Truth is stranger than fiction

There's currently a storm here today, and I think the winds have blown away most of my brain, so this week's post will be trivial. Or to be more precise, about trivia.

All facts are taken from www.kickassfacts.com so if you disagree with something, take it up with them.

The following facts are in random order, and are just stuff I find amusing and interesting.

Here we go:

1. A snipers bullet can travel so far that the earth's rotation moves the target.
   
   
2. Haiti's and Lichtenstein's flags were originally identical, by mistake. No one knew until they both competed in the 1936 Olympics.
   
   
3. The Mongols tried to invade japan twice in seven years, and both times a typhoon stopped them
   
   
4. The sun and moon appear to be of same size because of an astonishing coincidence. The moon is 400 times smaller but 400 times closer, which makes the eclipses possible. 
    
5. Actress Anne Hathaway’s husband Adam Shulman has an uncanny resemblance to William Shakespeare. William Shakespeare had a wife called Anne Hathaway. 
    
6. A blurry photo of a man stealing a wallet in a store ran on the bottom of the front page of the December 14, 2007, edition of Idaho’s Lewiston Tribune. Above it was an unrelated photo of a man painting a business. Readers noticed both men were wearing the same clothes and could be the same man and he was, leading to his arrest. 
    
7. On the Christmas Eve 1994, two cars collided near Flitcham, England. The drivers were twin sisters who were delivering presents to each other. Their names were Lorraine and Lavinia Christmas. 
    
8. The oldest recorded British joke dates back to the 10th Century A.D. It is “What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before? Answer: A key.” 
    
9. The word ‘fuck’ was first used in 1568, but was most commonly used between 1700-1720. It disappeared from the English language for 150 years in the 1800s-1900s, but is now once again climbing in popularity. 
    
10. The terms “left” and “right” politics appeared during the French Revolution of 1789 when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the king to the president’s right and supporters of the revolution to his left. 
     
11. For 200 years tomatoes were considered poisonous in Europe. In reality, their acidity was dissolving poisonous metals like lead from plates. 
     
12. A Japanese anime named Sazae-san is more than 46 years old and has been airing since 1969 with a total of 2330 episodes. It is one of the biggest ratings grabber on Japanese TV following simple plot lines.
    
    
13. The Mayflower voyage ended in Plymouth instead of its intended Virginia Colony destination because the Pilgrims ran out of beer. 
     
14. In 1962, LIFE magazine published an article about Lauri Rapala and his fishing lures. The cover featured recently deceased Marilyn Monroe and it became the magazine’s best-selling issue. Consequently, Rapala received millions of orders and is today the leading lure manufacturer in the world. 
     
15. In the wake of WWII, the combination of inexpensive geothermal power and high prices for imported fruit led to Iceland using the warmth from lava to grow banana trees. 
     
16. “Bellydance” was not a dance of seduction, and wasn’t done by harem girls for the sultan. It is a community folk dance with a rich and long history done by both men and women during family celebrations and gatherings. The two piece costume was invented by early Hollywood, and adopted by Egyptian dancers in nightclubs to cater to Western tourists. The term “bellydance” was invented at the 1893 World’s Fair by Sol Bloom because it sounded salacious, would attract scandalized Victorian patrons, and sell a lot of tickets. 
     
17. Diamonds can in fact be shattered with a hammer. There is a difference between how strong something is and how hard it is. Diamonds are one of the hardest minerals (certainly the hardest gemstone), but their toughness is only middle of the road. The toughest gemstone is nephrite jade and that toughness is part of what makes it such a good carving material. 
     
18. The amount of times you need to push down per minute during CPR is the beat of Staying Alive or Another one Bites the Dust. 
     
19. The USSR was to first to launch a satellite into orbit, launch a man into space, launch a woman into space, the first spacewalk, put the first manmade object on the moon, made the first soft landing on the moon, the first landing on another planet, had several probes transmitting from Venus, had the first space station and the first long duration space station. For a country that supposedly lost the space race those are a lot of firsts. 
     
20. During the Civil War, upon being told General Grant was a drunkard who enjoyed Whiskey, President Lincoln said “I wish some of you would tell me the brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.”

That's all for today, I hope you enjoyed it. Until next time, have an interesting week!

Did you know?

Most of the things that surround us on a daily basis have a specific use. But many of those things have surprising extra uses, like the time I opened a bottle of wine with a screwdriver, a loose screw from an office chair and a pair of pliers.

Today we're looking at the baffling originally intended uses of some common items.

Let's start with bubble wrap. This highly useful product is used to keep items safe and intact during transport. It's also a great stress reliever and toy. I mean, who hasn't spent a couple of hours of their lives popping those wonderful, satisfying bubbles?

But the inventors of bubble wrap, Alfred W. Fielding and Mark Chavannes envisioned it as wallpaper! They honestly thought that people would like to cover their walls in translucent plastic blisters. And then, twenty minutes later, popped translucent blisters...

Speaking of wallpaper, Play-Doh started as wallpaper cleaner before becoming that weird colorful edible toy. Who knew?

One of mankind's favorite hobbies is killing each other. That's not exactly anything new. But did you know that the corkscrew was invented for removing bullets from guns? Well it was. You see, back in the days of the musket, bullets were soft lead balls, and the manufacturing process wasn't always that exact. Thus, bullets could easily become jammed in the barrels, and a screw was the best way of popping them out of there. I just wonder how long it took until someone used it to open some wine...

Speaking of bullets, the originally intended use for tampons was for plugging bullet wounds. This was during the Great War, and it didn't take the nurses long to figure out the more commonly know use for these cotton tubes as a better alternative to rags that were used, washed and reused.

Finally, do you suffer from halitosis? The answer is no, no matter what you just said. Halitosis was made up by Johnson & Johnson in order to sell more Listerine, the worlds most common mouthwash. Back in the day, they desperately wanted to sell more floor cleaner which is exactly what Listerine was (and is) but people weren't buying more. So they invented halitosis and launched a massive ad campaign that preyed on peoples insecurities. And it worked. Just be aware that you're swilling floor cleaner in your mouth.

That's all for today, so until next time, have a popping week!

The Fourth Fallout

Fourty seven hours so far. Fourty seven glorious hours of Fallout 4 so far, with many more to come.

I've been playing since Tuesday morning and I have only scratched the surface of this magnificent game. It's not perfect no, but damn it's good.

Let's get the technical stuff out of the way first. It's beautiful. Simple as that. Graphics, music, voice acting, all spot on. And if for some reason you aren't satisfied with how it looks, you can mod it better.

Game-play is mostly awesome. The controls are responsive and the addition of a sprint button is a welcome change. Sure I have had to get used to a different key layout compared to F3 and New Vegas but that's no cause for complaint. The AI is mostly good, with the occasional silliness. Like a raider getting upset when I stealthily blow his friends head off, only for the raider to shrug and say “I guess it's my imagination”. But these things are more funny than anything to complain about.

What we have here is a wonderful sand box game in the best tradition of Bethesda. Fallout 4 stands proudly as their latest creation in the long line of Fallout and Elder Scrolls games. If you don't like action RPG's or sandboxes, this is not your game, but for me it's narcotic. Addicting and sweet.

There are several important changes from Bethesdas previous Fallout titles, some which are familiar to Skyrim players.

First off, the skills are gone. It's all been baked into the perks system, which not only preserves the immersion better but makes leveling up easier. When I say immersion, I mean that since you can't see exactly how good you are at a skill it feels more alive and less numeric. Not that it was ever a problem as such.

As I said, you can sprint now at the cost of action points. Very useful for getting out of trouble. Or into trouble if you prefer. And you can parry with melee weapons as well as pistol whip your enemies.

In the previous titles, radiation poisoning was fairly abstract. You had to get seriously irradiated before you felt any ill effects, but not any longer. Now rads eat up your health bar, so it's definitely in your best interest to keep those rads down.

I'm not going to go too deeply into all the details here, so I'll just quickly talk about base building. I have let's say, sampled it a bit. There are lots of pictures online of some really great fortresses people have built, but from what I have experienced, it's lots of fun, if a bit fiddly. I have grand plans though. Time will tell.

There is more, so much more, like armor and gun modding but I'll let you find out on your own. It's time to talk about the negative.

First off, yes there are bugs. Of course there are. Sometimes my guns become invisible. I have had a sound effect loop endlessly until I re logged. Small things like that. I haven't thankfully experienced any game breaking bugs so far, and most are things that will get fixed in time.

My biggest complaints personally have to do with story. The game predisposes you to be a good caring person. This is no issue if that is what you want to play, but if you want to play a villain, it's a big snag.

Likewise, and minor spoiler here, there is a quest where you support a Brotherhood of Steel paladin in combat. He then invites you to join the Brotherhood. I declined, but the quest won't go away until I accept. At least so far. And to make things worse, his brothers have actually tried to kill me, which doesn't really help either.

So with only 47 hours of gameplay behind me, I'll conclude that this is indeed a great game, a weird and wonderful Fallout game, and a game RPG fans really aught to play.

Until next time, may your week be radiation free! See ya.

John Wick and Mad Max

I rarely watch movies when they come out but I did recently catch up with two that have gotten a lot of positive reviews; John Wick and Mad Max: Fury Road.

John Wick, played by Keanu Reeves, is a retired assassin with legendary abilities that comes out of retirement in a quest for revenge.

The story is really nothing to brag about, but it's adequate. Visually the film is beautiful but a bit too dark, making some scenes hard to make out. The soundtrack, well basically I don't remember it. I assume it was fine.

What makes this movie are the action scenes and the actors. The action is great. I read somewhere, probably on Reddit or Imgur, that it's like a bullet ballet, but I wouldn't go quite that far although it's very enjoyable.

It is however the actors that make this film. Keanu is Keanu. He does what he usually does and it fits well in the narrative, but he's not the interesting part. In supporting roles we have both Willem Dafoe who is great as always and Ian McShane who is magnificent. I only wish he'd been around more. Fans of The Wire will also find both Lance Reddick (Lt. Daniels) and Clarke Peters (Lester Freamon) in minor roles.

Finally I really liked some of the odd details that the film has, like special gold coins that the criminals use to pay each other and the hotel that exclusively caters to assassins and their kind. It serves not only as a hotel but also as a sanctuary. Clever idea.

Over all, John Wick is a good solid action piece well worth your time if you're in the mood for something of that nature. Or you fancy seeing Keanu with a beard.

Mad Max: Fury Road is a weird one. I've been a Mad Max fan since I was a kid and although the movie has received extremely positive reviews I had my reservations. I finally sat down and watched it since Fallout 4 goes live tonight. In the middle of the night in fact. I therefore decided to re-watch Mad Max, Mad Max the Road Warrior and finally Fury Road for the first time. I skipped Thunderdome, since I can't stand it.

OK, first off, Fury Road is made by George Miller, the man behind all Mad Max films so I have to respect the mans vision. Mel Gibson is not playing the titular role, instead Max is played by Tom Hardy. In a fun “twist” the main villain Immortan Joe is played by none other than Hugh Keays-Byrne who also played the main villain in the first Mad Max, Toecutter. Charlize Theron is our female lead. There was no bad acting in this film, but Charlize stands out. She's really good.

What threw me off quite badly was how different this movie is compared to the earlier films. Immortan Joe has a huge fortress that could never have been built since society collapsed at least if you look at Max's age, but I was wrong. Fury Road is not Mad Max 4. It is in fact a reboot of the franchise. But rather than remake the first film, George Miller has elected to retell the story and make it new. This I can respect. After all, it is his vision and creation. Besides I'm sick of retooled origin stories. (Batman and Spiderman, I'm looking at you).

With this firmly in mind, I really like Fury Road. It is essentially a two hour car chase, but it never got boring or repetitive, which is no small feat. It is a visual masterpiece, a violent 120 minutes long metal video. And that's perhaps my biggest critique. The cinematography is very modern with quick cuts to zooms and popular sound effects. But after ten minutes you no longer care, seduced by the fantastic chaotic cornucopia of action.

Finally there are two interesting pieces of information that I would like to share. Mel Gibson gave his blessing to both Tom Hardy and George Miller. Not that is should matter, but for some reason that made me happy. Also, there is apparently a comic book that fills in some blanks in the story. This did not make me happy. I think it's silly to expect audiences to have to read a comic to understand parts of your movie. Just put it in there if it's important.

Like John Wick, this is is a great piece of entertainment if you're in the mood for such, but even more so. The time just flew by. Fans of the Road Warrior will not be disappointed.

That's what I have for you this time. I'm off to stare at the clock counting down the hours until I can play Fallout 4. So until we see each other again, have a great week!

World War Cthulhu

Today I want to talk about a collection of short stories I just finished reading.

WorldWar Cthulhu contains 22 short stories all with their own illustrations by M. Wayne Miller. The stories all share two points, a war of some sorts and the Lovecraft Mythos.

Over all, it's a mixed bag. Naturally another reviewer might like stories that left me cold and dislike the ones that I loved, but I feel confident when I say this is a good book.

Settings wise, the stories range from the Trojan war to the future. If I recall correctly there were two sci-fi stories, neither of which I liked very much and two Trojan tales that were both pretty OK.

My favorites were White Feather by T. E. Grau set in the American revolution, The Boonieman by Edward M. Erdelac set in Vietnam and Cold War, Yellow Fever by Pete Rawlik set in the Cold War, more specifically the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Most stories were solid and well worth reading if you are a Lovecraft fan. Unfortunately the majority of tales revolved around the Deep Ones and the Mi-Go, and I would have liked to see more variation, but it's not so much what you do but how you do it.

Surprisingly, there weren't more stories set in WWII, and in a pleasant twist there was one tale concerning the IRA which you don't see much of in books like this.

I won't go through all the stories as that would be insane, so I'll close by saying this: if you are a Mythos fan, read this book. The over all quality is very high, and even the stories I didn't really like were fine. Not great but decent. So I do recommend this anthology.

That's all I have for you this time so until we see each other again, have a great week!