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1/7/2003

Ever find yourself thinking about Uranus? When William Herschel discovered it in the 18th Century, a name was needed to go with the Greco-Roman mythology names of the five other planets known since ancient times. The god who was the father of Saturn and the Titans was eventually chosen, and a good thing too - Herschel himself wanted to call it 'George' after King George III.
[P.S. Saturn and the Titans is not the name of a 1950s doo-wop singing group.]

2/7/2003

Oceanographers got an unexpected bonus in 1994 when a storm swept 34,000 ice hockey gloves off a Korean cargo ship. They turned up all over the place and allowed the scientists to trace currents more accurately than ever before.

3/7/2003

The city known to many just as 'L.A.' was named by its founders El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles del Río Porciúncula.

Speaking of American placenames, how about these:

Toad Suck, Arkansas Jerk
Tail, Missouri
Humptulips, Washington
Superior Bottom, West Virginia
Bee Pee, Kansas
Turkey Scratch, Arkansas
Sugar Tit, Kentucky
Lick Fork, Virginia

4/7/2003

In Massachusetts there is a lake called Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. Allegedly it comes from the Nipmuck language and means 'You fish that side, I'll fish this side, and no-one fishes in the middle.'

7/7/2003

Q: Does the equator have a midsummer?
A: The northern hemisphere has its midsummer in late June, while we have ours in late December, so the sun is at its highest at the equator half-way between those dates, i.e at the equinox. So it actually has two 'midsummers' (in late September and late March).

'Abstemiously' and 'facetiously' are the only words in English which include all the vowels in alphabetical order.

8/7/2003

On the completion of the Panama Canal, the US Secretary of State wrote to many countries, inviting them to send their navies to the grand opening. Naturally, he included Switzerland.

9/7/2003

The first Governer of New South Wales arrived armed with Cook’s glossary of aboriginal words, unaware that the language of the locals was completely different from that which the explorer had encountered in Queensland. So when the settlers used the word 'kangaroo', the aboriginals took this to be the white man's generic term for grazing animals and applied it indiscriminately to sheep and cattle.

You'd seen better days, but after a sea-change you've come full circle and had greatness thrust upon you. You're now a tower of strength, poor but honest, as pure as driven snow, and the towering rage the green-eyed monster once sent you into is neither here nor there. In short, you're a cliché ­ or rather, ten coined by Shakespeare.

10/7/2003

Bislama, the pidgin language of Vanuatu, grew out of the need to communicate with traders but is now essential to communication there ­ the country has about 120 languages. I once spoke to a native of Tanna, an island about the size of Banks Peninsula, who spoke his mother tongue and understood the two neighbouring languages, but not the two from the other side of the island. He spoke English with tourists like me and Bislama with everyone else on Efate where we were at the time.

The Danes' method of counting is even more perverse than that of the French (see 15/5/03).
50 = 'half the third twenty'
60 = 'three twenties'
70 = 'half the fourth twenty'
80 = 'four twenties' (as in French)
90 = 'half the fifth twenty'.
More standard forms have been introduced, but they are only used in official documents, banking, etc.

14/7/2003

The people of Madagascar don’t speak an African language, even though their country is only 500km or so off the coast of Mozambique. Apparently the island was settled by a seafaring people from Indonesia, because Malagasy’s closest relative is a language spoken in Borneo. In fact, apart from having loan words from Swahili etc, Malagasy has more in common with Maori than any African language.

Centipedes' and millipedes' names imply that they fit neatly into the metric system, but actually centipedes can have between 30 and 382 legs, and millipedes up to 750. So strictly speaking the smallest centipede should be called a trigintapede, and the largest millipede a septigentiquinquagintapede. If you have a millipede and want to count its legs, the easy way is to count its segments and apply the formula 4s-10 [s = number of segments].

15/7/2003

What the hell did they eat in Europe before they discovered the Americas? Personally, if I knew I would never again have potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, courgettes, aubergines, pumpkin, corn, french beans, avocado, peanuts, vanilla, pineapples, cranberries or blueberries, turkey, tamarillos, bananas, guavas or (gulp) chocolate, I'd probably put my head in a gas oven. (Bananas are of course native to south Asia, but were virtually unknown in Europe before plantations were established in the Caribbean.)

If the All Blacks need to 'get back to basics', they can't get any further back than calcio storico ('historical football'), the code first played in Florence around 1500 AD. The world's oldest football competition, it's contested every June between the city's four districts, the teams being commonly known as the Blues, the Reds (sound familiar?), the Greens and the Whites. Teams have 27 players dressed in 16th Century costume, and the game has elements of rugby, soccer and no-holds-barred wrestling, with goals being scored by whatever means you can devise, although there is a whole clutch of referees and strict anti-doping laws. The winning team gets steaks equal to the weight of a calf. You can follow the final in real time on the net here or watch it televised live.

16/7/2003

Last year the USA made it to the quarter-finals of the football World Cup. Had they ever done as well? Yes, in the first Cup in 1930 they made the semis. Mind you, there were only 13 teams, and nine of those were from the Americas. There was no Germany, Italy, Spain, England or Netherlands.

17/7/2003

In the late 1890s the Moulin Rouge's biggest star was Joseph Pujol, 'Le Pétomane' ('The Fartiste'). He could draw huge amounts of water or air into his bowels and had perfect control over the 'output' of the same, so he could imitate birds and animals, cannons and thunder, and even the sound of two metres of calico being torn. He could play a range of notes in tenor, baritone and bass registers, and he could fire a jet of water 4 metres. The finale of his act included playing tunes on a flute (via a rubber hose) and then blowing out the footlights. The Moulin Rouge made more from one of his shows than one of Sarah Bernhardt's at the peak of her fame. Pujol's unusual physical gift came to light when as a child he came ashore from a swim with a quantity of seaweed hanging out his rear.

North American tribes sometimes used a game of lacrosse to resolve disputes without resorting to warfare. However, a game around 1790 between Choctaws and Creeks, arranged to settle a dispute over a beaver pond, ended in a controversial win for the Creeks, and the ensuing brawl turned into a pitched battle anyway.

18/7/2003

All cultures have words that are considered appropriate in some contexts and not others, but in many tribal languages there are special vocabularies used in 'taboo' situations, especially ceremonies like initiations. The most extreme example is the Dyirbal language of Austraia, in which no standard words may be used by a man in the presence of his mother-in-law ­ every word has a special equivalent. Luckily, this 'taboo' language has a simplified lexicon. For example, 'jijan' can mean blue-tongued lizard, frilled lizard, red-bellied lizard, water skink and water goanna.

There are not many monarchies left in the world, and most of them are in western Europe. By my reckoning there are only four in the southern hemisphere. What are they? Answer on Monday.

21/7/2003

The four southern monarchies:
• Australia and New Zealand (Queen Elizabeth II)
• Tonga (King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV)
• Swaziland (King Mswati III)

The all-time pole-sitting record is still held by Simeon Stylites, a 5th-Century Syrian hermit, who spent 30 years chained to the top of an 18-metre pillar (he had already spent seven years on smaller ones). He stood most of the time, and ate only once a week. He would bend his head almost to his feet in prayer; one visitor saw 1244 repetitions of this before giving up counting. In the last year of his life he got an ulcer on his leg, and taking this to be punishment for something or other, atoned by standing on the other leg only.

22/7/2003

1890s Bungy: When the Eiffel Tower was newly built, there was a proposal to install what would now be called a 'fun ride'. Suspended under the top platform would be a 10-ton bullet-shaped capsule for 15 people, which would be released to plunge about eight seconds later into a pool 300 metres below. The pool would be 55 metres deep, and narrowly tapered like a wineglass stem, so that the capsule would be slowed to a halt before hitting the bottom. The capsule would then be hauled back to ground level by cable and the breathless Victorian thrillseekers would debark into a boat.

23/7/2003

European 'coffee culture' didn't arise in Italy or France, but in England. The first commercial coffee house opened in Oxford in 1650, and by the end of the century there were thousands in London alone. In fact the city's consumption of coffee at this time was greater than the rest of Europe combined. The preparation of coffee (in particular the invention of the espresso method) was refined on the continent and re-exported to the Anglo-Saxon world last century.

24/7/2003

Big Sendoffs: Over one million people witnessed the funeral of the Princess of Wales, but her popularity pales in comparison with that of Umm Kulthum, the Egyptian diva who ruled the Arab music world from the 1920s to the 60s. Her funeral procession in 1975 passed through a crowd of four million mourners. But for hysterical grief the funeral of the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 will be hard to beat. Perhaps as many as 10 million people thronged the 40-kilometre route, making it impassable, so the body went by helicopter. However, the burial site was a sea of people, many having walked or run there after the procession was cancelled. The coffin was wrested from the guards, and the Imam's corpse spilt onto the ground. It was rescued and a second attempt was made six hours later - this time sucessfully, although it took ten minutes to get the coffin from the landing site to the grave ten metres away. After the burial, the grave was covered with large blocks of concrete to prevent the crowd disinterring the body.

25/7/2003

What are naprons, nadders, noranges and numpires? They are what aprons, adders, oranges and umpires were called before our hard-of-hearing or illiterate forebears dropped the 'n's.

The biggest-ever newspaper was the Sunday 17 October 1965 edition of the New York Times, which ran to 946 pages.

Both of the first two cars in the state of Kansas suffered traffic-accident damage. They ran into each other.

28/7/2003

Swords into Poughshares: High-end radiation measuring equipment has to be made from steel that emits no background radiation of its own, but ever since the first atomic bomb tests there has been Strontium 90 in the air, and all steel made since then contains some (blast furnaces use huge amounts of air). However, in 1919, when the crews of the German High Seas Fleet scuttled their ships at Scapa Flow in Scotland to prevent their being added to the Royal Navy, large amounts of metal went to the bottom, thereby providing physicists today with a prime source of uncontaminated steel.

29/7/2003

Q: Everyone knows that Munich is really München, and Naples Napoli, but what do the locals call the cities we know as Alexandria, Cairo, Bangkok, Bombay, Canton, Brunswick, Casablanca, Cologne, Copenhagen, Prague and Rangoon?
A: El Iskandariya, El Qahira, Krung Thep, Mumbai, Guangdong, Braunschweig, Daru l-Bayda, Köln, København, Praha, Yangon.

30/7/2003

Had the First World War not ended in 1918, the pace of aeronautical develoment would have been even more dramatic. For example, the Germans were developing a wire-guided missile for launching from aircraft. They also had on their drawing boards plans for enormous all-metal monoplane bombers with spans of up to 140m (the Boeing 747 has a span of 60m) and powered by up to 20 engines. They were intended to have a range that would allow them to bomb New York. (Keep in mind that no-one had yet flown across the Atlantic.)

31/7/2003

If you are a dominant, lunatic pesonality, partial to martial arts, with a mercurial wit, jovial disposition, a venereal disease, and are currently taking a sabbatical, then your profile illustrates the names of the days of the week ­ at least in the Romance languages.
Their day-names mean:
• The Lord’s Day (domingo/domenica/dimanche)
• Moon Day (lunes/lunedì/lundi)
• Mars’ Day (martes/martedì/mardi)
• Mercury’s Day (miércoles/mercoledì/mercredi)
• Jove’s Day (jueves/giovedì/jeudi)
• Venus’ Day (viernes/venedì/vendredi)
• The Sabbath (sabado/sabato/samedi)

1/8/2003

For todays tasty tidbit, come back tomorrow... All content is updated at the end of each day

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