ozoneocean [..] wrote:
A group of men is called a "sausagefest".
...so what's a group of women?

Soft and bouncy?
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True fact: One out of every three men wish they could be as awesome as me.
True fact: I am superman.

Kroatz [..] wrote:
True fact: One out of every three men wish they could be as awesome as me.
True fact: I am superman. 

I wish I was as awesome as superman. :(
 
Meme:
Old men wear their pants really really high because they're OLD!
 
Staus:
Half true
 
Real story:
In the early part of the 20th Century men's trousers were held up by braces (or suspenders), not belts, so they were never worn at the waste, always higher. Virtually all pants were like this, and of course they were based on earlier styles and traditions. Later when belts finally came in, the trousers style was still to have high wastes.
 
This means that many old men are simply wearing clothes either from the old days, clothes made in that style because it's what they're used to, or they attempt to wear modern clothes in the style that they grew up with.
 
These "Harry-highpants" guys are all dying out now, and since the fashion for pants in later years was to have a lower waste, in future there will be no old men who wear their pants up too high. :(

Just correcting something on the first page.
Mel Blanc was not allergic to carrots.
He was a method actor so every time he delivered Bugs's lines he'd actually bite and chew a carrot to get the sound.
But in order to clearly deliver the line he had to spit the carrot out of his mouth after crunching it.
Just something I saw while watching a documentary once.
Its also mentioned on wikipedia, though its hard to really put as much faith into something that just about anyone can edit as they see fit.

A koala's appendix is 2m long.
A cow produces 100 litres of saliva per day.
An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
All wisdom from "Mameshiba"

ozoneocean [..] wrote:
A group of men is called a "sausagefest".
...so what's a group of women?

 
A tacofest.

MediGuy [..] wrote:
A tacofest.

Ah-ha! Thankyou! Maybe "tacofiesta" would be better though? ^_^
 
Also- Koalas have four thumbs :D

Fact:
The two word phrase "Make love", or "lovemaking" or other variation thereof was NOT originally a moronically simple euphemism for sex. Originally, it just meant to court someone, to show simple lover's affection etc.
 
This is important to remember when you read old literature where the phrase will appear in its original form.

Or see old movies where two fully dressed people in a room full of others an the girl accuses the guy of making love to her.
 
Once upon a time it meant "pitching woo" or even flirting and coquettry.  But actual intercourse has been called f**king in English since the Anglo-Saxons. 
 
And in England "knocking someone up" just means knocking on their door to wake them up.

Are you sure? After all, the term "Knocking shop" (brothel) comes from Britain, so...?

Saw it in several vintage British movies as well as running into it from the hotel concierage in London.  He had no idea what it meant in American English as opposed to the colloquiallism in British English.
 
The same way "knocking shop" has any colloquial meaning in American English and will get a confused stare.
Just found out that I can paste my avatar into here.  Tee hee.


(online) posts: 2,422 joined: 1-21-2008

Not sure if this has been posted already but John Wilkes Booth's brother saved Abraham Lincoln's son. http://www.omg-facts.com/view/Facts/46479

Abraham Lincoln was fond of pets, and owned horses, cats, dogs and a turkey.
More than 40,000 parasites and 250 types of bacteria are exchanged during a typical French kiss!
40% of women have hurled footwear at a man.
Peanuts are one of the ingredients in dynamite.
Over 1,000 birds a year die from smashing into windows.
In Chinese, the KFC slogan "finger lickin' good" comes out as "eat your fingers off".
Most lipstick contains fish scales!
Extremely high pressured water can easily cut through a steel beam.
A sneeze travels out your mouth at over 100 m.p.h.!
A fire in Australia has been burning for more than 5,000 years!

i learned the other day that when you see a litter of kittens and one or two of them look completely different from the rest, that it's actually possible these kittens have different fathers =O
Lady kitty gets around!
(mind=blown)

Tribute by Tenacious D says in the lyrics: "this is not the greatest song in the world, this is just a tribute", when in actual fact it IS the greatest song in the world. @_@

Mythbusters, the TV show that we all know and love has always been produced by the Australian Production company "Beyond Productions".
 
Their history goes back to the 1980s when there was a science based TV series on the government channel here (ABC), called "towards 2000", which was about all the cool new things that were being developed, like soar powered cars, attack helicopters, wave power generators, robots, wristwatch TVs etc.
 
When their contract ran out the show makers sold the idea to a commercial channel here in Australia: Channel 7. And they renamed it "Beyond 2000".
 
That ran during the 1990's and was a pretty good show, focussing on more future prediction and much more futuristic and advanced sort of stuff mostly, as well as new gadgets and things... then I don't know what happened to it.
 
Aaaanyway, eventually their production company seems to have taken on other science based things and somehow ended up doing the mythbusters, which is a LOT more rough and ready and down and dirty than their clean, futuristic themed shows used to be, but WAAAAAY more fun.

Just learned this one: the US 101st Airborne Divisions "Screaming Eagle" patch is in fact modeled off of a real eagle that served as a live mascot at one point. His name was "Old Abe", and he served as the Civil War mascot to the 8th Volunteer Infantry Regiment from Wisconsin, which later handed him off to the state's "Iron Brigade" who shared their armory with the 101st whent it was a reserve unit after WWI. During that time the 101st and the Case Tractor Works adopted Abe as their mascots as well and the 101st eventually made the representation of him into their official unit patch when they were re-instated as a regular army division for World War II.

I just learned this because the unit I'm attached to is considered the flag descendant of the 8th VIR and Iron Brigade and I was actually doing research for a branding design project that wanted to use the old Case logo as a reference. So it might not bee too interesting to anyone else, but I thought it was cool that I get to tease any Screaming Eagles I meet about who their daddy was.

You mean this?

If Don Troiani has done a painting of it, it's no secret in the military uniforms and heraldry community.  This image was also the cover of the book The United States Infantry by Gregory Urwin.
This is the 8th Wisconsin advancing on Vicksburg in 1863.  Properly the 8th Wisconsin was not part of the Iron Brigade which was comprised of the 6, 7 and 9th Wisconsin and 19th Indiana and later 24th Michigan.  The Iron Brgade was in the Army of the Potomac and was known for wearing the Hardee Black hats.  In Grant's western Army wearing the black Hardee hats was common as it was more practical in the campaign conditions of the Western Army.

The 101 Infantry division in 1921 was formed in the midwest and chose Old Abe and the black shield for their insignia.  The black shield was for the black hats of the Iron Brigade which ironically the 8th Wisconsin with Old Abe was not a part of.  It's interesting to see images of guys in the interwar era with the Screaming Eagle on their shoulder (or vomiting vulture as veterans call it) without the Airborne tag.

Every insignia in the US Army has a similar story and typically units give a junior officer the job of researching it to get them integrated into the unit and to instill unit pride.  I often tagged along because such things fascinated me. The US Army used to have all the lineage and honors of all the crests on line.  It was taken offline a few years back so one would have to spend money to contact the Corps of Army Historians to get the information or travel to a library to do the research.  Both of which I've done. 

SO, can anyone answer this:
Why all the flagrant old fashioned imperialist type symbols?
I mean, there are imperial eagles everywhere, more than 1930s Germany or Napoleon's France, more on a par with Rome at its height, which is what a lot of the civil architecture is also modelled off...
Were the guys who came up with that stuff (in the US) Rome fetishists or what?

Yeah Bravo, that's more or less the long-form version of what I learned from the unit records and the Case company's history. The Case records I got were what said that the 8th handed off Old Abe to the Iron Brigade when they disbanded. I just figured that it would be interesting to those who aren't hardcore military history buffs. 

And yeah Oz. The early American founders used the symbols of Rome as a means of giving the government a feeling of legitimacy and they went pretty crazy on it. That's why most of our buildings are heavily adorned with Roman eagles, olive branches, etc and follow classical geometry and building styles very closely. You'll see a lot of American government buildings that very closely ape a classic Roman building. It's a major point in American architectural history. In the specific case of military stuff, I think a lot of military's did it to claim a sort of lineage from Rome and make themselves appear more powerful, but I don't know for sure.

The neo-classicism rife on US public buildings is for the most part actually a 19th Century phenomon.  Look at the corner stones of the buildings and you'll see ones done in the 1880's into the 1930's.  Earlier public buildings where they exist would be Romanesque if built in the late-19th-early 19th Century because everything greco- Roman was HUGE with the Enlightenment down to fashion and statesmen wrapping themselves up in togas to deliver speeches and those women's high waisted dresses based on Roman styles and originally being very, very diaphanous.

The American Republic and later the First French Republic were both founded on a solid basis of Roman history. That's why Washington constantly compared himself to Cinncinitus. (who?) Anyone with an education knew some Latin and read and re-read Roman works.  Some translated them as a hobby.  They knew and made what we would find obscure references to Roman (and Biblical) events and characters as surely as we know about Lady Gaga and the Kardashians.  Every single time a problem arose in the early US republic in would come refrences to Caesar and dictatorships and the standing army and Washington would pull out his reference to Cinncinitus and go back to his plow.  Of course the First French Republic did become a military dictatorship but then Napoleon didn't have a Mount Vernon to retire to even if he did havea hot wife in one of those see-through Romanesque gowns reclining on a divan copied from a Roman one eating grapes like a Roman.

As for imperial imagery?  Why always an eagle?  "It's a majestic bird" says John Adams. 
"A symbol of more than 10 centuries of European mischief." says Franklin. "The turkey is a native American, substanance of our original settlers, a brave and staunch fellow who would take on a regiment of redcoats single handed." 
Though those are lines from the play 1776, they are paraphrased from the contempory correspondence of Adams and Franklin.  Jefferson briefly played with the idea of the dove and of course since the US Continental Army was originally inspired by the Republican army of ancient Rome, it had its eagle and roman breastplate symbology very early on.
Needless to say the eagle was chosen.  However, on some very early Great Seals of the US it is not an eagle depicted but the mythical bird the phoenix which had a much longer neck.  This didn't last very long and it became the bald eagle which was oneof the most common species of eagle on the east coast in the 1770s.
Of course when Napoleon came along he chose eagles as the symbol of the army after Rome.  His personal symbol was the worker bee because he constantly worked for the benefit of his empire.

 

Kohdok [..] wrote:There is somebody alive named Staff Sgt. Max Fightmaster.

  

Most groups claiming connection to the illuminati or Knight's templar actually have little to do with the origional groups.
Eight out ten father's would love to marry their children of to someone named Staff Sgt. Max Fightmaster 
the other two would fear the inheritant danger that someone with such a name could bring to their offspring. 

only male turkeys can gobble
licking a stamp burns calories
the first filmed sport was boxing 1894 
a rainbow can only be seen in the morning or late afternoon.