Fact of the Day

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - SLANG TERMS FOR THE BUTT

Did you know... There’s no shortage of words for asses. Hiney, butt, can, cakes, money-maker, and (in the U.S., anyway) fanny are readily available. But when talking about the fundament, some terms have slipped through the crack (sorry) of lexical history. So please enjoy these old and enjoyable terms for the hindquarters.

 

1. Downstairs

This tasteful euphemism has been recorded since the 1940s, and it’s still in use in recent times, as seen in a 2000 example from The Guardian (which is rather non-tasteful, apologies “You all know what happens downstairs when that happens (loose as a goose I was, if you’ll pardon my anatomicals).” Kudos to anatomicals as a superb euphemism for some messy bathroom business.

 

2. Prat

Though prat came to mean “fool” or “buffoon”—or “ass,” if you will. In addition to other meanings, it referred to the hiney in the 1500s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). That’s why a pratfall is when someone falls on their prat.

 

3. Sitting Place

This is one of the most logical butt euphemisms. It’s been recorded since the 1500s, and is labeled obsolete, but who knows why since it seems timeless. A 1607 use from Edward Topsell’s The History of Four-footed Beasts asks readers to consider or literally grasp a hirsute situation: “Take the hairs that grow behind on the Goats sitting place.”

 

4. Latter End

Latter end has been in use since the 1300s for all sorts of closing chapters, which have sometimes included the badonkadonk. An 1852 example from R. Coombes’s Aquatic Notes offers acrobatic advice: “Throw the body forward with a spring, as if your latter end was made of Indian-rubber.”

 

5. Crupper

The OED defined the original sense of this term, which popped up around 1300, as “A leathern strap buckled to the back of the saddle and passing under the horse's tail, to prevent the saddle from slipping forwards.” From there the term spread to mean a horse’s butt, and then, by the 1500s, anyone’s. There’s no relationship to another ass-adjacent word—crapper.

 

6. Rusty-dusty
According to Green’s Dictionary of Slang, this term is based on “the implication that someone has been sitting around doing nothing; thus they are rusty and dusty from lack of movement.” The 1942 Count Basie Orchestra song “Harvard Blues” contains the line “Mama, get up of your big fat rusty dusty.” Rusty-dusty, like mumbo-jumbo, flim-flam, and palsy-walsy, is an example of reduplication—a process that makes language go helter-skelter.

 

 

Click the link below  to read others words that are referred as the butt. 

 

Source: Old and Obscure Terms for the Butt

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE

Did you know... On the surface, disinformation and misinformation have a lot in common: They’re both types of false information. In fact, misinformation can sometimes be disinformation, and disinformation can give way to misinformation. But despite their similarities, the two terms aren’t exactly interchangeable.

 

Misinformation vs. Disinformation
As Dictionary.com explains, misinformation is wrong information relayed “regardless of intent to mislead.” In other words, the person transmitting the intel isn’t necessarily trying to make anyone believe something erroneous; in many cases, they don’t even know it’s erroneous in the first place.

 

Say, for example, you tell your uncle that you’re headed on a spelunking adventure in a bat-heavy area. He tells you to wear a hat at all times, considering bats’ penchant for getting tangled in people’s hair. If your uncle actually believes that bats target hair (they don’t), he’s spreading misinformation—it’s untrue, sure, but he’s not purposely trying to sow untruths.

 

But maybe your uncle had a harrowing encounter with a bat colony as a kid. He’s feared and hated them ever since, and he’s keen on making everyone else fear and hate them, too. To further his mission, he’s constantly presenting slanderous misconceptions about bats as facts. That’s not just misinformation—it’s disinformation, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the dissemination of deliberately false information, [especially] when supplied by a government or its agent to a foreign power or to the media, with the intention of influencing the policies or opinions of those who receive it.” Disinformation can be as large as an international propaganda campaign or as small as one man’s crusade to turn the world against Stellaluna and company.

 

So your uncle maliciously mentions that bats love to claw at hair, you believe him, and then you tell everyone on your spelunking trip that bats love to claw at hair. As you’re not sharing the fictitious tidbit out of any ill intent, it’s back to being plain old misinformation.

 

How to Know Which Term to Use
Misinformation is a much older term, first showing up in print during the 16th century. The earliest known written instance of disinformation, by contrast, is from 1955—possibly derived from the Russian word dezinformátsiya. Unsurprisingly, disinformation appeared a lot in reference to all the espionage and propaganda that happened on both sides of the Cold War. Here’s a handy mnemonic device to help you keep the two straight: Misinformation is often a mistake, while disinformation is intentionally dishonest.

 

 

Source: Disinformation vs. Misinformation: What’s the Difference?
 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - THE ARCTIC

An aerial view of icebergs in Greenland.

Did you know....  There’s a lot more to the northernmost part of our globe than just frigid landscapes. Read on for some fascinating facts about the Arctic region and the people and wildlife who call it home.

 

1. Bird poop helps keep the Arctic cool.
A 2016 study published in Nature Communications found that the massive amounts of bird guano in the Arctic release gases that contribute to cloud cover, which in turn slightly reduces the temperature of the surrounding air.

 

2. The Arctic is still lively during winter.

In some Arctic Ocean habitats, wildlife is even more active during the region’s long, dark winter than it is in the summer. According to a 2015 study in Current Biology, “Biodiversity, abundance, growth, and reproduction in habitats studied were at similar or higher levels than in warmer months.” Researchers counted lots of plankton, crustaceans, certain cod and haddock species, and a surprising number of birds going about their business in winter.

 

3. It’s home to the world’s biggest, most secure seed storage facility.

The Svalbard Seed Vault.

More than 800 miles beyond the Arctic Circle lies the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a storage facility run by the Norwegian government. The structure, which was built into the permafrost, holds seeds for more than 4000 plant species—including life-sustaining food crops—keeping them safe in the event of natural or human-made disasters.

 

4. The first man to reach the North Pole was overlooked for decades.
American explorer Robert E. Peary claimed to have been the first man to reach the geographic North Pole, in April 1909. Today, however, experts argue that it was his assistant, Matthew A. Henson, who actually deserves the distinction. By the time Peary and Henson and four Inughuit dog sled drivers neared their destination, Peary was struggling with a bad case of frostbite, leaving him unable to walk. (He had to be pulled along on a sled instead.) As they got closer to the North Pole, Henson and two guides went ahead on foot, but accidentally overshot their destination—which meant that Henson technically reached the Pole about 45 minutes before Peary did.

 

5. Millions of people live in the Arctic.

Iñupiat hunter Herbert Nayokpuk pushes floating ice away from his boat during the traditional spring seal hunt near Shishmaref, Alaska.

Despite its harsh conditions, about 4 million people call the Arctic home. Parts of the U.S., Canada, Greenland (which is a territory of Denmark), Iceland (barely), Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia are above the Arctic Circle. The largest Arctic settlements are Murmansk (population: about 270,000) and Norilsk (184,000) in Russia and Tromsø (78,000) in Norway, with smaller cities in the other circumpolar countries. Inuit, of many groups and communities, make up a large majority of Arctic residents in North America and Greenland.

 

6. There’s an intergovernmental forum just for the Arctic.
Countries whose borders fall north of the Arctic Circle are part of the Arctic Council, which, according to its website, “is the only circumpolar forum for political discussions on Arctic issues, involving all the Arctic states, and with the active participation of its Indigenous Peoples.” The council works to assess and solve environmental, economic, social, and cultural issues across the region.

 

7. The word Arctic is derived from Greek.

A polar bear (‘Ursus maritimus’) on pack ice. 

The Greek word arktos means “bear,” and refers not to the region’s native polar bears, but to the circumpolar constellation Ursa Major. (Ursa is Latin for “bear.”)

 

8. The Arctic Ocean is the world’s smallest.
It comprises 5.4 million square miles. By comparison, the Atlantic Ocean covers 41.1 million square miles, and the Pacific 62.46 million square miles.

 

9. The North Pole is much warmer than the South Pole.

A satellite image shows the Beaufort Sea north of Canada's Ellesmere Island covered in sea ice.

The Arctic is mostly ocean surrounded by land, while Antarctica is land surrounded by ocean. While significant portions of both are covered in sheets of ice, the Arctic Ocean holds more heat that helps warm (relatively speaking) the surrounding air. The landmass of Antarctica, in contrast, is covered with an ice sheet more than a mile thick in places and over 9000 feet in elevation at the South Pole. Higher elevations, of course, result in colder temps. The average summer temperature at the North Pole is 32°F. At the South Pole, it’s -18°F.

 

10. Santa’s North Pole home was dreamed up by a 19th-century cartoonist.
The famous political cartoonist Thomas Nast began drawing illustrations of Santa Claus as part of an advertising campaign for Harper’s Weekly in the 1860s. In a few of his drawings, he made reference to the fact that Santa’s mailing address was the North Pole—a place that had already captured the world’s imagination, as they watched a number of explorers attempt to reach the frigid destination. As for the real St. Nicholas? He was born in what is now Turkey.

 

 

Source: Fascinating Facts About the Arctic

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - SPOOKY ETYMOLOGIES

Did you know... Ghosts, ghouls, and monsters turn up everywhere at Halloween—including in our language. From treacherous underground goblins to ghostly roaming primates, here are the spooky origins of 10 familiar words.

 

1. Aghast
Although it’s used much more loosely in English today, the word aghast literally means “frightened by a ghost.” That’s because the ghast part of of aghast is a derivative of the Middle English word gæsten, meaning “to terrify,” which is in turn a derivative of gæst, the Old English word for “ghost.” The gast of flabbergast, incidentally, probably comes from the same root.

 

2. Larva

In Latin, larva originally meant “ghost” or “ghoul,” and when the word first began to be used in English in the mid-1600s, that’s also what it meant. But because the ghosts and ghouls of antiquity were often portrayed as wearing a disguise to hide amongst the world of the living, in Latin larva also came to mean “mask,” and it was this figurative sense that the 18th-century naturalist Carl Linnaeus meant when he began to call the juvenile forms of insects larvae in the 1700s.

 

3. Bugaboo
Bugaboo has been used since the early 1700s to refer to an imagined problem or bugbear (although oddly, in 19th century English, it was also used as a nickname for a bailiff). The word itself has two possible origins, both of which are equally ghoulish: It might come from an old Celtic word (most likely bucca-boo, an old Cornish word for a devil or spectre), or it might come from “Bugibu,” the name of a monstrous demon that appeared in a Medieval French poem, Aliscans, written in the mid-1100s.

 

4. Lemur

Carl Linnaeus was also responsible for the word lemur, which he stole from the ghoulish Lemures of Ancient Rome. To the Romans, the Lemures were the skeletal, zombie-like ghosts of murder victims, executed criminals, sailors lost at sea, and anyone else who had died leaving unfinished business behind them on Earth. According to Roman tradition, ultimately the Lemures would return to haunt the world of the living each night—and hence when Linnaeus discovered a group of remarkably human-like primates wandering silently around the tropical rainforests in the dead of night, he had the perfect name for them.

 

5. Cobalt
The chemical element cobalt takes its name from the kobold, a type of devious subterranean hobgoblin in German folklore. Described in Sir Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830) as “a species of gnomes who haunted the dark and solitary places,” the kobolds were once believed to inhabit the rocks and tunnels of mineshafts, where they would reward those miners who respected them with rich discoveries, and would punish any others with rockfalls, poisonous fumes, and underground fires. The kobold’s connection to cobalt stems from the fact that two of the element’s most important ores—namely cobaltite and smaltite—both contain an equivalent amount of arsenic, which makes mining for them a particularly hazardous business. Long before the harmful nature of these metals was known to science, however, any miners who fell ill collecting cobalt would be left with little option but to blame their misfortune on the treacherous kobolds.

 

6. Mascot

We might use it more generally to mean an emblem or symbol, but a mascot was originally a talisman or charm, namely something intended to be used to protect someone from harm. In this sense the word is derived from masca, an old Provençal French word for a witch or sorceress.

 

7. Mindboggling
The boggle part of mindboggling is derived from an old Middle English word, bugge, for an invisible ghost or monster. These bugges (or “boggles,” as they became known) could not be seen by human eyes, but could supposedly be seen by animals: A spooked horse that reared up for no apparent reason would once have been said to have seen a bogle.

 

8. Nickel

Like cobalt, nickel takes its name from another ghoul from German folklore, known as the Kupfernickel, or “copper-demon.” Unlike the kobolds, however, nickels were more mischievous than dangerous and would simply trick unsuspecting miners into thinking they had discovered copper, when in fact they had discovered nickel, which was comparatively less valuable. Like the kobolds, however, the nickels had to be placated and respected, lest they cause cave-ins or other underground disasters.

 

9. Zeitgeist
If a poltergeist is literally a “noisy ghost” in German, then a zeitgeist is simply a “spirit of the age”—that is to say, something that seems to sum up the era in which it exists.

 

10. Terabyte

The tera in words like terabyte, terawatt, and terahertz is derived from the Greek word for “monster,” teras. The words teratism, meaning “a monstrosity,” and teratology, “the study of biological abnormalities,” are derived from the same root.

 

 

Source: Common Words With Spooky Etymologies

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - HAUNTED ATTRACTIONS

Did you know.... While some people use autumn as an opportunity to get cozy, horror fanatics see it as the time to get their adrenaline pumping. There are few better places to do this than at a haunted house, maze, or hayride. If October gets you in the mood to be terrorized by an actor in a clown mask, plenty of businesses across America are happy to provide that service. Whether they’re housed in a theme park or a historic prison, these are the most heart-pounding haunted attractions in all 50 states.

 

1. Alabama // The Haunted Chicken House; Location: Heflin, Alabama

 

The Haunted Chicken House wins our unofficial award for most creative backstory. According to the attraction’s lore, the Seven Oaks Chicken Farm took a dark turn in 2003, when a local farmer named Dan imported genetically-altered roosters to boost his business. The birds mutated into violent monsters, and Chicken Dan recruited an army of slashers and monsters to help fight them. The result is one of Alabama’s most bizarrely spooky attractions. After walking through the actual Haunted Chicken House, guests can take a spin onboard the haunted hayride or the “Crazy Train” bus. Tickets are currently on sale for Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays throughout October. —Michele Debczak

 

2. Alaska // Fright Nite Haunted House; Location: Anchorage, Alaska

 

Fright Nite has been freaking out patrons for more than three decades. Each production—usually open during the second half of October—features new actors, costumes, sound effects, and themes. And you can bet there will be evil clowns. —Kat Long

 

3. Arizona // 13th Floor Haunted House; Location: Phoenix, Arizona

 

Phoenix’s spooky 13th Floor offers four different experiences with creepy backstories. You may find yourself harshly judged by an evil nun with a sinister agenda, enchanted by malevolent spirits from the deep sea, or hunting down zombies infected with a global virus (too soon, guys!). There’s also an optional, interactive maze adventure that takes place in total darkness. If you think you can handle it, 13th Floor runs through November 4. —KL

 

4. Arkansas // The Reaper Haunted House; Location: North Little Rock, Arkansas

 

Like a slasher movie come to life, The Reaper Haunted House—which has been scaring Arkansans since 2011—promises to shock its guests with more than 30 scenes of “blood, gore, and mayhem.” The terrifying tableaux continues through November 1. —KL

 

5. California // Knott’s Scary Farm; Location: Buena Park, California

 

Knott’s Berry Farm transforms into Knott’s Scary Farm during spooky season. The Southern California theme park is celebrating 50 years of frights this year. On select nights through October 31, the park is overrun with terrifying creatures. In addition to the 10 unique haunted mazes, the event features five sprawling scare zones and four chilling live shows. When they’re not getting their pants scared off, guests can decompress over themed treats like cereal killer funnel cake and spookghetti pie. Tickets for 2023 are available starting at $60. —MD

 

Click the link below  to know about more haunted attractions

 

Source: The Most Terrifying Haunted Attraction in All 50 States
 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - TWILIGHT (movie)

Did you know..... On August 2, 2008, Breaking Dawn—the fourth and final chapter of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga—hit shelves, setting a record for Hachette Book Group by selling roughly 1.3 copies in a day. But the vampire hype had yet to reach its peak for that year, because not four months later, on November 21, the film adaptation of the series’s eponymous first installment hit theaters.  Twilight, directed by Thirteen’s Catherine Hardwicke, took about $37 million to make and earned more than $400 million at the worldwide box office. While some critics panned it as cheesy or, in Variety’s words, “disappointingly anemic,” many others gave kudos to Hardwicke and her cast for capturing teen lust in all its angsty awkwardness. Good or bad, the movie—which follows the forbidden romance between a teenage (but immortal) vampire, Edward, and a human high schooler, Bella—is undeniably important, as it catapulted Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart to global fame and also proved that it’s possible for a major blockbuster to seem more like an indie cult classic. 

 

1. The original Twilight script included a Jet Ski chase and some surprising deaths.

When Paramount’s MTV Films initially started developing Twilight for the silver screen, they thought the story would need much more action in order to appeal to a male audience. So screenwriter Mark Lord wrote a script in which Bella is a long-distance runner who gets to shoot vampires with a shotgun and transform into one of the fanged immortals herself. Lord also decided to kill off Bella’s dad, Charlie, and Edward’s dad, Carlisle. The studio ended up letting its option lapse, and Summit Entertainment picked up the rights in 2007. When Catherine Hardwicke was tapped to direct the film, she told Summit to scrap the screenplay completely. “The original script literally had Bella on Jet Skis being chased by the FBI. She was a star athlete. Nothing to do with the book,” the director said on The Big Hit Show podcast. Melissa Rosenberg, who wrote the screenplay for 2006’s Step Up and had also written for The O.C., was hired to pen a new Twilight that stuck to its source material. (She went on to write the screenplays for the rest of the Twilight Saga.)

 

2. Stephenie Meyer’s dream cast included Emily Browning as Bella and Henry Cavill as Edward.

While Meyer was heavily involved in the making of Twilight, she didn’t spearhead the audition process—but that’s not to say she didn’t have a dream cast in mind. She initially wanted Henry Cavill to play Edward, though she felt he’d aged out of the role by the time Summit Entertainment optioned the film rights in 2007. (Cavill was already 24 years old.) Other “realistic options,” as she wrote on her website, included Tom Sturridge and Logan Lerman. For Bella, her “favorite choice” was Emily Browning, probably best known at the time for starring as Violet Baudelaire in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004). Meyer thought Elliot Page and Danielle Panabaker “could do a decent job with Bella,” too.  Meyer also wanted Charlie Hunnam as Carlisle, John C. Reilly (or Vince Vaughn) as Charlie Swan, Rachel Leigh Cook as Alice, and Cillian Murphy as James.

 

3. Jackson Rathbone was almost cast as Edward.

Hardwicke found her Bella fairly easily—Stewart was chosen in part because she conveyed “longing” so well in Into the Wild (2007), Hardwicke told Yahoo! Entertainment. Casting Edward proved harder: Pretty boys abounded, but not many looked “otherworldly, like they’d been around for a hundred years,” Hardwicke said. Jackson Rathbone, who ended up nabbing the role of Jasper Cullen, was among the final four, along with Ben Barnes (Westworld, Shadow and Bone), Shiloh Fernandez (2013’s Evil Dead), and Pattinson. “They all came over to my house with Kristen, and she had an hour and a half with each guy. She had to kiss him, and we had to do improvs, and run around and do all kinds of crazy, fun stuff, and just see who she really could click with,” Hardwicke said. “At the end she goes, ‘It’s gotta be Rob.’”

 

4. The vampires took a cat movement class to get into character.

Hardwicke had the actors take a cat movement class so they could learn how to comport themselves with the grace and fluidity you’d expect from vampires. Nikki Reed (who plays Rosalie Cullen) told Insider that she found the approach “really cool and interesting.” Ashley Greene (Alice Cullen), on the other hand, called it a “wildly uncomfortable situation” and “one of my least favorite experiences” on her podcast The Twilight Effect. “I think it bonded us a little bit because we all felt like idiots,” she said. “[The instructor] was like, ‘I need you to all move like cats and meow and hiss,’ and I was like, ‘Is she serious? Is she joking?’”

 

5. Robert Pattinson handpicked “You better hold on tight, spider monkey” from a list of options.

 

One of Twilight’s most memorable lines occurs right before Edward gives Bella a lightning-fast piggyback ride through the woods. “You better hold on tight, spider monkey,” he says. Pattinson actually handpicked that line from a list of nearly 10 options that Hardwicke had written herself the night before. (The Writers Guild of America was on strike while Twilight was being filmed, which meant Rosenberg couldn’t make any edits to the screenplay during production.) Other options included “Prepare for liftoff,” “Got a good grip? Don’t let go” (to which Bella would’ve responded “No chance of that, buddy”), and “Wrap your legs around me like a spider monkey.”

 

6. Kellan Lutz inspired Emmett’s egg-centric school lunch.

Eagle-eyed fans have pointed out that Emmett’s (Kellan Lutz) school lunch consists of a plastic bag filled with hard-boiled eggs—a strange meal for most high schoolers, and especially for one who doesn’t subsist on human food. The bag of eggs actually belonged to Lutz, who was eating them on set in order to stay bulked up for the role. Hardwicke noticed and decided to use the detail in the film. “I was just laughing so hard,” Hardwicke told Insider. “I’m like, ‘OK, [Emmett] has to have those eggs. You have to carry that in that scene,’ because it was just outrageous.”

 

Click the link below  to read more facts about the movie Twilight.

 

Source: Illuminating Facts About the Movie ‘Twilight’

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - VAMPIRE BATS

Did you know.... Bats are firmly rooted in Western vampire lore, but only three species out of some 1100 in the order Chiroptera actually have a taste for blood. Vampire bats are the only mammals in the world that live on blood alone, and the unique challenges of that diet make them some of the most specialized, fascinating, and downright weird animals in nature.

 

1. Each vampire bat species specializes in different prey.
The common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus), the hairy-legged vampire bat (Diphylla ecaudata), and the white-winged vampire bat (Diaemus youngi) are closely related and grouped together in the subfamily Desmodontinae. Their ranges overlap in parts of Central and South America, so, in what might be an effort to avoid competition with each other, the species go after different prey. The common vampire bat feeds primarily on the blood of mammals—ranging from tapirs to horses to the occasional human—and seems to have a preference for livestock animals. The hairy-legged vampire bat, meanwhile, lives almost exclusively on bird blood, while the white-winged vampire bat is more versatile and drinks from both birds and mammals.

 

2. Europeans misunderstood vampire bats from the beginning.

Other bats with less grisly diets got a bad rap from European explorers in the Americas. The Europeans had heard stories about blood-drinking bats and encountered Native people and livestock that had been bitten in the night and, without any real knowledge of the animals’ diets, began labeling different bats as vampires willy nilly, usually applying the term to bigger and/or uglier ones. Bats that lived on insects or even fruit were assumed to be vampires thanks to their appearance, and the association stuck when they were scientifically described and saddled with names like Vampyrum spectrum and Pteropus vampyrus. Meanwhile, when a naturalist finally got his hands on an actual vampire, D. rotundus, no one one believed his assertions that it drank blood, and he made no mention of it in his description.

 

3. They have incredibly sharp teeth and grooved tongues.
When the bats feed, they use their teeth to shear away hair or feathers from a small spot and then cut into their victim’s flesh with their sharp incisors. (According to zoologists at Chicago’s Field Museum, even the teeth on old, preserved bat skulls in museum collections are sharp enough to cut someone handling them carelessly.) Rather than actively suck the blood from the wound like their namesakes, the bats let the physics of capillary action do the work. They lap at the blood and specialized grooves on their lips, tongues, and/or roof or their mouths suction it up. A protein in the bats’ saliva called a plasminogen activator prevents the blood from clotting and keeps it flowing freely while they drink.

 

4. White-winged vampire bats play tricks on chickens to access their blood.

The white-winged vampire bats have a few tricks for feeding on domestic chickens without startling the birds. Sometimes, they’ll approach a hen and mimic a chick by nuzzling up to her brood patch. This featherless section of skin on the hen’s underside is densely packed with blood vessels and is used to transfer heat to her eggs or chicks during nesting. The vessels make an easy target for the bat, and if the hen thinks it’s her baby cuddling up to her, she’ll sit on the bat to give it access to drink. Other times, the bats will climb up on a hen’s back, mimicking the touch and weight of a mounting rooster and sending the hen into the crouching stance they take before mating. The bat can then shimmy up to the hen’s neck for a bite and she’ll stay in that position until the bat hops off.

 

5. They also sneak up on birds in trees.

White-winged vampires will also take their meals in the trees instead of the barnyard. While a bird roosts on a branch, the bat sneaks up on it from below, crawling along the underside of the branch and staying out of sight. Once it’s directly underneath its prey, the bat bites the bird’s big rear-pointing toe and drinks its fill.

 

 

Click below  to read mow about Vampire Bats.

 

Source: Surprising Facts About Vampire Bats

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - DANGEROUS UMBRELLAS?

Did you know..... If leaving your umbrella open to dry in the corner of your office makes you slightly uneasy, you’re probably not alone: Open indoor umbrellas are right up there with broken mirrors and black cats when it comes to alleged harbingers of bad luck. While the origin of the superstition isn’t exactly proven, there are a few leading theories about how and why it began.

 

 

One of them suggests it started around 1200 BCE, when the ancient Egyptian priests and royalty were using umbrellas made of peacock feathers and papyrus to shield them from the sun. According to Reader’s Digest, the superstition might have stemmed from a belief that opening an umbrella indoors—away from the sun’s rays—would anger the sun god, Ra, and generate negative consequences.

 

 

Another theory involves a different ancient Egyptian deity: Nut, goddess of the sky. As HowStuffWorks reports, these early umbrellas were crafted to mirror (and honor) the way she protected the Earth, so their shade was considered sacred. If anybody with non-noble blood used one, that person supposedly became a walking, talking beacon of bad luck.

 

 

The reason we try to abstain from opening umbrellas indoors today, however, is probably more about avoiding injury than divine wrath. Modern umbrellas gained popularity during the Victorian era with Samuel Fox’s invention of the steel-ribbed Paragon frame, which included a spring mechanism that allowed it to expand quickly—and dangerously.

 

“A rigidly spoked umbrella, opening suddenly in a small room, could seriously injure an adult or child, or shatter a frangible object,” Charles Panati writes in his book Panati’s Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things. “Thus, the superstition arose as a deterrent to opening umbrellas indoors.” All things considered, even if opening an umbrella indoors doesn’t necessarily make for bad luck, getting poked in the eye by one can certainly make for a bad day.

 

 

Source: Fact about Why Opening Umbrellas Indoors is Bad Luck

Edited October 26, 2023 by DarkRavie

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - FAKE WORDS

Ghost words sometimes end up in the dictionary by accident, but nihilartikels are put there on purpose—and for good reason.

Did you know.... Ghost words have nothing to do with otherworldly apparitions, but they’re certainly scary for lexicographers. The term ghost words—meaning “a word form never in established usage,” according to Merriam-Webster—was coined by philologist Walter William Skeat in 1886. They’re often the result of misreadings and typographical errors—but not all misread and mistyped words are so spooky. While some that have meandered from their original forms have mostly retained their original meanings, the meaning of ghost words, and by extension the words themselves, never existed, except, as Skeat said, “in the perfervid imagination of ignorant or blundering editors.” Another kind of fake word is the nihilartikel, which translates from Latin and German as “nothing article.” Nihilartikels are deliberately phony words included to ward off would-be plagiarists. In other words, you know your dictionary content has been stolen if it includes a word that exists only in your dictionary. Here are seven fake words that ended up in Webster’s, Oxford, and the like.

 

1. Dord
Dord is perhaps the most famous of the ghost words. First appearing in the 1934 second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, dord was said to mean “density.” The phantom phrase hung out until 1939, when an editor finally noticed its lack of etymology. Spooked, he checked the files and found the original slip: “D or d, cont/ density,” which was actually referring to abbreviations using the letter D. At the time, words to be entered in the dictionary were typed with spaces between letters, so “d or d” might have been interpreted as “d o r d.” Despite having proved its non-existence, Webster’s pages wouldn’t be dord-free until 1947.

 

2. Abacot

Abacot made its debut in the second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles, edited by Abraham Fleming and published in 1587. It then found its way into Spelman’s Glossarium (1664), and every major dictionary since. Almost 300 years later, James Murray, the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), discovered that the wordy wraith was actually a misprint of bycoket, a cap or head-dress. By then, abacot had taken on a life of its own, referring to not just any cap but a “Cap of State, made like a double crown, worn anciently by the Kings of England.”

 

3. Morse
By the time morse appeared in Sir Walter Scott’s 1821 novel, The Monastery, it already had a couple of accepted noun meanings: It could refer to a fancy clasp for a cape or be used as another word for walrus. The verb morse, however, was a mystery. Scott’s use—“Dost thou so soon morse thoughts of slaughter?”—elicited a few theories. The word was thought to be “excellent Lowland Scotch,” and perhaps meant “to prime,” as in the priming of a musket. Another guess was that it came from the Latin mordere, “to bite,” and thus meant “to indulge in biting, stinging, or gnawing thoughts of slaughter.” In actuality, morse was merely a misinterpretation of the far less exciting nurse, meaning “to nurture or care for.”

 

4. Phantomnation

A ghostly word in more than one way, phantomnation was defined by Webster’s 1864 American Dictionary of the English Language as an “appearance as of a phantom; illusion,” and was attributed to Alexander Pope’s translation of The Odyssey: “These solemn vows and holy offerings paid  - To all the phantomnations of the dead.” The real word? The no less creepy phantom-nation, a society of specters. We can blame scholar Richard Paul Jodrell for this gaffe, who, in his book The Philology of the English Language, left out hyphens in compound words.

 

5. Momblishness
As the OED puts it, momblishness is “explained as: muttering talk.” Not surprising with its similarity to the word mumble. While this linguistic bogey was discovered to be a “scribal error” of the plural of ne-moubliemie, French for the forget-me-not flower, we think this is one ghost word that should be brought back from the dead.

 

6. Cairbow

The curious cairbow was mentioned in an early 20th-century proof of the OED in an example sentence of “glare”: “It [the Cairbow] then suddenly squats upon its haunches, and slides along the glare-ice.” Cairbow? No one had heard of such thing. Was it some kind of polar creature with an affinity for ice? Did it have a big rainbow on its back? Nope. Cairbow was merely a misreading of caribou.

 

7. Adventine
In his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, English writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson defined adventine as meaning “Adventitious; that which is extrinsically added; that which comes from outward causes,” noting that it was “a word scarcely in use.” He had tracked it down in Francis Bacon’s Natural History, which read, “As for the peregrine heat, it is thus far true, that, if the proportion of the adventine heat be greatly predominant to the natural heat and spirits of the body, it tendeth to dissolution or notable alteration.” The only problem? Bacon had written adventive. Adventine was a printer’s error, and therefore a ghost word.

 

8. Foupe

According to Johnson, foupe is “a word out of use” that means “To drive with sudden impetuosity”; he spotted the word in a 1605 text. (“We pronounce, by the confession of strangers, as smoothly and moderately as any of the northern nations, who foupe their words out of the throat with fat and full spirits,” it read.) But as Jack Lynch writes in You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf from Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia, foupe wasn’t actually a word. Instead, “Johnson misread the long s of the rare word soupe ‘to swoop’ and inadvertently coined a new word.”

 

9. Esquivalience
The one faker by design, this spurious term, meaning “the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities,” materialized in the second edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD). Its fraudulence was revealed in The New Yorker. According to the magazine, an “independent investigator” who had heard rumors that there was a fictitious entry under the letter e in the NOAD did some research and guesswork and narrowed down the options. After the investigator sent a list of six possibilities to a group of nine experts, seven identified esquivalience as the fake. A call to NOAD’S then-editor-in-chief, Erin McKean, confirmed it. McKean said that another editor, Christine Lindberg, had invented the word, and added that esquivalience’s “inherent fakeitude is fairly obvious.” Not obvious enough for some: The charlatan ended up in Dictionary.com, which cited Webster’s New Millennium as its source. Esquivalience is gone now from the online reference as well as the NOAD, but as with all ghost words, its semantic spirit still remains.

 

 

Source: Fake Words That Ended Up in the Dictionary

Edited October 27, 2023 by DarkRavie

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - HALLOWEEN MOVIES

Did you know.... Getting a group of people to agree on what movie to watch is hard under any circumstances—especially if the group spans a wide age range. The task becomes tougher still if you’re confined to spooky movies in honor of Halloween. Naturally, you’ll want to steer clear of heavy-duty horror flicks for the sake of any young kids in your party. But you also don’t want to choose a movie so geared toward the tykes that it’s a snooze-fest for everyone else. To find a happy medium, UK-based holiday park operator Parkdean Resorts recently devised a system that ranks spooky movies based on their family-friendliness. First, the researchers compiled a list of movies with G and PG ratings, plus some comparably mild Halloween-appropriate programs that premiered on television (e.g. It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and the 1998 Disney Channel Original Movie Halloweentown). 

 

They then assigned a score to each one based on a few different data points: the Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score, and the average star ratings from parents and kids (separately) on Common Sense Media. (The number of reviews on Common Sense Media factored into the breakdown, too.) Coraline (2009) topped the list with a score of 171, a good 26 points ahead of the runner-up: Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 classic Spirited Away. It’s worth noting that just because a movie scores high on this list doesn’t make it the perfect crowd-pleaser for your watch party in particular. Multiple kid reviewers on Common Sense Media mentioned being “traumatized” by Coraline, and the site’s overall takeaway is that it’s a “cool but creepy animated fantasy too scary for young kids.” The fact that it has more than 1000 reviews on the site—hundreds more than any other movie included in the study—no doubt helped it clinch the top spot. In short, it’s not a foolproof study. But the list is a boon for people of all ages who want to celebrate Halloween with gently creepy content that won’t scare them out of their skin. See what other movies made the top 15 below.

 

1. Coraline (2009) // 171

 

2. Spirited Away (2001) // 145

 

3. Beetlejuice (1988) // 137

 

4. The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) // 127

 

5. Ghostbusters (1984) // 122

 

6. Goosebumps (2015) // 113

 

 

Click the link below  to know about move kid Halloween friendly movies.

 

Source: Great Family-Friendly Halloween Movies to Watch This Year

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - HAUNTED HOUSE MOVIES

Did you know... The haunted house is one of horror’s most time-honored tropes, a dark twisting of the place we call home into a maelstrom of terror and things that go bump in the night. There’s something eternal about the idea, so it’s no wonder that hundreds upon hundreds of filmmakers have channeled it for dark visions of their own. There are, of course, dozens of classics in the genre on the big-screen, but if you’re looking for the very best to dive into this Halloween season, these are the ones you definitely won’t want to miss.

 

1. The Uninvited (1944)

The Uninvited, a ghost story from Hollywood’s Golden Age, has pretty much everything you’d want out of a classic black-and-white horror-drama. It’s got a spooky old house, a cast of beloved character actors led by Ray Milland, a slow-burn supernatural narrative that moves at its own leisurely pace, and of course old-school ghosts. It might move a little slowly for modern audiences, but if you’re patient with it, it’s the kind of film that will wrap you up in its own creepy comforts. In 2019, Martin Scorsese named The Uninvited one of the scariest movies of all time; “the tone is very delicate, and the sense of fear is woven into the setting [and] the gentility of the characters,“ he wrote for The Daily Beast.

 

2. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)

 

If you want a haunted house story that’s not scary, and might in fact leave you buoyant with joy, look no further than this classic starring Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison in the title roles. A supernatural romance about a young woman and the spectral sea captain who becomes her preternatural paramour, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir is both thoroughly layered with ideas and wonderfully sweet, remaining a great change of pace from the horror films where ghosts usually dwell. Bernard Herrmann, the legendary composer behind such diverse titles as Citizen Kane, Psycho, and Taxi Driver, scored The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and considered it his best work.

 

3. 13 Ghosts (1960)

 

Legendary gimmick-happy genre director William Castle made two great haunted house films in his career, and while House on Haunted Hill (1959) is more than worth a watch, 13 Ghosts stands out now as the superior (and more overtly supernatural) picture. The story of a family that moves into a house they suddenly inherited, it’s a supernatural mystery that’s both satisfying and delightfully over-the-top, and the ghost effects (enhanced by Illusion-O, Castle’s gimmick of special glasses that allowed you to see the ghosts or avoid them at will in the theater) are still genuinely unsettling after more than 60 years.

 

4. The Innocents (1961)

 

Just like the story that inspired it, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents is a film that focuses more on the haunted houses we build in our own minds than on actual ghosts reaching out from the darkness. In that regard, it’s a tremendous showcase for Deborah Kerr in the lead role of a governess slowly losing it in a big, old, possibly haunted house. She gets wonderfully, devastatingly lost in Clayton’s Gothic atmosphere, and you will, too. The Innocents also made Scorsese’s list of scariest movies ever, with the Oscar-winner describing it as “one of the rare pictures that does justice to Henry James. It’s beautifully crafted and acted, immaculately shot (by Freddie Francis), and very scary.“

 

5. The Haunting (1963)

 

Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is one of the all-time great haunted house stories, and it has given us more than one great adaptation along the way. If you’re looking for the best feature film version, though, look no further than Robert Wise’s psychologically rich, unshakably tense vision from the 1960s. The horror is subtle, but the way Wise’s camera paints with light and shadows will leave you searching every corner for a spirit. Russ Tamblyn, who plays Luke Sannerson—the heir set to inherit Hill House—in the film also appeared in one episode of Netflix's 2018 miniseries, The Haunting of Hill House.

 

6. The Legend of Hell House (1973)

Richard Matheson’s novel Hell House is a masterclass in pure, straightforward haunted house terror, and John Hough’s film adaptation delivers all that and more. The film follows a group of experts as they head into the title house with the goal of finding proof of the supernatural. It quickly devolves into terror as the group encounters dark image after dark image, all building toward a terrifying conclusion that’s still one of the more fascinating haunted house resolutions in the cinematic canon. More than 25 years after its original release, the film inspired the creation of the MTV horror reality series Fear.

 

7. House (1977)

If you’ve never seen House, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 haunted house film, do yourself a favor and just go watch it. Right now. Don’t look up the plot, don’t watch trailers, just watch the movie and hold on for dear life. It’s been nearly 50 years since Obayashi’s film was released, and there’s still nothing else in the horror genre—or in any other genre—quite like it. It’s a dark dream full of imagery that will live in your head forever, and a singular achievement in haunted house storytelling. While House was an immediate hit in its native Japan, American audiences didn’t get a chance to witness it until more than 30 years later, when it began screening at festivals in 2009 and very quickly gained a cult following.

 

 

Click the link below  to see more of the Best haunted House Movies.

 

Source: Best Haunted House Movies of All Time

[DarkRavie]

Monday's Fact of the Day

 

Fact of the Day - TV SHOW PILOT?

Did you know... Pilot episodes are a longstanding tradition in television. They’re usually the first episode of a series, introducing you to its world and characters. In fact, cable networks have often used the word pilot as the title of a TV show’s first episode. This tradition has led to “Pilot“ being the most common TV show episode title by far; just check out the first episodes of Breaking Bad (2008), American Horror Story (2011), and New Girl (2011). But a show’s first episode isn’t always its pilot. Not all pilots even get aired, and some shows abandon or remake their pilot episodes. So before diving into the term itself, we have to ask: What even is a pilot, really, and what is it used for?

 

What is a pilot, and why is it so important in the TV industry?
Pilots are a single episode of a potential new TV series, and are essentially what decides whether a show makes it to your television screen. Each year, most big television networks receive a massive number of pitches for new shows between January and May, which has historically been considered “pilot season” (though it seems like this timeline may shift due to the year-round pitching at streaming companies like Netflix). The networks then decide which pitches they would like to develop a pilot, or sample episode(s), from. For creators pitching new shows, the pressure is on to make these pilot episodes good. They have to prove that their concept will come to life on the screen because producers will use that single episode to decide if they want to fund the rest of the show.

 

Pilots are carefully scrutinized by network producers. With costs-per-episode averaging millions of dollars (especially at Netflix) and only going up, it’s more important than ever that producers have a good idea what the shows they’re considering making would actually look like. In the end, this means that most pilots never make it to TV. Between ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox, only 35 comedies and dramas were picked up last season, which is a lower number than in years past.

 

Getting a concept onto the big screen is a difficult process, and the pilot episode is what can make—or, more often, break—a series. In rare cases, however, the pilot itself isn’t used but the show is funded regardless. This is what happened with Game of Thrones, whose $10 million pilot was completely reshot with multiple roles recast, but also led HBO to commit to a $100 million budget for the next 10 episodes. The most important thing is that producers see the creator’s vision.

 

So why is the first episode of a series called a pilot?
No one is quite sure where the term pilot originally came from, but there are several potential explanations. Successful pilots often (though not always) become a TV series’ first episode, so one theory is that pilots are called that because they serve as the foundation and guide for later episodes of the TV show, just as a pilot is the guide of an airplane. Others claim that because we describe TV shows as airing, the pilot is the episode that “takes off.“ A similar explanation posits that the word refers to the phrase pilot light, because the episode is the spark that sets off the larger fire of the series. It’s also possible that the term was borrowed from scientists who try to determine the feasibility of larger-scale research projects with pilot studies, pilot projects, or pilot experiments.

 

The etymological origin of the word pilot comes from the Greek word pēdon, which means “oar.“ This lends some credibility to the idea that the term was adopted because the episode is supposed to steer the rest of the show the way an oar propels a boat.

 

Nowadays, those within the film industry have created their own lingo to refer to the specific types of pilots. A premise pilot is what we typically think of as the first-episode introduction to the show’s characters and plot. But there are also backdoor pilots, episodes of existing shows that focus on supporting characters or a side plot to see if viewers would watch a spinoff, as well as put pilots, which are aired with no guarantee of being picked up, among others. Because pilot can mean a lot of different things, those in the TV industry often call a show’s first episode the “series premiere.“ The term “series premiere“ is also useful because of the increasing popularity of straight-to-series orders—a.k.a., networks (and especially streaming studios) skipping a pilot altogether and just commissioning a TV series. 

 

For now, though, pilots remain an essential part of television production. These sample episodes lay the groundwork for the rest of a show and help producers get a better idea of the viability of a new series. And though we don’t know exactly where the television industry got the term pilot originally, we can make some pretty good guesses that it’s something to do with how important it is to the show’s future.

 

 

Source: Why Is the First Episode of a TV Show Called a ‘Pilot’?

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - LANDAU BARS

Did you know... If you’ve ever been to a funeral (or behind the procession of one on the road), you’ve probably seen a hearse—and perhaps you’ve noticed that the vehicle usually doesn’t have windows in the back. Instead, there are S-shaped bars where the windows should be. What gives? Those diagonal irons on the rear quarter panel of hearses are called “landau bars.” They’re purely decorative today, but they once served a purpose and are now in place as a nod to history.

 

 

The landau carriage was invented in the mid-18th century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, they got their name from “a town in Germany where the vehicle was first made. The German name is landauer, short for landauer wagen.” Lightweight and suspended on elliptical springs, this four-in-hand coach was a precursor to today’s convertible cars in that it had a collapsible roof. The soft folding top on the original model was divided into two sections, front and rear, which were latched in the center. An elongated external hinge mechanism was necessary to support the folding roof, and since the pricey landau was designed as a luxury vehicle for the upper classes, designers added the elegant S-shaped scroll to the utilitarian hinges to make them more aesthetically appealing.

 

 

Early horse-drawn hearses were carriages that often featured fully functional landau bars. Before World War II, American automobile hearses borrowed the landau bar flourish as an homage and an attempt to add a touch of Old-World “class.” Over the years the landau bars became so ingrained in the public’s mind as a symbol of a funeral car that most hearse manufacturers still tack them onto their limousines as a matter of tradition. By the way, don’t be surprised if you hear a funeral director use the word coach rather than hearse to refer to the vehicle transporting a casket—as Jessica Mitford wrote in The American Way of Death Revisited, this was just one change to funeral-related language in the 20th century. Other terms that got phased out were morgue (the suggested replacement was preparation room) and undertaker (replaced by funeral director or mortician).

 

 

Source: Why Do Hearses Have Metal S-Shaped Scrolls Where the Back Windows Should Be?

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - SLEEP PARALYSIS DEMON

Did you know... Witches. Ghosts. Shadows. It wasn’t that long ago that dark paranormal forces seemed like the most plausible explanation for the strange phenomenon of sleep paralysis. After all, sufferers are not only trapped in their bodies and unable to move, but they’re usually subjected to terrifying hallucinations more vivid and stimulating than regular dreams. Many of these hallucinations involve an unwelcome intruder metaphorically called a “sleep paralysis demon,” but historically, people took the “demon” part quite seriously. “The devil lay upon her and held her down,” wrote Dutch physician Isbrand van Diemerbroeck of a patient in 1644. Even doctors pointed to the fantastic back in the day. Sleep paralysis happens when consciousness overlaps with the muscle atonia phase of REM sleep. In simpler terms, the brain is wide awake and lucid while the body is fast asleep. Like sleepwalking, sleep paralysis is classified as a parasomnia, or a sleep disorder accompanied by bizarre, usually undesirable physical activity or experiences. Before coherent medical explanations were available, different cultures used their own folklore and cultural beliefs to figure out what was happening. Take a look at these 13 names from across the world that describe sleep paralysis and the demon once believed to cause it.

 

1. Mære
Before time and hyperbole watered down the term, nightmare once referred to the nocturnal torture sleepers experienced at the hands of a malicious spirit called a mære. This Old English word only has debatable connections to adult female horses. According to Etymology Online, it likely derives from the Proto-Indo-European root mer- meaning “to harm” and refers to a (typically female) demon who paralyzes sleepers and suffocates them. This suffocation is one of the hallmarks of sleep paralysis across cultures, and it’s often believed to be the mære riding or sitting on people for sinister pleasure, making this phantasmagoric being closely related to succubi. Mære and its many linguistic variants (mara in Old Norse, mare in Old Dutch, and mora in many Slavic languages) have given way to other modern words for “nightmare,” like the French cauchemar and the Dutch nachtmerrie. Given that sleep paralysis describes the liminal space between waking and dreams, the word mære may also relate to the Old Norse -mæri, which meant “borderland.”

 

2. Hexendrücken

When in doubt, blame the witches: That was the go-to ethos for many cultures to explain away any unfortunate event. Hexendrücken is a fun-to-say German word that translates to “witch’s pressing” and pinned the blame on evil enchantresses for the suffering of sleepers. This tradition would continue through the Salem Witch trials, leading to multiple deaths after people complained of being physically oppressed in the night by accused witches. Fun fact: In Germany, non-paralysis bad dreams are blamed on elves to this day. Their German word for a nightmare is Alptraum, or “elf-dream.”

 

3. Ogun Oru
Among the Yoruba of southwest Nigeria, ogun oru means “nocturnal warfare” and is seen as a type of demonic invasion of the body and mind. It’s characterized not just by the frightening loss of muscle control, but also as an epic battle between the sufferer’s spouse on Earth and their “spiritual” spouse that can only be fixed through exorcisms and Christian prayer.

 

4. Kanashibari

This Japanese word for sleep paralysis translates as “bound in metal,” combining the words kana (“metal”) and shibaru (“to bind”). It comes from a medieval Japanese spell practiced by priests to immobilize or expel an assortment of cunning supernatural beings known as yokai from possessing people. Some of these sleep paralysis-inducing yokai include the shapeshifting fox kitsune, a type of prankster zashiki-warashi (“child ghost”) known as a makuragaeshi, and the popular raccoon-like dog and trickster tanuki that has magical testicles (yes, you read that right).

 

5. Se me subió el muerto
In Mexico, this macabre folk expression means “a dead body climbed on top of me” and describes the uncanny horror of feeling suppressed by a mysterious and sinister weight. The shadows and figures that are often hallucinated during episodes are believed to be spirits of the deceased that lay on top of the sleeper, leaving them pinned to the bed, unable to get up.

 

6. Old Hag

Found across Britain and the Americas, and in particular Canada’s Newfoundland province, old hag is one of the most common colloquialisms for sleep paralysis. The old hag (who is sometimes called “night hag”) expands on the persistent witch mythology where a withered crone perches on top of the sleeper’s chest and holds them down.

 

Click the link below  to read more about the Sleep Paralysis Demon.

 

 

Source: Names for the Sleep Demon from Around the World

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - IN THE 90s

 

Did you know.... When The Galveston Daily News asked local Walmart employees about the hottest holiday items for 1989, they got a list of the usual suspects: a Nintendo Entertainment System; VCRs; a Game Boy; and fax machines. But the one item that really fascinated shoppers, a store manager said, was a clear landline telephone. These compact, push-button phones had translucent plastic cases so callers could see every component. They lit up in neon colors when the phone rang. And for a period in the 1980s and 1990s, they were the preferred way of ordering a pizza, prank-calling someone, or weeping after your high school crush said they just wanted to be friends.

 

A Ringing Endorsement
For decades, phones were utilitarian in purpose and appearance. Mounted on kitchen walls or resting on desks, they were often black and virtually without frills. That was thanks in large part to AT&T, which had a monopoly on the phone industry and saw little need to make phones more aesthetically pleasing. But things changed in the early 1980s after government intervention; the ensuing deregulation of the telephone industry meant that anyone could make one, and their ideas were far more daring than the stodgy models on offer. Phones could be fun or kitschy. Even better, they could become something teens would welcome as a birthday or holiday gift.

 

 

 

Trying to determine the responsible party for the first clear phone is a formidable task, though it apparently took some time before the idea occurred to anyone. A 1988 Los Angeles Times guide to Disneyland alerted visitors to check out the Premiere Shop in Tomorrowland, which was offering a “see-through telephone” for a steep $125, or the equivalent of $322 today. Later that year, The Honolulu Advertiser mentioned that a gift shop dubbed Nothing You Need (But Everything You Want) offered a clear phone from manufacturer Roxanne for $300, or almost $800 today. (The store also sold a gasoline-powered air mattress that could purportedly propel itself across the water.)

 

Another model was from BellSouth and Fun Products. Dubbed the Metrolight, it featured a “trimline” design with buttons on the handset and could be mounted to a wall, which is closer to the kind of clear phone people remember.

 

Fun Products was notable for having marketed the Swatch Watch, which also took a somewhat mundane product—a wristwatch—and imbued it with some personality: One 1985 model was translucent. The $65 phone (originally $130) got plenty of attention thanks to a deal struck with catalog company Sharper Image, which ordered 5000 of them.

 

While those phones were the first to market, it was likely Conair—yes, the hair dryer company—that brought it into the mainstream. According to a 2020 Slate piece by author Heather Schwedel, Conair executive Barry Haber was traveling when he came across a clear (though still clunky-looking) telephone. Haber believed a sleeker version at a more consumer-friendly price point would be best. He was right: The company sold 2 to 3 million phones over the next five years, with a typical retail price of $20 to $25, or roughly $56 to $64 now, accounting for inflation.

 

Cool Calls
Some phone purists wrote these clear phones off as a passing fad, claiming they lacked useful features. Few, if any, had answering machines or came in cordless versions. But really, that was the point. Kids were the primary demographic for the phones, and they didn’t really need anything fancy. The phones were seen as more of a room decoration than a multifunctional electronic gadget.

 

 

 

The clear phone wasn’t the only device to come out of the break-up of the phone industry. Phones shaped like Garfield, Snoopy, Mickey Mouse, hamburgers, and even the infamous Sports Illustrated NFL football phone—free with subscription—were all fun alternatives to boring handsets.

 

The clear fad had some mileage in other consumer lines, as well. The debut of Crystal Pepsi in 1992 promised a familiar soft drink taste without the mud-colored glass; Nintendo offered up a transparent Game Boy Advance; Apple’s 1998 iMac put its innards on display, immediately making industrial-looking personal computers look bland in comparison. (The see-through Apple models continued through 2004.)

 

Like most trends, clear phones lost their novelty over time. Today, there are periodic pleas for Apple to bring the clear-phone phenomenon full circle and release a transparent iPhone. (An Android phone, made by the brand Nothing, does come in a clear chassis.) Apple has yet to answer the call. It’s more likely that clear phones will be relegated to the nostalgia heap, a reminder of consumer marketing at its most transparent.

 

 

Source: Loud and Clear: When See-Through Telephones Ruled the ‘90s

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - BIZZARE GLOBSTERS

Did you know.... They’ve washed up on beaches around the world: slimy blobs of organic material that don’t resemble any creature known to science. Some lack discernable faces and limbs, and others sport hair-like filaments and fleshy stumps that suggest streaming tentacles. They range from a few feet long to the breadth of a house. Part glob, part monster, these strange visitors from the depths are known as globsters. They’re often mentioned alongside Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, but unlike other cryptids, there’s no shortage of physical evidence for these apparent organisms. They’re also unique among monsters in that their true identity is usually confirmed by scientists. The vast majority of globsters turn out to be hunks of decomposing whale blubber. Basking shark carcasses rendered featureless by the sea are another common culprit. Though these marine mysteries are usually solved, globsters continue to capture the public’s imagination. As long as masses of rotten blubber show up on shores, people will keep projecting their fears about the ocean and its strange creatures onto them. Here are some of the more baffling and bizarre globsters to make headlines over the years.

 

1. The Chilean Blob
Experts were initially perplexed when this mysterious flesh mound washed up on a beach in Chile in 2003. Dubbed the Chilean Blob, the globster weighed 13 tons and measured 41 feet long by 19 feet wide. The monstrosity’s gelatinous consistency led some researchers to speculate that it came from a giant squid or a new species of octopus. The latter possibility was especially intriguing, as no octopuses of that size have been identified by science. Electron microscopy and DNA testing revealed a more plausible and less exciting explanation: the Chilean Blob was merely the decomposing blubber of a sperm whale.

 

2. The Hairy Globster of the Philippines

Some globsters are more hairy than jelly-like. That was the case with a 20-foot-long organic mass discovered on a Philippine beach in 2018. The white, shaggy carcass may have resembled the dragon from A Neverending Story (1984), but its origins were less fantastical. Local officials concluded that the remains belonged to a whale that had died a couple of weeks earlier—possibly after being struck by a ship. The long “hairs” were actually decaying muscle fibers, and the white coloration was a natural consequence of decomposition.

 

3. Trunko
This globster holds the rare distinction of allegedly being spotted while it was still alive. A farm owner named Hugh Balance claimed he saw the sea monster fighting two whales off the coast of South Africa in 1922. He said the body washed ashore that night, and when he got a closer look he observed it was 47 feet long, 10 feet wide, and covered in white hair. The nickname Trunko comes from the 5-foot-long trunk that apparently hung from the creature’s face. After 10 days on land, it was swept back to sea without being studied by an expert. Two years later, the Daily Mail reported the sighting under the headline “Fish Like A Polar Bear.” Photographs and descriptions of Trunko match those of other whale blubber-based globsters, though without a sample to analyze, its identity remains unconfirmed.

 

4. The Stronsay Beast
The Stronsay Beast is one of the first globsters on record. The remains washed up on the shore of Scotland’s Orkney Islands in September 1808. With an alleged 55-foot long body and the girth of a pony, it was immediately compared to legendary sea serpents. Other unusual features reported by eyewitnesses included two blowholes, a silky mane, and three large fins on either side of its body. Scientists in Edinburgh who studied samples of the specimen believed they had identified a new species. They even gave it a scientific name: Halsydrus pontoppidani, after the 18th-century Danish bishop and sea monster enthusiast Erik Pontoppidan. But not everyone was convinced: After studying the animal’s vertebrae, a leading surgeon named Sir Everard Home determined it to be a decomposed basking shark. Further analysis in the 1980s supported this assertion. The Stronsay Beast still remains a mysterious creature, however. The longest basking shark on record measured 32 feet, which is significantly shorter than the globster’s reported length of 55 feet.

 

5. The St. Augustine Monster

Another early globster to make national headlines was the St. Augustine Monster. Two boys stumbled upon the amorphous carcass in 1896 while walking along a beach on Anastasia Island in Florida. The boys shared the find with local doctor DeWitt Webb, who concluded that the creature had been some kind of large octopus. The blob was 21 feet long by 7 feet wide, with stumpy appendages protruding from one end. Another doctor who examined it described the presumed head as being “as large an ordinary flour barrel, and has the shape of a sea lion head.” Newspapers dubbed the specimen a sea monster. It took nearly a century for scientists to reveal the true identity of the St. Augustine Monster. In the early 1990s, researchers studied a sample of the globster under light and electron microscopes and found it consisted of pure collagen. The remains had likely come from a whale, and they definitely didn’t derive from an invertebrate like an octopus. DNA analysis of the specimen in 2004 confirmed the whale theory.

 

6. The Tasmanian Globster
It wasn’t the first unidentified marine blob of its kind, but this mass discovered in Australia did give us the term globster. Scottish cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson coined the delightful label following the creature’s arrival on a Tasmanian beach in 1960. The 20-foot-long mound reportedly had white bristles, gill-like openings, and tusk-like stumps on its body. Because it beached on a remote part of the island inaccessible by car, it took two years [PDF] for scientists to observe it. They determined that it was part of a dead whale, but some eyewitnesses remain skeptical. Graham Airey, who was a child when the globster washed up near his home, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2016, “This thing doesn’t look like whale blubber […] this thing has five gills on each side of it. It was 5 foot high, slightly furry fur, like wool from a sheep with spikes all over it. Whales don’t have that sort of thing.” He also cited the fact that the carcass sat on the beach for years without rotting away as evidence of its mysterious origins.

 

7.  New Ireland Globster
The most recent addition to globster roster is an unidentified “mermaid”-shaped mass that washed up on the shore of New Ireland, an island forming the northeastern province of Papua New Guinea, in October 2023. The gooey white body appears to have whale-like flukes but no other distinct characteristics. Residents who discovered the globster posted photos on Facebook and reportedly buried the object before measurements or biological samples could be taken. Experts consulted by Live Science examined the Facebook images and suggested the blob could have been a decomposed whale, shark, or dugong—a marine mammal closely related to manatees, which are thought to have inspired sailors’ tales of mermaids.

 

 

Source: Bizarre Globsters That Have Washed Ashore

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - CHILDHOOD SNACKS

Did you know... You never forget your first love—or your favorite childhood snack. And if the latter was Dunkaroos, you’re in good company. Spin Genie, a UK-based website for slots and other casino games, recently analyzed Google search data to find out which throwback snacks and drinks people are still looking up online. Dunkaroos took the top spot with an average search volume of nearly 478,000.

 

The survey is definitely geared toward ’90s kids, as most of the products were popular during that decade. That said, Oreo Cakesters didn’t hit shelves until 2007, and TaB soda, which debuted in 1963, had its heyday long before Millennials were around. In short, the products aren’t all united by which generation would have enjoyed them as kids.  Nor are they united by availability status. Some have been discontinued seemingly for good (e.g. Orbitz drinks), others have returned after being discontinued (e.g. Dunkaroos), and still others have remained on the market since their launch (e.g. Bagel Bites, though they were discontinued in Canada). It’s worth pointing out that the top three most searched items on the list—Dunkaroos, Oreo Cakesters, and Bagel Bites—are all currently sold in stores. So it’s tough to draw definite conclusions about who’s searching for these items and whether nostalgia has anything to do with it. In other words, the list is far from a scientific ranking of childhood snacks that a single generation misses the most. But it is a fun way to see which pantry fads have managed to stick around in our cultural consciousness at least enough for hundreds of thousands of people to still be googling them.

 

1. Dunkaroos 

 

 

Dunkaroos, discontinued in 2012, came back by popular demand about eight years later.

 

2. Oreo Cakesters

 

 

Fluffy Oreo Cakesters could have gone the way of lemon meringue Oreos and other discontinued iterations of the sandwich cookie (which is older than you might think). Fortunately, after being conspicuously missing from shelves for about a decade, Cakesters made a triumphant return in 2022.

 

3. Bagel Bites

 

 

The inspiration for these beloved bite-sized pizza bagels, which debuted in 1985, came from a suggestion on a Lender’s Bagels bag.

 

4. TaB

 

 

Coca-Cola’s one-calorie soft drink “for beautiful people,” as the commercials claimed, started falling out of favor when Diet Coke came along in the early 1980s. But it managed to stay in production until 2020.

 

5. Fruitopia

 

 

This hippie-ish line of fruit juices from Minute Maid (owned by Coca-Cola) had names like “Strawberry Passion Awareness,” “Citrus Consciousness,” and “Raspberry Psychic Lemonade.” Kate Bush and Cocteau Twins both composed music for Fruitopia ads.

 

 

Click the link below  to read more on our missed childhood snacks.

 

 

Source: Favorite Childhood Snacks

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - UNKNOWN SOLDIER

Did you know.... On Veterans Day 1921, President Warren G. Harding presided over an interment ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery for an unknown soldier who died during World War I. Since then, three more soldiers have been added to the Tomb of the Unknowns (also known as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier) memorial—and one has been disinterred. Below, a few things you might not know about the historic site and the rituals that surround it.

 

1. There were four unknown soldier candidates for the World War I crypt.

To ensure a truly random selection, four unknown soldiers were exhumed from four different WWI American cemeteries in France. U.S. Army Sgt. Edward F. Younger, who was wounded in combat and received the Distinguished Service Medal, was chosen to select a soldier for burial at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington. After the four identical caskets were lined up for his inspection, Younger chose the third casket from the left by placing a spray of white roses on it. The chosen soldier was transported to the U.S. on the USS Olympia, while the other three were reburied at Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery in France.

 

2. Similarly, two unknown soldiers were selected as potential representatives of World War II.

One had served in the European Theater and the other served in the Pacific Theater. The Navy’s only active-duty Medal of Honor recipient, Hospitalman 1st Class William R. Charette, chose one of the identical caskets to go on to Arlington. The other was given a burial at sea.

 

3. There were four potential representatives of the Korean War for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

 

The soldiers were disinterred from the National Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii. This time, Army Master Sgt. Ned Lyle was the one to choose the casket. Along with the unknown soldier from WWII, the unknown Korean War soldier lay in the Capitol Rotunda from May 28 to May 30, 1958.

 

4. The Vietnam War’s unknown soldier was selected on May 17, 1984.

 

Medal of Honor recipient U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Maj. Allan Jay Kellogg, Jr., selected the Vietnam War representative during a ceremony at Pearl Harbor.

 

5. The Vietnam veteran wasn’t an unknown soldier for long.

 

Thanks to advances in mitochondrial DNA testing, scientists were able to identify the remains of the Vietnam War soldier. On May 14, 1998, the remains were exhumed and tested, revealing the “unknown” soldier to be Air Force 1st Lt. Michael Joseph Blassie. He had been shot down near An Loc, Vietnam, in 1972. After his identification, Blassie’s family had him moved to Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis. Instead of adding another unknown soldier to the Vietnam War crypt, the crypt cover has been replaced with one bearing the inscription, “Honoring and Keeping Faith with America’s Missing Servicemen, 1958–1975.”

 

6. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier’s marble sculptors are responsible for many other U.S. monuments.

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was designed by architect Lorimer Rich and sculptor Thomas Hudson Jones, but the actual carving was done by the Piccirilli Brothers. Even if you don’t know them, you know their work: The brothers carved the 19-foot statue of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial, the lions outside the New York Public Library, the USS Maine National Monument in Central Park, the Dupont Circle Fountain in Washington, D.C., and much more.

 

 

Click the link below  to read more about the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

 

Source: Facts About the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - HOLIDAY DIFFERENCE

Did you know..... It may not be easy for most people to admit, but certain national holidays often get a little muddled in their minds—namely, Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Clearly, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has seen and/or been asked about the confusion enough times that it has gone ahead and dedicated some space on its website to explaining the difference between these two similarly themed, but very different, holidays.

 

When is Memorial Day and When is Veterans Day?
Memorial Day and Veterans Day are held approximately six months apart: Veterans Day is celebrated every November 11, while Memorial Day takes place on the last Monday of May as part of a three-day weekend that’s typically packed with parades and plenty of retail sales promotions. In 2024, that will be Monday, May 27, 2024. You probably realize both holidays are intended to acknowledge the contributions of those brave individuals who have served in the United States military, but you may not recall the important distinction between the two. So what’s the difference?

 

Who Does Veterans Day Honor?

Veterans Day was originally known as Armistice Day. It was first observed on November 11, 1919, the one-year anniversary of the end of World War I. Congress passed a resolution making it an annual observance in 1926. It became a national holiday in 1938. In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower changed the name from Armistice Day to Veterans Day to recognize veterans of the two world wars. The intention is to celebrate all military veterans, living or dead, who have served the country, with an emphasis on thanking the people in our lives who have spent time in uniform for their service to this country.

 

What Makes Memorial Day Different From Veterans Day?

Memorial Day is also a celebration of military veterans, but the mood is more somber. The occasion is reserved for those who died while serving their country. The day was first observed in the wake of the Civil War, where local communities organized tributes around the gravesites of fallen soldiers. The observation was originally called Decoration Day, because the graves were adorned with flowers.

 

 

It was originally held on May 30 because that date wasn’t the anniversary for any battle in particular and all soldiers could be honored. (The date was recognized by northern states, with southern states choosing different days.) After World War I, the day shifted from remembering the fallen in the Civil War to those who had perished in all of America’s conflicts. It gradually became known as Memorial Day and, in 1971, was declared a federal holiday and moved to the last Monday in May to organize a three-day weekend.

 

The easiest way to think of the two holidays is to consider Veterans Day a time to shake the hand of a veteran who stood up for our freedoms. Memorial Day is a time to remember and honor those who are no longer around to receive your gratitude personally.

 

 

 

Source: What’s the Difference Between Memorial Day and Veterans Day?

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - LAUGHTER ONLINE

Did you know... Everyone has a preferred way to laugh online, whether it’s an acronym like IJBOL (“I Just Burst Out Laughing”), a reaction GIF, or a crying laughing emoji. Which one do you use? We can’t actually hear someone chortle or guffaw through the internet, but we still want to express our emotions. Luckily, internet residents have come up with a whole slew of ways to convey laughter online. Here are 16 of them.

 

1. IJBOL

One way to laugh online that’s gaining popularity is IJBOL, which means “I just burst out laughing” (it’s pronounced “eej-bowl”). “The term,” The New York Times explains, “is not necessarily novel or different from how other iterations of internet laughter are used, but it describes something people actually do: explode into an audible, full-belly guffaw.” IJBOL may date back to 2009, but according to Dictionary.com, “it was rarely used” then. Its resurgence began within the K-pop community in 2021, which led many to assume it was a Korean term. IJBOL is currently a favorite of Gen Zers and frequently appears on social media platforms like TikTok.

 

2. LOL
The classic acronym for laughing out loud (it may once have meant “lots of love” or “little old lady,” but it doesn’t anymore). However, lol has been around long enough now—more than 30 years—that it doesn’t really mean out-loud laughter either—linguist John McWhorter says it now indicates empathy. For genuine laughter, make sure to emphasize it somehow: all-caps LOL is a good start, or try one of the longer variants below. (Lol doesn’t count as emphasis; it’s probably just autocorrect.)

 

3. Other Spellings of LOL
When we treat lol as just a word rather than an acronym, it means that we can change things about the letters just to indicate a different pronunciation, and without trying to come up with something they stand for. Changing the vowel, as in lel and lawl, indicates a more laid-back, less-laugh-y response, whereas repeating part of the word, as in lollll and lololol, indicates more actual laughter. And the combination of all-caps and reduplication—LOLOLOLOL—is the most likely to be genuine laughter of all the lol-variants, the more -OLs the better.

 

4. LMAO, ROFL, and Other Laughing Acronyms

It’s not just lol—there are other acronyms indicating laughter, such as lmao, lmfao, rotfl, rotflol for laughing my ass off, rolling on the floor laughing (out loud), and of course they can also be capitalized for emphasis. Lmao and lmfao are still relatively common, but while ROTFLOL had a great cameo in Weird Al’s “White and Nerdy,” it and rotfl have gotten rarer—these days, you’re more likely to see rofl with the word the omitted, or the rofl emoji.

 

5. Words Made from LOL
Lollerskates, lollercoaster, loltastic, roflcopter—these words are fantastically creative, but like rofl, they seem pretty vintage early 2000s. Perhaps they’re due for an ironic revival? Another expansion is lulz, but it’s more of a noun than an emotive response: You can do something for the lulz or say that “much lulz were had.”

 

6. Haha

Another classic laughter expression that, like lol, has weakened through repeated use. Plain haha or autocorrected Haha are sufficient for mild amusement, but for true laughter, go for all-caps HAHA or you can go shorter, for less amusement (ha, aha, heh), or longer, for greater amusement (hahahaha, bahaha, ahaha). You can also vary the consonant (bahaha, gahaha) or the vowel (heh, hehe, heehee). Typos, like ahha or hahahaah, may indicate you’re laughing too hard to type properly. Caps, as ever, for emphasis. Combining them is not common (you’ve likely never seen *behehe or *ahehahe or *abaha, and even BAHAHA is rarer than HAHAHA).

 

 

Click the link below to read more ways to laugh online.

 

Source: Ways to Laugh Online