Totally useless information/trivia

[Xela]

On 02/12/2020 at 22:15, lapal_fan said:

The woman in the 2007 indy hit film Juno was played by a bloke.

Wait until you find out a woman won the mens Olympic gold medal in the Decathlon in 1976! 

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, Mark Albrighton said:

I bet a few on here already knew this, but I’ve only just discovered that Nokia and Nintendo were both founded in the 19th century. Nokia starting as an 1865 paper mill and Nintendo making playing cards in 1889.

You were watching The Chase then?

[Mark Albrighton]

31 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

You were watching The Chase then?

Edited December 4, 2020 by Mark Albrighton

[Sid4ever]

2 hours ago, Mark Albrighton said:

I bet a few on here already knew this, but I’ve only just discovered that Nokia and Nintendo were both founded in the 19th century. Nokia starting as an 1865 paper mill and Nintendo making playing cards in 1889.

I knew the Nokia one, we still have a paper mill called Nokia.

[HanoiVillan]

47 minutes ago, Mark Albrighton said:

So was I

Always enjoy the ones with the Beast; I love how he's just genuinely harsh with the useless ones.

Edited December 4, 2020 by HanoiVillan

[Mark Albrighton]

28 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

So was I

Always enjoy the ones with the Beast; I love how he's just genuinely harsh with the useless ones.

 

On 03/04/2018 at 14:46, Mark Albrighton said:

I’ve taken on Mark “The Beast” Labbett from “The Chase” at a quiz in a bingo hall. We did enough to get to the final round to face him, but we were soundly beaten in the end. Here’s a blurry picture of him shaking my hand after said defeat. For purposes of scale, I’m 5’8” tall.

 

Shamelessly quoting part of my post from the rubbish claim to fame thread. 

He was quite nice to us, there had been plenty of drinking involved so I dare say he took pity on us. 
 

[HanoiVillan]

That's so good it's almost not a rubbish claim to fame!

[useless]

About 2,500 B.C., Greek farmers carved wooden scarecrows in the image of Priapus, the son of Dionysus and Aphrodite, creating a “scarecrow” that was supposedly ugly enough to scare the birds away from their vineyards, ensuring a good harvest

[bickster]

Look at the state of this potty mouthed ho you like @Seat68

Profanity after profanity. Makes you wanna ask "You ok hun?"

https://i.redd.it/cpg1a4fods461.png

Link only as there is hienous profanity in the chart labelling

 

[Seat68]

3 minutes ago, bickster said:

Look at the state of this potty mouthed ho you like @Seat68

Profanity after profanity. Makes you wanna ask "You ok hun?"

https://i.redd.it/cpg1a4fods461.png

Link only as there is hienous profanity in the chart labelling

 

I see as soon as she got with the indie types it went south. 

[mjmooney]

Unlikely career changes, vol 385: 

Quote

Jeffrey Allen "Skunk" Baxter (born December 13, 1948) is an American guitarist, known for his stints in the rock bands Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers during the 1970s and Spirit in the 1980s.

Baxter has continued working as a session guitarist for a diverse group of artists, including Willy DeVille, Bryan Adams, Hoyt Axton, Eric Clapton, Gene Clark, Sheryl Crow, Freddie Hubbard, Tim Weisberg, Joni Mitchell, Ricky Nelson, Dolly Parton, Carly Simon, Ringo Starr, Gene Simmons, Rod Stewart, Burton Cummings, Barbra Streisand, and Donna Summer. He has worked as a touring musician for Elton John, Linda Ronstadt, and Billy Vera and the Beaters. 

He also produced two albums for the hard rock band Nazareth, and also produced albums for Carl Wilson, Livingston Taylor, The Ventures, and Nils Lofgren. He was producer on the 1982 Bob Welch album Eye Contact. In 1991 Baxter also produced a documentary video, "Guitar" (Warner Brothers VHS and LaserDisc), in which he travels the world and interviews guitarists he admires. 

In the mid-1980s, his interest in music recording technology led him to wonder about hardware and software originally developed for military use, specifically data compression algorithms and large-capacity storage devices. His next-door neighbor was a retired engineer who had worked on the Sidewinder missile program. This neighbor bought Baxter a subscription to Aviation Week magazine, provoking his interest in additional military-oriented publications and missile defense systems in particular. He became self-taught in this area, and at one point wrote a five-page paper that proposed converting the ship-based anti-aircraft Aegis missile into a rudimentary missile defense system. He gave the paper to California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, and his career as a defense consultant began.

Backed by several influential Capitol Hill lawmakers, Baxter received a series of security clearances so he could work with classified information. In 1995, Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Curt Weldon, then the chairman of the House Military Research and Development Subcommittee, nominated Baxter to chair the Civilian Advisory Board for Ballistic Missile Defense.

Baxter's work with that panel led to consulting contracts with the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. He consults for the US Department of Defense and the US intelligence community, as well as defense-oriented manufacturers such as Science Applications International Corporation, Northrop Grumman Corp., General Dynamics, and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. He has said his unconventional approach to thinking about terrorism, tied to his interest in technology, is a major reason the government sought his assistance. 

In April 2005, he joined the NASA Exploration Systems Advisory Committee. Baxter was a member of an independent study group that produced the Civil Applications Committee Blue Ribbon Study recommending an increased domestic role for US spy satellites in September 2005. This study was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on August 15, 2007. He is listed as "Senior Thinker and Raconteur" at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, and is a Senior Fellow and Member of the Board of Regents at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.

Wiki

[Mark Albrighton]

13 hours ago, bickster said:

Look at the state of this potty mouthed ho you like @Seat68

Profanity after profanity. Makes you wanna ask "You ok hun?"

https://i.redd.it/cpg1a4fods461.png

Link only as there is hienous profanity in the chart labelling

 

Rather quaint that the author of that chart considers three of those as swear words, or at the least on par with “f***”.

[bickster]

48 minutes ago, Mark Albrighton said:

Rather quaint that the author of that chart considers three of those as swear words, or at the least on par with “f***”.

'muricans innit

[HanoiVillan]

'Speak Now [but only U-rated]'

[Chindie]

On May 31st, 1995, a woman booked into a 5 star hotel in Oslo. Three days later, a member of the hotel staff knocked on the room the woman had booked into, and heard a gunshot. 15 minutes later, security opened the door and found the woman dead on the bed, a single bullet hole in her head, gun in her hand on her chest. 

So what? Well... The woman had no identification. None. No driving licence, no passport, no credit card. Ok, weird, but just check the booking in form for the hotel right? Sure. She booked into the hotel as Jennifer Fairgate, 21, from a small Belgian village. Bizarrely, though, she booked with no payment information. Strange.

In her room, all of her clothes had the labels removed. And oddly she only had changes of clothes for her upper body - no skirts, trousers, anything.

The gun, a Browning 9mm, had had it's serial number removed, thoroughly. One of the few things the woman seemed to own were 25 rounds for the gun.

More things came to light that were strange. The woman was well dressed, as if ready to go out. Someone had recently had a shower in the room. A bottle of aftershave was in the bathroom, but no other toiletries. The gun was in an odd backwards grip, the trigger pulled by the thumb, which made it particularly odd that the gun hadn't been thrown from the hand by the recoil. More, both the gun and her hands had no blood on them, despite splatter over every surface in the room. The door has been double locked from the inside. The record of the lock on the door, which noted every time someone entered the room, showed that the woman had rarely left the room, although the day before her death she had seemingly been out of the room for 20 hours and maids visiting the room during her stay said it was usually empty.

Ok, strange. But there's a name, right? Yes. But... Jennifer Fairgate didn't exist. Not only that, she'd actually spelt the name wrong on the different hotel forms - Fairgate, Fergate. And the address she gave, for a village in Belgium, was for a house that didn't exist on the street named. 

And more oddly, she signed in with a man, noted as Lois Fairgate. Hotel staff who served her recalled that she did seem to be with a man, but there's no record of him, and police seem to have not bothered with the CCTV.

Nobody ever noted the woman as a missing person, her body was never claimed. She eventually was buried in an unmarked grave. The only leads in the case appear to be that, she was probably born between 1970 and 1972, based on modern analysis of radioactive isotopes in her body, she was European, and she spoke with an East German accent according to hotel staff.

Officially, a lonely young woman booked into a hotel, and for reasons only she knew, killed herself 3 days later. Theories outside of that have ranged from drug dealer, to high end prostitute, to the most popular theory, spy.

The spy theory has been lent credence by the circumstances. Labels removed from clothes are a common thing for intelligence agencies to do - it's one less thing to trace. The gun having been thoroughly anonymised suggests it had been prepared by someone who knew what they were doing. The fact one of the few possessions the woman seemed to have was a number of bullets suggests at least nefarious activity. It's even been suggested that the double locked door from the inside, the long periods away from the hotel room and the fact the woman is seemingly completely anonymous, never having been reported missing or claimed after her death, all suggest a spy.

What does seem unlikely is that it's the official verdict of suicide.

Interestingly Norway has a couple more of these cases - anonymous deaths in odd circumstances. In the 70s the partially burnt remains of a woman was found in a remote valley, with poison in her system, and later suitcases belonging to her were found with various items like wigs, multiple currencies, fake glasses. And in 1987 a completely unknown man in his 50s, again with no labels in his clothes and no ID, was found dead on some train tracks, the only things of any lead being done of his belongings being tied to Germany and USSR.

Edited January 12, 2021 by Chindie

[mjmooney]

Scandi noir. 

[lapal_fan]

Twas on unsolved mysteries on the netflix. 

[lapal_fan]

56 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

Scandi noir. 

 

 

[It's Your Round]

Ever wondered why parents tell kids not to pick dandelions or they’ll wet the bed?

The French word for dandelion is pissenlit.

The French phrase 'en lit' means 'in bed'.

So now ya know

 

[Dr_Alimantado]

2 hours ago, It's Your Round said:

Ever wondered why parents tell kids not to pick dandelions or they’ll wet the bed?

The French word for dandelion is pissenlit.

The French phrase 'en lit' means 'in bed'.

So now ya know

 

In a pleasing bit of symmetry the English word dandelion derives from the french “dent de lion” (lion’s tooth) due to the jagged shape of the leaves.