Useless Facts

Debate. You are a MasterDebater.

 

May have found the secret to the 3 seashells thing.

Spoiler: Shhhh....

 

YESSSS! Haahahaaaaa!

 

There is currently a coin shortage in the US. "The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted the supply chain and normal circulation patterns for U.S. coin," the government said in a statement. Go figure.

 

Masks, toilet paper, now coins. Wish there was a shortage of absurdity in the US, but that never seem to run out.

 

Where can I buy my "Kanye West for President" T-shirt? Have the printing firms run out of them, yet? I hear you guys will be like Wakanda soon. I want in.

 

You've never met the United States before, have ya?

 

It will be amazing to hear him freestyle his inauguration address.

 

A pregnant cat is called a queen.

Unpregnant they're called a molly.

 

Yo
I'm the prez'
The prez' o' the US
Yo Yo Yo
Look at me babe
I yo prez of this big-ass land
Land so big so ass so fine
so

...

*leaves*

 

I just tried to watch the movie adaptation of Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep. It’s easy to see why that one didn’t get much press. Two and a half hours of my life I won’t be getting back.

 

I watched it on a transpacific flight. It had moments, but not many.

 

I admit Abra hamstringing Rose was good.

 

Hollywood's Gilmore Field was host to pro wrestling's first $100,000 gate on May 21, 1952 when Lou Thesz took on local star Baron Michele Leone. The card drew a crowd of 25,256 and $103,277.75 which comes to $999,237.56 today.

Was reading Wikipedia and it seems Baron was quite a draw in southern California even though he was usually cast as a heel. Thesz was the biggest star of the 1950s.

 

Most police and firefighters, and most teachers from at least fifteen states, are exempt from Social Security.

 

For a long time after tomatoes were brought back to Europe from the new world, they were thought by many Europeans to be poisonous. There's some debate about why this was the case, but my personal favorite hypothesis is the fact that wealthy Europeans ate from pewter plates and the acids from the tomatoes caused the lead in the plates to leach into the food, giving them lead poisoning.

 

My mind boggles when I think of the foods that are now worldwide staples originated in the New World. Tomatoes, potatoes, and maize never touched the palate of a person of European, Asian, or African descent until some point after Columbus's voyage. Shakespeare said:

but it seems he probably didn't have any experience with tomatoes. Julius Caesar wouldn't have recognized anything in @Homer Potvin 's cookbook, and Miyamoto Musashi never tasted a double-corn mayonnaise pizza...

Okay, that last one is a stretch, but the Japanese really, really love corn, and I've spoken to a number of students who believed that maize was indigenous to Japan and introduced to the rest of the world later.

Spoiler

I also read about a survey taken in the early 2000s which found that something like 40% of Japanese high school students believed the attack on Pearl Harbor was justified, as it was revenge for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Geopolitical history is complicated, and even more so when you can't agree on basic timelines.

 

I'm sure there's a Venn diagram where those two overlap, but I'm not going to go searching for the center of it.

Spoiler

Not today at least

 

The term "Yankee" actually refers to a specific New England ethnic group, and does not refer to all Americans or all northerners.