I refer of course to money.

The Economics of Stripping. According to researchers at University of New Mexico strippers make more money when they're ovulating, because it's at the time when men find them most attractive: "Surprisingly, Miller found that strippers who were in the estrus phase made $354 per shift compared to $90 during the luteal phase and $170 more than during the menstrual phase. The use of birth-control pills didn't help results, with woman on oral contraception earning about $80 less per shift."

UsedFAQs

Whilst HeardSaid is taking a sabbatical, we recommend UsedFAQs which posts random answers from Frequently Asked Questions on a variety of subjects. [via]

Fake Money

Did you know every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the US Treasury? [Nope, we didn't Fran, thanks!]

Gullible?

Website that's similar to HeardSaid, and to be honest they're posting more often. [via]

wharf

The word "wharf" stands for "Ware House At River Front".

Strange Reagan

When Ronald Reagan was given his first tour of the White House after being made president of the US he demanded a visit the war room he'd seen in Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove. He was somewhat annoyed to discover it had been built on a soundstage.

Ant Farmers

Leafcutter ants are the only species on the planet, apart from humans, to cultivate their own food. The ants, usually found in the rainforests and other tropical areas of America, grow a special fungus in their nests.
They get their name because they cut pieces of leaves which they harvest in the fungus gardens. The fungus is then used for food.

Belly Bomb

If a human being were to eat black pudding followed by king prawns and washed down with a glass of milk, due to the un-stable chemical mixture now sitting in his or hers gut, the poor individual's stomache would literally explode within a matter of minutes ! [Ugh -- thanks Franchesca]

Spooky

In the Steven Spielberg film 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' during the scene when we've discovered that Roy has built a scale model of Devil's Point in his living room, the television is on and we can hear the sound of a postman calling at a front door. He says: "I have a package for Gillian Anderson."

The actress Gillian Anderson would later play Dana Scully for nine years on 'The X-Files'.

Crispy

A new Franchesca fact. Did you know that a human being can safely live on a diet of one packet of regular crisps a day because of their high fat and water content.

Eh?

Alexander Graham Bell's wife was deaf.

Free Travel

While the London Metropolitan Police have free transport on the trains, buses and underground systems of London - the same is not true of the British Transport Police (who enforce the law on those same systems).

Hello and welcome to ...

A great example from Music Thing of how sometimes it's vitally important to keep your copyright. The man who composed the four notes which used to appear on Channel Four's logo (Daaa-daaa-da-daaaa) became very rich indeed. "Every time that sequence was played, David Dundas was paid £3.50. Every week, for ten years, Dundas received a cheque for £1,000 from Channel Four. "

One with the force

Here is a scene from the shooting script of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith which explains the one thing many fans had been dying to know. Why do some Jedi's burn up whilst others just fade away?

222 INT. POLIS MASSA-OBSERVATION DOME-NIGHT

On the isolated asteroid of Polis Massa, YODA meditates.

YODA: Failed to stop the Sith Lord, I have. Still much to learn, there is ...

QUI -GON: (V.O.) Patience. You will have time. I did not. When I became one with the Force I made a great discovery. With my training, you will be able to merge with the Force at will. Your physical self will fade away, but you will still retain your consciousness. You will become more powerful than any Sith.

YODA: Eternal consciousness.

QUI-GON: (V.O.) The ability to defy oblivion can be achieved, but only for oneself. It was accomplished by a Shaman of the Whills. It is a state acquired through compassion, not greed.

YODA: . . . to become one with the Force, and influence still have . . . A power greater than all, it is.

QUI-GON: (V.O.) You will learn to let go of everything. No attachment, no thought of self. No physical self.

YODA: A great Jedi Master, you have become, Qui-Gon Jinn. Your apprentice I gratefully become.

YODA thinks about this for a minute, then BAIL ORGANA enters the room and breaks his meditation.

Considering the big long list of things which aren't explained it's odd that this couldn't be worked in somehow. Then again, check out of that exposition... [via Amygdala via Sore Eyes]

Machu Picchu

Should you find yourself at the top of Machu Picchu and suddenly worried about whether you left the gas on, don't fret. You can call home on your mobile phone. Yes, that's right, there's a signal.

Which is more than I can say for the train route from Bournemouth to Derby. (Thanks Dave!)

Damselflies go like shit off a stick

Damselflies can fly 15m in a single second from a standing start, and can reach a top speed of 40 mph.

Naked Mole Rats

Naked mole rats are fossorial (live underground) and have a fairly consistent temperature.

They have no circadian rhythm and sleep/wake when it suits them. This occurs on no particular schedule at all.

Numbers

The Globe Theatre, the original in the 1600s, had a capacity crowd of three thousand. There were only two hundred thousand people in London at the time so it would take just seventy-five performances before everyone in the city had seen one of Shakepeare's newest.

On election night

The Welsh Assembly is the only elected body in the Western world, if not the world, to have a 50/50 split between men and women members.

Happy May Day!

The use of 'mayday' as a distress call originated with the French m'aidez (help me) or m'aider (to render help to me), and has nothing to do with the ancient spring festival or the international working class holiday.

Although if you want to dance around a big pole whilst your ship sinks, that's up to you.

A pigeon pair

When pigeons mate, the female lays two eggs - one male and one female. When the eggs hatch, the chicks grow up together and, eventually, mate to produce two eggs - one male and one female.

Which explains why pigeons are so stupid. They've got to the bottom of the gene pool and have started drilling.

Special Crossover Unit

Richard Belzer plays Detective John Munch on the series "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit". The character originated as a regular cast member of "Homicide: Life on the Street". Two cop shows, two colons, one Munch. A character from one show landing a prime spot on another show that's not a spin-off is unusual in an of itself.

Belzer as Munch has recently become the most prolific character in prime time TV history, having appeared on six different series: Homicide, SVU, the original Law & Order, The X Files, the short-lived The Beat and most recently in an episode of Law & Order's newest franchisee, Trial by Jury.

Self pimp - Crossover Grid and Live Journal community to discuss Crossover Grid.

Coinage

Franchesca writes: "Whilst realizing I have no money, for some reason I decided to add up each demomination of coins and notes in the UK to see how much I would have if I had one of each. Oddly enough it works out at £88.88p . Try it urself if you dont believe me ... and don't forget like most people do, the £2 coin!"

i-equine

In 1967 at the height of the foot and mouth epidemic, horse racing was banned. The authorities resorted to electronic races with imaginary horses, but to give an extra level of authenticity on BBC's Grandstand, Peter O'Sullivan was drafted in to commentate on these unreal events. Footage exists of him getting excited over a close finish between two horses which didn't exist.

Little Ghengises everywhere!

It is estimated that one in two hundred modern Mongol men can trace their genetic heritage back to Ghengis Khan. Now that is what I call putting it about a bit.

Carrots!

The carrot is not a vegetable, but a herb. Carrots used to be purple in colour, until someone decided that the orange ones tasted better (a fact that anyone who has eaten Opal Fruits/Starburst knows to be 100% true). Carrots do not improve your night vision - that's propaganda spread by the British government during WWII to 'explain' why their pilots were able to fly at night. In actual fact, it was down to the invention of radar, something the govmint and the RAF wanted to keep secret.

Postcodes

There is a house in Liverpool which has its own postcode. When postcodes were being handed out, the doctor who lived there ascerted what authority he had at the time and they gave him one. Its stayed that way ever since.

Rugby Pope

The Welsh Rugby Team only seem to win the Grand Slam in a year the Pope dies. They won it this year the same year Pope John Paul II dies, and the last time they did was in 1978 , the same year as the death of Pope John Paul I. [Thanks Fred!]

Peat

Peat bogs cover more than 1% of the Earth's surface. This is equal in area to about one half of the United States.

Peat is a major part of the carbon cycle, and it stores lots of carbon that is subsequently not released as carbon dioxide. Ecologists are worried that burning peat and disturbing peat bogs might be a contributing factor to global warning.

Nonchalant arachnids

Australia is home to the world's only whistling spider.

First Time?

Franchesca tells us about The Real Thing:

Only two people in the company know Coca-Cola's formula, and each of them only knows half of it.

Coca-Cola's name was translated into Chinese as "bite the wax tadpole."

Coca-Cola used to contain cocaine.

A tooth left in a glass of Coca-Cola will dissolve overnight.

Some fun French facts

Some fun French facts from one of our readers, Jacques:

"The real name of my country is not France, but France Republic - not many know this!

Louis XIV bathed once a year.

There are 450 different types of cheese in the world, and 240 come from France!"

Thanks Jacques!

Gobble. Zzzzzzz.

Another contribution from Franchesca. Eating turkey makes people sleepy. Which presumably explains why I never feel tired after Christmas dinner. We all eat steak in our household.

It's all in the crinkles

Snack expert Dave Green tells me, as we sit at the Mason's Arms on Seymour Place, that the reason that crinkle-cut crisps taste better is that the crinkles create a higher surface area for flavourings to adhere to, thus maximising taste. Nothing to do with the wine, then?

Fishy

The combination of shrimp and Vitamin C tablets will cause arsenic poisoning. [thanks Franchesca!]

Falling Junkies

In Poplar (North London, UK) there are a block of flats that are notorious for dead bodies being found on the ground at the bottom of them.

What happens is a heroin user dies from an overdose in one of the flats, his 'friends' then throw his dead body out of the window so that no-one knows where he comes from. The ambulance/police scrape them up and life goes on...

Shakespeare and Words

from Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue

"A man of Shakespeare's linguistic versatility must have possessed thousands of words he never used because he didn't like or require them. Not once in his plays can you find the words Bible, Trinity, or Holy Ghost, and yet that is not to suggest he was not familiar with them."

Pollution?

Mosses and lichens are used as pollution indicators. Mosses and lichens are non-vascular (no system of veins to transport materials around the plant), so they rely heavily on moisture in the air. Because of this, they are highly sensitive to air pollution, and these plants are rarely found or are completely absent in heavily polluted areas. If you've got a bunch of moss in your backyard, that's actually a good sign.

Secret of cats' nine lives

Cats purr at a frequency which stimulates blood flow, thus accelerating healing. This allows cats to survive injuries which would kill a dog of the same size.

Whether putting a purring cat on your head would cure a headache is currently open to question.

Hey, I died twice

Petra, the dog from BBC's Blue Peter whose death was mourned by million in the 70s and honoured by a bronze bust effectively died twice. The animal was introduced to viewers as a puppy in the mid-sixties. But that baby dog died of complications the day before the next programme was due to go out, and so the then producer of the show had to rush around all the pet shops in north London with a photo looking for a duplicate pup. Luckily he found one and none of children watching knew any the wiser.

angels like whiskey, too.

apparently, 1% of the contents of a whiskey barrel evaporate.
distillers call this the "angel share".

pleasure in death.

i once heard that oysters die happy.

being vegan and hence avoiding the consumption of any animal products, these news surprised me quite a bit.

apparently, scientists found out that if living oysters are drenched in lemon juice (as is apparently common practice when eating them), they produce a hormone that puts them into a state of ecstasy. hearing that made me wonder how one measures ecstasy levels in oysters. anyway.
one might hence argue that the oysters death by gastric acid (one doesn't chew oysters, apparently), really isn't all that bad, really isn't torture or anything, but the perfect combination of pleasure for both the eater and the eaten. pleasurable death for one, pleasurable protein consumption for the other. good grace.

i think i'll still stay away from oysters.