Pointless Trivia

[fragger]

Should this be a topic, do you think? I do. Stick all your random facts and pointless snippets of info here!

Let me kick it off:

I never noticed this before. I must have glanced at the cover photo for Paul McCartney and Wings' 1973 "Band On The Run" album dozens of times over the years but never noticed who is in it.

Spoiler

Click on the image for better detail.

Guests are not allowed to view images in posts, please Register or Login

Apart from McCartney, wife Linda and band member Denny Seiwell, you can see:
TV interviewer Michael Parkinson, actors James Coburn and Christopher Lee, British singer Kenny Lynch,
broadcaster/writer Sir Clement Raphael Freud and boxer John Conteh.

I always just assumed they were all band members and never looked too closely...

Story goes that they were all high as kites when the photo was taken...

[Dweller_Benthos]

Interesting, probably one of those moments when they were at a party and someone suggested they all go shoot the album cover right then.

To continue the album cover trivia, all of Blue Öyster Cult's original albums have their "hook & cross" logo on it somewhere:

Guests are not allowed to view images in posts, please Register or Login


Most times it's obvious, others it's hidden.

[PZ]

Good topic 

Although nothing comes to mind at the moment, I often see stupid things that would fit this thread.

[Art Blade]

pointless but true (check it on yourself..)

No human being has got any hairs on their intermediate phalanx (middle section) of either of their index fingers.

I remember that because many, many years ago there was a television show about bets that always included a bet from the audience. The person whose bet was chosen claimed, "you won't find anybody." The show master accepted the bet like, "that will be an easy one." By the end of the show, nobody had been found to have got any hairs on their intermediate phalanx and, with quite some applause, the person won the bet.

(Hmm, a pointless trivia about a pointer finger.. lol)

[fragger]

D_B: As a long-time fan of BÖC, I already knew about that symbol One of the guys in the band, Eric Bloom, has at least one guitar made in that shape. They're still playing too, have been now for about 50 years One of them has passed away (Alan Lanier) but the other four are still going strong. They've always been one of my favourite rock bands.

Nice bit of info, Art In a roughly similar vein, nobody can lick their own elbows.

[mandru]

Umm...

YouTube "licks elbow".


One of my favorite bits of trivia stems from Abraham Lincoln at a time when presidential candidates had to go out on horseback traveling from town to town to mingle and speechify with the potential voters.

At one of his stops he stayed on his horse.  He'd kicked one foot out of the stirrup and sat sidesaddle using the horse as an ad hoc raised platform to speak to the townspeople and address questions from the crowd that had gathered.  The horse (after a prolonged delay) in boredom and probably pestered by flies kicked one of its hind hoofs into the empty stirrup.

Lincoln quickly slid off the horse's back and quipped "If you are getting on, I'm getting off."

[LinkHero]

    This one comes from my neighbour's daughter, who is 5 years old.

    On a day when I am babysitting her, a routine question leads to her singing some nursery rhymes for me. She recites the famous "Humpty Dumpty" rhyme and after a short pause, asks me why Humpty Dumpty is an egg.

    A closer analysis of the rhyme reveals: at no point in the rhyme is the nature of Humpty Dumpty remarked upon. A Google search reveals that the notion of Humpty Dumpty being an egg was started by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass.

    A further search  reveals that the Humpty Dumpty is a tale of a cannon in a fort in England. This cannon used to rest on top of a tower. Once during a seige, the tower toppled and the cannon came crashing to the ground, and was destroyed.

TLDR: Humpty Dumpty was a medieval WMD.

Also,bless children and their inquisitiveness. This never occurred to me in my childhood.

[fragger]

@mandru: I stand corrected If I could remember the source from where I heard that, I'd make a mental note never to trust it again...

Love the Lincoln story Old Abe had quite the sense of humour.

@LinkHero, that's pretty interesting. Humpty Dumpty sounds like a name an egg would have, if an egg had a name

I suspected there had to be some kind of historical basis for that nursery rhyme, as is often the case. I'd often wondered if it was about the English Civil War and the fall of Charles I. He "sat on a wall" over matters of deep Parliamentary concern and through his habit of essentially dissolving Parliament whenever they vexed him - and finally setting himself up as a power unto himself for about a decade - ultimately brought on the war, where he (and England) had a great fall as Royalist forces were systematically defeated by the Parliamentarians until Charles himself was eventually executed (all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Charles - or his reign - together again).

Turns out maybe the truth is somewhat more prosaic. But I liked my theory anyway

[Art Blade]

 

[fragger]

Alaska is the only US state that can be typed on one row of keys.

[PZ]

  an excellent example of pointless trivia, fragger! 

[fragger]

Thanks mate. I guess that's the point (-lessness) of the exercise

[PZ]

Brings a smile to my face 

[fragger]

If you're smiling, I'm smiling

[Art Blade]

that made me smile, too, both the trivia and the following conversation

I've also got a pointless trivia, of sorts.

Have you ever wondered why women's clothing got the buttons/buttonholes on "the wrong side," from a male's perspective? I knew "the lore" but checked wiki to see whether they had anything about it and indeed, they explained it better than I could, albeit I'll add one thing at the end.

"Traditionally, men's clothing buttonholes are on the left side, and women's clothing buttonholes are on the right. The lore of this 'opposite' sides buttoning is that the practice came into being as 'women of means' had chamber maids who dressed them.

So as not to confuse the poor chamber maids, the wealthy began having women's garments made with the buttons and holes 'switched'; the birth of the modern ladies' blouse. The chamber maids themselves, as did most all the common class, both male and female, actually wore 'shirts' with buttons and holes placed as on men's clothing.

There appears to be no concrete reference to prove or disprove this story, but its plausibility bears noting."

Those chamber maids would of course stand in front of the noble lady and it was easier and therefore faster for (right-handed) maids to button up clothes when the buttons/buttonholes were set up that way.