Quote
“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
Mark Twain
Joke
After dinner, my wife asked if I could clear the table. I needed a running start, but I made it!
Fun Fact
Fact: Peanuts aren’t technically nuts
They’re legumes. According to Merriam-Webster, a nut is only a nut if it’s “a hard-shelled dry fruit or seed with a separable rind or shell and interior kernel.” That means walnuts, almonds, cashews, and pistachios aren’t nuts either. They’re seeds.
Reading Fact
Portuguese Library Biblioteca Joanina is home to a swarm of bats that feed on book-eating insects every night.
Biblioteca Joanina has a rather unlikely cleaning crew – in this grand old Portuguese library, bats act as pest control. Swarms of bats hide behind the rococo bookcases during the day, while at night they feast on book-damaging insects, helping preserve the over 300-year-old building and its rich cultural heritage.
Human bookworms are safe, though.
History Fact
That Ain’t Genetics
On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl disaster struck the Soviet Union when a nuclear plant released radiation pretty much everywhere after an explosion. Firemen were sent into the center of the radiation to extinguish the fire, and the radiation was so intense in this exclusion zone that one fireman’s eyes were said to turn from brown to blue.
Movie/TV Trivia
Fed up of killing other people Rambo grabs a gun aimed at him and pulls the trigger thus killing himself and ruling out a bajillion sequels.
Movie/TV Quote
"You're the man now, dog!"
Finding Forrester (2000)
It's tough to explain why "You're the man now, dog" needs to be on this list. For one thing, the movie that the quote springs from, a coming-of-age drama starring Sean Connery as a J.D. Salinger-like literary recluse who mentors a teenage basketball player, is completely forgettable, a sentimental retread of Good Will Hunting from people who should probably know better. (Somehow, it made $80 million at the box office, a sign that the year 2000 really was a different time.) In the context of director Gus Van Sant's career, it's considered a semi-embarrassing speed-bump on the way to more experimental, riskier terrain like Gerry and Elephant. Sure, a grizzled Connery shouting, "PUNCH THE KEYS!" is funny on its own, but the importance of "You're the man now, dog!", which was featured in the trailer for the movie, is rooted in the phrase's digital afterlife. Launched in 2001 with a loop of Connery repeating the line, YTMND became an online community for users creating and sharing low-quality audio-visual jokes with each other, the kind of inexplicable and absurd concoctions internet users now take for granted as the basic language of being a little too online. The site became a pre-Twitter and -Facebook behemoth with four million monthly users at its peak, according to a Gizmodo article about its rise and eventual fall. And it did fall hard, almost disappearing earlier this year after suffering a "catastrophic failure," but the site's influence is massive. Thank you, Sean Connery.
Conversation Starter
Who are the 3 greatest athletes of all time?
Writing Prompt