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Games & Recreation Pointless Trivia

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kickazz said:
On the topic of returning horses:

In WW1 Australia sent over 120,000 horses overseas to do battle.

The number of those that returned to Australia: One.
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Maybe its time we honour the lives of those animal companions that gave up their lives, if we don't/haven't already.
 

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Sqotty from office works said:
Quarantine
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That would be a big part of it - but also the war was very costly and bringing them home full stop would have been an effort. Many were sold off, but unfortunately only the younger fitter ones. The older ones would have been euthanised.

Flemington racecourse has a race meeting every ANZAC day, and the ceremony commemorates the service of not only the soldiers but the horses too.
 
MarcMaverick said:
Maybe its time we honour the lives of those animal companions that gave up their lives, if we don't/haven't already.
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Putting animals to work against their will is an interesting ethical discussion. (There is debate over Guide Dogs for example)

I do see something noble and dignified about animals that work. A sort of respect I guess? But maybe in some ways we do not acknowledge them enough.


Some animals do get acknowledgement though. The Dickin Medal is unique in that it is awarded to non-humans. It started as a wartime award but is also now awarded for civic duty too. Many pigeons received it in WW2. Horses and dogs have also got it - dogs more so in recent years. The only other animal to get it is a single ship's cat - who despite being injured in battle managed to improve the health and morale of a ship by ridding it of disease from a rat infestation.

The medal is inscribed with the phrase We Also Serve.
 
kickazz said:
Some animals do get acknowledgement though. The Dickin Medal is unique in that it is awarded to non-humans. It started as a wartime award but is also now awarded for civic duty too. Many pigeons received it in WW2. Horses and dogs have also got it - dogs more so in recent years. The only other animal to get it is a single ship's cat - who despite being injured in battle managed to improve the health and morale of a ship by ridding it of disease from a rat infestation.

The medal is inscribed with the phrase We Also Serve.
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The animals wouldn't have had a clue about the medals given to them. It's about their impact on human endeavour. I can see people forming emotional attachments to horses, dogs and cats - so that's where the stories come from. I'm not sure that applies to pigeons.
 
An episode of American sitcom 'Malcolm in the Middle' simply titled 'Bowling' aired on 1st April 2001 and was a 'sliding doors' style episode, showing what would happen in one timeline if the mother Lois drove sons Malcolm and Reece to the bowling alley for a party with some of their friends from middle school while Hal stays home to watch grounded younger son Dewey, and in the alternate timeline Hal drives the boys to the bowling alley and Lois stays home to watch Dewey.

In the timeline where Lois takes the boys to the bowling alley, things rapidly turn into one humiliation after another for Malcolm as his overbearing mother takes strict control of the party and is highly critical of Malcolm's increasingly poor performance at ten-pin bowling and getting him to improve his game. This includes extreme micromanagement like a stage/sports mother, getting Malcolm to bowl with a ball used by very young children (and which even has a girls' name on it) and then getting the staff to put up the gutter guards, hardly being discrete in this request to the bowling alley staff, his game only getting worse and his mother more critical.

Finally Malcolm snaps and walks along the lane ranting about how much he hates bowling until he stands right up against the pins, yelling about how he is going to finally get a strike and make his mother happy, only to somehow fail to knock over a single pin despite bowling from just inches away and everyone (except an angry Lois) laughing at him as he walks back.

When the scene was filmed, it was anticipated that at this distance from the pins it was inevitable that at least some would be knocked down, so producers/directors advised the then 15-year-old Frankie Muniz to aim for the side and knock down as few as he possibly could. The bowl from so close that failed to knock down any pins at all was an absolute fluke shot by Muniz that seemed to defy the rules of physics, astounding the actors and production staff making the episode, and one that everyone agreed could not be repeated no matter how many takes they took of the scene.
 
I was watching a movie that featured Roberta Flack singing 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face'. It's such a beautiful song. I was surprised to find that it was written by Ewan MacColl, who also wrote 'Dirty Old Town'. His daughter, Kirsty MacColl, had a few hits such as 'There's a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis' and 'Fairytale of New York', with the Pogues.

There's a conspiracy around her death. She was hit by a powerboat in Mexico, owned by a millionaire businessman. A young boathand took the blame, was given a short sentence, which was commuted to a fine. To bring it full circle, it's quite similar to the plot in the movie.
 
With the passing of the world's second oldest person Marie-Rose Tessier of France at age 115 earlier this week all the super-centenarians (with the obvious exception of the oldest living person Ethel Caterham aged 116) stepped up one spot on the list of the world's oldest 50 living people, and place 50 was taken by a 112-year-old Australian man named Ken Weeks of Grafton NSW, who was born on 05-Oct-1913 and the oldest verified male in Australian history. He is the first Australian to enter this list for some years, and only the third man currently on it, the oldest being Joao Marinho Neto of Brazil, who interestingly was born exactly one year earlier on 05-Oct-1912.

At the time Ken Weeks was born the major news story was the unexplained disappearance of German inventor and engineer Rudolf Diesel from the ship the SS Dresden bound for London on 29-Sep-1913, his body found at sea by a pilot boat 10 days later on 9th October, the circumstances of his death and how he ended up in the ocean still unsolved to this day. There was also a major moral panic around this time about this new dance craze called 'The Tango' from South America, with lots of countries seeking ways to ban it on the grounds of immorality.

While there were no really famous names among the birth list for 05-Oct-1913, the day after Ken Weeks was born American artist, cartoonist and entrepreneur Alfred Harvey was born in New York City, the founder of Harvey Comics. While many Harvey Comics characters have faded to obscurity over the years a number are still fairly memorable - Casper the Friendly Ghost, Richie Rich and Little Dot. Mr. Harvey however was not able to congratulate Mr. Weeks on his ascent into the Top 50 Oldest people as he died from heart problems at age 80 back in 1994.

With sports, the 1913 NSWRL premiership was won by Eastern Suburbs over Newtown, but there was no GF this year, with the top team on the table - the Roosters - winning the competition. In the VFL, Fitzroy had just beaten St Kilda in the 1913 GF several weeks before Ken Weeks was born, but the Saints would not return to another GF until 1965 by which time he was approaching age 52, and Fitzroy and St Kilda would never be in the same finals series again. The Saints however did meet the newly formed Brisbane Lions team in the finals in 1997 following the Fitzroy merger with the Brisbane Bears in 1996, by which time Ken Weeks was 83-years-old.
 
The word 'nun' is just the letter n doing a cartwheel
 

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One for the engineers or mathematically nerdy:

Most people know that the first and second derivatives of position are velocity and acceleration respectively.

(For the non nerds - how quickly an object's position changes is called its velocity (sorta like speed but with a direction) and how quickly an object's velocity changes is called its acceleration.

Big deal, we all know that.

But what about the term for how quickly its acceleration changes, and how quickly that change changes, etc?


Well you'll be glad to know that the third, fourth, fifth and sixth derivatives of position are called jerk, snap, crackle and pop respectively.

Jerk is useful to aerospace engineers, and snap has some application in robotics. But those last two are a truly trivial creation at this point in human discovery.
 
kickazz said:
Well you'll be glad to know that the third, fourth, fifth and sixth derivatives of position are called jerk, snap, crackle and pop respectively.

Jerk is useful to aerospace engineers, and snap has some application in robotics. But those last two are a truly trivial creation at this point in human discovery.
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Probably just thought bubbles
 
Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before is the only Smiths song to have a guitar solo in it.
 

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