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| Useless but fun info |
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| Please send your trivia offerings to: Zandra |
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| Why is there no "Q" or "Z" on many telephones? |
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The telephone's pad of twelve buttons reflects its history. There are three letters on most buttons, except for zero, one, octothorp(#) and the star symbol (*), which have no letters. "Q" and "Z" are usually missing from the list. Why?
Instead of twelve buttons, telephones used to have circular plates with ten holes numbered from zero to nine. To make phone numbers easier to remember, the phone companies assigned letters to the numbers, so people could remember mnemonics like "Charleston" for C-Hinstead of the first two digits of a number.
Of the ten digits, zero was already used to dial the operator and one was used for internal phone company signals. That left eight numbers to which letters could be assigned. Three letters per number took care of 24 of the alphabet's 26 letters, and the least common letters "Q" and "Z" were left out, but not forever. Many telephones now show "Q" on the seven button, and "Z" on the nine button.
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Early work on dial telephone systems: |
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| http://www.privateline.com/Switching/EarlyWork.html |
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| The history of the telephone: |
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http://www.privateline.com/TelephoneHistory/History1.htm |
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What are the Seven Seas? |
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It's an ancient term describing what were believed to be all the seas and oceans of the world. Many people believe the seven are what we now know as the Arctic, Antarctic, North Pacific, South Pacific, North Atlantic, South Atlantic and Indian oceans. However, the phrase has no literal meaning and is used to romanticize sailing. It came into use before some of the oceans were even known to exist. |
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| side note: |
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The British Admiralty stands by five oceans and seven seas, even if modern geography now defines the Caspian Sea as a lake. Real trivia: in the British navy, short sailors have 5 pleats (the 5 oceans) in their trousers, while tall sailors get 7 pleats (the 7 seas)." |
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What was the first spacecraft to visit a comet? |
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___ __ ___ ____ ____ ___ _____ ____ ____ _____ ____ ____ ____ ___ ______ ____ _____ |
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When Halley's Comet came through the inner solar system in 1986, spacecraft from Japan, the Soviet Union, and Europe were there to meet it. But six months before these spacecraft met up with Halley, another one had already made the first comet rendezvous, with a different comet.
The craft was the International Sun-Earth Explorer 3, which was renamed the International Cometary Explorer (ICE) for this special mission. Its historic first comet visit was made possible by a unique, complex orbit that took it from its original station between the Earth and the Sun, past the Earth-Moon system five times, then looping out in a long arc that passed right through the tail of comet Jiacobi-Zinner.
After the comet encounter, ICE coasted farther out into empty space, but in 2014 it will return to Earth, with fuel still in its tanks. Where will they send it next?
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| More about ICE and other comet missions: |
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http://www.friends-partners.org/~mwade/craft/isee.htm |
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Money isn't made out of paper, it's made out of cotton. |
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| The 57 on Heinz ketchup bottle represents the number of varieties of products the company once had. |
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A rat can last longer without water than a camel. |
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The dot over the letter 'i' is called a tittle. |
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Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks otherwise it will digest itself. |
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The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper. |
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How are bonsai grown? |
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| _ __ ___ ____ ____ ___ _____ ____ ____ _____ ____ ____ ____ ___ ______ ____ _____ |
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| "Carefully" is an acceptable answer. You don't just plant miniature tree seeds and think small. Nor do you expose them to radiation--the reduction method you may have seen in the classic science fiction film, "The Incredible Shrinking Man." |
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So what's the trick? Did your mother ever warn you not do certain things, such as smoking, because it might "stunt" your growth? Well, bonsai are trees whose growth are carefully and methodically stunted. They are placed in small pots and trimmed every day. And that's the least of it. The cultivator actually places restricting rings around the branches or, in the case of pine, binds them with iron wire. The result is a tree that's no more than 20 inches high. They're aesthetically pleasing--and functional for shade if you're a leprechaun. |
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(Source: THE BIG BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE) |
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Why is giving up on something letting it "go by the boards?" |
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_ __ ___ ____ ____ ___ _____ ____ ____ _____ ____ ____ ____ |
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Once again in tracing the roots of a phrase, we find ourselves at sea. One wonders how sailors ever got to where they were going, so busy must they have been enriching the language. With a dictionary in one hand and a thesaurus in the other, how did they manage to swab the decks? |
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This particular expression must have been invented on a dark and stormy night. It involves the decision a captain would have to make if the mast broke. Fix it? Or cut it down and toss it overboard, where it would float by the side of the ship, also known as the "boards." Hence the phrase "letting it go by the boards," meaning to give up on something. |
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(Source: DICTIONARY OF WORD AND PHRASE ORIGINS) |
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How old is the practice of branding livestock? |
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The practice of branding animals (permanently marking them by applying a heated tool) is ancient indeed. The earliest clear evidence of branding comes from Egyptian tomb paintings 4,000 years old, but the practice probably began much earlier than that. Cave paintings 7,000 years old show bison with markings on the flanks, possibly to indicate ownership.
When humans first began to herd animals, it became worthwhile to identify the ownership of each animal. The first prehistoric brands were probably made by nomadic herdsmen with burning wooden sticks.Later, red-hot iron tools were used to draw or stamp the designs onto the animals.
When Spaniards began to colonize the New World, they brought the practice of branding with them, and developed it further. Ranch cattle brands evolved into a complex language with technical terminology and multi-symbol phrases that carried specific meanings. |
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| More about livestock brands: |
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| http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/CC/auc1.html |
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| http://www.barbwiremuseum.com/cattlebrandhistory.htm |
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| On average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily. |
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Daniel Boone detested coonskin caps. |
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Playing cards were issued to British pilots in WWII. If captured, they could be soaked in water and unfolded to reveal a map for escape. |
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| Chocolate kills dogs! Chocolate effects a dogs heart and nervous system, a few ounces enough to kill a small sized dog. |
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| John Wilkes Booth's brother once saved the life of Abraham Lincoln's son. |
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Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine are brother and sister. |
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| Most lipstick contains fish scales. |
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Why do we call someone who overacts a "ham"? |
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Throughout the English-speaking world, thespians who overact are commonly called hams. At first glance, there is no obvious reason for this connection between pig and player, other than the linguistic one that such an actor is hogging the limelight and doing everything but chew up the scenery in order to make an impression.
In the history of histrionics, two scholarly explanations for the use of "ham" turn up most often. One has it that the word comes from the ham fat that actors once used to take off their makeup. But ham would more logically relate to laying it on thick, not taking it off. More credible is the notion that hams were actors who once played HAMlet but now had to take whatever roles they could get. Going from great art to play-for-pay left them still making grand gestures but now over miniscule material--much ado about nothing, so to speak.
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(Source: BREWER'S DICTIONARY OF PHRASE AND FABLE) |
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What's the origin of the "at sign" (@)? |
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| Everyone who uses email knows the "at sign," the little "a" with a circle around it. It separates the user's online name from his or her mail server address. Before it was used in email addresses, the "at sign" was used on invoices to show how much each item costs, and in a few other places. |
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Like its relative the ampersand, the "at sign" was invented in the days before printing presses, to shorten the task of transcribing documents. As short as the word "at" might be, it was still common enough in texts that medieval monks thought it would be worthwhile to shorten it even more. So they looped the "t" around and made it into a circle, saving one stroke of the pen. |
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| The "at sign" has no official one-word name, even though many names have been proposed. Among the proposed names, we like arobase, vortex, and snail. |
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More about the curious "at sign" including more proposed names: |
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| http://www.herodios.com/herron_tc/atsign.html |
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| Upper and lower case letters are named 'upper' and 'lower,'because in the time when all original print had to be set in individual letters, the upper case' letters were stored in the case on top of the case that stored the smaller, 'lower case' letters. |
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| There are four cars and eleven lightposts on the back of a $10 dollar bill. |
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Leonardo Da Vinci invented scissors, also, it took him 10 years to paint Mona Lisa's lips. |
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The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo. |
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| The numbers '172' can be found on the back of the U.S. $5 dollar bill in the bushes at the base of the Lincoln Memorial. |
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| There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with: orange, purple, and silver! |
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| There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos. |
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Return to my Main Page Zandra's Home Page |
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