I bet you didnt know that

dxhound2005

Judy in Disguise (With Glasses) was a number one hit for John Fred and His Playboy Band. It is based on a mishearing of Lucy in the Sky. When looking at Wiki, I found that there is a word for this, Mondegreen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judy_in_Disguise_(With_Glasses)

joeguevara

Franz Von Peppercorn wrote: »

I’m inclined to believe that John and Paul knew more about it than anybody else.

Edit:

And Julian who wrote a song for Lucy as late as 2009. After contacting her he finds she has lupus and dedicated some of the earnings for the single to her. he says he drew the picture.

Very good debunking of the LSD myth here:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lucy-in-the-sky-with-diamonds/

Looks like the cutesy Lucy story is true. Very very coincidental though.

Ipso

Wasn't the song Hey Jude based on Julian? Supposedly McCartney had the words "hey Jules" running through his head and it inspired the song.
Also, yesterday came to McCartney in a dream and at one point was the most covered song in music history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yesterday_(Beatles_song)

Over 50 years later and these songs are still great. And 50 years from now will still be.

dxhound2005

Lucy was not officially banned by the BBC, but probably not played very often. Hi, Hi, Hi by Wings was banned. In the lyrics here we see the word Polygon. The BBC said it was Body Gun.

Give Ireland Back to the Irish was also banned.

Capt'n Midnight

dxhound2005 wrote: »

Lucy was not officially banned by the BBC, but probably not played very often. Hi, Hi, Hi by Wings was banned. In the lyrics here we see the word Polygon.

Wings ? Throwing shapes ? :eek:

facehugger99

In France, it is illegal to name your pig Napoleon.

joeguevara

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Wings ? Throwing shapes ? :eek:

Wings. The band the Beatles could have been!

y0ssar1an22

facehugger99 wrote: »

In France, it is illegal to name your pig Napoleon.

do give some background please!

Capt'n Midnight

All of Wings songs were co-written by Linda Mcartney

Because she was really talented, and it has nothing to do with Paul getting tiny royalties because of the contract he was stuck in.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

y0ssar1an22 wrote: »

do give some background please!

It's another myth. The law is that it's illegal to insult the head of state. And as Napoleon is not the head of state any more...

facehugger99

y0ssar1an22 wrote: »

do give some background please!

I have one of those calendars where you tear off a page each day and there’s an inspirational quote or fact.

That was today’s nugget.

I didn’t fact check it admittedly.

pleas advice

of the 38 referendums to amend the constitution of Ireland, only two have ever been passed or defeated by a majority of the electorate – to join the European Community in 1972 (58.6% of the electorate, 83.1% of those who voted), and to ratify the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 (52.5% of the electorate, 94.4% of those who voted).

Chancer3001

Three main characters of Its Always Sunny In Phladelphia are mac , Charlie and Dennis.

Mac is the guys real surname / nickname

Charlie is the guys real name

Dennis is made up because Glenn howerthon the actor hated the character so much he didn't want his name associated with him

Long before Tyson claimed the title Iron Mike, there was a man called Michael Malloy who was apparently indestructible.

Born in Donegal in the late 1800's, he was unfortunate enough to end up homeless on the cold streets of New York in the 20's and 30's, an alcoholic with some very dodgy acquaintances.

Five of these acquaintances decided that Mike would be the centrepiece of an insurance scam, and took out life insurance on him with the help of a shady broker. Then they proceeded to try to kill him. One of the men ran a speakeasy, and to begin with Mike was simply given unlimited credit as the initial plan to get him to drink himself to death was implemented. Day after day, Mike showed up and drank as much as possible, staggering out and sleeping rough on the streets, but the decline the would-be killers hoped for never happened. So they decided to help things along and started adding antifreeze to his drinks, but Mike neither noticed nor felt any effects. So the ante was upped and they added turpentine, same story. In a last ditch effort, rat poison was used to lace his booze, but Mike endured.

Having seen a man die after eating bad oysters and drinking whiskey, the baddies decided to serve him a dish of rotting oysters laced with wood alcohol. Mike had indigestion, but arrived the next day for his drinks at his regular time. So they went one further and served him a snack of rotten sardines, rat poison and carpet nails. He ate the lot and arrived at the bar the next day, as usual.

Desperate to kill him off, they decided on another approach. On the coldest night of the year (-26 c), the unholy alliance decided to pump Mike full of alcohol until he passed out, then they carried him to a park and put him on a mound of snow, removed his outer clothes, then poured buckets of cold water on him. He arrived for his morning tipple the next day, as normal.

At this point, desperate measures were called for. One of the failed killers was a taxi driver, and they orchestrated an 'accident' where Mike was hit at speed, sending him sailing over the car and apparently landing on his head. Some of his limbs were obviously broken, blood was everywhere, and Mike was stilled.

Some weeks later, he showed up at the speakeasy on crutches.

Realizing the subtle approach was getting them nowhere, the nasty chaps decided to take direct action and after getting Mike so drunk he passed out (again), they put a gas pipe in his mouth and kept it there for an hour, and only when they were sure he was dead did they take it out. Mike's cause of death was assumed to be pneumonia and he was duly buried. Sadly for the inept murderers, although they claimed the insurance their antics were the talk of speakeasies all over town, and naturally enough it came to police attention as people trying to avoid conviction after police raids in the illegal boozers offered information for freedom.

Mikes body was exhumed for examination and it became clear that the stories were true. The infamous five were tried and convicted, four seeing the electric chair and the remaining one spending his days in Sing-Sing.

After his death Mr Malloy was nicknamed Iron Mike and also Durable Mike, taking on an almost legendary status. The poor, poor guy.




tl:dr Steven Seagal only wishes he was as Hard To Kill as Mike Malloy.

Gloomtastic!

Candie wrote: »

Long before Tyson claimed the title Iron Mike, there was a man called Michael Malloy who was apparently indestructible.

Born in Donegal in the late 1800's, he was unfortunate enough to end up homeless on the cold streets of New York in the 20's and 30's, an alcoholic with some very dodgy acquaintances.

Five of these acquaintances decided that Mike would be the centrepiece of an insurance scam, and took out life insurance on him with the help of a shady broker. Then they proceeded to try to kill him. One of the men ran a speakeasy, and to begin with Mike was simply given unlimited credit as the initial plan to get him to drink himself to death was implemented. Day after day, Mike showed up and drank as much as possible, staggering out and sleeping rough on the streets, but the decline the would-be killers hoped for never happened. So they decided to help things along and started adding antifreeze to his drinks, but Mike neither noticed nor felt any effects. So the ante was upped and they added turpentine, same story. In a last ditch effort, rat poison was used to lace his booze, but Mike endured.

Having seen a man die after eating bad oysters and drinking whiskey, the baddies decided to serve him a dish of rotting oysters laced with wood alcohol. Mike had indigestion, but arrived the next day for his drinks at his regular time. So they went one further and served him a snack of rotten sardines, rat poison and carpet nails. He ate the lot and arrived at the bar the next day, as usual.

Desperate to kill him off, they decided on another approach. On the coldest night of the year (-26 c), the unholy alliance decided to pump Mike full of alcohol until he passed out, then they carried him to a park and put him on a mound of snow, removed his outer clothes, then poured buckets of cold water on him. He arrived for his morning tipple the next day, as normal.

At this point, desperate measures were called for. One of the failed killers was a taxi driver, and they orchestrated an 'accident' where Mike was hit at speed, sending him sailing over the car and apparently landing on his head. Some of his limbs were obviously broken, blood was everywhere, and Mike was stilled.

Some weeks later, he showed up at the speakeasy on crutches.

Realizing the subtle approach was getting them nowhere, the nasty chaps decided to take direct action and after getting Mike so drunk he passed out (again), they put a gas pipe in his mouth and kept it there for an hour, and only when they were sure he was dead did they take it out. Mike's cause of death was assumed to be pneumonia and he was duly buried. Sadly for the inept murderers, although they claimed the insurance their antics were the talk of speakeasies all over town, and naturally enough it came to police attention as people trying to avoid conviction after police raids in the illegal boozers offered information for freedom.

Mikes body was exhumed for examination and it became clear that the stories were true. The infamous five were tried and convicted, four seeing the electric chair and the remaining one spending his days in Sing-Sing.

After his death Mr Malloy was nicknamed Iron Mike and also Durable Mike, taking on an almost legendary status. The poor, poor guy.




tl:dr Steven Seagal only wishes he was as Hard To Kill as Mike Malloy.

I was waiting for a punchline but he did actually exist......

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Malloy

Gloomtastic!

Gloomtastic! wrote: »

I was waiting for a punchline but he did actually exist......

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Malloy

I know! When someone was telling me about him I was the same, you couldn't make it up.

The determination to kill him must have led to a kind of blindness to how the preceding trail of dastardly deeds pointed to their guilt. They just got so determined to murder the poor man that they lost sight of how thoroughly they incriminated themselves.

Franz Von Peppercorn

Candie doesn’t lie!

What confuses me though is how they got life insurance on an unrelated homeless man.

New Home

It reminded me a lot of when Michael Palin in A Fish Called Wanda kept trying to kill the little old lady with the doggies and kept missing, killing the dogs one by one in the attempt, and being absolutely devastated by it.

FrancieBrady

Franz Von Peppercorn wrote: »

Candie doesn’t lie!

What confuses me though is how they got life insurance on an unrelated homeless man.

He thought one of the docs he was signing was an endorsement for one of his killers to become Mayor.

Fascinating story. TG4 doc here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgKJKYkR8oE

Tell me how

Everyone knows of "Making a Murderer" from Netflix and the trial of Steven Avery and his cousin Brendan Dassey. There was outrage at the apparent weakness of the case resulting in a conviction.

A similar event took place around in the mountains of Mayo on the Galway border over 135 years ago. It has become known as the Maamtrasna Murders.

John Joyce and his family were attacked in their mountainside cottage resulting in 5 deaths. His daughter Patsy was also attacked but survived to tell the tale.

Ten men from the area were arrested and charged. One of these was Myles Joyce (no relation to murder victims), a married father of 5. The trial was held in Dublin and even though none of the men spoke English, there wasn't a word of Irish spoken to them during it. Two of those charged became informers, one of whom later admitted to lying under oath.

Evidence was admitted by witnesses, who were paid to do so, who claimed to have followed the band of men in the dead of night (in 1882, without torches obviously) without being seen and were able to identify those present. They admitted that they had no prior experience of tracking someone during the night in this manner but still their evidence was accepted. According to information provided by the CSO, the amount which they were paid for their evidence in today's money equates to about €160,000.

The 3 who were sentenced to be hanged were sent to Galway for the sentence to be carried out. Two of the 3 separately admitted that Myles was innocent but still that was not enough to save him and he was hanged with them.
His fate was sealed when Earl Spencer sent a telegram to the governor of the gaol in Galway, rejecting an appeal for a pardon.

On Wednesday last, the 3rd of April, President Michael D Higgins signed a pardon for Myles Joyce. It was the first pardon granted by the state for a conviction carried out before the foundation of the state.

An other interesting fact related to the case related to key locations. When Earl Spencer had enforced that the sentence be carried out, his place of residence was the Vice-Regal Lodge in the Phoenix Park. That building, is currently titled Áras an Uachtaráin meaning Joyces death cert and pardon were signed in the same place, 135 years apart, in a building which had changed ownership from one country to another.

A documentary on the crime and trial was shown on TG4 during the Week. It is available for about 5 weeks on the player. It's 2 hours long but is compelling viewing.

Franz Von Peppercorn

Franz Von Peppercorn wrote: »

Candie doesn’t lie!

What confuses me though is how they got life insurance on an unrelated homeless man.

I think the insurance broker was a little shady or perhaps a bit dim

EndaHonesty

Candie wrote: »

Long before Tyson claimed the title Iron Mike, there was a man called Michael Malloy who was apparently indestructible.

Born in Donegal in the late 1800's, he was unfortunate enough to end up homeless on the cold streets of New York in the 20's and 30's, an alcoholic with some very dodgy acquaintances.

Five of these acquaintances decided that Mike would be the centrepiece of an insurance scam, and took out life insurance on him with the help of a shady broker. Then they proceeded to try to kill him. One of the men ran a speakeasy, and to begin with Mike was simply given unlimited credit as the initial plan to get him to drink himself to death was implemented. Day after day, Mike showed up and drank as much as possible, staggering out and sleeping rough on the streets, but the decline the would-be killers hoped for never happened. So they decided to help things along and started adding antifreeze to his drinks, but Mike neither noticed nor felt any effects. So the ante was upped and they added turpentine, same story. In a last ditch effort, rat poison was used to lace his booze, but Mike endured.

Having seen a man die after eating bad oysters and drinking whiskey, the baddies decided to serve him a dish of rotting oysters laced with wood alcohol. Mike had indigestion, but arrived the next day for his drinks at his regular time. So they went one further and served him a snack of rotten sardines, rat poison and carpet nails. He ate the lot and arrived at the bar the next day, as usual.

Desperate to kill him off, they decided on another approach. On the coldest night of the year (-26 c), the unholy alliance decided to pump Mike full of alcohol until he passed out, then they carried him to a park and put him on a mound of snow, removed his outer clothes, then poured buckets of cold water on him. He arrived for his morning tipple the next day, as normal.

At this point, desperate measures were called for. One of the failed killers was a taxi driver, and they orchestrated an 'accident' where Mike was hit at speed, sending him sailing over the car and apparently landing on his head. Some of his limbs were obviously broken, blood was everywhere, and Mike was stilled.

Some weeks later, he showed up at the speakeasy on crutches.

Realizing the subtle approach was getting them nowhere, the nasty chaps decided to take direct action and after getting Mike so drunk he passed out (again), they put a gas pipe in his mouth and kept it there for an hour, and only when they were sure he was dead did they take it out. Mike's cause of death was assumed to be pneumonia and he was duly buried. Sadly for the inept murderers, although they claimed the insurance their antics were the talk of speakeasies all over town, and naturally enough it came to police attention as people trying to avoid conviction after police raids in the illegal boozers offered information for freedom.

Mikes body was exhumed for examination and it became clear that the stories were true. The infamous five were tried and convicted, four seeing the electric chair and the remaining one spending his days in Sing-Sing.

After his death Mr Malloy was nicknamed Iron Mike and also Durable Mike, taking on an almost legendary status. The poor, poor guy.

Capt'n Midnight

If all the ground water ended up in the oceans then sea level would rise by more than 1000 feet ( 300 meters )

https://phys.org/news/2018-04-sea-groundwater-link-climate-response.html

mzungu

There is a small parasite Toxoplasma gondii that is only able to breed sexually when in the guts of a cat. Hence when it infects rats, it changes their behaviour to make them less scared of cats.

Capt'n Midnight

mzungu wrote: »

There is a small parasite Toxoplasma gondii that is only able to breed sexually when in the guts of a cat. Hence when it infects rats, it changes their behaviour to make them less scared of cats.

It also changes the behaviour of humans.

Cats didn't need to invent the can opener. They domesticated it instead.

stimpson

The radius of the universe is about 46 billion light years. To calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom you would need to use 39 or 40 decimal places of pi. We know pi to 22.4 trillion digits. You can download it here. It is 9TB in size.

cdeb

stimpson wrote: »

We know pi to 22.4 trillion digits. You can download it here. It is 9TB in size.

For comparison, in 2012, the solution to every chess position with seven or fewer pieces left (there are 32 at the start) was gathered together in one database. This includes a huge amount of trivial positions (king v king, pawn and king v king, five queens and king v king, etc, etc)

The database is 100TB.

Capt'n Midnight

William Shanks was an amateur mathematician who spent years and years of his spare time calculating Pi to 707 places.

Or so he thought.

Turns out he'd mistake on the 528th digit so years wasted.

cdeb

The person who wrote and sang the theme tune to the BBC kids' show Rainbow also played Hastings in the Poirot films.



The Cadbury Caramel bunny was also the Spanish Infanta in Blackadder.

Skylinehead

Towards the end of WWII (I love my war posts ), a rather strange battle occurred. Castle Itter is in Austria, and during the war it was used by the SS for high ranking prisoners - a couple of Prime Ministers, commander-in-chief of the army Maurice Gamelin, and tennis Grand Slam star Jean Borotra (for some reason, the Gestapo were an odd bunch).

So onto the strangeness - 5 days after Hitlers suicide, but before the surrender of Germany, a motley crew of a few American reconnaissance units of a tank battalion, 1 tank, some German Army members, and the aforementioned French prisoners, all defended the castle against a Waffen-SS battalion (the SS were fanatics to the end, the Wehrmacht had all but given up) until a proper relief force could arrive.

It was the only battle in the war where Germans and Americans fought side by side.