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When writing, Charles Dickens would often stand at a mirror and would act out the characters words so that he could get the inflection just right. Which is probably why they're so vivid.

Good Friday

On Good Friday, many songs are banned from broadcast on RTE Radio, the Irish public broadcasting company. The most tenuously linked to Easter being a Beatles song from Magical Mystery Tour... "The fool on the hill".

Praise you, Charlie Brown

The opening line of Fat Boy Slim's track, 'Praise You' was inspired a collection of Peanuts' strips called 'You've Come a Long Way, Snoopy' (the actual line in the song is 'We've come a long, long way together...')

Toe length

Historically, the length of shoes' toes corresponded to how peaceful the country was. In times of peace, shoes with very long, curly toes were fashionable, but in times of strife and civil war the toes were shorter, presumably because it's hard to run away with long-toed shoes on.

Zebras

Humans have been able to tame horses without too many problems; while they buck and kick, the horses will eventually calm down enough to be properly ridden. However, zebras will never calm down and aren't suitable for riding. Therefore, they've never been domesticated.

According to the Oregon Zoo, if you see someone riding a zebra in a movie, it's probably a horse painted with black and white stripes.

Shiny

The maximum length of CDs was based on Beethoven's 9th symphony.
[thanks Franchesca!]

Red tape

When you become a Member of Parliament and take up your place in the House of Commons, you're given your coat peg (just like in school) and underneath is a little loop of red tape designed to hang your sword in. One wonders if 'cutting through the red tape' originally meant using your sword to settle an issue instead of negotiation.

(Proxy blogged by Kevin Marks.)

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...