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

The web address itanimulli.com is owned by someone called John Fenley, who is not connected with the NSA.

https://itanimullihoax.wordpress.com/ explains everything

"This fact was not useless to his mother when she called him to dinner."

It's useless to us though.

True.

I once met Colonel Harland Sanders
He gave a motivational talk at my Junior High School

That's two useless fakes in a single post

F S

that should be facts

I thought you meant you'd made them up. I was all geared up to reply with a useless quote by Oscar Wilde...

What could Harlan Saunders motivate junior high kids to do? Learn to fry chicken?

He did create a highly-successful fast food chain.

...

Eventually.

As I recall it was along the lines of how anyone could succeed in America, if we only tried harder and stayed in school. I believe he also mentioned how he didn't start his franchise until he was 65, probably because he dropped out of school himself.

I told you it was useless

F S

After he sold the restaurant chain, he Col. Sanders once described their gravy as "nothing more than wallpaper paste."

Actor Willem Dafoe was expelled from high school for shooting a porno.

Here is an excellent article about that Most Useless of Factoids, "a duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why."*

http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/duckecho.asp




*It does.

Hippocrates believed that the ibis used its bill to self-administer salt water enemas.

Bill Paxton is the only actor to be killed on screen by The Terminator, Alien and Predator.

http://youtu.be/DHg6S4AYlb4 [NSFW: language]


"Game over, man... game over!"

I should have read the comments first. Lance Henrickson was also killed by all three, but as he was playing an android in Aliens he was counted merely as damaged equipment.

Winston Churchill made his 'We shall fight them on the beaches' speech in the House of Commons in 1940. However, since there were no recording facilities there at that time, the recording that we hear from time to time, was actually made in 1947 - 2 years after the war had ended.

PP.

So it didn't include asides?

I have read - though this may be apocryphal - that he covered the microphone and said, 'And we'll hit 'em over the head with beer bottles, because that's all we've got left.' Or similar.

Thus the need for Lend Lease.

Without looking at the backlog I will add that

Franklin Delano Roosevelt never said 'day of infamy'

The proper quote is 'December 7th, 1941 is a date that will live in infamy'

F S

In 1901 HG Wells published a short novel on the prospects
and negative possibilities of a drug like 'speed' or one of the
methamphedamines. That was114 years ago - and they say
he wasn't a proper sci-fi writer, prophet or 'see-er'. Ha!

The text is here:

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/wells/hg/w45tw/chapter8.html

The BBC reading is available for another month at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007jzbk#auto


~jwf~

Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde" is interpretable as early and pioneering anti-drug literature, the effect of Dr. Jekyl's unspecified potion stikingly similar that which can in a worst case be produced by LSD, though LSD hadn't been discovered yet in those times.

I'm stealing a link from Bald Bloke from another thread And reposting it here.

[WARNING: PDF] http://lawcommission.justice.gov.uk/docs/Legal_Oddities.pdf


Back in the day, a lot of posts here concerned various blue laws. We came to a bit of a consensus to avoid posting such "facts" as after a short search we typically would find they had been either recinded or were simply uninforced. Either way, while they were typically interesting, they fell short on being factual.






Another popular theme was group names of animals; murder of crows, etc. Then someone rightfully pointed out that regardless of species the proper term is "bunch".