The Privy Report
Copyright© 2022 by Old Grey Duck
Chapter 19
Just some more random stuff.
1. The probability of a blue lobster existing is widely touted as being one in two million. Bright blue lobsters are so-colored because of a genetic abnormality that causes them to produce more of a certain protein than others.
2. There’s only one letter that doesn’t appear in any American state name. There’s a Z in Arizona and an X in Texas, but no Q in any of them.
3. A book called ’A la recherche du temps perdu’ by Marcel Proust contains an estimated 9,609,000 characters, making it the longest book in the world. The title translates to “Remembrance of Things Past”.
4. Big Ben’s clock stopped at 10:07 p.m. on 27 May 2005, most likely due to an extremely hot temperature of 31.8 degrees Celsius.
5. There’s a fruit that tastes like chocolate pudding. (Can we get in on this?) Apparently, there’s a fruit native to Central and South America called black sapote that tastes like chocolate and sweet custard.
6. The Easter Island heads have bodies. Those iconic stone heads - you know the ones. In the 2010s, archaeologists found that two of the Pacific Island figures actually had torsos that measured as high as 33 feet.
7. M&Ms are named after the businessmen who created them. But what do the M’s stand for? Forrest Mars and Bruce Murrie, who apparently didn’t have the best relationship as Mars leveraged Murrie out of his 20% share of the business before it became the biggest-selling sweet in the US. Ouch.
8. Pigeons can tell the difference between Picasso and Monet. What?! A 1995 study shows that the birds can differentiate between the two artists.
9. The real name for a hashtag is an octothorpe. The ‘octo’ refers to the eight points in the symbol, but according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary the ‘thorpe’ part is a mystery. (Maybe I’m ‘old school, but I call it a ‘pound sign’.)
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