Sylvia Shults's Blog, page 31

Today I Learned…

Death metal music attracts sharks. (From National Geographic Kids Weird But True! 8: 300 Outrageous Facts)

Today I Learned…

The first text message was sent on December 3, 1992. It was from its inventor, a Finnish engineer name Matti Makkonen. The message was to his girlfriend, and it said, We need to talk.

Today I Learned…

A female hippopotamus can eat more food relative to its body size than any other ruminant. Her appetite is so big that her stomach contents can make up one quarter of her total body weight.

Today I Learned…

(Today’s TIL is on the long side, but hey, today’s my birthday. So here’s my present to you.)

On the morning of October 23, 1894, Louis Bouchard enjoyed some good fortune. As the Fall River, Massachusetts, egg merchant drove his cart along his route, he noticed a wrapped bundle lying on the trolley tracks at the “Westport Four Corners” intersection. A subscriber to the “finders keepers” school of philosophy, Louis concluded that the unattended package was his, and he descended from his cart to make the retrieval.

He climbed back in with the bundle under his arm, settled into his seat, and slowly unwrapped his prize. Louis was delighted to find that the take was bountiful: four large, plump sausages, a ready-made breakfast for a hungry man who was sick of eggs. Unable to read English, Louis could not make out what was written on the large stamps prominently displayed on each end of the four tubes.

The lucky merchant dug into the end of one of his trophies and took a taste. He noticed that the flavor was different from that of any sausage he had ever tasted — and unusually sweet. He wondered if it was not a sausage at all, but some type of dried fruit. But he liked the sweet flavor, and after sampling some more, he decided to find out just what it was.

Louis pulled up to Barre’s Drug Store, hoping that Homer Barre might be able to identify the mysterious stuff. He proudly unwrapped his find and asked what type of fruit he had been eating. After reading the stamp on one of the tubes, Homer gave Louis a sympathetic look. He gently explained that he’d been eating dynamite and was likely, at any moment, to explode.

Horrified, Louis sank gingerly into a chair while Homer fetched help. Officer Louis Moreau soon arrived on the scene, relieved to find that the egg merchant was, at least for the moment, still intact. An explosives expert was summoned, and he identified the “sausages” as high-intensity dynamite. It had probably been meant to blow up the streetcar. What could have been one of the worst disasters in Fall River was avoided because Louis picked up the package. History doesn’t tell us if the police ever caught the saboteurs. It does seem that Louis never did explode. The Fall River Daily Herald noted that “when restoratives had been applied to Bouchard, he departed aimlessly and is probably treading his way back home with panther-like steps, that no sudden jar might set off the explosive he had chewed off the ‘sausage’.” (This story comes to us from the pages of Yankee Magazine.)

Today I Learned…

As if being bitten by mosquitoes isn’t bad enough, the little buggers regularly pee on us too. Female mosquitoes (the ones that do the biting) suck up so much blood that they swell up to twice their normal size, which makes takeoff a bit problematic. They solve this problem by offloading all unnecessary water and salts from the blood they’ve just eaten, by excreting them as urine.

Today I Learned…

In 1968, Robert Rush, an American army sergeant, was woken at 6 am by his wife, who screamed once and then died. At the inquest it was revealed that five years earlier, the woman’s sister had expired in a similar manner. She had climbed out of a local swimming pool with a look of terror on her face, screamed once, and died. Autopsies on both women failed to explain either death. (From Bizarre World, by Bill Bryson)

Today I Learned …

Monkeys will pay to look at images of sexually attractive or socially powerful primates. Male rhesus monkeys will give up a drink of cherry juice in order to look at a picture of a face of a socially dominant monkey, or of a female’s hindquarters. However, it seems that the monkeys have to be paid to look at a picture of a subordinate, as they only take a peek at the picture if they are bribed with a larger than normal drink.

Today I Learned …

A battered and chipped ceramic bowl that an elderly couple from Essex, England regularly allowed their cat to sleep in sold for $170,000 after it turned out to be a Ming dynasty vase dating back to the 15th century. (From Ripley’s Believe It or Not: Eye-Popping Oddities)

Today I Learned …

A book given to an Australian girl by her father found its way back to her after 66 years and a journey around the world. When Betty Fowkes of Melbourne was 11, her father gave her the book, titled Magic Australia, and inscribed it, “To Betty, from Daddy, Christmas 1944.” She lost the book in a house move four years later. In 2014 she heard the author’s name mentioned on a radio broadcast and asked her daughter, Liz Crooks, to search for a copy online. Liz randomly selected a copy from New York’s Austin Book Shop — and when it arrived, it was Betty’s original, complete with her father’s inscription. (From Ripley’s Believe It or Not: Eye-Popping Oddities)

Today I Learned …

The cookie-cutter shark is just over a foot long, but it has the chutzpah to attack nuclear submarines. These sharks have been spotted taking chunks out of the rubber sonar domes of submarines with their razor-sharp teeth. (Also, how adorably terrifying is the name “cookie-cutter shark?!?)