Weird Facts 1

I didn’t do anything interesting yesterday and the political things on my mind are too difficult to write about. It doesn’t do any good to tell people, “You’re being stupid! Cut it out!” I’m not feeling exposing my feelings this morning. So I’m going to do something I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while, throw weird facts at you. The right way to do this is to add to the list every time I come across one and the present them when I have enough. That requires preparation. So I’m just going to list facts. I’m not even going to document them though I have researched them all. I’m not even going to try and organize them by topic. This is almost a stream of consciousness. This might be short, it might be long. I’m just going to list things till I’m out of weird facts or I get hungry.

• Fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants. That is, a mushroom shares a more recent common ancestor with a person than with potato.
• A tuna is more closely related to a human than it is to a shark.
• Galileo was offered a teaching position at Harvard
• Lorenzo da Ponte who wrote the librettos for Don Giovanni and Le nozze di Figaro moved to America and taught at Columbia College.
• The last wooly mammoth died on Wrangel Island only 4,000 years ago. That’s well after the pyramid of Khufu was built, circa 2560 BC.
• The banana is botanically a bean
• The closest living relative of the elephant is probably the rodentlike hyrax, though that is disputed.
• If a pitcher won 30 games for the next 17 years he’d have one less victory than Cy Young had.
• Cleopatra’s hair was blond or perhaps auburn. She was not of Egyptian decent by Macedonian, northern Greece.
• The early homo sapiens in Europe were dark skinned, the whites didn’t come in from Asia till later.
• The modern country in the Americas that had the largest population when Columbus came to the New World was Peru.
• Frederick the Great of Prussia was born in Sicily and his first language was Italian.
• Galileo was born the year da Vinci died and died the year that Newton was born.
• Halley’s Comet was in the sky when Mark Twain was born and when he died.
• Newfoundland was a British colony, then an independent dominion, and then went back to being a colony. It considered becoming part of the US before it joined Canada.
• A young Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka had a mutual friend that thought they should meet. They did one day in Prague. This was before either was famous.
• The name Russia comes from the Rus, who were Vikings that conquered part of the country.
• Madagascar lies off the coast of Africa but was populated by people from Asia. The first inhabitants were from Borneo across the Indian Ocean.
• Neutronium, what neutron stars are made of, is a liquid. Science fictions stories like the Star Trek episode, The Doomsday Machine which have solid objects made of solid neutronium get it wrong.
• The Pythagoreans discovered the major chord.
• The Pythagoreans were a religious cult, and Pythagoras a cult leader. They lived in Italy, not Greece.
• Archimedes lived in Sicily not Greece
• Napoleon was 5’7” not particularly short, especially for those times.
• One in 200 men in the world is a direct patrilineal descendent of Genghis Khan.
• A chicken is more closely related to a T-Rex than a crocodile is.
• Roy Campanella was half Italian and spoke Italian. When the Dodgers played the Yankees in the world series he shocked Phil Rizzuto by speaking Italian to him when he came to the plate. I heard that from the Scooter himself.

I’m hungry and an out of ideas. I’ll start making a list of weird facts as they come to me and do this again.