Games & Recreation Pointless Trivia

[cats_09]

 

[74561347]

Darwin only appears farther away because north south distances are compressed by magnetic distortion fields generated at the Antarctic ice wall.

 

[the_interloper]

Darwin only appears farther away because north south distances are compressed by magnetic distortion fields generated at the Antarctic ice wall.

 

[emuboy]

My nan was born 11/22/33 in the American system of writing the date. 30th birthday was the JFK assassination.

Some famous people with really distinctive dates of birth are American actor Craig T Nelson (04/04/1944), Princess Beatrice of England (08/08/1988) and Australian actress Angourie Rice (01/01/2001). No excuse for forgetting their birthdays.

Jack Sears, the captain of WAFL team Peel Thunder also has a date of birth that is impossible to forget - 11/09/2001. As I pointed out on another thread his name is kind of ironic, as the building that eclipsed the World Trade Center's Twin Towers in height when completed in the mid 1970s was Sears Tower in Chicago.

 

[Gough]

Bob Woolmer was considered to be the only person to have seen both Hanif Mohammed's 499 and Brian Lara's 501 live at the ground.

 

[Pistol Night]

Bob Woolmer was considered to be the only person to have seen both Hanif Mohammed's 499 and Brian Lara's 501 live at the ground.

If the Proclaimers wrote a song about cricket..

 

[Moonwatcher]

Not quite pointless trivia but I just realised that Australia paid $1.3M for Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles in 1973. It is now worth $500M.

 

[Plugger35]

A lot of great artists paintings are worth a lot more after they died.

Vincent van Gogh couldn't sell any of his paintings when he was alive and he died broke, now they are worth millions.

 

[Mofra]

A lot of great artists paintings are worth a lot more after they died.

Vincent van Gogh couldn't sell any of his paintings when he was alive and he died broke, now they are worth millions.

Brett Whiteley's prints tripled overnight when he passed away.

 

[troybe]

Ewan McGregor’s brother is a RAF pilot with the call sign Obi Two

 

[Gough]

During the second Test of the 1902 Ashes at the MCG (did not start Boxing Day) Clem Hill became the first man to be dismissed for 99, at the next Test in Adelaide he was out for 98 in the first innings and 97 in the second.

 

[emuboy]

Two men from England who shared the same name of Donald Sinclair but who had absolutely nothing else in common would both remarkably become the inspirations for two well-known characters from popular TV shows.

The first Donald Sinclair hailed from Torquay in Devon, where he and his wife ran the Gleneagles Hotel and where the Monty Python team stayed in the early 1970s and were so appalled by Sinclair's alleged rudeness, incompetence and bizarre behavior that they quickly departed for new accommodation. All but John Cleese, who stayed behind at the hotel writing down reams of notes about what he was observing, using these as inspiration for developing the sitcom Fawlty Towers and the character of Basil Fawlty, whom Cleese himself would play. Apparently Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair both hated Fawlty Towers, condemning the sitcom and those who created and produced it until their deaths.

The second Donald Sinclair was a few decades before this and worked not as a hotelier but at the other end of the country as a vet in the Yorkshire moors. He was the senior partner of the vet practice with Alf Wight - who (Wight) under the pseudonym James Herriot published a series of books about his experiences working with animals over the years. Donald Sinclair was named Siegfried Farnon in the books, and when some of these were adapted to the screen he would be played first by Sir Anthony Hopkins in the 1975 movie 'All Creatures Great and Small' then by the late Robert Hardy in the 1980s television show of the same name.

 

[emuboy]

Being shrunk to a very small size like the characters in the 1989 movie 'Honey I Shrunk the Kids' would be a terrifying experience due mainly to the many formidable arthropod predators that inhabit this miniature world.

Scariest of all might be the antlion, an insect that looks like pure nightmare fuel and which lurks in the sand, digging funnels in which it hides at the bottom. It grabs ants and other small crawling insects that fall into its lair, injecting poison into its victim through its pinchers and then sucking them dry.

The antlion lurking in the sand however is not an adult insect but a larvae, which will the pupate into its adult form. So if the larvae is this scary, the adult must be even more terrifying - something like an Asian giant hornet with a sting more painful than that of a bullet ant and very aggressive?

Fortunately this isn't the case. The adult insects that emerge from the pupae of antlion larvae are delicate, timid and harmless, and in appearance much like a damsel or dragonfly.

 

[emuboy]

One of the biggest hits in the American music charts in 1964 was 'Dancing in the Street' by Motown girl group Martha and the Vandellas. In the Australian music charts the same year, one of the biggest hits of 1964 was the song '4,003,221 Tears from Now' by young Sydney singer Judy Stone. The music video for Judy Stone's song was filmed at Luna Park on Sydney's North Shore with the Sydney Harbour Bridge prominent in the background, although of course no Opera House to be seen back in those days.

Forty years later and another young singer from Sydney had one of her biggest hits with a cover version of 'Dancing in the Street', this being Nikki Webster. And like Judy Stone's music video four decades previously the 2004 Nikki Webster music video for DITS was filmed entirely in a theme park, this time Movie World on the Gold Coast.