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20 Oct 2006, 2:02 pm

The expression "Chinaman's chance" is not a racial epithet. During the building of the railroads in the US, the Chinese laborers were the ones who most often volunteered to place the dynamite and light the fuses. This very dangerous job also paid more.

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20 Oct 2006, 2:10 pm

Gandy Dancers was the slang term for work crews on American Railroads who tightened the rails together, replaced rottens ties, and tidied up the rail-bed. No one is sure where the name originated from. (My grandfather actually did this for the Penn. Railroad.)

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20 Oct 2006, 2:12 pm

The Wright Brothers never became a major manufacturer of airplanes because they spent so much of their time and money in court battles over patents.

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20 Oct 2006, 2:31 pm

For 4 or 5 days after she disappeared, radio operators in the Pacific claimed to hear distress calls from Amelia Earhart. Some were later discounted as ghoulish hoaxes, but some seemed genuine. If so, this meant she made it to dry land. The type of plane she was flying had to sitting on dry land to run the engine to power the radio.

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20 Oct 2006, 2:56 pm

The Swedish verb "veta"="know" is the same ethymologically as the hindu verb "veda"="know".

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20 Oct 2006, 2:58 pm

"Habadedeima" is ancient Gothic for "had".

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20 Oct 2006, 2:58 pm

Musashi Miyamoto wrote "The book of the five rings". He's the most famous samurai.

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20 Oct 2006, 3:01 pm

Michael Nesmith once parodied one of his own songs, "Joanne", with a short piece called "Rodan". During this performance, he wore the lower half of a Godzilla costume and stomped on a prop village while playing the song.

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20 Oct 2006, 3:03 pm

The newest member right now is MarijuanaMan.

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20 Oct 2006, 3:14 pm

Today, I overslept and I didn't go to college

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20 Oct 2006, 3:17 pm

A Swedish inventor invented the first automatic gas pump around 1920. It was fed with coins. However no oil company bought the invention, since it would have made gas station people unemployed.

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20 Oct 2006, 3:17 pm

SamuraiSaxen wrote:

Today, I overslept and I didn't go to college

Today I tried to oversleep because there was no school, but I woke up when I felt a sharp pain in my neck.

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werbert
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20 Oct 2006, 3:18 pm

Litigious wrote:

The Swedish verb "veta"="know" is the same ethymologically as the hindu verb "veda"="know".

Swedish and Hindi have the same root language, called Proto-Indo-European.

The only European language not in this family is Basque.

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20 Oct 2006, 4:37 pm

Van Gogh liked to always use the color yellow in his paintings.

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I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go. ~Theodore Roethke

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20 Oct 2006, 4:42 pm

The Studebaker Automobile company started out making covered wagons.

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20 Oct 2006, 4:46 pm

Prof_Pretorius wrote:

Van Gogh liked to always use the color yellow in his paintings.

I hate yellow.

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