Quote
“The greatest pleasure of life is love.”
Euripides
Joke
What's a ninja's favorite type of shoes?
Sneakers!
Fun Fact
People can suffer from a psychological disorder called Boanthropy that makes them believe that they are a cow. They try to live their life as a cow.
Reading Fact
The longest novel ever written is À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust, first published in 1912. It has an estimated 1,267,069 words.
Also known as Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time, the 13-volume-long masterpiece was published in 20th-century France. It is roughly 4,215 pages long and is comprised of an estimated 9,609,000 characters including spaces. An average reader who reads at 300 words per minute would have to spend at least 70 hours to finish this great novel.
History Fact
Good Things Come in Small Packages
Ancient Greece was a strange place: For one, they believed that redheads turned into vampires after death. Okay, okay, so maybe they’re right about that one. They also thought that small penises were elegant, especially in comparison to bigger, er, packages, which they associated with “old men and barbarians.”
Movie/TV Trivia
Ripley (or at least her clone) finally makes it back to Earth in a deleted scene for Alien: Resurrection.
Movie/TV Quote
"Even artichokes have hearts."
Amélie (2001)
We debated for a long time about whether or not quotes from foreign language films belong on this list, not because there isn't incredible writing in film from other countries (obviously, there is), but because fewer bits of dialogue from films from outside the US and Britain have entered our American cultural lexicon. "Even artichokes have hearts" from Amélie is an exception. Just take a jaunt to Etsy and you'll find all kinds of merchandise bearing the cutesy phrase. In Jean-Pierre Jeunet's sometimes aggressively twee comedy, Audrey Tautou's impish Amélie uses "even artichokes have hearts" as part of an imagined retort to a cruel grocer who verbally abuses his employee calling him a "vegetable." It's almost too adorable, the kind of thing you would find on the AIM away message of a particularly cultured teen in the early aughts.
Conversation Starter
What do you think the oldest sport still being played is?
Writing Prompt