Lassie: The Fall of Timmy

As the winter winds down here in South Africa the fates decided that I should be graced with a final cold before the wintery weather subsides completely. After the onset of the usual suspects, the sore throat, fatigue and muscle pains, I took some medication in order to battle this last minute bout of the plague. So on Sunday night I decided to medicate and crawl into bed. As my beloved was not tired yet, she stayed up to watch some movies. At some point I recall half waking up and hearing the far-off sounds of the movie she was watching. It featured what sounded like explosions, gunfire and.....um.....a dog barking. Because my brain works in mysterious ways, I started automatically turning what I was hearing into this very blog post by wondering what it would be like if Michael Bay, director of films like Bad Boys, Transformers and lover of explosions, made a Lassie movie. Now some of my younger readers might not know who Lassie is. Google exists, look it up! So without further ado......

(Please read the below in your most epic movie announcer voice)

"In a small farming community somewhere in the United States of America, the Martins live a peaceful life. Little do they know that the war on terror is about to find them. After a suicide bomber blows up the town's only post office after mistaking it for something more important, the town is thrown into anarchy. In the midst of this chaos, an unlikely canine hero will arise. From Michael Bay, the award winning director who brought you Bad Boys and the travesty that was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, comes this summer blockbuster. Lassie, the brave collie that is more intelligent than anyone in the town, will have to save her masters from terrorists, bombs, the well that Timmy constantly falls into and aliens. Illegal aliens. Get ready for action, intrigue, explosions, comedy, terror, explosions, romance, thrills and more explosions! Lassie: The Fall of Timmy - the war on terror and goofy rednecks has a new hero. Rated R for Really big explosions!"

Unbelievable

I am a massive fan of expanding my general knowledge. From the most well-known facts to the most obscure ones, I love learning new and unusual things. So it should come as no surprise that I regularly scour the internet for things that I do not know yet. And very recently I came across an article that lists some true facts that are so baffling that they should be false, and yet they aren't. I thought I would share it with you.

WW2 Rockets
More people died making V2 rockets than were killed by them. Germany was facing a large issue with rocket fuel shortages during the project because people kept drinking it. The fuel was made from 70% ethyl alcohol and 30% water, distilled from potatoes. It was the most economically viable fuel at the time, since they were already very low on other fuels. To stop workers from drinking it, they denatured the alcohol (essentially poisoning it) but people kept drinking it anyways and getting extremely ill. This simply caused people to start leaving the V2 program and costing Germany massive losses in production. This also means that any alcohol over 70% is stronger than actual WW2 rocket fuel.

Syphilis
Before the medicinal cure for syphilis was found, people who had the disease were infected with malaria in order to cure them. The extremely high fever caused by malaria killed the syphilis bacteria and the patients were then cured of their malaria using quinine.

Bill Gates
Starting now, if you earned one US dollar every second, it would take 2921 years to have more money than Bill Gates.

Aircraft
There were more planes destroyed during World War 2 than there are intact planes in the world today.

Headless Chicken
On the 10th of September 1945 a farmer was beheading chickens to sell at the local market when he realised that one was not dying like the others. It was still running around and trying to peck at the ground. He caught it and put it in a box overnight, but the next morning it was still alive. And so Mike the Headless chicken became famous. He was fed with liquid food squirted directly into his oesophagus and had to have mucus cleared out using a syringe. He lived for 18 months and finally died when he started choking on mucus and his owners couldn't find the syringe in time.

Spider's Web
The silk from a black widow spider's web has 10 times the tensile strength of steel.

Orange
The colour orange was actually named after the fruit. Before then the colour was described as red. Which is why people with orange hair are called red-heads.

Attractive
If 99% of the Earth's population found you unattractive, that means that 76 million people would still think you are good looking.

Dinosaurs
Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809 and the first dinosaur fossil was officially discovered in 1819. So that means that Abraham Lincoln was born before the existence of dinosaurs became known to the general population.

The Sun
If sound could travel through space, the roar of the sun would be unbearable on Earth, even though it is 93 million miles away.

GPS
Global Positioning Satellites have to compensate for time dilation, because time runs at a different rate in orbit.

Printer Cartridges
A toner cartridge is more expensive by weight than a B2 Stealth Bomber which costs $2 billion US dollars.

Tigers
There are more tigers in private collections in Texas than there are anywhere else in the world, wild or otherwise.

David
The statue of David by Michelangelo was made from a block of very low grade marble that no-one wanted to use for sculptures but was too expensive to discard.

Children
The record of most children born to a single woman is 69. Valentina Vassilyev, a peasant woman from Shuya in Russia, gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets during her lifetime.

Gravity
The gravity of a black hole is so great that it literally bends light around the black hole. This means that if you could somehow stand close enough to a black hole and look straight ahead, you would actually see the back of your own head.

Temperature Changes
The city of Spearfish in South Dakota holds the world record for the fastest recorded temperature change. On January 22, 1943, at about 7:30 a.m. MST, the temperature in Spearfish was −20°C. The Chinook wind (a local wind that blows through the mountains) picked up speed rapidly, and two minutes later (7:32 a.m.) the temperature was +7 °C above zero. The 27 °C rise in two minutes set a world record that still stands today. By 9:00 a.m., the temperature had risen to 12 °C. Suddenly, the wind died down and the temperature tumbled back to  −20 °C. The 32.2 °C drop took only 27 minutes.

Photos
Every two minutes we take more photographs than all of humanity took during the 1800s.

Ejaculation
The average speed of semen being ejaculated out of the male body during orgasm is 45km/h. This can be increased with Kegel exercises.

Sparrows
One day Mao Zedong, otherwise known as Chairman Mao, saw a sparrow eating grain. Thinking that the sparrows were hurting China's grain supply, he and the Communist Party launched the Four Pests Campaign. The Chinese military and population killed every sparrow they could find. Embassies didn't allow the Chinese to kill sparrows on their property, so the Chinese banged pots and pans outside the embassies 24/7 until the sparrows died of exhaustion. Unfortunately for the Chinese, sparrows mainly eat insects, not grain. The locust population exploded and 43 million people starved to death.

Nose
Your nose is always in your line of sight, your brain just ignores it.

In Space, No-one Can Hear You.....Um.....Pee

I read a rather interesting article recently, one that deals with one of the most fundamental human acts; weeing. But not just weeing in general, weeing when in zero gravity environments. Since us humans are quite a curious bunch, it was inevitable that at some point we would gaze beyond the distant horizon and then decide to travel there, just because we were bored. So we figured out how to get a man into space but, and I wish I were making this up, didn't know if his various organs, including his bladder and the ability to swallow, would actually function there. The theory was that, on Earth, we have gravity to help us with our various bodily functions but no-one knew if the same would be true in space. So in accordance with pretty much all human decisions throughout history we thought "Well, there is only one way to find out" and then sent someone up and asked him to have a wee while he was up there.

Unfortunately for the unlucky man, they hadn't actually given much thought as to how he would do this, so he just went in his space suit. First man ever to go to space and he wet himself because they hadn't really thought it through. Eventually someone did spare a brain cell or two and developed a condom-like sheath that they could wear which would funnel urine into a special container. But every time nature called, the sheath would blow off and they'd end up with pee in their suits anyway. The reason for this? The male ego. The sheaths came in small, medium and large and all the astronauts claimed they needed the large one. They didn't.

Another quite delicate bodily function was that of pooping. Because early on space toilets hadn't been invented yet, astronauts had to tape a special bag to their backsides in order to have a poop. This failed quite spectacularly for various reasons, chief among which is the fact that, without gravity, poop doesn't break off as it exits the body, so they had to use special gloves in order to help the process along.

These days the space toilets are a lot more functional and efficient but their have been reports of these breaking at times and then you have a large globe of pee exiting the toilet and floating about. And because of special chemicals to essentially keep it sterile, it is bright purple and highly acidic. This is also a very good reason not to eat any milk duds you find floating around!

Before I end, just a few more fun facts:
Firstly, farts do not propel you in space, astronauts have tried. So no matter how rich in baked beans your meal was, the human body just doesn't create enough pressure during farting to actually propel you anywhere.

Secondly, never burp in space. Gravity normally keeps food in your stomach, so in a zero gravity environment burps almost always tend to be accompanied by solid matter.

Thirdly, gravity is usually required for your body to realise that you have to go, so astronauts don't always realise that nature is banging at the door. This means they need bathroom schedules so as not to wet/poop themselves.

And lastly, in the early days of the international space station, a water purifying unit that worked absolutely flawlessly on earth kept getting clogged up in space. The reason? The astronauts were losing bone density in the zero gravity environment and were peeing out the calcium in their bones, thus clogging the system. And here we always thought being an astronaut was glamorous!

Glamping

My beloved and I recently went away for the long weekend. As it was her idea the details were left firmly in her court and she decided to introduce me to a much-loved holiday destination. We went to a resort that offers traditional tent and caravan camping, log cabins, safari tents and mountain tents. Her first preference was the mountain tents, set higher up than the rest of the accommodation and thus closer to nature, but alas, they were already fully booked. So we settled for a safari tent. This was my first ever experience of glamping, so basically living in a tent but one that is already fully equipped with beds, a kitchen and a full bathroom attached at the rear. So imagine that a tent and a log cabin fell madly in love and had one torrid night of steaming romance and the result is a canvas tent/log cabin hybrid.

As I haven't gone camping in quite a while, and my last camping experience involved a traditional tent where you still have to go and use the ablution blocks with everyone else, this was a welcome surprise. No standing in line at the showers, no sitting in a cold bathroom stall listening to a variety of farts, burps, coughs and the occasional splash of a butt bomb hitting water. You actually have privacy. And it was wonderful!

Unfortunately, because it was a long weekend and thus the ideal time for EVERYONE to go on a mid-year break, the place was extremely busy. The tent next to ours had a group of people in their mid-twenties whose sole responsibility, in their minds, was to provide music to the entire resort. Thankfully they did adhere to the 23:00 noise curfew, mostly because they were completely sloshed and thus passed out at that point.

Apart from the interesting neighbors, the rest of the resort was amazing. There were hiking trails, canoeing, fishing, game drives, mountain biking, swimming (they had a hot pool), zip-lining, obstacle courses and a plethora of other activities to choose from. My beloved and I decided to go for a hike the one day and managed to get quite a distance before we realised that we were slightly too unfit for a walk of this magnitude and thus headed back to camp. While standing in reception waiting to chat to someone behind the information counter, a sign caught our eye. It stated that, before heading off for a romantic hike in the bush, reception had to be informed. This was because they had leopard, hyena, honey badger and a wide variety of other toothy critters roaming freely on the property. So we decided to rather hire mountain bikes and follow the rules of informing reception of our plans. Unfortunately most of their trails are all uphill from the camp and we also didn't get tremendously far on the bikes before fatigue, sore buttocks and, in my case at least, mashed man-bits made us turn around and rather go and have a cold beer instead.

I admitted to my beloved afterwards that I absolutely loved glamping. Sitting outside under the stars, grilling meat on the fire and generally enjoying nature (and the occasional good song from our music loving neighbors) makes the experience worthwhile. And then, when all is quiet in the dead of night, you can hear the cries of baboons and leopard and you feel like you really are one with nature. Even though you are in a mutant tent with a comfy bed. I would definitely recommend it!

It's Time to Play

I enjoy gaming. I've always enjoyed it. Immersing yourself in another world and just forgetting about the worries and cares of daily living for a while. It is like reading, just with visuals! I recently purchased Mortal Kombat XL. I've been a fan of the franchise from the very beginning, so it was a no-brainer to obtain the latest (at that point) installment. Especially because this one comes with fun extra characters like the xenomorph from Aliens (read about that cuddly character here), Jason from the Friday the 13th movies, Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the Predator from, well, the Predator movies. My beloved is also into gaming and we decided to give it a go together, mainly because MK XL is the only two player game I own at this point.

I was a little concerned that the extreme violence and brutality of the game would be a little bit off-putting and that we would play about two rounds before she would go sit somewhere quiet with a glass of wine and ponder her life choices. But no, she took to it like the proverbial duck to water! I decided to go easy on her at first while she was getting used to the controls but I soon realised that she is a natural. And once she got into it, boy did it get intense!

It is getting to the point where, when we play, we are pretty evenly matched. I would win some rounds, she would win others. I have come to dread the times where she picks Sub-Zero (a ninja character with cryogenic powers) or the above mentioned xenomorph. I just know that in those rounds I will either barely beat her or get thoroughly brutalised. But it is all in good fun, and it is the most effective way to get rid of the day's frustrations (well, while wearing clothes that is). But there are times where I fear I may have created a monster!

Shower Thoughts - Part 2

A while back I created a post in which I shared some "shower thoughts" from around the world (which can be found here). For those who haven't read it and have no idea what shower thoughts are, they are not deep philosophical thoughts about getting wet and washing yourself, but rather the random thoughts that you have while performing the act of cleaning yourself. I recently discovered some more, which I will share with you....

"Knowing you have the next day off is actually more relieving than having the next day off."

"If centaurs were real, the bottom half would start walking around immediately after birth while the top half would be all floppy for the first 2 years."

"Both concrete and glass are made of sand, which means skyscrapers are actually just really tall sandcastles."

"The spiders that live in Buckingham Palace now are probably descended from the spiders that lived there during Victorian times. It's like a whole parallel royal family, but with spiders."

"The internet almost killed off the postal service with email and then made it more needed than ever with online shopping."

"Pixar is the version of Disney that just wants to tell the story without someone bursting into spontaneous song every 10 minutes."

"Talent shows like Britain's Got Talent get much more disturbing when you realise that it consists of 4 rich people dangling money in front of poor people to get them to perform for their entertainment."

"Telling a dangerously overweight person not to lose weight because they're beautiful is like telling an alcoholic not to stop drinking because they are more fun when they are drunk."

"'So easy a caveman could do it' completely ignores the fact that cavemen were able to start fires without matches and could hunt and kill animals several times their size with nothing but rudimentary weaponry."

"The main child actors in the Harry Potter films were tutored on set, so theoretically they all went to school at Hogwarts."

"The Nordic people went from being the most feared and hardcore raiders in history to being the most polite and friendly people in Europe."

"Condoms are made by automated assembly lines, meaning robots are literally helping to prevent human reproduction."

"The sentence 'Don't objectify women' has 'women' as the object of the sentence."

"A college class is like an episode of Dora the Explorer. The professor asks a question, stares blankly at the class for a few seconds and then answers his own question."

"Having kids is like having broke little best friends who think you are rich."

"When you choke on water you have failed at both breathing and drinking, the two most important activities in your life."

"No-one has ever been inside an empty room."

"'Do not touch' must be one of the scariest things to read in Braille."

"The person who proofread Hitler's speeches was a grammar Nazi."

"When a pregnant woman swims, she is a human submarine."

"When you are criticized for being short, they are really just saying that the worst thing about you is that there isn't more of you."

Random Acts of Weirdness

So the other day I was reading an article about the weird things that people do but never really talk about. For example, have you ever wanted to go to the bathroom at a public function and someone you know sits down next to you and you keep sitting there internally drowning in your own urine just because you don't want to get up immediately and hurt their feelings? (I truly and sincerely hope I'm not the only one doing that!) But I decided to share a few examples of the strange things we all do, but will rarely admit to.

Passwords
Have you ever tried entering a password but the PC/site keeps telling you that it is incorrect? And when you decide to reset the password and it tells you that your new password can't be the same as your old one? And you set your PC on fire and move to a different country?

Word
Have you ever inserted an image in Microsoft Word, decided the spacing is not quite right so you move it 1mm to the left and it creates 4 new pages, all your text and images move all over the place, volcanoes erupt, aliens invade and a meteor obliterates some remote village in India?

Names
Have you ever asked someone what their name is and then not listened when they tell you or only heard it partially and then realise that you will never be able to mention them by name for the rest of time?

Time
Have you ever noticed how a minute speeds by when you are having fun but stretches out into 2 and a half years when you are exercising?

Medicine
Have you ever read the label on medicine and it says to not take it and operate heavy machinery and assumed they meant forklifts or bulldozers instead of cars?

Tardiness
Have you ever been late for an appointment because it was early and you spent the first 45 minutes after waking just sitting on the edge of your bed staring at the wall?

Alarm
Have you ever woken up and glanced at your phone to see how much time you have left to sleep and found that it is 1 minute before your alarm is set to go off so you roll over and cry a little while waiting for the inevitable?

Clock
Have you ever taken out your phone to check the time, put it back in your pocket and realised that you didn't actually check the time when you were holding the phone?

Lyrics
Have you ever Googled the lyrics to a song and realised you've had it all wrong for years?

Queue
Have you ever stood in a short queue at the supermarket and then realised that the much longer queue next to you is moving much faster?

Voice
Have you ever heard a recording of your own voice, realised it sounded completely different and then stood staring out a window at the pouring rain and questioned who you really are?

Screensaver
Have you ever sat somewhere and zoned out, and then realised you are zoned out but was too lazy to zone back in again?

Expressions
Have you ever caught yourself making a facial expression and then thought "Woah, I didn't mean to make that face out loud?!" and hoped no-one saw you?

Browsing
Have you ever pretended to be looking at other products in the supermarket when someone is blocking access to the product you need and you are waiting for them to leave?

Potholes
Have you ever hit a pothole so hard that you apologised to your car out loud?

Phone Call
Have you ever been on your phone and had someone call you but you don't want to talk to them so you just stare at your phone until it stops ringing and you can go back to playing Candy Crush?

Radio
Have you ever sat in your car after you have parked and waited for a song to finish before turning the car off and getting out?

Minty Fresh
Have you ever chewed peppermint chewing gum and then had some really cold water and felt like you just had liquid nitrogen poured down your throat?

TV Dinner
Have you ever sat down for dinner in front of the TV and then had it go cold because you couldn't find a show you liked?