Easy way to lose weight

Franchesca writes: Eating celery results in negative calories.

Flying dishes

My Mother was telling me the other that a friend had moved into a new flat so had to buy a new saucer to get more TV channels.

Fun with words!

"Facetious" is the only word in the Oxford English Dictionary where all the vowels appear in alphabetical order.

"Almost" and "Effort" are the longest words in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order.

Venus Flytrap

The standard venus flytrap can only shut and reopen 10 times in total. It doesn't really "spring" shut; it takes anywhere from 5-15 seconds for a venus flytrap to close (amended: apparently, the literature says that a flytrap shuts in a second or less. Perhaps this is true in nature, but I've tripped venus flytraps before, and you could definitely watch them shut. My friends and I never got our fingers stuck. I don't know why some researchers had to video tape a fly trap shutting. FYI, this was in a botanical garden and they were small flytraps. Anyway, they shut b/c cells on the outer layer of the plant expand, which pushes the trap shut. This is also related to why it can only shut a set number of times.). Once it closes around a victim, the flytrap exudes digestive enzymes to kill the fly and break down the nutrients so the nutrients can be absorbed into the plant.

Also, venus flytraps don't need flies to live. They normally grow in nitrogen-deficient soil, so they're carnivorous for added nutrients. However, if grown in properly fertilized soil, they'll do just fine without meat.


There are also many other kinds of carnivorous plants, including bladder worts, pitcher plants, etc. Check it out.

More information can be found at "Barry's Carnivorous Plant Page."

Mummy!

Here is how Egyptian mummies got their name: "The word "mummy" comes from the Arabic word mumiya which means bitumen. Bitumen is also called pitch and is a black tar like substance that can be found in mountains in the Middle East. It's like molasses, but it's darker and thicker. When Arabs invaded Egypt many years ago and discovered mummies, the mummies had a dark coating on them which reminded the Arabs of mumiya. So the Arabs thought these mummies were covered with mumiya, even though mumiya was not really used. The Arabs began calling these bodies mumiya. As the years went by, mumiya would turn into the english word "mummy." [more facts about mummies can be found here]

Can the craving with cardamom

Cardamom, a spice and mild stimulant, can be helpful in reducing nicotine cravings when giving up smoking.

Dimples

Dimples are really flaws in the musculature of the cheek. That area simply has a divot in the muscle.

Removing splinters

If you have a splinter and don't fancy digging it out with a needle and tweezers, use sticky tape instead: smooth the tape over the splinter, pull the tape off and the splinter will come with it. Never tried it, so no idea if it works, but I'll try to remember it for next time I get a chunk of 2 by 4 in my thumb.

Olive Oil

Olive oil is the only vegetable or fruit oil that you can safely drink without harming your insides.

trees

You can only use growth rings to count the age of a tree in areas with the distinct four seasons (for example, in most of the US). In tropical areas, trees may lay down multiple growth rings in a year, since a new growth ring occurs whenever the weather changes from dry to wet.

In the United States, you can also tell the difference between wood grown in the spring and the summer when looking at slices of woody plants in a microscope; in the spring, the cells the tree creates are larger, and summer cells tend to be more compact. This is due to the greater amount of water that is usually available during the spring, which fuels faster and more growth.

dandelions

If you mow dandelions, they will cease to grow taller. Instead, they will grow outwards just underneath the height of the mower blades. Digging them up is a much better removal option.

The London Underground

About a third of the tunnels in the London Underground system are not used. There are around 40 unused stations which have been bricked up, including British Museum on the Central Line which served - surprise surprise - the British Museum, and Aldwych which is now used as a TV/film set. Some stations, such as Charing Cross and Embankment, are so close together that it's quicker to get out and walk.

Pole vaulting

The sport of pole vaulting developed from the Dutch habit of using poles to vault the many dykes and ditches they had to navigate which did not have bridges and which could not easily be circumnavigated. Without the pole vault, the Dutch would have had a very, very long walk to work.

Be warned...

Sharks will not attack you unless you're wet.

Nails

Your fingernails grow faster than your toenails. And the nails on your dominant hand grow faster than on the other hand. (I saw this on Ripley's Believe It Or Not, and I choose to believe it.)

Victory at a price

When Admiral Lord Nelson was given his fatal wound on board The Victory during The Battle of Trafalgar his first instinct was to conceal the fact from his men. So he covered up the medals on his lapel which had been a sign of leadership in the weeks leading up to the fight so that from a distance he would seem like just another sailor. As he lay in the hold of the ship word was passed to his second in command. Again, to keep the low awareness in the fleet, instead of the usual signalling methods expected for orders, an able man was ordered to take a tiny boat and row through the thick of the battle. The deputy knew that something was wrong as soon as he saw the young man's face.

WD40

WD40 is called WD40 because it was the 40th water displacement formula that the developers tried, and the first one to work.

All smiles

Real smiles use different muscles when compared with fake smiles, but we're generally rubbish at telling who's putting it on. Real smiles involve a raising of the cheek muscles and a dip in the eyebrow, whereas fake smiles just stretch the corners of the mouth back and don't 'reach the eyes'. It's thought that our general inability to tell real from fake actually helps us to get along, because people can use fake smiles as a sort of social lubricant to make life easier. (Via Brainiac, again.)

Which is interesting enough, but when you put it together with the information that Americans and Brits smile differently, well, you can draw your own conclusions:

While we British smile by pulling our lips back and upwards and exposing our lower teeth, Americans are more likely simply to part their lips and stretch the corners of their mouths. (Via BoingBoing and Neil Gaiman.)

There's also a correlation between how genuine a smiler was at school and how happy they were in later life, with the genuine smilers happier than the fakers. I wonder if there's a correlation between how genuine a celeb is and how they are perceived by the public/how successful they are.

I wish Posh Spice would learn how to smile genuinely. Or just go away completely, actually.

Out of out takes

The reason that the film company MGM very rarely features deleted scenes on the dvds of their older films, particularly those by Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese is because in the early 1990s they junked reels and reels of unused film to make a saving on storage costs, which included out takes from the classics by those directors. In the end they saved themselves twenty thousand dollars.

What's the time, Mr Wolf?

Despite being seen as the same, GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) and UTC (Co-ordinated Universal Time) can actually differ by up to 0.9 seconds because of different ways of calculating GMT.

Neither the English term 'Co-ordinated Universal Time' nor the French term 'Temps Universel Coordinné' result in the acronym UTC. This is because UTC is based on the "workaday mean solar time scale, UT-1, which is based on the somewhat irregular rotation of the Earth", so really it's 'Universal Time - Co-ordinated'.

Card slot

The section above the numeric keypad on a computer keyboard which includes the Caps Lock & Num Lock lights doesn't have keys blocking the way because when the peripheral was originally designed one of the main applications was in banking and this would be the perfect place to slot a credit card, punch card or business card when keying in details.

Baaaa!

Dame Ellen Macarthur was today given the Freedom of the Isle of Wight. Which means she has the right to drive sheep down the High Street in Cowes.

Course, the trouble with driving sheep is that they've got no brakes and are a bugger to steer.

Pale face

I've often wondered why the families in portrait photographs from the mid-1800s always seem slightly unreal. Apparently because of the limited amount of light in photographic studios, the subjects would have their faces covered in white make up to reflect better in the camera. So that the subjects could keep perfectly still, a brace was used to hold the waist of the woman in the chair or any children standing by in place. The other reason that family isn't smiling is because to do so would seem foolish because they'd be making fun of something which was massively expensive at the time. Also -- and this explains everything -- the subjects often had their eye lids closed during the taking of the photo and their eyes would be painted in later when the image was printed which is why the iris never looks quite right.

What's loudest?

Babies produce more noise than pneumatic drills. Babies hit 123 decibels when screaming, whereas a pneumatic drill only produces 119 decibels. Ok, so there's only 4 decibels in it, but still, louder is louder.

(And yes, I am watching Brainiac at the moment.)

'Gave me an a A please Bob.'

Bob Holness, ex-presenter of teenager quiz show Blockbusters, as well as being the first James Bond (on radio) is also a keen musician. He even played the alto sax solo on Gerry Rafferty's record 'Baker Street'. [thanks Franchesca!]

Polar Bears

As heard on the radio this morning -
All polar bears are left handed.

Can anyone confirm or deny?

Penny Drop

Virginia Madsen from Sideways is the sister of Michael Madsen from all of Tarantino's films.

Why adverts sound so loud

I have just been told by a fellow traveller here at 37,000 ft above the icy wastes of northern Canada that although adverts subjectively sound louder, objectively they aren't louder than the TV programmes they interrupt. The reason that they sound louder is that the audio signal has been compressed so that the quiet bits are louder and the louder bits are quieter so there's more sound packed into the same loudness.

What a dastardly trick.

Forget playing Doctors and Nurses. Now you can be a patient too.

The University of Minnesota pay actors to pretend to be patients over an extended period so that Medical Students can get practical experience without going anywhere near an actual patient. "The pay depends on what you do," (one of the participants describes) "Rheumatology pays the least, about $10 an hour, because all you do is let them show how the joints work on a real person. When I did a scenario for someone with chronic myelogenous leukemia, it was $35 for two hours.

Take a shufti at this

A 'shufti' is a look or a glimpse, and it comes from the Arabic 'saffa' - to try to see.

Dr Who?

The real name of Dr Who actor Sylvester McCoy is, in fact Percy Smith.

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

A popular landmark in Liverpool City Centre is a statue illustrating a Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby. What isn't necessarily known is that it was actually designed by well known musical performer, Tommy Steele. In 1981 when he was appearing a show he got in touch with Liverpool Council with the idea of creating a tribute in sculpture to the fab four. His fee was just three pence, a reference to the show he's perhaps best known for, Half a Sixpence.

Penny Drop

Wierdly, Ethan Hawke's character in Before Sunset is called Jesse Wallace. Jessie Wallace, the actress, played Kat Slater in Eastenders.

Lost

Apparently if you ever asked the author Henry James for directions, he would often go into the minutest detail of the route you were to take and would somehow get himself lost in his own description as it meandered this way and that way without reaching a satisfactory conclusion to what he was trying to say to the extent that the person listening would often forget were he was when he started speaking ...

Bomb Alley

On the London Underground, the bit of the District Line running East of Barking has the nickname "Bomb Alley". The tracks here are above ground, and so there are a number of pedestrian bridges crossing them. Because of the area the tracks run through, and the ease of access - children would throw bricks, planks of wood and other weaponry at the trains as they passed under the bridges.

The problem got so bad that they bridges now have wire coverings, and there is a special helicopter that flies over, watching to see if there are any vandals about.

For some reason the helicopter flies low over my flats...

Varietal-isationality

So I went to see 'Sideways' the other night and I learnt a new word. I laughed when people at the wine tastings kept saying 'varietal'. I assumed it was one of those silly made up things that come out of America from time to time, especially when the President is speaking. But no, there are wine grape varietal tables and varietal dictionaries all over the place.
I was actually drinking red wine at the time (its a great place our local cinema) but I think it was Merlot, say no more.

ain't misbehavin'.

every february, just before the start of lent, all across germany "karneval" is celebrated, street carnival of the german kind.
it originated from pagan rites of scaring winter away with sounds and costumes and street parades. these days, it's mostly a reason to get a day off work and get drunk.

in southern germany and switzerland, the event is called "fasnacht", and it's more traditional and firmly rooted in local culture.
people who belong to fasnachts clubs dress up in traditional clothing made out of hundreds of little patches of fabric and very ugly wooden masks. on "rosenmontag" the monday before ash wednesday, they parade through their city, rattling rattles and ringing bells and harrassing on-lookers, often "kidnapping" good looking females in giant nets. it can be fun. or annoying. or absolutely awful, that.

now here's the cool -and very german- part.
as these traditional costumes make it impossible to identify who's underneath them, a little license plate needs to be attached to the costume, stating an abbreviation of the club name and a number.
clubs are obliged to keep track of who's wearing what costume with what license plate when.

so in case of serious misbehavin' of people in strange costumes and ugly wooden masks: just jot down that license plate. and report to the police.

[me, i'm glad that fasnet will be over tomorrow.]

Where's Whit?

After watching through his films again, I wondered what had happened to film director Whit Stillman. During the nineties he created three excellent comedies of manners - Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days Of Disco, but once that last was released in 1998 it almost seems as though he dropped off the planet, to be forever known as a cult director.

It transpires that he moved to Paris with his family hoping to find inspiration on the boulevards, and over the past few years has been trying to get other projects off the ground, but each time poor luck has come into play. For example, he was developing an epic about Colonial America at much the same time the Roland Emmerich film The Patriot was in production. This information comes from a reproduced magazine article here, which also updates us on the extra-ordinary piece he now hopes to be his next step:

"Stillman has been busy adapting Winchester Races, a project with British producer Stephen Evans that would combine two unfinished Jane Austen novels, The Watsons and Sanditon, into a single script. The script would merge two characters: Emma Watson, a young woman who returns to her family after a long absence during which she's been raised by her aunt, and Charlotte Hayward, an attractive country girl who is taken up by a family of comically optimistic real-estate speculators."

There is a reproduction of The Watsons here, and here is Sandition. I really hope that Whit makes it this time. Another excellent article about the films can be found here.

Starship Captain Sundance Kid

In the week that Enterprise is officially cancelled, it's interesting to look back at the situation the show was in during the 1970s, when the The Original Series was running in syndication. Paramount knew there would be some mileage in a film version, but their initial opinion was that it couldn't fly with a bunch of tv actors at the helm, so they'd have to recast the whole crew with box office gold. Apparently they became very close to casting Robert Redford as James T Kirk and Paul Newman as Spock. Who wouldn't have paid to see that movie? (apart from everyone who loved the tv series)

The Virgin Queen

There is growing evidence that Queen Elizabeth I was very far from fulfilling the promise of her nickname. On numerous occasions, her parliament tried to pursuad her to marry to the point that it eventually advised: "You Majesty declares yourself resolved to die a virgin" to which she replied "I am resolved never to marry" which is slightly different thing. When pressed on the subject again later she said: "I am no angel." According to this book, a rough list of suitors might include a Lord Seymour, The Duke of Norfolk and The Earl of Wessex (who would later romance Mary, Queen of Scots, just to be choosy).

Smashing!

The use of the word "smashing" to describe something in a positive light - as used extensively in Wallace and Gromit films - comes from the Irish phrase "Is maith sin", meaning "That's good". It's thought to have crossed over in to the English language with Irish emigration to London in the early 19th century.

(And of course everyone knows that in the Aboriginal language the word "kangaroo" means "I don't know", right?)

Not now Buster!

Silent comedy stallwart Buster Keaton didn't smile once in any of his films, letting physical comedy create the mirth. The one time he did smile, in a kind of knowing wink at the end of one of his film, the audience hated the moment so much he had to edit the scene out of the film before any would go and see it.