Things you didn't know until very recently...

The shortest known sentence to use all 26 letters in the English alphabet isn't actually "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". It's "Cwm fjord bank glyphs vext quiz", a perplexing message that uses a ton of either obscure, or archaic, but real, words. A translation would be "Carved symbols in a mountain hollow on the bank of an inlet irritated an eccentric person".

"Come a Little Bit Closer" was not originally by Johnny Duncan.

There was a syndicated Winnie the Pooh newspaper comic during the 70s & 80s.

In polyamorous relationships, "metamour" is the term for your partner's partner

There is a random hose in our pop system at McDonald's. If you hit it accidentally with the cart used to carry frozen fries out, then it is very easy to flood the back room of the store.

I found this out today.

You have a cart for carrying the fries?

For carrying boxes of frozen fries, or other boxes (meat, burrito mix, etc.)

McDonald's has burrito mix?

Yes, they have sausage breakfast burritos.

The McDonald's I used to work at didn't have a designated restocking cart, except for sauces, so we'd repurpose an empty bun rack stack to carry multiple bulky boxes.

edited 7th May '17 7:34:02 AM by WillDeRegio

That makes sense.

Everything we know about the legend of the peryton (a flying deer) comes from a manuscript lost in WWII.

There was a syndicated comic strip of Rugrats.

In 2015, a Kenyan university ordered security forces to open fire on campus to teach students what a terrorist attack is like… accidentally killing a student.

edited 7th May '17 11:07:54 AM by Spinosegnosaurus77

Paleontologists are now saying that creodonts are more closely related to pangolins, rather than sharing a common ancestor with the mammals of Carnivora.

Not shocking when you realize carnivorans & pangolins are closely related.

New York and New Jersey have gone from having a life expectancy below the US average in 1980 to having a life expectancy above average in 2014 (possibly Maryland as well). The reverse has happened to Kansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming.

More poignantly, while life expectancy went up in all states (plus DC) between those years there are substate pockets where it has fallen, including eastern Kentucky, the Mississippi Delta, and Indian reservations in the Dakotas.

Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation via 538

Speaking of evolution, there's apparently a court jester hypothesis to counterbalance the Red Queen hypothesis.

The fiddle player on this song is a then unknown Lindsay Stirling:

Holy shit, Stephen King has cameoed in a LOT of his movies.

And he's kinda of an asshole in most of the cameos.

The 20,000 leagues Jules Verne's novel refers to is the distance traveled underwater, not the depth. 20,000 French leagues under sea level would put you all the way through the other side of the Earth and way out into space beyond the orbits of GPS satellites.

An opossum has 13 nipples.

Albert Einstein died the year my mom was born, 1955. That means my grandfather, a linotype operator for the Ft. Collins Coloradoan, probably set the type for the story reporting his death.

My grandmother was also a linotype operator at the same paper. She probably wouldn't have worked on the story, since it happened about a month after my mom's birth.

(This is a linotype)

Lungfish are one of the animals that 19th Century scientists thought was a fraud.

The Incredibles is nearly 13-years-old.

My boss is a Trump supporter. That surprised me since he seemed pretty liberal.

You can turn in a movie script for UCLA masters thesis.