Did You Know...

...that for some unknown reason, I receive each month a trade magazine called something like Beverage News.
It reports that, in 2009, the Coca Cola company earned $850 million in royalties from the licensing of products carrying the iconic Coca Cola logo.
I will bet that none of yall knew that.
And, yes, I am well aware that you can't drink Canada dry. Let's not go there again.

Kangaroo farts do not contain methane.

I'm caught. I've been reading Super Freakonomics.

In Switzerland, it's illegal to flush a toilet after 10 pm if you live in an apartment.

Didn't know that.

Also, it's illegal for unmarried women to skydive in Florida ... but only on Sunday.

Didn't know that either lol.

Nor do any Swiss.

(It certainly might be that some apartment owners have issued such in a set of rules - but even this would be against the Swiss laws and constitution.)

Yeah, I've seen some pretty weird laws, but even this one seemed a bit over the top. I think it's probably as you say.

Apparently, this only happens once every 823 years...

This August has 5 Sundays, 5 Mondays, and 5 Tuesdays, all in one month.

So I have these two white oaks in my yard. Big trees. Two tree huggers can't get their fingers to touch while embracing either of them.
I swept up acorns today. I filled a 5-gallon bucket just from the driveway and sidewalk. The rest of them, in the yard, will be left for the squirrels and the deer.
I did some googling and found this somewhat dubious claim: The Greeks mention acorns in their diet 2000 years ago. Over the course of human history it has been estimated that people have consumed more acorns then rice and wheat combined.
I found a recipe or two for acorn bread. I doubt I will be trying it anytime soon.

I once read about Native American Indians laying acorns out on the sand and drenching them with water. This, with the sunshine, was to get out the bitterness. It reminds me of the Donner Party, in California history. The ones that set out walking to get help met some Native American Indians. The only food they could ingest at all turned out to be pine nuts. Their shrunken stomachs could not tolerate anything else they were given.

Here ya go -
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/dining/13acorn.html

Earthworms are not native to Alberta, or to most of Canada, or for that matter most of N. America. Most of earthworms here are of European descent. The US also have Asian earthworms.. Worms were scraped away during the ice age and our boreal forests evolved with out them. They are ruining the soil and plant life in these forests and could potentially cause a catastrophic collapse in the near future.
Most of the worms come from fishermen who throw them away after a day waiting for the big one that got away...

Salmon P. Chase is on the $10,000 bill, but they are no longer in circulation.

(I broke up my last one in Wal-Mart last week! )

It is claimed that 90% of what we express, orally or written in English, is comprised of only 7,000 words. New words, many of them, get added to dictionaries each year (blog, tweet) while many others get deleted; discarded, sent to land fills and mixed into a spicious muck with other garbage.
Please visit savethewords.org to adopt a word.
The word I took over by assignation is "spicious" meaning "having a thick consistency." I pledged to try to use it once a day.

The new phone book for Charlottesville, Virginia, landed on my doorstep earlier this week. As I have done for the past few years, here is a review.
The latest edition continues a trend of declining thickness.
The residential white pages shrank from 187 to 175 pages (down 6.4%), despite an increase in population. The culprit, of course, is the growing popularity of cell phones at the expense of land lines.
One of the phone book publishers in Virginia has asked for permission from the state to stop publishing the residential listings in future editions.
We also have a business white pages, with alphabetical listings and small in-column display ads. That section declined from 70 to 62 pages (down 11.4%).
The yellow pages went from 673 to 619 pages (down 8.0%), reflecting, I suspect, the continuing weak economy.
Back in the residential pages, the Zyromski family gets the last listing.

I used to keep phone books from all over the country, rjb.

the online resources now far surpass the printed books.

I think they will be dinosaurs soon...


please give my regards to the Zyromskis.

I think it is the same everywhere. The books get smaller as people lose interest in them. Here, there are three or four companies that still print them. We get Houston, NW Houston, Tomball/Magnolia, etc. No problem for me. But at the apartments, distributors want to place them at every door, constantly. When we catch them at it, we tell them to cease and desist. They whine and argue, but finally go away. The reason such activity is not allowed is, the books are ignored by residents. The staff ends up having to gather them for the dumpster. One year, the manager had us save them all for the recycler. But the recycler rejected them.

Elinor Roosevelt ate chocolate covered garlic balls for her memory.

I have eaten garlic balls for years and I still have trouble finding my car keys. Interestingly, I always do find them but always in the last place I look for them. Why is that?

You forgot the chocolate?

...that the price of copper hit a record price of $4.42/lb yesterday. Zinc closed at $1.10/lb.
Which got me thinking about the lowly U.S. penny. From 1909-1982, our one cent piece was 95% copper and 5% zinc. I checked a couple of sources who came up with the same melt value of a penny from that time period: 2.9 cents each.
A sample of spare change I collected today found that 50% were pre-1983.

I just learned that the correct pronunciation of Van Gogh sounds something like 'Fun Cock' with a dutch accent. The 'ck' is a gutteral glot stop like the scottish pronunciation of 'loch'