Post a random fact people probably don't know! (And even if they did, they wouldn't care.)

[Benice]

Todd Howard's brother ended up being the Director of creative affairs for Bambi II.

 

Despite the name, Poison Ivy isn't an Ivy at all; it is in the same family as pistachios, mangoes and cashews. Similarly, some people who are particularly sensitive to poison ivy may find that mango skin also provides a similar reaction to that of poison ivy.

 

One of Salvador Dali's early works included the Lobster Telephone. It is a telephone with a lobster on the hook.

Edited June 1, 2022 by Benice

[ping]

Following the death of Margaret Thatcher, the song "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead" from the 1939 movie "The Wizard of Oz" rose to #2 of the UK single charts and #1 of the Scottish charts, making it the shortest Top 10 song in history at 51 seconds. Notably, two surviving actors of that film, who played two of the Munchkins singing that song, were rather appalled to see their song used to celebrate an actual person's death.

Checking the wikipedia article also taught me that the (tied) second-shortest Top 10 songs in the UK are called "Boris Johnson Is a *bleep*ing *bleep*" and "Boris Johnson Is STILL a *bleep*ing *bleep*".

5 minutes ago, Benice said:

Despite the name, Poison Ivy isn't an Ivy at all; it is in the same family as pistachios, mangoes and cashews. Similarly, some people who are particularly sensitive to poison ivy may find that mango skin also provides a similar reaction to that of poison ivy.

And here I thought Poison Ivy was an eco-terrorist

[ping]

Carlos II, the last Habsburg king of Spain, only had 10 great-great-great-grandparents instead of the 32 that a regular non-Habsburg person should have, which makes him more inbred than a child of two siblings.

Edited May 27, 2022 by ping

[ping]

The fursona of John Oliver, of Last Week Tonight, is a (and I quote) "sexy river otter".
(the link is SFW, but, well, includes a sexy river otter)

[Benice]

The word "Chunk" comes from the mispronunciation of the word "Chuck", meaning small but thick-set and strong.

Giraffe milk is the only milk that can be drunk by every species of mammal.

The living animal with the largest wingspan is the Wandering Albatross, with a wingspan of 2.5-3.5 meters, and they put those oversize wings to use-They fly over 120,000 kilometers every year.

The tallest flying bird is the Sarus Crane, at a staggering average height of 5'11.

[ping]

The first realm to officially adopt christianity as its state religion wasn't Rome, but Armenia. At the time, Constantine was already Augustus, but still shared that title with his rival Licinius and his support for the religion still wasn't 100% explicit at that time. And even though that changed dramatically when Constantine was the sole ruler of the Roman empire, christianity was officially named state religion only by Theodosius I some decades later.

During Constantine's reign, the first council of Nicaea was held to determine what would be considered orthodoxy or heresy - Constantine was big on unity and did not want the church to endlessly fight over what he probably considered small details in the grand picture of faith. Weirdly, the first canon law listed by wikipedia is the prohibition of self-castration for priest. This isn't entirely out of left field, as Matthew 19:12 shows:

Quote

For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.

This is generally considered to be stylistic exaggeration on Jesus's part, but I can imagine that some would read that as "removing your own dong is very pious", whích would explain the inclusion of that specific law.

And, er, while I'm on the subject - it was somewhat common practice (although how common exactly isn't clear) in early modern Europe that boys would be castrated to conserve their soprano voice. This was basically shut down in 1878, when Pope Leo XIII decreed that the Catholic church would not hire any castrated singers anymore, but there's actually one single castrate of whom audio recordings exist.

[Elina]

One of the longest books ever written was a Trump x reader fanfiction 

[AnonymousSpeed]

9 hours ago, ping said:

This is generally considered to be stylistic exaggeration on Jesus's part, but I can imagine that some would read that as "removing your own dong is very pious", whích would explain the inclusion of that specific law.

"No man whose testicles have been crushed or whose penis has been cut off may enter the LORD’s assembly."

-Deuteronomy 23:1

9 hours ago, ping said:

And, er, while I'm on the subject - it was somewhat common practice (although how common exactly isn't clear) in early modern Europe that boys would be castrated to conserve their soprano voice. This was basically shut down in 1878, when Pope Leo XIII decreed that the Catholic church would not hire any castrated singers anymore, but there's actually one single castrate of whom audio recordings exist.

If I recall from my art credit, they were called castratos, and had a distinct sound from a regular soprano.

[Benice]

The iconic voice of Mario, Charles Martinet, was one of the final people who auditioned for the role in Super Mario 64; he was called in at the last moment. Since all they had for Mario's character was "Italian plumber", most of the other voice actors went with more of a New York style voice, while Martinet knew the audience was kids and went with the Italian chef-like angle.

[ping]

The StarCraft II player Eo "soO" Yun-su is famous in the scene for reaching a lot of finals and then losing - he lost six finals of the Koran GSL without ever winning that competition, plus some international silver medals, most notably during the 2017 world championship. His first victory at a big global event was quite emotional as a result.

Anyway, soO recently finished his obligatory military service and returned to the SC2 competition. Coincidently, the first big tournament that he's currently playing in is the 2nd GSL of the year 2022. It's the 22nd season that he's participating in, he was drawn into group B (i.e. the 2nd one) and finished 2nd in that group after winning against Joo "Zest" Sung-wook, losing to Lee "Bunny" Jae-seon, and then winning the deciding match against Byun "ByuN" Hyun-woo.

[ping]

Roman emperor Valentinian I was known to have quite the temper, which makes his death morbidly fitting. During negotiations, representatives of the Germanic Quadi federation insisted that a) their hostilities were provoked by the Romans first building fortifications in Quadi territory and then murdering one of their kings during negotiations, and that b) because the Quadi weren't exactly a centralised state, they couldn't guarantee that every single Quadi chief would feel bound by whatever treaty they would sign. Enraged by this lack of reverence (I, the Emperor, already determined that the Quadi are in the wrong! HOW DARE they question my judgement!!), Valentinian worked himself into a screaming rage -- which then caused a lethal stroke.

[Benice]

Sharks have very large livers; the Basking Shark's, for example, weighs approximately 900 kg. The function of the livers is to produce oils that make the shark more bouyant. This feature is not present in bony fish (I.E, any fish that has a jaw and is not a shark or ray), since they instead have swim bladders to help them control their depth.

The infamous blob-fish is not actually a blob; it is simply a standard deep-sea fish that very much does not enjoy being brought to the surface, where there is no pressure to help keep its structure.

In England, a breed of dog called the Turnspit dog was used to do just what its name implies; they would be put on a wheel that they would slowly walk on, thus turning a spit with meat on it.

[Toncka]

the fallen angel lucifer and the demon king satan are actaully seperate entities with different and coexisting roles in demonology

[Benice]

Canada accounts for 75% of the world's maple syrup exports.

Despite having a penchant for playing evil characters, Giancarlo Esposito wanted to be a priest when he was growing up.

[ping]

German actress and chansonière Hildegard Knef played in several 20th Century Fox movies between 1951 and 57, the first being Decision Before Dawn. She was also supposed to be nominated as Best Supporting Actress for the Oscars, but 20th Century Fox's chairman Joseph Schenck was told that a German nominee so soon after the war would, well, not work. According to Knef, Schenck completely lost his temper over that and, as a little revenge, brought her the Grauman's Chinese Theatre to get her hand- and shoeprints into the concrete - an honour that Knef, by her own admission, didn't really deserve after playing in one Hollywood movie, and not even in a leading role.

As you can see, her name was a bit "Americanised", much to her chagrin. It's not like "know" and "knight" are incredibly obscure words, which would make the removal of the initial "K" rather pointless even if it was silent in the "correct" pronounciation (which, of course, it isn't).

Right before coming to the US of A, Hildegard Knef played the leading role in maybe the most scandalous movie in Germany at that time. In Die Sünderin ("The (female) sinner"), she played the prostitute Marina (gasp!), who at the end of the movie assists her boyfriend's (they lived in sin! Double-gasp!!) suicide (triple-gasp!!!) - he's a painter who's suffering from imminent blindness - and then commits suicide herself (quadruple-gasp!!!!). Oh, and Knef has a short nude scene, too (quintuple-gasp!!!!! - but the few seconds of boob footage did not contribute to the following outrage).

In the FSK (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle / "voluntary self-control") committee, who did and does the German equivilent of PG-13 etc., the representatives of both protestant and catholic church resigned because they were unwilling to work with a committee that would allow a movie depicting, nay, glorifying such sinful acts (hehe, "act") to be shown to the public. Cologne's archbishop Joseph Frings encouraged people to actively disrupt showings of the movie, and people actually threw stink bombs into the cinema halls, or released white mice into them.

Funnily enough, this turned out to be a Streisand effect when Barbra was only nine years old. I haven't watched Die Sünderin, but contemporary and later reviews agree that... it just wasn't a particularly good movie. If not for the outraged reactions by the two big churches, it probably would have remained in obscurity, instead of becoming a fairly important object in German history.

And I'm actually serious about that last part. Three years later, in 1954, the conservative minister of family matters, Franz-Josef Wuermeling, called for a Volkszensur ("people's censorship" - Volks- generally has somewhat nationalistic vibes), but later that year, the German supreme court ruled that freedom of speech and art is not overruled by some people's religious sensibilities.

[Benice]

The last game released on the infamous Nokia N-Gage was a Warhammer 40k game.

[ping]

The Roman Imperial succession had a number of low points throughout its entire run (Nero was the fifth Emperor, Caligula the third - and when he came to power, people were glad that old, cruel, paranoid Tiberius was finally dead) and Didius Julianus probably wasn't a particularly bad person at all, but the way he gained his (very short) Imperium still stands out.

His predecessor, Pertinax, was instituted when the Praetorian Prefect had Emperor Commodus (another terrible ruler, by the way) assassinated and made the Praetorian Guard hail Pertinax as Imperator. It seems that the Prefect had promised his guard a great monetary bonus for that, but Pertinax was unwilling - or unable, it's not like Commodus left a healthy Imperial treasury - to pay more than half of that. An enraged group of 200-300 Praetorians ended up striking down Pertinax when he tried to reason with them.

The Praetorians then still felt that they were due some cash, so they had the brilliant idea of selling the throne to the highest bidder. Didius Julianus ended up winning that auction, paying 25000 sesterces, although it probably helped that the main competitor was Pertinax's father-in-law and the Praetorians feared retribution for their murder should he become Emperor.

Obviously, Didius Julianus was deeply, deeply unpopular with basically everybody - the Roman citizenship as well as the military outside of the Praetorian Guard. Immediately after his ascension, three generals were hailed Imperator by their respective legions - Pescennius Niger in Syria, Clodius Albinus in Britain, and Septimius Severus in Pannonia (located in today's Austria, Hungary, and a couple Balkan states). Severus, being stationed closest to Rome, immediately marched his troops to Italy, faced very little opposition because few people were willing to fight for Didius Julianus, and was quickly named Emperor by the same senate that had declared him an enemy of the state maybe two months prior. Instead, the senate sentenced Didius Julianus (who they had only named Emperor under threat by the Praetorians) to death and he was executed on June 2nd, 193 AD, 66 days after trying to buy the entire Roman empire for 25000 sesterces. According to a contemporary historian, Cassius Dio, his last words were, "But what evil have I done? Whom have I killed?”.

193 ended up in the history books as the "Year of the Five Emperors" - Pertinax, Didius Julianus, and the three pretenders following them, between whom Septimius Severus ended up victorious. There's also a year of Four (69 AD; Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespacian) and a year of Six Emperors (238 AD; Maximinus Thrax, Gordian I-III, Pupienus, Balbinus), which is definite proof that the German Kaiserreich was but a pale imitation of the Roman original. We only managed a Year of Three Emperors, or Dreikaiserjahr, when Wilhelm I and his son Friedrich III died within a few months and made way for ol' war monger and later nazi sympathiser Wilhelm II.

[Lightchao42]

The record for the oldest voice actor in a video game is held by Sir Christopher Lee, who voiced the narrator in Lego The Hobbit at age 91 in 2014. He held the record before that too, by voicing DiZ in Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days at age 87.

[ping]

In a Swiss tropiquarium (which apparently is a word), the first ever seen albino Galapagos Tortoise hatched from its egg about two months ago. The owner of the tropiquarium believes that an albino in the wild would have very low life expectancy because its white colour would easily attract predators, and Galapagos Tortoises very very rarely multiply in captivity - the news article I got this from cites a 2-3% chance of success.

You can search for "albino galapagos tortoise" for some very adorable pictures, too. Galapagos tortoises grow to up to 200 kg weight (and the mother weighs around 100 kg), but only weigh 50 g when hatching.

[AnonymousSpeed]

On 6/20/2022 at 3:57 AM, ping said:

"But what evil have I done? Whom have I killed?”.

I know this is late, but it's also very sad.

On 6/20/2022 at 8:53 PM, Lightchao42 said:

The record for the oldest voice actor in a video game is held by Sir Christopher Lee, who voiced the narrator in Lego The Hobbit at age 91 in 2014. He held the record before that too, by voicing DiZ in Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days at age 87.

A fact I read in a YouTube comment (trust but verify) was that Christopher Lee did the Howling II because he realized he hadn't done any werewolf movies yet. He truly was the man.

***

Blond/blonde is the only gendered word in English. A man is blond-haired, a woman is blonde-haired.

[Benice]

The word "Twazzock" comes from a combination of "Twat", which is still occasionally used today, and "Wazzock", which I have never heard of before.

Edited July 4, 2022 by Benice

[Sidereal Wraith]

Ping is a heretic.

[AnonymousSpeed]

1 hour ago, WraithReborn said:

Ping is a heretic.

My God. I hope he's not a Donatist!

[ping]

On 7/4/2022 at 7:22 PM, WraithReborn said:

Ping is a heretic.

Heck yeah! I, for one, welcome our cookie-distributing false deities. By the way, interested in some delicious bakery products?

---

"Seas of blood" is a popular piece of imagery to attach to particularly nasty massacres. My first instinct when having this rather morbid thought was that, obviously, this would be a gross exaggeration that wouldn't hold up to any scrutiny, but... Well, let's do the bloody maths:

An adult human has a blood volume of 4.5-6 litres. A moderately-sized lake, let's say 10 hectare (or 100'000 m², a round lake with a diameter of around 360 m, which means a lake that you'd need like half an hour to hike around) and on average 3 metres deep has a volume of 300 million litres (or 300k m³). If, for ease of calculation, we assume 5 litres of blood per human, that kind of lake would require 60 million dead bodies - which is actually lower than the total number of casualties caused by WW2, which is estimated to be between 70 and 85 million people (50-56 million directly caused by the war, 19-28 millions caused by war-related famine and disease).

Anyway, I think this is an interesting visualisation to bring up when somebody rants how "we need a war so that those gosh-darn millenials with their avocados toughen up a little". A literal lake of blood.

[ping]

Serenes doesn't let me edit my post, so I'll doublepost for an important clarification:

Quote

€: I feed the necessety to clarify that the Emperor is (1) a false deity that (2) isn't known for handing out cookies, making the cookie heresy a dramatic improviement and, until we find any real deity that likes to bake, frankly the best offer that you're going to get. There will be cookies.

Apologies for the incovenience.