Things I Learned: 5/2/11 (The vacation edition)

-In World War I, the British and Germans had an unspoken breakfast treaty.

-Navigating by response (ie. doing what your GPS tells you to do) can cause one’s hippocampus to atrophy.

-Saltwater crocodiles kill their prey using a death roll.

-King crabs are moving into Antarctic waters.

-Hopewell Township, NJ is proposing a law that would limit conjugal visits between backyard chickens and roosters to 10 days a year and no more than 5 consecutive days.

-260 million years ago, there was a saber-toothed animal that only ate plants.

-Three to five million years ago, a giant rabbit species lived on the island of Minorca. It couldn’t hop and, because of its short ears, probably couldn’t hear very well.

-This is awesome.

-Henry Ford and Thomas Edison invented the charcoal briquette.

-The Imperfectionists is a real downer of a book.

-Honeybees can detect pesticides in pollen.

-An invasivore is someone who eats invasive species.

-Bubblegum flavor is a combination of vanilla, wintergreen, peppermint and cassia.

-McDonalds in Hong Kong offers a wedding package.

-Hag fish can die in their own slime.

-The penis of the Queen conch is so long and unprotected that crabs often eat it. It grows back.

-“The Imperfectionists” is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad book.

-CO2 takes up more volume than O2 in our lungs.

-Each state in India celebrates the New Year on a different day.

-There’s a tribe in Africa that steals kills from lions.

-Soldiers guarding the tomb of the unknown soldier in Athens wear traditional attire, including skirts with 400 pleats to mark the 400 years of Turkish rule.

-The Dutch partake of “inter course,” a break between courses of a meal.

-The Swiss were the first to come up with a word for homesickness.

-Santorini, Greece used to be a ring-shaped island with a massive 1,000 + meter tall volcano (surrounded by water) in the middle. A long time ago, the volcano erupted and sank into the sea. The eruption was so big that the lava has been found in Iceland and ash has been found in the soil under the California redwoods.

-The eruption caused a tsunami that covered Crete (wiping out the Minoans), caused the Red Sea to part and caused the plagues…supposedly, the sky was dark for 2 days.

-A hippo’s mouth is half a meter wide.

-Steig Larson’s trilogy is the perfect antidote to “The Imperfectionists.”

-One month after the Olympic games (which were for free Greek men only), Greek women (virgins only) competed in the Heraea games. The women raced 160 meters in short one-shouldered dresses.

-In the ancient Olympics, men who cheated had their names and offense carved on a plaque below a statue of Zeus. Competitors spat on the plaques as they entered the arena.

-Cheaters always “met with an accident” on their way home from the Games.

-Winners of the ancient Olympic games got free food for life.

-When the winners returned to their hometown, they drove right through the town’s barricades because, if a town had an Olympic champion, the townspeople no longer needed a barricade to protect them.

-In ancient times, the motto of Kotor, Montenegro was “What belongs to others, we don’t want. What’s ours’ we’ll never give up.”

-Albarino is a yummy white wine.

-Croatians invented the ballpoint pen and the cravat.

-Continental Airlines SUCKS.

-A coypu is a web-footed rodent.