Did you know?

Victor

Windmills always turn counter-clockwise. Except for the windmills in Ireland.

Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.

Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.

Thomas Edison, lightbulb inventor, was afraid of the dark.

There are 92 known cases of nuclear bombs lost at sea. :eek:

On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying over the Parliament Building is an American flag. :duh:

A duck's quack doesn't echo and no one knows why.

A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue.

More: http://www.angelfire.com/fl/JackCraig/HUMOR-KNOW.html

Raz

Can I be a kill joy on two of them
Well I'll spoiler it at least

Windmills always turn counter-clockwise. Except for the windmills in Ireland.
This would be due to the angle of the 'blades' of the windmill.

Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.
Space has no up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards.
You float in space and can face any direction without knowing the difference. Therefore, when looking at the solar system flat we can't be sure if we're infront or behind it. From one side it looks clockwise, from the other it looks counter clockwise. Which is right? We don't know or there is no answer.
The correct statement of this fact would be,
Venus is the only planet that rotates in the opposite direction to all the others in the solar system.

That was fun
Oh, I'm such a spoil-sport
Dont hate me!

Lukin Black

From this page
The American Flag on the 2 or 10 dollar bill

In fact, it is the old Canadian two dollar and ten dollar bills (1989 "Bird" Series) that people think has the American Flag in it. (For more information about Canadian Money, go to the Canadian Paper Money web site.)

The two dollar bill is simply the Canadian flag, and is a false alarm. But, if you have a copy of the ten dollar bill and look very closely at the flag over the Parlimant Buildings you will see a patch in the upper left hand side, and this, combined with the pattern on the rest of the flag, looks like the American flag.

The flag is, in fact, the Canadian Ensign, the patch in the upper left is the Union Jack, and the stripe effect is caused by shading and scaling. If you look carefully, you can see a crest in the bottom right of the flag.

secret_squirrel

Originally posted by Victor

A duck's quack doesn't echo and no one knows why.

they proved this wrong the other day - it does echo just very faintly think it was in the New Scientist, will try to dig out the link

Lump

I'm sure the reson windwill turn the way they do is due to the way in which the water pump works and the way in which it need to turn. In Ireland, I may be wrong, windmills were used to mill. However in Amsterdam, they were used to pump water from canal to canal in order to drain land for reclaiming.



Are there any windwill in Ireland ***?



John

Cabaal

Originally posted by Victor
A duck's quack doesn't echo and no one knows why.

Thats all been resolved now and everyone knows why so not really a valid fact anymore

The old saying that a duck's quack produces no echo is... well, just plain quackers. - news.bbc.co.uk

Cabaal

Originally posted by Lump
Are there any windwill in Ireland ***?

Not to many, I've only seen one on all my travels..

sceptre

I've seen three - one on Malin Head, one on Cape Clear and the real one in Blennerville.

Don't we have a wind farm somewhere with hundreds of the things?

Cabaal

Originally posted by sceptre
Don't we have a wind farm somewhere with hundreds of the things?

Yeah a few places around the country, I saw aload of them near Aran lslands when I was there.
There abit different to normal windmills I'd imagine.

dendenz

Greenland is cold!

Mossy Monk

Originally posted by sceptre
Don't we have a wind farm somewhere with hundreds of the things?

in leitrim according to the lottery ad

stormkeeper

Originally posted by Lump
Are there any windwill in Ireland ***?

Yeah, there is, there is one in Tralee that I know of (Blennerville, as pointed out by spectre - I just forgot the name until I finished my posting)... There aren't many windmills here in The Netherlands from what I've seen, but still they have more than us, possibly. I've only seen about 2 windmills so far, and a few of those electricity generating ones.

andrew163

i think i saw a big load of windmills on a mountain somewhere in Donegal.....

Lump

Are they actually windMILLS or are they wind turbines everyone is talking about, we are getting a little confused on the whole wind thingy.




John

Capt'n Midnight

There are lots of old windmills here
all the "bottle towers" were windmills
that tall tapering tower in guinness's brewery with the green dome on top is AFAIK the worlds biggest wind mill (as opposed to pump or generator)

sceptre

Originally posted by Lump
Are they actually windMILLS or are they wind turbines everyone is talking about

Ah yeah, my fault for starting it. Blennerville is a real Don Quixote style windMILL

DriftingRain

Now I'm confuesd!!
LOL :P

byte

Originally posted by andrew163
i think i saw a big load of windmills on a mountain somewhere in Donegal.....

There is a heap of Wind Turbines at Barnesmore Gap in Donegal on the way to Ballybofey. Was it these you saw?

Mark

At long last the 'Did J0o Know' word document I assembled months ago during periods of excessive boredom finds it's home!

I give you: ONE SIXTH OF SAID DOCUMENT! hUNF!

In France: No pig may be addressed as Napoleon by its owner.

In York, it is perfectly legal to shoot a Scotsman with a bow and arrow (except on Sundays). But of course.

South-Korea has its own TV-channel for Starcraft.

During WWII, Americans tried to train bats to drop bombs.

Glass is a "slow-melting" materia. In 10000 years your windows will have melted down into a pile

In New Brunswick, Canada: Driving on the roads is not allowed.

An American dime has 118 ridges around the edge.

The people of Zanzibar are known as Zanzibaris and their native language is Kiswahili, commonly known internationally as Swahili.

Friendless patients die at three times the rate after a heart attack than others who have family or friends to help them recover.

Gold is a common ingredient in some biscuits

The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

After being awake for more than 20 hours the body starts producing painkillers. This is why most people get happy outbursts at late nights.

Trivia is the Roman goddess of sorcery, hounds and the crossroads.

The pharaohs of ancient Egypt wore garments made with thin threads of beaten gold. Some fabrics had up to 500 gold threads per one inch of cloth.

John Hancock was the only one of fifty signers of the Declaration of Independence who actually signed it on July 4.

Escape maps, compasses, and files were inserted into Monopoly game boards and smuggled into POW camps inside Germany during W.W.II; real money for escapees was slipped into the packs of Monopoly money.

On November 29, 1941, the program for the annual Army-Navy football game carried a picture of the Battleship Arizona, captioned: "It is significant that despite the claims of air enthusiasts no battleship has yet been sunk by bombs." Today you can visit the site-now a shrine-where Japanese dive bombers sunk the Arizona at Pearl Harbor only nine days later.

During the California Gold Rush of 1849 miners sent their laundry to Honolulu for washing and pressing. Due to the extremely high costs in California during these boom years it was deemed more feasible to send the shirts to Hawaii for servicing.

The IRS employees tax manual has instructions for collecting taxes after a nuclear war.

Gloucestershire airport in England used to blast Tina Turner songs on the runways to scare birds away.

Emilio Marco Palma was the first person born in Antarctica in 1978.

Until the 1960's men with long hair were not allowed to enter Disneyland.

On November 29, 2000, Pope John Paul II was named an "Honorary Harlem Globetrotter."

Coconuts kill more people in the world than sharks do. Approximately 150 people are killed each year by coconuts.

In ancient times, any Japanese who tried to leave his homeland was summarily put to death. In the 1630's, a decree in Japan forbade the building of any large ocean-worthy ships to deter defection.

The Ramses brand condom is named after the great pharaoh Ramses II who fathered over 160 children.

The British once went to war over a sailor’s ear. It happened in 1739, when Britain launched hostilities against Spain because a Spanish officer had supposedly sliced off the ear of a ship’s captain named Robert Jenkins.

Florence Nightingale served only two years of her life as a nurse. She contracted fever during her service in the Crimean War, and spent the last 50 years of her life as an invalid.

Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history. Spades - King David; Clubs - Alexander the Great; Hearts - Charlemagne; and Diamonds - Julius Caesar.

Spiral staircases in medieval castles are running clockwise. This is because all knights used to be right-handed. When the intruding army would climb the stairs they would not be able to use their right hand which was holding the sword because of the difficulties of climbing the stairs. Left-handed knights would have had no troubles, except left-handed people could never become knights because it was assumed that they were descendants of the devil.

Vincent Van Gogh painted a picture a day in the last 70 days of his life.

It took 20,000 men 22 years to build the Taj Mahal.

It took 214 crates to transport the Statue of Liberty from France to New York in 1885.

Fourteen years before the Titanic sank, novelist Morgan Robertson published a novel called "Futility". The story was about an ocean liner that struck an iceberg on an April night. The name of the ship in his novel - The Titan.

George Washington, who was nearly toothless himself, was meticulous with the teeth of the six white horses that pulled his presidential coach. He had their teeth picked and cleaned daily to improve their appearance.

Once upon a time, in the little state of Rhode Island, they were electing a state legislature. There was a thrifty Federalist farmer who started for the polls late in the afternoon and, on the way, heard the squealing of a pig. He looked around to see the pig with its head caught in the mesh of an old wire fence. Hogs often will kill and eat a trapped pig. So the farmer stopped to rescue the porker and was too late at the polls. Now, wait a minute. The Federalist farmer was too late to vote, and, the election was decided by a one-vote margin in favor of the Democrats.
If the farmer had been at the voting place in time, the Democrat would not have been elected. One vote.

At the following session of the legislature (these were the days when the legislatures elected their Senators) a Democrat was sent to the Senate from Rhode Island by a one-vote margin in the legislature. Try to keep up with this. The legislator was elected by one vote and his one vote elected a Senator. And in the United States Senate the vote that we should go to war with England was carried by the one Democrat margin. So the Revolutionary War was fought because, a Rhode Island pig got caught in a fence. One vote.

A vote was taken on which would be the national language - English or German. English by one vote.

Dr. George Benson of Harding College traced this sequence: One morning in 1844 a grain miller in De Kalb County, Indiana, was walking toward his mill. It was election day, but he had work to do and did not intend to vote. Before he reached the mill, however, he was stopped by friends who persuaded him to go to the polls. As it happened the candidate for whom he voted won a seat in the state legislature, by a margin of one vote. When the Indiana Legislature convened, the man elected from De Kalb cast the deciding vote that sent Edward Allen Hannegan to the United States Senate. Then, in the United States Senate the question of statehood for the great state of Texas came up, the result was a tie vote. But Senator Hannegan, presiding as President pro tempore, cast the deciding vote from the chair. So the Lone Star state of Texas was admitted to the Union because a miller in De Kalb County, Indiana, went ten minutes out of his way to cast his one vote, just one vote.

Thomas Jefferson was elected President by one vote in the Electoral College. So was John Quincy Adams. And so was Rutherford B. Hayes, elected President, by one vote. One vote gave statehood to California, Idaho, Oregon, Texas, and Washington. All those people in all those states are Americans because of somebody's one vote.
Kentucky came into the Union as a slave state, by the casting of one majority vote in the Constitutional Convention. Had it not been for the one vote, Kentucky would have entered the Union a free state. If it had, Missouri, largely settled by Kentuckians, would have done likewise. In that event there probably never would have been a war between the states.
And closer to home the Draft Act of World War II, passed in the House of Representatives, by just one vote. One vote.

In St. Johns, Michigan, the race for City Council (two seats, four candidates) was a one-vote wonder. The top three candidates were separated by one vote each. Election results showed Bates with 27%, Hanover with 27% and Huard with 27%. Mark Bates had one more vote than Heather Hanover, who had one more vote than Roland Huard.

Giraffes have black tongues.

The military salute is a motion that evolved from medieval times, when knights in armor raised their visors to reveal their identity.

Czar Paul 1 banished soldiers to Siberia for marching out of step.

Louis XIV had forty personal wigmakers and almost 1000 wigs.

Until 1796, there was a state in the United States called Franklin. Today it's known as Tennessee.

WWI flying ace Jean Navarre attacked a zeppelin armed with only a kitchen knife.

Chrysler built B-29's that bombed Japan, Mitsubishi built Zeros that tried to shoot them down. Both companies now build cars in a joint plant called Diamond Star.

In the late 30's, a man named Abe Pickens of Cleveland, Ohio, attempted to promote world peace by placing personal calls to various country leaders. He managed to contact Mussolini, Hirohito, Franco and Hitler (Hitler, who didn't understand English, transferred him to an aide). He spent $10,000 to "give peace a chance."

When Napoleon wore black silk handkerchiefs around his neck during a battle, he always won. At Waterloo, he wore a white cravat and lost the battle and his kingdom.

Unfortunately the entire file would request about six posts to get her all in and I'm not that eager to have accusations of SPAEM WHOER11 thrown at me.

Lukin Black

Originally posted by byte
There is a heap of Wind Turbines at Barnesmore Gap in Donegal on the way to Ballybofey. Was it these you saw?

Plus there are a pile in the Illies, west of Buncrana, visible from the Lough Foyle area, and the Glentogher (Derry Road) area of Carndonagh.

Then there are some to the north of Buncrana, in the Parish area. They're visible from Malin Head, so perhaps those are the ones you saw Sceptre?

The only place outside Donegal that I'm aware of is somewhere between Coleraine and Limavady.

The_Bullman

Isn't a Canadian $2 a coin? At least it was last christmas when I was there.

they call the $1coin a loonie, and the $2 coin a toonie.

they really are a strange folk

sceptre

Originally posted by Lukin Black
Then there are some to the north of Buncrana, in the Parish area. They're visible from Malin Head, so perhaps those are the ones you saw Sceptre?

Hmmm, I sem to remember falling asleep under one but it was eight years ago and I may not have been entirely sober so it could well be that I climbed on top of a hill up there that night (this much at least happened), saw one in the distance and remember it differently now:D



On the topic of the "one vote would have saved the world", have a look here

Lump

Sincw we are on the subject of windturbines, wnat are people's views on them, are we liking them or hating them. I think they look beautiful, and serve a purpose too. I'm fed up of the environmental people giving it all "We need clean energy" and then moaning when they smack 1000 turbines on the burren or somewhere else. Anyway I'm all for them, put them where ever ***. I remember turning a corner in the south of spain on route to a port to go to africa, as I turned said corner my eyes opened wide to see hundreds of turbines all elegantly spinning away.... beautiful.



John

skipn_easy

I'm a big fan of wind turbines too. I think they look great and should be put all over the place. Although apparently you wouldn't like one beside your house as they make a lot of noise.

Lump

Yea, but there are plaenty on places in Ireland that have no houses and that would be perfect for wind turbines...... Oh It'll relocate a few birds.... Boo Hoo. I wonder will that toxic plant go ahead just because it is but somewhere that it suits people.



John

secret_squirrel

I think they look really elegant the road between Newquay and Redruth in Cornwall has two largish wind farms, the road just comes round a hill then you're presented with the sight of all the Turbines turning leisurely in the wind.

They alway remind me of those little twirly things I used to plant in the top of my sand castles as a kid - what were they called??

Arent there plans to put a farm on a sand back on the east coast south of dublin somewhere?

herbie747

Here's a few bullsh*t rumours that idiots always spread around. You've probably heard a few of them:

1. Marilyn Manson is the guy from the wonder years
2. If you put call-cards in the freezer, they re-generate
3. Cow Tipping?? Complete crap. They don’t even sleep standing up.
4. The seeds in weed make you sterile.
5. You can’t eat 3 crackers in under 2 mins.
6. Slim Fast is maggot eggs.
7. Everyone eats an average of 3 spiders every year in their sleep
8. Your hair washes itself- just an excuse dirty hippies use.
9. Your hair and nails continue to grow after you die. Nope—but the fleshy parts of your body recede from your hair and nails, making them appear longer.

Lump

TO be honest, your hair does clean its self. If you leave it dirty for a few months, the natural oils start to clean it.



John