Who Knew? Some Fun Facts

A young musician called Jimmy Page was a session player with the John Barry Orchestra and played on Goldfinger. He recalled in an interview with GQ: “The full orchestra sounded absolutely amazing, but then Shirley Bassey arrived. She arrived with a friend, was very quiet and then was asked to come out and sing. And it took her just one take. And at the end of the tape, she collapsed on the floor … she just held this one note and she basically ran out of breath and collapsed. You know how dramatic she is usually, what with all the stuff she does with her hands, but this was even more dramatic – and I was in the front row of the musicians, so I really had a good view of all of this.”

 
The Miniatur Wunderland is the largest model railroad layout in the world and Hamburg's No. 1 tourist attraction. More than 23 million visitors from all over the world have already viewed the superlative miniature world in Hamburg's Speicherstadt warehouse district. A unique miniature masterpiece has been created on 1,694 m² in over 1,200,000 working hours - and it is still growing.

It impresses not only with its sophisticated technology but above all with its wealth of detail. More than 292,000 figures have been lovingly staged, cars and ships move through the landscapes, and even airplanes take off every minute at Knuffingen Airport. The Wunderland is a breathtaking miniature cosmos that cannot be seen anywhere else in the world. And this cosmos continues to grow. With the opening of Monaco and the Provence, the european continent grew by another 70m². In the following years, the rainforest, parts of Central America and the Caribbean will follow.


 
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John Lester Nash Jr. (August 19, 1940 – October 6, 2020)[1] was an American singer, best known in the United States for his 1972 hit "I Can See Clearly Now".

Nash sang the theme song to the syndicated animated cartoon series The Mighty Hercules, which ran on various television stations from 1963 to 1966.


 
January 18, 1943, when Claude R. Wickard, the secretary of agriculture and head of the War Foods Administration, declared the selling of sliced bread illegal. Since sliced bread required thicker wrapping to stay fresh, Wickard reasoned that the move would save wax paper, save on tons of alloyed steel used to make bread-slicing machines and force bakeries not to charge more for bread.
Public outcry was immediate. Less than a week after the ban, the whole thing began to unravel. By March 8, the government decided to abandon the wildly unpopular measure.

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hollydolly said:
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Blue whale tongues can weigh as much as an elephant
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Last Thanksgiving we saw a humpback whales off the Big Island of Hawaii. We have also seen pilot whales in those same waters. They migrate there to breed and give birth in the warm waters. Several years ago we were able to watch a pod of Orca off the coast of Canada. Different animals of coarse but very fascinating.
 
TennVet said:
Last Thanksgiving we saw a humpback whales off the Big Island of Hawaii. We have also seen pilot whales in those same waters. They migrate there to breed and give birth in the warm waters. Several years ago we were able to watch a pod of Orca off the coast of Canada. Different animals of coarse but very fascinating.
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I've only ever seen Whales on Wildlife programmes like David Attenborough etc.. and of course we'll never get as close to a Whale as that in real life... but only once did I see a massive school of whales, spouting... and that was as we flew over the Med going to Greece..and they were very far below but we could still see them from that great height
 
hollydolly said:
I've only ever seen Whales on Wildlife programmes like David Attenborough etc.. and of course we'll never get as close to a Whale as that in real life... but only once did I see a massive school of whales, spouting... and that was as we flew over the Med going to Greece..and they were very far below but we could still see them from that great height
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When you see their size, and a calf along side its mother its a beautiful thing. Orcas for example, have their black and white markings. They are observed enough that naturalists can identify a specific whale just by those markings, like spot or nick in the dorsal fin. The individual whales remain for long periods from birth to maturity in the same pod. Then occasionally a male will break away and form a new pod that gradually expands with new birth season to season. Seeing them rise and blow exhaling then taking on air and flap their fluke as they role in the water is amazing.
 
hollydolly said:
I've only ever seen Whales on Wildlife programmes like David Attenborough etc.. and of course we'll never get as close to a Whale as that in real life... but only once did I see a massive school of whales, spouting... and that was as we flew over the Med going to Greece..and they were very far below but we could still see them from that great height
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They call it breeching when the whale comes from deep under the water and soars through the air, but those amazing sights require days of patient watching. We never witnessed a full breech, but we did see them roll exposing a lot of their body and then splashing their fluke as the went back down. Every time you would hear the excitement in you group at the sight, just as you do a fireworks exhibition.
 
The Poison Garden Alnwick.jpg

In the north of England, there is a garden that only contains the world’s
most dangerous and poisonous plants.

Situated inside the grounds of Alnwick Castle, the Poison Garden contains
around 100 killer plants.

Jane Percy, Duchess of Northumberland, designed the poison garden after
a trip to the Medici poison garden in Italy.

In 1996, she appointed an architect to help her design and create this garden
of infamous plants.

The garden is still maintained today and is a popular tourist attraction.
 
At the end of the last Apollo 15 moon walk, Commander David Scott (pictured above) performed a live demonstration for the television cameras. He held out a geologic hammer and a feather and dropped them at the same time. Because they were essentially in a vacuum, there was no air resistance and the feather fell at the same rate as the hammer, as Galileo had concluded hundreds of years before - all objects released together fall at the same rate regardless of mass.

 
The Union Oyster House is the oldest restaurant in Boston and the oldest restaurant in continuous service in the U.S. — the doors have always been open to diners since 1826.
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Union Street was laid out in 1636, two years after the Boston Common was established, but there are no municipal records documenting the Oyster House's date of construction. All that is known is that the building has stood on Union Street as a major local landmark for more than 250 years.
 

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