Fun facts!

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Oh, are we talking about Soya Misaki? I've got some more mildly interesting stuff about it:

The weather in northern Hokkaido can be really nasty and is much colder than you might think for Japan. It gets worse the closer you get to the ocean, which makes it fucking awful if you try to go see the northernmost point on a day that's not in the middle of summer. That said, if you do go during winter, you may see floating ice chunks out on the water, which is really cool.
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It's a local tradition to head to Soya Misaki at the crack of dawn on New Year's to watch the first sunrise of the year. Unfortunately, most years you can't even see it because of how cloudy and misty and gross it is thanks to the aforementioned bad weather, so it often leads to a bunch of people freezing their asses off for nothing. The traffic sucks hard as well. Fun!

The area isn't just home to the northernmost point's monument, either. There are a few others, but the most notable is a memorial monument for a Korean Air flight that was shot down by the Soviet Air Defense Force in the Sakhalin strait back in 1983, killing all 269 people inside. Touching, right? Sure, but the monument is kinda shaped like a fucking plane wing sticking up out of the ocean. Creepy shit.
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If you go a bit further inland from Soya Misaki, up the hills, you'll reach White Road: a long path made up of crushed scallop shells, of all things, that you can walk or drive on and enjoy the lovely view. (This gay little picture I found on Google doesn't do it justice, btw.)
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I'm going to stop there before I get a flood of puzzle pieces. I fucking love Hokkaido, don't get me started.
 
From 466-ish to 437-ish million years ago, Earth had a "ring" around it, caused when a massive asteroid, and or, a cluster of asteroids, broke apart, and got stuck in Earth's orbit. Coming back to this, as my spergy, GAD, curious about pretty much brain is, well... curious, it makes me wonder what will happen to the space debris, or as NASA calls it, 'space junk', in 400+ million years.
 
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Tom Green almost burned his feet off in Costa Rica in 2022 while on vacation.
TL;DR
An evening bonfire at the resort was extinguished late-night by covering with sand.
Tom walked on the sand by accident.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vqATKN78Jzo
Speaking of Tom Green, as one frequently does, while shooting Freddy Got Fingered, he insisted on doing his own skateboarding stunts (the movie opens with him skating around and doing some tricks), which caused great grief to the production company for insurance reasons, and because of the risk of the main actor, who also happened to be the fucking director, getting seriously injured for no reason. From what I recall, they eventually changed the shooting schedule so that those scenes would be shot last.
 
Charles Bukowski drank so heavily, and generally lived so hard, living rough, fucking owt that moved, and renting bedsits, before slumming it somewhere else, that, when he reached his mid 30s, he fucked himself up so badly, he needed a blood transfusion.

He of course, survived, and the priest who'd been summoned to his bedside, as everyone was certain it was curtains for him, warned him not to touch alcohol again, or he'd die for real. The first thing Charles did after being discharged from the hospital, was go to the nearest bar and order a beer. And, as everyone familiar with him knows, he kept necking back whatever booze he liked, until the last several years of his life, where he settled down with his final wife.
 
In ants, a gamergate is a worker that can reproduce. In a handful of ant species there are no separate queen caste and all workers can potentially reproduce. However, in these species there are only one reproductive worker per colony; the rest are suppressed through either pheromones or anatomical mutilation.
 
Charles Bukowski drank so heavily, and generally lived so hard, living rough, fucking owt that moved, and renting bedsits, before slumming it somewhere else, that, when he reached his mid 30s, he fucked himself up so badly, he needed a blood transfusion.

He of course, survived, and the priest who'd been summoned to his bedside, as everyone was certain it was curtains for him, warned him not to touch alcohol again, or he'd die for real. The first thing Charles did after being discharged from the hospital, was go to the nearest bar and order a beer. And, as everyone familiar with him knows, he kept necking back whatever booze he liked, until the last several years of his life, where he settled down with his final wife.
Bukowski is sort of like if GG Allin lived into his 70s and actually had some talent.
 
Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Eastern was so unbelievably large for its time (19,000 tons) that its first launch attempt failed. Its second launch attempt required so much equipment (hydraulic rams, jacks, chains and windlasses) that Richard Tangye was able to start up his machinery company.

To expand further, Great Eastern was the largest ship of her time by every conceivable metric. She was 692 feet long, had a beam (width) of 82 feet, and a draft (depth of the keel below the water) of 30 feet when fully laden (loaded). She displaced 32,000 tons of water when fully laden. She had five funnels, the largest pair of paddles ever constructed, a single propeller and an engine that had an output of 8,000 horsepower. She had six masts providing for 18,150 square feet of sail. Her top speed was 13 knots, or approximately 15 miles per hour. Of particular note was that she could not raise sail at the same time as her engines were active, as the sails would be set on fire by the exhaust from the funnels. She could carry 4,000 passengers on a single trip.

She operated as an ocean liner from 1859 until 1863. She laid the first permanent transatlantic cable in 1866 and continued in the cable-laying business until 1874, when she was laid up in Milford harbor. She accrued an immense amount of biofouling. Over the course of 11 years, she ended up with 300 tons of marine life attached to her hull. In 1885, she was auctioned off for £26,200. She was used as a showboat, a concert hall and a gymnasium, later being used as a floating billboard (called a "hoarding" in the UK) by Lewis's department store. She was sold for scrap, the value being £16,000. It took 18 months to scrap her, which caused a labor dispute as shipbreakers were paid by the ton and thus demanded quick work.

Great Eastern during her construction in 1855.
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Isambard Kingdom Brunel standing in front of the massive chains used to launch Great Eastern, 1857.
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Great Eastern in Southampton, England in 1860.
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Great Eastern docked in New York, 1860.
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Great Eastern at Heart's Content, Newfoundland and Labrador, after laying the first permanent transatlantic cable in July 1866.
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Great Eastern as a floating billboard in Liverpool, sometime in 1886.
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Great Eastern after being beached to facilitate scrapping the ship, 1889.
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Lithograph depicting the Great Eastern, made in 1858 as an artist's conception of the not-yet-finished vessel.
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Robert Tangye, the man whose machinery company was effectively started by the launch of the Great Eastern. Illustrated 1888.
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The languages spoken by Yupik/Inuit cultures in the Far North of North America are believed to be the descendants of a now mostly extinct Paleo-Siberian language family, with their descendants having come over from Asia  much more recently than the main wave(s) of Native American migration. This is based in part on the presence of a small group of Yupik languages in Russia's Chukchi Penninsula, with Yupik loanwords in the Northern Tungisic languages suggesting a much more widespread proto-historic distribution in the region.

Norse settlers in Greenland actually described the replacement of the island's original inhabitants by a new and distinct group of "skrelings" (a word meaning "wretches" that was used for all polytheistic peoples they encountered in the North Atlantic). It's very likely, then, that Europeans predated the modern inhabitants of Greenland by at least a few decades, although Norse settlers there died out not long afterward.
 
Today, I read that Levon Helm helped Rick James kick-start his career. It goes like this:

Rick was involved in racketeering, and pissed off some (might as well have been) mob types, so he fucked off to Canada... where he got jumped by three dickheads outside a bar, who probably weren't connected to the guys who wanted him dead. Levon was doing a concert in the same area, saw this, helped get him to safety, and sometime afterwards let him play in his band.

Extra fun fact: Rick was with Linda Blair for a time, and it got serious to the point Linda got pregnant, but she had an abortion without telling him first.
 
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Before Reverend Al Sharpton became a "civil rights leader" and then Cable news host, he tried to make a living trafficking cocaine and was busted and turned rat for the feds. Here's a video he probably wish you didn't see.

fat al.webp



Remember Tim Allen? The voice of "Buzz Lightyear" of "Toy Story" one of the most loved children's films of all time? The super wholesome dad from the show "Home improvement'? He also attempted to traffic coke was busted and ratted out his associates to avoid prison.

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You should probably check your dad/grandads stuff gathering dust in the attic, there might be some cocaine left over from the early 1990's.
 
Speaking of skeletons in the closet, Matthew Broderick of Ferris Bueller fame killed two Irish women in 1987 while driving on the wrong side of the road. He ended up having to pay a £100 fine for this crime.

Years later, he starred in a car commercial.
 
Earliest paleotempestology (geologic study of tropical cyclones) records date back as early as 185 million years ago from a tempestite found in Morocco.
 
food poisoning is caused by a range of pathogens that can appear depending on variables like what you ate, how it was (or wasn't) stored, the length of time it's been improperly kept, and possible exposure to cross-contamination. and while every pathogen will make you wish you were dead, they do it with a timeframe and symptom pattern rather unique to specific species.

for example, staphylococcus aureus hits hard and fast, sometimes as soon as thirty minutes, but the symptoms are straightforward (nausea, vomiting, stomach cramps, diarrhea), your body usually flushes out all those endotoxins within twenty-four hours, and you won't need to seek medical help if you stay on top of keeping hydrated. typical sources include meat, milk and dairy products, salads, and pastries that are kept between 45-118 F (also eating food prepped by someone with staph in their skin's microbiome who didn't wash hands but you're probably not going to swab the cook's skin for a gram stain test).

hepatitis a, on the other hand, may take its sweet fucking time by doodling around the body for two or three weeks before hitting you with gastritis, dark urine, joint pain, liver pain, and bodily weakness, then dragging on for another couple weeks. most hep a infections are mild and unremarkable, but there's a chance the virus could cause acute liver failure. typical sources include close contact with an infected person, sexual contact with an infected person, drinking contaminated water, and eating food prepped by an infected person who didn't properly wash hands after using the toilet.
 
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