1. Removing your wisdom tooth isn't risk free. The operation could damage mandibular nerve and cause paralysis.
2. There is a thing called "disruptive mood dysregulation disorder".
"Although many children have occasional tantrums, youths with DMDD have outbursts that are out of proportion in terms of their intensity or duration. These outbursts can be verbal or behavioral. Verbal outbursts often are described by observers as "rages" or "fits". Children may scream, yell, and cry for excessively long periods of time, sometimes with little provocation. Physical outbursts may be directed toward people or property. Children may throw objects; hit, slap, or bite others; destroy toys or furniture; or otherwise act in a harmful or destructive manner."
I recognize myself in this... now, I'm not saying I have DMDD, I don't have it (it's not regular enough and I'm an adult. Adults don't have it.), but... with all the crap that happened 2012-2015, that is how I was behaving. It must have been hell for my husband.
3.
4. Oranges are actually green.
5. Male swan is called cobbe, female is pen and babies are cygnets or swanlings. Group of swans is called a bevy, or a wedge when flying.
6. There are male calico cats! I thought it was impossible!
7. Fasnacht (also spelled fastnacht, faschnacht, fosnot, fosnaught, fausnaught) is a fried doughnut of German origin served traditionally in the days of Carnival and Fastnacht or on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Lent starts. Fasnachts were made as a way to empty the pantry of lard, sugar, fat, and butter, which were traditionally fasted from during Lent.
Recipe
8. Praerie dogs are squirrels
9. Diane Duane's book "To Visit the Queen" was published in UK as "On Her Majesty's Wizardly Service". :-( I bought both of them, believing them to be two different books. :-(
10. Gamboge is a pigment, tree sap, used to dye the Buddhist monks' robes. I thought they used saffron or turmeric.
11.
Gaol is an alternative spelling of jail and is pronounced the same way! Huh!
12.
Calf's head a la Financière
Yes, it is a calf's head. You remove the bones and cook it, and then you arrange the bits of the head artistically on a plate - tongue in the middle, ears on both sides of it, brains on top of the tongue and the rest of the head nicely placed around them. I suppose the eyes are there somewhere also.
Then you douse it with Financière ragout.
That is made by warming up "few cockscombs, button mushrooms, truffles, quenelles, and scollops of sweetbreads" in good brown sauce and sherry or madeira. I thought first that the cockscombs were some sort of mushroom, but then I realized it was actual cockscombs...
13. Cinco de Mayo is NOT Mexico's independence day,
AND the way it is celebrated is pretty... horrible. Talk about ethnic stereotypes and cultural appropriation. I wonder what USonians would say if people "celebrated" Fourth of July by playing "cowboys and Indians" - or "hillbillies"?
14. Turkish has two past tenses; the definite and the reported. Reported past tense is used when one isn't quite sure that what is said to have happened actually did happen...
http://turkishbasics.com/verbs/reported-past-tense.php
15. Somewhere in the world, was it Minnesota, Michigan? Somewhere. The rain freezes on apples, and stays frozen. The apple inside the ice shell rots and turns into mush and drains out of the shell, leaving a perfect ice apple on the tree.
16.
There is a "Magic Capital" in India, Mayong. They say the people are very good with illusions and such, making things turn into other things, etc.
17. A giraffe's tail is about a meter long. An elephant's tail is about 1-1 1/2 meter long. A hippo's tail is about half a meter long.
18. Barbola: decorative work consisting of small models of flowers and fruit made from plastic paste
19. Chess boxing is “11 alternating 3 minute rounds of chess and boxing”. First you have a round of chess (speed chess) immediately followed by a 3 minute round of boxing, and this goes on 11 rounds.
20. Bigfoot erotica is a thing.
I can't unknow that now.
And I don't know what to do with that fact.
21. Hmm... I learned that midges are like mosquitos, not like flies. Though they do belong to the "fly" family. As mosquitos do. I thought they were flies, like horse-flies, but just very, very small.
22. We have a dish in Finland called mämmi. In Swedish it's memma, and I think it's the same thing in English. It's basically malted rye porridge, and it's very dark and sweet and special. I tried to explain what it is to a Swedish friend. I couldn't come up with any word to describe the sweetening process, because it's very special. It's called "imeltää" in Finnish.
Today I remembered to find out what it is in Swedish. It's "mälta". The process one used when one makes malts. To malt...
Another interesting little thing. "Imelä" is a purely Finnic word, meaning sweet. Imeltää and mälta are totally unrelated. Mälta comes from malt, meaning soft, weak, young, probably referring to the sprouting process; that the hard, dry corns are made soft and malleable by sprouting.
23. I was reading Kipling's Second Jungle Book, and read this: "And he met Thibetan herdsmen with their dogs and flocks of sheep, each sheep with a little bag of borax on his back". What? Why would the sheep be carrying borax? Isn't that bad for the wool?
So I found out, that
In Tibet, people used to freight borax on the backs of sheep!
Tincal is brought into the [nearest] town in Tibet and sold at the bazaars... ...Sheep owners buy it from the small dealers and put it into their saddlebags, placing as much as 30-40 pounds in each bag, or about equal in weight to the animal carrying it. When they (the sheep) have received their loads, they are started on their wearisome journey, many of the flocks carrying nothing but tincal. Each sheep-driver carries a distaff and bobbins, and as they travel along, every bit of wool that falls from the sheep, or that sticks to the thorny bushes with which the sheep may come in contact, is carefully collected. The wool thus gathered is spun into yarn or strong thread and then woven into cloth, which in its turn is made into bags. These are covered outside with sheepskins to prevent the tincal from getting wet, and also to prects the woolen bags from getting torn by the thorny bushes.
Numbers of the sheep and goats die on the road, and their flesh is always eaten by the drivers.
From 800-1000 sheep constitute a drove.
The animals are driven from 7-9 miles a day, and it takes from six to eight weeks for the journey from the starting point to Moradabad.
Borates: Handbook of Deposits, Processing, roperties, and Use By Donald E. Garrett
These borax caravans were so common they even had "salt roads".
(BTW, sheep weight a lot more than 30-40 pounds, at least twice that, if not more.)
Picture is from In the Forbidden Land by A. Henry Savage Landor
This "Forbidden Land" is the area between China and India, so "close enough" :-D
24. Tincal is rude borax salt, the way it is mined
25. Don Quixote is written with x in English, because that's how Cervantes wrote it. That Cervantes wrote it so, because that's how Spanish was written at his time, is irrelevant. It is pronounced "kichote" anyway.
Now, the word "quixotic" is not pronounced "kichotic", but "quicksotic"... "because it's an English word". No. It's based on the character, not the spelling, it should be pronounced like the name of the character, not like the English word with that spelling would be pronounced. English are stupid.
26. Pazzo is Italian for crazy, fool. Wiktionary doesn't know the etymology, but I think i do. I think it's short of pagliacco, a clown. The opera Pagliacci is called Pajazzo in Swedish.
27. So, today I was called a stan :-D "Stan - A crazed and or obsessed fan. The term comes from the song Stan by eminem. The term Stan is used to describe a fan who goes to great lengths to obsess over a celebrity."
I read Tomi Adeyemi's book Children of Blood and Bone. I didn't like it.
But someone left a trashy review, and someone else responded to that review by claiming that people should be perfect when they write diverse literature.
What?
I reacted and told that person that Children of Blood and Bone is good enough. Might not be the best book ever, but it shouldn't need to, either. That the only requirement for people to write diverse fiction is to write diverse fiction. That a book by a black author with a black MC is diverse, and does its in the effort to balance the scales, to provide us with more diversity in literature. That we shouldn't expect more of colored authors than we expect of white authors. That we shouldn't try to set expectations and demands on colored authors that will only make it harder for colored authors to dare to write and publish what they have written. And the person who wrote the review (a white author who writes trashy romance novels - trashy by her own definition) responded by saying she's so tired of all Adeyemi stans telling her she didn't understand. :-D
I wasn't even talking to her, I wasn't implying that she didn't understand the book or that there was something wrong with her review, and I don't think Tomi Adeyemi is a celebrity :-D
But - what ever. I suppose she's p'd off because this young woman just writes a book and instantly everyone is raving about it, and no-one did that for her, and it's so unfair!
28. In Agatha Christie's Tuedsay Murder Club there is a peculiar item... a bowl of corn-flour.
“Mr. Jones had gone down to the kitchen and demanded a bowl of corn-flour for his wife, who had complained of not feeling well.”
Later: “Miss Clark… told us that the whole of the bowl of corn-flour was drunk not by Mrs. Jones but by her.”
Later: “it is nicely made, too, no lumps… Very few girls nowadays seem to be able to make a bowl of corn-flour nicely.”
Later: “You drink up the bowl of corn-flour.”
I don't think that's actual bowl full of dry flour poured straight out of a bag. So... what is it?
Here's
a discussion about this and other interesting things :-D
I think that "2 tablespoons of starch in 1/2 pint of water" is a recipe I found in an old cook book with recipes for invalids...
29. Platinum foxes are a color variant of the red fox, not arctic fox.
30. Of the last 10 Presidents of USA, only three didn't have US born parents and grandparents.
Ronald Reagan's parents were born in USA, but his paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother were born in UK.
Barack Obama's father and paternal grandparents were Kenyan, mother and maternal grandparents were USonian.
Of Donald Trumps parents and grandparents, only his father was born in USA. His mother and maternal grandparents were Scottish and paternal grandparents were German.
