Superman, hulk and batman, life past retirement

According to a study by Barclays Wealth, British people are more likely to carry on working after retirement age than any other nation.

The study found that over 60 per cent of people under 65 intend to work past retirement age, and those numbers will probably increase over the coming years, as 70 per cent of these are under 45, in the study they said "i would always be involved in some kind of work."

Ireland was second with 59 per cent,
Spain the number was 44 per cent,
Japan 46 per cent, but in Switzerland,
only 34 per cent plan to carry on working!

The Desciples

Ok so i always thought that the Desciples were old!

In Matthew there is a story that talks of Jesus having to pay temple tax and only Paul and himself have to pay, Which means the Desciples were all under the age of 17!!

Those guys did some amazing things according to the bible and they were soo young!

This photo won the London Natural History Museum's Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award for 2009.

Then, several Spanish photographers recognized that wolf, and revealed the chance image was a setup.

Im not sure if i care because this image looks amazing.

Another fox related link but a bit more obscure

Karen O'Leary creates hand-cut city maps from paper. She just finished Paris!

This is just too amazing!

Saw this and loved it

I saw this and loved it i have a couple of friends who will love this




You can actually buy this from www.thinkgeek.com

Im so sorry matt.

I recently discovered Fox-Tossing, a 17th/18th century European pastime that is exactly what it sounds like.
People would go out in a field and set up a little fenced-in court. Then high-society types would stand, in pairs, holding slack ropes. Then a bunch of foxes would be released into the court. When the foxes ran over the ropes, the players pulled the ropes tight, launching the foxes up into the air. Repeat until all foxes are dead.



Fleming's Deutsche Jaeger (published in 1719) produced this image, and commented on it saying "Skilled male tossers could toss a fox 24 ft. high. At a famous fox-tossing in Dresden there were tossed some 687 foxes, 533 hares, 34 badgers, 21 wild cats, and at the end 34 young wild boar and 3 wolves...."

This is both funny and wrong!

Richard Smith, a 41-year-old care worker from Carlisle, England, has legally changed his name to Stormhammer Deathclaw Firebrand: "It's just a strange name I like the sound of." English and Welsh name-changing procedures are much simpler than US equivalents: the ancient tradition of "deed-poll" name change has made it possible for people to change to all kinds of wonderful and wacky things

Freedom of speach but not of music

In 1940 Igor Stravinsky re-orchestrated 'The Star Spangled Banner' for the Boston Symphony. Someone alerted the Boston police, who arrived at Symphony Hall, confiscated the instrumental parts to the Stravinsky orchestration and arrested Stravinsky for 'tampering with public property.

Igor Stravinsky

The Hunch back of Notre Dame, fact or fiction?

New evidence suggests that the iconic character of Quasimodo was not entirely the brainchild of Victor Hugo, author of the famed 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame).

Historians recently found references to a "hunchback sculptor" working at the cathedral in British sculptor Henry Sibson's memoirs, now in the Tate Archive. From The Telegraph:

In one entry, he writes:

"the French government had given orders for the repairing of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and it was now in progress ... I applied at the Government studios, where they were executing the large figures for Notre Dame and here I met with a Mons. Trajan, a most worthy, fatherly and amiable man as ever existed – he was the carver under the Government sculptor whose name I forget as I had no intercourse (no this does not mean sex) with him, all that I know is that he was humpbacked and he did not like to mix with carvers."

In a later entry, Sibson writes about working with the same group of sculptors on another project outside Paris, where he again mentions the reclusive government sculptor, this time recalling his name as "Mon. Le Bossu". Le Bossu is French for "the hunchback".

He writes: "Mon Le Bossu (the Hunchback) a nickname given to him and I scarcely ever heard any other. "

William Dieterle's 1939 version of the Hunch back

See its out to get us one by one

The Akansha Food Products unit in Lucknow, India has claimed its 6th victim.
A worker slipped into a 6 foot vat of Tomato Ketchup. The woman was unable to swin to the top so five other workers jumped in to save her, these workers were overcome by the fumes and also died. Two workers are still critical in hospital.

Moral of this story is donteat Tomato Ketchup as you are killing innocent people.

A little geek history

The idea for a laptop was first developed in the late '60s, Alan Kay of Xerox then wrote about coming up with a 'personal, portable information manipulator' in a 1972 paper, calling it the 'Dynabook'.

Alan is credited for conceiving the idea of a portable computer in 1968, when computers still weighed over 100 pounds and ate punch cards.

His concept was a very thin, highly dynamic device that weighed no more than 2 pounds, which would be an ideal tool for children to learn programming and science. Alan’s Dynabook was never made, but characteristics of his concept can be seen in the mobile computers we have today.

Steve Jobs (mr apple) took a tour of Xerox PARC in 1979, and some say that his visit is still unfolding with the release of the iPad, which resembles Alan Kay’s description of the Dynabook.

Steve Jobs this month personally mailed an iPad to Alan, who praised Apple’s tablet as “fantastically good” for drawing, painting and typing.

The first commercially available portable computer was the IBM 5100. The first flip laptop appeared in 1982 and was the GRiD Compass 1100, which was used by NASA scientists and cost $8,150.




IBM 5100



GRiD Compass 1100

Thank you Mr Alan Kay

Light speed!

Light doesn’t always travel at ‘the speed of light’ (299,792,458 metres per second). It only travels at that speed when travelling through a vacuum; when it passes through matter, it slows down. The slowest light has ever been recorded moving at is a 38mph, while passing through an ultracold gas of sodium atoms.

So if you have been down the M1 you van say you have travelled travled faster than light!

Twins!

Twins are always born at about the same time.

But the world record for the longest gap between one twin being born and its sibling emerging is held by American Peggy Lynn, who gave birth to twins on November 11 1995, and February 2 1996 - an incredible 84 days apart.

I have been away for a week so a small catch up

According to MBT a shoe company, flip-flops 'injure 200,000 people a year'.


The injuries range from trips and falls, joint pain and other conditions linked to long-term use, and it costs the NHS £40m a year! Yes these innocuous looking pieces of cheap, flimsy plastic are death traps in disguise.

Fillip, not just a boys name

I found this one intresting, a brief thank you to Tom Brennan for telling me this.

A fillip is the act of clicking your fingers. So you dont click you fillip!

Its been a while

Its been a while and I am really struggling. Most days I try to work out if something i have learnt is worthy of blogging or just a silly bit of trivia. Both sides interest me but this journey is definitely pushing me to try harder with the things I am blogging. So this is the 1st of my belated posts .

The Eiffel Tower, built in 1889, stands at 325 m high and is the seventh tallest building in France. Gustave Eiffel, designer of the Eiffel Tower, had a successful career as an architect despite having dyslexia and a paralyzing fear of heights.

Gustave also helped design the Statue of Liberty!!

Life would have been so different

In a very early draft of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones carried brass knuckles instead of a bullwhip.

Man on the moon

The last person on the moon was Eugene Cernan. He and fellow explorer Harrison Schmidt left the moon at 5.40, December 13th 1972 and no one has been to the moon ever since.

This black and white picture was taken from a color television transmission made by the color RCA TV camera mounted on the Lunar Roving Vehicle. Astronaut Ronald E. Evans, command module pilot, remained with the Command and Service Modules in lunar orbit.

Harrison is in front with Eugene behind.

pukey lukey

Ok, I have failed already!

I was going to try and do this every day but have not managed it! Today i have a great one!



I have spent a lot of my life being called names that rhyme with mine, 'puke' being one of them. Today i have found out where the birth of 'puke' came from



The first recorded use of the word 'puke' in the English language comes from William Shakespeare, who used it in the 'All the world's a stage' speech in As You Like It - where he refers to 'the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.'



Who knew puke was such a poetic word?

Weblog, web log, we blog and blog

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997.

The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April 1999.

The term blog became used as a noun and a verb "to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog" by a guy called Evan Williams from a company called Pyro Labs.