Monday Musings 10/02/22

Interesting Facts

- 101 Dalmatians and Peter Pan (Wendy) are the only two Disney cartoon features with both parents that are present and don't die throughout the movie. (Wait, what about Sleeping Beauty, which also has both parents surviving in the film?)

- 'Stewardesses' is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.

- The Baby Ruth candy bar was actually named after Grover Cleveland's baby daughter, Ruth.

- Armadillos have four babies at a time and they are always all the same sex.

- Armadillos are the only animal besides humans that can get leprosy.

- A group of unicorns is called a blessing. Twelve or more cows are known as a "flink." A group of frogs is called an army. A group of rhinos is called a crash. A group of kangaroos is called a mob. A group of whales is called a pod. A group of geese is called a gaggle. A group of ravens is called a murder. A group of officers is called a mess. A group of larks is called an exaltation. A group of owls is called a parliament.

- Physicist Murray Gell-Mann named the sub-atomic particles known as quarks for a random line in James Joyce, "Three quarks for Muster Mark!"

- The phrase "sleep tight" derives from the fact that early mattresses were filled with straw and held up with rope stretched across the bed frame. A tight sleep was a comfortable sleep.

- "Three dog night" (attributed to Australian Aborigines) came about because on especially cold nights these nomadic people needed three dogs (dingos, actually) to keep from freezing.

- Gilligan of Gilligan's Island had a first name that was only used once, on the never-aired pilot show. His first name was Willy. The skipper's real name on Gilligan's Island is Jonas Grumby. It was mentioned once in the first episode on their radio's newscast about the wreck.

- In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.

- Ivory bar soap floating was a mistake. They had been overmixing the soap formula causing excess air bubbles that made it float. Customers wrote and told how much they loved that it floated, and it has floated ever since.

- Studies show that if a cat falls off the seventh floor of a building it has about thirty percent less chance of surviving than a cat that falls off the twentieth floor. It supposedly takes about eight floors for the cat to realize what is occurring, relax and correct itself. (I don't want to know how they found this out - LadyHawke)

- The saying "it's so cold out there it could freeze the balls off a brass monkey" came from when they had old cannons like ones used in the Civil War. The cannonballs were stacked in a pyramid formation, called a brass monkey. When it got extremely cold outside they would crack and break off...Thus the saying.

- Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks otherwise it will digest itself.

- The Sanskrit word for "war" means "desire for more cows."