Did You Know?

February 11, 2006 6:16 AM

Did you know that Marilyn Monroe was colorblind? Me neither. How about November being national gingivitis awareness month? No? Well, I'm sure I'm the last person to find out that the standard 52-card deck was originally used as a calendar before it was used for gaming purposes. And that Gershwin is the only composer to have written an orchestral part for the conch shell. Oh, oh, and you know why you close your eyes when you sneeze? Turns out it's because otherwise the pressure behind them would be sufficient to pop them out of their sockets. Don't believe me?
posted by Gator (39 comments total)

I am colorblind as well.
This, of course, makes Marilyn and I soulmates.
Born too late! Born too late!
posted by bradth27 at 6:32 AM on February 11, 2006

Did you know they took the word gullible out of the dictionary?
posted by Rhomboid at 6:35 AM on February 11, 2006

Born too late! Born too late!

We can help.
posted by sonofsamiam at 6:45 AM on February 11, 2006

• The community site MetaFilter was created under the auspices of Monster.com. It served as a peer-reviewed job board for three months, and was considered a failure before ex-Monster employee Mathew Haughey purchased the site's domain for eight hundred dollars.
posted by Smart Dalek at 6:53 AM on February 11, 2006

In 1983, after his team lost the World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals, Bud Selig instructed the team trainer to "beef up the players." An extensive and secret dosing of players was instituted during spring training. The team won all but two games there, but completely fell apart during the season and finished 5th in their division. It was later discovered that starting May 17th the trainer accidently switched the Human Growth Hormone for estrogen. While their finish disappointed the fans, the wives of the players reported their husbands were more giving, calm, and patient at home. At the time, The Milwaukee Water System was blamed for the team's demise since that was the summer the system started flouridating the city's water.

And that's why the MLB Player's Association now has a contract rider that requires four 500ml bottles of Evian be chilled for each player before each game.
posted by ?! at 6:54 AM on February 11, 2006

great! I was having a hard time finding worthless stuff to read online, and now that problem's solved. thanks.
posted by Busithoth at 6:57 AM on February 11, 2006

The playing-cards-as-calendar idea was actually explored in Jostein Gaarder's The Solitaire Mystery (the whole plot revolves around playing cards in some form). It was actually very logical; at the very least, intriguing.
posted by divabat at 7:02 AM on February 11, 2006

Eating mints makes you infirtile. That is why the people in chewing-gum adverts look so virginal.
posted by asok at 7:09 AM on February 11, 2006

infertile
posted by asok at 7:10 AM on February 11, 2006

posted by cenoxo at 7:12 AM on February 11, 2006

If you remove a man's intestines and stretch them the length of a football field, that man will die.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 7:29 AM on February 11, 2006

Woody Guthrie put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp while at Brooklyn State Hospital. Bob Dylan wrote a harrowing ballad at his bedside raising questions of authorship and authenticity but unable to set it to No More Auction Block, he let his friend Barry Mann record it.
posted by allen.spaulding at 7:33 AM on February 11, 2006

did you know you can get high from smoking banana peels?
posted by pyramid termite at 7:48 AM on February 11, 2006

Bob Barker??? I don't get it.
posted by The Deej at 7:49 AM on February 11, 2006

marilyn monroe didn't marry henry miller
posted by wakko at 7:50 AM on February 11, 2006

Did you know taking too many hits of Acid (or ecstacy) could make you think you are a glass of orange juice? If this happens, you will spend the whole night trying not to fall (or "spill yourself out").
posted by piratebowling at 8:09 AM on February 11, 2006

Drew Carey killed a guy and paid to cover it up.
posted by PlusDistance at 8:15 AM on February 11, 2006

Heardsaid

[it's a self link, but worth pointing out in context of the linked blog. They're kind of similar really. I'm shocked and stunned ...]
posted by feelinglistless at 8:18 AM on February 11, 2006

Paris Hilton suffers from syphillis of the ear.
posted by DenOfSizer at 8:22 AM on February 11, 2006

[... although they started in September 2004 and we began in November ... I had no idea this other site existed ...]
posted by feelinglistless at 8:24 AM on February 11, 2006

Cherie Blair has six fingers on her left hand.
posted by greycap at 8:25 AM on February 11, 2006

From Heardsaid...

UPS trucks are painted white on the top in an effort to reflect sunlight, and keep the cabin cool.

Ah, that's good.
posted by 327.ca at 8:38 AM on February 11, 2006

Since 1997, Brookhaven National Laboratory has been running a high energy particle physics experiment that has a 1 in 5000 chance of creating a small black hole that would consume the lab, Long Island and the Earth in a matter of moments.

You forgot Poland.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:26 AM on February 11, 2006

Gullible.info is a black-ops project started by the DOD as a grassroots effort to spread high-volume, small-scale disinformation, in an effort to mask the larger-scale disinformation spread by the Bush Administration.

posted by mkultra at 9:27 AM on February 11, 2006

Did you know they took the word gullible out of the dictionary?

One of the most embarassing moments of my life: someone told me that and I actually reached for the dictionary. Thanks for reviving that hideous memory, Rhomboid.
posted by CunningLinguist at 9:36 AM on February 11, 2006

Did you know embarrassing is spelled with a double r and a double s?

If you multiplied together all the fingers everyone on earth has on their left hand, the answer would be zero long before you finished.

The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing.

“Stewardesses” is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand, assuming you have a left hand.

If a rooster is not present in a flock of hens, a hen will often take the role, stop laying, begin to crow, and stop using the word “stewardesses”.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:48 AM on February 11, 2006

actually, "tetraterrarecastratedfredsavage" is the longest word typed with the left hand.
posted by stenseng at 10:32 AM on February 11, 2006

That explains all those black and white photos...
posted by phrenq at 10:40 AM on February 11, 2006

Uhm. Sneezing won't make your eyes pop out of their sockets. Or at least, snopes says it won't.

http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/sneeze.asp

some people do manage to sneeze with their eyes open, and they don't go blind from it. Eye sockets are made of bone, they aren't connected to the nasal passages, and there are no muscles behind the eyes that contract when you sneeze, so there's really no mechanism involved in a sneeze that could force your eyes out of their sockets. Even if there were, human eyelids aren't particularly strong, so simply closing your eyes during a sneeze wouldn't be sufficient to keep them in their sockets if a sneeze truly had enough power to dislodge them. (In any case, some people — due to circumstances such as birth defects or injury — do not have eyelids. Were the "eye-popping" rumor true, all of those people would have to spend their lives in constant mortal fear of sneezing.)

And no mention of calendars in the wikipedia entry on Playing Cards, though they do mention that the standard deck was thought to have been first used by the Mameluke's in the 1300's.

I'm not convinced. Seems like another dubious source of information. Doesn't mean you couldn't cite it in a bibliography for a college term paper (in the US at least).
posted by einer at 11:44 AM on February 11, 2006

I'm not sure what to make of einer's comment.
posted by graventy at 11:53 AM on February 11, 2006

Dear einer, please put down the US-bashing stick and RTF website address. Thank you.
posted by booksandlibretti at 12:11 PM on February 11, 2006

• In many societies, the word gullible is a synonym for streamlined.
Many places on the internet are considered gullible for their remarkably high bandwidth.
posted by Smart Dalek at 1:32 PM on February 11, 2006

This website scares me. I'm afraid I'm going to quote one of these facts sometime.
posted by Citizen Premier at 1:33 PM on February 11, 2006

CunningLinguist, we should form a support group for similarly gullible people.
posted by Citizen Premier at 1:40 PM on February 11, 2006

snopes, via einer: Eye sockets are made of bone, they aren't connected to the nasal passages, and there are no muscles behind the eyes that contract when you sneeze, so there's really no mechanism involved in a sneeze that could force your eyes out of their sockets.

I've had air leak out of the corner of my eyeball when sneezing before, so I don't know that I believe this part.
posted by pompomtom at 3:45 PM on February 11, 2006

corner of my eyeball sorry, corner of eye socket, past the eyeball. It's not a pleasnt experience.
posted by pompomtom at 3:46 PM on February 11, 2006

That's very interesting, einer. Say, did you know that Mister Ed was actually a zebra, and not a horse? Snopes teaches me something new every darn day.
posted by Gator at 5:26 PM on February 11, 2006

Cherie Blair was born Polly Dactill in the small town of Fausthandschuh, Michigan.
posted by rob511 at 5:28 PM on February 11, 2006

Tom Delay cannot defecate without an enema.
posted by Citizen Premier at 3:11 AM on February 12, 2006