Trivia Thread!

Aredhel Ar-Feiniel said:

I once took a left turn instead of right and kept going for a while until I realized I was lost. My dad and me were looking for each other for nearly 20 minutes unitl I realized why I'm lost exactly and came back the way I had left. I was not allowed to leave the house alone since then(this happened in our own town.)

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Hey, that's not really building the case for females-- 🚶‍♀️

I found this piece of trivia about Tolkien to be rather amusing:

One day a neighbour’s pet monkeys climbed over the wall and chewed up three of the baby’s [Tolkien’s] pinafores.

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Anyone who has spent any amount of time in South Africa, has had a run in with monkeys.

Aethelwulf said:

Anyone who has spent any amount of time in South Africa, has had a run in with monkeys.

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Ah, they must have spent time with you.

Glorfindel Goldtress said:

Ah, they must have spent time with you.

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Speak up, man! Don't you know it's rude to whisper?

From an article in the Saturday edition of our regional newspaper:

Steppenwolf lead singer John Kay was born in Tilsit, East Prussia, in April 1944. His family fled the Red Army in early 1945, ending up in Arnstadt, Thuringia (to become part of East Germany) for almost five years. Kay gave a solo concert there last year. They mover on to Hannover, capital of West Germany’s state of Lower Saxony, in 1949, and to Toronto, Canada in 1958. As the teachers there had difficulty pronouncing his birth name of Joachim Krauledat, he was called John K instead …

‘Belsnickeling’ may have preceded trick-or-treating

According to the Library of Congress, the old German-American tradition of belsnickeling, a custom in which children dress up in costumes for Christmas and visit their neighbors, is one possible origin of modern-day trick-or-treating. As the tradition goes, during Christmas, kids would visit their neighbors in disguise and have them guess who lurked behind the masks. If they were wrong, they had to pony up treats.

Erestor Arcamen said:

‘Belsnickeling’ may have preceded trick-or-treating
According to the Library of Congress, the old German-American tradition of belsnickeling, a custom in which children dress up in costumes for Christmas and visit their neighbors, is one possible origin of modern-day trick-or-treating. As the tradition goes, during Christmas, kids would visit their neighbors in disguise and have them guess who lurked behind the masks. If they were wrong, they had to pony up treats.

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Never heard of it here in Germany. But then, even if I had lived the first 20 years of my life in Germany instead of outside it, I would still be ignorant of local / regional specialties (often tightly restricted to small communities) of a huge swath of the country.

Here's one speaking volumes about its...well...judge for yourself.

Did you know the official bird of Redondo Beach, California, is the Goodyear Blimp?​

In 1983, the coastal city made the Goodyear Blimp their official city bird in anticipation of the 1984 summer Olympics. They even presented a plaque to a team from Goodyear Airship Operations to help celebrate the decision!

Because it contains myristicin, a natural compound that has mind-altering effects, you can experience hallucinations if you ingest large quantities of nutmeg.

Erestor Arcamen said:

Because it contains myristicin, a natural compound that has mind-altering effects, you can experience hallucinations if you ingest large quantities of nutmeg.

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I really need this to see a Blimp as a bird..!!

A wee bit of trivia with addendum:

In view of a few other posts I'm currently seeing out in the Forum about movies, changes, and wanting to see them done 'differently', keep in mind the very first full length movie ever made created controversy over its alteration of what most people perceived to be 'true.'

"The Story of the Kelly Gang
On Boxing Day 1906 The Story of the Kelly Gang opened at the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne. It was the first multi-reel, feature-length film ever produced in the world. The film caused controversy by presenting the Kelly gang sympathetically."

Change and controversy = memorability and money.

Consider this: which pulls YOU more. "Wow, i liked that movie. It was exactly like the book. (or, 'the truth'.)

If it's exactly like the book, why watch it? And if 'it's exaclty like the truth' every one of us looks at "our own truth" and says "well, I already know that. Why watch it?"

OR:

"Wow, that movie is very different from the book. (or 'the truth')." Suddenly, one is confronted with something they haven't experienced.

Which of these is going to fulfill the "2 C's and 2 M's" of the marketing agenda?

115 years films have been produced and marketed with pretty much the same philosophy.
Ent wonders why it's still a surprise. But well... Ent wonders many things.

The longest-ever book title consists of over 3,700 words.

Written by Vityala Yethindra and released on 20 March 2019, the title of The Historical Development of the Heart… is made up of a whopping 26,000 characters.

It is so long mainly because the author decided to enlist all the different species the book mentions, as well as ask over 50 different questions the book provides answers to, and include both in the title.

Ever think that man-eating lions were slightly exaggerated? Think again.
One pride, known as the Njombe man-eaters, killed around 1500 people between 1932 and 1947. That's quite a lot of people.

A wee factoid I'd never encountered, though I bet most of you had.

Rankin Bass 1977 Hobbit VHS lost some sounds when it moved to the 2001 Warner Brothers DVD.

"The 2001 DVD release by Warner Brothers omited a number of sound effects from the origianl Sony VHS release. The sound when characters die; when Sting attacks the Spiders in Mirkwood; Smaug's screams as he attacks Lake Town; the flapping of the Thrush's wings in all scenes; when the arrows bounce off of Smaug and when the Black Arrow pierces Smaug's belly; and the howling of the Wargs during the Battle of Five Armies."

Makes me want my original VHS back..! But well... they stretched and aged over time.
I wonder if any recordings remain, with all the original sounds.

The Great Pyramid of Giza contains about 2.3 million stone blocks. The largest stones are up to 80 tons.

From an article in our regional newspaper from Monday:

In 1958, a then 15-year-old in Fürth (Henry Kissinger's birthplace, bordering directly on the cities of Nürnberg and Erlangen to form a tri-city area) discovered the German translation "Der kleine Hobbit" of JRRT's story. Being a boy scout leader, he read the story to many groups under his care over the years. Some years later, his English having improved by English studies ("Anglistik") at the university, he wrote JRRT a letter. Not knowing the precise address, he addressed it to "Professor Tolkien, University of Oxford". And received a reply, to his surprise. The correspondence continued from 1963 to 1967.
He had also written to C.S. Lewis, whose first "Narnia" book had been translated into German in 1957. From Lewis he learned that JRRT and Lewis were friends, and that Lewis considered LotR much superior to TH. In later correspondence with JRRT, the latter described a bit of LotR, and that unfortunately no German translation of LotR existed at that time. This would appear 1969/1970. And JRRT also declared his dislike of allegory in this correspondence.
The article also has a picture of the first letter JRRT sent the now 80-year-old back in 1963.

Here is a fun piece of trivia from my other obsession (the Grateful Dead):

Grateful Dead rhythm guitarist Bob Weir is the most performed musician in history (meaning total stage-time, since BB King technically has him beat in number of performances but has much shorter sets; 75 min concerts compared to well over 180 mins in many cases for Bobby). He has performed at an estimated 4,500 concerts/sessions. That is over 12 years of straight-up time on stage.

Olorgando said:

From an article in our regional newspaper from Monday:

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I really need to pick up my German Bible done on the Gutenberg press again and refresh myself on my German.
Also find some other more current work(s) to use to do so. The language is likely quite different between the two now, in many ways.
As I recall, Germany... about the size of Idaho... had 9 different dialects still in the 1970s when I went there. I wonder if it has changed. even since then.
Sorry for the aside here...

addendum: Oh wait... more recently I've added a German/English parallel bible to help with that too.

So all I need is another good work of some kind to bring along... something of a non-biblical and more current nature.

Ent said:

I really need to pick up my German Bible done on the Gutenberg press again and refresh myself on my German.
Also find some other more current work(s) to use to do so. The language is likely quite different between the two now, in many ways.
As I recall, Germany... about the size of Idaho... had 9 different dialects still in the 1970s when I went there. I wonder if it has changed. even since then.
Sorry for the aside here...
addendum: Oh wait... more recently I've added a German/English parallel bible to help with that too.
So all I need is another good work of some kind to bring along... something of a non-biblical and more current nature.

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Hey, I'll fly off on a tangent in a second.
Gutenberg will not be very helpful for current German. Though probably not as archaic as Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" is for English, it does predate Martin Luther by several decades. And I have a book about Luther I bought in 2017 (500th anniversary of the 95 theses) in which quotes of Luther and others were given in the spelling of the time. Serious eye cramp territory!
West Germany (the old Federal Republic) was more than 12,000 sq.mi. larger than Idaho, just slightly smaller than Wyoming. Reunified Germany is between Montana and New Mexico in size, though closer to the larger state.
As to there being 9 dialects in western Germany back in the 1970s (which is when I finally settled in Germany after my roughly 20 years abroad from birth) - do you still have a list? What philologists would divide into 9 might be seriously subdivided by the local speakers. For example, there is no such thing as a Bavarian dialect - not for all of Bavaria, anyway. There would at least be Old Bavarian, Franconian, and Swabian. The three Franconian counties insist that they have distinct dialects. People claim to be able to hear a difference between the dialects of the Middle Franconian cities of Nürnberg and Fürth. And within each city it drops to Henry Higgins ridiculousness, is my impression.
Dialects have been making a bit of a comeback in recent decades.

Thanks for the corrections on Germany's size @Olorgando.
A correction back to you: (or shall we say, a clarification): My information about '9 dialects" may have covered all of Germany rather than just West Germany.

The information came from our German teacher, who in 1968 and '69 when I was indulging in a little 'school based German', was directly from someplace in 'Southern Germany", and pretty recently arrived here before she was teaching us. (She was also a bit of a hoot.)

When I was in Berlin, I was trying to converse with one of the many German folk I tried to talk with, and after awhile of beating my brain for 'the right words', she suddently stopped and in perfect English said: "Oh, you're from America".

After I picked myself up, (insert my 'fainting chicken' here,) I said 'well yes. Where did you learn English.' Turned out her sister had moved to America years before, and they had been flying back and forth ever since.

Anyway, our German teacher indicated the dialects were "basically" the result of natural geographic differences due to mountain rainges etc. separating peoples somewhat.

I never bothered to get a list... nor to look at Germany's geography to see how it might impact it... it was just an 'accepted curiosity' in my mind given its source and the probable knowledge level she had.

I CAN say my time staying with a family who had escaped East Germany, my observations of the Berlin Wall, the events of crossing the borders in those days, and the day in East Germany itself, on a CAREFULLY guided tour, were very interesting..!!

Anyway, any recommendation of a 'current' work in German not too deep, interesting, and helpful with more modern German?
(I really don't want an Astrophysical treatise, or a work on the origin of the universe and interaciton of matter with energy, or anything like that... I don't think it would be too helpful.)

p.s - maybe thsi should go to PM.