Topic: Interesting Facts

[Skhilled (OP)]

Duncan Hines was a real person.

Stroll through the baking aisle at any grocery store, and you’ll likely find instant cake mixes and containers of frosting emblazoned with the Duncan Hines name. But unlike other boxed mix competitors (looking at you, Betty Crocker), Hines was a real-life food personality whose name was once synonymous with fine dining. For a man who couldn’t cook, Hines became a surprisingly well-trusted authority on American cuisine for nearly three decades, all thanks to an iron stomach and fearless forays into restaurant kitchens.

Born in Kentucky in 1880, Hines worked as a traveling salesman from the ’20s through the ’40s, a life that didn’t allow for regular home-cooked meals. While putting anywhere from 40,000 to 60,000 miles on the road each year, he kept a meticulous journal of his dining experiences, listing noteworthy restaurants that provided budget-friendly dishes. But Hines didn’t just review meals — at a time when health codes and food inspections weren’t yet standard, he went so far as to audit kitchens himself, monitoring food safety practices, cleanliness, and even examining the garbage.

Flooded with requests from fellow travelers, Hines attached a list of 167 restaurants to his 1935 Christmas card. A year later, he self-published Adventures in Good Eating, a comprehensive compendium of U.S. eateries that was updated annually until 1962. With each edition, Hines solidified his reputation for honest critiques, in part because he refused payment for good reviews (though he did profit from renting signs bearing his stamp of approval to restaurants, and once accepted a gifted Cadillac from a happy restaurant owner). By 1949, Hines had teamed up with businessman Roy Park to launch Hines-Park Foods, which sold under the Duncan Hines label — moving the reviewer’s name from print to the containers of more than 250 grocery items. The brand’s iconic boxed cake mixes debuted in July 1951 in just two flavors  — vanilla and devil’s food. Today, the cake mixes are beloved by many, even if the man who originally helped create them has been forgotten.

[Ken]

Tasted many a cake with his name on it! 

[Skhilled (OP)]

Scientists can figure out how old whales are by looking at their earwax.

Whales are some of the most majestic creatures on the planet. The blue whale is the largest animal to ever exist, the bowhead whale can live for more than 200 years, and a few humpback whales saved the future of humanity in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. In fact, these creatures are so amazing that even their earwax is a vital tool — at least for helping scientists understand the mysterious mammals themselves. Take, for instance, the 10-inch-long earplug of an adult blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus). Cetologists — scientists who study whales — can cut into a plug of earwax and learn the whale’s age, much as dendrochronologists do with tree rings. Earwax from blue whales (and other large whales such as humpbacks) forms rings, known as “laminae,” every six months, which give scientists a snapshot of the creature’s entire life through cycles of summer feeding and winter migration.

And these waxy earplugs can tell scientists more than just a whale’s age. Earplugs also capture a chronological “chemical biography” that shows what chemicals and pollutants were found in the animal’s body throughout its life, including levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Scientists have compared whale cortisol levels with whaling data, using records from 1870 to 2016, and found an unmistakable positive correlation. The only discrepancy was during World War II, when whale stress levels increased despite a decrease in whaling overall (scientists assume increased military activity was the likely culprit). Despite a near-international moratorium on whaling in the 1980s, whales still exhibit high cortisol levels thanks to increased ship noise, climate change, and other factors. But with the help of whale earwax, scientists can at least continue to examine the health of these majestic beasts and the oceans they inhabit.

[Skhilled (OP)]

Medieval Scotland had a practice similar to modern battle rap, called “flyting.”

Today, sharp-tongued verbal jousting primarily exists in the art form known as battle rap, in which two rappers take lyrical aim at each other with intricate (and often devastating) rhymes. During these battles, no insult — artistic or otherwise — is off-limits, and that’s a sentiment that 15th- and early 16th-century Scottish poets might have shared. Medieval Scottish men of words linguistically barbed each other in a practice known as “flyting” (based on the Old English word flītan, meaning “to quarrel”), often as entertainment for the Scottish king and his royal court. The most famous of these “battles” that still survives, known as “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie,” featured Scottish poets William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy entertaining the court of James IV in the early 16th century. Among its many famous attributes, it’s the first recorded moment of scatalogical humor. (One of the more family-friendly examples of its insults, translated from Middle Scots, reads: “Grovel for grace, dog-face, or I shall chase you all winter; Howl and yowl, owl.”)

The biting lyricism of flyting wasn’t restricted to Scotland, of course. Ancient Irish professional poets, called filid, were also known for their insults, and a form of flyting can be found in Old English literature as well as the famous Norse text the Poetic Edda (in which the trickster god Loki goes on the verbal offensive against his fellow deities). Similar art forms can be found in Japan, Nigeria, parts of the Middle East, and elsewhere. Although flyting didn’t survive the Middle Ages, its influence can be seen in works ranging from Shakespeare to James Joyce. Thankfully, the birth of the rap battle in the 1980s once again provided a much-needed venue for settling serious artistic beef — and it’s been a fixture of hip-hop culture ever since.

[Ken]

Learned a lot about whales that I didn't know and a little more about the 'verbal warfare' history. 

[Skhilled (OP)]

10 of the World’s Strangest Borders

https://www.interestingfacts.com/strange-border-facts/Yg64cXnUVAAGtuZh

[Ken]

7of 10
A Tiny Island Changes Hands Between France and Spain Every Six Months

has changed more than 700 times.

I thought that one was interesting, because on the one hand it seems to be just a random bit of pomp, but if it keeps the peace then it is well worth the effort. 

[Skhilled (OP)]

Yes, I thought it was interesting too.

[Skhilled (OP)]

September is the most common month for birthdays in the U.S.

The most common birthday in America is September 9, and the second-most common is September 19. In fact, nine of the 10 most popular U.S. birthdays fall between September 9 and September 20 — making September the most common month for birthdays in the U.S. overall, at least based on data from 1994 to 2014. The reason for September's popularity may be fairly simple. Flipping the calendar back nine months brings us to December, when people tend to have more time off for the holidays and thus more reason to celebrate in a variety of ways. In addition to being in good company, fall babies are blessed with good fortune and/or good genes, as people born in October are far more likely to live until 100, and those born in September and November often live longer as well (although scientists still aren’t sure exactly why).

On the other end of the spectrum are the year’s biggest holidays, with December 25 being the least common birthday — in the 20 years of data compiled by data journalist Matt Stiles, there were even fewer babies born on Christmas than on February 29. Rounding out the bottom four are January 1, December 24, and July 4, respectively. One reason for this is that so many births are scheduled, either by cesarean or induced labor, and doctors generally don’t schedule births on the holidays when they may not be working. This might also shed some light on why September births are so popular, according to some — with no major holidays that month aside from Labor Day, there’s less reason for soon-to-be parents to worry about hospitals being short-staffed the way they might be on Christmas or New Year’s Day.

But...I have my own theory.  Let's see...it's very cold out, not much to do, you probably alone with someone and trying to stay warm... 

[Ken]

September is the most common month for birthdays in the U.S.
But...I have my own theory.  Let's see...it's very cold out, not much to do, you probably alone with someone and trying to stay warm... 

 

[Skhilled (OP)]

I'm SOOOOO jealous! I've always wanted to do this!   

7 Famous Voice Actors You May Not Recognize (But You’ve Definitely Heard)

https://www.interestingfacts.com/voice-actors-facts/YvrUN0KJ8wAItdgQ?liu=bfb99dadf51e2d85f3443cda78c57e07

However, I am very surprised that Mark Hamill is in that mix.

[Skhilled (OP)]

Dung beetles navigate using the Milky Way.

e tend to think of dung beetles as lowly creatures, right down to their name. In spite of their earthbound status, however, they do something downright cosmic that no other animal we know of does: navigate using the Milky Way. While “dancing” atop their balls of dung, they orient themselves by looking up at the night sky, catching a glimpse of the bright strip of light our humble galaxy generates, and then moving relative to its position. They do this by taking what scientists call “celestial snapshots” and storing the images in their tiny little dung-beetle minds, a surprisingly fast process that allows them to hightail it away from the dung piles they scavenge. (As for daytime gathering, they move using special photoreceptors in their eyes that allow them to see a symmetrical pattern of polarized light emanating from the sun.) Doing so quickly is imperative — there’s a lot of competition for dung out there, and daddy dung beetles need to move quickly to bury the excrement, which they later feed to their babies. The insects move rapidly in straight lines away from the dung piles, which seems to minimize the likelihood of meeting other creatures of the same kind and getting into a dung-related squabble.

https://www.interestingfacts.com/fact/630e795969efab0008c03998?liu=bfb99dadf51e2d85f3443cda78c57e07#630e765669efab0008c022a9

[Ken]

 

[Skhilled (OP)]

7 Not-So Elementary Facts About the Origins of School Supplies

I thought this was a very interesting read.

https://www.interestingfacts.com/school-supply-origins/YwP0akKJ8wAItdmt

[Skhilled (OP)]

There are no bridges across the Amazon River.

When it comes to the Amazon River, there’s no such thing as water under the bridge. The idiom simply doesn’t apply there, as no bridges cross the Amazon River despite it being at least 4,000 miles long. This isn’t because the idea has never occurred to anyone — it would just be extremely difficult to build any. The Amazon has both a dry season and a rainy season, and during the latter its waters rise 30 feet, causing three-mile-wide crossings to grow by a factor of 10 as previously dry areas are submerged. The river bank itself is also in a near-constant state of erosion due to how soft the sediment it consists of is, and there’s no shortage of debris floating in the water.

Beyond all those logistical hurdles, there simply isn’t much use for bridges across the massive river. For one thing, there are few roads on either side of the Amazon that need to be connected. The river is, of course, in the middle of a dense rainforest, the vast majority of which is sparsely populated. Other long rivers have numerous crossings, however: The Nile has nine bridges in Cairo alone, for instance, and more than 100 bridges have been built across China’s Yangtze River in the last three decades. For now, boats and ferries are the preferred method of crossing the Amazon, and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

https://www.cntraveler.com/story/why-the-amazon-river-cant-be-crossed-by-bridge