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Klaus van der Kroft wrote:

In 1883, Spanish King Afonso II visited Strassbourg, where he was honoured by the Prussian army. On his way back home, he passed through Paris, where the locals (including government officials) booed at him, insulted him, and even threw him stones, as they were still furious over the losses incurred during the Franco-Prussian War.

News of this treatment reached Spain, where the public became deeply offended, but none as angry as the inhabitants of the tiny village of Líjar, in the south.

Calling for the village council, the mayor proposed declaring unilateral war to France over vexations incurred upon the Crown, which was passed with 100% approval; a formal letter of commencement of hostilities was then sent to Paris, though the French didn't pay much attention to it.

Hard to believe they were the first to declare war over how rude the French are. :)


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Randarak wrote:

Religious traditions hold that repeated sexual activity with a succubus may result in the deterioration of health or even death.

Yeah, but what a way to go.


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According to a number of medical studies as well as layman observations, hemorroids are a pain in the arse.


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Al Pacino's grandparents came from the Sicilian town of Corleone.


The Swedish rock band Soundtrack of Our Lives got a job as opening act during an Oasis tour after their singer, Ebbot Lundberg, threw a one-pound-coin off the stage and hit Noel Gallagher in the forehead.


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Said Ebbot got his artist name by turning his regular nickname, "Tobbe," around.

Today, over a hundred Swedish children are called Ebbot.

Scarab Sages

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Carol Burnett once worked as an usherette at the Warner (now Pacific) Theater on Hollywood Blvd. One night, the movie playing was Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), a film Carol had seen and loved. She advised a late arriving couple to wait until the next show, because the film was so good, it should be seen from beginning to end. The manager overheard her, rudely fired her on the spot, and humiliated her by ripping the epaulets off her usherette uniform. Decades later, when she was to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she was asked by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce where she would like it placed. Carol asked that her star be placed in front of the Pacific Theater. In her memoir "One More Time", she states the name of the manager who so rudely fired her, followed by an epithet that won't be repeated here. The star is at 6433 Hollywood Blvd.

The Exchange

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Trigger Loaded wrote:

Vatican City is the only country with no schools. Not overly surprising, considering 60% of its population is over 60, and the birth rate is 0.

No primary Schools

Scarab Sages

Jack Klugman enjoyed betting on the horses from the tender age of 15. His own thoroughbred, 'Jacklin Klugman', finished third in the 1980 Kentucky Derby.


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Zombies [Bestiary 1] are fictional undead creatures, typically depicted as mindless, reanimated human corpses with a hunger for human flesh. Zombies are most commonly found in horror and fantasy genre works. The term comes from Haitian folklore (Haitian French: zombi, Haitian Creole: zonbi) where a zombie is a dead body animated by magic. Modern depictions of zombies do not necessarily involve magic but invoke other methods such as a virus.

Zombies have a complex literary heritage, with antecedents ranging from Richard Matheson and H. P. Lovecraft to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein drawing on European folklore of the undead. George A. Romero's reinvention of the monster for his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead led to several zombie films in the 1980s and a resurgence of popularity in the 2000s. The "zombie apocalypse" concept, in which the civilized world is brought low by a global zombie infestation, became a staple of modern popular art.

The English word "zombie" is first recorded in 1819, in a history of Brazil by the poet Robert Southey, in the form of "zombi". The Oxford English Dictionary gives the origin of the word as West African, and compares it to the Kongo words nzambi (god) and zumbi (fetish).

One of the first books to expose Western culture to the concept of the Vodou zombie was The Magic Island by W.B. Seabrook in 1929. This is the sensationalized account of a narrator who encounters voodoo cults in Haiti and their resurrected thralls. Time claimed that the book "introduced 'zombi' into U.S. speech".

In 1932, Victor Halperin directed White Zombie, a horror film starring Bela Lugosi. Here zombies are depicted as mindless, unthinking henchmen under the spell of an evil magician. Zombies, often still using this voodoo-inspired rationale, were initially uncommon in cinema, but their appearances continued sporadically through the 1930s to the 1960s, with notable films including I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959).

How these creatures came to be called "zombies" is not fully clear. The film Night of the Living Dead made no spoken reference to its undead antagonists as "zombies", describing them instead as "ghouls", (though ghouls, which derive from Arabic folklore, are demons, not undead). Although George Romero used the term "ghoul" in his original scripts, in later interviews he used the term "zombie". The word "zombie" is used exclusively by Romero in his 1978 script for his sequel Dawn of the Dead, including once in dialog. According to George Romero, film critics were influential in associating the term "zombie" to his creatures, and especially the French magazine "Les Cahiers du Cinéma". He eventually accepted this linkage even though he remained convinced at the time that "zombies" corresponded to the undead slaves of Haitian Vodou as depicted in Bela Lugosi's White Zombie.


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Taumata-whaka-tangihanga-koauau-o-Tamatea-turi-pukaka-pikimaunga-horonuku-p okai-whenua-kitana-tahu, is the longest place name in the world. It is in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, and means ‘The hilltop where Tamatea with big knees, conqueror of mountains, eater of land, traveller over land and sea, played his koauau to his beloved.’

Scarab Sages

Ann-Margaret was discovered by actor/comedian George Burns when he heard her sing in a campus musical at Northwestern University and hired her to be a part of his Las Vegas act.


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An archon [Bestiary 1, 2, & 3], in the Gnosticism of late antiquity, referred to several servants of the Demiurge, the "creator god" that stood between the human race and a transcendent God that could only be reached through gnosis. In this context they have the role of the angels and demons of the Old Testament. They give their name to the sect called Archontics.

The term was taken from the ancient Greek and means "ruler" or "lord," frequently used as the title of a specific public office.

Grand Lodge

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Pathfinder PF Special Edition, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
Randarak wrote:

An archon [Bestiary 1, 2, & 3], in the Gnosticism of late antiquity, referred to several servants of the Demiurge, the "creator god" that stood between the human race and a transcendent God that could only be reached through gnosis. In this context they have the role of the angels and demons of the Old Testament. They give their name to the sect called Archontics.

The term was taken from the ancient Greek and means "ruler" or "lord," frequently used as the title of a specific public office.

It was also the name of one of the Federation's less than lucky starships in the background of "Return of the Archons".

Silver Crusade

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The name Qlippoths is presumably inspired from the Kaballah, and represent the evil forces that impede the righteous or the 'shells of the dead.'


meatrace wrote:
Saint Caleth wrote:
Tirq wrote:
The Japanese do not call their own country Japan. They call it Nippon, which translates to Two Sticks.
I'm not sure how you are getting "Two Sticks" for 日本, but then again I don't really speak Japanese. I always thought that it meant "Root of the Sun".
You are correct. I don't know where two sticks comes from. /boggle

I'm no expert in Japanese language, but it could from the fact that many Japanese words have different meanings depending how they are written out and with what characters (Japanese acttualy has three sets, Hirigana, Katakana, and Kanji, with Kanji having full meaning for individual characters as apposed to just representing sounds for the first two).


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LazarX wrote:
Randarak wrote:

An archon [Bestiary 1, 2, & 3], in the Gnosticism of late antiquity, referred to several servants of the Demiurge, the "creator god" that stood between the human race and a transcendent God that could only be reached through gnosis. In this context they have the role of the angels and demons of the Old Testament. They give their name to the sect called Archontics.

The term was taken from the ancient Greek and means "ruler" or "lord," frequently used as the title of a specific public office.

It was also the name of one of the Federation's less than lucky starships in the background of "Return of the Archons".

...it was the will of Landru...


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A good way to fight the Spanish slug, an invasive species in large parts of Europe and sporadically spotted in the US, is to take a regular plastic bottle, cut off the top and tape it inside the bottom upside-down, pour some beer into it, and wait for the garden-destroying mollusks to drown themselves.

Scarab Sages

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Jerry Seinfeld is a Porsche collector. Paparazzi have seen him in at least 20 different ones. He bought the first Porsche 911 ever built. It was light blue and bought at Manhattan Motors.


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A hag (hag variants are found in Bestiaries 1, 3, & 4), or "the Old Hag", was a nightmare spirit in English and anglophone North American folklore. This variety of hag is essentially identical to the Old English mæra — a being with roots in ancient Germanic superstition, and closely related to the Scandinavian mara. According to folklore, the Old Hag sat on a sleeper's chest and sent nightmares to him or her. When the subject awoke, he or she would be unable to breathe or even move for a short period of time. This state is now called sleep paralysis, but in the old belief the subject had been "hagridden". It is still frequently discussed as if it were a paranormal state.

Many stories about hags seem to have been used to frighten children into being good. The Northern English Peg Powler, for example, was a river hag who lived in the River Tees and had skin the colour of green pond scum. Parents who wanted to keep their children away from the river's edge told them that if they got too close to the water she would pull them in with her long arms, drown them, and sometimes eat them. This type of nixie or neck has other regional names, such as Grindylow (a name connected to Grendel), Jenny Greenteeth from Yorkshire, and Nellie Longarms from several English counties.
Many tales about hags do not describe them well enough to distinguish between an old woman who knows magic or a supernatural being.

In Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga was a hag who lived in the woods in a house on chickens legs. She would often ride through the forest on a mortar, sweeping away her tracks with a broom. Though she is usually a single being, in some folktales three Baba Yagas are depicted as helping the hero in his quest, either by giving advice or by giving gifts.

In Irish and Scottish mythology, the cailleach is a hag goddess concerned with creation, harvest, the weather and sovereignty. In partnership with the goddess Bríd, she is a seasonal goddess, seen as ruling the winter months while Bríd rules the summer. In Scotland, a group of hags, known as The Cailleachan (The Storm Hags) are seen as personifications of the elemental powers of nature, especially in a destructive aspect. They are said to be particularly active in raising the windstorms of spring, during the period known as A Chailleach.

Hags as sovereignty figures abound in Irish mythology. The most common pattern is that the hag represents the barren land, who the hero of the tale must approach without fear, and come to love on her own terms. When the hero displays this courage, love, and acceptance of her hideous side, the sovereignty hag then reveals that she is also a young and beautiful goddess.

In Persian folklore, the Bakhtak has the same role as that of "the Old Hag" in English folklore. The Bakhtak sits on a sleeper's chest, awakening them and causing them to feel they are unable to breathe or even to move. Bakhtak also is used metaphorically to refer to "nightmare" in the modern Persian language.


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Kajehase wrote:
A good way to fight the Spanish slug, an invasive species in large parts of Europe and sporadically spotted in the US, is to take a regular plastic bottle, cut off the top and tape it inside the bottom upside-down, pour some beer into it, and wait for the garden-destroying mollusks to drown themselves.

Indeed. But what I find fascinating is how quickly the invading spanish slugs have adapted to the Swedish climate. When they first came here in the late 90s, it was massively everywhere. Since then, it has become far more of a modest threat. Turns out enormous fertility and aggressiveness is hard to sustain in the face of real winters...

Scarab Sages

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Cloris Leachman posed "au natural" on the cover of "Alternative Medicine Digest" (issue 15, 1997) body painted with images of fruit adorning her nakedness. This was a parody, or imitation, of the famous Demi Moore body painted nude Vanity Fair photo.


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In Jewish folklore, a golem (Bestiary 1,2,3 & 4. My God, they're everywhere!!) is an animated anthropomorphic being, magically created entirely from inanimate matter. The word was used to mean an amorphous, unformed material (usually out of stone and clay) in Psalms and medieval writing.

The most famous golem narrative involves Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late-16th-century rabbi of Prague. There are many tales differing on how the golem was brought to life and afterwards controlled.

Scarab Sages

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Julie Benz was once ranked the number 12 ice skater in the United States.


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A goblin (Bestiary 1) is a legendary evil or mischievous grotesque dwarf-like daemon or monster that appeared in European stories and accounts during the Middle Ages.

They are attributed with various (sometimes conflicting) abilities, temperaments and appearances depending on the story and country of origin. In some cases, goblins are little creatures related to the brownie and gnome. They are usually small, sometimes only a few inches tall, sometimes the size of a dwarf, and have magical abilities; they are greedy, especially for gold and jewelry.

Scarab Sages

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Dwayne Johnson is a skilled light tackle salt water fisherman.


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Aberzombie wrote:
Tracy Marrow (aka Ice-T) served in the U.S. Army Rangers (1979-1981).

Sorry -- he was in the 25th, not the 75th. The only thing of note he was able to accomplish as to go AWOL after stealing a rug and receive an NJP.

Scarab Sages

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Kirth Gersen wrote:
Aberzombie wrote:
Tracy Marrow (aka Ice-T) served in the U.S. Army Rangers (1979-1981).
Sorry -- he was in the 25th, not the 75th. The only thing of note he was able to accomplish as to go AWOL after stealing a rug and receive an NJP.

Awesome! But you'll have to figure out on your own how to tell IMDB they're wrong, sunshine. I've got more important things to do. Garbage doesn't put itself out.....


A gargoyle is a working water spout in addition to a work of art

The things sitting on the side of notre dam are technically grotesques.

Scarab Sages

When The Four Seasons finally made it, their age was something of an embarrassment. They were a good ten years older than The Beach Boys. The record companies thought no teenagers would listen to a band in their thirties. Frankie Valli was 28 when "Sherry" became a hit, and the record company thought it would be better if he were considered 25, so his age was changed. But his real age and birth date (1934) were on the back of an album Valli made as part of The Four Lovers, a group he was in before The Four Seasons. Then, when The Four Seasons were arrested in Columbus, Ohio, for not paying for the hotel rooms the prior year, Valli's mug shot became public, and based on his driver's license and police record, it became obvious that he was born in 1934.


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BigNorseWolf wrote:

A gargoyle is a working water spout in addition to a work of art

The things sitting on the side of notre dam are technically grotesques.

Ah, the fancy French hydroelectric plant. ;-)

Dronf!


Aberzombie wrote:
But you'll have to figure out on your own how to tell IMDB they're wrong, sunshine.

I don't have to do that -- it's their job to fact-check what they post. Just because they don't doesn't mean that we shouldn't...


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Prior to his Hollywood career, actor/director Woody Allen served in the Pacific during WWII, where he amassed the largest number of single-handed Japanese fatalities -- using only a knife.


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Cliff Clavin wrote:
Prior to his Hollywood career, actor/director Woody Allen served in the Pacific during WWII, where he amassed the largest number of single-handed Japanese fatalities -- using only a knife.

Thomas Jefferson invented a working lunar lander. However, given that rocket technology was not significantly advanced enough at the time to propel the lunar module out of Earth's gravity well, the lander sat in Jefferson's garage collecting dust next to his fleet of Bentleys.


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The emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation wastraditionally elected by seven electors: The king of Bohemia, the margrave of Brandenburg, the duke of Saxony, the palatine count of the Palatinate by the Rhine, and the archbishops of Köln (Cologne), Trier, and Mainz.


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Of course, in practical terms the Imperial Crown became an heirloom for the Habsburgs who (with a brief interlude in the 1740s) held it from 1437 until the empire's dissolution in 1806.


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On July 4, 1776 the Declaration of Independence was completed and signed by the Founding Fathers. After that was done they all turned to Benjamin Franklin with a look of hope on their faces.

Benjamin said, "Look guys, I only just discovered electricity. The xerox machine is going to take a while longer."

Thus it was that the Declaration was sent out to be printed and was not available to the public until sometime later.

50 years later the heirs of Thomas Jefferson were going through all the junk that was piled up in his garage. In addition to several weird overly heavy metal carriages that had no provision for hitching horses to them and a bizarre object resting on three legs they found a crate that had been sent to Thomas Jefferson from Benjamin Franklin. In it was a weird contraption with a strange cord coming off of it. But as they had no 120 volt 60 hertz AC outlet to plug the cord into they weren't able to figure out what it was.

So the various different items of junk were scrapped, and interesting marvels of American history were lost. Their existence only to be surmised by various cryptic entries in assorted diaries and the questionable analysis of Eric Von Daniken.

A footnote to all this is that an understudy of Eric Von Daniken's grandfather, one Woody Allen, found a treatise on the art of knife fighting written by Jim Bowie when he was going through a collection of old manuscripts. Stealing the treatise for himself and studying it in secret, Woody Allen became a master knife fighter. Thus he was able to kill an incredible number of Japanese in brutal hand to hand combat during World War II before becoming famous as an actor, a film maker, and seducing one of his adopted daughters. Though one should probably not criticize Woody too much for that when he has a knife in arm's reach of him.

Dronf!


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Ceaser Slaad wrote:
In it was a weird contraption with a strange cord coming off of it. But as they had no 120 volt 60 hertz AC outlet to plug the cord into they weren't able to figure out what it was.

It's connected to the wall by a cable. There's a thing that lives in the wall and makes the pictures change.

Scarab Sages

Kirth Gersen wrote:
Aberzombie wrote:
But you'll have to figure out on your own how to tell IMDB they're wrong, sunshine.
I don't have to do that -- it's their job to fact-check what they post. Just because they don't doesn't mean that we shouldn't...

They must have been short-staffed that day.

Scarab Sages

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Audrey Hepburn turned down a role in the film The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) because, as a young girl in the Netherlands during the war, she had witnessed Nazi soldiers publicly executing people in the streets and herding Jews onto railroad cars to be sent to the death camps. She said that participating in the film would bring back too many painful memories for her.


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Philipp Fabricius, one of the three men that were the thrown out a window in the Defenestration of Prague which set of the 30-years-War was later ennobled for his pains and given the title Count of Rosenfeld and Hohenfall.

Hohenfall is German for "high fall"


On May 4, 2011, the first organized celebration of Star Wars Day took place in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at the Toronto Underground Cinema. Produced by Sean Ward and Alice Quinn, festivities included an Original Trilogy Trivia Game Show; a costume contest with celebrity judges; and the web's best tribute films, mash-ups, parodies, and remixes on the big screen.

Scarab Sages

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John Rhys-Davies lost the end tip of his left hand middle finger to the knuckle while changing a van engine. During filming of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), he was fitted with a gel tip for the finger. Rhys-Davies and the crew played a prank on director Peter Jackson by slicing the gel tip nearly in half and inserting prop blood inside. Rhys-Davies approached Jackson to tell him he was hurt and pulled open the tip, letting the blood flow out.


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A cockatrice (Bestiary 1) is a mythical beast, essentially a two-legged dragon with a rooster's head.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives a derivation from Old French cocatris, from medieval Latin calcatrix, a translation of the Greek ichneumon, meaning tracker. The twelfth century legend was based on a reference in Pliny's Natural History that the ichneumon lay in wait for the crocodile to open its jaws for the trochilus bird to enter and pick its teeth clean. An extended description of the cockatriz by the 15th-century Spanish traveler in Egypt, Pedro Tafur, makes it clear that the Nile crocodile is intended.

According to Alexander Neckam's De naturis rerum (ca 1180), the cockatrice was the product of an egg laid by a cock (a male chicken) and incubated by a toad; a snake might be substituted in re-tellings. Cockatrice became seen as synonymous with basilisk (also Bestiary 1) when the basiliscus in Bartholomeus Anglicus' De proprietatibus rerum (ca 1260) was translated by John Trevisa as cockatrice (1397).

It is thought that a cock egg would birth a cockatrice, and could be prevented by tossing the yolkless egg over the family house, landing on the other side of the house, without allowing the egg to hit the house.
It has the reputed ability of killing people by either looking at them—"the death-darting eye of Cockatrice"—touching them, or sometimes breathing on them.

It was repeated in the late-medieval bestiaries that the weasel is the only animal that is immune to the glance of a cockatrice. It was also thought that a cockatrice would die instantly upon hearing a rooster crow, and according to legend, having a cockatrice look itself in a mirror is one of the few sure-fire ways to kill it.


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While not a common feature, the almond-shaped eyes normally associated with East- or Central Asian heritage, is fairly unremarkable on Swedes.


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Among the prisoners saved when US forces reached Buchenwald were 900 children.


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The first mountaineering expedition to attempt to summit K2 in the Himalayas was led by famed English mountaineer Oscar Eckenstein in 1902. Eckenstein's second-in-command and expedition sponsor was a 26-year-old poet, mountaineer, and dilettante named Aleister Crowley.

Scarab Sages

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Adrianne Palicki has starred in three different productions featuring members of DC Comics' Justice League. She played a fellow Krypton native and ally of Clark Kent/Superman in an episode of Smallville (2001), she played a villain in the aborted "Aquaman" series, and she played Wonder Woman in a 2011 pilot that was not picked up.


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...that this is the 3300th post in this thread...

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