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Post by aubrey on Dec 10, 2019 17:50:26 GMT
"White Christmas" (like a lot of other Christmas standards) was written by a Jewish man). As was a lot of other music, and films made too
True: Frank Zappa did a musical about AIDS that - amongst all the deliberately offensive and obscene bits - was really about how various minorities are responsible for most of the US's cultural heritage: Jazz from black people, cinema from Jewish people and musicals from gay people (although it's obviously not as simple as that). But without the blacks and gays and Jews, all the US would have is Stephen Foster and Charles Ives (I love Charles Ives, but he's really not very commercial).
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Post by ARENA on Dec 18, 2019 10:25:20 GMT
Did you know? If it hadn't been for a bout of dysentery, Indiana Jones would have fought against an Arab swordsman. As Harrison Ford was too ill and too tired to go through a lengthy round of hand-to-hand combat - that would have demanded multiple takes - he suggested to Steven Spielberg that Indy simply shoot the maniac.
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Post by aubrey on Dec 18, 2019 10:54:58 GMT
Did you know? If it hadn't been for a bout of dysentery, Indiana Jones would have fought against an Arab swordsman. As Harrison Ford was too ill and too tired to go through a lengthy round of hand-to-hand combat - that would have demanded multiple takes - he suggested to Steven Spielberg that Indy simply shoot the maniac.
That's a great scene - and the one in a later film, where the bloke's shaping up to do the same, and Indy sighs and reaches for his gun, just as before - and it's not there! Best bit of that film (Temple of Doom), really (oh, the bit where the bloke stepped out of the painting was pretty good as well).
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Post by althea on Jan 6, 2020 17:28:19 GMT
There are roughly the same number of ants as cows in the world. (QI)
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Post by jimmy20 on Jan 6, 2020 17:54:15 GMT
There are roughly the same number of ants as cows in the world. (QI) Counting the cows I can imagine but counting the ants?
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Post by themanwhoknewnothing on Jan 7, 2020 8:46:58 GMT
There are roughly the same number of ants as cows in the world. (QI) The total weight of all the ants in the world is the same as, if not larger than that of all humans. Ants are arguably the greatest success story in the history of the animal kingdom. For every human there are about one million ants. In tropical regions; where ants are very common, their weight can exceed that of ground living ‘vertebrates’ (animals with backbones) by up to four times!
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Post by althea on Jan 7, 2020 15:59:58 GMT
On QI,it was explained that statisticians went all over the world and counted the cows and ants in measured areas to get a representative number of cows and ants in the world. I thought it sounded implausible,but maybe there are many more cows than we know about. It is about numbers not weight.I just thought it was noteworthy.
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Post by ARENA on Apr 4, 2020 7:59:14 GMT
It seems the longest orgasm in mammals is that of the domestic pig Sus scrofa domesticus. On average, its orgasm lasts 30 minutes, but it can last for as long as 90 minutes.
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Post by jimmy20 on Apr 4, 2020 9:18:44 GMT
It seems the longest orgasm in mammals is that of the domestic pig Sus scrofa domesticus. On average, its orgasm lasts 30 minutes, but it can last for as long as 90 minutes. I dread to ask, but how do they know?
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Post by ARENA on Apr 8, 2020 7:40:27 GMT
The tea-bag was an accidental invention. This occurred in 1908 when tea merchant Thomas Sullivan distributed his tea samples in small, silken bags. His customers, not understanding that these were samples, dunked them and suddenly Sullivan was swamped with orders for his ‘tea bags’!
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Post by althea on Oct 10, 2020 12:45:11 GMT
Often described as a continent of superlatives, Antarctica is the world’s southernmost continent. It is also the world’s highest, driest, windiest, coldest, and iciest continent. Antarctica is about 5.5 million square miles (14.2 million square km) in size, and thick ice covers about 98 percent of the land.
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Post by aubrey on Nov 11, 2020 15:02:50 GMT
Dweezil Zappa was born as Ian Donald Calvin Euclid Zappa; he changed his name to Dweezil - the name he had always been known as - at 18.
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Post by aubrey on Dec 11, 2020 19:21:29 GMT
(Gene Wolfe used to be my favourite living writer.)
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Post by ARENA on Feb 13, 2021 8:37:18 GMT
The Brown Antechinus rodent reaches sexual maturity at 10 months, has a two-week-long sex frenzy, and dies afterwards from the overexertion.
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Post by aubrey on Oct 7, 2021 9:29:49 GMT
The writer Brian Aldiss was on an arts council tour of places in China. There were other writers there as well, including Iris Murdoch.
Anyway, on a visit to a village, Iris Murdoch and the other women on the tour found themselves surrounded by several of the older women of the village. It felt very odd, but eventually they agreed to go in a hut with them.
A few minutes later they all came out, grinning hugely.
Later, Iris Murdoch explained: "They'd heard that western women have their fannies on sideways, and wanted to know if it was true."
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