 The Water Cooler |
• A compilation of interesting facts that may make you the office know-it-all.
• You can't see a beaver's tail when he swims.
• More than a century ago, men and women in attendance together at a lecture or stage play were called a "promiscuous audience." The language takes some turns, huh?
• More divorced women than divorced men tell pollsters they're happy about the breakup. In one survey, 85 percent of the women versus 58 percent of the men.
• Any savvy biker will tell you the gasoline engine was developed to power a motorcycle.
• Whose idea was it to have bands play at school football games in the U.S.? We know why, but not who. It started at town sports events, not at schools. Sabbath rules in many places prohibited games on Sunday unless musicians were there to play hymns.
• So you think modern warfare started with gunpowder? So did we, but it's evidently not so. According to those renowned historians Will and Ariel Durant: In 399 B.C. in the Greek City-State of Syracuse, Dionysius the Elder wanted a better weapon than a sword. His engineers invented the catapult.
• Mythmakers of ancient England spoke of a monster in the shape of an emaciated cow called "Chichevache" that ate nothing but faithful wives. The bit of lore eventually lost currency. Some English say it was too silly. Some Irish say the old cow starved to death.
• In the India of old, certain wise men prescribed that a wife should be one-third the age of her husband. Ideally, they averred, if he were 24, she should be 8.
• In 5,000 years of recorded human history, polygamy has been much more common than monogamy.
• Historians say those Native Americans called the Nez Perce didn't pierce their noses. Why the early French so named them is a mystery. "Nez Perce" means "pierced nose."
• The philodendron likes to grow up tree trunks. In Greek, "philo" means "love" and "dendron" means "tree."
• It's only a coincidence that "nasa" in Hebrew means "to go up."
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More in the section:
Yesterday
Pravda
Read also previous issue' articles:
Bumper Stickers
Things Found Only in America
Devil in the Church
Generosity Begins at Home
Murphy's Other Laws
Some Interesting Facts
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