h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What if you make the table twice as high? Then it would do a complete flip in midair. Of course, the real reason that it "always" lands butter side down is you don't complain if it doesn't. You just pick it up. If it does land butter side down, you have to go to the trouble of cleaning it up, and this extra significance causes you to remember it more clearly. This principle can explain other things that "always" seem to happen, as well. Our brains are programmed to forget insignificant things, to save space and processing time.

In fact now we should feed the floor all of the time by simply dropping bread on in because it will just land butter side down and the floor will eat it.

This can be a very good solution when you put too much butter on the bread and want to take some off. All you have to do is drop the bread and it will land butter side down taking some of the excess butter off of the piece of bread so that it will be perfect for your eating pleasures.

Do we remember the incident if the bread happens to land butter side left or butter side right? I guess that would depend on whether or not it flops over to the position in which it is butter side down. Then again, doesn't it not matter what the bread does after it hits the ground?

Back to useless info... please

The earliest known written version of Sleeping Beauty was actually published 61 years earlier by an Italian named Giambattista Basile.
Here is how the story was originally told:
A great king was forewarned by some wise (old?) men that his newborn daughter named Talia was in great danger. It seems that a poison splinter was in the palace's flax, and it would destroy her. The king immediately ordered a ban on flax inside the palace walls. But, as all great fairy tales go, Talia somehow encountered a flax-spinning wheel and got that nasty splinter in her finger.
What happened? Talia dropped dead.
As a result, King Dad placed his daughter's body on a velvet cloth, locked the palace gates, and left the forest forever and ever.
Enter the great nobleman, who turned out not to be so noble.
While hunting in the woods one day, he just happened to stumble on the abandoned palace and Talia's dead body.
One would think he kissed her at this point, but no such thing happened.
Instead, he raped her.
He planted the noble seed and nine months later Talia gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. Their names were Sun and Moon (which is the boy and which is the girl?) and the fairies took care of them.
One day, the boy was sucking on mom's finger and sucked out the poisonous flax splinter.
Talia awoke from her death bed.
Many months go by and the horny young nobleman returns to the woods to have another encounter with the princess. To his surprise, he found her alive and well.
He confesses that he is the father of her children and they enjoy a hot weekend fling in the hay (Would you have a love affair with your rapist?).
The nobleman then returns home to his wife. Somehow she learns about his illegitimate children.
The wife orders the capture of the children. Her cook is then told to slash their young throats and to cook a hash with their flesh.
At dinner that night, the wife gleefully watches her husband eat his meal. When he has finished, she announces "You are eating what is your own!".
We can be sure that the nobleman did not feel too well at that moment. But then, he did rape a dead woman, so he deserves a little suffering.
But all fairy tales must have a happy ending, so check out this one:
It turns out that the cook had a soft heart and never slaughtered the children. Instead, goat meat was substituted.
The enraged wife ordered the capture of Talia and that she be burned at the stake.
But she was saved from death by her rapist and they lived happily ever after.
I wonder why Walt Disney didn't use this version of the story? It has so much more romance than the modern version.

Lovely. Tell that one to the kids.

Anyway.

I've a nugget of knowledge here that worries me intensely. You see, after World War 1 ended there was an incredible surplus of mustard gas lying around. So some bright spark had the idea of taking all the drums of gas and burying them in concrete.

Do you know where?

Under the town of St. Helens in the North West of England. The town where I live.

There's now a chemical plant on top of it. So every time Heyes Chemicals Ltd. suffers a fire (which it used to do at disturbingly regular occasions) the fire derpartment ignore the flames and just soak the ground with foam to ensure that the gas doesn't go up and decimate my lovely little town.

Sympathy on a postcard please...

Want to buy a canary?

Yes. A canary. That would help.

"Look, the canary's died. I think there might be..."

KABOOOOOOOOOOOM.

*a sea of mustard gas rolls out over the town*

"Thank god for the warning. If it hadn't been for the canary we'd all be..." *dies*

My mistake - I should've said budgie

The United States government tried to build a flying saucer

The nasty Sleeping Beauty is in one of the many-coloured fairy books produced by Andrew Lang for the delight of innocent little Victorian kiddies. I'm not sure if he rapes her, though- if he does, it's put rather more gently so as not to set little minds a-questioning. The boy and girl are called Morning and Day, the girl being 'not quite so fair as the boy'.
And Snow White has the traditional ending involving red-hot iron shoes.

Most lipstick contains fish scales.

Emergancy rooms treat twice as many left-handed people for accidents as right handed people.

I find there is a disturbing rise in the amount of useful information here.

Most fairytales were altered into a nicer state when the Grimm Brothers got hold of them I think. But I must admit Cinderella having fur shoes doesn´t seem all that fairy tale like.

The Grimms were pretty... well, grim. Take the tale of the sausage, the bird and the mouse.
We have a theory: one of the Grimms was nice and kind to children, and the other was kept in a cage in the corner because he kept trying to throw them into a boiling cauldron.
The mirror in this room is wonky. There, who on earth could find a use for that?

Was Mary Queen of Scots over six feet tall before they cut off her head or afterwards?

And although Elizabeth I may have thrown slippers, surely she was actually famous for being Queen of England?



--David, who can also be expressed numerically

I think that although she was a fairly good queen, she should get more recognition for the slippers. The overwhelming opinion of the history group I was in when I discovered that, was that Queenie from Blackadder is the most likely portrayal of her. And I know it's a disappointment but she probably did die a virgin.
There is a moth flying around.
Mandragora's Did You Know? for today: my name is the official-type Latin handle for the mandrake, well-known screaming plant with roots of little men, widely used aphrodisiac, hallucinogenic and poison.
Hope this is sufficiently useless.

91% stated that they had picked their nose in the past and were still actively practicing this habit. Yet, only 49.2% of the respondents actually thought that nose-picking was common in adults.
9.2% rate their pickin' as "more than average."
25.6% actually pick their noses daily, 22.3% do it 2 to 5 times each day, and three people admitted to doing it at least hourly.
55.5% spent 1-5 minutes, 23.5% spent 5-15 minutes, and 0.8% (2 people) spent 15-30 minutes each day cleaning their nostrils. One lone soul claims to devote over 2 hours each day to thie ritual (I'm not a doctor and I can tell you that this guy definitely has rhinotillexomania).
18% reported nosebleeds, while 0.8% claimed perforation of the nasal septum from their nose-picking.
82.8% had picked their noses to "unclog the nasal passages", 66.4% had done it to relieve discomfort or itchiness, 35.7% to avoid the unsightly appearance of a booger hanging from their nose, 34.0% for personal hygiene, and 17.2% picked out of habit. 2.1% (five people) claimed to pick solely for enjoyment. To no one's surprise, one perverted person picked his/her nose for "sexual stimulation."
65.1% use their index finger, 20.2% use their pinky, and 16.4% use their thumb (must have BIG nostrils to fit a thumb in) as their instrument of choice.
Most people (90.3%) disposed of the goop in a tissue or a handkerchief, while 28.6% used the floor, and 7.6% stuck it to the furniture.
8% of the respondents actually ate the end product. In case you are thinking of trying this delicacy, the study claims that the pickings are quite tasty (salty).

Oh, I forgot the scientific or medical term for picking your nose is "rhinotillexomania" (rhino=nose, tillexis=habit of picking at something, mania=obsession with something).

Coleslaw often contains less than 1% phlegm.

Apparently there are only 9 types of predator on the island of Madagascar.