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The Best of Fun Facts
Written by Jimmy
So here’s a lit of our best ‘fun facts’ blogs. You can always find the full list under ‘Kitchen Sink’, fun facts in our blog categories. But we think this is the only blog that in one space mentions the Apollo moon missions, the French Invasion of Moscow and Colin Hay on Scrubs.
10. Fun Facts Around Birthdays: We start off with our various fun facts around rock stars birthdays. Christopher Guest was born on February 5th and we noted his extraordinary role in the ’11’ scene in Spinal Tap:
We also mentioned that Yoko Ono was born on February 18 , which led to a discussion of which woman had inspired most rock hits – it is, of course, Patti Boyd with at least three: Something, by George Harrison, and Layla and Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton. That’s a very fun fact. Yoko gets at least Ballad of John and Yoko and Be my Yoko Ono. I’m sure most of Lennon’s screamin’ period can be attributed to her and all his rubbish later stuff, but we’re talking hits not just songs. We leave you with, Barenaked Ladies, Be My Yoko Ono:
9. We then had some good little blogs on true fun facts, some about prawns, about the Statue of Liberty’s Fingernails, etc… The only one that is really worth remembering is: A shrimp’s/prawn’s heart is in its head. Man, what problems does that create for songwriters and philosophers? Oh, and the Statue of Liberty’s fingernails weight 1o pounds each.
8. Which leads to fun facts for lyricists – one about Misheard Lyrics and one about wordplay. On the latter, I think it is pretty cool that the longest word you can type on one work of a typewriter is ‘typewriter.’ Top row. On the former, although it is not mentioned, we have to give the gong to Ken Lee:
7. Then we did a few ‘fun facts’ around Gen Z. Some were about their weird habits, like they press door bells with thumbs (after years of texting and video games) or that my 14-17 year olds have lived thru two decades, two centuries and two milliea.
6. Then we gave you a random fact, that Colin Hay was getting sued for using the Kookaboora song in Down Under. But to cheer you up we showed you this video:
Which reminds us all of the second best use of a Pop Star on Scrubs:
Which reminds us of another song that starts off shaky and then goes into beautiful hi fidelity:
Or another SMCC classic from our new album (am I plugging in a middle of a fun fact blog????), No Bells:
No Bells Ruff (Ruff) by AbubillaMusic
But, of course, I digress.
5. We then did a fun fact around Santa and Science. Best to read this one, here. Essentially, not to put too fine a point on it, Ed pointed out that if Santa existed he would die in a horrible fire ball due to the speeds he was travelling. Nice.
4. Then things got a bit weird because Jimmy wanted to talk all about how graphics are displayed and the use of information. There were two blogs on this. The first was about the perfect Minard Map on the invasion of Moscow by French Forces.
You should read more about this in the blog. But the second was Rosling’s view of data around socio-economic development patterns. When you have 20 minutes you must watch it:
3. We then did a fun list of awful predictions. My favourites were all around the fact that from Thomas Watson (IBM), to Ken Olson (DEC) to Bill Gates (Micro-soft) every leader in computing completely blew it in terms of our computing needs. Thomas thought the world needed five computers, Ken Old felt they would never find their way to homes and Bill felt we’d never need more that 1/2 a mb of storage requirements. Think what our grandchildren will be doing!
2. Which leads to my personal favourite fun fact, about the Apollo Moon Missions and an iPod. Simply put – the entire moon mission required about 5mbs of storage capacity. 4 super computers with 1 mb each and 3 small computers on board the space craft with about 1/3 of mb. Or, putting it differently – an iPod carries the storage capacty of over 200,000 Apollo moon missions. Oh my. Which for no reason, makes me think you should read my recent ‘Moon Blog.’
1. The final ‘fun fact,’ which is of course a terrible phrase for what I’ll describe is about the double survivors of US atomic attacks on Japan. We described that one of the last survivors of both attacks had died on January 4th this year at age of 93. He was thought to be the LAST of 166 separate survivors of both bombs. 166 people were in both cities on the days the two bombs dropped and both survived. Were these the luckiest or unluckiest people on earth?
That’s it.
Jimmy