A random thread of absolute randomness...

[kejedo]

"Drinking the Kool aid, although associated with the Jonestown murder-suicides, actually originated in the Tom Wolfe book "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" about Ken Kesey and the "Merry Pranksters". Jonestown actually used Flavor Aid.

[hybridxer0]

35 minutes ago, kejedo said:

"Drinking the Kool aid, although associated with the Jonestown murder-suicides, actually originated in the Tom Wolfe book "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" about Ken Kesey and the "Merry Pranksters". Jonestown actually used Flavor Aid.

ah, the inferior product, lol -- I would always hate when my parents got FA instead of KA. As an adult, I can appreciate my parents trying to find cost-effective ways to make sure we didn't "miss out", but at the time it felt like a betrayal getting Peter Pan peanut butter instead of JIF 😄 

[kejedo]

In April 1969,North Korea shot down a US spy plane. An enraged Nixon allegedly ordered a tactical nuclear strike and told the joint chiefs to recommend targets. Henry Kissinger spoke to military commanders on the phone and agreed not to do anything until Nixon sobered up in the morning.

 

 

[kejedo]

 In the 1980s, NASA had a 1-900 number which charged $2 for the first minute and $.45 for each additional minute. It allowed callers to listen in on a mission status report and mid-flight press conferences, and thousands of them heard the Challenger explosion in real-time. January 28, 1986.

 

[kejedo]

Keurig co-inventor went to the ER with suspected  heart attack.John Sylvan suffered a severe case of caffeine poisoning in 1995 after drinking 30 to 40 cups of coffee a day.

[kejedo]

Tonight New Yorkers are watching for Manhattanhenge. It is a phenomenon where the setting sun aligns with the east/west street   grid and is framed between towering skyscrapers.

 

 

[dljbsp]

15 hours ago, kejedo said:

allegedly

That opens the field on randomness of this thread.

 

John Sylvan — the co-inventor of the Keurig machine — allegedly drank somewhere between 30 and 40 cups of coffee a day during the height of the company’s early years.

 

And honestly… you can almost picture it.

 

Two in the morning.
Prototype parts scattered everywhere.
A half-working machine hissing on a cluttered counter.
Another cup.
Then another.

 

Because when you are building something that might change everything, sleep starts looking like wasted production time.

 

Some reports say he later landed in the ER with what was believed to be severe caffeine poisoning and symptoms that mimicked a heart attack. The exact details get fuzzy in retellings — and that matters. Some of it is solid reporting. Some of it has drifted into modern entrepreneur folklore.

 

But the image survives because it feels believable.

 

A man so deep inside his invention that he may have been stress-testing not just the machine… but himself.

 

Was he checking consistency?
Trying to perfect the brew cycle?
Making sure cup number twenty tasted like cup number one?

 

Or was this just what happens when ambition, exhaustion, deadlines, and caffeine form an unholy alliance at 3 a.m.?

 

Either way, there is something darkly poetic about the possibility that the man who helped engineer instant coffee convenience may have nearly been consumed by the very thing he was trying to perfect.

[kejedo]

Earworms: Dionne Warwick was on tv last week and this started an earworm for me. When Dionne  sang the song Alfie, my mother and her then fiancee were both working at a Bar and Grill. Mum's boyfriend had attracted the attention of another femme who frequented there. To let dear Mom know how confused this left him, her boyfriend played Alfie (What's it all about) on the juke box, repeatedly. Mother had the bright idea of bringing everyone from the bar home after hours to have her teenage daughter sing this song a capella. I had sung thru-out school. Mum sang as well, but not ever together. So the drunk crowd came home and further disturbed the insomniac high schooler. Mum waved her arms about like she was conducting the restless songstress. So Alfie has been recurring. My earworm breaker was and is a French Nursery  song I learned in 4th grade. What cure for earworms do you use?

 

[minister159]

@Kejedo,

You are undoubtedly the queen of randomness, or is it trivia? Either way, you are numero uno!  

[Hope]

I am in Fort Lauderdale, Florida right now. It is so hot! 🥵 I don't understand how anyone lives here on purpose... 💀

 

I detest hot weather 👹

[kejedo]

President Andrew Jackson had a parrot as a pet. When Jackson died, his parrot was present at the funeral, but was kicked out for swearing too much.

 

[kejedo]

In ancient Rome, a vomitorium was not a room for purging food, but an architectural passageway. Derived from the Latin verb vomere (to spew forth), that allowed large crowds to rapidly enter and exit structures like the Colosseum or large theaters.

 

[kejedo]

 Robert Todd Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln, almost fell from a train platform, which would have killed him if it wasn't for the man who saved him: Edwin Booth, John Wilkes Booth's brother.

 

[kejedo]

Russia ran out of vodka celebrating the end of World War Two. When the long war ended, street parties engulfed the Soviet Union, lasting for days—until all of the nation’s vodka reserves ran out a mere 22 hours after the partying started.

 

[kejedo]

       It takes 3-4 years to become a licensed London taxi cab driver. Those are years spent studying for a comprehensive test of the London map. A study in Current Biology, by Katherine Woollett and Eleanor Maguire, shows that preparing for this test changes the structure of the drivers' brains. Along with other similar findings, this study shows the brain remains plastic and adaptable into adulthood. 

         Psychology studies like this have shown changes in the hippocampus and deeper convolutions in the brain that result in more  sequential thoughts. The conclusion has been that studying pictures and letters togethher, like in map reading, effects the physical brain structure and improves thought processing. 

 

[kejedo]

    G.G. Lord Byron kept a pet bear in his dormitory while studying at Cambridge. Known for being an avid animal lover, when he found out he couldn’t bring his dog, he decided to bring a tame bear to live with him on campus instead. He was even known to take it on walks with a leash!  Reading Byron's works introduced me to Senacherib and other Bible thoughts, before I came into the truth.

     Milton's sonnet, On His Blindness, mentioned Bible talents. I wonder how many were inspired to look into the Bible by classic reading.

 

[kejedo]

NYNews tonight featured Marilyn's early days around here and "The art of Mono-tasking."  I'm  a fan, but need to practice less multi-tasking. UMMM, starting tomorrow.

 

 

[Tronora]

I wonder ... Wasn't there a thread where we shared "experiences out in service today"? Where did it go? 

 

0K, so I'll write it here: Cart witnessing. Person 1: The sister I was with: "She's my very closest neighbour!" Person 2: "I just met this woman on a health course" (She lives quite FAR away from where we stood) Person 3: Scanned the qr-code? She didn't talk to us, but it looked like she took a picture.

 

Persons 1 & 2 helloed us.

 

Interesting   

[kejedo]

The number of tigers in the wild is less than those being kept as pets (not in zoos).

 

 

[dljbsp]

Some countries have more tigers in captivity than exist in the wild. The estimated number of tigers in the wild is between 5,000 and 6,000. The United States has over 5,000 captive tigers, and China has more than 6,000 in captivity.

Estimates indicate a total of 15,000 tigers alive on the planet today. 

 

Edited 1 hour ago by dljbsp

[dljbsp]

The number of house cats in the wild is less than those being kept as pets. But the number is close.

[kejedo]

The Krakatoa caldera is a massive sunken crater, formed during the catastrophic, world-altering 1883 eruption; it is an active volcanic zone famous for birthing a new cone, Anak Krakatoa ("Child of Krakatoa"), which continues to erupt and reshape the landscape. 

 

[kejedo]

Several prominent volcanologists have been killed in the line of duty by the very volcanoes they were studying.

 

[kejedo]

The major tragedies of the dust bowl era involved thousands of local farmers, everyday citizens, and children dying from "dust pneumonia" (acute respiratory failure caused by inhaling massive amounts of silt and dust) or choking in severe "black blizzard" storms.

 

[kejedo]

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is the definitive Dust Bowl classic. It expresses the human-driven weather disaster and the subsequent movement of people from Oklahoma to California.