Ponder
Points
Just so you’ll know….Sir
Lancelot was Sir Galahads father…you knew that anyway…..
While we’re doing names….Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were real people….their real names
were….Robert Leroy Parker and Henry Longbaugh.
Somebody gives you a pound of
new dollar bills……how many should you get? Exactly 490….or so says
the US Treasury.
Just where is the Louisiana
Museum of Modern Art anyway? Look for it in Humlebaek, Denmark….was
started in 1958 for are dating from 1950 until present.
Verona, Italy gets about 1,000
love letters mailed to them each Valentines Day….All going to
Juliet…..Verona was the setting for Shakespeare’s famous …”Romeo and
Juliet”.
Speaking of Italy……Florence was
the first city to have all of it’s streets paved…..did that in 1333.
Don’t know who paid for it …must have been a tax of some sort.
The Yellow River in China is the
muddiest in the entire world…..no you can’t swim it and I said so….
Old Benjamin Franklin used to
swim in the Thames River in England…..what was his favorite stroke?
The Breast Stroke…..tough old guy old Ben.
If you ever need a picture to
see what a 1926 Hupmobile looked like…just look on the back of a ten
dollar bill….it’s the car parked in front of the US Treasury
building.
That famous gunfight….at the OK
Corral….only 34 shots fired that day…about even for each
side…..However the Earps were better marksmen than the Clantons…..Earp’s
group scored 13 hits and the Clantons only 3.
You probably already knew that
Los Angeles was the first city in the United States to pass an
ordinance requiring you to get a license before you could serenade a
woman. Did that in 1838.
Italy comes in as the first
country to produce lace…started doing so in the early 1500’s.
U Thant…that fellow from Burma
who was the secretary general of the United Nations back in the
50’s…his name means …”Mr. Clean” in English.
Can you name 3 cities in Italy
whose names are now associated with color? Magenta, Siena and
Venice, as in Venetian Red.
Just in case you didn’t know….we
are living in the Cenozoic Age…this period of geology started some
65 million years ago…give or take a few hundred thousand.
Joan of Arc…The Maid of
Orleans…was just 19 years old when she was burned at the stake….want
to read a good book about it….try Mark Twains version…it’s a classic
but not well received when it came out since he had always written
humorous pieces.
Texas has the highest average of
tornadoes (124) each and every year….Oklahoma comes in second with
54.
Hank Aaron once was overheard to
say…..”It took me 17 years to get 3,000 hits in baseball, but only
one afternoon on the golf course.”
If you’d care to know …there are
56 signatures on the Declaration of Independence.
The film known as …”Krakatoa,
East of Java” has a major flaw in it …what was it? It’s really West
of Java…not East….title was changed for the video version.
Bet you didn’t know that Frank
Lloyd Wright invented the word…”Carport”. Wonder if he ever designed
any? Probably not.
You’ve heard of nooks and
crannies…..what’s the difference? A nook is a corner while a cranny
is a crack. Now you know….
If you were told someone in
Australia was suffering from…’dingbats’…..what would you think? That
they were probably a heavy drinker. Dingbats is the Aussie word for
Delirium tremens or the ‘D-T’s’.
What’s a nightjar? No, no, no,
not something that used to go under the bed…it’s a European
bird….also know as a goatsucker….
Useless…..the State
Department…our State Department refers to elevators as “vertical
transportation units.”
In 1902 Animal Crackers came out
on the market…they had a string handle….why was that? So, you
could hang them from the Christmas tree…..came out in December..
About this same time…in
1904….St. Louis Missouri was the host of the first Olympics ever
held in the United States.
The periods of play in a polo
game are called …..’chukkers’…..total of 6 to a game…each is 7 ½
minutes long….
You’ve got 1 chance out of 4,164
of getting 4 of a kind in a game of 5-card deal poker.
Our own John Paul Jones was also
an admiral in the Russian Navy. Fought with the Russians against the
Turks in 1788.
A baby giraffe is just about 6
feet tall at birth…..
Your big toe has 14 bones in
it…same as all your other toes…now you know.
1 Cherry St, New York City….bet
you forgot that it was the site of the first Presidential mansion,
didn’t you?
Calvin Coolidge has been the
only President so far to have been born on the Fourth of July.
Banana Oil is made from what
part of the banana? If you said any part, you’d be wrong..it’s a
chemical compound made with amyl alcohol…just smells like
bananas..used as a solvent….
In Denmark….if you wanted a
Danish pastry..you better order Vienna bread..or Wienerbrod…they
don’t know what Danish pastry is.
Milton Hershey stopped making
caramels and started making chocolate bars in 1903. Why did he do
this? Caramels didn’t retain the imprint of his name in the summer,
but the chocolate did.
It took 36 ballots to break the
deadlocked House of Representatives vote on the Presidential
election of 1801 between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr.
The Red Sea gets its name from
the huge amounts of dying algae that turn the blue waters red from
time to time.
Name that play….”Who’s there?”
is the opening of what famous play? Hamlet…written by
Shakespeare….it’s spoken by the soldier called Bernando.
Humphrey Bogart played in one
horror film…what was it? …”The Return of Doctor X” in 1939.
William Henry Pratt doesn’t
sound too menacing does it? Moviegoers knew him as Boris Karloff.
Speaking of names…..the names of
the Three Wise Men are……? (Drum roll goes here)
Balthazar, Caspar and Melchior.
