By David Fidelman
I don’t make a regular habit of attending happy hours, but I have participated in my share of male bonding, and have noticed that you can pick up an amazing amount of information during these sessions. Some of the things I’ve learned are so interesting that I feel compelled to pass them on to my readers. A note of caution, however. Considering their sources and the conditions under which they were acquired, there is no guarantee of accuracy for any of these items:
In spite of all our technological developments, the great amounts of money spent on pharmaceutical research, and the improvements in medical practice, the single greatest health discovery in the past 150 years has been to teach medical practitioners to wash their hands.
25% of burglaries occur between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and 40% of sick days are taken on Fridays and Mondays.
Louis Pasteur is the actual discoverer of penicillin. His laboratory notes contain the following statement: "This damned mold keeps destroying my cultures."
Sailors and navigators knew that the earth was round long before Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America. At sea they could see the curvature of the horizon, and they could see the ships’ hulls sinking out of sight and the masts getting lower as the ships sailed away.
One of the things that Apollo mission did was deposit a cockroach on the moon. During their outward flight, the astronauts noticed a cockroach in their spaceship, but when they returned, the craft was thoroughly inspected by NASA technicians and no trace of it was found. The only conclusion is that it crept out and was left behind. If it was a pregnant female, there may now be a whole colony of cockroaches living on the moon.
The pilot in the first fatal plane crash was Orville Wright. It took place on September 17, 1908. Wright survived but his passenger died.
In 1958 as a fraternity initiation, a bunch of MIT freshmen had to see how many times one of their fellow students, Oliver Smoot, could be laid head-to-toe across the Harvard Bridge over Boston’s Charles River. They reported the length of the bridge as "364.4 Smoots + 1 ear." A bronze plaque on the bridge commemorates the event.
I met a man whose friend knows the man whose uncle invented the gasoline substitute, a small pill which is dissolved in water and can be used as a replacement for gasoline. It drives a car with better performance, at lower cost, and with less pollution than gasoline. The oil companies found out about it, and paid a lot of money for the invention. The uncle now lives in luxury on the Riviera, and the companies have safely hidden away the formula to protect their fuel monopoly. The man who told me about this invention also knows for a fact that the oil and coal interests have been sabotaging all efforts to perfect nuclear energy and cold fusion.
A patent has been issued on a "Secret Keeping Machine." Two people know a secret, but are reluctant to talk about it for fear of betraying a confidence. They both tell their secrets to the computer, which lets them know if it’s the same one and they can safely discuss it.
The famous French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, who discovered the role of oxygen in combustion, and who is considered to be the father of modern chemistry, was also the inventor of the "whoopee cushion." In spite of this accomplishment (perhaps because of it?), he was considered by the leaders of the French Revolution to be an aristocrat and was executed in 1794. His widow later married physicist Count Rumford who, after the marriage failed, said Lavoisier was lucky to have gone to the guillotine.
And a few miscellaneous items: when blueberries are red they’re green. The "you Are Here" map was invented by Gerardus Mercator in 1569. Archeologists digging in a cave near the Dead Sea have discovered the earliest known copy of the National Geographic - it was dated June 1, 1012 BC And evidence has been found that the first garage sale was held in Mesopotamia about 3,000 BC
I try to maintain a healthy skepticism. For example, I have my doubts about the stories of UFOs or visitors from outer space, because I have never personally met anyone who knows or has spoken with anyone who has seen a flying saucer or has any real knowledge of a secret government installation in Roswell, NM. But you never know.
I keep being surprised by how many useful and interesting things you can learn from casual conversations with strangers.