Amazing Things I Learned Today!

[Nate the Great]

Edward Bulwer-Lyton did more than just coin the phrase "it was a dark and stormy night", he also coined "the pen is mightier than the sword", "pursuit of the almighty dollar", and "the great unwashed." He also wrote "The Last Days of Pompeii" which I know only by reputation.

Secondary "amazing things" (if completely pointless trivia):

"The Last Days of Pompeii" was based on a Russian painting, and the novel in turn inspired an American sculpture called "Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii". Lyton himself was British, of course.

[Nate the Great]

So I'm watching a Cutthroat Kitchen rerun featuring tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. This is a traditional combination, but I suddenly found myself wondering why it's so....

TATILT: The reason.

In the post-war years school cafeterias had to find economical ways to meet the new nutritional requirements on a budget. Combining tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches piles up enough nutrients to be a viable and less expensive alternative to meat.

Plus, I guess people found that this combination tastes good.

[Nate the Great]

There was once a Mathnet/Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego crossover!

Ah, PBS in the '90s...

[Nate the Great]

So I'm watching the Quark/Garak root beer scene again and one of the comments mentions that a lot of Europeans don't like root beer. I decided to investigate (or as Ashens might put it, I spent ten seconds and Googled it)...

Root beer contains an ingredient that is present in many medicines.

You'll recall that in its earliest days carbonated beverages were medicinal, not recreational. Therefore root beer had this methyl salicylate stuff added to make it smell like medicine.

So I suppose modern Americans drink this stuff enough as a child so that the particular scent is associated with "root beer" and not "medicine." And if Europeans in general don't drink it, that switch isn't flipped and so they hate it.

[Nate the Great]

Bill Nye the Science Guy once cameoed on Mister Roger's Neighborhood!

I mean, you don't expect to see a crossover like that, do you?

[Nate the Great]

Supposedly the Kakariko Village theme from Zelda was based on "On a Clear Day" from Kiki's Delivery Service!

Personally, besides a general similarity of meter and melody I can't really see it. I'll let you be the judge.

On a Clear Day (Version One)
On a Clear Day (Version Two)

A comment on the second one references Kakariko Village.

Kakariko Village (Ocarina of Time)
Kakariko Village (A Link to the Past)

Remember that Kiki was made in 1989, A Link to the Past was 1991, and Ocarina of Time was 1998.

Another forum thread mentions this theory. Weird.

And now for another Kiki-related Amazing Thing That I Learned Today...

A ramen company aged up the characters for a commercial.

Amazing and bizarre, who could ask for more?

[Nate the Great]

Today's TATILT comes from today's LGR video...

In the seventies there was technology to remotely operate the technology in your house!

Furthermore, it wasn't radio waves or infrared, it was sending radio signals through the house's electrical network, allowing for each module to talk to the others!

[Nate the Great]

John Coclios voiced Apocalypse in the '90s X-Men cartoon!

Now that I know that, you can definitely detect hear Kor in there somewhere.

[Nate the Great]

I think the fact that Isaac Asimov was a fan of Tom Lehrer was something that I knew, albeit stuck way way back in the dustiest archive of my memory, but when I found a Lehrer song on YouTube that I'd never heard of before, and then discovery at Wikipedia that Asimov remembered Lehrer singing it, well, I thought it was time to shill Lehrer again. By the by, he's still with us at age 89, and the world will be a darker place when he's gone.

Now let's celebrate by poisoning the pigeons in the park...

PS. If you need some of his more obscure jokes explained, there's a site that has annotated his lyrics...

[Nate the Great]

As a Minnesotan I feel special that my people are the only ones to use "duck duck gray duck" instead of "duck duck goose". As an aside, we have it so much better because we can insert humor with "red duck", "orange duck", etc.

But why was it just us? The Straight Dope has the answer as usual. We say gray duck because the Swedish immigrants who came here said gray duck (or rather "anka, anka, gra anka."

Yes, the anka anka gra anka thing was on Wikipedia, but I found it today at The Straight Dope.

So now you know. And Knowing is Half the Battle!

[Nate the Great]

As a big fan of the Doctor Doolittle books I thought I knew about all of the stories (although I'm still looking for a couple of them to complete my collection), so imagine my surprise when I learned that Hugh Lofting wrote a short story featuring Doolittle for an anthology back in 1925.

Read Doctor Doolittle Meets a Londoner in Paris here.

[Nate the Great]

I've been a fan of both All Too Flat and Cockeyed (How Much Is Inside) ever since college, and I've shilled for both in the past. But today I've discovered that not only is Cockeyed even older than I thought, but in fact the All Too Flat guys are fans of it, and they did a spoof of the How Much Is Inside concept!

[Nate the Great]

The reason Riker propped a foot up on the furniture a lot and often sat down via swinging a leg over the chair back.

Maybe not "amazing", but certainly interesting.

[Nate the Great]

So today I learned of the existence of bimagic squares. That is, a magic square where, if you square all the entries, results in another magic square.

The smallest true bimagic square (the sum of all rows, columns, and both diagonals are the same) is 6X6. If you relax the requirement on the diagonal sums you can drop to 5X5.

[NAHTMMM]

Lorenzo Music, the voice of Garfield, also volunteered for suicide hotlines. Also from his page: imagine Garfield being voiced by the same person who voiced Winnie the Pooh. It could have happened.

[Nate the Great]

Traditionally water is not a beverage.

Mind. Blown.

[Nate the Great]

As a child I had a toy robot that could transform into a cap gun. I've been looking for it off and on for years, but I could never find it.

Until today.

TATILT: I had no idea it was a GoBot. That's because I didn't know what GoBots were until much much later. As I may have mentioned, I only had cursory knowledge of G1 Transformers at the time, so what chance did GoBots have?

I have no idea how I got this toy or what happened to it. But the shape of the head stuck in my mind, so when I stumbled upon it on Reddit it instantly connected.

[Nate the Great]

George C. Scott was married (twice!) to Colleen Dewhurst!


Mind. Blown.

[Nate the Great]

Today's Amazing Word That I Learned Today Is "Greeble".


It looks like you pronounce it to rhyme with feeble, but Adam Savage pronounces it more like "greeb-lee", so I'm not sure.


A greeble is a piece of a plastic model kit that you use as a pointless texturing element on another model. Or more generically, any pit of pointless texturing added to the surface of a model.

[Nate the Great]

Nyan Cat is only from 2011!

I mean, yikes. I thought it was one of those early 2000s Newgrounds-era flash video memes.

You really do learn something new every day...