Useless Facts

[Morty]

Okie doke, I know alot of you have read these in emails in the past. And I thought I saved them to my PC but I can't find them.

So I'm sending my pack of MTW hounds to hunt them out.

I want to create a list of Useless Facts. Not personal shit about yourself or how CableMonkey's wife is allergic to Zest soap. Yes that's useless to know unless your get asked to soap her up when CableMonkey is out of town. But its not what I want.

In the past I have received emails that have useless facts of how things got named what they are now or whatever. For example, these are a few I remember.

DEAD BELL RINGER
Started way back in the day when people drank and ate off of dishes that were made of lead. Lead poisioning often would put these people in a coma like state. Doctors weren't what they are now and people thought these people died because the breathing appeared to stop and you couldn't hear a heartbeat. Well the people would get buried alive. But when they buried them, they would tie a string to their finger and run the string up to the surface and tie it to a bell. And if they woke up while buried they would obviously freak and ring the shit out of the bell and the Graveyard Keeper would come dig them up.

And the graveyard keeper worked nights since people were visiting their dead or whatever during the day, thus the word GRAVEYARD SHIFT. His sole job was to stay awake and listen for bells and dig the people up if they turned out not to be dead.

Any of this sound familiar people? I'm hoping so. I think The Diva sent me a bunch in the past.

Well, I want to make a page of these things. Help me out please. Thanks!

[Maximal]

Stephen Crocker and Vinton Cerf were among the graduate students who joined UCLA professor Len Kleinrock in an engineering lab on September 2, 1969, as bits of meaningless test data flowed silently between the two computers. By January, three other "nodes" joined the fledgling network.

Then came e-mail a few years later, a core communications protocol called TCP/IP in the late 1970s, the domain name system in the 1980s and the World Wide Web -- now the second most popular application behind e-mail -- in 1990. The Internet expanded beyond its initial military and educational domain into businesses and homes around the world.

[Morty]

Okay, I guess I need to clarify a bit.

I'm talking like 1 or 2 sentence type facts. Something if I want I can do the same thing with them as I am with the "Random Rule to Live by"

[Maximal]

Dead Ringer - Unscrupulous racehorse owners have a fast horse and a slow horse that are nearly identical in appearance. They run the slow horse until the betting odds reached the desired level, then they substitute the ringer, who can run much faster. Dead, in this case means abrupt or exact, like in dead stop, or dead shot.

[Maximal]

Close but no cigar

Carnival games of skill, particularly shooting games, once gave out cigars as a prize. A contestant that did not quite hit the target was close, but did not get a cigar

[BunnyMan]

Wolf's Apple (Tomatos): Way back they used to cut tomatos on lead surfaces, people started getting sick and dieing when they ate the tomatos and then assumed the tomatos were deadly. They called it a wolf's apple, because the tomato was an "wolf in sheeps clothing."

[tiot]

Necking: Different than what you'd expect

When giraffes are pissed off at each other they rub and wrap their necks together. Serious fights usually result in headbutting and jabbing with their horns.

[Maximal]

The product began from a search for a rust preventative solvent and de-greaser to protect missile parts. WD-40 was created in 1953 by three technicians at the San Diego Rocket Chemical Company.

Its name comes from the project that was to find a "water displacement" compound. They were successful with the fortieth formulation, thus WD-40.

It is a carefully guarded recipe known only to four people. Only one of them is the "brew master."