Another week is set to begin and those of you lucky enough to have the day off on Monday for Memorial Day have to go back to work like the rest of us schmucks. Let’s grind into gently, shall we, and to do so I have a bevy of mind-numbing facts to get you going.
Since it was Memorial Day yesterday we’ll start off with a Memorial Day fact. Just prior to the Memorial Day weekend, the 3rd U.S. Infantry places flags in front of 260,000 gravestones and 7,300 niches at the columbarium of Arlington National Cemetery in three hours. An additional 13,500 flags are placed at the Soldier’s and Airmen’s Cemetary. The soldiers will then remove all the flags before the cemetery opens back to the public. Check out my post on the History of Memorial Day for even more info.
This next one is no joke. I thought it was before I researched it. There’s a basketball court above the United States Supreme Court. It’s known as the “Highest Court in the Land”. No, really, I’m serious. You can even be reprimanded if you play on the court while “Court” is in session. Confused yet?
Google search is know for having some interesting things happen when you type in the words on a search. Many of them are now gone (bye Pac-man), but some still exist. When you search for the word tilt on Google, the search results come up tilted slightly to the right. Type in “do a barrel roll” and see what happens.
There are two golf balls still on the moon, and it took Alan Shepard three swings to hit the first and one swing for the second on Apollo 14. There is some controversy on how far the balls went and if there were more left up there as moon trash, but my crack research team (me) found that the evidence clearly pointed to two balls. I don’t know far they went. I’ve never been on the moon.
I just looked. It really is there. The YKK on your zipper stands for Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikaisha, or YKK group; a group of Japanese manufacturing companies and the world’s biggest zipper manufacturer.
This one is hard to believe but true. The town of Calama in the Atacama Desert of Chile has never recorded a drop of rain since record keeping began. In some areas of the desert it hasn’t rained in 400 years.
I have to wrap things up. I’ll be back in a jiffy? Only if I can make it in approximately 33.35 picoseconds. A jiffy is equal to the time it takes light to travel one centimeter, about 33 trillionths of a second.
That’s it for this week. Check back again in a jiffy.
