- Marco Polo, a Venetian merchant, and adventurer traveled from Europe to Asia between 1271–95, remaining in China for 17 of those years, and whose Il Milione (“The Million”) known in English as the Travels of Marco Polo (considered a classic in travel literature) traveled a total of 15,000 miles during that time, which equates to 1.7 miles per day, which happens to be about the same distance as when I walked to and from St. Celestine grade school everyday as a youngster.
- It’s often said that there’s probably a German word for unusual situations that are difficult to express in English, such schadenfreude, which means taking pleasure at someone else’s misfortune. But the Germans don’t have anything on the Japanese who actually a word describing the act of buying books but never reading them? It’s called tsundoku.
- This idiom “To see the handwriting on the wall,” comes from the Biblical story of Belshazzar’s feast, Daniel 5:5-31, in which, in the presence of the king, a disembodied hand appeared and writes on the palace wall. The king, frightened, called for his magicians, astrologers, Chaldeans, and soothsayers and offered rewards to whoever could interpret the writing—none did, and Belshazzar died shortly thereafter.
- Cats aren’t nocturnal, they’re crepuscular, i.e., they’re most active during dusk and dawn. The reason they prefer twilight has to do with their hunting instincts, as their eyes are well attuned to low-light conditions that allow them to see their prey while remaining hidden themselves.
- And speaking of cats, a lion’s tongue is rougher than coarse sandpaper. Its lingual spines or papillae make the tongue so rough that if a lion licked the back of your hand only a few times, you would be left without any skin
- If you were to ask 100 people to think about the very best piece of fruit they’ve ever eaten, at least half of them will say, “A Peach!”
- In both the book and the script from the movie The Godfather, Caporegime Clemenza (played by actor Richard Castellano) was to have said the line, “Leave the gun,” after his new protégé Rocco, shot “that stronz” (turd in Italian) Paulie. But Castellano improvised and added, “Take the cannoli,” after his on- and off-screen wife, Ardell Sheridan reminded him in a previous scene to bring home dessert.
- Named after a titan in Greek mythology and found in California’s Redwood National Park, the world’s tallest redwood, “Hyperion,” stands 380 feet tall and stands 65 feet higher than London’s Big Ben.
- The Little Red-Haired Girl that Charlie Brown talked about was never given name nor did she ever appear in the Peanuts Comic Strip.
- Since 2010, I’ve had a 12-gauge 870 Remington tactical pump action shotgun next to our bed, a loaded snub nose .38 (with hollow point of course) in my car’s glove box, while Bobbi keeps her .38 loaded (also with hollow point) in her office closet. And in all that time, not a single one of those guns has ever shot anyone—amazing isn’t it.
- Earth’s moon has its craters, Saturn has its rings, and Jupiter has its Great Red Spot. Far more than a cosmetic anomaly, Jupiter’s most distinctive feature is actually a 10,000-mile-wide storm, with winds up to 400 mph and thought to have been raging for at least 300 years.
- The original idea for the Mary Tyler Moore Show was to cast Ms. Moore as a divorcee working for a gossip columnist.
- Talk about irony, In July 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed into law legislation creating a national Labor Day holiday in early September—and on that day federal troops in Chicago brutally crushed a strike by railroad and Pullman sleeping car company workers, leaving some 30 people dead.
- American elections take place in autumn for a reason. Out of consideration for farmers, Congress chose November (when the harvest was finished but it hadn’t usually begun to snow yet) in its 1845 decree establishing the date. As for Tuesday? Weekends were a no-go due to church, and Wednesdays were off the table because farmers usually went to the market to sell their goods. Thus, Tuesday emerged as a sort of compromise, and the tradition stuck.
- The actual paperwork for the patent on the first U.S. fire hydrant was destroyed in a fire.
- The number of global languages fluctuates each year — as of 2021, linguists recorded more than 7,000 different spoken languages. But one dialect that has gone uncounted is the only language we can all decipher without a translator: baby talk. That’s because parental prattle using a softer tone and more rhythmic inflection — also called “parentese” — is believed to exist across nearly every spoken language.
- The Biden administration tell us it has awarded more leases to drill on federal land than did the Trump administration during a similar time period. That it has leased 126 thousand acres through August of 2022, the president’s first 19 months in office, which is true, it has issued more leases than Trump. However, what the administration neglected to disclose, was that the 126 thousand acres it leased represents a 995% decrease in acreage from the twenty-six million acres leased by the Trump administration during its first 19 months in office.
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