Randomised Trivia thread

  • Thread starter Thread starter Famine
  • 140 comments
  • 4,491 views
Originally posted by daan
Gordon Murray first drew the design for the McLaren F1 in 1969 when he was at college. http://www.davidanderson.org.uk/images/f169.jpg

When they crash tested the F1, Gordon wanted to be sitting in it at the time. He thought it "would be cool". It was the only car that was still driveable after being "driven" into a concrete wall at 30mph. (Every other car has it's front wheels smashed up.) The only thing that didn't make it road legal was the headlights popped out!
http://www.davidanderson.org.uk/images/f1crash.jpg
Click to expand...

1969 for a modern day supercar? unreal

and why would you want a job as a crash test dummy for? bugger that at any speed into a concrete wall
 
Look like like but I give the benifit to daan, the 6 and the 9 look pretty close together
 
If Gordon Murray was at college in 1989, time has done him no favours... It does say 1969. Really...

From the top picture (profile) it looks like he designed the Mazda MX-3 too :D
 
Originally posted by The359
Um, doesn't that paper say Nov. 1989?
Click to expand...
It really does say 1969. They mentioned it in the text.

There is one really big pointer to the fact that it was drawn years ago. In the official book on the McLaren F1, there is a page of 12 sketches of what they wanted it to look like. Only 1 of which had a rear wing, and that was never seriously considered. The one in the drawing has a wing. And the glass over the engine looks like it would've drawn back in the late 60's.
 
A sadly neglected thread... So here's a trivia bombardment :D (read the last one closely...)

Famous People's Fathers:
Uma Thurman's father was the first American to be ordained a Buddhist monk.
Stephen King's father went out to buy a packet of cigarettes and never came back.
Laura Dern was bullied at school, because her father (Bruce Dern) was the only person to kill John Wayne in the movies...
Bob Marley's father was from Liverpool, England. And white.
Rachel Weisz's father invented the artificial respirator.
The fathers of Judy Garland, Jackie Onassis, Liza Minnelli and Anne Heche were all gay.

Famous People's Mothers:
Eric Clapton and Jack Nicholson had mothers whom the rest of the world thought were their sisters.
Sir Michael Caine's mother used to paste his ears to his head as a boy, to stop them from sticking out.
Victoria Principal's mother's full maiden name was "Ree Veal" (yes, really).
David Schwimmer's attorney mother handled Roseanne's first divorce.
Both Patrick Macnee's and Jodie Foster's mothers were lesbian.

Words:
Only 1000 words make up 90 percent of all writing (in English...)
No word in the English language rhymes with "silver" or "month". "Orange" is a disputed case.
Dreamt is the only English word which ends with "mt".
Queue is the only word in the English language which is pronounced the same if all but one letter are removed.
Singulars rarely used (and their more common plurals) - trivium (trivia), paparazzo (paparazzi), timpano (timpani), graffito (graffiti), scampo (scampi).
Shakespeare invented more than 1700 words, including "assassination" and "bump".

Names for things you never knew had names:
Rowel - the revolving star on the back of a cowboy's spur.
Columella - the bottom part of the nose that separates the nostrils.
Ophyron - the space between your eyebrows (if you have one).
Rasceta - the creases on the inside of your wrist.
Nittles - punctuation marks used to denote swear words in comics
Ferrule - the metal band on a pencil which keeps an eraser in place.
Armsate - the hole in a shirt or jumper through which you put your arm.

The Human Body:
Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.
The human body grows the equivalent of a new skeleton every seven years.
On average, your heart will beat 36 million times this year.
Although an adult has 206 bones (barring accident), a newborn child has 350 - which fuse together as the child grows.
However, children are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until 2-6 years of age.
Fingernails grow 4 times faster than toenails.
The first of the five senses to go with age is smell.
A sneeze can travel at 600mph.
You cannot kill yourself by holding your breath.
Men get more ulcers than women (no comment).
Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour.
If you were to yell non-stop for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, you would produce enough sound energy to heat up a cup of coffee.
On the other hand (or other end), the energy released from an atomic bomb is equivalent to 6 years and 9 months of continuous farting.
 
Originally posted by Famine
You cannot kill yourself by holding your breath.
Click to expand...
Can we post this in teh drifter's forum to try it? Can we? Can we? :D
 
Originally posted by Famine
Queue is the only word in the English language which is pronounced the same if all but one letter are removed.
Click to expand...
Pea? Bee?
 
Originally posted by daan
Pea? Bee?
Click to expand...

Bugger. Missed out the 5 letter part... :D

Although technically "aitch" (the phonetic spelling of "H") can have the first four letters removed andstill sound the same...
 
In world war two Enzo Ferrari's factory was bombed by the Allies.

Canada has the worlds largest french population that hasn't surrendered to Germany.

A canadain invented the baseball glove when broke some bones in his left hand.

The Ferrari Dino was named after Enzo's son.
 
The longest recorded flight of a chicken is 12 seconds.

The fastest land-based craft was an unmanned rocket rail-vehicle that reached Mach 8 (6121 mph) on a 15.2 km long rail.

The Russian Venera 7 space probe landed on Venus on 1970 but was unable to relay pictures back to earth because the plastic lens cap melted onto the lens due to the extreme heat.
 
Originally posted by Mike Rotch

The Russian Venera 7 space probe landed on Venus on 1970 but was unable to relay pictures back to earth because the plastic lens cap melted onto the lens due to the extreme heat.
Click to expand...
Hahaha, I bet that made all the Russian rocket scientist feel really stupid.
 
Originally posted by audiracing
The Ferrari Dino was named after Enzo's son.
Click to expand...
And on a Ferrari theme,

The 250 GTO & LM were given the name "250" because that is the size of each individual cylinder in cc (3.0 litre V12). The same naming convention happened with the 275, 330, 365 (aka Daytona), 456

The 512 got it's name from 5litre V12. The 308 (3.0 litre V8), 328, 348 were named in the same way.

The 360, 550 & 575 are just named after the size of the engine (3.6, 5.5 & 5.75 respectively)
 
I'll update this thread with my last four fun facts of the week, and periodically add them from time to time.

Week 1: Woodpeckers have an ear on the end of their tongues.
Week 2: The ancient Greeks made dildoes out of bread.
Week 3: The USA consists of only 46 States, not 50.
Week 4: The Catholic church officially classifies the beaver and capybara as fish, since they are scaly and live in water. This means Catholics are allowed to eat them on Sundays in Lent.

Which means it's time for a new sig... :D
 
1. The exact geographic centre of the USA is Lebanon, Kansas.

2. A 2 hour motion picture uses 10'800 feet of film.
 
Week 5: The Romans believed that buggery caused earthquakes.
Week 6: The Earth has FIVE natural moons.

So it's time for another new one. Bah!

Stinky Chicken
Reading your signature there mate - FIVE natural moons? Please elaborate
Click to expand...

A little article on Cruithne, Earth's second largest moon. Fascinating orbit. There are three others, but they have such dull numerical names.
 
miata13B
11.The term "the whole 9 yards" came from WWII fighter pilots in the South Pacific.
When arming their airplanes on the ground, the .50 caliber machine gun ammo belts
measured exactly 27 feet, before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots
fired all their ammo at a target, it got "the whole 9 yards."
Click to expand...
I've heard that one before, but in construction "the whole nine yards" refers to the fact that a concrete truck holds 9 cubic yards of concrete.

And...it's concrete, not cement. You walk on concrete, cement comes in bags.
 
I always find this thread interesting. I always heard the whole nine yards came from the 1800's, pioneer days. The women got 9 yards of fabric and would make each family member a piece of clothing from that nine yards and then they would all wear that piece of clothing on an occasion, like Christmas.
 
The "whole nine yards" doesn't have any particular meaning:

http://www.yaelf.com/nineyards.shtml

In fact, nobody's sure. Some one in the Navy told me it had to do with the nine sections of the ship being festooned with flags and ribbons when a high-ranking offical saw it.

I'm still not sure what to believe.
 
M5Power
You aren't an "LAian." You don't even know where Santa Monica is. You pose more than Krabbe. No, not really.
Click to expand...

To get to santa monica you can take the 405 freeway south towards Sandiego.. Then exit on highway 2, turn right.. then follow that street to the ocean :)
 
Since we're on the subject of gay animals....


Scientists testsed 27 sheep, 10 female, 17 male. Of the male sheep, 9 of them would only mount other male sheep.
 
pupik
The "whole nine yards" doesn't have any particular meaning:

http://www.yaelf.com/nineyards.shtml

In fact, nobody's sure. Some one in the Navy told me it had to do with the nine sections of the ship being festooned with flags and ribbons when a high-ranking offical saw it.

I'm still not sure what to believe.
Click to expand...
I wouldn't believe anything that keeps calling them "cement trucks," then quotes a different source that calls them "ready-mix-concrete trucks." By the time it's in the truck, it's concrete.

cement (from a bag) + water + rocks + sand = concrete (wet or dry)

There are trucks that haul cement (dry powdery stuff) around, but those aren't the big mixing trucks.
 
The Romans/Greeks(im not 100% sure who used it but i think greek) discovered and used a mixture for cement(similar to ours) about 1700 years before it was re-invented by modern civilazations.
 
Famine
Week 6: The Earth has FIVE natural moons.
Click to expand...
Did you watch QI a week or two ago as well as me? Apparently a few tiny natural satellites of earth have been discovered in remote orbit recently.

Science is cool.


KM.
 
pupik
The "whole nine yards" doesn't have any particular meaning:

http://www.yaelf.com/nineyards.shtml

In fact, nobody's sure. Some one in the Navy told me it had to do with the nine sections of the ship being festooned with flags and ribbons when a high-ranking offical saw it.

I'm still not sure what to believe.
Click to expand...
No, US WWII aircraft held nine yards of ammo. It was in ammo belts that were nine yards long. Some pilots were heard saying, "I gave that SOB the whole nine yards!" when talking about run ins with enemy pilots or targets.
 

Latest Posts

Back