Also helpful to know:

A possum's gestation cycle is 12 days!

Pound shop!?!?

I was listening to fantastic Blur record-day single last night on yertube, just because the Bride was putting away clean laundry and I was playing odd/varying tracks to keep her from making me watch Footballers Wives whilst I computated(worked for a while, but not long).

Anyway, besides the fact that this song is the best thing in many moons by anyone and how it destroys Damon's other wan output like Gorillaz, why I mention it is this, which I did not know until reading the "Fool's Day" lyrics:

The UK equivalent of a "dollar store" is a "pound shop."

EXCELLENT!

Daddy long-legs - a mystery solved?

The spiders called daddy long-legs a.) aren't spiders, though they are arachnids, and b.) aren't super giving when it comes to name-origin: one theory is that the name came after a novel or play of the same name from 1912. Huh? Like, what were they called before that? "Those skinny king-crab bugs?" Or, on seeing the title reviewed in the New York Herald Tribune, were the folks of 1912 taking to the streets in relief, that, yes!, here at last was a suitable name for those skinny spider[-like arachnid]s that had been ceaselessly roaming the earth, nameless?

And in the UK, they call the bug the Harvestman, which is so Andy Partridge-y you can barely stand it.

No bear pate, alas

Bear's liver is poisonous.

Ouch

John Bonham drank 40 shots the day he died.

Deaf Smith County

Yes, this is the name of an actual county in Texas. Here it is:

What's next? Blind Jones, Idaho?

Plus there are 256 counties in Texas.

Did not know

Buddy Glass's first name is Webb!

"G"

The g in Warren G. Harding stands for "Gamaliel."

The g in Warren G. stands for Griffin, as a bonus.

But seriously, "Gamaliel"? V. early Christian-y, yes, but it sounds more like some sort of swooping vengeful Egyptian bird god that would be statue'd on an epic dais in a DW Griffith movie like Intolerance.

Here's a painting of Gamaliel himself and Nicodemus, mourning St Stephen, which you can use if you are making a Joy Division comp CD this afternoon:

Did not know...

Alexander Hamilton was born in St. Croix and was an orphan!

Issey Miyake is a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing!

Zelda Fitzgerald (nee Sayre) died in a fire at the mental hospital where she was living!

Crazy!

Frank Lloyd Wright's son John Llloyd Wright invented Lincoln Logs.

Cousin/cousine

Richard Nixon and MFK Fisher were first cousins.

Taking the pork to the streets

This is the best pic I could find in a cursory two-page Google search - BUT did you know that one of those little dividing islands in a street (as pictured) is called, in city planning parlance, a PORKCHOP?

Awesome!

Our thing

As much as I love all that Godfather/Sopranos stuff, one would think I would have known/realized before today that "cosa nostra" simply meant "our thing" in Italian.

Duh!

A source tells me:

Llamas hum.