Trivia Today

[historylover]

RANDOM TIDBITS

Brazil’s most popular and festive holiday is Carnival. In
fact, many people consider Carnival one of the world’s
biggest celebrations. Each spring, on the Saturday before
Ash Wednesday, the streets of Brazil’s largest city, Rio de
Janeiro, come alive with wild parties, festivals and
glamorous balls.

***

At Chinese New Year celebrations, people wear red clothes,
give children “lucky money” in red envelopes and set off
firecrackers. Red symbolizes fire, which the Chinese believe
drives away bad luck. Family members gather at each other's
homes for extravagant meals. Chinese New Year ends with a
lantern festival.

***

Each April 23, Turkey celebrates Cocuk Bayrami, or
Children’s Day. Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
declared the holiday in 1920, as Turkey was becoming an
independent nation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire,
to illustrate that children were the future of the new
nation.

***

Children in England celebrate the end of winter and the
arrival of spring on May 1 each year. The festivities center
around a huge striped maypole that’s decorated with flowers
and streamers. Children hold the streamers as they dance
around the pole, weaving intricate patterns as they pass
each other. May Day dates back to ancient times, when Romans
honored Flora, the goddess of spring.

***

Every August, brothers and sisters in northern India show
their love for each other by celebrating Raksha Bandhan.
This tradition dates back more than 500 years. The girls
tie a bracelet of silk threads, called a rakhi, around
their brothers’ wrists. The boys then promise to protect
their sisters. The siblings also give each other a piece of
Indian candy, called laddu. At the end of the ceremony, the
children exchange gifts.

***

On December 13, one of the longest and darkest nights of the
winter, Swedes celebrate the festival of St. Lucia, the patron
saint of light. In many homes, a girl gets up early in the
morning and puts on a long white dress, with a red sash at
the waist, and a laurel crown decorated with four candles.
She serves her family warm lussekatt buns for breakfast. The
buns, shaped like the number eight, are usually flavored
with saffron and topped with raisins or nuts. Boys, called
star boys, wear long white shirts and pointed hats. They
help serve the buns. Children often go to school dressed in
the costumes and serve the buns to their teachers.

 

[historylover]

RANDOM TIDBITS

In the Middle Ages wearing spectacles signified knowledge
and learning. Painters of the time often included spectacles
when portraying famous persons even when depicting people
who lived before the known invention of spectacles. On
numerous paintings the religious teacher Sofronius Eusebius
Hieronymus (340 - 420 AD) is portrayed with a lion, a skull
and a pair of reading glasses. He is the patron saint of
spectacle makers.

***

It actually is true that eating carrots can help you see
better. Carrots contain Vitamin A, which feeds the chemicals
that the eye shafts and cones are made of. The shafts
capture black and white vision. The cones capture color
images.

***

Healthy eyes are so sensitive to light that a candle
burning in the dark can be detected a mile away. The human
eye can distinguish about 10 million different colors.
There currently is no machine that can achieve this
remarkable feat.

***

Roman tragedian Seneca is said to have read "all the books
in Rome" by peering through a glass globe of water. A
thousand years later, presbyopic monks used segments of
glass spheres that could be laid against reading material
to magnify the letters, basically a magnifying glass, called
a "reading stone." They based their invention on the
theories of the Arabic mathematician Alhazen (roughly 1000
AD). Yet, Greek philosopher Aristophanes (c. 448 BC-380 BC)
knew that glass could be used as a magnifying glass.
Nevertheless it was not until roughly 150 AD that Ptolemy
discovered the basic rules of light diffraction and wrote
extensively on the subject.

***

Venetian glass blowers, who had learned how to produce
glass for reading stones, later constructed lenses that
could be held in a frame in front of the eye instead of
directly on the reading material. It was intended for use
by one eye; the idea to frame two ground glasses using
wood or horn, making them into a single unit was born in
the 13th century.

***

In 1268 Roger Bacon made the first known scientific
commentary on lenses for vision correction. Salvino
D’Armate of Pisa and Alessandro Spina of Florence are often
credited with the invention of spectacles around 1284 but
there is no evidence to conclude this. The first mention of
actual glasses is found in a 1289 manuscript when a member
of the Popozo family wrote: "I am so debilitated by age
that without the glasses known as spectacles, I would no
longer be able to read or write." In 1306, a monk of Pisa
mentioned in a sermon: "It is not yet 20 years since the
art of making spectacles, one of the most useful arts on
earth, was discovered." But nobody mentioned the inventor.

 

[Jack Davenport]

Great thread

 

[historylover]

RANDOM TIDBITS - Fashion Firsts

1470 - To hide her pregnancy, Queen Juana of Portugal wore
the first hoop skirt.

***

1874 - Levi Strauss begins selling blue jeans for $13.50
per dozen.

***

1913 - Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel opens a boutique in Deauville,
France. Her chic and comfortable knit suits usher in the
modern era of women's fashion.

***

1916 - Sneakers are first made in America by the U.S. Rubber
Company. They were called Keds.

***

1923 - The U.S. attorney general declares it is legal for
women to wear pants.

***

1930 - Tennis star Rene Lacoste manufactures a tennis shirt
that features an embroidered crocodile. It's believed to be
the first time a designer logo appears on clothing.

 

[historylover]

RANDOM TIDBITS - History of Jeans


18th century - American mills begin producing their own
jean. Laborers wear the durable clothing.

***

19th Century - San Francisco dry goods merchant Levi Strauss
produces “waist overalls”—the early name for jeans. They
become a hit with gold miners eager to strike it rich in
California.

In 1886, Strauss adds a brown leather patch on the back of
his waist overalls. The label, which shows a pair of jeans
being pulled between two horses, is still affixed to Levi’s
jeans.

***

1940s - American troops pack their waist overalls when they
travel overseas to fight in World War II. The trend catches
on in Europe. Lee and Wrangler make their own jeans to
compete with Levi’s.

***

1950s - Jeans, no longer called waist overalls, became a
symbol of the teenage rebel, particularly after James Dean
wears them in the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause. Some
schools ban jeans.

***

1960s - Jeans dominate college campuses. Students began to
personalize their jeans with paint, embroidery and patches.

***

1980s - Designer jeans, such as Sassoon, Jordache and
Calvin Klein, emerge. Straight-leg, tight-fitting styles
give jeans a new look.

 

[historylover]

The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality and must live with a character: Peter De Vries.


RANDOM TIDBITS - Marriage Throughout the Ages

In ancient Egypt, a woman's rights and privileges were
equal to that of her husband. After marriage, women held
control of their independence, property and wealth, and
either person could easily get a divorce. For two people to
be considered married, all they had to do was move in with
each other.

***

Marriages in ancient Greece were arranged by parents and
approved by the gods. Women in their early teens were
married to men in their mid-thirties, and a husband had to
buy his new wife from her father. Many couples did not see
each other until after the ceremony, when the bridal veil
was removed. On the night before the wedding, the girl's
hair was cut off and she was bathed in holy water from a
sacred fountain.


***

The Spartans believed that a person's athletic ability
matched their fitness for marriage. Before marrying, a
couple was required to wrestle in public to show their
compatibility. The groom's father chose a bride for his
son. Twelve months after the selection, the couple was
married. During the marriage ceremony, the bride wore a
white robe, a veil, and jewelry given to her by her new
husband's family.

***

Roman brides wore white tunics with orange veils and orange
slippers. Following the ceremony, the groom carried his
bride over the threshold of their new home to symbolize his
ownership of her.

***

Christian church marriages were thought to be made in heaven
and therefore could never be broken. The father of the bride
gave a dowry of land or money to the groom. If the marriage
was unsuccessful, the wife and the dowry were returned to
the father's home, but neither partner was allowed to remarry.

***

Until the 1400s, married couples did not live together in
Japan. They stayed in separate homes, meeting only at night.
The old Japanese word for marriage meant, “slip into the
house by night.”

 

[historylover]

RANDOM TIDBITS - Firsts in America

The first bank established: The Bank of North America,
Philadelphia, 1781.

***

The first cartoon, colored: “The Yellow Kid,” by Richard
Outcault, in New York World, 1895.

***

The first Five and Dime store: Founded by Frank Woolworth,
Utica, N.Y., 1879 (moved to Lancaster, Pa., same year).

***

The first newspaper published over a continuous period: The
Boston News-Letter, April 1704.

***

The first public school: Boston Latin School, Boston, 1635.

***

The first radio station licensed: KDKA, Pittsburgh, Pa.,
Oct. 27, 1920.

 

[historylover]

RANDOM TIDBITS

Some Native Americans have two names, one of which is never
made public because of the power it would give another
person over them.

***

It is common in parts of West Africa for people to name
their children for the day on which they were born. Sunday
is Awushie, Monday is Adojoa, Tuesday is Abla, Wednesday
is Aku, Thursday is Awo, Friday is Afua, and Saturday is
Ama.

***

In seventeenth-century Europe people made anagrams from
names and believed these words formed from rearranging the
letters would give a clue to a person's characteristics.
Teresa is a teaser, Pat is apt, Greta is great, Mona likes
to moan, and Dora travels on the road.

***

There were tribes in the mountains of northwest Africa
known as anonymi, or people without names. These small,
isolated groups of people were described by Pliny, an
ancient Roman historian.

***

The Ojibway Indians of North America once considered it
dangerous to speak the names of their own husbands and
wives.

***

The people of Indonesia may change their names after they
have suffered some misfortune or have had a serious illness.
They believe a new name will confuse the evil spirits that
brought them grief.

 

[climactic1]

Historylover, you should change your screen name to Cliff Claven. LoL)

 

[historylover]

RANDOM TIDBITS

There are more than 600 million telephone lines, yet almost
half the world's population has never made a phone call on
a land line. However, more than half the world's population
has made a cell phone call. There are more than 2 billion
cell phones in use.

***

The chance of being born on Leap Day is about 684 out of a
million, or 1 in 1461. Less than 5 million people have
their birthday on Leap Day.

***

Since 1972, some 64 million tons of aluminum cans (about 3
trillion cans) have been produced. Placed end-to-end, they
could stretch to the moon about a thousand times.

***

The world's average school year is 200 days per year. In
the US, it is 180 days; in Sweden 170 days, in Japan it is
243 days.

***

One in ten people in the world live on an island.

***

According to the US Weather Service, their one day forecasts
are accurate more than 75% of the time. They send out 2
million forecasts a year.

 

[historylover]

Historylover, you should change your screen name to Cliff Claven. LoL)

Useless or useful, they are knowledge.

If I did not know useless movie trivia, I would know very little.
:wave2:

 

[gunslingingbird]

Until the 1400s, married couples did not live together in
Japan. They stayed in separate homes, meeting only at night.
The old Japanese word for marriage meant, “slip into the
house by night.”

There is a tribe in southwestern China that still does this. They call it a "walking marriage", and the father is not really a factor in raising his own children, which live in the mother's house, with all her family, for the rest of their lives.

Some Native Americans have two names, one of which is never
made public because of the power it would give another
person over them.

Native American identity theft? :dunno:

 

[historylover]

The safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket: Frank McKinney Hubbard

RANDOM TIDBITS

Coin-operated gaming devices in the late 1800s included
games with large revolving wheels divided into color
segments. Players wagered on which color the wheel would
stop. They're considered the forerunners of modern slot
machines, even though they didn't have reels. The first
recognizably modern three-reel slot was the Liberty Bell,
invented by Charles Fey in San Francisco in 1899. The
machine was so popular that for many years all slot
machines were referred to as bell machines.

***

The bar symbol used on modern slot machines is derived
from a Bell Fruit Gum logo. The gum was dispensed in slots
designed by Herbert Mills in Chicago in 1910, and other
fruit symbols on slots were derived from the gum flavors.

***

Among the most popular early slots were poker games,
although the machines did not usually pay out coins.
Payoffs had to come from the operator. After the intro-
duction of the Liberty Bell, poker-based slots waned in
popularity, until the invention of video poker in the 1970s.

***

The game of 21 got its common nickname, blackjack, from a
practice in illegal casinos in the early 1900s. Some
casinos paid a bonus if a two-card 21 was made up of an
ace and jack of spades. Others paid bonuses if an ace of
spades was accompanied by a jack of either clubs or spades.
The black jack was the key to the bonus, and became the
name of the game.

***

Horizontal gaming wheels, such as those used in roulette,
were invented in England in 1720 for a game called roly-
poly. Roly-poly was similar to roulette, except there were
no numbers on the wheel. There were alternating white
spaces and black spaces, along with a "bar black" space
and a "bar white" space. The "bar" spaces were the
equivalents of zero and double-zero -- if the ball landed
in either space, bets on black or white lost. Roly-poly
was banned in England in 1745, but the horizontal wheel
traveled well. By 1796, modern roulette was being played
in France.

***

The kings in decks of playing cards represent real leaders
and conquerors from history, although not all had the title
of king. The deck we use today is based on cards designed
in 15th-century France. The king of spades represents the
Biblical King David, the king of clubs represents Alexander
the Great, the king of hearts represents Charlemagne and
the king of diamonds represents Julius Caesar.

 

[hiropro]

The energy in an average one day hurricane could power the United States for three years.




The fastest wind speed ever recorded is 318 mph in one of the May 3, 1999 tornadoes to hit Oklahoma.



Eighty-five percent of the people killed by lightning are male.



The longest official city name in the world is: Krungthep Mahanakhon Amorn Rattanakosin Mahintara Yudthaya Mahadilok Pohp Noparat Rajathanee Bureerom Udomrajniwes Mahasatarn Amorn Pimarn Avaltarnsatit Sakatattiya Visanukram Prasit. It is the official name of Bangkok, Thailand.

 

[hiropro]

The saying 'Mind your P's and Q's' comes from the time when alcoholic beverages were served/sold in Pints and Quarts. Thus, to mind your P's and Q's meant to be careful how much you drank.


When reading horizontally from Shakespeare's original published copy of Hamlet, the furthest left hand side reads 'I am a homosexual' in the last 14 lines of the book.



Lip stick was said to have been invented in the Eygptian times for women that specialized in oral sex. They wanted their lips to look more inviting.



In Michigan, it is illegal to chain an alligator to a fire hydrant.

 

[assholebythedoor]

There is an Estimated 500 Billion tons of gold to still be in the ocean.

 

[historylover]

RANDOM TIDBITS - Remote Places

The Badlands is a rugged and barren region in southwestern
South Dakota and northwestern Nebraska. The soil there is
too poor to farm.

***

The high seas is the area beyond three miles from any
nation's territory, where no country has authority. Modern
pirates still sail on these waters.

***

The entire region of gold fields in northwestern Canada
extending to Alaska is the Klondike. Gold was discovered
there in the 1890s.

***

Reindeer roam in a region known as Lapland above the Arctic
Circle that extends through the northern parts of Sweden,
Norway, and Finland.

***

Pole of Inaccessibility: This point on Antarctica is the
farthest inland from all the seas that surround the
continent.

***

Siberia is a vast area of northern Asia. Parts of Siberia are
permanently frozen, and the average winter temperature is
–50°F. It has long been a place for outcast, exiles, and
Russian and Soviet prisoners.

 

[historylover]

RANDOM TIDBITS

According to the National Christmas Tree Association,
Americans buy 37.1 million real Christmas trees each year;
25 percent of them are from the nation's 5,000 choose-and-
cut farms.

***

Candy canes began as straight white sticks of sugar candy
used to decorated the Christmas trees. A choirmaster at
Cologne Cathedral decided have the ends bent to depict a
shepherd's crook and he would pass them out to the children
to keep them quiet during the services. It wasn't until
about the 20th century that candy canes acquired their red
stripes.

***

Child singer Jimmy Boyd was 12 years and 11 months old when
he sang the Christmas favorite, "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa
Claus." The song hit the top of the pop charts.

***

Electric Christmas tree lights were first used in 1895. The
idea for using electric Christmas lights came from an
American, Ralph E. Morris. The new lights proved safer than
the traditional candles.

***

Frustrated at the lack of interest in his new toy invention,
Charles Pajeau hired several midgets, dressed them in elf
costumes, and had them play with "Tinker Toys" in a display
window at a Chicago department store during the Christmas
season in 1914. This publicity stunt made the construction
toy an instant hit. A year later, over a million sets of
Tinker Toys had been sold.

***

The real St. Nicholas lived in Turkey, where he was bishop
of the town of Myra, in the early 4th century. It was the
Dutch who first made him into a Christmas gift-giver, and
Dutch settlers brought him to America where his name
eventually became the familiar Santa Claus.

 

[historylover]

RANDOM TIDBITS

There are two kinds of water; salt water and freshwater.
Salt water contains great amounts of salt, whereas fresh-
water has a dissolved salt concentration of less than 1%.
Only freshwater can be applied as drinking water.

***

In a 100-year period, a water molecule spends 98 years in
the ocean, 20 months as ice, about 2 weeks in lakes and
rivers, and less than a week in the atmosphere.

***

If water changes phase its physical appearance changes due
to parting of water molecules. In the solid phase the water
molecules are close together and in the gaseous phase they
are the furthest apart.

***

Frozen water is 9% lighter than water, which is why ice
floats on water.

***

It doesn't take much salt to make water "salty." If one-
thousandth (or more) of the weight of water is from salt,
then the water is "saline."

***

A person can live about a month without food, but only
about a week without water. If a human does not absorb
enough water dehydration is the result.

 

[historylover]

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.: Bertrand Russell

RANDOM TIDBITS

Japan and China were already engaged in a war before the
outbreak of World War II. China was also involved in a
civil war and spent most of World War II dealing with
internal conflicts and repelling the advances of the
Japanese.

***

Lasting from 1939 to the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945,
the Battle of the Atlantic was the longest continuous
battle of World War II. It pitted Nazi U-boats against
North American convoys as Germany attempted to cut off
Britain's vital lifeline to North America.

***

Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp, and was
formed from an empty munitions factory in March 1933.
According to a report made by the International Tracing
Service at Arolson, Germany in 1977, there were 31,951
deaths at the main Dachau camp during its twelve year
existence. Estimates for the number of deaths at Dachau,
however, vary widely.

***

Having risen to power with the support of Italy and Germany,
the Franco government of Spain decided to send "volunteers"
to aid Germany in its attack on the Soviet Union in the
form of Division Azul (Blue Division). Spain, however, did
not become directly involved in the war and remained a
neutral power until the 1980s.

***

After World War II, Germany was divided into four zones of
occupation. The American, British and French zones were
grouped together as West Germany, and the Soviet zone became
East Germany.

***

With approximately 27 million total fatalities (both
military and civilian), the Soviet Union lost the most
lives during World War II. China was next with approximately
11 million total fatalities, followed by Germany with
approximately 7 million total fatalities.