Saturday, July 14, 2018

Armed and trivial.


This week on Trivia Corner we examine 10 incredible fun facts about those thingies coming out of your shoulders--that's right: Your ARMS!

1. A car's airbag deploys and inflates in .04 seconds. The only safety device faster is your mom's arm whapping you across the breastbone.

2. Carpal Diem = It hurts when I seize the day.

3. The original name of Arm & Hammer Baking Soda was Spleen & Sponge. Other attempts at product names were Noggin & Hatchet, Thumb & Screw, Colon & Lathe, Ankle & Wrench, and Ass & Adze, before the arm was finally selected, along with a hammer.

4. A seven-armed octopus is not a septopus; it is a differently abled octopus.

5. The first draft of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms was entitled Enough with the Arms. Correspondence between him and his editor reveals other titles they considered: Get the Arm Outta Here; Armen't Ya Glad the War Is Over?; Hit the Road, ArmsArms! Feh!; and The Legs Can Go Too. Finally Hemingway's editor suggested he stop drinking absinthe.

Took a while but he dried out.

6. The bone in the upper arm is called the humerus--so never let anyone tell you that you don't have a humerus bone in your body.

AMAZING FACT! Pope Hilarius also two humeruses!

7. By some accounts, when the serpent met Eve, he said, "Don't be a-scaert o' me, mate! I'm perfectly 'armless."

8. The word armistice comes from the Latin arma (shoulders) and solstitium (solstice), arma having come to refer to weaponry (as in the terms armor, army, armada) and solstice coming from sol (sun) and stare (stand). So armistice means shoulders sun standing. And we think other languages are weird.

Another work by Hemingway.
9. When Hamlet says "to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them," he's not talking about fighting, he's talking about swimming.

10. There is a condition known as Saturday Night Palsy, numbness in the arm caused from passing out with the arm over the armrest of a chair, compressing the radial nerve. Similarly, Honeymoon Palsy is caused by someone sleeping on your arm, compressing the radial nerve. Saturday Night Honeymoon Palsy is when a drunk person or persons passes out on your arm overnight, I guess.

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