Commercial glass mirrors were first produced in 16th century
Venice. It was the Renaissance, when realistic portraits came
into vogue and literature and philosophy were suddenly
emphasizing the individual.

The mirror glass was backed by a mixture of mercury and tin,
a method that was used until the 19th century, when a
chemically treated silver-ammonia compound replaced it. The
backing, supported and protected by the glass, reflects the
image.

(Source: ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA)

The game is poker, folks--draw poker, to be exact. You need a
pair of jacks or better to open, but you ante-up regardless.
The longer we play without someone holding the requisite
cards, the more money there will be in the pot. Eventually
someone will draw the cards that will win the...you-know-what.
(What are you grinning about, pardner? Just what cards are you
holding?)

By extension, the payoff at slot machines is also commonly
called the jackpot.

(Source: BREWER'S DICTIONARY OF PHRASE AND FABLE)

Benjamin Disraeli, the future British Prime Minister, coined
it in his 1831 novel, The Young Duke, to describe a horse
with dim prospects that emerges from the pack to become a
serious challenger. The term was picked up at British tracks,
passed into American racing lingo, and from there entered the
political lexicon, where it is still trotted out to label a
candidate who may surprise everyone at the finish line.

(Source: A BROWSER'S DICTIONARY by John Ciardi)

In the 1920s doctors claimed that scopolamine, an anesthetic,
could get the truth out of anyone. It was used in some
sensational trials and the press labeled it "truth serum."
But it was never proven scientifically reliable. Nor have its
successors, such as sodium pentathol, been proven any more
legally dependable than the lie detector or for that matter,
the administering of multiple Margaritas. (In fact, enough
Margaritas will make you tell the truth, but you will slur
your words to the point that no one can make out what you
said.)

(Source: HOW DO THEY DO THAT? by Caroline Sutton)

When the tuxedo debuted in 1886, black tie and tails had been
the accepted formal wear for a century. But that year Pierre
Lorillard (from the tobacco family) commissioned a tailor to
create something less stiff--preferably tail-less--for a big
social occasion where he lived, in Tuxedo Park, New York.
But by the big night his enthusiasm for the new suit had
tailed off, and he chickened out. However, his son and his
friends wore it, and they started a new fad that itself
became the standard for formal wear. In the process, they
immortalized the name of their hometown.

(Source: EXTRAORDINARY ORIGINS OF EVERYDAY THINGS by C. Panati)

You may have heard that a bull never literally "sees red" when
the bullfighter waves a cape in his face. It's the movement of
the cape that provokes. Animals, after all, are colorblind.

Hold on, not so fast. Birds, for instance, have a marked
ability to distinguish colors. They need it to spot food, such
as berries, on the ground. On the other hand, most creatures
of the night--including the ubiquitous house cat--have little
sense of color. But they're awfully good at picking up
movement.

So the next time someone tells you that all animals are color
blind, tell them that it's not such a black and white
proposition.

(Source: READER'S DIGEST, DID YOU KNOW?)

This one, in effect, even describes a left-handed mood--a bad
one, of course. Getting out of bed on the wrong side is like
starting the day on the wrong foot, if the left foot is the
first one you place on the floor upon arising. The
superstition about all things left bringing bad luck and worse
at one time even led innkeepers to push the left side of their
guest beds against the wall to physically prevent the disaster
of getting out of bed on that side. Good Lord!  What other
negative things do you suppose were originally tied to left-
handedness. What's left?

(Source: WHY YOU SAY IT by Webb Garrison)

There is not much dye in the shampoo to begin with--just
enough to color the light passing through the liquid when
it's in the bottle. So when it comes down to the suds--
bunches of very thin bubbles--the coloring agent is present
in tiny quantities. But more than that, the color of the suds
comes mostly from the overhead light it's reflecting, which
is likely to be white in the first place. Oh, I suppose we
could get deeper into the science of optics, but let's not
split hairs.

(Source: WHY DO DOGS HAVE WET NOSES? by David Feldman)

Haywire was the offshoot of the invention of a baling
machine. It's what held the bundle of hay together after it
was tightly packed. But the wire often got tangled in the
baler, causing accidents. And when that wire was cut to
unpack the hay--hey, get out of the way. The tightly wrapped
wire, suddenly let loose, whiplashed out in all directions.
There was no telling which way it would go. So it made an
excellent metaphor for anything that was out of control.

(Source: WHY YOU SAY IT by Webb Garrison)

Let's first dispose of a widely held misconception. No camel
carries a canteen on its back. Those humps are not water
sacks; they store fat. However camels can convert that fat
into water--a good thing, since they might otherwise get
dehydrated from their nasty habit of spitting when angry.

As for dealing directly with that hot sun: no sweat. In fact,
camels don't have to sweat because--surprise!--they wear a
camel's hair coat. The hair on their back is thick enough to
shield their skin from the sun and keep heat out. Their
relatively hairless belly, on the other hand, enables body
heat to escape. All in all, a well engineered, if not always
pleasant beast.

(Source: READER'S DIGEST, DID YOU KNOW?)

The term originated in the Middle Ages to describe a mercenary
knight whose lance was for hire. He was free of any attachment
to a particular lord and could be employed on a project-by-
project basis--assault a castle, rescue a damsel, the usual
stuff. Eventually the term was applied to anyone who was paid
by the project or the piece.

(Source: A BROWSER'S DICTIONARY by John Ciardi)

The main reason for the retention of all that heat is the
superb insulation, plain old rock, that's keeping it in.
Another is that the heat process is being fueled by the energy
emitted by the decay of radioactive material way down below--
in effect, a battery with one heck of a long life. And in the
scheme of things, volcanoes and such release a miniscule
amount of the planet's inner heat. They don't dissipate any
more of it than your perpetually angry aunt Sadie dispels her
enormous reserves of heat every time she blows her stack.

(Source: WHY THINGS ARE & WHY THEY AREN'T by Joel Achenbach)

The way the capsules work is amazingly simple. In effect, you
are swallowing a group of small medicinal time bombs--close to
a thousand of them in some capsules--with "fuses" set for
different times. Those fuses are created by the varying
thickness' of a wax-like coating over the medication which
determines how soon your digestive system can get at the
medicine inside each pellet. The thin-skinned ones go to work
almost right away, while the ones with the heavier coatings
hang around, waiting for that coating to dissolve. All you
have to do is swallow the capsule. Bombs away!

(Source: HOW DO THEY DO THAT? by Caroline Sutton)

Essentially, the dog is taught through the use of its instinct
to retrieve. What it fetches is marijuana, wrapped carefully
so the animal can't bite into the package and get high, but
loosely enough so that the smell becomes familiar. When the
fetching becomes routine, the marijuana is hidden so that the
dog must sniff for it. Then the drug is placed in a bag and
hidden. (You can see where this escalating game is headed--the
airport baggage department.) Heroin is treated similarly,
except that the real stuff is so potent that a like-smelling
artificial substance is used in initial training to keep the
dog from nodding out.

(Source: HOW DO THEY DO THAT? by Caroline Sutton)

There actually is a very mundane reason for the image with
which we are all familiar. In the Middle Ages and
Renaissance, when the Western image of Jesus became fixed,
artists themselves were likely to look that way. They painted
what they knew.

The probably ascetic Jesus may have been thin, and Jews, it's
been suggested, might have had long hair to set themselves
off from the Romans. Jesus may also have been a man of color,
but we don't just know. And it may not really matter.

(Source: WHY THINGS ARE & WHY THEY AREN'T by Joel Achenbach)

In 1902, President Teddy Roosevelt took a political trip down
South. His hosts, knowing Teddy loved to hunt, corralled a
bear cub for him to shoot. But Teddy would not fire at the
furry little thing. A celebrated newspaper cartoon praised
this act of decency, and it gave Brooklyn toy maker Morris
Michtom an idea. He created a stuffed bear cub, "Teddy's
Bear," and it did so well that the next year Morris formed the
Ideal Toy Company. It's been a bull market in Teddy Bears ever
since.

GO UP

It reflects a practice found in many cultures: the use of the
"patronymic." Last names originated in the Middle Ages when
men, who embodied the continuity of the family, started to be
identified by their relationship to their immediate ancestors.
The son of David, for example, might take the name Davidson.

The Scots used "Mac," which meant "the son of," for this
purpose. And so with the Irish and the "O'," except here it
meant "the grandson of, " possibly because one of the first to
use it, Teigue, grandson of Brian, High-King of the Irish in
the 11th century, started to call himself Ua Briain (Gaelic
for O'Brian) after his famous grandfather.

(Source: ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA)

GO UP

The answer,  is yes, they drink it. Saltwater fish do so
under duress. Gulp! The greater concentration of salt in the
water outside their bodies is constantly drawing the less
salty fluid inside them out through their skin, a porous
membrane, through the process of osmosis. Therefore they have
to be drinking constantly to replace that lost fluid.
Freshwater fish don't have this problem and don't need to
drink, but they take in some water anyway when they open their
mouths to eat.

(Source: DO FISH DRINK WATER? Bill McLain)

GO UP

What might there be about the threat of death that inspires
a sudden indulgence in autobiography? Wouldn't the mind be
fixed on other things, such as, "How the heck can I get out of
here?" Yet so many people have described this phenomenon--
which makes it real enough--that scientists have been
compelled to try to explain it.

Two theories have been proposed. The first holds that a threat
as traumatic as that of imminent demise from any cause, not
just drowning, automatically triggers the release of memories
that one always retains but usually doesn't recall. The other
explanation points to hardware breakdown. Cutting the flow of
oxygen to the brain makes its electrical impulses go haywire,
catapulting long-stored memories into one's consciousness
helter skelter. Either way, I prefer to confine my own life
review to whatever a glass of Chardonnay might pry from my
temporal lobes.

(Source: READER'S DIGEST DID YOU KNOW?)
GO UP

In the Old West a "straight shooter" was an honest person you
could rely on. Metaphorically, shooting straight meant that
the person was like a bullet's path: true, not crooked. But
just what was it that enabled a bullet to travel in a straight
line?

The bullets coming out of the first muskets were literally
scattershot. The unevenly shaped lead balls bounced against
the inside of the barrel as they were launched and could
easily veer off. Gunmakers solved the problem by improving the
fit between bullet and barrel and by placing spiral grooves
inside the barrel to spin the bullet as it emerged.

Spinning, like a gyroscope, corrects irregularities in an
object's flight path. Finally, in the mid-19th century,
bullets were aerodynamically redesigned. They were made
longer, ending in the familiar conical tip which puts the
bullet on the straight and narrow.

(Source: READER'S DIGEST HOW IN THE WORLD)
GO UP

Recently I traveled by train, and my itinerary required me to
take a shuttle the rest of the way. I asked the conductor
where I could get the shuttle and he said, "The dinky stops
over there."

What was this, baby talk? A little research set me straight.
"Dinky" (probably from a Scottish word that originally meant
"neat" and "trim") was first used in railroading for the small
switching yard locomotives.

So, I thought, dinky, a synonym for small, was used to
describe those undersized choo-choos, and then applied to the
mini-train that makes up a shuttle. Not so, it turns out.
Dinky as a synonym for small started with railroading, then
spread to general use. I had mistaken the engine for the
caboose.

(Source: DICTIONARY OF WORD AND PHRASE ORIGINS)
GO UP

Yes, sometimes, but even then it's only an accident if they
do.

If life were perfect, baby boomer memories of the TV program
"Flipper," about a friendly and helpful dolphin, would now be
burnished by scientific research showing dolphins to be
altruistic as well as smart. But dolphins don't help people
because the creature feels warm and fuzzy about us.

For example, dolphins attack sharks in self-defense. If a
person is helped in the process, that's just a coincidence.
As for drowning people pushed to the surface by dolphins, that
happens sometimes, but it's now attributed to the dolphin's
inborn instinct to do that for its young. Flail around enough
and you might be lucky and get mistaken for a young dolphin.
(Or unlucky and, in the process, recognized as a person by a
shark.)

(Source: READER'S DIGEST DID YOU KNOW?)

We don't exactly know. We visit the planets, map the human
genome, and split the atom. But an itch is still largely that
which you scratch, one of medicine's last frontiers.

It's a stimulus affecting the nerve endings between the dermis
and epidermis; scientists liken it to a form of pain. But
that's neither here nor there. It's usually caused by
histamine released in the epidermis. Scratching stops it,
either by interfering with the nerve impulses or by
temporarily damaging the nerves themselves. That's it.

So if you would like to make your mark in medicine,
investigate the itch. But you won't get much help from
research so far. You'll just have to start from scratch.

(Source: ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA)

Carefully! Your plane can't pull over to the side of the road
in bad weather, so the pilot had better be able to find the
runway. That's where the "instrument landing" you may have
heard of comes in.

A bit less than 10 miles from touch down and just under 500
feet altitude, the plane's radar picks up a signal, the outer
marker, that orients the pilot toward the runway's glide path.
This path is defined by two signals. One keeps the pilot from
veering too far to either side, while the other guides the
plane down at the correct angle. At a height of 200 feet the
middle marker signals the fail-safe point. If the runway
lights are still not visible, you're going back up and on to
another airport (and wherever that may be, you will still wait
an hour for your luggage).

(Source: HOW DO THEY DO THAT? by Caroline Sutton)

A dragonfly can fly up to 30 miles per hour. If gas prices go
much higher, I'm going to start carpooling to work with a
dragonfly.

Even though a mosquito beats its wings 600 times per second
it only travels about one mile per hour. That's because
stopping to annoy people tends to slow you down.

Your tongue print is as unique as your fingerprints. So if
you are planning on committing a crime, be sure not to lick
anything.

The human body has 45 miles of nerves. That may explain why
so many people tend to get on mine.

The salt scattered on American highways each winter to keep
cars from skidding on snow and ice represents 10 percent of
the world's annual output of the mineral.  I have it on good
authority that almost half of what's left of world salt output
is to be found on the French Fries sold at fast food
restaurants along these roads.

In third century China, kites were used as games, ritual
objects, musical instruments, transmitters of messages,
distance measuring devices, weapons, and parachutes.
Nowadays they are just a means of fun and power
outages.

In the 15th century, scholars in China compiled a set of
encyclopedia that contained 11,095 volumes. You heard of
Death of a Salesman? It was lugging this series door to door
that killed him.

A crocodile doesn't chew its food, it swallows it whole.
What a waste of a whole bunch of really sharp teeth.

Crocodiles also continually grow new sets of teeth to replace
old teeth. Since they don't use them to chew, what happens?
The teeth fall out from boredom?

When christening a ship, instead of using champagne, the
Vikings would sacrifice a human being. The custom started
when some Vikings tried to break a bottle of champagne and
the owner of the ship said, "Over my dead body."

The Vikings also thought the spirits of the murdered person
would guide and guard the craft. Come on, if they sacrificed
me just to launch a stupid ship, the only place I would guide
it would be the bottom of the ocean.
 

Assuming that each fold neatly overlaps its opposite side, a
dollar bill can be folded only 6 times, 7 if put in a vise
(although the dollar can only be folded six times, it can be
stretched numerous ways).

The amount of play money printed each year for use in the
game, Monopoly is more than the amount of real money issued
every year by the U.S. government. Of course, Monopoly money
is a lot easier to come by.
 

Always give 100% at work....
 12% Monday
 23% Tuesday
 40% Wednesday
 20% Thursday
  5% Friday