Obscure facts ya know!

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Does that include portable swimming pools resting on dry ground?

the mutual history between the BBFC and the CARA [MPAA] is been one of the former cutting violence out of American movies, while the latter cuts language and nudity out of british movies.

What does it mean? Sumpin' to do with eggs I bet. "Egg eating" (like carnivorous) maybe?

In Japanese ALL words are vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant.

So when the Japanese appropriate features (and the words for them) from other cultures they have to render the borrowed words that way.

So you go out with your "boyfriendu, or girlfriendu", and you can watch a sport called "baseburu".

back in the 60s and 70s, Japanese television broadcasts would routinely cease at 11PM in the interest of energy savings.

During the National Union Of Mineworkers strike over here in 1973-4, television broadcasting shut down at 10pm each night, if I recall correctly, as coal stocks were running out. The strike eventually brought about the downfall of Edward Heath's Conservative government.

if only strikes had that kind of power here.

Well, the Conservatives got their revenge in 1984-85, when Margaret Thatcher's government crushed the mineworkers, who were led by Arthur Scargill. There were about 200,000 NUM members then - now there are well under 10,000.

I see the right wingers may be just as bad for the unions there as they are here.

The 84-85 miners strike was the end for the left in Britain, at least in the industrial arena. In 1985, many key public services were under taxpayer ownership, eg Gas, Electricity, Water, Telecoms, Rail and Buses. Now every one of these has been privatised: they provide very indifferent service at extortionate prices.

I feel for ya. America has its own form of "trickle-down" hell going on.

it took me a while to get the concept. an ovoviviparous species produces eggs that develop and hatch within the mother's body, and are later born live and without placental attachment. they are fed from the yolk, rather than directly from the mothers body. i think 'egg eating' would be something like "oophagous", but that's in use and means something more specific.

interesting property of japanese, and similar assimilation is found in other languages (mostly to convert into other writing systems, hebrew almost exclusively uses tet ט for 't' in transcribing foreign words. vowel marking also tends to be more regular.)

nothing like it in english obviously so we end up all these diverse loanwords. but we [english] don't have a regulating body anway unlike french with it's Académie française and constant butthurt over the increasing amount of english words in colloquial use...

but 'boyfriendu' has two consonant clusters, "fr" and "nd". and i see sometimes that two consonants next to each other are alright if the first was a nasal, like the 'n' in Honshū.

President Abraham Lincoln'widow, Mary, is buried in his tomb, but not beside him.

She is across the room, behind a wall.

I have always thought that odd; I believe that they should be side by side.

Queen Mary 1 ("Bloody Mary") and Queen Elizabeth 1 of England are buried side by side in the same tomb in Westminster Abbey. This is despite the fact that during her own reign (1553-58), Mary kept her half-sister imprisoned in the Tower Of London and came close to executing her for her Protestant faith.

Declawing a cat is basically the same as chopping a human's fingertips off. Saying it's cruel seems to be considered an opinion, but I think that alone makes it a fact.

I read about this last night about a show on Animal Planet (which I unfortunately don't get on cable) called Cats From Hell, which is basically Supernanny with cats, and one owner's cat wouldn't stop peeing outside the litterbox. She honestly believed the cat was doing this deliberately and just to spite her, but the truth was that the kitty litter hurt his paws, which were declawed. Changing the brand solved the problem. Contrary to the show's title the cats' problems are really because of physical or psychological issues, or their living environment and not because they're "evil".

cats can purr by varying the length of their trachea, in much the same way that lions roar.

Every rise of 1000 ft in altitude lowers the boiling point of water by 1.8 F.