Useless Facts

Oddly one of the least Samuel L. Jacksonish roles he's ever played, which, given all the "holy mthfkn shit!" stuff going on in that film seems rather unintuitive. I would argue that even his role in The Red Violin is a more badass mthfkr role than in Jurassic Park. While everyone else is Karen & Kyle-ing around, my dude recognizes - on sight - one of the most famous musical instruments ever created by human hands and then quietly constructs machinations to keep the prize for himself.

All joking aside, the scene where he first lays eyes on the violin, when he reaches for it, his hand pausing, pulling back, no, one does not simply touch such a creation, one asks God first, is a stunning scene.

 

Rhubarb is a vegetable.

 

Really?

I thought it was a barbed fish with rhumitoid arthritis.

(Just messing, I know it is a veggie, and some make it
into a pie with strawberries.)

 

Yeah, I thought it was a fruit though because it is sweet/tart. But I guess it's more like celery in terms of the biology.

 

Fruit has nothing to do with sweetness. An avocado is a fruit. If it's got seeds inside, then the edible part is made up of the plant equivalent of the uterus. That's a fruit. Any other arrangement - such as seeds on the outside of a strawberry - has a different celular provenance and is not technically a fruit, though usually referred to as an accessory fruit. Rhubarb is neither. The part you eat is technically a stalk, like in celery as you mentioned.

 

Everything that carries seeds is technically a fruit through the lens of plant biology. Although, as a species who have put people on the moon, I find it interesting that we still give a rats ass about whether or not tomatoes are vegetables or fruits.

 

I guess there's a distinction to be drawn between the true biological definition of fruit and the practical/culinary definition of fruit. A baker would organize rhubarb and apples in a similar place in their mind based on flavor and the fact that both can be used in pies, but rhubarb has more similarity to a tree trunk in terms of biological function than it does to an apple.

 

Little bit of flesh crawl, and a whole lotta nope.

 

Ahem...

 

Fire. You must use fire.

 

Not completely true. It is the core in an apple that is the actual fruit, while the part we eat is the hypanthium of the flower. So unless you're eating the core you're just a flower eater.
Same with strawberries; the fleshy body is the hypanthium, and each of the seeds on the outside is its own fruit. This is similar to the raspberry where each of the little "cells" that make up the "berry" is its own fruit as well.

As for vegetables, there is no such thing in biology. "Vegetable" is purely a cultural/culinary term, which is why it causes so much confusion when we talk about whether something is a vegetable or fruit. We simply keep mixing up the biological terms (fruit and berry) with the cultural/culinary terms (vegetable, fruit and berry). For example, a tomato is a vegetable from a culinary perspective but a berry (I think) from a biological perspective.

 

Rose petals taste a bit like lettuce, and the home grown ones
taste better than store bought.

 

Figs are actually flowers turned inside-out.

Since fig flowers do not bloom in a way that they can count on bees or wind for the purpose of spreading pollen, they need to rely on fig wasps instead. Here’s how the process works:

1. A female fig wasps enters a male fig – at this point, the female’s antennae and wings break off, so there is no escaping once they’re in.
2. New wasp eggs are laid by the female wasp, and the baby wasps are relied on to continue the life cycle (this is because the original female wasp cannot get out).
3. Male baby wasps mate with the female baby wasps and dig a tunnel out of the fig.
4. The female offspring leave the fig and take the pollen with them. This step is solely intended for female offspring since male baby wasps are not born with wings.

In the event that a fig wasp enters a female fig rather than a male fig, it will die inside since there is no room for reproduction to take place (male figs on the other hand are shaped in a way that reproduction can occur, which is why it’s so essential that female fig wasps enter male figs).

 

And while I'm on the topic of wasps, members of the Pompilidae family are collectively known as Spider Wasps because they sting spiders, completely paralyzing them, lay their eggs inside the spider's abdomen, and the larvae hatch there and eat their way out. After stinging a spider, the mother wasp will drag it to the burrow, where it remains, alive but completely immobilized, until the single larvae hatches. It eats around the vital organs until the end to preserve its living food source for as long as possible, then do a sort of Chest-Burster and abandon the hollowed-out corpse.

I witnessed this grisly ritual on my front porch 2 years ago just as dusk was descending and managed to get much of it on video, though I had to use a flashlight after a while. When I noticed what was going on, there was a good-sized Wolf spider (very common around here, and shockingly large, but they're friendlies, no venom and they eat the smaller spiders and other insect pests, often living in basements or sheds). I saw this spider being dragged backward by its mouthparts by a very agitated and very determined wasp up the concrete steps and then across my porch to a small hole in the mortar at the base of my wall. I occasionally got too close with the camera and the wasp briefly abandoned its mobile incubator and attacked me like a kamikaze pilot, once smacking audibly right into the front of the camera. I didn't see it drag the spider inside the hole, it left it sitting just outside for a long time and disappeared, apparently inside the den to clear room in order to drag the huge beast through. I started researching meanwhile and discovered all this info that just blew my mind.

The biggest wasp in existence I believe is what's called a Tarantula Hawk because it does this with Tarantulas in the desert, and it also has the most painful and debilitating sting of all wasps, among the most deadly venoms in the world. The one on my porch looked a lot like one of those but smaller (the Tarantula hawk is 2 inches long) and I dubbed it a Wolf Hawk.

The next year, at exactly the same time of year (almost to the day) and just before dusk I saw it happen again by my back door, but this time the wasp's nest was apparently way up on a windowsill on the 2nd floor, and it couldn't drag the heavy spider all the way up the wall try as it might. I suddenly realized with a shock, the wasp may well have been the one born of the incident I saw a year ago.

This isn't from my video—I can't pull good images from it because it was so dark, but it looked almost exactly like this:

​

Now imagine the wasp dragging the spider backwards in a series of jerks, very spastic and agitated, stopping to run around rapidly every few minutes, and then dragging it straight up a wall by the mouthparts. The stuff of nightmares I tell ya! Even more so when I realized the spider wasn't dead but was totally helpless.

Here's how big the Tarantula hawks are:

​

Mine was much smaller than that, smaller than normal wasps in fact, but here's the size of a Wolf Spider:

​

 

Glad it's morning here and I'm reading this waking up, not trying to get to sleep.

 

LOL, it's kind of like Aliens vs Predator, only not a crapfest of a movie.

 

Sometimes I worry about you.

 

The echidna has a four-headed penis and the female has between two and three vaginas!

 

Edible flowers are actually an old tradition in salads. I say we bring it back.

 

Assuming a single anus... Given what we've learned so far, that's a pretty big leap of faith.

 

An echidna doesn't even look big enough to contain multiple digestive tracts, but if so much room is devoted to the reproductive organs, then who can say?

 

It's like when a kid declares they're full with broccoli still left on their plate but suddenly finds room when the ice cream comes out. Cows have four stomachs running in sequence. Other animals may run them in parallel.

Spoiler

Or maybe they were genetically engineered by real serious preeverts.