Fun Friday Fact - hope you respond weekly to give us all a smile

[Vidanjali]

14 hours ago, Heather Nicole said:

 

Flaming trumpet idea is...sooo...cool!!!

 

I wonder if there are composers who create works specifically for flaming trumpet.

[Jackie C.]

1 hour ago, Vidanjali said:

 

I wonder if there are composers who create works specifically for flaming trumpet.

 

I suppose that would depend on how the pyrotechnics alters the sound.

 

Hugs!

[Heather Shay]

Wow this is turning into a hot topic 

[Jandi]

I keep thinking of half-time at high school football games.

[Heather Shay]

I have 2 interesting ones today:

 

 

 

22

 

Only two mammals like spicy food: humans and the tree shrew.

Shutterstock/Vladimir Wrangel

While humans have long had the rare distinction of being the only mammal that actually enjoys spicy food, that list has seen a new addition, as a study by Chinese researchers found that tree shrews have a mutation in their ion channel receptor, TRPV1, which makes it less sensitive to the "hot" chemical in chili peppers. As a result, the adorable critters happily gobbled up corn pellets laced with capsaicin (the compounds that give peppers their spice) while other mammals in the study avoided them.

 

The "M's" in M&Ms stand for "Mars" and "Murrie."

Shutterstock/BORIMAT PRAOKAEW

That would be Forrest Mars and Bruce Murrie, the two businessmen who created the candy-coated chocolates. The two actually had a very contentious relationship, as Mars leveraged Murrie out of his 20 percent share in the company in 1949—years before M&Ms would become the best-selling candy in the U.S., paying him just $1 million for a share of business that would quickly be worth billions.

 

 

[Jandi]

1 hour ago, Shay said:

other mammals in the study avoided them.

Well, about this…

I have a problem with squirrels getting on my bird feeders.   My daughter gave me a super capsaicin laced squirrel repellent to treat the seeds with.  Birds are fine with it.  It worked for a couple of years, but this year, they seem to have developed a taste for it.  

[Jani]

3 hours ago, Jandi said:

Well, about this…

I have a problem with squirrels getting on my bird feeders.

@Jandi I have issues with the squirrels too.  I bought this dome at the local Agway (feed) store.  I had to enlarge the center hole and add three brackets to the pole that are attached with a hose clamp.  It works well.  It's not fastened to the brackets so if a squirrel does reach for it it will move a little.

[Vidanjali]

Have y'all seen the squirrel ninja warrior videos?? They are truly amazing. This guy who's a physics teacher and inventor embarked on this project during the pandemic. He is brilliant! 

 

 

 

And if you liked squirrel maze 1.0, 2.0 is like

 

 

 

Enjoy!!

 

 

I

[Heather Shay]

@Vidanjali thanks - I've seen before but it's fun to see again.

[Heather Shay]

Oh BTW found a great way to get rid of squirrels - my neighbor has a bird feeder so squirrels are all over his place. We had a bird feeder at our last house and squirrels didn't bother - now we save on bird seed and enjoy watching our neighbors birds. We watch hummingbirds come to our flowers on the porch (squirrels don't seem to care for flowers).

[miz miranda]

Squirrels drive me nuts, pun intended.

 

Neil Armstrong had to clear customs and immigration after returning from the moon.

 

Charlie  Chaplan lost a Charlie Chaplan look-alike contest.

 

Can openers were invented 48 years after cans were invented.

 

Nintendo started while the Ottoman empire still existed.

 

and lastly

 

A typical cloud weighs 1.1 million pounds

[Jandi]

4 hours ago, Vidanjali said:

Have y'all seen the squirrel ninja warrior videos?

I've seen these.  They are a trip.

 

Mine hang from the porch roof.  They get up in the rafters and drop on it.

If they can't knock them down, they'll tear 'em up where they hang.

I'm not sure you can keep them away - hence the pepper treatment.

I finally got a metal feeder.  Even if they get on it, they can't chew it up.  (so far!)

 

I do use a BB gun to discourage them when I can.

 

[Heather Shay]

@miz miranda - you never fail to have my jaw drop - the weight of an average cloud - wow.....

 

Speaking of squirrels (?) one of my favorite lines from M*A*S*H was when Hawkeye told Henry that he hoped when he died he'd come back as a squirrel so he could run up his pants.

[Heather Nicole]

Here's one:

 

Fortune cookies do have a connection to Asia, but they're not Chinese at all. They were invented by a Japanese-American restaurant owner in California, and are based on a popular Japanese Shinto New Year's tradition.

 

But in the Japanese Shinto version, not all the fortunes are good. They range all the way from very good to bad. If you get a bad fortune, you can purify it and not get the bad luck by tying the fortune to the bark of a tree.

[Elizabeth Star]

I always take the day off on Friday the 13th. Haven't worked one in over 20 years. I don't do it any type of superstitious or spiritual reasons. It's just easy to remember.

[Heather Shay]

The first-ever documented feature film was made in Australia in 1906.

 

Apples, peaches, and raspberries are all members of the rose family.

 

There are more Lego mini-figures than there are people on Earth.The hand and footprints in front of Los Angeles’s Chinese Theater tradition started accidentally when silent film actress, Norma Talmadge stepped on wet cement.

 

and for our Canadian friends.............................

 

Canada eats more macaroni and cheese than any other nation in the world.

[Jandi]

2 hours ago, Shay said:

Canada eats more macaroni and cheese than any other nation in the world.

Sensible people.

[miz miranda]

Some animal facts

 

Oysters can change gender multiple times during their life. 

 

Houseflies hum in the key of F.

 

The blue whale's tongue weighs as much as an adult elephant.

 

A cheetah can go from zero to 60 miles per hour in three seconds.

[Heather Shay]

@miz miranda would be nice if humans were like oysters..

[Jackie C.]

8 hours ago, Shay said:

@miz miranda would be nice if humans were like oysters..

 

Oh, y'know... maybe blue whales... for... reasons...

 

Hugs!

[Heather Shay]

 

The Japanese word 'Kuchi zamishi' is the act of eating when you're not hungry bcause your mouth is lonely. 

The unicorn is the national animal of Scotland. 

It's illegal to own just one guinea pig in Switzerland.

The Ancient Romans used to drop a piece of toast into their wine for good health - hence why we 'raise a toast'.

 

 

[miz miranda]

 

This weeks oddities

The best place in the world to see rainbows is in Hawaii.

Dentistry is the oldest profession in the world. 

Other biting research conducted by the University of Bologna, Italy on a 14,000-year-old skull found that "one rotten tooth in the jaw had been deliberately scoured and scraped with a tool," according to the BBC. That makes dentistry one of the oldest recorded professions and is definitely a reason to smile.

 

 

The hottest chili pepper in the world is so hot it could kill you.

https://www.livescience.com/59184-how-dragons-breath-chili-peppers-can-kill.html

 

The dragon's breath chili measures in at 2.48 million Scoville units.

 

Hot sauces are made from chili peppers, so it's only natural that both hot sauces and chili peppers follow the same units of heat measurement, which is call the Scoville unit. The Scoville unit was named for Wilbur Scoville in 1912. At the time, he worked for a pharmaceutical company named Parke-Davis where he developed a test called the "Scoville Organoleptic Test" which is used to measure a chili pepper's heat. Originally, Scoville ground up peppers and mixed them with sugar water, then test them with a panel of tasters who sipped from these sugar-water-pepper solutions. He would then dilute the solutions bit by bit until they no longer burned the tongues of the tasters, after which he would assign a number to the pepper based on the number of dilutions needed to kill the heat. The measurements are divided into multiples of 100. Note that 1 part per 1,000,000 dilutions of water is rated at 1.5 Scoville Units. Pure capsaicin, the stuff that makes chili peppers hot, is rated between 15 - 16,000,000 Scoville units. This is incredibly HOT!

 

 

[Davie]

Salvador Dalí liked the one-second nap:

sit upright, key in hand. The hand over

a dinner plate. Once asleep, the key drops

to wake youl. Boing! A one-second nap.

[Vidanjali]

8 hours ago, Shay said:

 

'Kuchi zamishi' is the act of eating when you're not hungry bcause your mouth is lonely. 

 

 

 

This is a whimsical yet poignant expression. It makes me think about things I learned whilst endeavoring to overcome eating disorders. One thing that was pivotal was learning mindfulness of eating. Oftentimes we take a bite of something and then immediately and unconsciously wind up poised, utensil in hand, loaded with the next bite ready before we've hardly begun to chew what we just took in. I began to practice putting down the utensil and resting my hands between bites. I realized a lot. One, that I enjoyed the food better when I focused on eating each bite absent the distraction of my hands being busy and my mind already anticipating the next bite; two, that I became much less likely to binge because I experienced greater satisfaction from practicing eating mindfully. Furthermore, I came to understand that in my mindless eating I was compulsively seeking to re-experience that first sensation of filling the mouth and that for me it wasn't really about food at all - rather something I felt I was missing in myself. So! Eating because the mouth is lonely, yes! An apt description. It's very cool to learn there's an expression for that because as one realizes its such a common experience that there's an expression, one feels less strange about it & more connected with others who experience it too. 

[Heather Shay]

 

 

Goosebumps are meant to ward off predators.

Shutterstock/Tunatura

Why do we get goosebumps? In this physiological reaction, small muscles attached to individual body hairs contract, which leads the hair to stand on end. We inherited this ability from our ancestors in part as a way for our (then) coat of body hair to capture air beneath it and in that way retain heat. But, as George A. Bubenik, a physiologist and professor of zoology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, explained to Scientific American, it also caused our ancestors to appear bigger than they were, helping to ward off predators when they were frightened or on the defense. With modern humans having less body hair, goosebumps no longer cause us to look that much more intimidating.

 

 

The wood frog can hold its pee for up to eight months.

Shutterstock/Jay Ondreicka

Talk about having to go! Wood frogs in Alaska have been known to hold their urine for up to eight months, sticking it out through the region's long winters before relieving themselves once temperatures increase. The urine actually helps keep the animal alive while it hibernates, with special microbes in their gut that recycle the urea (urine's main waste) into nitrogen.