Things that make you go .....Hmmm, that's interesting.

[take_yer_points]

The average male will ejaculate 7,200 times in his lifetime.

Come again??

[seafoid]

http://maps.pobal.ie/#/Map

[LeoMc]

Why NI has an M1, M2, M3 & M5 but no M4.

http://www.wesleyjohnston.com/roads/historymotorwayplans.html

Never knew it.

[Hardy]

Come on. Surely something interesting has happened in the last seven weeks.

[Orior]

The smallest bird in Ireland is not the wren, but the goldcrest

http://www.birdwatchireland.ie/IrelandsBirds/Kinglets/Goldcrest/tabid/1070/Default.aspx

[muppet]

The smallest bird in Ireland is not the wren, but the the goldcrest

I thought it was the AndreaCorr.

[Tony Baloney]

I thought this was in the hmmm. that's interesting/things that make you go WTF bracket.

Vietnam Vet Found after 44 Years

A NEW DOCUMENTARY called Unclaimed claims to introduce the world to former Army Sergeant John Robertson, lost over Vietnam in 1968 and left behind for over four decades.

The Toronto Star reports Edmonton filmmaker Michael Jorgenson found Robertson, 76, living in a rural Vietnam village stooped with age, unable to speak English, remember his birthday, or names of the children he left behind in the U.S.

[thejuice]

The first recorded use of the ubiquitous texting abbreviation OMG wasn't uttered by a precocious teen in the 1990s, but by one Lord Fisher in a letter to none other than Winston Churchill.

[passedit]

[seafoid]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/oct/11/truth-about-world-war-ii/

The harshness of the discipline men like Zhukov imposed on their troops is nowhere better illustrated than by Roberts's calculation that no fewer than 158,000 Red Army soldiers were executed by command of their own officers during the war, with tens of thousands more being sent to "penal battalions" in which the fatality rate was 50 percent or higher. Where Roberts merely mentions such statistics, however, Beevor succeeds in conveying the full horror of the conflict on the Eastern Front. Among many memorable vignettes is a scene from the winter of 1941–1942, where a Red Army officer near Kursk

saw a horrifying sight. An enormous space stretching to the horizon was filled with our tanks and German tanks. In between them there were thousands of sitting, standing or crawling Russians and Germans frozen solid. Some of them were leaning against each other, others hugging each other. Some propping themselves with a rifle, others holding a submachine gun. Many of them had their legs chopped off. This had been done by our infantry who had been unable to pull off the boots from the Fritzs' frozen legs so they chopped them off in order to be able to warm them up in the bunkers.

[LeoMc]

The Dambusters raids, celebrated as a triumph of British ingenuity, would now be considered as a war crime.

[seafoid]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bea2c458-14fd-11e1-a2a6-00144feabdc0.html

Lunch with the FT: Stewart Lee

Towards the end of lunch, though, he becomes quite angry about present conditions. There's no way he would have made it to Oxford today, he says. "For a start, I was adopted. In the 1960s, the process took three months, now it can take three years. That's going to affect people differently. I might have been damaged by longer in care. And I wouldn't have gone anyway because of the debts. There's no way I would take that on. Thirdly, a whole generation of people are being made to feel that they shouldn't be studying the arts. They're being told that their degree has got to be cost-effective."

He especially regrets the disappearance of the old "support networks", such as the unemployment and housing benefits, that enabled artists to live cheaply and find their way. "It's all over. There'll come a point when somebody will suddenly realise – there's loads and loads of Coldplay but there isn't a Radiohead, there's loads and loads of ITV1 sitcoms, and things with Robert Lindsay in a house, but there isn't a League of Gentlemen. Someone will be reading an embossed novel about a missing artefact, and they will suddenly think, 'Didn't there use to be books that were not just a list of events?' " (Lee's well-known parody of a typical Dan Brown sentence goes: "The famous man looked at the red cup.") In 40 years, he reckons, people will be saying, "Where's all that stuff gone that was ... good?"

[DrinkingHarp]

The Future is NEAR

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/trending-now/futuristic-high-speed-tube-travel-could-york-los-171007828.html?vp=1

[Asal Mor]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bea2c458-14fd-11e1-a2a6-00144feabdc0.html

Lunch with the FT: Stewart Lee

Towards the end of lunch, though, he becomes quite angry about present conditions. There's no way he would have made it to Oxford today, he says. "For a start, I was adopted. In the 1960s, the process took three months, now it can take three years. That's going to affect people differently. I might have been damaged by longer in care. And I wouldn't have gone anyway because of the debts. There's no way I would take that on. Thirdly, a whole generation of people are being made to feel that they shouldn't be studying the arts. They're being told that their degree has got to be cost-effective."

He especially regrets the disappearance of the old "support networks", such as the unemployment and housing benefits, that enabled artists to live cheaply and find their way. "It's all over. There'll come a point when somebody will suddenly realise – there's loads and loads of Coldplay but there isn't a Radiohead, there's loads and loads of ITV1 sitcoms, and things with Robert Lindsay in a house, but there isn't a League of Gentlemen. Someone will be reading an embossed novel about a missing artefact, and they will suddenly think, 'Didn't there use to be books that were not just a list of events?' " (Lee's well-known parody of a typical Dan Brown sentence goes: "The famous man looked at the red cup.") In 40 years, he reckons, people will be saying, "Where's all that stuff gone that was ... good?"

I take his overall point but how are Radiohead somehow artistically superior to Coldplay? Just because he likes one and not the other? Arrogant cnut. I'm not a big Coldplay fan but they're alright. I prefer them to Radiohead  anyway, whose music does nothing for me. But that's just my own personal taste.

[muppet]

I don't think he is insulting Coldplay. It is just that they are the current head of the marketable music producers club and fair play to them. Radiohead don't care whether their music is marketable and experiment wildly. I am a fan of Radiohead but some of their stuff I find insane. But I wouldn't want them to change.