Gallimaufry, n.: odds and ends: a motley assortment of things.

This is the thread to share random, useless trivia. It can be about movies, sports, nature, politics, language, anything you want. Go nuts. Thanks to CyberCorn who started this thread on the previous boards, without whom I would not have known what gallimaufry meant.

My bit of useless trivia for the day: Reykjavik, Iceland is the world's northernmost capitol.

Enjoy!

Han shot first.

Glad to know I've got something interesting rattling about in my head.

Chronograms, or eteostichons, are inscriptions or riddles in which certain letters, representing Roman numerals, stand for dates. Perhaps the most famous chronogram is that written on the death of Queen Elizabeth I:

My Day Closed Is In Immortality = MDCIII = 1603

The Great Fire of London was marked with the following eteostichon:

LorD haVe MerCI Vpon Vs = L+D+V+M+C+I+V+V = 1666

Addison denounced chronograms as 'the results of monkish ignorance' and sneered that 'tricks in writing require much time and little capacity'.

Source: Schott's Original Miscellany

What a grouch that Addison must have been.

J.R.R. Tolkein's last name is not pronounced TOL-kin. It's pronounced tol-KEEN.

The Elvish language Quenya was based upon Finnish. Sindarin deliberately resembles Welsh. The two languages were meant to have a relation like that of Latin and British English.

The Lord of the Rings is not a trilogy. It was simply too long for the publishers to print in one book.

i rememeber i saw a documentary on tv and it said those things
good things heh

bildungsroman, n. A novel dealing with a protagonist's early development or education. A well-known set of bildungsromans is the Harry Potter books, which deal with the titular hero's education at Hogwarts.

entwicklungsroman, n. A novel dealing with a protagonist's development from childhood to maturity. Unsurprisingly, the Harry Potter books could also be considered entwicklungsromans as well.

Shakespeare's play Macbeth is considered to be an unlucky one to perform. Actors generally don't use its name but, instead, refer to it as "that Scottish play".

The arctic tern flies 12,500 miles from the Arctic to the Antarctic in migration, and back again, every year.

Female ferrets (also known as jills) in heat must mate or they die.

Bats can’t walk.

House cats are the only felines who hold their tails vertically when walking. Others cats hold their tails either straight out behind them or tucked between their legs.

The modern word migraine came from the Old French word megrim, which meant "foul mood".

foul mood
heh i kinda agree on that!

When a possum "plays possum," it isn't playing. It actually passes out from sheer terror.

Master comic book artist and writer Carl Barks drew up a basic family tree for Donald Duck, which Don Rosa later filled out for his own comic books stories (which are heavily based upon Carl Barks' works).
According to the Duck Family tree:

- Donald has a twin sister named Della Thelma "Dumbella" Duck who is the mother of Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

- Donald's mother is Hortense Duck nee McDuck, the younger of Scrooge McDuck's two sisters. Incidentally, in order for Ludwig von Drake to be Donald's uncle, he would have to have married Matilda McDuck, Scrooge's other sister.

- Grandma Duck (born Elvira Coot) is the granddaughter of Duckburg's founder, Cornelius Coot, and is Donald's paternal grandmother. She's also Gladstone Gander's maternal grandmother.

- Don Rosa placed Fethry Duck, a character well-known in Europe, on the Duck Family tree as another of Grandma Duck's grandsons (but Fethry's father is not Donald's). However, Rosa has expressed his dissatisfaction with this move, which had been done at the behest of his European editors.

- As of this post, the identity of Huey, Dewey, and Louie's father is unknown, though it has been speculated that he's Daisy Duck's brother.

Duckburg, home of Donald Duck and company, is possibly the only Disney city whose location has been pinpointed. While most Duck artists have generally avoided placing Duckburg and its state of Calisota in any spot in particular, Don Rosa located the city on the north coast of California, about where the town of Eureka is in the real world. This means, in the Duck version of Earth, the northernmost part of California (at least) is actually the state of Calisota.

Interestingly, Calisota almost had a real life counterpart. In 1941, Gilbert Gable, mayor of Port Orford, Oregon, announced that the four southwesternmost counties of Oregon (Curry, Josephine, Jackson, and Klamath) should join forces with the three northernmost counties of California (Del Norte, Siskiyou and Modoc) and create the new state of Jefferson. Gable made this proposal mostly as a publicity stunt to draw attention to the poor state of the state roads along the Oregon-California border. However, people throughout the region liked the idea, believing the existing state governments as indifferent to their needs. Siskiyou county especially embraced the idea as its county seat, Yreka, was chosen as the provisional capital. However, the death of Gilbert Gable and the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of that year put the brakes on any further plans for Jefferson.

(Eureka is the county seat of California's Humboldt County which borders Del Norte County's southern border as well as the coast of the Pacific Ocean.)

The Old World wildcat, Felis sylvestris, has long been considered the ancestor of the domestic cat, Felis sylvestris domesticus. However, a recent anaylsis of the DNA of 979 cats, both domestic and wild, has revealed wildcats can be grouped into five lineages (which could make six total subspecies, if one includes domestic cats).
Domestic cats are so genetically similar to their wild ancestor as to be considered part of the same species. Furthermore, the DNA of domestic cats, no matter where in the world they came from, are most similar to the Near Eastern wildcat subspecies, Felis sylvestris lybica.
Presumably, as ancient nomadic peoples settled down in the Near East, their settlements provided new niches for animals which could live among humans. As the humans switched from hunting and gathering to more agricultural societies, cats were among the various animals they domesticated.
What is know is that cats were probably not domesticated by the Egyptians, as a 9,500-year-old cat skeleton was found intentionally buried near a human skeleton in Cyprus, some 5,000 years before Egypt.

Until about 450,000 years ago, the present-day island of Great Britain was connected to the European mainland by a broad chalk ridge which ran through where the Strait of Dover lies nowadays.

About 450,000 years ago, an ice age covered Scandinavia, most of Britain, and much of the North Sea in kilometer-thick ice sheets. A large lake collected along the ice sheets' southern edge, fed by Europe's north-flowing rivers. As the world warmed up at the end of the ice age, melt-water from the ice sheets also fed the lake until it began to spill over the chalk ridge connecting Britain and France, rapidly eroding the soft material and causing a massive flood to rip out what would become today's Strait of Dover.

Evidence for this (as reported in Science News, July 21, 2007, page 36) includes the results of a sonar survey just south of England of a 100-km-long submerged figure dubbed the Northern Paleovalley. Many of the features of the Northern Paleovalley resemble the Channeled Scablands in Washington state in the US, which was created at the end of the last ice age when massive amounts of water burst through the ice sheet which held it at bay and scoured portions of the northwestern US.

very intereting facts, roadstripe

When first developed in China, dominos were based upon the results of throws of two dice. Europeans added the dominos with blanks to represent the throws of a single die, including the double-blank tile possibly for symmetry with the other double dominos. Today, the double-six set of dominos is commonly sold as well as double-nines, double-twelves, and double-eighteens.

Specifications of competition-grade rope, as prescribed by The Tug of War International Federation:

'The rope must not be less than 10 centimetres (100mm), or more than 12.5 centimetres (125 mm) in circumference, and must be free from knots or other holdings for the hands. The ends of the rope shall have a whipping finish. The minimum length of the rope must not be less than 33.5 metres.'


Source: Schott's Original Miscellany

The medium-sized Anna's hummingbird (Calypte anna) performs aerial dives when showing off for a female or confronting a male. He flies high in the air and then drops nearly straight down. When he plummets to the level of his audience, he pulls out of the dive, giving off a distinctive explosive squeak.

Since the late 1970's, scientists thought the hummingbirds made the squeaks with their vocal organs. However, a recent test has revealed that the squeak really comes from the hummingbird's tail whipping through the air when they pull out of their dive. While a wide variety of noises made by bird wings have been documented, tail-feather noises are rare.

Source: Science News, August 25, 2007 issue

Both the 108 million-year-old crater Tycho on the Moon (the crater from which all those bright rays radiate away from) and the 65 million-year-old Chicxulub crater on Earth (the one believed to have been formed by the meteorite which slew the dinosaurs) both may have been formed by fragments from the same asteroid.

While investigating the pattern of craters on the asteroid 951 Gaspra (which had been visited by spacecraft some years earlier), researchers ran computer simulations tracing a group of asteroids, called the Baptistina family, near the asteroid belt's inner edge. The researchers found that the Baptistina asteroids were spread out over a region containing two places where a gentle gravitational nudge could kick an asteroid out of the belt and into the inner solar system.

Simulations tracing the Baptistina group of asteroids back in time revealed that they appear to have come from a single, 170-kilometer-wide rock which got shattered by another asteroid some 160 million years ago. Twenty percent of the resulting rubble eventually escaped the asteroid belt with one-tenth of those reaching in at least as far as Earth, doubling the number of objects hitting the planet over the past 150 million years. Fortunately, we seem to be at the tail end of this "asteroid shower".

Studies of the sediments left behind by the Chicxulub meteorite indicate its composition matches that of the Baptistina asteroids more so than any other likely candidate. The researchers give a 90 percent chance that the dinosaur-killer meteorite was a Baptistina asteroid.

Source: Science News, September 8, 2007 issue

by recycling used cartriges/toners fromn printers and photocopiers through th manufactturers you can make substantial savings for your office, which should then be spent on chocolate biscuits. ainners all around

The three species of grasshopper mice in North America (Onychomys arenicola, Onychomys leucogaster, and Onychomys torridus) all exhibit many of the same characteristics as wolves do, including howling, pack behavior, and carniverous habits. A single grasshopper mouse can take down a rat more than three times its size.

According to the September 14, 1985 issue of Science News, a 70-year-old woman suffered for three weeks from an invisible radio constantly playing songs, mostly from the 1930s and 1940s, in her ears. Her friends and neighbors verified that their apartments were not the source of the music, while local radio stations were checked to make sure their signals weren't being picked up by the woman's hearing aids. Even a soundproof room didn't provide her with any relief. The incessant playing got to be so bad that she changed part of her previously made funeral guideline so that "When Irish Eyes are Smiling" (which she had heard over 50 times in her head) would not be played as she originally intended.

The only health problems she had were otosclerosis (an ear infection that can interefere with hearing) and arthritis. However, this did lead to the clue to the nature of the problem, her taking 12 aspirin tablets a day. Her blood level of the active chemical in aspirin was much greater than what was considerd normal during aspirin treatment. When she switched to taking 6 aspirin a day, the music stopped.

Large doses of aspirin taken over an extended period can cause a ringing in the ears or hearing loss, but this was apparently the only case (at the time) of an aspirin-induced songfest, possibly with contributions from the ear infection and anxiety caused by making funeral instructions.

Bananas do not grow on trees. Bananas are actually the giant berries of the world's largest herb. Bananas are also seedless, requiring them to be grown by cloning, which, beyond making them easy to breed and transport, also means that the fungal infection known as Panama disease can easily threaten them with extinction.