Real Facts That "Feel Wrong"

Post Reply New Topic

Tennis players you think should be from countries other than the ones they actually come from:

Caroline Wozniacki (Denmark, of Polish descent)
Thanassi Kokkinakis (Australia, of Greek descent)
Nick Kyrgios, (Australia, of mixed Greek/Malaysian descent)
Milos Raonic (Canada, of Serbian descent-actually was born in Serbia/Montenegro)
Pete Sampras (American of Greek descent)
Denis Istomin (Russian descent, playing for Uzbekistan)
Andrey Golubev (Russian descent, playing for Kazakhstan)
Varvara Lepchenko (Naturalized American citizen of Ukrainian descent, formerly lived in Uzbekistan)

I visited New York (Long Island) around 5 years ago for work and while there had to go to hospital. The guy taking down my basic detail on arrival couldn't understand me and kept asking me to repeat myself. I am from the South East of England, my accent and dialect should be easiest for Americans to understand!

If you removed the reflective effect of clouds, aerosols, water, and snow/ice, the earths poles would actually receive more solar energy per unit surface area than the equator. The constant daylight during the summer more than makes up for the constant darkness during the winter.

We are actually a little bit translucent to visible light as well. It’s just hard to detect with the naked eye in most settings. Finding out that I could shine a flashlight through my hand and vaguely make out the outline of the bones kind of freaked me out as a kid. Other parts of the body aren’t thin enough unless you have a really powerful light.

It’s been shown that our bodies emit a small amount of visible light as well, especially our head. This light is “cold” bioluminescent light, as our bodies are not hot enough to generate any detectable radiation in the visible spectrum via heat alone.

Last edited by NoClearMind53 on 25 Mar 2018, 5:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The first sign of madness is hair growing on your palms.

Last edited by SaveFerris on 25 Mar 2018, 7:07 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Second sign is looking for them

The original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, were not actually "Siamese." (Thai) They were 7/8 Chinese and only 1/8 Thai.

Sounds like a good place to hang out but there's a vas deferens between vacations and cruising

trololololol

Marie Antoinette was born Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna and she wasn't French, she was Austrian.

The core British royal family members are not required to have a surname. When a surname is required on documents or they do not wish to be formally addressed in royal fashion, they can use Mountbatten-Windsor, Mountbatten, Windsor, or the name of a territory they have a title in. For example, Wales and York have been used.

Toilet paper was difficult to sell when first invented. People thought it was a waste of money and used corn cobs and catalog paper instead.

The lagoon in Gilligan's Island actually was outside.

Color photography has existed since the 1900s.

The electric car was invented in 1881.

You can run a car on burning wood provided it has been modified to do so.

Clothes dryers are uncommon in Europe.

Under the right conditions, wetting coal can cause it to spontaneously combust.

Hydraulic concrete and cement can "dry" under water.

Natural gas is not flammable on it's own. It needs the proper air/gas mixture to ignite.

Gas companies often repair gas mains without turning the gas off.

The legalization of enslaving Africans in the 13 colonies began in 1640 when group of three indentured servants, two white men and a black African man named John Punch, unsuccesfully attempted to breach their contract and flee. The Virginia Governor's Council sentenced the two white men to longer terms as indentured servants but declared John Punch a slave for life. Their rationale for this was not given but it's thought that the reason was that it was illegal to permanently enslave christians and the two white men were assumed to be christians but John Punch, being a black African, was assumed not to be.

England had a black population in the 1500s. They were called "blackamoores".

Slavery of black people was never actually legal in England. There was no basis for it in English law. Rather this fact was acknowledged but disregarded. The abolishment of slavery in England consisted of the government ceasing to disregard it's lack of legality.

The immaculate conception is the conception of Mary, not Jesus. It refers to her being conceived without original sin.

Electric shock therapy actually can treat depression.

Modern American accents are closer to 17th century British accents than modern British accents are.

The language of Barcelona is not Spanish. It's Catalan.

Many of the men who were present at Chernobyl when the reactor blew up are still alive.

One can stand next to the melted fuel from the reactor today for a few minutes without receiving a lethal dose of radiation.

Hawaii has blizzards.

Tornados can occur in the Rocky Mountains.

Certain species of palm trees can grow in Ireland.

Only 2% of households in Britain had refrigerators in 1948.

^^ Inspired a few follow-up factoids.

One of the reasons that toilet paper did eventually become more popular was the release of the first brand which could advertise itself as "splinter-free"!

Until 1917, the British Royal family would have called themselves, the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas. They switched names to Windsor to sound less German due to Britain being at war with Germany at the time (Windsor is a town containing one of their castles) The German emperor during that war, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was one of Queen Victoria's grand-children.

The Mountbatten name is also an anglicisation from German - originally Battenburg (as in the yummy cake; 'berg' = mountain.) The Queen's consort, Prince Philip, took this name, though he was actually born to the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.

Every 19th Century official land speed record was held by an electric vehicle. There were also more electric cars on the road than petrol-engined ones prior to the First World War.

Just before World War Two, the German "silver arrows" teams of Mercedes-Benz and Auto-Union were racing Grand-Prix cars with over 600 horsepower. Post war, Formula one cars didn't have this level of power again until turbo-chargers were allowed nearly 50 years later in the 1980's.

When people think of the "blitzkrieg" campaigns with which the Nazi's opened World War Two, they usually think of the propaganda films of vast echelons of tanks and other motorised armour. The infantry, however, were mostly transported by horse and cart because they had so few trucks.

The "classic" Citroen 2CV was designed before the Nazi occupation of France. Citroen were so worried that the German armed forces would find the design useful as a cheap "jeep" that it was buried beneath a shed for the duration of the occupation.

"Blowing smoke up someone's ass" was originally a real medical procedure. Rectally applied tobacco smoke was thought to help revive people who had been rescued from drowning. There were even campaigns to raise money for installing equipment for it alongside the river Thames in London.

Natural gas has no smell. When you can smell a gas leak, it is a special odour added to the gas, specially chosen because it doesn't smell like anything else.

When you walk across the gangway or tarmac to get on an aeroplane, you have probably walked further than the first aeroplane flight by the Wright Brothers, and the wingspan of your plane will be longer too.

Orville Wright, who made that first powered aeroplane flight, was still around when Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1.

Taking the famous photograph of the Wright Brothers' first powered flight was entrusted to a helper from the local life-guard who had never used a camera before. He was so astounded by seeing the plane take off that he nearly forgot to trip the shutter. Coincidentally, he died the day after Orville Wright.

The Guillotine was not an invention of the French Revolution; it is known from earlier examples in Scotland and parts of England. There is a famous one near me in Halifax, Yorkshire - the tradition was that the rope holding the pin in place that allowed the blade to drop was thrown out into the crowd so that the whole community was 'the executioner' ("From Hell, Hull and Halifax, may the good Lord deliver us." is an old Yorkshire saying.)

Catherine the Great was not Russian. She was German. Wild claims about her sexual proclivities permeated history, including fatuous claims that she had sex with a horse. She was indeed a sexually vigorous woman, but only with men, never with animals.

Members of many European nations' royal families had German bloodlines, including the current Spanish royal family. King Felipe is 6 feet 5 inches tall, the tallest reigning monarch.

Prior to princess Kate European Royalty couldn't marry commoners. Only other royalty. So all of the royals of Europe are in the same inbred family (worse than that inbred Appalachian kid who plays the banjo in "Deliverance").

So all of the European nations swap royal members all of the time.

But whats interesting is the nonroyal rulers.

The three most notorious rulers of modern Europe were Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin. None were royals. But All three were either foreign to, or were from finge minority groups within, the nation they ruled. Hitler was not a German, but an Austrian. Napoleon was not a Frenchman, but a Corsican (the island of Corsica was only recently conquered by France before the French Revolution, and they speak a dialect of Italian, and not French in Corsica). Stalin was not a Slavic Russian, but an Ossetian from Georgia in the far south middle eastern part of the Russian Empire. When Stalin gave the equivalent of his "inauguration" speech before the throngs in Red Square the members of the ruling Politburo couldn't even figure out WTF he was talking about because his command of the Russian language was so bad.

methyl mercaptans

^ +1 ice-cream.

And I was wrong , it isn't a unique smell at all...

"flatus" = posh farts (not that I would know anything about those, of course - mine are the coarse, oafish kind! )

tell me, what does a "posh" fart sound like?