The Cellar - Fun Facts

The Cellar (http://cellar.org/index.php)

- Nothingland (http://cellar.org/forumdisplay.php?f=36)

- - Fun Facts (http://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=23266)

I couldn't care less if he rimmed Hitler while giving him a reach around.

Chuck Yeager used to herd antelope with a P-39 Airacobra.

The term "nerd" originated in the 1950 book “If I Ran the Zoo”.
“And then, just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo. And Bring Back an IT-KUTCH, a PREEP and a PROO, a NERKLE, a NERD, and a SEERSUCKER, too!”

According to the American Heritage Dictionary’s word history. Experts maintain that Dr. Seuss is the true originator of nerd, and that the word nerd (“comically unpleasant creature”) was picked up by the five- and six-year-olds of 1950 and passed on to their older siblings, who by 1957, as teenagers, had restricted and specified the meaning to the most comically obnoxious creature of their own class, a “square.”’

Quote:

As the walruses used their flippers to clear away ocean muck to find clams, the scientists noticed that they overwhelmingly favored their right sides. In fact, a left-handed walrus has yet to be seen.

Now those are some fun facts!

Paul McCartney is left-handed.
And rumor has it, he was the walrus...

Did you know Fidel Castro has a blog?

SOS is a Morse "procedural signal” or "prosign," its respective letters have no inherent meaning per se. In the simplest terms, SOS is a ‘SIGNAL’ indicating distress and the need for help, and not an acronym or abbreviation.

I thought it meant "Save Our Ship"
When our kids were young and we voted on school budgets, we turned it into "Save Our Schools"
Here in the Pacific Northwest there is also "Save Our Salmon".

But these may just be plagiarisms from the original.

Now it's the chicken's symbol for "Save Our Salmonella.":yelsick:

Save our souls, we're facing de-feet.

Quote:

Save Our Ship
Save Our Souls
Sink Or Swim

These are termed 'backronyms,' as explained below, and came into popular use AFTER SOS went into effect. In actuality, and as originally intended when SOS was introduced in 1908, the letters have no meaning.

SOS is a Morse "procedural signal” or "prosign." As the SOS signal is a ‘prosign’, its respective letters have no inherent meaning per se. In the simplest terms, SOS is a ‘SIGNAL’ indicating distress and the need for help, and not an acronym or abbreviation.

After SOS was first used by the steamship Arapahoe in 1909 (not the Titanic in 1912 as many people believe), people applied their own meanings to the letters. The most popular ones: "save our ship" and "save our souls." These are correctly termed ‘bacronyms.’

‘SOS’ was chosen because the three dots, three dashes, three dots are easy to transmit and not easily confused with other letters by the sender or recipients. With the advent of radios on ships beginning in the 1920s, ‘Mayday’ became, and still is, the International Distress Signal, but SOS served its purpose, for a while.

SOS is pretty much all I know in Morse code.
I learnt it from John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, where Bill signals Josella across the countryside (it's the only Morse Code he knows too!)

The fun fact is John Wyndham's full name is John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris. That was in the days before names were taxed.

ETA I did have to look this up to make sure I had it exactly right (I had a mispelling and the order wrong in truth) but it was something I pretty much knew.

The space between your eyebrows is called the glabella.