Row, Row, Row Your Boat...Quack

A duck waddles, paddles, dives, bobs and quacks. A man...waits.

photo credit pixabay.com

At the 1928 Olympics quarter-final , oarsman Henry Robert "Bobby" Pearce stopped to let a family of ducks cross his lane and still won with the fastest time of all 8 competitors in that round (and he didn't stop there). Not only did he win the gold medal, but he also set a new Olympic record.

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Fried Eggs: Help Yourself!

Can You Fry an Egg on the Sidewalk If It’s Very Warm Outside?

photo credit Jen

Sort of. But you’d need a little help from something besides the sun. To cook an egg, you need pretty high heat. The white of an egg turns solid between 62 and 65°C. The yolk needs a little higher temperature: between 65 and 70°C.

On a very hot day, the outside temperature might reach 43°C. But even then, a sidewalk wouldn’t get hot enough to cook an egg. Concrete - the material usually used to make sidewalks - gets hot in the sun. But it doesn’t get that hot. 

Still, there are some tricks you can use to cook an egg on a sidewalk. Materials such as metal and glass conduct heat. That means heat moves through them—and they get hotter. You could hold a piece of glass or metal over your egg. Try a magnifying glass or a mirror. If you hold the glass at the right angle, you can catch some of the sun’s heat and conduct it over your egg.

The question is - considering how dirty a sidewalk can be, would you eat it?

Did You Know?

Oatman, Arizona, hosts a sidewalk egg-frying contest every Fourth of July. The only rule is that you can’t use any heat other than that of the sun to fry your egg. People fry plenty of eggs that day. But they get help from mirrors, magnifying glasses, and even solar-powered (sun-powered) ovens.

[source: Does It Really Take Seven Years to Digest Swallowed Gum?: And Other Questions You've Always Wanted to Ask (Is That a Fact?)]

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Dinner is Breakfast

The English word ‘dinner’ comes from the French word disner, meaning ‘breakfast’.

credit pixabay.com

The Old English word for dinner, "disner", in Old French, "disjejeunare", in Latin, means to break fast and was the first meal eaten in the day until its meaning shifted in the mid 13th century. It was not until the 15th century that “breakfast” came into use in written English to describe a morning meal, which literally means to break the fasting period of the prior night.

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The Eyes of A Reindeer

Reindeer have golden eyes in summer and blue eyes in winter.

photo credit pixabay.com

What this change in color helps reindeer eyes do is capture more light during the dark winter months in the Arctic.

[read more: LiveScience]

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Swimming and Peeing

Olympic swimmers routinely pee in the pool!

Nearly 100 per cent of elite competitive swimmers pee in the pool. Regularly. Some deny it, some proudly embrace it, but everyone does it.

The more interesting question is, when does said peeing happen? 

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Longevity and the Olympics

Olympic medal-winners live almost three years longer than the rest of us.

All that training, regardless of the sport, my pay off in extra years, according to two recent studies.

Both studies, published in the BMJ, confirm the fact that the best athletes in the world are indeed among the healthiest as well, thanks to their rigorous training regimens. And now it seems that fitness translates into a survival advantage as well.

Part A

Part B

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George Eyser

George Eyser, who competed at the 1904 Olympics and won 6 medals (three golds, two silvers and a bronze), had a wooden leg.

Meet George Eyser. He's the one in the center there, wearing khakis as he holds himself upside down on the parallel bars. Eyser won six medals in the 1904 Summer Olympics (the third modern-day Olympic Games and the first ones where gold, silver and bronze medals were introduced for the first three places). He had one flesh-and-blood leg. The other was amputated below the knee after a train accident. So, how did Eyser  compete over a century ago? With a wooden prosthesis, of course.

[read more: The Atlantic & The Olympic Fanatic]

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Cows and War

Gavisti, the Sanskrit word for ‘war’, literally translates as ‘desire for more cows’.

During the pastoral stage of the Vedic society, the main object of wealth was cattle.

The Kshatriyas (warrior caste) of every tribe had the function of not only acquiring cattle reared by other tribes, but also protect the cattle that belonged to their own tribe. Thus the Vedic word for war was gavisti which literally means "searching for cows".

Kshatriyas are known as the protectors of cows. Gautam Buddha, was born a Kshatriya.

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Christmas Facts: Lego Mania

During the Christmas season, almost 28 LEGO sets are sold every second.

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Birthday word generator: which words originated in your birth year?

Do you know which words entered the English language around the same time you entered the world? Use our the birthday word generator to find out!

OED birthday word generator

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White Christmas

The chances of a white Christmas are just 1 in 10 for England and Wales.

photo credit pixabay.com

Can it be more complicated? 

The definition of "White Christmas" varies. In most countries, it simply means that the ground is covered by snow at Christmas, but some countries have more strict definitions. In the United States, the official definition of a white Christmas is that there has to be a snow depth of at least 1 in or 2.5 cm at 7:00 a.m. local time on Christmas morning, and in Canada the official definition is that there has to be more than 2 cm (0.79 in) on the ground on Christmas Day. In the United Kingdom, although for many a white Christmas simply means a complete covering of snow on Christmas Day, the official definition by the British Met Office and British bookmakers is for snow to be observed falling, however little, (even if it melts before it reaches the ground) in the 24 hours of 25 December.

[source: Wikipedia]

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Come Again?!

More Americans have died from guns in the United States since 1968 than on battlefields of all the wars in American history.

[source: punditfact]

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Christmas Facts: Singing in Space

What was the first song broadcast from space?

Jingle Bells

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Christmas Facts: The Giving Tree

Hanging presents on trees may come from the Druids who believed the tree was the giver of all good things.

photo credit pixabay.com

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Christmas Facts: Hurry, Santa!

US scientists calculated that Santa would have to visit 822 homes a second to deliver all the world's presents on Christmas Eve, travelling at 650 miles a second.

Dig in

Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second.

This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding etc.

This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles (1046.07 kilometres) per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

[source: Humour for All Ages, Occasions and Celebrations]

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Christmas Facts: In Bulk

The Queen’s staff get to choose their own Christmas presents, which must be worth between £20 and £25.

photo credit pixabay.com

Anyone with more than 12 months' service is eligible for the Christmas gift. As a rule, the present is valued at around £20, but because the royal household buys in bulk  -  there are around 800 staff at the Palace  -  considerable savings can be achieved. 

[source: dailymail]

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Christmas Facts: What a Waste!

The waste produced at Christmas each year in Britain would fill 400,000 double-decker buses.

photo credit Curtis Cronn

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Christmas Facts: Last Minute Shopping

Every Christmas Day, 400,000 Britons go out to a shop to buy batteries.

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