Today I Learned

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TIL: During Road America's first season in 1955, the track owner hired the local Boy Scouts to pick up all the garbage under the grandstands after each event. Among the usual litter were large amounts of empty Canadian beer cans and lots of empty Canadian cigarette packs. The track owner got wind of this and renamed turn twelve, Canada Corner.

That’s funny, I always thought it had something to do with being near Canada. Never been there and didn’t know there were stands. Turn five was my favorite to watch for the bikes.

Ever hear of the gravity cavity at road atlanta?

I had to google it, but I've heard of it referred to as 'the dip' before. I'm mostly familiar with the current layout which eliminates the dip and reshapes that section into 10a and 10b. I imagine before the redesign that corner would be somewhere you'd clench your teeth hard through every single time and hope you don't end up like:

http://www.mulsannescorner.com/RoadAtlanta1992.html

I mis-typed frigid with fridged and learned about fridging, Gail Silmone, and about Women in Refrigerators.

I have heard of "Refrigerator moms" (has to do with autism).

But I have feeling that you're talking about something else.

TIL that in some early English translations of The Smurfs, the Smurfs were called Goblins.

Actually, when I was really young our teacher brought a giant Smurfette doll to class and read us a book called "Dilly Duckling and the Goblins", and I was confused because I had seen the Smurfs on TV and knew they were called Smurfs. The Smurfs had different names in the book as well. Papa Smurf was called the Great Goblin. Vanity Smurf was called the Conceited Goblin, and Harmony was called the Musical Goblin, even though he played music just as badly has he did in the cartoons. Smurfette wasn't in the story, and our teacher mispronounced her name as Smurfett-ee.

It turns out the book was originally written in Belgium by Peyo and the book the teacher read was an English translation that was reprinted in 1972. How very Smurfy!

In South Korea they made an English dub and subtitles for the Pingu cartoons. The characters in Pingu, which was created in Switzerland, speak a made-up language called Penguinese, but for some strange reason in South Korea they decided to use the cartoon to teach Korean kids English. The English voices and subtitles are often broken and unintentionally funny or mildly disturbing.

The Chinese government had to "clean house" o the bad English slogans of local businesses of the city that hosted the Olympics a few years ago. For example a local restaurant had to stop calling itself "Saliva Chicken".

Funny as that inept name was it does show how subtle ANY language is. In English its fine for a restaurant to advertise "mouth watering chicken". But saying "saliva chicken" is repellent.

Today I learned that some non-religious people can be just as unreasonable when they see people holding prayer circles as some religious people can be unreasonable when seeing gay couples holding hands.

Today on Zybooks, I learned about Basic Electricity and Resistor Networks.
Later on today, I will learn network anaylsis and Time-Domain Analysis, and possibly more if time and brain allows it.

Acknowledging the existence of a personal God, one who exists outside of time and who loves us dearly and who suffers with those who are plunged into torment, it is established beyond all doubt that man, for reasons unknown, has left his labors abandoned, unfinished.

Many things in the North American version of Tamodachii Life game for the Nintendo 3DS were changed and it seems that mostly they were changed because "Americans are stupid and too easily offended".

On the other hand, in the Japanese version it was perfectly okay for adult Miis to be dating and even marrying child Miis (who are supposed to be under 18).

But apparently there are still plenty of people in the USA who are so homophobic that Nintendo decided same sex characters should not show any romantic interest in each other whatsoever in the game. After the reactions of some people from Pixar's Lighter movie, however, I don't entirely blame them for the changes.

Dr. Seuss wrote a book that was made for adults in the 1930s called The Seven Lady Godivas, which was a retelling of the story of Lady Godiva and contains nudity. The book was a flop. Dr. Seuss admitted he had trouble drawing naked people. And apparently people were too unhappy during the Great Depression to laugh at funny-looking naked ladies.

TIL: Walruses eat seals and the typical indicators of walrus predation are a suctioned out head and otherwise intact body.

TIL that California was named after a fictional island in a Spanish novel written around 1510.

The fictional island was inhabited by a tribe of Black women amazon warriors ruled by a queen named "Califa" which is the feminized verision of the Arab word "Caliph" (title of the ruler of the Muslim empire that once ruled Spain).

Cortez and his men learned that there was a big island off of the west coast of Mexico and named it after the fictional island. Decades of exploration later geographers realized that the "island" was a peninsula (now called baja Mexico)attached to north america.

^ Interesting.

TIL: Windfucker is an archaic name for the common kestrel.