The basenji is a breed of dog that cannot bark.
The basenji is a breed of dog that cannot bark.
The first mass-produced typewriter was made by the gun manufacturer, Reminington.
Not only did Fredric Remmington produce the first typewriter, one of his first compeditors was L.C. Smith a famous producer of Shotguns and partner in Smith-Corrona.
However this is not too amazing as Remmington was the first to make firearms with interchangeable parts. This allowed for the first production line and the first successfull mass production line of anything.
See even pen pushers owe their success to a man with a gun, as he enabled them to write in a fashion that one could actually read.
Chip
Behind the Legend
You'll be pleased to hear that this is not true. The only way one could reasonably say that a person eats eight spiders a year is by assuming, a) that you can add up all the spider parts found in typical foodstuffs (e.g., vegetables, rice, hamburger buns) until you reach the mass of a spider and call that one spider, b) that all spiders are as large as medium-size tarantulas, when in fact most of the spiders eaten each year are significantly smaller, and c) that spiders that crawl into your mouth while you are asleep don't count as having been eaten. But without making such wild assumptions, one can only say that the average person eats 10-12 whole spiders a year, and some two to three pounds of miscellaneous spider parts
The glass lizard looks like a snake but is actually a legless lizard. The name comes from the fact that when endangered, it can shed it's tail into several pieces and escape while the predator is eating it's tail.
DragonlensmanWV N.A.O.L.
"There is nothing patriotic about hating your government or pretending you can hate your government but love your country."
Andrew Johnson was buried with his head resting on a copy of the U.S Consititution.
Sean: Do they dig him up and change it as the courts re-write it?
Originally Posted by chip anderson
Uh-Oh, starting to sound like the old "digging up Beethoven" joke.:D:D
DragonlensmanWV N.A.O.L.
"There is nothing patriotic about hating your government or pretending you can hate your government but love your country."
:bbg::):bbg:
This manganese-rich nugget or "nodule" was recovered from a depth of 17,000 feet - more than three miles down - from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Metallic oxide mineral deposits like this are known to carpet large areas of the ocean bottom. Some are as large as footballs. The nodules are laden with manganese, iron, cobalt, copper, nickel and other valuable metal content.
During the early 1970s the possibility of mining the sea floor for these rich metal ores garnered considerable attention in the U.S. and a number of other countries. Ocean mining was the topic of numerous media reports. The National Science Foundation (among others) loosened its purse strings and looked with new favor upon grant proposals from scientists and engineers with ideas of how to tap the economic "gold mine" waiting deep below.
It all started with a public disclosure that eccentric billionaire and business tycoon Howard Hughes, whose holdings included the Hughes Tool Company, had contracted with Los Angeles based Global Marine to design the Hughes Glomar Explorer: a 63,000 ton, 619-foot long ocean-going platform of unprecedented design and capabilities. The Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company delivered the ship in June, 1974. The costs for its design and construction surpassed $350 million. Press releases rounded out the story for the public: The ship was going to be used by the Summa Corporation for deep sea mining operations, starting with the recovery of manganese nodules in commercially significant quantities.
The venture was called "DOMP": short for "Deep Ocean Mining Project".
It was one of the CIA's most carefully crafted cover stories.
The only undersea deposit of metals that Glomar Explorer was ever intended to "mine" was a Soviet Navy submarine that had sunk by accident. The CIA hoped to retrieve the water-logged sub, which was thought to be otherwise relatively intact, from the bottom of the Pacific. The submarine's encrypted communications gear and battery of nuclear-tipped missiles were to be painstakingly disassembled and analyzed by U.S. military experts, revealing a very different kind of "gold mine": a gold mine of new intelligence about Russian military capabilities. It would be recorded in the annals of international espionage as "Project Jennifer".
The Glomar Explorer was revolutionary in its station-keeping technologies; i.e. its ability to maintain an exact, fixed location at sea without the hindrance of having to be anchored to the seabed. This was one of the special requirements of its unprecedented mission.
A large mechanical grasping device or "claw" (known to the machinery-smitten engineers and operators as "Clementine") was designed to be lowered all the way to the ocean floor, 16,500 feet below, grasp the sunken submarine hull, and then lift it all the way up to the ship. It worked by threading steel pipes together in the same way as oil drilling rigs, descending by one 60-foot long pipe section after another. After a successful capture with the claw, the process would be reversed, and the pipes would be unthreaded to raise the captured materials.
The entire submarine (or more likely, just a large section thereof) was to be lifted all the way upwards into a huge flooded compartment in the middle of the ship, called the "Moon Pool". The outer doors of the Moon Pool would then be closed, creating a secluded compartment to contain the salvaged materials, and the seawater would be pumped out. The Moon Pool was the final element of the CIA plan to conceal the entire salvage attempt from detection by any nearby surveillance ships or by overflying aircraft or spy satellites.
The Los Angeles Times revealed the secret operation in 1975. After news stories that the CIA had approached the media to convince them to discontinue publication, Harriet Ann Phillippi, a journalist, used the FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act) to ask the CIA to disclose any records about its contacts with the media. The CIA responded by refusing to either confirm or deny the existence of such records. The CIA declared that if there were, in fact, any such records, they were classified.
It was the first time that the CIA ever went public with a statement that it would "neither confirm or deny ...".
A new idiom had been added to the language.
Amid the legal wrangling that ensued after the publication by the Los Angeles Times, Global Marine executives were obliged to testify in court that the ship was not designed for commercial mining operations.The ship's enormous lifting capacity was intriguing, but no one could identify another practical use for it, in view of its staggering costs of operation. In 1976, GSA (General Services Administration) invited businesses and other interested parties to submit proposals for leasing the ship. GSA received a total of just seven bids.
Defense giant Lockheed Missiles and Space came the closest to putting an acceptable package on the table, but they couldn't come up with the financing.
Scientists rallied in support of the Glomar Explorer, urging President Ford to maintain the ship as a national asset, but neither the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) or any other agency was amenable to picking up the formidable tab for maintaining and operating the one-of-a-kind vessel.
To add insult to injury, GSA received a bid of $1.98 from an individual who "planned" to seek a government contract to salvage nuclear reactors from two U.S. submarines; presumably, submarines that were known to have gone down.
A Nebraska college student offered more: Two dollars even.
By year's end (1976), the ship was designated the USNS Glomar Explorer (T-AG-193) and drydocked as part of the Navy's reserve or "mothball" fleet.
From 1978 to 1980, the ship was reactivated by a private consortium, led by Lockheed Missiles and Space and including Global Marine and units of Standard Oil Company of Indiana and Royal Dutch Shell. In a kind of "Life Imitates Fiction" scenario (the fiction having been the CIA cover story), the vessel was put to sea to test its capabilities for deep sea mining, and specifically, the recovery of manganese nodules from the ocean bed. This may have been when the ship recovered the manganese nodule that is pictured at the very top of this post.
In 1997 the Glomar Explorer was reactivated for the second time, after 17 years at drydock. It underwent an extensive conversion that transformed it into an ultra-deepwater drillship for the petroleum industry. Under a lease agreement with the Navy, Global Marine's oil recovery unit stationed the ship in the Gulf of Mexico, where it set a new industry record by drilling to a depth of 7,718 feet below sea level. The ship is currently operated by GlobalSantaFe Corporation under the name GSF Explorer. It's on station near Angola, where it's expected to support oil recovery operations until the end of 2009.
GSF Explorer passing under a bridge in Istanbul.
But what about that Russian submarine?
The U.S. has never released an official report for public scrutiny, although it's been 33 years since the salvage attempt and 15 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It's indisputable that parts of the submarine were recovered.
During the salvage operation, the CIA (anticipating, perhaps, a future era of improved U.S.-Russia relations) made a video record of memorial services that were conducted within the seclusion of the Moon Pool for six Russian sailors whose bodies were recovered from the wreckage. The video was quietly presented to the Russian government about the same time or shortly after the demise of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. In 2003 excerpts from this video were included in TV segments about Project Jennifer, including a Cold War submarine episode of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's NOVA series.
Some accounts have it that only a small forward section of the submarine was ever recovered. According to these reports, the salvaged materials did not include either the nuclear-tipped missiles or the cryptography equipment that were the focus of the CIA's interest. By other accounts, however, the operation is said to have retrieved both nuclear-armed and chemically explosive torpedoes, cryptography gear, operating manuals and other documents and an assortment of electronic components that were of significant import to U.S. military experts.
And then there are those who have reported that the entire submarine was recovered virtually intact ...
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_...lomar_Explorer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project...ts_cover_story
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USNS_Gl...%28T-AG-193%29
http://longburn.blogspot.com/2005/11...e-nodules.html
http://www.americanheritage.com/arti...999_3_36.shtml
http://www.btinternet.com/~derek.mac...vessels01e.htm
http://www.casgen.com/pr/pr970003.htm
http://www.chesterchallenge.org/past/sanders/sra.html
http://www.coltoncompany.com/newsand...ws/2006/09.htm
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~adg/adg-psoimages.html#mn_nodule
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1341110
http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/jennifer.htm
http://www.globalsantafe.com/index_fl.html
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=480527
http://www.rigzone.com/data/rig_detail.asp?rig_id=272
Last edited by rinselberg; 08-13-2007 at 09:12 PM.
A gifted parrot that learned to mimic English words to the extent of demonstrating that he could count from zero to six, discriminate among 7 different colors, 5 different shapes and 50 different objects and even express frustration with repetitive scientific tests, has died, after 30 years of helping scientists better understand the capabilities of the avian brain.
Alex, the world's smartest bird. See MSNBC for the complete report.
Last edited by rinselberg; 09-18-2007 at 05:03 AM.
Released in 1969, "Krakatoa, East of Java" starred Maximilian Schell and Brian Keith. It superimposed a fictional story against the background of the legendary catastrophe of 1883, the largest and most destructive volcanic eruption in modern history. The movie was created with state-of-the-art cinematic technology.
Krakatoa is in the Sunda Strait, immediately to the west of the island of Java.
After the mistake was recognized, the original film title was retained; partly because the powers that were thought that "East" sounded more exotic than "West" in that context. And partly, I guess, because they didn't want to undertake the trouble of renaming the film.
Of course, they could have renamed it "Krakatoa, South of Sumatra", but that would have been a step backwards as well. "Java" rolls off the tongue more easily than "Sumatra".
rinsel's latest OptiBoard Word of the Day! lets you experience a time when popular jazz tunes went to war for the "dark side" in a rare multimedia presentation.
Last edited by rinselberg; 09-18-2007 at 04:54 AM.
Those who hungered for sausage during the Great War (1914-1918) were often out of luck. Especially those in Austria, Poland and German-occupied France and Belgium. Under German authority, the manufacture of sausages was forbidden in these areas. And not just out of caprice. Sausage casings are made from the intestines of slaughtered livestock, and during the Great War, those intestines were in great demand for another use: as raw material for the manufacture of goldbeater's skin.
Goldbeater's skin is a parchment-like material that acquired its name from its usefulness in the manufacture of ultra-thin gold leaf by "beating down" gold.
During the Great War, goldbeater's skin was sorely needed by the German war industry. It was made into a fabric that was used to construct and repair the hydrogen-filled buoyancy cells of Germany's Zeppelins: The rigid but lighter than air ships of the German armed forces. And it was needed in enormous quantities.
A Zeppelin crew at war ... artist's conception. Select ("click") to enlarge.
A Zeppelin crew at war ... photograph. Select ("click") to enlarge.
The Germans started using goldbeater's skin for this purpose before the war. At first, it was only one of a few different fabrics that were used. It was combined with other fabrics. But after the war started, goldbeater's skin became the German fabric of choice for the Zeppelins. And so the making of sausages was strictly regulated and outright forbidden in many areas under German control. Butchers were required to send the intestines of slaughtered livestock to wartime collection agencies. Thousands of women were employed during the war for the stomach-churning job of scraping and cleaning the intestines.
The year before the war (1913), a German Zeppelin was photographed after landing in France. It's clear that the Zeppelins were already enormous. Select ("click") to enlarge.
In the years after the Great War, the Germans continued to use enormous quantities of goldbeater's skin throughout the dawn of a new era of large, luxurious passenger-service Zeppelins. The construction of a Zeppelin or dirigible typically consumed the innards of about half a million cattle. The Zeppelin company used the guts of several million animals per year. And the British followed suit. There are photographs from 1927, during the construction of Britain's Airship R101 passenger-service dirigible, of ranks of women performing the revolting task of preparing the intestines of over 100,000 oxen.
Airship R101. Select ("click") to enlarge.
In 1930, Airship R101 encountered turbulent weather over a mountainous area of France. It crashed and its buoyancy generating hydrogen gas burned. Only six of the 54 passengers and crew survived. Thus ended Airship R101's first and last operational flight. Up to that point, it was only considered to be undergoing test flights.
As the years went by, dirigible builders turned to other raw materials. In 1931 Time Magazine reported on the U.S. Navy's giant new dirigible Akron. The article remarked that the quantity of gelatin-latex treated cotton fabric, developed by Goodyear-Zeppelin and used in the Akron, was substituting for goldbeater's skin that would have required the intestines of 1.5 million cattle.
U.S.N. Akron. Select ("click") image to enlarge.
Just recently, the case of Airship R101 and its tragic demise was analyzed from a modern perspective by a group of NASA flight systems engineers.
The charred remains of Airship R101 near Beauvais, France (1930). Select ("click") image to enlarge.
The results were published in April, 2007 as one of NASA's System Failure Case Studies under the title "Innovation Pushed Too Far Too Fast"; available on line.
All that stuff about dirigibles and livestock intestines was originally published in 1922, in the French journal L'Aeronautique, under the title "Balloon Fabrics Made Of Goldbeater's Skin" and credited to one Capt. L. Chollet of the S.T. ae. (Whatever that stands for ...) The French was translated into 13 pages of antiquated looking typewritten English under the auspices (and bearing the official stamp) of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the organization that eventually gave rise to NASA. The 13 typewritten pages were scanned, converted into PDF format and stored on the Internet, in an archive domain. I found it earlier today, prompted by a segment that I viewed on cable TV. I found it here.
National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics; 1915-1958.
Long live the past!
Last edited by rinselberg; 11-11-2007 at 01:27 PM.
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Chicago: 1929. Reinhardt H. Schwimmer, often referenced as "Dr." Schwimmer (he wasn't), was a 30-year old eyeglass fitter (or optician, as we usually say here) with a hotel residence and an office on Chicago's North Side. He was more interested in gambling and hanging out with members of Chicago's notorious North Side Gang than he was in pursuing the trade of his business office, where he actually spent little time. He liked to brag about town that he was centrally involved in the gang's bootleg liquor operations and that he could have anyone in Chicago "whacked' if he wanted to do so.
Schwimmer's bragging had little to do with reality. He just liked hanging around with the gang members, and they found his company tolerable. Schwimmer had never been arrested or charged with any criminal offense. He had divorced his first wife and married again, this time into "money", but his second wife got fed up with his indolent ways and divorced him in 1928.
If that were all there were to his story, he probably wouldn't be recorded in any particular Internet archive. But on the morning of a cold, winter Thursday, Schwimmer got "lucky". He decided it was time to pay his gangster cronies another social visit.
It was February 14, 1929: The feast day of St. Valentine.
And the rest is history ...
Source: Chicago Police Department Homicide Record.One of the seven Moran gangsters who were lined up facing a brick wall and mowed down with machine guns and shotguns in a garage at 2122 N. Clark Street at 10:40 A.M., 2/14/29.
That's the way the Chicago Police Department recorded the late Reinhardt Schwimmer in their homicides file.
Schwimmer would probably have liked being described as "one of the seven Moran gangsters". He was the only one of the seven victims with no prior criminal record. George "Bugs" Moran, a name that's far better known to history than Reinhardt Schwimmer, was the last significant chieftain of the North Side Gang - and a vexing obstacle to Al Capone, who wanted to expand his South Side operations into the North Siders' territory.
According to Wikipedia, it's not clear what the North Side gang members were up to that morning at the garage, or why Moran himself wasn't there when the brazen gangland hit of legend went down. Six of the seven victims, including Schwimmer, were dressed in fashionable suits that seem to discount the widely circulated theory that the gang had assembled with the expectation of meeting and unloading a truck shipment of bootlegged whiskey.
The other man found dead at the scene was John May, a one-time safe-blower turned auto mechanic. May was there to fix one of the gang's broken down vehicles and was dressed accordingly. He calculated that his relatively minor role in the gang's activities as the North Siders' "Mr. Goodwrench" made him an unlikely target for the seemingly endless gang-on-gang violence that had taken root in the streets of Chicago since the passage of Prohibition a decade earlier.
http://www.myalcaponemuseum.com/id58.htmThe killers ... used two Thompson [submachine guns], one with a 50-round rotating drum magazine and one with a 20-round stick [magazine]. This theory [was] put out by Rick Mattix and Bill Helmer ... as the newspapers ... exaggerated the [number] of bullets found at the crime scene ... [about] 70 spent shells were recovered by investigators, leading to the theory that a Thompson with a 20-round stick was used along with another one with the 50-round drum, in case the somewhat less reliable rotating drum magazine jammed.
It's possible that the St. Valentine's Day Massacre might have been postponed, if not for another day then perhaps for another hour, but one of the assassination team's lookouts mistook another gang member whom he saw entering the garage for Bugs Moran, and that lookout gave the "go" signal. Some accounts say that the man who was mistaken for Moran was Albert Weinshank; but at least one account speculates that it may not have been Weinshank, but the aforementioned "optometrist" Reinhardt H. Schwimmer.
Countdown Iran
High profile OptiBoard poster rinselberg reports on the Pentagon's latest plans ...
Last edited by rinselberg; 11-11-2007 at 05:14 PM.
How'd they make chitlins?
MSNBC's Erin Burnett just reported that one of every four of the world's construction cranes are currently at work in "Dubai Inc.", the biggest boom town on Earth. Even bigger than China. Or bigger, at least, than any one place in China.
"They" send us oil. "We" send them Dollars (and Pound sterling and Euros). "They" invest heavily in "our" enterprises. And "they" are investing heavily in the United States.
This video segment (07:40) from June is still current: It's about the construction boom in Dubai. It doesn't go into the investment side of the story.
Coming to Southern California: Honda's FCX Clarity. It's the first fuel cell powered automobile to venture into the open U.S. marketplace. OptiBoard has a full report ...
Last edited by rinselberg; 11-20-2007 at 04:23 AM.
You'll need to part with a lot of money to buy our product!
There are consumer products for which "pitchmen" are not averse to letting on, directly or indirectly, that said product is costly to purchase. The products that come to (my) mind: Rolls-Royce automobiles, Rolex watches, Parfum V1 (that took a little research on my part); etc. You can no doubt think of some other examples.
But you probably wouldn't think of Chevrolet.
Chevrolet is GM's entry level division. GM's economy brand. You'd have to go way back in automotive history to find a time (if ever there was one) when it was otherwise.
Of course, there's the Corvette: a premium priced, eight cylinder, fiberglass body sports car. But I've never seen an ad that literally bragged about how high the asking price was for a new Corvette.
Yet it happened once. In 1973. But it wasn't the 1973 or 1974 Corvette.
It was the limited edition Cosworth Twin Cam Vega.
Cosworth Vega featured an all-aluminum, twin cam, fuel injected, four cylinder engine, designed by United Kingdom based Cosworth Engineering Ltd.
And Chevrolet was only too happy to announce that you could have one Cosworth Vega for the price of two Vega hatchbacks.
"ONE VEGA FOR THE PRICE OF TWO" ... select ("click") image to enlarge.
Dealers opened waiting lists and started accepting customer deposits in 1973. By then, the plan called for a 1974 public rollout, but it would be 1975 before the first Cosworth Vega was ready for delivery. They needed another year to modify the engine parameters until it passed the federally mandated requirements for fuel economy and tailpipe emissions. At the end of this process, the hand assembled Cosworth engines were good for a decidedly modest 120 horsepower, or about 30 more horsepower than the single cam, carburetor fed, mass produced Vega engines.
I found a 30-second video clip on MySpaceTV: The audio track is the sound of a 1975 Cosworth Twin Cam engine as the owner revs it up from idle.
Introduced with an MSRP of $5,916 (in 1975) the Cosworth Vega was, as advertised, almost double the price of a Vega hatchback and only $900 less than a baseline Corvette: The asking price was the highest ever for a new Chevrolet - not counting the Corvette.
Running from 1971 through 1977, GM's Vega/Astre assembly lines produced over 2 million cars. Of that number, the Cosworth Vega ran for just two years - from 1975 through 1976 - coming to only 3,508 cars total. (Astre was the Pontiac division's Vega "clone": a footnote to a model that was all told, only a mere footnote itself in automotive history.)
Falling short of the projected sales volume (of 5,000), the parts to assemble 1,500 additional Cosworth Vega engines went straight to the scrap heap.
Chevrolet Vega has all but vanished completely from public view - and thought, for that matter. But if you chance to catch sight of one (I did, the other day), it's likely to be one of the 3,508 Cosworth Twin Cam cars. These few have caught on to a certain degree as collector's items.
Just about all the others (more than 2 million cars) have long since gone to junkyards, and many - by all recorded accounts - not long after their first mile on the road.
Photo: 1976 Cosworth Twin Cam Vega. Select ("click") image to enlarge.
Sources:
Wikipedia
A Cosworth Vega History
Chevrolet Small Cars: Cobalt, Cavalier, Monza and Vega
Complete Vega History 1970-1977
Cosworth Vega Owners Association
Q. This is the "Strange Facts!" thread. What's the strangest fact about this post?
A. THIS POST.
See "syllogism". (Better yet: see a "shrink" ..?)
Last edited by rinselberg; 11-27-2007 at 11:53 PM.
Caveat emptor is always in order, especially if your neighborhood witch doctor promises you that genuine, custom-made tsantsa (shrunken head) for your living room curio collection by tomorrow at five.
It takes about six days to make a shrunken head (starting with a freshly separated head) using the authentic South American process developed by the Jivaro Indians of Ecuador, who were able to supply an increasing world demand for these once trendy collectibles during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
If you're a Do-It-Yourselfer, I have just the web page for you: It gives a brief, step-by-step description of how to make one. It also explains the spiritual significance of the tsantsa from the Jivaro perspective.
The same web page explores the effectiveness of the "revolutionary razor" (guillotine). Was it really the painless, instantaneous killing machine that its champions maintained? Or did the typical guillotine client experience a macabre interval or even a moment of conscious self-awareness, of inhabiting a living yet uniquely disembodied state of existence, after completing the "severance" process?
You can also catch up with the latest developments in brain and head transplants.
It's all on line at Strange Horizons under the title Guillotines and Body Transplants: the Severed Head in Fact and Fiction, by Fred Bush (September 2002).
If (on the odd chance) you are in any way appreciative of this post, you may also want to see another of my OptiBoard posts Talking Heads! and its companion post Wewelsburg: Castle of Evil.
March 4, 1970: Pioneering neurosurgeon Robert J. White has surgically attached the living head of one rhesus monkey to the living body of another. It was reported (by White) that upon regaining signs of activity, the transplanted head tried to bite Dr. White's finger.
White, who has been called a "modern day Dr. Frankenstein", accentuated the positive aspects of his research by calling the operation a "body transplant", rather than a "head transplant", which sounds even more grotesque, and nowadays, reminiscent of the 1983 Steve Martin film comedy "The Man With Two Brains". White was interviewed in March of 2007. The four-page transcript can be read on line at Litmus.
Last edited by rinselberg; 01-24-2008 at 06:12 PM.
Ever seen one of these thrown onto the ice by a fan at a hockey game?
I did. At a college hockey game. And until I was inspired just now to look it up, I thought that I had witnessed something unique. The home team was taking a pasting. There was a rowdy, well "marinated" group of fans in one section, and one guy threw an octopus onto the ice. Not during a break or timeout, but during actual play. A security guard went up there to eject him from the facility. And the other fans in that section were shouting (at the security guard) "Your mutha' wears aaaarmy boots ..." One of those timeless lines, I guess. I may need that to respond to some future posts like other ones I have seen, but that's just a hypothetical at the moment.
The first octopus landed on the ice during the [Detroit] Red Wings' 1952 Stanley Cup run ...
See About.com: Where did Red Wings' octopus tradition come from?
"I will work a work in your days which ye will not believe, though it be told you." --Habakkuk. Today's OptiBoard "Just Conversation" vintage post..
Last edited by rinselberg; 02-24-2008 at 06:31 AM.
Middle names are much in the news of late, starting with Barack Hussein Obama. Which has led TV commentators to recall Hilary Rodham and William Jefferson Clinton. Before that: Richard Milhous Nixon.
Which leads me to remark of one Robert Strange McNamara, Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968. Legacies: Vietnam. Computerization of the armed services. Adoption of the M-16 assault rifle as the armed services primary single-soldier long-barrel weapon.
"No, you may not use smilies."
--posted by an OptiBoarder who is no longer active
"I will work a work in your days which ye will not believe, though it be told you."--Habakkuk.
--today's vintage post
Professor Tudor Parfitt from London's School of Oriental and African Studies believes that the remnants of a large, 600-year old African wooden drum, last filmed inside a museum storage room in Zimbabwe, are the remains of a lineage of reproductions of religious artifacts that started with the legendary Ark of the Covenant.
Parfitt believes that this artifact is likely the closest that anyone will ever come to actually living the Indiana Jones fantasy and "discovering the long lost Ark of the Covenant".
This History Channel documentary covers the thousands of miles that Parfitt traveled in pursuing his theory.
Incredible?
Parfitt may merit some credibility. He also promoted the idea that the Lemba tribespeople of Zimbabwe are the descendants of one of the legendary lost tribes of ancient Israel. According to the documentary, there is convincing scientific DNA analysis now on record to support this "lost tribe" theory.
I haven't checked on that any further.
Last edited by rinselberg; 04-08-2008 at 09:16 PM.
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During World War ll .50 caliber ammunition belts for use in B-17's were 27 ft long. That's where the expression the 'whole 9 yards' was born.
"Always laugh when you can. It is a cheap medicine"
Lord Byron
Take a photo tour of Cape Cod and the Islands!
www.capecodphotoalbum.com
Although there are many charges and credits to the phrase, such as yours, there is not a definite answer from whence the phrases origins came. Some say it's how many yards to make a suit, others a wedding veil.
Don
HC is right on this one. However it think it was the Mustang (P-51) that held 27 feet of ammo. (And no, I didn't fly one.)
Chip
The information came from an article appearing in the Smithsonian Magazine having to do with the Normandy invasion. It should be an easy thing to verify- all one would need do is find a pre WWll reference to the expression.I have other fish to fry today but if you have the time, have at it! :)
"Always laugh when you can. It is a cheap medicine"
Lord Byron
Take a photo tour of Cape Cod and the Islands!
www.capecodphotoalbum.com
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