What is odd about Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer?
He is a girl.
Despite being called Rudolph and referred to as 'him', like all Santas reindeer 'he' must in fact have been female. Male reindeer loose their antlers at the beginning of winter. Females keep their antlers until they give birth in the spring.
Why is a marathon 26 miles and 385 yards long?
For the convenience of the British royal family.
At the first three Modern Olympics, the marathon was run over a distance of roughly 42km (26 miles), varying from games to games. In 1908 the
Olympic Games were held in London and the starting line was put outside a window at Windsor Castle from which one half of the royal family could watch,
with the finish in front of the royal box in the White City stadium where the other half of the family was waiting. This distance was 26 miles and 385 yards:
the standard length of a marathon ever since.
The origin of the 26-mile run dates to a Greek messenger called Pheidippides, who ran this distance from Marathon to Athens to relate the victory of
the Athenians over the Persians in 490 BC. According to popular legend he delivered the message and then dropped dead.
It’s a heroic tale but it doesn’t hold water. Very few marathon runners die after the event, and professional ancient Greek couriers were regularly
required to run twice as far.
This version of the story first appears in the work of the Roman historian Plutarch (c. AD 45–125) more than 500 years later. He calls the runner Eucles. It
seems to have become confused with the much older story of Pheidippides recorded by Herodotus, who was born six years after the battle, and whose
account is the nearest we have to a contemporary one.
According to him, Pheidippides ran from Marathon to Sparta (246 km or 153 miles) to ask for help in beating off the Persian attack. The Spartans were
busy with a religious festival, so he ran all the way back and the Athenians had to fight the Persians on their own. They won a resounding victory, losing
192 men to the Persians’ 6,400. Pheidippides didn’t die.
What did they call the man who won the Battle of Hastings?
Many things, not all of them nice, but definately not William.
William is an English invention, a product of the collision between Norman French, which had no 'W' and Anglo Saxon which had a 'W' but no equivalent name. His Norman French companions would have called him 'Guillaume' and written it in Latin, Guillelmus (As it appears on his tomb in Caen). The English had to call the new boss something, and reached the compromise to pronounce and spell his name with a Germanic 'W' - Willelm.
Whats the loudest thing in the ocean?
Shrimp.
The blue whale makes the loudest noise of any individual animal, but the loudest natural noise of all is made by shrimp.
The sound of the 'shrimp layer' is the only noise that can white out a submarines sonar, deafening the operators through their headphones. Below the layer they can hear nothing from above it and vice-versa. Hearing from below can only be acomplished by raising a mast through the layer.
The noise of the collected shrimps amounts to 246 decibels, which even adjusted for the fact sound travels five times faster in water, equates to about 160 decibels in air: considerably loder than a jet taking off (140 decibels) or the human threshold of pain. it has been compared to the sound of everyone in the world frying bacon at the same time.
