Depuis la dernière fois où j’ai posté
Depuis la dernière fois où j’ai posté un billet, il s’est passé bien des affaires, comme:
- La sortie de l’album Backspacer de Pearl Jam
- TQS est devenue V-Télé et Mario Dumont y anime une émission d’actualité
- La mort et les funérailles de Pierre Falardeau en plus du groupe Facebook pour rebaptiser la rue Amherst à son honneur
- La saison de hockey est recommencée et George Laraque fait plus parlé de lui en dehors que sur la glace
Je brise le silence après une pause de quelques semaines en postant ce billet bien simple. Je viens de retrouver quelques-uns des meilleurs textes que le widget Useless Knowledge m’a déjà présenté. Il y a des trucs complètement farfelus et d’autres plutôt intéressants, mais à vous de faire le tri!
Animaux
Chimpanzees frequently engage in sex 20 or more times a day. Should there be no male around, the female of the species will take care of business by any means necessary.
A kangaroo cannot jump if its tail is lifted off the ground. It needs its tail for pushing off.
Spiders never spin webs in structures made of chestnut wood. That is why so many European chateaux were built with chestnut beams—spider webs on a 50-foot beamed ceiling can be hard to remove.
Corps humain
Babies are born without kneecaps; they don’t appear until the ages of 2-6 months old.
Birth-control campaigns in Egypt in the late 1970s failed because village women ended up wearing the pills in lockets, as talismans.
During menstruation, the sensitivity of a woman’s middle finger is reduced. Medical science has yet to explain why.
Histoire
The men who served as guards along the Great Wall of China in the Middle Ages often were born on the wall, grew up there, married there, died there, and were buried within it. Many of these guards never left the wall in their entire lives.
In the mid 1880s, until about 1910, undertakers sold Grave Alarm devices.These were elaborate rope-and-bell/pulley arrangements allowing those buried alive to summon help.The rope was placed into the hand of the (supposed) deceased, and it wound through a series of tubes to the bell outside the grave.
The phrase « the whole 9 yards » derives from World War II combat pilots in the South Pacific. Their planes were armed with machine guns that took .50 caliber ammo belts, which were exactly 27 feet long. Hence, whenever the pilots blasted all their bullets at a target, it caught « the whole 9 yards.’
Inventions
Silly Putty started as a mistake in a New Haven laboratory, and was turned into a consumer hit in the 1960s. According to engineers, Silly Putty is a self-contradiction. Chemically, it is a liquid, but it resembles a solid. The molecular structure will stretch if the structure is slowly pulled. But if tugged, it snaps apart. The toy has a rebound capacity of 75 to 80 percent, whereas a rubber ball has only about 50-percent capacity. A silicon derivative, Silly Putty won’t rot; it can withstand temperatures from minus 70° Fahrenheit to hundreds of degrees above zero. On top of all that, it picks up newsprint, which often appears sharper than the original.
In 1886, Herman Hollerith had the idea of using punched cards to keep and transport information, a technology used up to the late 1970s. This device was originally constructed to allow the 1890 census to be tabulated. The Tabulating Machine Company was founded by him in the same year. Twenty-eight years later, after several takeovers, the company founded by Hollerith became known as International Business Machines (IBM).
Musique
In 1977, the Nifty Gritty Dirt Band became the first American pop group to tour the U.S.S.R.
The Beatles held the top 5 spots on the April 4, 1964 Billboard singles chart. To date, they’re the only band to have ever accomplished that feat.
« We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out »—Decca Recording Company on rejecting the Beatles, 1962
The fuzz box was invented to give the guitar a unique « saxophonic » sound. The small box was operated by foot; when connected to the instrument, it put out a fuzzy distorted sound that « filled » gaps. The fuzz box gained instant fame in the rock world when the Rolling Stones used it in their 1965 hit « Satisfaction, » and it was used by most musicians of the era thereafter.
The worst catastrophe in rock history was hosted by the Who in 1979. Booked at the Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, Ohio, the band watched as a crowd rushed the stadium doors before the show. Eleven fans were crushed and killed in the melee. After the show, Roger Daltry is said to have cried his eyes out.
While Nirvana performed the song « Lithium » at the 1992 MTV awards show, bassist Novoselic tossed his bass in the air. It came down and hit him on the head, temporarily knocking him out. Kurt Cobain apparently missed the accident and screamed at him for being off beat.
« Long Tall Sally » was the last song played by the Beatles during their last scheduled concert, which took place at Candlestick Park in San Francisco on August 29, 1966.
Sports
In the 1979-80 season, at age 19, Wayne Gretzky became the youngest hockey player ever to score 50 or more goals and 100 or more points in a season, and the youngest player to be voted Most Valuable Player.
Tags: Hockey, IBM, Musique, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Rolling Stones, Sciences, Silly Putty, The Beatles, The Who, Useless Knowledge, Vidéo
février 17th, 2010 at 17:55:11
Cool post! How much stuff did you have to look up in order to write this one? I can tell you put some work in.
avril 4th, 2010 at 2:47:35
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