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Totally useless information/trivia


RunRickyRun

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Today is the 20th anniversary of the last time a Premier League team fielded an entirely English team.

It was Aston Villa and we were playing Coventry City. We lost 4-1.

Edited by Stevo985
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5 hours ago, A'Villan said:

I don't know about this one.

My brother seems to think that the word for pineapple is the same in every language universally except for English?

It's certainly the same in French, Spanish and Italian (although Spain sometimes use "pina", as in pina colada)

"ananas"

 

But I doubt it's EVERY language universally. Could be wrong, but can't imagine it's the same in korean for example.

Edited by Stevo985
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17 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

It's certainly the same in French, Spanish and Italian (although Spain sometimes use "pina", as in pina colada)

"ananas"

 

But I doubt it's EVERY language universally. Could be wrong, but can't imagine it's the same in korean for example.

That was the one.

Interesting. I reckon you'd be right. Can't see it being the same in Somali or Swahili either.

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44 minutes ago, A'Villan said:

That was the one.

Interesting. I reckon you'd be right. Can't see it being the same in Somali or Swahili either.

Might be all European languages or all Romance languages or something like that.

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1 hour ago, Stevo985 said:

It's certainly the same in French, Spanish and Italian (although Spain sometimes use "pina", as in pina colada)

"ananas"

 

But I doubt it's EVERY language universally. Could be wrong, but can't imagine it's the same in korean for example.

Funnily enough it's 'Pineapple' in Korean.  Obviously introduced late to their language. 

Same with stuff like cheese and pizza, although they don't have 'z' sounds in their alphabet so they use a 'j' sound giving you 'cheej-uh' and 'pee-ja'.

 

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Dettol was, until fairly recently, used in Australia to kill cane toads. It was discovered the chemical chloroxylenol, the key ingredient of Dettol, kills the toads very quickly and given that they are a particularly resilient invasive species was quickly used as a pesticide for them.

Unfortunately it's also lethal to a bunch of other creatures and it's use was banned in 2011. 

Oh well, back to running then over...

Chloroxylenol also strips paint off plastic quite well.

Edited by Chindie
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When Burke and Hare were to be tried for 16 murders the police offered Hare immunity from prosecution if he turned evidence against Burke.

He accepted the offer, dobbed Burke in it and he was convicted, hanged, dissected and his skin used to make book covers and wallets etc as interesting trinkets.

D1DjLCYXgAEhp26.jpg

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1 hour ago, chrisp65 said:

When Burke and Hare were to be tried for 16 murders the police offered Hare immunity from prosecution if he turned evidence against Burke.

He accepted the offer, dobbed Burke in it and he was convicted, hanged, dissected and his skin used to make book covers and wallets etc as interesting trinkets.

D1DjLCYXgAEhp26.jpg

Never judge a book by it’s cover.

The Burke and Hare stuff interests me. When I get round to visiting Edinburgh that’s one of the tours I’d look at doing, that and a Deacon Brodie one.

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It's interesting with B&H that they're 'known' as grave robbers, less so as murderers.

The thing that I rediscover every now and again is the access given to the public to the bodies of the executed. A large part of the reason executions retreated to being inside prisons was because the crowds were getting less controllable. There was an understanding that once dead, the people could take what they wanted as prizes and trinkets. The dead would be ripped to pieces by souvenir hunters.

We're basically 150 years ahead of ISIS in our degree of civilization.

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27 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

It's interesting with B&H that they're 'known' as grave robbers, less so as murderers.

The thing that I rediscover every now and again is the access given to the public to the bodies of the executed. A large part of the reason executions retreated to being inside prisons was because the crowds were getting less controllable. There was an understanding that once dead, the people could take what they wanted as prizes and trinkets. The dead would be ripped to pieces by souvenir hunters.

We're basically 150 years ahead of ISIS in our degree of civilization.

Samuel Johnson actually wrote to complain about the curtailment of public executions iirc.

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To carry on this rather macabre discussion....the nice little Shropshire town of Much Wenlock has the grim claim of being the location of the “legal” execution of the youngest girl in the UK, 11 year old Alice Glaston in 1546. Her crime isn’t recorded. 

They’ve perhaps wisely gone for the Olympic connection as a way to promote tourism instead.

For completion, John Dean was the youngest child, aged about 8 in 1629, in Abingdon, for arson.

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Executions are interesting.

Take hangings. The modern idea is to break the neck. But historically that wasn't the case and it took quite a long time to get to the point where the neck snap was fairly consistent. Initially more often than not a hanging was actually a strangulation, and regularly would lead to family members of the convicted (and sometimes even the executioner) hanging off the condemned's legs to hurry their death.

To try to get around that they tried the standard drop method, which had the side effect of decapitation being more common. Eventually that evolved into the long drop using maths developed by William Marwood that took into account weight and height, and the position of the noose, to ensure as much as possible a neck break.

Of course that assumes the executioner is competent. Allegedly the US executioner at the Nuremberg Trials **** up a number of the hangings of Nazis, possibly purposefully. And even in other methods the executioner would mess up more often than they really should. There's various accounts of decapitations with swords and axes going wrong, with the executioner missing or having to take multiple attempts to complete the job.

Being an executioner would have been a fairly grim life, even if you accept the whole being a professional murderer thing. They were ostracised in most communities, which in turn meant it often became a family profession.

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10 hours ago, Chindie said:

Being an executioner would have been a fairly grim life, even if you accept the whole being a professional murderer thing. They were ostracised in most communities, which in turn meant it often became a family profession.

Timothy Spall’s Pierrepoint. 

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