##EMBED## Weird Al Yankovic has a degree in architecture. After graduating from college with that degree, Weird Al decided he didn’t like architecture and so applied for a job at McDonald’s, but was ultimately rejected due to being overqualified. He later got a job in a mail room. Source
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##EMBED## The name “tetris” derives from the Greek prefix “tetra-” (because the game pieces are all tetrominoes) and the latter “-is” is from “tennis”, which is the primary creator of Tetris’, Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov, favorite sport. Tetrominoes are four element polyominoes. Polyominoes are known to have been used in puzzle games for at least 90 years (and most likely much further […]
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##EMBED## “Stadium” originally meant “a foot race” or “an ancient measure of length”, which was about a furlong or 1/8 of a Roman mile. The name was also affixed to any track that was one stadium in length. This eventually became any running track and, finally, as we use it today to refer to any large structure used for sporting […]
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##EMBED## “Super Bowl” and “Super Sunday” are trademarked by the NFL. As a result of this, any advertisement, event, promotion, etc. that wants to refer to the Super Bowl has to come up with some colloquialism or be granted rights to do so by the NFL, which rarely happens. For the Super Bowl, the most popular colloquialism is “The Big […]
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##EMBED## The word “nougat” is French and comes from the Old Provencal word “nogat”, meaning “nut cake”. This, in turn, derives from the Latin “nux”, meaning “nut”. Nougat is known to have been around since around the 9th century in Greece. However, it was a generally unpopular sweet until the 17th century in France. Source
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##EMBED## “Comet” comes from the Latin “cometes”, which in turn comes from the Greek “kometes”, meaning “long-haired”. This all in turn comes from Aristotle using a derivation of the Greek “koun”, “kountng” (“stars with hair”), which eventually came to be “kometes” (long-haired) and then “cometes”, in Latin, and finally “comet” in English. Source
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##EMBED## Not only did Marie Curie win two Nobel Prizes, but her family has been the recipient of five total Nobel Prizes. She won two, her husband, Pierre Curie, won one. Her daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, won the Chemistry Prize in 1935 with her husband. Her second daughter was also the director of UNICEF when it won the Nobel Peace Prize […]
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##EMBED## Your nose runs when you’re crying because the tears from the tear glands under your eyelids drain into your nose, where they mix with mucus to form very liquidy snot. Source
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##EMBED## To date, four people have won a Nobel Prize twice. Those include: Maria Sklodowska-Curie (1903 and 1911, for discovery of radioactivity (physics) and later for isolating pure radium (chemistry)); John Bardeen (1956 and 1972, for invention of the transistor (physics) and for coming up with the theory of superconductivity(physics)); Linus Pauling (1954 and 1962, for research into the chemical […]
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##EMBED## Pop Rocks were invented by Chemist William A. Mitchell, who worked for General Foods. He also invented Tang, Cool Whip, quick-setting Jell-O, a tapioca substitute, and powdered egg whites, among other things. All total, he received over 70 patents in his lifetime. Source
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##EMBED## “That’s what she said” is thought to have been around since the 1970s with the earliest documented case of the phrase showing up on Saturday Night Live, spoken by Chevy Chase in a weekend update skit in 1975, which also happened to be the first season of SNL. “That’s what she said” was later hugely popularized thanks to Wayne’s […]
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##EMBED## Asparagus belongs to the same family as lilies. Once the asparagus buds start to open, the shoots themselves become unpalatable and woody, so typically only young asparagus shoots are used for eating, making all asparagus eaters baby killers. Source
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##EMBED## In 1909, T.D. Haubner of the SS Arapahoe became the first person to use the SOS distress signal call. The ship he worked on had lost its screw near the Diamond Shoals which are also known as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic”. Interestingly, a few months later Haubner, still working on the SS Arapahoe, received the world’s second SOS […]
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##EMBED## Uncle Phil, also occasionally known as James Avery in the real world, was also the voice of James Rhodes in the 1990s Iron Man series. Along with that, he was also the voice of Shredder in the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. Source
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##EMBED## Along with the fact that eating KFC at Christmas is a tradition in Japan, Colonel Sanders is somewhat of a cult figure there. Not only is there a life-sized statue of the Colonel in front of most KFCs in Japan, but his memorabilia, like wind-up toys and figurines, can be found at many toy stores throughout Japan. Sources
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##EMBED## Wil Wheaton did voices for various romulans in the 2009 movie Star Trek. This was kept a secret until fairly close to when the movie came out. In his own words: “JJ Abrams called me. It was an entertaining conversation; I couldn’t believe he wanted me to do work on his film, and he couldn’t believe that I wanted […]
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##EMBED## One pound of fat is approximately 3500 calories. So if you were to eat around 350 calories more per day than your body uses, in just ten days, you’d gain one pound of fat. If you kept that amount of excess every day, you’d continue to gain weight until your body reached an equilibrium where the extra fat it’s […]
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##EMBED## When Michael J Fox auditioned for the role of Alex on Family Ties, he was completely broke. At that point, he had sold almost everything her owned to make ends meet and had canceled his phone service. He told his agent only to call at a certain time in the afternoon because he was busy. The number he gave […]
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