Useless Facts

A bit late for St. Patrick's day, but did you know there are 6 million Irish in Ireland and 80 million in the rest of the World?

 

not to mention many of us who have Irish in our families

 

Also, The Great Wall of China is not visible from space like some claim. At least not to a free eye.

 

No, I think that IS mentioning those of you who have Irish in your families.

 

Today's Useless Fact from Subbing:

Now, there's a certain song I've been hearing the last two years as part of the Muzak track for the DIY store where I work. Today I was in for a music teacher and learned it's called "Unwritten" and it's about writer's block, or getting over it. Who knew?

(Yeah, I know it's Symbolic of Life in General and all that . . . )

 

It is a verifiable fact that the best English palindrome is: "No sir, panic is a basic in a prison."

 

This may be true, but it doesn't help matters. Come on, people! How do we get out of this mess?

 

A car, a man, a maraca? ... No, it is opposition!

Meet animals; laminate 'em? ... I'm a fool; aloof am I.

Sex at noon taxes! ... Rise to vote, sir!

 

A full moon is nine times brighter than a half moon.

 

Outside of the moon, Venus is the brightest orbiting celestial body visible in the northern hemisphere's night sky, and yes, for the sake of fairness, I am excluding the Northern Lights because not everybody can see them, even in the middle of podunk northern nowhere.

 

Percy Shelley blew up his school science lab.

Also, Lord Byron, he kept a bear in his dorm at university at Cambridge, and when the dean said to him that the university forbade the keeping of tame animals, Lord Byron assured him the bear was 'entirely wild'.

The Romantic poets were amazing people.

 

Amazing? Sounds to me like they were pretty average college kids...

 

We're on a collision course, actually.

 

The largest mammal to ever walk the earth was a kind of hornless rhino called Paraceratherium.

 

Well, we should change course, then! Evasive maneuvers! Who's piloting this damn galaxy, anyway?

 

Sulu...

 

Has he disengaged the inertial dampeners?

 

Damn parking brake...

 

1,300,000 Earths can fit inside the sun.

 

Relax, the galaxy isn't going to hit ours for another few million years. Sulu, proceed on course.

 

Also, apparently, when the Andromeda Galaxy does collide with ours, all that will happen in the end is that our galaxy will become bigger, have more fuel to play with. It is obviously right now impossible to determine if Earth itself will survive the collision - most likely if we are doomed to be trapped in this solar system we'll die during the process, if we haven't killed ourselves in the mean time. Or have been killed. But our home-galaxy will certainly survive pretty much intact.

 

In fact the sun is 99% of the mass of our solar system.

Jupiter is sometimes described as a failed star because it is mostly hydrogen and helium. This is a bit of a misnomer, as it would need to be 80x more massive to kick start fusion and it was not formed by a collapsing cloud of dust but rather in an accretion disc around Sol.

 

If you rearrange all the letters in Finnegans Wake, you might make something coherent.

 

Maybe Joyce started with something coherent, rearranged all the letters, and wound up with Finnegans Wake. It might have started as a phone book for all we know.