Official Cool Fun Fact Thread....

[jorian]

Originally Posted by HHI944

What kind of cracked out jacka55 would steal an aztek?!?!?

Maybe one of the owner's friends...

Friends don't let friends drive AZZteks

[M.D. Holloway]

Originally Posted by jorian

Maybe one of the owner's friends...

Friends don't let friends drive AZZteks

Oh shyt I don't know which comment was funnier!

[romad]

Originally Posted by HHI944

What kind of cracked out jacka55 would steal an aztek?!?!?

Cars are stolen for parts, Aztec probably has alot of common GM parts.

[Hawkeye's-911T]

craigster59's avatar is 1 of only 3 or 4 known photos of Robert Johson in existence.

Cheers
JB

[Dueller]

Originally Posted by Hawkeye's-911T

craigster59's avatar is 1 of only 3 or 4 known photos of Robert Johson in existence.

Cheers
JB

[Dueller]

Robert Duvall's first movie role was as Boo Radley in "To KIll A Mockingbird" in 1962.

[teenerted1]

Originally Posted by Rick Lee

Uh, no. Might be missing a few zeros in that one. 90k strings are about 51 miles long.

you sure?
if you are correct on the string length
if they do 51 miles a day and work 365 days thats only 18615 miles, (probably only work so even shorter total numbers.)
you are both a little short

circumference of the earth at the equator is 24,901.55 miles (40,075.16 kilometers).
But, if you measure the earth through the poles the circumference is a bit shorter - 24,859.82 miles (40,008km)

don't always believe what you read on the INTERNET

[scottmandue]

There is no gravity.

The earth sucks.

[HHI944]

Originally Posted by scottmandue

There is no gravity.

The earth sucks.

It certainly does have an awful lot of people dense enough to qualify as black holes .....

[MBAtarga]

Originally Posted by NotaBRG

One half of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Sorry, wrong. It's actually 83.7% that are made up on the spot.

[Hawkeye's-911T]

Submitted by pavulon: the space shuttle booster rockets' diameters can be traced to the width of horse butts.

Apologies for digging up an old thread........

Does the statement, "We've always done it like that" ring any bells? Read this to the end. (For those who don't know of this trivia & might find it a bit interesting albeit somewhat tongue-in-cheek)

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?

Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads.

Why did the English build them like that?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did "they" use that gauge then?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools, that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England), for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads?

Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.

We all know bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses. Now, the twist to the story...

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory at Utah.

The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.

The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

Sooo, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass.

Cheers
JB

[Jared at Pelican Parts]

the space shuttle booster rockets' diameters can be traced to the width of horse butts.

That has to be something James Burke said..

[GDNF2ET]

On April 14, 1912, the huge "unsinkable" ship the Titanic was steaming across the Atlantic towards New York. This was the Titanic's maiden voyage, and her captain was encouraged to break the record for speed while making the voyage. As most people know, after striking an iceberg, the unsinkable ship went down in only a matter of hours. Out of the 2,201 passengers, only 711 were saved.

There was one fictional story written by a merchant seaman by the name of Morgan Robertson. Robertson's book was about an unsinkable passenger liner that sank while carrying the elite people of the time. The ship in Robertson's story was called the Titan and the book was titled The Wreck of the Titan. Even though the book is fictitious, the events in the story parallel the events of the Titanic. Both ships were built to be unsinkable. Both ships sank after striking an iceberg. Both ships were on their maiden voyage. The most well to do famous people were on the Titan and Titanic. Only one third of the passengers on each ship survived. Both ships had an inadequate number of lifeboats. Both ships were encouraged to break speed records during their voyage.

Robertson's book The Wreck of the Titan was never published. Each time it was rejected by editor's, they told him the same thing. The story was unbelievable. Surely the events he wrote of could not possibly happen to an unsinkable ship.

The book, The Wreck of the Titan was written in 1898, fourteen years before the Titanic hit an iceberg and settled on the bottom of the northern Atlantic.

[Embraer]

Nepal is the only country in the world whose flag is not square or rectangular shaped.

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by Dueller

Robert Duvall's first movie role was as Boo Radley in "To KIll A Mockingbird" in 1962.

I didn't know that. He is one of the greats. He was great in Lonesome Dove and fantastic in The Apostle. Duvall is one of my favorite actors (in spite of his weird right wing politics )

[snbush67]

Originally Posted by Dueller

Robert Duvall's first movie role was as Boo Radley in "To KIll A Mockingbird" in 1962.

He memorized his lines before the script was written.

[Jim727]

The operational life of the WWII battleship Bismarck was only nine days.

[GDNF2ET]

It always has been intended that a proper christening and the accompanying ceremony ensures good fortune to the lady and her crew throughout the life of the vessel. It's comforting to think that if a vessel does have a run of bad luck, it will be because her christening ceremony was poorly written or performed, rather than sea monsters, her Captain's incompetence, or any number of other reasons we'd rather not contemplate.


One new vessel's christening and launching seemed to strangely forebode its fate. Following the christening of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the iron ore behemoth slid down the skids and into the water at an unusual, precarious angle, throwing a monstrous wave back onto the launch area. The giant hull then crashed back against the pier with such violence that one onlooker actually suffered a heart attack and died.

The Edmond Fitzgerald was 729 feet long, 75 feet wide, and weighed 13,632 gross tons. She contained 21 cargo hatches, and her hold was large enough to transport the Statue of Liberty.

[GDNF2ET]

The wartime sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff during World War II, with an estimated loss of about 9,300 people in 1945 remains the greatest maritime disaster ever.

[wdfifteen]

The reason the Fordson tractor has toolboxes in the tail ends of the fenders is that Henry made the tractor just long enough to fit across a railroad car. With its center of mass so close to the rear axle it was prone to flipping over backwards. So Ford made "fenders" whose real purpose was to act as wheelie bars. Ford claimed they extended so far backwards to accommodate the tool boxes he decided farmers needed.