Stuff you didn't know and probably don't care about

[GagHalfrunt]

This is about Thaddeus McCotter. If you've never of him, most voters didn't either. He was serving in the US House of Representatives from Michigan and with typical delusions of grandeur decided he wanted to be President and would not seek re-election to the House. He lasted in the race for about 20 minutes because even his own family didn't know who the hell he is. So of course, he decided to run for his old seat again, but he committed some fraud when he faked signatures on the necessary petitions to be allowed on the ballot and not only was he not allowed to run, the resulting scandal forced him to resign before his term was over. That's not much of a story, but it led to the most pretentious resignation letter in US political history. This is the kind of thing that can't be written accidentally, you have to be aiming for giant douchebag to even approach it.

His resignation, and I quote:

This past nightmarish month and a half have, for the first time, severed the necessary harmony between the needs of my constituency and of my family. As this harmony is required to serve, its absence requires I leave. The recent event's totality of calumnies, indignities and deceits have weighed most heavily upon my family. Thus, acutely aware one cannot rebuild their hearth of home amongst the ruins of their U.S. House office, for the sake of my loved ones I must "strike another match, go start anew" by embracing the promotion back from public servant to sovereign citizen.

 

[Chaotic42]

Cassius Belly is the act of using Muhammad Ali's stomach as an excuse to start a war.

 

[IronWing]

Cassius Belly is the act of using Muhammad Ali's stomach as an excuse to start a war.

Wow. F' me dead, I've been humbled.

 

[shortylickens]

Massachusetts was the first colony to authorize slavery and Virginia actually freed the first Africans to arrive in America as slaves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States#Colonial_America

I wonder how the smug liberals today would feel if they knew about that.

 

[Mai72]

1) You are not really you. What you think is you is just biological impulses firing off in your head mixed with social conditioning. So, basically those thoughts you have aren't really your thoughts but just someone else has put in you. Parents, school, society at large. Those thoughts that you so desperately attach to don't really matter in the end. Go live in another country unlike your own long enough and you'll come to the same conclusion

2) Studies show that we have anywhere from 12-60k thoughts a day and that 85% are negative. And, that it takes 16 positive affirmations to negate 1 negative thought. This is due to the fact that being in a negative state actually had some benefit as cavemen and cave woman. Not so much in modern society.

 

[lxskllr]

"strike another match, go start anew"

It's all over now, baby blue

 

[lxskllr]

Here's something I doubt anyone here knows, or cares about... A valravn is a raven of the slain, and if they ate a king's heart after a battle, they became a real PITA :^D

According to Danish folklore recorded in the late 1800s, when a king or chieftain was killed in battle and not found and buried, ravens came and ate him. The ravens became valravne. The valravne that ate the king's heart gained human knowledge and could perform great malicious acts, could lead people astray, had superhuman powers, and were "terrible animals".[1]

In another account, a valravn is described as a peaceless soul in search of redemption that flies by night (but never day) and can only free itself from its animal countenance by consuming the blood of a child. This is reflected in a Danish traditional song that describes how, after refusing offers of riches, the Valravn makes an agreement with a maiden to take her to her betrothed after she promises the valravn her first-born son. After the agreement, the valravn flies away. In time, the couple have a child and the Valravn returns, and asks the maiden if she has forgotten her promise. The valravn takes the child away, and tears into the chest of his won wager and consumes the blood contained within the child's heart. As a result, the valravn transforms into a knight. This traditional song was reinterpreted by the electro-folk band Sorten Muld and became a hit for them in 1997, under the title Ravnen.

Other accounts describe valravns as monsters that are half-wolf and half-raven.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valravn

It would be kinda cool to live in the place where folk tales were real. Where they exist because people give them power a la American Gods. That would also take care of cultural conflict where there's overlap in god/spirit function.

I looked it up due to this tune...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V-22svnseo

Sounded pretty bad ass, and I wanted to see what the word was

 

[Squisher]

Stoned Ape Theory is a hypothesis that eating hallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms caused the rapid increase in homo erectus's brain between 500K and 100K years ago. Our brains doubled in size between 2m years ago and 700K years ago then between 500K and and 100K years ago it tripled in size. There's little to indicate why this is. The notion is these hominids were following the migration during the ice age and with scant resources some were eating mushrooms growing out of dung left by the larger mammals and these hallucinations brought about traits of fearlessness and a sense of community that gave an advantage to those that ate them to hunt down dangerous prey.

 

[Thebobo]

 

[Thebobo]

 

[GagHalfrunt]

On the cover of the October 12th, 1987 issue of People Magazine Michael Jackson said: "I was sent forth for the world, for the children."


Maybe he was trying to warn us and we just didn't understand the message.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Actor Hank Patterson is not very well known by name, but fans of late 60s to early 70s sitcoms might know him by site. Patterson played farmer Fred Ziffel on both Petticoat Junction and Green Acres from 1963 to 1971. Hank was well into his 70s by the time Petticoat Junction came on the air and when Green Acres started he was near 80 and almost completely deaf. The producers liked his portrayal of the character so much they couldn't bear to replace him, so they worked around his deafness by poking him in the leg with a stick as his cue that it was Fred Ziffel's turn to talk.

 

[William Gaatjes]

This is interesting :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

Low-background steel is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first atomic bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. With the Trinity test and the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and then subsequent nuclear weapons testing during the early years of the Cold War, background radiation levels increased across the world. Modern steel is contaminated with radionuclides because its production used atmospheric air. Low background steel is so called because it does not suffer from such nuclear contamination. This steel is used in devices that require the highest sensitivity for detecting radionuclides.

The primary source of low-background steel is ships that were constructed before the Trinity test, most famously the scuttled German World War I battleships in Scapa Flow.

From 1856 until the mid 20th century, steel was produced in the Bessemer process where air was forced into Bessemer converters converting the pig iron into steel. By the mid-20th century, many steelworks had switched to the BOS process which uses pure oxygen instead of air. However as both processes use atmospheric gas, they are susceptible to contamination from airborne particulates. Present-day air carries radionuclides, such as cobalt-60, which are deposited into the steel giving it a weak radioactive signature.[4]

World anthropogenic background radiation levels peaked at 0.15 mSv/yr above natural levels in 1963, the year that the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was enacted. Since then, anthropogenic background radiation has decreased exponentially to 0.005 mSv/yr above natural levels.[5]

However, cobalt-60 still contaminates modern steel because it has been recycled through the scrap metal supply chain

 

[Charmonium]

Only one animal has ever held official rank in the US military.

One of the heroes of the Korean War had a thankless job. In the mountainous area along the border between North and South Korea, combat consisted mainly of volleys from ridgelines with 75mm recoilless rifles -- deadly from long distances. The shells for these guns weighed 20 pounds (9 kg) each, and had to be lugged up the hills. That job went to a horse named Reckless, a 3-year-old filly purchased at a Seoul race track for $250 USD. She was trained in the ways of war and initially given the rank of private first class in the U.S. Marine Corps. After a heroic tour of duty in which she displayed uncommon valor, she retired as a staff sergeant -- the only animal ever to hold an official rank in the U.S. military.

Just one of the guys:

• Reckless was a Mongolian horse whose mother might have been a thoroughbred. Lt. Eric Pedersen, commander of the Recoilless Rifle Platoon, purchased the horse from a stable boy who wanted the money in order to buy his sister an artificial leg.
  
• After training as a pack horse, Reckless roamed freely through the camp, even sleeping in a tent on cold nights. She’d eat anything, including scrambled eggs, beer, Coca-Cola, and, once, about $30 USD worth of poker chips.
  
• Reckless excelled during the Battle for Outpost Vegas. For three days, she hauled ammunition -- by herself -- and carried wounded soldiers to safety. She was wounded twice, and honored with two Purple Hearts.

http://www.wisegeek.com/have-any-animals-become-war-heroes.htm

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Only one animal has ever held official rank in the US military.

Thanks, I had not heard before. It's a story well worth reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergeant_Reckless

 

[GagHalfrunt]

The current Ku Klux Klan is the third KKK to be active in the USA. The first began following the Civil War and was headed by Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. A federal grand jury declared them to be a terrorist organization in 1870 and issued hundreds of indictments for Klan members. Forrest officially dissolved the organizaton in 1871 to protect its members and it was not revived until the Second KKK came to life in 1915. That one faded away in the 1940s and eventually came back as the Third KKK in the 1950's.

None of that is all that interesting, but this part is: The primary goal of the Original Klan was to overthrow the Republican state governments that controlled the South during the post-war Reconstruction Era and get Democrats into power.

 

[shortylickens]

Meet Virginia was recorded in 1996 and released in 1999. That makes it WAY older than I thought it was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_Virginia

 

[shortylickens]

The Glock 17 is so-called because its the 17th patent ever produced by the company.
Gaston Glock never produced a firearm until he was 52 years old. His experience with polymers came from camera equipment.
He was born in 1929 and is still kicking strong.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Miami Herald humor columnist Dave Barry wrote a piece making fun of the cities of Grand Forks, North Dakota, and East Grand Forks, Minnesota, for calling themselves the "Grand Cities" when they're not much more than frozen tundra. To get a little payback Grand Forks ND named a sewage pumping station after Barry in 2002 and invited him to attend the naming ceremony. He went.

 

[Charmonium]

If he's the dude on the right, it's nice to see that he dressed for the occasion. Nothing says 'respect' like shorts and a ratty t-shirt. And that's not to mention the impressive array of dignitaries in attendance.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

If he's the dude on the right, it's nice to see that he dressed for the occasion. Nothing says 'respect' like shorts and a ratty t-shirt. And that's not to mention the impressive array of dignitaries in attendance.

That is him on the right, but that's not the occasion. He must have taken his family to see it at some point. Like "see, daddy's famous!! Sewage!!" The dedication was 2002, judging from the pictures of then and now I'd guess that the first one is from like 2010 or so.

Picture of Dave at the actual event

 

[William Gaatjes]

This sure is interesting, i never knew about this :

HeLa immortal cell line

https://hackaday.com/2018/01/09/henrietta-lacks-and-immortal-cell-lines/

In early 1951, a woman named Henrietta Lacks visited the “colored ward” at Johns Hopkins hospital for a painful lump she found on her cervix. She was seen by Dr. Howard W. Jones, who indeed found a tumor growing on the surface of her cervix. He took a tissue sample, which confirmed Henrietta’s worst fears: She had cancer.
The treatment at the time was to irradiate the tumor with radium tubes placed in and around the cervix. The hope was that this would kill the cancerous cells while preserving the healthy tissue. Unbeknownst to Henrietta, a biopsy was taken during her radium procedure. Slivers of her tumor and of healthy cervix cells were cut away. The cancer cells were used as part of a research project. Then something amazing happened: the cancerous cells grew and continued to grow outside of her body.
As Henrietta herself lay dying, the HeLa immortal cell line was born. This cell line has been used in nearly every aspect of medical research since the polio vaccine. Millions owe their lives to it. Yet, Henrietta and her family never gave consent for any of this. Her family was not informed or compensated. In fact, until recently, they didn’t fully grasp exactly how Henrietta’s cells were being used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

HeLa /ˈhiːlɑː/ (also Hela or hela) is a cell type in an immortal cell line used in scientific research. It is the oldest and most commonly used human cell line.[1] The line was derived from cervical cancer cells taken on February 8, 1951[2] from Henrietta Lacks, a patient who died of her cancer on October 4, 1951. The cell line was found to be remarkably durable and prolific which warrants its extensive use in scientific research.[3][4]
The cells from Lacks' cancerous cervical tumor were taken without her knowledge or consent.[5] Cell biologist George Otto Gey found that they could be kept alive,[6][7] and was able to isolate one specific cell, multiply it, and develop a cell line. As was custom for Gey's lab assistant, she labeled the culture 'HeLa', the first two letters of the patient's first and last name; this became the name of the cell line.
These were the first human cells grown in a lab that were naturally "immortal", meaning that they do not die after a set number of cell divisions (i.e. lack of senescence). These cells could be used for conducting a multitude of medical experiments—if the cells died, they could simply be discarded and the experiment attempted again on fresh cells from the culture. This represented an enormous boon to medical and biological research.[4]

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Most of us have probably visited the IMDB at some point to find the name of a film or an actor. They have a rating system for movies that follows the normal 1 to 10 stars. Except for one movie. This is Spinal Tap goes to 11.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088258/

 

[Skunk-Works]

If he's the dude on the right, it's nice to see that he dressed for the occasion. Nothing says 'respect' like shorts and a ratty t-shirt. And that's not to mention the impressive array of dignitaries in attendance.

Not to mention the mismatched sock. LOL

 

[Red Squirrel]

Here's a fun one: your blood type actually determines what kind of foods you should eat.

I'm type A- so apparently I should be vegetarian. Interestingly, I'm not all that much of a meat eater, I do eat meat but I could probably live without it if I really had to, provided I could find proper replacements that are still filling.

http://www.dadamo.com/txt/index.pl?1003 (lots of other info online too on this)

A lot of the info on that page seems to jive for me too, like not liking big crowds etc.

Someone pointed this out to me and I thought it was interesting so did more research.