I bet you didn't know that this thread would have a part 2

Gloomtastic!

ohnonotgmail wrote: »

in 2015 and 2018 Nigel richards from New Zealand won the french world scrabble championships. He doesn't speak french.

That’s mad. A quick wiki said he spent 9 weeks studying a French dictionary. Boy, his fellow contestants must have been pee’d off!

KevRossi

Gloomtastic! wrote: »

That’s mad. A quick wiki said he spent 9 weeks studying a French dictionary. Boy, his fellow contestants must have been pee’d off!

Surely if they were French they would be Pee D'Off. :pac:

Capt'n Midnight

KevRossi wrote: »

Surely if they were French they would be Pee D'Off. :pac:

Oui oui.

mzungu

The Canary Islands were named after dogs. In Spanish, the area's name is Islas Canarias, which comes from the Latin phrase Canariae Insulae for "island of dogs."

ohnonotgmail

mzungu wrote: »

The Canary Islands were named after dogs. In Spanish, the area's name is Islas Canarias, which comes from the Latin phrase Canariae Insulae for "island of dogs."

and the birds are named after the islands.

this is the breed of dog the islands are named after, the presa canario.

Bloody Nora! That's surely some kind of genetically engineered horse-dog?

He looks like a doggy version of an olympic weight lifter after a lifetime of steroid abuse.

ohnonotgmail

Candie wrote: »

Bloody Nora! That's surely some kind of genetically engineered horse-dog?

He looks like a doggy version of an olympic weight lifter after a lifetime of steroid abuse.

they are working dogs for livestock. they are usually about the same height as your thigh so a decent size as well.

ohnonotgmail

ohnonotgmail wrote: »

they are working dogs for livestock. they are usually about the same height as your thigh so a decent size as well.

Is the livestock a herd of T-Rex?

New Home

Look up Neapolitan Bullmastiff, Candie. The only one I ever saw in real life was probably overweight, too, but it was the size of a hot water tank with legs. They're supposed to be big softies, but I wouldn't be taking my chances...

New Home

New Home wrote: »

Look up Neapolitan Bullmastiff, Candie. The only one I ever saw in real life was probably overweight, too, but it was the size of a hot water tank with legs. They'te supposed to be big softies, but I wouldn't be taking my chances...

Did an image search - I've driven smaller cars!

cdeb

Speaking of the Canary Islands, why is island spelled with an s anyway? What a silly silent letter.

The word in middle English was iland, which makes sense. But in the 15th century, it was thought that the unrelated French word isle was actually related, which would mean that the English version had dropped an "s" somewhere along the way. So it was added back in, having never been there in the first place.

Isle comes from the Latin insula, which does have an "s". Iland comes from the the Norwegian øy or the Swedish ö (meaning island) and the general suffix "land", meaning "land", neither of which have an s.

Capt'n Midnight

I used to think the shortest pitch was for Miami Vice it was just "MTV Cops."

But James Cameron pitched Aliens by writing the title on a chalkboard and drawing a line on the S (making it a dollar sign). The next day, the film was greenlighted and given an $18 million budget.

1990sman

i bet you didn't know that helen hunt looks class in the rain.

larchielads

peasant wrote: »

silly dress... check
silly walk ... check
actual conflict potential ... treble check :eek:

closing ceremony at India/Pakistan border

It's like that film step up

LostinBlanch

Big cats go wild for Calvin Klein’s obsession for Men.

https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/00000144-0a2e-d3cb-a96c-7b2fe7b70000

Insert cougar jokes here.

Capt'n Midnight

If you have highly enriched uranium of 93.5% you can make an atomic bomb without explosives or detonators.

Simply drop one of the sub-critical pieces 4.4 meters to the other and it's 50:50 whether you get a bang or a fizzle.

KevRossi

None of the countries that bordered Poland in 1990 existed in 1993. They had all been dissolved, founded, split or reunified with another one.

East Germany had been reunified with West Germany

Czechoslovakia had been split into Czech Republic and Slovakia

USSR was now Russia

Lithuania gained independence from USSR.

https://omniatlas.com/maps/europe/19891110/

LostinBlanch

Did you know Sudocrem was invented by Cabra pharmacist Thomas Smith in in 1931? Every tub sold worldwide is made in Baldoyle.

His son Brendan dealt with all the marketing.

Brendan, came up with the idea of sending the cream out to new mothers. He would trawl the local papers for the births announcements and send out sample cream to all of the mothers on the lists.

Smith wasn’t just a whiz at direct marketing it seems, he was also unusually pro-active about dealing with customer feedback. If someone wrote to complain about Sudocrem, he would visit the family personally to find out what the problem was.Such dedication paid off in the ’60s and ’70s when lucrative new markets opened up for his creation.

There was a post in broadsheet about it.

KevRossi

LostinBlanch wrote: »

Did you know Sudocrem was invented by Cabra pharmacist Thomas Smith in in 1931? Every tub sold worldwide is made in Baldoyle.

His son Brendan dealt with all the marketing.




There was a post in broadsheet about it.

I never worked out how it never became a real global seller. I used to have to truck boxes of it back to Germany to mates who had had kids when I was there in the 1990's.

I did a couple of Camino's last year and people were blown away by it, how good it was for rash and some other ailments. Truly magical stuff.

its_steve116

Anthrax are the only one of the "Big Four" 80s thrash metal bands (Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer) not from LA. They're from Queens, New York.

secondrowgal

From Twitter:

In 1974, Ramesses II was sent on a flight to Paris for preservation and maintenance work. But since French law required every person, living or dead to fly with a valid passport, Egypt was forced to issue a passport to the Pharaoh, 3,000 years after his death.

He's looking well

https://twitter.com/victorocampo/status/1304351074019467272?s=21

ohnonotgmail

secondrowgal wrote: »

From Twitter:

In 1974, Ramesses II was sent on a flight to Paris for preservation and maintenance work. But since French law required every person, living or dead to fly with a valid passport, Egypt was forced to issue a passport to the Pharaoh, 3,000 years after his death.

He's looking well

https://twitter.com/victorocampo/status/1304351074019467272?s=21

3000 years old and he still has a better passport photo than i do

KevRossi

They had machine readable passports in 1974? Also, would it not be in Arabic as well as English?

FWIW, in the 1990's I used to issue 'passports' for paintings and sculptures. If it was worth about $250,000 or more on the international market the insurance companies would insist on them.

Skylinehead

KevRossi wrote: »

They had machine readable passports in 1974? Also, would it not be in Arabic as well as English?

FWIW, in the 1990's I used to issue 'passports' for paintings and sculptures. If it was worth about $250,000 or more on the international market the insurance companies would insist on them.

Yeah it seems that the image there is a reconstruction.

New Home

In fairness, I don't think he'd have changed that much...

Adyx

LostinBlanch wrote: »

If someone wrote to complain about Sudocrem, he would visit the family personally to find out what the problem was.

This sounds worse than it probably was. :pac:

Capt'n Midnight

Australian astronomers have an average carbon footprint of 37 tons a year.

Over four times that of a EU citizen.

Marcusm

KevRossi wrote: »

This is one of the best threads on Boards.ie, but the first post in the original thread has only received 8 Thanks to date.



Anyway, there are 7 islands that are divided by international borders.

Here they are:

There are more; including St Martin/Sint Maarten.

Capt'n Midnight

Marcusm wrote: »

There are more; including St Martin/Sint Maarten.

Anguilla is another island 8km away. But it's British. And the main airport is on Sint Maarten and Brexit won't make things easier there.

Capt'n Midnight

Thanks to the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) Pheasant Island aka Île des Faisans aka Île de la Conférence aka Isla de los Faisanes aka Konpantzia is Spanish from 1 February – 31 July and French from 1 August – 31 January.