Really TRUE odd factoids

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houblon

Senior Member
Relying on GPS to navigate destroys your innate sense of direction, a skill that took our ancestors thousands of years to develop and hone.

When areas of the brain involved in navigation are no longer used, those neural connections fade away via a process known as synaptic pruning.

I heard that debunked earlier this year [citation required {I'll get my coat}]
 

Joey Shabadoo

My pronouns are "He", "Him" and "buggerlugs"
intriguing.
Not a lot of gorillas in greece?
From the font of all knowledge

The word "gorilla" comes from the history of Hanno the Navigator, (c. 500 BC) a Carthaginian explorer on an expedition to the west African coast to the area that later became Sierra Leone.[2][3] Members of the expedition encountered "savage people, the greater part of whom were women, whose bodies were hairy, and whom our interpreters called Gorillae".[4][5] It is unknown whether what the explorers encountered were what we now call gorillas, another species of ape or monkeys, or humans.[6] Skins of gorillai women, brought back by Hanno, are reputed to have been kept at Carthage until Rome destroyed the city 350 years later at the end of the Punic Wars, 146 BC.

The American physician and missionary Thomas Staughton Savage and naturalist Jeffries Wyman first described the western gorilla (they called it Troglodytes gorilla) in 1847 from specimens obtained in Liberia.[7] The name was derived from Ancient Greek Γόριλλαι (gorillai) 'tribe of hairy women',[8] described by Hanno.
 
OP
OP
Blue Hills
Location
London
There were three german/german born pilots in the RAF during WW2.
One was Ken Adam, whose work many of you probably know - he went on to design many of those extravagant James Bond sets.
Apparently, seeing the horror of the Falaise Pocket at the culmination of the Normandy campaign he was more affected by the dead cattle than the many many dead Germans - he and his family had had to flee the country as they were Jewish.
One of the others was his brother.
The third was a fugitive from British justice who had adopted a false identity and then joined up. The false identity came in handy as he was later captured and held as a PoW by his former countrymen - if his real identity had been discovered he may have been shot as a traitor.
 

Beebo

Firm and Fruity
Location
Hexleybeef
99.9% of Americans have never tasted blackcurrants.
Lucky gits. Black currants are horrible.
We used to have a black and red currant bush as well as gooseberries when we were kids. My mum insisted on making stewed fruit with them.
Horrible!
Although gooseberries are OK if left on the bush until very ripe.
 

Joey Shabadoo

My pronouns are "He", "Him" and "buggerlugs"
Rabies often causes involuntary erections and hands-free orgasms, sometimes as many as 30-50 per day in the final phases before death.
 
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