Fact Of The Day

[Alex]

Piers Morgan tells of an occasion in which he saw President Clinton shake dozens of hands at a function, then turn around and scoop up a piece of pie in his own unwashed right hand, and set about devouring it. Oh my.

I'd be more worried if I had touched Piers Morgan to be fair. There isn't enough sterilizing fluid in the world to cleanse that kind of taint.

Ha! I take it Piers Morgan is yucky?

He is a pretty foul example of humanity who should have served jail time imo. There was a scandal where journalists from Rupert Murdock's newspapers in the UK were hacking into people's phones and listening to their voice mails, including in one case where a young girl went missing. When voice mails were being deleted from her phone, it gave the police and her family hope that she was still alive. It turned out the hackers were deleting messages because her phone was full and they wanted to get new ones. The girl was later found dead. Due to political connections, the people in charge involved mostly lost jobs rather than facing criminal convictions. He had moved on from being the editor of The Sun by the time the scandal broke, but there was some evidence that it was happening during his time there and with his knowledge. Nothing was ever proven though. Generally, The Sun was one of the worst papers for making up stories and telling outright lies.

Yeah, that's bad.

Piers recently returned to tv with a new show with him avowing he was going to use it to "cancel, cancel culture". The first episode featured an interview with ex-prez trump and pulled in 400,000 viewers. A few weeks later his viewing figures have plummeted to 10,000 and falling (although for the channel he is on, this is still a high number of viewers compared to the other shows it has).

[ER]

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain lived  the last forty years of his life with a bullet lodged in his bladder.

[claws]

Germany has one of the highest rates of gun ownership worldwide, yet also one of the lowest rates of gun-related deaths.

[Trevor]

Germany has one of the highest rates of gun ownership worldwide, yet also one of the lowest rates of gun-related deaths.

Here in South Africa people were disarmed in 1994 as the new government feared a revolution and it is extremely difficult to get a firearm licence. Firearms are also hideously expensive.

[Rev. Powell]

[chainsaw midget]

It's now Ben's Original Rice instead of Uncle Ben's Rice, but before it was even that it was originally promoted as Uncle Bens Plantation Rice. 

Who is Uncle Ben?  There's actually very little information on him.  We don't even known his real last name.  We do know, however that he was a rice farmer in Texas in the 1940s (possibly.  It could have been the 30s or earlier) who was renowned for his rice. 

The reason he's "Uncle Ben" and not "Mr. Ben" is because at the time the product was first named, white people often felt uncomfortable calling black people Mister, so Aunt and Uncle were often used in it's place for older black people. 

However the guy you see on the labels isn't Uncle Ben.  It's a man named Frank Brown who worked at a restaurant frequented by the man who owned "Converted Brand Rice".  He paid Frank the equivalent of $50 for his likeness and used it to rebrand his rice company.   

[lester1/2jr]

"Marriages between relatives are widespread in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia, where a government study has found that 56.8% of all marriages are between first and second cousins or more distant relatives."

[chainsaw midget]

Recent studies have discovered that Sand Tiger Sharks engage in cannibalism even fore they're born.  While still in the womb, unborn baby sharks eat their siblings to satisfy their hunger.

[claws]

Corporal punishment in German schools ended in 1973 but was not completely abolished until 1983.

It is still legal in America. More than 167,000 students were paddled in the 2011–2012 school year in American public schools.

[chainsaw midget]

If you could empty out Loch Ness (of both the water and that big dinosaur that lives in it) you could fit every single person in the planet in it.  They probabaly wouldn't like it though.

[ER]

I have insomnia. Um, yaaaay.

[chainsaw midget]

A painting that had been missing and assumed lost for 90s years was rediscovered when an art historian sat down with his young daughter to watch Stuart Little and saw it hanging in the background of a scene as set dressing. 

[Morpheus, the unwoke.]

Russia's total gdp os only a bit larger than NYC's, and a bit smaller than New York state's.

[Alex]

Australians export camels to the Middle East.

[ER]

Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx met while performing in a theater in Manitoba. Marx was seventeen and Chaplin a year older. While Marx did a standard Vaudeville comedy routine, Chaplin's act was insane and involved him pretending to be a drunk who staggered up to a balcony two stories above the stage, then spilled stuporously off the balcony, only to catch himself on the handrail with the crook of his umbrella. Even half a century later Marx would say it was the craziest thing he'd ever seen a comedian do, yet Chaplin did this hundreds of times without incident.