State your TRIVIA that anyone barely know.

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lennon met yoko ono for the first time in a soho art gallery exhibition featuring her work, and one reason he decided to get to know her was one of her artworks consisted of a ladder exhorting viewers to climb and read a message at the top, and the message read, "YES."

he world has only 3% fresh water

this is what scientists think mars would look like if it still had all its water that it lost billions of years ago-

Vatican city is the smallest nation in the world.

the longest period of time between a song being recorded and it being released on record, is creditable to the musical ensemble "the prairie ramblers" who recorded in 1937 a song called "ghost in the graveyard" and its being released on a Columbia folk music compilation LP set in 1982- 45 years the acetates sat in the record company vault before somebody bothered to make records of them, long after the original artists passed away.

"Haarpfeile" (German, literally "hair arrow" in English) is a term used either for hair pins (modern sense) or decorative hair sticks (old-fashioned sense or incorrect museum terminology).

the term "nifty" is a civil-war-era slang contraction of the word "magnificent."

the original redbook CD specification was for 4-channels of sound! that was ashcanned, however, by the Japanese [sony was a co-creator] insistence that the entirety of Beethoven's 9th symphony be able to fit on just one CD, which requires at least 74 minutes of carrying capacity. a pity. too bad data compression tech hadn't been developed back in 1979 when the CD was invented.

Napoleon was actually above the average height in the french military at the time. Rumors of his shortness is due to british propaganda.

the hays office' stranglehold on movie producers lost most of its teeth when the supreme court ordered the studios to divest themselves of their movie theatres in the late 1940s. at that point a producer could elect to release a film sans MPAA certification should he wish to unshackle himself from that organization's movie content strictures, and several did, most notably otto Preminger with his film "the moon is blue."

Preminger had an affair with stripper Gypsey Rose Lee.

And a son.

in 1990 or so, Phillips [the inventor of the analog compact cassette format] introduced the digital compact cassette which was their way of updating the analog compact cassette to the digital format, with backwards compatibility with existing analog cassettes. the format sank with barely a trace. if it had survived it would likely have flopped due to chronically clogged record/playback heads. at the same time, sony [co-inventor of the compact disc] introduced its competition to the compact cassette called the minidisc [in music and data formats], which lasted about a decade or so in the marketplace. about 15 years before, sony tried to compete with the compact cassette with something called the Elcaset [phonetic description of "Large Cassette"] which was about 50% larger [less compact, as it were] than the Phillips compact cassette] but with twice the tape width and twice the tape speed, with sound quality the full equal of open reel tape decks. it also sank with barely a trace. sic transit Gloria.

i am always interested in the scale of things, but rarely do i ever see information that conveys scale very well.
for example, i always wondered how big mt everest really looked in scale to a familiar frame of reference. then i realized that all photos of mt everest taken from the foot of it are actually showing a 10,000 -12,000 ft mountain due to the fact that the plateau it sits upon averages 15000 ft or so above sea level.

anyway, here is an idea of how big australia would look on the surface of mars.


here is how big europe would look on the surface of the moon.


i like to see the scale also of the pockmarks on the surfaces of planets that most people would not even consider.

here is a shot of the area of mars (to show overall scale) that i superimposed a picture of the new york region onto for the purpose. the area expanded is shown as a yellow rectangle.


and here is what new york area would look like within that small region above. it is translucent to show the crater sizes (insignificantly small compared to the large ones on mars) under the overlay.

the heads clogged and the belts wore out on my various DAT machines long ago, and I didn't really have the duckie$ to fix them. so I just invested in a zoom H2 digital recorder and put 'em in a drawer someplace.
as late as the 1970s the British Board of Film Classification was censoring bloody bits out of horror movies, and banning entire movies such as "straw dogs."