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

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If you order an "Ahlenfelder" in a pub in Bremen, there's a good chance that you'll be served a beer and a schnaps (specifically a Malteserkreuz Aquavit).

This goes back to the football referee Wolf-Dieter Ahlenfelder, who on the 8th of Nov 1975, in a Bundesliga match between Werder Bremen and Hannover 96, called the halftime break 13 minutes early, leading to the following exchange with the Werder defender Horst-Dieter Höttges (according to Höttges himself):

• H: "Ref, are you sure it's halftime already?"
• A: "Why wouldn't I, Mr Höttges?"
• H: "My shirt, you know, is always soaked during the break. But, look, it's still almost bone dry."

Ahlenfelder then looked over to his assistant referee, who panicky pointed at his watch, and continued the match for another 11-12 minutes before giving the halftime whistle, still about 90 seconds early.

As it turns out, Ahlenfelder had a very extensive lunch (it was goose), which he flushed down with, of course, a beer and a schnaps. In his own words: "We're men, so we don't drink a Fanta". Incredibly, even though this happened during his first year as a Bundesliga ref, he ended up refereeing a total of 106 Bundesliga matches between 1975 and 1988, and even was named best referee of the 1983/84 season. In the "official" story spun by the German football association, Ahlenfelder had caught a cold and took cough syrup containing alcohol.

Ahlenfelder was also known to be pretty direct and informal with the players during the matches, which did make him popular with them. He reportedly told players that in his opinion took too long to get moving after a foul to "get up, the undersoil heating isn't turned on", but his most famous dialogue was with Paul Breitner, who's an interesting person in his own right:

• B: "Ahlenfelder, you're refereeing like an arsehole."
• A: "Breitner, is it possible that you're playing like an arsehole?"

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When Abraham Lincoln was reelected as president of the US of A, one of the congratulatory letters he received was penned by none other than Karl Marx, starting with:

Quote

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.

Marx wrote the letter representing the International Working Men's Association (the First International), who received a receptive response from the US ambassador in London, Charles Francis Adams (son of John Quincy Adams and grandson of John Adams) to the letter.

The opinion about Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, was considerably worse, if a letter from Friedrich Engels to Marx is any indication, in which he calls out Johnson's intense racism and worries that with Johnson, "all the old villains of secession will be sitting in Congress at Washington."

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The oldest recorded mention of the term nekomusume - japanish for "catgirl" - comes from an 18th century urban exhibition. Modern-style catgirls, as in "cute girl with kitty ears", first appeared in 1924, predating the American comic villainesses Catwoman (1940) and Cheetah (1943) by a bit less than two decades.

Stumbling upon this information also forced me to learn that there's an official cutesy anime girl personification of Wikipedia, called Wikipe-tan.

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In the user manual for Sid Meier's Spitfire Ace (back in 1982, when "Sid Meier's" wasn't officially part of any video game title yet), the player is informed that "The sky and ground are light blue and green respectively."

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The Canadian-American artist Hal Foster wanted to name the protagonist of his hugely popular comic strip Prince Arn, but was overruled a syndicate manager to call him (and the strip) Prince Valiant instead. As a little bit of revenge, Foster would later use the name Arn for Valiant's oldest son, who if I remember correctly, plays a pretty active role once he's old enough in-universe.

Shortly before the outbreak of WW2, the strip also started to be published in Nazi Germany, despite the Nazis not being nearly as big on comic strips as they were on animated films, presumably because Valiant's backstory as the son of a Viking king pushed some racist buttons. He was, however, rechristened to the proper traditional German name of Prinz Waldemar.

However, Valiant-Waldemar didn't remain popular with the Nazis for long, because in summer 1939, just months if not weeks later, Foster let Valiant join a war agains Attila the Hun - which pushed some different buttons because the Germans had already been called "the Huns" in allied propaganda during the first world war. Foster was quite pleased with the reaction, although there's a good chance that it was more of a happy coincidence. Foster claimed that he always avoided any kind of messaging in his works, but more importantly, he had already penned Valiant's entire biography before even starting to work on the actual comic strip itself. He did use to joke that he always knew where the Nazis were right now in Europe, since the local newspapers would stop publishing his work.

After the war, the comic was eventually published in Germany again, although under yet another name - the more relevant to the original name, but also somewhat clunky "Prinz Eisenherz" - literally Prince Ironheart.

Edited September 9, 2023 by gnip

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On the character selection screen of Super Smash Bros. Melee, every character has a name plate under their portrait, with white font on a dark reddish background. The only exception to this is Roy (from the tactical role playing agme Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade for the Game Boy Advance), whose name plate is white on black.

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A 19-year-old Gaius Julius Caesar came fairly close to being killed during the rule of the dictator Sulla, for committing a trifecta of crimes:

1. Caesar was the nephew of Sulla's old nemesis, Gaius Marius.
2. Caesar was married to the daughter of Sulla's newer nemesis (although they were both dead at that point), Lucius Cornelius Cinna.
3. Caesar refused to divorce his wife when Sulla demanded it.

Because of that, Caesar ended up on the death lists that Sulla was publishing, but managed to go into hiding before anybody would kill him. And soon, friends of Caesar in the inner circles of Sulla managed to get him off of the death lists, even though Sulla was wary of the political talent of the young man.

(It's also... interesting that in one of his countless tweets, Elon Musk mused if we might "need a modern day Sulla", considering that Sulla, well, published death lists of his personal enemies. Sulla also had the political goal to restore dominance of the oligarchic Senate over the democratic Assembly to its peak, which might explain why Musk seems so enamoured)

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In 1903, when the new French ambassador to the US of A Jean Jules Jusserand introduced himself to President Roosevelt, Teddy took him on a walk in the park. A loooong walk in the park. When the two men reached a creek, Roosevelt took off his clothes and insisted that Jusserand do the same. To go skinny-dipping, of course. And so Ambassador Jusserand got naked for the honour of France. He later remarked that he kept his lavender gloves on, reasoning that if a lady had happened to walk on him and the president, it would have been embarrassing to be seen without lavender gloves.

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Before subatomic physics was a thing, allowing physicists to figure out that the sun's energy source is nuclear fusion, it was assumed that the sun's heat comes from compression - from which follows that physicists thought that the sun used to be really bloody big, as in "as big as the whole solar system is now" big. The theory was that the shrinking sun would occasionally leave behind matter, from which planets would form. I don't remember the numbers, but a central piece of evidence supporting this theory was that Lord Kelvin (who I believe was the most renowned scientist in the era directly preceding Einstein's works) calculated both how long ago the sun would've been as large as the Earth's orbit, and how long the Earth would take to cool down from the temperature of the sun's surface to its current state, and found the two numbers to be the same.

One implication of this theory is that the outer planets would be older than Earth, while Venus and Mercury would be younger. If you ever wondered why in SciFi literatur from around 1900, an advanced civilisation of Marsians was a recurring thing, this is why: Since Mars is older, a Marsian civilisation would've had more time to develop, or, to a less optimistic author, more time to either wither away or blow itself up. And conversely, one could also expect to find lifeforms on Venus that are long extinct on Earth, so if you ever come across a story about dinosaurs on Venus (I haven't, I don't think, this is second-hand information), you can point to this Shrinking Sun theory, too.

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The Great Red Spot on Jupiter, which is the largest storm in the solar system with a diameter 1.5x that of Earch, has been raging for at least 192 (earth-)years. It's possible that it has been going on for even longer, as first observations of a spot on Jupiter date back to 1665-1713, but since there are no records of it for more than 100 years after that, it's quite possible that the storm in question had receded and that its observation in 1831 by Samuel Heinrich Schwabe was the first on of the Great Red Spot we know today.

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On 11/5/2020 at 5:59 PM, Benice said:

The D in D-Day stands for Day, so it is Day-Day.

D-Day was initiated at H-Hour, too, although the beach landings only started three hours later.

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Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as president of the US of A by his father John, at 2:47 AM on the 3rd of August, 1923.

The given names in that family were a little confusing - John was actually named John Calvin, and so was Calvin; they were just called by the different halves of that double name for distinction. Calvin then went to name his two sons John and Calvin Jr.

[Acacia Sgt]

The dot written over lowercase i and j is called a tittle.

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When John Maynard Keynes first met his future wife, Lydia Lopokova, he lamented to a friend that because she was no man, he did not know how to approach her and express his feelings.

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In Turkey, a turkey is called a 'hindi'.

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In the first Pokemon generation, there is a rather obscure way of evolving Pokemon that normally require an Evolution Stone (like Staryu with a Water Stone or Clefary with a Moon Stone) via level-up: At the end of a fight during which the Pokemon levels up, your active Pokemon has to have an index number correspoding to the appropriate stone:

• Moon Stone - Exeggutor
• Thunderstone - Growlithe
• Water Stone - Onix
• Leaf Stone - Psyduck
• Fire Stone - some specific MissingNo.

So basically, to evolve Staryu, send it into a fight and swap it out for Onix (or, in a trainer fight, have Onix defeat their last Pokemon). If Staryu got a level-up during the fight, it'll evolve into Starmie.

Not very impactful for the elemental stones, since they're available for sale (so Growlithe doesn't have to be sad that it can cause, but not benefit from the glitch), but Moon Stones are technically a limited resource that this glitch can expand.

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New York technically isn't named after the English city of York, but after James Stuart, Duke of York, the later King James II.

In a wild coincidence, both Carolina and the man who the territory was named after, King Charles I., ended up being split into two parts.

[Crows n Murder]

The Squid Sisters...

ARE COUSINS!

Spoiler

And secret agents. Not that that matters.

 

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Skatole, or 3-methylindole, is the main contributor to the smell of poop. In low concentrations, it smells of flowers.