18.1.07

Trivia for Singles

Because I'm such a sucker for trivia and I think it's high time our English teachers bucked the fuck up by staying off the verb-adverb route and just giving us random pieces of information we could have used to show off to the chicks with.

Another random thought before you proceed: Why are there no singles bars in Singapore? Cos, even if a woman was single, she'd still convince her gay guy friend / fat girl friend to follow her [a solitary deer always gets annihilated by a pack of hyenas]?

Cos people these days are never comfortable all alone staring into blank space while nursing their one hour ago beer listening to Ricki Lake on the Ipod-docking station jukebox? Or is it just a Singaporean thing to do? Where everyone WANTS to get laid but no one actually wants to be associated with the idea?

And isn't that why singles bars were built anyway so you wouldn't need to be working someone for the past 3 hours and 45 lychee martinis, only to realize her husband is coming to pick her up in the next 10 minutes. Anyhow, I think this is a very untapped market. The "declare you are single and only drink here if you choose to revel in that status" bar.

I think I'd like to open up one of these. Call it "Slingers" or something that doesn't really reveal the real theme. But then technically, an owner of such an establishment would be directly / indirectly responsible for all the hook-ups [serious or one nighters] that will invariably take place. So, I'd be "technically" a pimp. Or am I? Anyhow, in the words of the esteemed wrestling superstar The Godfather [ex Kama and ex Papa Shango], "Pimpin aint' Pimpin aint' easy man!".

For other business enquiries, do give me a tinkle at the usual digits. Now was that Brit or Yankee?

1. The longest one-syllable word in the English language is "screeched."

2. "Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt"

3. Almonds are members of the peach family.

4. The symbol on the "pound" key (#) is called an octothorpe.

5. The dot over the letter 'i' is called a tittle.

6. Ingrown toenails are hereditary.

7. The word "set" has more definitions than any other word in the English language.

8. "Underground" is the only word in the English language that begins and ends with the letters "und."

9. There are only four words in the English language which end in "-dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

10. The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

11. The only other word with the same amount of letters is its plural: pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosesl.

12. The longest place-name still in use is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaung ahoronukupokaiwe- nuakit natahu , a New Zealand hill.

13. Los Angeles's full name is "El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reinade los Angeles de Porciuncula" and can be abbreviated to 3.63% of its size, L.A.

14. An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

15. Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.

16. Alfred Hitchcock didn't have a belly button. It was eliminated when he was sewn up after surgery.

17. Telly Savalas and Louis Armstrong died on their birthdays.

18. Donald Duck's middle name is Fauntleroy.

19. The muzzle of a lion is like a fingerprint - no two lions have the same pattern of whiskers.

20. A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.

21. There is a seven-letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, "therein": the,there, he, in, rein, her, here, ere, therein, herein.

22. Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.

23. A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.

24. Cranberries are sorted for ripeness by bouncing them; a fully ripened cranberry can be dribbled like a basketball.

25. The letters KGB stand for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti

26. 'Stewardesses' is the longest English word that is typed with only the left hand.

27. The combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different ways; the following sentence contains them all: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."

28. The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

29. Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning "containing arsenic."

30. Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and are on the Australian seal for that reason.

31. Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.

32. The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat," which means "the king is dead."

33. The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days of yore when the engines were pulled by horses. The horses were stabled on the ground floor and figured out how to walk up straight staircases.

34. It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open. [You should however try holding them open with workbench clamps or what the optometrist uses and see if they DO pop out when you sneeze a la the famous urban legend]

And the real reason why I am blasting you with needless trivia is only because I am on a mission to do housekeeping on all of my 15 [known] e-mail accounts. This particular piece was of course from the "I see, I forward, You read, You forward" friendly NTU professor I have. Who else would be so interested in sharing 33 pieces of unnecessary information with all and sundry when he could have just stopped with the best 5 and still walked away looking like a genius?

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