Fun Facts

...and as I mentioned in another thread, sadly, most SMs can tell you what the symbol for a Yank is these days... prolly a few married guys can too...

BT

All New Zealander military are Kiwi's, like all US military are Yanks to other countries.

FF: The air force of New Zealand use the kiwi, a flightless bird, as the symbol that identifies their aircraft.

Isn't that kinda like using a snail to identify a Formula One race team? I mean, at least the snail moves, a kiwi can't fly.

Mayo In a Bottle ~ The Police

BT

Fun Fact: The average specific density of mayonnaise is .91; the average specific gravity of sea water is 1.025.

You almost had me until I realized mayo doesn't sinko; mayo floatso.

:-)

Most people don’t know that 100 years ago, there were no manufacturers of mayonnaise on this side of the ocean. It had to be imported from England and was expensive. The Titanic was carrying 12,000 cases of Duke mayonnaise scheduled for delivery in Veracruz, Mexico, which was to be the next port of call after its stop in New York. This would have been the largest single shipment of mayonnaise ever delivered to Mexico. But as we know, the ship hit an iceberg and sank, and the cargo was lost. The people of Mexico, who had been experiencing a shortage of mayonnaise, were disconsolate at the loss. To this day, the event is commemorated as Sinko de Mayo.

Fun Fact: When I was a kid, the ice cream truck in my neighborhood only played music when they were out of ice cream.

I learned that from my dad, but I found out much later in life that the opposite was true.

Fun Fact: the US postal service maintains a 78,000 square foot facility in Salt Lake City whose sole role is to read all of our shit handwriting.

The 1,700 employees decipher our chicken scratch on around 5 million pieces of mail a day, although in December it can exceed 11 million. Experienced staff can somehow figure out our crappy addressing up to 1,600 times an hour. The best average 1,869 an hour.

That's pretty amazing, actually. Less than 2 seconds to read and correct a shitty address, thousands of times a day?

If the process still fails, they go to the dead letter office, where teams of people work together to try to figure it out. The last resort is to open the mail in an effort to find something inside which would indicate where it is supposed to go, or at least where it came from.

While only a very small percentage of mail ends up completely undeliverable, what's inside is sometimes interesting. Cash goes to the treasury. Drugs go to the cops. Urns of cremated people are buried. Things of potential value like watches or computers are auctioned.

Fun fact: e means the same thing in Portuguese as it does in Spanish.

BT

A related Fun Fact:

The 1983 HBO movie The Terry Fox Story was the very first movie produced specifically for pay per view TV.

I'm not sure if my American friends know who this is, but here's the short version.
40 years ago, Terry Fox - just 21 years old and having had one leg amputated due to bone cancer - set out to run across Canada to raise money for cancer research through the Canadian Cancer Society. The "Marathon of Hope" began in St. John's, Newfoundland. He hoped to raise $24 million ($1 for each Canadian).

After 143 days, he had reached Thunder Bay, Ontario. He had ran 3,339 miles (5,373 km) in 143 days (average of 23.3 miles/37.6 km per day), just shy of a marathon every day for 143 days. On ONE LEG.

He was forced to stop, as his cancer had returned. He died about a year later. He raised only $1.7 million during his run, but by the end of 1980 he met his $24 million goal, and the foundation has raised $750 million as of 2018.

He is a national icon in Canada. Truly an incredible person. I was only a child but I remember him running on his one leg, all day, every day, with highways closed and people lining the roads for him to make his trip. Unbelievable. I'm tearing up a bit just remembering it.

Was the pit bull trying to take the Buick out for a drive?

You never want to stand in the way of a pit bull and an Easter Sunday drive.

Not exactly a “fun” fact but two years on this day it was Easter, April Fools day and I was bit in the face by the neighbor’s pittbull

Fun times

~rabbit~

Fun Fact: Iran sends Salmon Rushdie a short letter every year on February 14th (the anniversary of Khomeini's fatwa ordering his death), reminding him that the fatwa remains in effect, reminding him that they still vow to kill him.

At this point he states that he no longer considers the threat (from the Iranian government, anyway) to be serious anymore, and really just a piece of rhetoric. However, some are apparently still interested, and in 2016 forty state-run Iranian media organizations reportedly raised $600,000 to assist in the efforts to kill him. The purported total bounty on his head is now $3.4 million.

Fun fact … if you make a snarky comment about somebody who posts here and then routinely deletes their posts you get blocked. La vie continue.

Fun Fact: Harold Ramis named Sigourney Weaver's character in Ghostbusters (Dana Barret) after actress Dana Barron, who played the original Audrey Griswold in National Lampoon's Vacation.

T

Fun Fact: Paul Allen's 1986 MiG-29 is for sale. New paint. $4.65 million. Low mileage!

I've always loved planes, although my knowledge of them is amateur at best. Someone once bought me a book called "World's Worst Aircraft", which basically was dedicated to decades of crap aircraft designs, although some of them (such as the incredible XB-70 Valkyrie) are included not because they were bad planes, but because of their staggeringly bad economics. The XB-70 cost almost one billion dollars each- in 1964! Worth more than their weight in gold.

AN-2 is a ridiculous airplane, which of course is the BEST type of aircraft.

small correction: any airplane can be stalled, particularly when the g,s are loaded up

As for slow flight, I've always had an affinity for the Antonov AN-2 biplane which literally doesn't have a stall speed. In fact, once your headwinds get up to about 35mph, you can LITERALLY fly the plane backwards with full control at about 5mph. It also had one of the longest production runs of any aircraft, only exceeded by the C130.

The original Wright flyer only needed 8 horsepower. They actually had 12 horsepower available on the first flight.

I'm even more impressed that in less than 70 years we went from what was essentially a kite with a leaf blower motor barely able to fly 100 yards to men walking on the moon.

I'm quite sure you're right, T. Early aircraft were incredibly unstable and unreliable, but I also think that the few flights they did make were at low speed and very low altitude (usually less than 100 feet), and over water whenever possible, so the chances of surviving a crash were also much higher.

On one hand, it's really impressive that in the earliest days of aviation that 5 years went by before the first fatality. On the other hand, I'm guessing that there are more flights going in and out of a major airport in a single day than the total number of flights everywhere during that 5 year period.

T

Fun Fact: it was nearly five years from the first powered flight by the Wright brothers in December,1903 until the first fatality involving an aircraft, in September 1908.

The pilot was Orville Wright himself. He was attempting to interest the US army in airplanes, and had Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge on board as an official observer. A few minutes into the flight at only about 100 feet, the propeller shattered and the plane plunged to the ground. Orville survived with serious injuries, but Lieutenant Selfridge died later that day.

Oh, wow. Interesting