24 February 2008

JUICY FILLING: A Few Interesting Things That You Might Find Interesting

I have nothing to say about art, music or film today so I will squirt you with random facts instead...


NOAH'S ARC

It is commonly known that there were two of every animal sent into Noah's Arc. INCORRECT. Now, the story of Noah's Arc could be completely untrue because it was written in the bible... and no one likes to believe what's written in there anymore. But there are of course a select few who do, for some reason. Let us just pretend that we are those people for a few minutes. The bible is of course the only source we have that tells us exactly what happened with Noah's Arc. God did not in fact order him to gather two of every animal. I can't remember the exact quote, but it was in fact seven of every clean animal and the the usual two of every unclean animal. I don't know how you would determine which animals are clean and which are unclean, but those were God's orders. I think this proves that barely anyone actually reads the bible anymore, otherwise, we would have known that.


HOW YOU CAN USE A BLACK COCK TO CATCH THIEVES

Of course when I say cock, I mean a rooster. It's a bird. Don't get excited. Right, yesterday I heard an interesting story about the man who invented the decimal point. Yes, that's right... essentially he invented a dot. Anyway, John Napier was his name, and he had a black cock (rooster) as a pet. He also invented those important things known as logarithms that only mathematicians and physicists use. Not for us creative types. So, as you can imagine, Napier grew to become a rather wealthy fellow. When you are wealthy, you tend to have nice expensive things. You also tend to have servants, some of which like to steal your nice expensive things. Unfortunately, this did happen to Napier. Far too regularly, as it happens, for he had to get is cock involved. He decided to order his servants to sit in a dark room and stroke his cock for a few minutes (please remember I'm talking about a bird). He would say that his rooster could tell when he was being stroked by the hand of a thief. What he in fact did, was cover the bird in soot. The guilty servant would pretend to have stroked the rooster, in fear that he might actually be able to tell the difference between the stroke of an innocent man and his own. This way, all Napier had to do was pick out the servant who had clean hands, and that would be his man. Very clever... but only if the servants are stupid enough to believe that the rooster is magic.


CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

Was a bit of a stupid man, if you think about it. It is i a common mis-conception that everyone all the way back then thought the earth was flat. It has never actually been recorded in history that people ever thought that way. Most of europe already knew the world was round. Christopher Columbus, however, thought it was pear-shaped. Then he went off to discover India and found America instead. Which is why we use the phrase "Native American Indians" or "Red Indians" (which is pretty offensive). They are just Native Americans... nothing to do with being Indian. Columbus wasn't that smart. Why the hell would the earth be shaped like a pear?


THE ROMANS AND THEIR HATRED OF CHRISTIANS

Another common mis-conception is that the Romans threw Christians (or people of general annoyance) into a room full of lions. Neither did anyone have to fight a lion in the Coliseum. This was another thing that was never actually recorded in history. It feels like the whole idea of being thrown to the lions came from a story-teller or something. That is all.

2 comments:

Psychotic Little Thing said...

Ooh wow, interesting factoids there ;)

And who is to say that roosters are not in fact magical, eh?

Talking of roosters, I had Rooster Hair today. It kept sticking up. My mother and sister found it vair amusing ¬_¬

Kat Mortensen said...

I must correct you on one thing; it's Noah's Ar(K).
Other than that, I think your blog is great.
Kat
Come by my blog Poetikat's and check out some old lady's poetry.