Useless Information

Love tidbits like this!

Such as...do you know the name of the little plastic thing at the
end of your shoelace? It's an AGLET.

:-) KM

That's fun word. Almost as fun as grommet.

I'm now stumped; I'm sitting here thinking of something I know, and for the life of me...I know nothing! Brain Freeze

SacValley.......I've got the same problem.....thanks for admitting it. I'm usually in great demand when playing Trivial Pursuit in teams. I'm bound to come up with some gems in due time.

Totally useless info. The song Purple Haze by Jimmy Hendrix wasn't about drugs but was his story of his day's in the 101st airborne and what it was like jumping from the plane at dawn. :)

The song Green Tambourine IS about drugs.

And so is Puff the Magic Dragon (or is that myth?)

I'm sorry, but I'm getting such a kick out of this!

I never knew Jimmy Hendrix was in the 101st airborne. That's just a scary thought to me.

I always wondered about "Puff The Magic Dragon" too, so I looked it up. Snopes says it's not about drugs....
http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/puff.asp


Ok, more useless info....

Louis the XIV wore high heels.

The reason we mount horses from the left dates back to when men wore swords on their hips. Most were right handed, so the sword was on their left hip....making it hard to mount a horse from the right because the sword would get in the way. The "tradition" has just never changed. There is a story that Napoleon was left handed, so wore his sword on the right hip and, therefore, mounted his horse from the right side. (There's also stories that Napoleon was too short to ride a horse and had to ride a donkey.)

Thanks for that link, heathrjoy. I was going to look it up but you saved me the trouble. I like Snopes. It is a good place to go to find out if some of those ridiculous emails that people send around are true or false (most of them are false).

Which reminds me that, IMHO, 95%+ of emails are full of useless information! LOL Who cares if it is "kiss your boss day" or something equally ridiculous? I'm forever getting emails that say something like: "Today is Girlfriend's Day". Well, everyday must be girlfriend's day according to the number of emails I receive about it. I suppose I should be glad that others consider me to be their "girlfriend". Okay, I'll stop griping! LOL

More...

My B-Day is Square Dance Day.

LOL, I love you daver's. You make me smile. :)

Heather thanks SO much for researching the Puff song. I used to love it, heard it was about drugs, and have been in the dumps ever since. You lift my spirits! Now I can sing it happily to my kids. :)

Marsue, oh I hate those tons and tons of forwards. I try to be very discriminate about what I send out. Sometimes I send something off in good spirits though only to read it's FALSE on Snopes. So often now I just check. Started a thread about sending Christmas cards to "unknown soldier" only to read on snopes they won't be handing those out at any hospitals. Luckily was able to correct the thread asap, sure many got that email!

Never got any of the emails about "made-up" holidays though. I call most of them Hallmarks holiday (Mothers/Fathers Day, Grandparents Day, Secretary Day, yada yada).

My friend calls Valentine's Day "Singles Awareness Day." :)

Sooooooo agree about the e-mails. I don't mind the jokes so much (as long as they aren't filthy), but most of the time I'm left feeling like I wasted my time by checking my e-mail.

Never got the "kiss your boss" day one....that would be such a riot in the office! I'm thinking back to some of the bosses I've had. Whoa boy! That would have been interesting!


Ok, here's one I find very funny.....
Most folks believe that water swirls down a drain in one direction in the northern hemisphere (US) and in an opposite direction in the southern hemisphere (Australia). Nope, they both go the same direction. Hurricanes do spin in different directions though.

Even funnier....I think a lot of the ill informed folks got their info from an episode of "The Simpsons" where the false info was stated as true....and Bart gets himself into a lot of trouble over the matter.

HA! It's Bart's fault! That's a fact!

TNN, if you really want to send cards (Christmas or otherwise) to the troops (in the hospital or otherwise) I know a great small military support group that's local to me that can help you out. D-mail me if you'd like more info.

Here is a whole slew of use water facts...

http://waterknowledge.colostate.edu/coolfact.htm

Ok, I got to the part where it said "Anglers at the turn-of-the-century used mice, birds and small rabbits as bait...." and I was done! LOL! Now that's some info I won't soon forget.

Quoted from the link above: "Producing a typical lunch--hamburger, french fries, and a soft drink--uses 1500 gallons of water. This includes the water needed to raise the potatoes, the grain for the bun and the grain needed to feed the cattle, and the production of the soda."

Now how do "they" know this? Does somebody stand beside the potato as it grows and measure how much water it takes in--same for the grain and for the cattle? Who comes up with all these figures and how do they know, after all? Did anybody ever question the person who gives out all this information? I'm just thinking outloud. Isn't it amazing how many so-called facts (useless information) we are fed every day that we believe just because somebody else "says so"? Or we "heard it on TV" or we "read it in the paper", therefore, it must be true? Scary thought, isn't it?

Yes, it very scary. Huh. Well, it has to be true because I saw it on the link.

Yes, and remember that Febreze will make all your animal's hair fall out (remember that one?)

No, that one I didn't hear! LOL

Snopes!

What about my hair? It's going somewhere!!!

kw...sheep skin, as I think you were referring to, was used to stop the spread of infection and also people....LOL


Drug song....how about "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", sung by none-other than......?

Hap

Mama Told Me Not To Come? Okay, too easy.

Was that the name of the group? Euuuu.

moving right along: . . . .

Did y'all know that Little Rock, AR got its name from a "little rock" on the banks of the Arkansas River. One of the French explorers (LaSalle, I think) stepped onto a "little Rock" (La Petite Roche) when he came on shore when he was exploring up the Arkansas River from the Mississippi. There is a commemorative plaque at the site today. Don't know if you consider that to be useless information or not--just thought I would throw it at you. LOL

LOL~! That's a good one marsue!

Mama Told Me...3 Dog Night.

Studied all of the early explorers of America when growing up in N. MN. Thought LaSalle was fantastic, but did not know he explored the southern territory as well as the upper mid-west and central Canada.

There is a statue on the Gulf Coast where the former town of Indianola was on Lavacca Bay. And his own troops mutinied and killed him near Navasota.

So while he was a great explorer must have been an unbearable "boss".

This message was edited Jan 28, 2008 11:33 AM

It's kind of funny. I never know where or when I'm going to learn something new.

LOL Bubba, that is one funny history lesson! Poor guy. Maybe?

Drug songs....Stairway to Heaven, Magic Carpet Ride

So funny how this thread has lots of drug songs!

I have three Magic Carpet Rides. Which one?

You can tell where our...ahem... brains are!

Did I see y'all in SF during the summer of '67? LOL

Never thought I would be explaining this to a bunch of drug-song-lovers--LOL-
but here is more useless information, if you want to call it that, about Little Rock (I was wrong, Bubba, it was LaHarpe, who was the explorer)

"La Harpe, who is believed to have traveled about 50 miles above the present sites of Little Rock and North Little Rock, described the area when writing of the journey. He noted a landmark on the north bank of the Arkansas River, which he referred to as the "French Rock" (now known as "big rock").
While he didn't mention it specifically, he may have also seen another smaller outcropping of rock along the riverbanks he would have encountered before the larger one. The first outcropping of rock along the riverbanks above its mouth on the south bank came to be known as the "Little Rock." By 1769 there was a settlement of sorts in the vicinity of this landmark but it was made up a just a handful of families, of mixed French and Indian origin, scattered along both sides of the river, with Quapaws primarily on the south side and Osage mainly on the north.
In 1803, Arkansas was included in the sale of the Louisiana Territory Purchase from France to the United States." P.S. Arkansas became a state in 1836--so now you know.

Hey, Tir_Na_Nog ... regarding your name.

I was trying to remember where I had heard the name before.
Then it hit me - in the movie "Titanic", as th ship is sinking, there's a scene of an Irish mother in a bunk with her two small children telling them the story of Tir Na Nog - the "land of eternal youth and beauty".

Sure enough, the movie was on yesterday and I saw the scene.

Nancy

Oh, Nancy, I remember that scene! It was so sad, because the children were beginning to drift off to sleep and the water was rising and you knew what their fate would be. I never realized that was the story the mother was telling them till now. Yes, the children did enter the "land of eternal youth and beauty" and hopefully, their mother did, too.

Marsue, I find that very interesting. Somewhere around here I have a genealogy book on my Father's family. It includes stories about certain individuals. Our first ancestor to come to the "new world" was named Nicholas and he came here in the 1400's. There is still a town in Maine named after our family, Hodgdon, Maine. There is also a site called "Hodgdon Flats" in Yosemite.

Anyway, in this genealogy book, one of the stories was about how one of my ancestor's DD was kidnapped by Indians. She was taken to Canada, or so they thought. Her father searched and searched for her. If I remember correctly when he finally found her she was married and didn't want to come home! Imagine! I believe she was only about 14 or 15 yrs old.

What I found so odd about this story is that my Mother's ancestors may very well have been the ones who did the kidnapping.


Oh, and I found my great x5 grandfather's homestead for sale on line once. It was a gorgeous home, so huge and restored. It was selling for $500,000. That just didn't seem right to me! LOL!