in SE [???] Ohio[?]) Became attached Oct 19 1861 [Illegible] My cat, I had her four months in the army. She was not afraid of horses, guns or any noise, used to be with me on picket & seemingly lulled herself to sleep unde[r] my arm. I sent her home by a sick soldier. [e:] Ohio might be wrong, it could be a mangling of some native american name or a somewhere nicknamed chia? and seemingly is actually regularly Jaguars! has a new favorite as of 00:16 on Jun 10, 2019 |
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Jun 10, 2019 00:01
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That makes sense, I just wasted 1/2 hour at work looking for likely placenames in Virginia 
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Jun 10, 2019 00:32
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Alhazred posted:In 1902 French Indochina was overrun with rats. The colonial government hired rat hunters, but even though they were killing over 20 000 rats a day they couldn't even make a dent in the rat population. The solution was to set å bounty on one cent per dead rat. They even had the ingenious idea of telling people to just show up with the tail so to not flood the governmental offices with rat corpses. And sure enough the rat tails started to pour in. But then people started to notice that the rats were still there, they were just missing their tails. A dead rat can't generate any more money after all, but an alive rat (without a tail) can produce more rats which means more money. People even began smuggling rats into the country and set up rat breeding farms. The government then gave up one extermination the rats and in 1906 there was an outbreak of the bubonic plague in Hanoi. Paul Doumer, the then governor of French Indochina and the man responsible for it all, later became president of France. I'm sure this happens everywhere at least once, It's happened in NZ with rabbits and maybe possums.
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Sep 5, 2020 22:52
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ChocNitty posted:
This is his coronation portrait:  Notably, he is already crowned and is pictured in the act of crowning his wife, Empress Joséphine. Pope Pius VII is next to him watching. This is because Napoleon decided at the last minute to crown himself. A draft sketch of the portrait show him autocoronating. Jaguars! has a new favorite as of 19:59 on Jan 4, 2021 |
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Jan 4, 2021 19:42
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Asterite34 posted:Gross It was thought in extremely bad taste at the time, which is why they came up with the solution shown.
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Jan 5, 2021 02:20
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Claim inflation was endemic to everyone. An example: 15 August 1940 was a day of large raids in the battle of Britain. The Luftwaffe flew 2000 planes mainly on airfield raids over Britain. The RAF claimed 182 kills, but Luftwaffe losses were about 75. In turn the Luftwaffe made 108 claims while the RAF lost 34. I know in the Luftwaffe at least this lead to some pretty poor intelligence where crews were frequently told that the RAF had virtually no planes left (Things were pretty dire, but they never ran so short as to stop squadrons intercepting.) Jaguars! has a new favorite as of 03:03 on Oct 1, 2022 |
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Oct 1, 2022 02:59
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Robert Leckie recorded that 25 men were killed away from the front lines at Cape Gloucester by collapsing trees caused by a prior artillery barrage. That always seemed like a bastard of a thing to happen to you.
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Sep 11, 2023 22:14
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For some reason, all this reminds me of a fun fact: When Concorde (Or Concord, if you've had a falling-out with De Gaulle) was being designed, a compromise was reached - The French engineers had to learn English, while the British engineers had to learn metric.
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Mar 19, 2024 01:02
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