Fun Fact Friday

[funkStrat_97]

So you have a male mule and a female mule and you've decided to go into the mule breeding business.  Too bad.  You'll probably lose your ***.  You will not be seeing any baby mules because mules cannot reproduce (except for a handful of documented exceptions).

A mule is the product of a male donkey and a female horse.  But since donkeys and horses have different numbers of chromosomes, the offspring mule has an odd number of chromosomes.  For whatever reason, that makes them incapable of reproducing.

And for the record, the product of a male horse and a female donkey is called a hinny.  They are typically smaller than mules and also incapable of direct breeding.

My daughter is an equestrian lover (she got upset at me when I told her that horse is eaten in certain parts of Italy) and she told me this a couple years back.  In fact, I may have even heard this before then.

[funkStrat_97]

Ever hear of the legend of John Henry?  Turns out that the story is based on a real man whose job it was to drive steel rods into mountainsides so that dynamite could be inserted to blast away rock to make tunnels.  He was a slave who worked for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway (which is now part of CSX Transportation) and it is generally believed that he died after winning a race against a mechanical rod-driver during the construction of Big Bend Tunnel.............however...........so me accounts say that he died at Lewis Tunnel and others say at Coosa Mountain Tunnel on a line that became part of todays Norfolk Southern.

[phbrown]

so is that where the phrase


get your hinney over here


comes from? they want me to bring my male donkey/ female horse cross breed over?

[malthumb]

The word SALary dates back several hundred years to a time when people were often paid for labor, goods, and services in salt.  There was no refrigeration back then, and salt was the best known preservative. As such it was a very valuable commodity, and even used as a trading staple, even currency.

[Mysteryman]

Get rid of salt, sugar, corn, and wheat and you control the country.

[Hasmonean1]

Business owners may get an idea now on how to cut expenses by the way of salaries (salt).

[malthumb]

Pick a number.  However many digits you want.  Now add all the digits together.  If the sum of all the digits is equal to or evenly divisible by 9, the number you have chosen is also divisible by 9.  Try it.

Example:  49509 will be divisible by 9.  4+9+5+0+9 = 27.  27/9 = 3, so 49509 is divisible by 9.
49509/9 = 5,501.  Rearranging the digits would still result in numbers divisible by 9.

99504/9= 11,056
94509/9= 10,051

[phbrown]

the number I chose is i

[malthumb]

the number I chose is i

I am going to find out where you live and then show up on your doorstep with a shaving cream pie.

 

[phbrown]

LOL!

[malthumb]

Henry Ford used to work for Thomas Edison. 

He was an engineer, and eventually chief engineer, at Edison Illuminating Company before being involved in three different car companies ( Ford Motor Company was the third, Henry Ford Automobiles, which eventually became Cadillac, was the second).

Now Thomas Edison's laboratory from Menlo Park, New Jersey is preserved intact at Greenfield Village, a Ford family owned attraction in Dearborn, Michigan.  George Washington Carver's house and the Wright Brothers' bicycle shop are also now located, intact, in Greenfield Village.

Wright Brothers Bicycle Shop


George Washington Carver's House


Edison's Lab

[T-Block]

Pick a number.  However many digits you want.  Now add all the digits together.  If the sum of all the digits is equal to or evenly divisible by 9, the number you have chosen is also divisible by 9.  Try it.

Example:  49509 will be divisible by 9.  4+9+5+0+9 = 27.  27/9 = 3, so 49509 is divisible by 9.
49509/9 = 5,501.  Rearranging the digits would still result in numbers divisible by 9.

99504/9= 11,056
94509/9= 10,051

That same trick works for numbers to be divisible by 3. I got a whole list of divisibility rules I could post.

[malthumb]

Why is a tank called a tank?  I'm talking about the military vehicle.  The first tanks appeared in World War I.  The British didn't want German spies to figure out what they were working on so they claimed to be constructing water tanks.



While we're at it, where did the name Jeep come from?  They were first supplied to the U.S. Military by a company called Willy's as General Purpose Vehicles.  General Purpose became GP.  GP Became Jeep and a brand was born.  The company (Willy's) was located in Toledo , Ohio.  It eventually was absorbed by Nash Motors which became absorbed by American Motors which was absorbed into Chrysler Corporation which is now Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA).  Jeep is FCA's most profitable brand.  The main plants are in Toledo.

1940s Jeep


2011 Jeep Wrangler


Ok...last one. Since we are talking military vehicles, where did Hummer come from?  In 1979, the U.S. Military held competitive bids for a company to design and build specialized in-field personal carriers.  A subsidiary of American Motors, AM General, won the bid with their concept for the "High Mobility Multi-Purpose Wheeled Vehicle", or HMMWV.  It quickly came to be known as the Humvee, and later Hummer.

Here's a military spec Humvee


And the publicly available street legal version (this one belongs to Arnold Shwartzenegger)


And one of the last production Hummers from GM's ownership of the brand

[Hasmonean1]

The Matami Tribe of West Africa play their own version of football, instead of a normal football they use a human skull.




A flock of crows is known as a murder.





An average person’s yearly fast food intake will contain 12 pubic hairs.

[malthumb]

B.B. King is currently in hospice care, so let's pray for the comfort and good keeping of this American icon.

Which brings us to the subject of today's Friday Fun Fact.....

Why does B.B. King name all of his guitars "Lucille"?

Seems he was playing in a hall in Arkansas in 1949.  A fight broke out in the hall and in the course of the fight, a kerosene heater was knocked over., causing a fire.  King evacuated the hall with the rest of the crowd, but realized he had left his guitar.  He went back in and was able to retrieve it.  Later on he found out two things about the incident. 

• Two men died in the blaze.  He was lucky he wasn't the third, given his poor decision to go back in to get the guitar
• The fight that started the fire was the result of two men arguing over a woman named Lucille.

So he named that guitar, and every one after it "Lucille", as a reminder to not do anything foolish like get into a fight over a woman or run into a fire after mere possessions.

[Hasmonean1]

B.B. King is currently in hospice care, so let's pray for the comfort and good keeping of this American icon.

Which brings us to the subject of today's Friday Fun Fact.....

Why does B.B. King name all of his guitars "Lucille"?

Seems he was playing in a hall in Arkansas in 1949.  A fight broke out in the hall and in the course of the fight, a kerosene heater was knocked over., causing a fire.  King evacuated the hall with the rest of the crowd, but realized he had left his guitar.  He went back in and was able to retrieve it.  Later on he found out two things about the incident. 

• Two men died in the blaze.  He was lucky he wasn't the third, given his poor decision to go back in to get the guitar
• The fight that started the fire was the result of two men arguing over a woman named Lucille.

So he named that guitar, and every one after it "Lucille", as a reminder to not do anything foolish like get into a fight over a woman or run into a fire after mere possessions.

T'was good.

[Hasmonean1]

The lady on the weather channel mentioned Fun Fact Friday in conjunction with this entry.

The pyrocumulonimbus cloud (pyroCb) is a type of cumulonimbus cloud that forms above a source of heat, such as a wildfire, and may sometimes even extinguish the fire that formed it. It is the most extreme manifestation of a pyrocumulus cloud. According to the American Meteorological Society’s Glossary of Meteorology, a pyrocumulus is "a cumulus cloud formed by a rising thermal from a fire, or enhanced by buoyant plume emissions from an industrial combustion process

[Hasmonean1]

The site where the Parthenon was built had to be cleared of hundreds of dinosaur bones (then called giants' bones) before construction could begin.

Did you know that approx. 180 million people in the world still need a Bible in their own language?


Did you know the Budweiser Clydesdales dates back to 1933 celebrating the end of Prohibition?

[malthumb]

The site where the Parthenon was built had to be cleared of hundreds of dinosaur bones (then called giants' bones) before construction could begin.

Did you know that approx. 180 million people in the world still need a Bible in their own language?


Did you know the Budweiser Clydesdales dates back to 1933 celebrating the end of Prohibition?

That reminds me
Before Prohibition.....


During Prohibition....


After Prohibition....

[funkStrat_97]

While we're at it, where did the name Jeep come from?  They were first supplied to the U.S. Military by a company called Willy's as General Purpose Vehicles.  General Purpose became GP.  GP Became Jeep and a brand was born.  The company (Willy's) was located in Toledo , Ohio.  It eventually was absorbed by Nash Motors which became absorbed by American Motors which was absorbed into Chrysler Corporation which is now Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA).  Jeep is FCA's most profitable brand.  The main plants are in Toledo.

1940s Jeep


2011 Jeep Wrangler


Ok...last one. Since we are talking military vehicles, where did Hummer come from?  In 1979, the U.S. Military held competitive bids for a company to design and build specialized in-field personal carriers.  A subsidiary of American Motors, AM General, won the bid with their concept for the "High Mobility Multi-Purpose Wheeled Vehicle", or HMMWV.  It quickly came to be known as the Humvee, and later Hummer.

Here's a military spec Humvee


And the publicly available street legal version (this one belongs to Arnold Shwartzenegger)


And one of the last production Hummers from GM's ownership of the brand

...and speaking of General Purpose vehicles, General Motors has it's own version, but you're not going to find these driving down your street.  Through its Electro-Motive Division, GM offered a series of 4-axle, 'general purpose' or 'GP' road switcher type locomotives starting in 1949 with the GP-7 to the GP-60M which ended production in 1994.  Advances in the design of 6-axle locomotives allowing them to negotiate sharp curves spelled the end of the line for high-speed, 4-axle locomotives.  Hence, the GP60M was the last of the Geeps (note the difference in spelling).


GP7


GP60M