Chopped eel in jelly and vinegar served cold is a traditional English dish.
Tennessee Williams was from Mississippi.
If a machine could converse with a human and make him believe it was not a machine, it would pass the Turing Test.
In The Godfather, every speaking character who handles an orange eventually dies.
Whenever Mr. Bean encounters the blue three-wheeled car, a Reliant Robin, he has to damage it. This behaviour could be an example of OCD.
See other: Quite Interesting Facts
Clyde (of Bonnie and Clyde) Barrow’s middle name was ‘Chestnut’.
On her eighth birthday in 1936, Shirley Temple got 135,000 birthday presents.
The US states of Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina and Maryland have legislation which forbids an atheist from holding public office.
In Danish, the word ‘forgive’ means ‘to poison’.
Because of his squeaky voice, Reinhard Heydrich was called ‘the goat’ at school. He became a heavy drinker and a sex-addict. While serving as an officer in the SS, he opened an exclusive brothel.
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A community in Thule, in north-western Greenland, was so remote that until the start of the 19th century they believed themselves to be the only people in the world.
The potato originated in Peru about 3 million years ago; the Peruvians consider the spud a point of national pride.
During the late 1800s, sewage from the Chicago River repeatedly polluted Lake Michigan, Chicago’s main water source, causing devastating disease outbreaks. In the 1900, engineers built the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which reversed the river’s natural east-to-west flow and directed water toward the Mississippi River.
Backpfeifengesicht is German for ‘a face that makes you want to hit it’.
Aristotle believed that the Sun went round the Earth, that intelligence was located in the heart, and that the brain was a device for cooling the blood. He also taught that flies had four legs.
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Not too many decades ago, being a child in the western world meant having a license to roam: you spent a large chunk of your free time outside, exploring your surroundings, chasing adventure. This is the Huckleberry Finn mould of carefree childhood – even if you weren’t floating down the Mississippi on a raft, you could easily imagine that you were.
That mould has definitely been broken. A British study called One False Move, investigating the mobility of children, found that the average eight-year-old saw its ‘home habitat’ shrink to one-ninth of its size within a single generation. In 1970, 80% of British children 7 or 8 years of age were allowed to go to school unsupervised; by 1990, this figure had dropped below 10%.
The result of this gradual shrinkage of children’s habitat, is the effective end of the outdoor childhood. This evolution, by and large an unreported phenomenon, is put in stark perspective by this list of figures. Zooming in on parts of Sheffield, in the north of England, we can list the differences in size of the stomping grounds of four generations of the Thomas family – each snapped at eight years of age:
The worrying fact of the matter is that the reduced exposure to the outdoors could harm the mental well-being of children.
Ironically, parental fears for their offspring’s well-being have been an important factor in reducing their children’s unsupervised access to the great outdoors: fears of traffic, of predators, of being seen to have their children roam unsupervised.
But the growing list of fears, whether old or new, real or imagined, wasn’t the only factor driving the trend. George Thomas’s 1919 childhood home was overcrowded and held little attractions, while in 2007 his great-grandson had a room of his own, stocked with games and toys, with access to the entertainment provided by television and the internet. On top of that, the fragmentation of communities, and the concomitant increase in car-dependency are perhaps also to blame.
Knowledge Guild 