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How do you get rid of a guest who's overstayed their welcome?

In Europe, during the Middle Ages, such a guest would be served a cooked but cold beef shoulder. After a few meals of this, even the most obnoxious guest would get the message and leave.

As a result, the phrase, "give the cold shoulder" came to refer to any intentional coldness.

Why is 13 considered an unlucky number?

Many people believe that fear of the number thirteen goes back to the Last Supper. Jesus and his apostles numbered thirteen at that meal, and within a day Jesus was crucified. Truth is though, that this superstition predates the Last Supper, going back at least to Norse mythology.

According to Norse tradition twelve gods were invited to a banquet at Valhalla. Loki, the evil god, wasn't invited to this party but crashed it anyway, bringing the number of guests to thirteen. During the evening, Loki, always looking to cause destruction, shot the god Balder with a mistletoe arrow, killing a favourite of the gods.

As a result of this story, the number thirteen became a source of anxiety for people. By the time Jesus began preaching, the superstition had already been established, but the Last Supper reinforced it.

Toilets and Plumbing

* Toilets in Australia flush counter clockwise.

May 22/02

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*78% of cats never travel with their owner.<o:p></o:p>

*A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.<o:p></o:p>

*A cat's jaw cannot move sideways. <o:p></o:p>

*A cat's whiskers are called vibrissae. <o:p></o:p>

*A house cat has 18 claws. <o:p></o:p>

*A large majority of white cats with blue eyes are deaf. White cats with only one blue eye are deaf only in the ear closest to the blue eye. White cats with orange eyes do not have this disability. <o:p></o:p>

*Black cats are considered lucky in England. <o:p></o:p>

*Cat whiskers can detect movements 2,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. <o:p></o:p>

*Cat's urine glows under a blacklight. <o:p></o:p>

*Cats cannot taste sweets. <o:p></o:p>

*Cats have AB blood groups just like people. <o:p></o:p>

*Cats have five toes on each front paw, but only four toes on each back paw. <o:p></o:p>

*Cats have two sets of vocal chords. <o:p></o:p>

*Cats, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, have a very high possibility of having six toes. <o:p></o:p>

*In 1888, as estimated 300,000 mummified cats were found at Beni Hassan, Egypt. They were sold at $18.43 per ton, and shipped to England to be ground up and used for fertilizer. <o:p></o:p>

*In 1993, there were an estimated 64 million cats in the United States. <o:p></o:p>

*In four years, one female cat could be responsible for the birth of 20,736 cats. <o:p></o:p>

*Most cats have no eyelashes. <o:p></o:p>

*Mother cats teach their kittens to use the litter box. <o:p></o:p>

*Spot, Data's cat on Star Trek: The Next Generation, was played by six different cats. <o:p></o:p>

*Studies show that if a cat falls off the seventh floor of a building it has about thirty percent less chance of surviving than a cat falling of the twentieth floor. It supposedly takes about eight floors for the cat to realize what is occurring, relax and correct itself. <o:p></o:p>

*The ancestor of all domestic cats is the African Wild Cat which still exists today. <o:p></o:p>

*The average house cat weighs in at 11 pounds.

Why do things appear darker when they're wet?

Grab a white shirt, dip it in water, and voila, it turns gray right before your very eyes. If we hadn't all seen it much too often it would make for an impressive magic trick. Since we have, it's an excellent trivia question.

What causes this optical transformation is simple science. When fabric gets wet, light coming towards it refracts within the water, dispersing the light. In addition, the surface of the water causes incoherent light scattering. The combination of these two effects causes less light to reflect to your eyes and makes the wet fabric appear darker.

Why doesn't drinking water cool your mouth after eating spicy food?

The spices in most of the hot foods that we eat are oily, and, like your elementary school science teacher taught you, oil and water don't mix. In this case, the water just rolls over the oily spices.

So what can you do to calm your aching tongue? Try one of these three methods. Eat bread. The bread will absorb the oily spices. A second solution is to drink milk. Milk contains a substance called "casein" which will bind to the spices and carry them away. Finally, you could drink something alcoholic. Alcohol will dissolve the oily spices.

They weren't invented in France, so why does everybody call them "French fries?"

It's true, the French fry wasn't invented in France. (Its origin is probably Belgian.) But the "French" in French fries doesn't refer to its country of origin. It refers to the way in which this side dish is prepared.

Food that is cut into strips is said to be "Frenched." Since French fries are strips of potato that have been fried, they became known as French fried potatoes, or "French fries."

How do astronauts go to the bathroom?

Thanks to gravity, we here on earth take going to the bathroom for granted, but using the toilet in space isn't nearly as easy. For a long time, says NASA, astronauts actually taped a plastic bag to their backsides to collect feces and used a hose-and-bag device to urinate.

Then, in the early 70s, NASA improved bathroom technology with its vacuum toilet. To defecate, astronauts now sit on this toilet and turn the vacuum on. Urination is done through what looks like your vacuum cleaner's hose attachment. Using this toilet is a bit tricky, so part of the preparation for space travel includes potty training, but it sure beats the old bag system.

WOW!!! That was a lot of useful info. Just shows you how little we know, about the expressions we use all the time in our daily conversations. Thanks for the enlightenment, John,

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