WTF Fun Facts 12594 – Hot Dog Diplomacy

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King George VI was the first sitting British ruler to visit a U.S. president. It was kind of a big deal after the whole Revolutionary War and the sore feelings that left.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president at the time and wanted to give the king a royal greeting, American style.

Of course there was a state dinner with all the attendant fancy food. But it was a casual picnic that really made the trip memorable because that’s when King George VI had his first hot dog on June 11, 1939.

It was a private picnic, but the hot dog moment was anything but a secret. In fact, a NYT headline the following day read: “King Tries Hot Dog and Asks For More.”

The brand was Swift, for those who need to know these things. And the king very appropriately had a beer with his 2 hot dogs as well, according to the Times.

Looking back on the moment in 2009, Dan Barry wrote in the NYT:

“There is no record of the founding fathers ever eating hot dogs, no trace, for example, of mustard on the Declaration of Independence. But the hot dog has played a role in American foreign relations since at least June 1939, when the king and queen of England attended a picnic at President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s estate in Hyde Park, N.Y., while soliciting American support for England in the war about to consume Europe.”

The king’s mother was with him at the time and also partook in a hot dog – but she is said to have eaten it with a knife and fork.

Upon inviting an Iranian delegation to the US, the Obama administration relied once again on the diplomatic dogs. There’s no word on how they went down, but Barry seemed to think that it was an essential part of the diplomatic process either way, noting:

“The hot dog, it seems, figures in American diplomacy only when absolutely needed. In 1999, for example, President Bill Clinton gathered at a table with Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel and the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat to eat hot dogs. Kosher, of course.”

– WTF fun facts

Source: “When Franklin Delano Roosevelt Served Hot Dogs to a King” — Smithsonian Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12593 – Vienna Makes For Strange Neighbors

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In 1913, Vienna had over two million inhabitants and was home to many people who would go on to be both famous and infamous. And while we might look at a borough in Manhattan and marvel over the notable people who live within just a few miles of one another, that doesn’t make it seem any less weird that Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Sigmund Freud, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand were all part of the same neighborhood at the same time over 100 years ago.

Vienna’s coffeehouses were notorious cauldrons of intellectual activity at the time, and it’s not unlikely that these men all got coffee at the same place.

A Reddit moderator who goes by the handle u/commiespaceinvader explained it all more succinctly:

“In 1913, Hitler lived in a Men’s Dormitory in Meldemannstraße 27 in Vienna’s twentieth district. Being rejected from the art academy, he lived off the sale of his paintings and was unable to afford another residence, so he lived in a men’s dormitory, an institution set up for people without a fixed residence, where for a weekly rent of 2,5 Kronen, you could rent a bed.

In the same year, Trotsky lived at Rodlergasse 25 in Vienna’s 19th district. He worked as a journalist from Vienna reporting on the Balkan wars and publishing the Vienna edition of Pravda. Trotsky had lived in Vienna before after being exiled for political agitation in 1902. After the attempted Revolution of 1905 had been crushed, Trotsky again fled Russia and moved to Vienna where he had good contacts with the local Social Democratic Party and through them found employment as a journalist. Trotsky’s favorite hang-out was Vienna’s Cafe Central where he was relatively well known. There is an unsubstantiated anecdote that in 1917 when the Russian Revolution broke out, a fellow patron of the Central and an officer of the Austrian Army is to have said “And who is supposed to lead this revolution? Mr. Trotsky from Cafe Central?”

In 1913 Stalin visited Trotsky in Vienna and lived there for one month in Vienna’s 12th district in Schönbrunner Schloßstraße 30. He was sent there by Lenin to do research for an article called “Marxism and the National Question” in effect researching how Marxism in the multiethnic empire of the Habsburg’s could be applied. The house still bears a commemorative plaque, financed by the Austrian Communist Party in 1949 and put there with permission of the Soviet occupational government of Austria. As part of the state contract of Austria, signed in 1955, the Austrian government is obligated to take care of the plaque…Freud’s famous address was Berggasse 19 where today, Vienna’s Freud Museum is. And Archduke Franz Ferdinand worked in the Hofburg and had quarters in Schönbrunn palace.

…both Hitler and Trotsky are attested to have visited Cafe Central frequently for it was one of Vienna’s prime coffee houses. When Stalin was there in January 1913, he too went there together with Trotsky. It would be speculation to say anything definitively but who knows, maybe at some point in January 1913, they all were there at the same time.“

That’s some neighborhood! – WTF fun facts

Source: “1913: When Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud, and Stalin all lived in the same place” — BBC News

WTF Fun Fact 12592 – The Robot Monk

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Softbank’s former line of Pepper robots took on many tasks in Japan, including duties in hospitals, retail stores, and even Buddhist temples. Pepper was even programmed to become a stand-in for a Buddhist monk, news outlets reported in 2017.

While the robot monks can deliver blessings and beat a drum, their real purpose is to preside over funeral services in Japan, which has a significantly increasing elderly population.

The robot funerals not only pick up some slack when there aren’t enough human monks to go around, but they’re economical as well. A robot funeral cost about 1/5 of what a regular one would

It’s a question for the ethicists and theologians.

Another interesting fact is that human Buddhist monks have shown the same respect for robots as well, presiding over ceremonial funerals for obsolete robotic dogs in Japan.

– WTF fun facts

Source: “The Robot Priest” — Tech Top 10 List

WTF Fun Fact 12591 – The Animal With the Poisonous Elbow

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There is only one venomous primate in the world, and it’s not exactly a fierce-looking creature. The slow loris is the poison primate in question, and they’re native to Indonesia. Unfortunately, they’re also going extinct because they are thought to contain medicines and spiritual properties.

We don’t know about any of that, be we do know they pack a poisonous sac in their elbow.

It sounds like something out of a Marvel comic – a character that can deliver a striking blow with a sharp elbow to the face. But they don’t attack with their elbows.

Instead, they suck out the poison, swish it around in their mouths a little, and then deliver the venom through a bite.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t save them. They’re treated pretty brutally, and if someone plans to catch one, they typically remove its teeth. And the slow loris gets its name in part because it can’t outrun predators, especially humans.

Animals rescuers are trying to save them from their brutal fates, but studying them is hard because they’re nocturnal, secretive (and not super keen on humans who have a habit of dismembering and cooking them over fires). Go figure.

Lorises don’t typically attack other species with their poison bites – they’re far more likely to attack other lorises, which certainly doesn’t help those sustainability numbers.

While the loris is the only venomous primate, there are other venomous mammals: vampire bats, two species of shrew, platypuses, and solenodons.

But loris venom is truly gruesome causing necrosis causes necrosis (or tissue death), so victims can lose the limb affected.

This is just one more piece of proof that you can’t just blindly trust a cute face. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Slow loris: the eyes may be cute, but the elbows are absolutely lethal” — The Guardian

WTF Fun Fact 12590 – The Spider That Eats Its Mother

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It may sound like just another day at the office for some mothers used to giving their all to their children, but some spider moms really do make the ultimate sacrifice for their young.

It’s called matriphagy, the act of eating one’s mother, and it’s rare. But it happens in a spider species called Stegodyphus lineatus.

These spiders only have one group of babies throughout their lives. And when these spider babies are born, they are entirely dependent on their mothers to regurgitate food and feed it to them so they can grow up.

And what does she get in return?

Well, to be fair, the moms don’t put up a fight. After about two weeks of motherhood, they allow their children to consume them, leaving behind only an exoskeleton.

The spiders are native to Israel, and research into matriphagy in this species showed another interesting thing. Females that had given birth actually started to digest their own tissues before their gruesome deaths. Now, that might be a sign that the species just wasn’t designed to survive motherhood. However, Dr. Mor Salomon, a postdoctoral fellow in entomology at the Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food & Environment of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, also found that the ovaries and the heart were the last organs to degenerate.

It also seems that spider mothers know their time is limited because they stop maintaining their web after their babies begin to grow.

Please don’t assume that females who don’t give birth have it any easier. They also tend to sacrifice themselves when a member of the colony has babies. Researchers are still looking into whether this is conditioned behavior or part of the species’ biology. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Arachnid Matriphagy: These Spider Mothers Literally Die for Their Young” — Entomology Today

WTF Fun Fact 12589 – Lockheed Martin’s Metric Problem

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In a move that John Logsdon, director of George Washington University’s space policy institute, called “so dumb,” engineers at Lockheed Martin made a math error that cost millions.

Sloppy errors had plagued the U.S. space program for years by the time it all took place in 1999, but this mistake was one for the record books.

NASA’s rockets were being built by engineering powerhouse Lockheed Martin before being sent to NASA. Meanwhile, the Mars mission launched in early 1999 was run by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In the nine months between launch and mishap, no one had noticed that the math for the Orbiter’s orbiting program was off.

The LA Times explained:

“A navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the metric system of millimeters and meters in its calculations, while Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, which designed and built the spacecraft, provided crucial acceleration data in the English system of inches, feet, and pounds.
As a result, JPL engineers mistook acceleration readings measured in English units of pound-seconds for a metric measure of force called newton-seconds.”

Instead of landing on Mars, the Orbiter entered the planet’s atmosphere incorrectly and burned up upon entry, costing roughly $125 million.

The Times went on to explain why people were pretty fed up at this point:

“The loss of the Mars probe was the latest in a series of major spaceflight failures this year that destroyed billions of dollars worth of research, military and communications satellites or left them spinning in useless orbits. Earlier this month, an independent national security review concluded that many of those failures stemmed from an overemphasis on cost-cutting, mismanagement, and poor quality control at Lockheed Martin, which manufactured several of the malfunctioning rockets.”

The basic discrepancy wasn’t all Lockheed Martin’s fault. Engineers at the two facilities had been exchanging data for months and no one ever noticed the numbers were off.

There was a shot at redemption that year as the Mars Polar Lander was scheduled to set down on December 3, 1999, on the frozen terrain of Mars’ south polar cap.

Unfortunately, it crashed into the planet’s surface along with $165 million of hopes and dreams. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Mars Probe Lost Due to Simple Math Error” — Los Angeles Times

WTF Fun Facts 12588 – The Walkie Talkie Skyscraper

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In 2013, a 38-story skyscraper needed a bit of a redesign during construction. Located at 20 Fenchurch Street in London, the building is nicknamed the “Walkie-Talkie” because of its shape. The building has an interesting top-heavy shape.

The building cost around £200million and was designed by architectRafael Viñoly. But it wasn’t very popular. In fact, in 2015, the Carbuncle Group named it the worst new building in the UK. But they weren’t the people who were most upset.

It turns out that on those rare sunny London days, the building could become a giant magnifying glass.

For 2 hours a day, the sun shone just right so that the building acted like a concave mirror, beaming that light down onto the streets. (In this magnifying glass metaphor, that makes humans the ants.)

Developers only realized that it was creating temperatures up to 243 degrees F at ground level in the summer of 2013 when a beam six times brighter than direct sunlight started melting a car – a Jaguar XJ, to be exact. The owner, Martin Lindsay, told the BBC that he only realized what happened when he saw a photographer taking photos of the vehicle and asked about it. He recalled the moment:

“The photographer asked me, ‘have you seen that car? The owner won’t be happy.’

“I said: ‘I am the owner. Crikey, that’s awful.'”

The wing mirror, panels, and Jaguar badge all melted.

“It could be dangerous. Imagine if the sun reflected on the wrong part of the body. On the windscreen, there was a note from the construction company saying, ‘your car’s buckled; could you give us a call?'” Lindsay said.

A reporter named Jim Waterson even managed to fry an egg in a pan on the sidewalk.

After that, the building got some new nicknames – “Walkie-Scorchie” and “Fryscraper,” for example.

Of course, an immediate and permanent solution needed to be found, so an awning was installed on the south side of the building to keep it from inadvertently incinerating Londoners and their pricey vehicles.

The same architect, Viñoly, also designed a building in Las Vegas with a similar problem and its windows needed to be coated in non-reflective film.

Viñoly blamed himself, but also the fact that he didn’t realize it was ever that sunny or warm in London. Meanwhile, the Jaguar owner got his repairs paid for by the developers.

–WTF fun facts

Source: “‘Walkie-Talkie’ skyscraper melts Jaguar car parts” — BBC News

WTF Fun Fact 12587 – Discount Turns to Debt

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In what may be one of the most expensive typos in history, in April of 2006, Alitalia had the price of their business class flight from Toronto to Cyprus (an island nation in the Mediterranean) deeply discounted. The regular cost was $3,900, but a glitch resulted in the price losing two zeros. Tickets were sold for just $39 – for a 12-15 hour flight! (And that’s just in Canadian dollars – it was $33 in US dollars. Then again, once you add taxes and fees, it was closer to $200.)

Word spread quickly on the website FlyerTalk before Alitalia could make any changes and while they didn’t release the specifics, guesses as to the number of tickets sold range from hundreds to over 2000.

The price was active for around 12 hours, and you better believe that Alitalia tried not to honor the price at first. And purchasers had the angry reaction you’d imagine. In fact, things got so heated that Alitalia ended up honoring the tickets that were officially confirmed. (People who bought through Orbitz and other brokers were largely out of luck.)

The lucky buyers who were given ticket confirmation numbers upon purchase took their trips, costing Alitalia around $7 million.

CBC News interviewed one of the lucky travelers shortly afterward, Donnie Bowers of New Haven. “I didn’t even know where Cyprus was,” he said.”I looked at the regular price, and I thought, wow, this is something to really get involved in.”

They reported that 509 people made purchases, though other sources report higher numbers.

“Why not roll the dice and see what happens?” Bowers said as he prepared for his October 2006 trip. – WTF fun facts

Source: Flyertalk Forums, 2006

WTF Fun Fact 12586 – Using Urine to Treat Stains

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Healthy urine is 95% water, 2.5% urea, and 2.5% salts, minerals, enzymes, etc. That doesn’t necessarily make it the ideal laundry detergent, but there’s plenty of historical evidence that it was used as such going all the way back to ancient Rome.

The key here is urea, which decays into ammonia. You’ll find ammonia in many household cleaners because it can cut through dirt and grease.

Even after the invention of laundry soap, some people preferred to use urine for tough stains. (Our question remains: what do you use to get out the urine stains and smell?!)

Hey, it’s free and never in short supply, so we can see why you might want to soak a particularly terrible grease stain every now and then when you had no other choice. And one would need to use stale urine to get the correct chemical reaction, so perhaps that’s easier to rinse out? We’re not sure; we’ve never tried.

Urine also had other uses back in the day – disinfecting wounds and softening leather, for example. But there’s really no reason to try this at home to see how it works.

Now, for those who continue to claim that Romans used it for whitening their teeth, we’d like to see some more evidence. The only citation for this “fact” is a poem by Catullus, famous for writing scandalous and filthy poems (and who hardly makes a factual claim).

– WTF fun facts

Source: “From Gunpowder to Teeth Whitener: The Science Behind Historic Uses of Urine” — Smithsonian Magazine