Useless Facts

I'll have the dog.

 

So, a cult trying to bring back an evil god-king, werewolves, and now a horrible plague afflicting the land.

Can anything get worse for my poor characters in 'The Alkorian Legends'? Find out next time.

 

Dude, it's llama!

 

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I love how if you read the citations you can see that a "Distinguished Professor of Medicine" and Time Magazine both looked into how much poop people make. *gigglesnort*

 

The polite term "please" derives from the satisfaction sense of "please", via phrases like "if it please you" and "if you please" which eventually just became "please" because human languages seems to atrophy from a mixture of efficiency and laziness. In the same way, "thank/s" is related to thinking, which is why the words are almost identical because of some shared Anglic Germanic origin. "I give you thanks" or "you have my thanks" meant "I will remember this" or "I think positively of you" and these just became "thanks" and weirdly "thank you". The former is largely a relic of feudal custom, and this was most often used by tenants to feudal land-lords before being adopted by merchants for commercial etiquette, and the latter is essentially a shortening of something like "I owe you one" or "you're a top gent". What a strange language we have.
Savoury Sauces:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/please
https://www.etymonline.com/word/thanks
https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/07/25/origin-of-please-and-thank-you/

 

So apparently in 1896, American naval forces almost got into a skirmish with Imperial German forces at Samoa Islands but a typhoon wrecked both sides before shots were fired. The Americans and the Germans decided to declare a truce simply because they had no ships with which to fight.

Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Samoa

 

The turn of the twentieth century was so weird.

 

Yup. Useless related fact: Theodore Roosevelt is the only US president (also the only American, and by definition the only person) to have won both the Medal of Honor and the Nobel Peace Prize. The MOH was for his actions at San Juan Hill (which was actually called something different, but I don't remember the name right now) and the Peace Prize was for brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese war.

 

What? He got a peace award for that....? Sometimes i think that they [the nobel peace prize people] just give them to people for political, economic, or other reasons outside of their actual merit for a peace prize.... Theodore Roosevelt was imperialistic and highly interventionist - neither trait are particularly peace-prize worthy. But then again, the Nobel Peace Prize has had a track record to awarding them to people who really don't deserve it (with some exceptions).

Anyway. Talking about the nobel peace prize, it was first awarded to Henry Dunant, for founding the Red Cross. Henry Dunant founded the red cross after having been present at the battle of Solferino - where the number of wounded shocked him as there was seemingly no real effort to help them. He organised a rudimentary help to the wounded - regardless of the sides - and begun to help people. After that, he set himself on the course of attempting, and eventually succeeding, at founding the red cross.

 

Point taken on his overall track record, but negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese war did certainly serve the cause of peace. The Nobel Prize's official page acknowledges the fact that his award was controversial even at the time.

 

Useless facts about coffee.

https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/7-weird-entirely-useless-facts-about-coffee.html?cid=readmoretext_aut

 

You can kill someone by injecting air in between their toes.

 

One wonders how they find out things like this.

 

Great now air-compressors can be classified as assault weapons, thanks...

 

ARPA

 

Which is an anagram for the AARP. Damn murderous geriatrics....

 

A hideout for all those ghostly analysts of Nazi and Soviet documents and experiments and data. Oh, and don't forget the equipment and tech.

 

There is exactly 10 types of people in this world.... those who know binary, and those who don’t.

 

Right! No 10 ways about it!

 

Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P. Was once in the band New York Dolls.

 

That's just an air embolism. Injecting air into the bloodstream can be done anywhere you can hit a vein. Between the toes just makes it harder to find the needle mark. The hairline works well for that too.